Most of the press is still running the Arafat=polonium stuff with minimal skepticism. Some of the only doubt surprisingly comes from Al Jazeera itself.

Russian study calls Arafat poisoning claims ‘unsubstantiated’

The Russian report concluded that “only one of the four provided fragments,” a piece of the skull bone, “was found to have radioactive background.”

Dr. Francois Bochud, who led the Swiss investigation, told Al Jazeera’s David Poort that the skull was an unlikely place to test for the radioactive substance.

“We thought that (the skull) would not be the best kind of bone sample to measure,” he said. “It is not as vascularized as other bones and therefore not the bone that would collect the highest quantity of polonium.”

Dave Barclay, a veteran forensic scientist and investigator, told Al Jazeera, “the choice of bone fragments that they’ve chosen to use is very odd and the levels they’ve got appear to be 10 or 20 times less than you’d expect just from anyone else in the world.”

“I think the results are meaningless,” he said.