Extradition battles, Japan's Defense White Paper, Hybrid Russian cybercrime, Chinese text input method vulnerabilities, Putinism in a nutshell

What We’re Reading, Hearing, and Watching – August 10, 2023

Two US Setbacks in Extradition Battles With Russia

Twice in one week, the United States has experienced setbacks in its attempts to extradite criminal suspects from foreign countries. In both cases, Russian authorities had hastened to lodge competing extradition requests, likely in an attempt to prevent the suspects from facing US prosecution, where they could be induced to testify against other Russian suspects. US-Russian extradition battles have become commonplace in the past decade. In both of the recent cases, judicial authorities decided to delay final decisions on whether to send the suspects to the US or to Russia.

• The Suspected Spy: Sergey Cherkasov, allegedly a Russian deep-cover spy, spent years posing as a Brazilian named Victor Muller Ferreira, deceived his professors and fellow students at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC, and nearly won an internship at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, where he could p…