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A member of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee warned that bio-weapons are being made that use a target's DNA to only kill that person. Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum on Friday, US Rep Jason Crow of Colorado warned Americans to not be so cavalier about sharing their DNA with private companies due to the coming of the new type of weapon Earlier this week the Washington Examiner reported on just how easy it could be for privately-owned databases to be used to develop bioweapons such as the ones touted by Crow. The publication explained how DNA belonging to a...

SNIP Officials did not disclose the informant’s identity or new location, both closely held secrets. The person’s life remains in danger, current and former officials said, pointing to Moscow’s attempts last year to assassinate Sergei V. Skripal, a former Russian intelligence official who moved to Britain as part of a high-profile spy exchange in 2010. The Moscow informant was instrumental to the C.I.A.’s most explosive conclusion about Russia’s interference campaign: that President Vladimir V. Putin ordered and orchestrated it himself. As the American government’s best insight into the thinking of and orders from Mr. Putin, the source was also key...

Ofcom, Britain's communications watchdog, highlighted seven instances of problematic reporting by the channel. Its handling of the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury played a large part. British communications watchdog Ofcom announced the measure on Friday, after an investigation into RT's coverage of the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine. The fine of £200,000 ($250,000, €220,000) comes eight months after Ofcom launched its investigation into RT. Lack of impartiality Ofcom said RT, formerly known as Russia Today, "failed to preserve due impartiality in seven news and current affairs programs...

Why did Steele, with all of his experience, miss this obvious disinformation campaign in 2016? Christopher Steele is known to be an extremely left-wing mind, and he quite aggressively tried to help his transatlantic ideological soulmate, Hillary Clinton, to win the presidential election. ... Why did Steele, well acquainted with the methods of Russian intelligence, allow the GRU to fool him this time? Steele had a sincere desire to believe that everything the "reliable Russian sources" had thrown at him was right. ... Oddly enough, Skripal's poisoning was triggered not by the actions of the Trump administration, but by the...

The Trump administration has informed Congress that Russia has not complied with a series of requirements necessary for Moscow to evade a second round of U.S. sanctions over the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy in Britain. The development, announced by the State Department and House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday, means that a new tranche of sanctions on Russia will be automatically triggered under a 1991 law on the elimination of chemical and biological weapons — likely further deteriorating relations with Russia at a time of high tensions. In a statement, State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said the department is...

A high-ranking Russian law official believed to be the authority behind attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, who took part in the notorious Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr during the presidential campaign, has been killed in a mysterious helicopter crash. Deputy prosecutor-general Saak Karapetyan - a long-time ally of President Vladimir Putin - died last night when his AS-350 came down in Kostroma region northeast of Moscow during an unauthorized flight. Karapetyan had been in charge of Russian criminal investigations into the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the UK, and the deaths of Putin critic...

An online investigations group has published what it says is the real identity of one of the prime suspects in the Salisbury nerve agent attack. Bellingcat has reported that the man who was named as Ruslan Boshirov is actually Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, who they say is a highly decorated officer in the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service. The Home Office said it could neither confirm nor deny the reporting about the suspect’s real identity. Scotland Yard, which has already said it believed the two suspects were using aliases, declined to comment.

LONDON—British authorities charged two men that they believe are Russian military intelligence officers with the attempted murder of a former spy and his daughter in March, an incident that prompted the largest-ever collective expulsion of Russian diplomats from the West. Prosecutors charged the men—named as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov but those names are believed to be aliases—with four offenses related to the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, who has lived in Britain since a 2010 spy exchange with Moscow. The charges also included conspiracy to murder and the use and possession of nerve agent Novichok. In a statement to lawmakers...

British authorities on Wednesday indicted two men for the March chemical-weapons attack on a former Russian double agent on British soil. The new details add to the evidence that Vladimir Putin’s regime is responsible, but its reckless methods are the real stunner. Police and prosecutors allege the men they identify as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov—almost certainly pseudonyms—arrived at London’s Gatwick airport on Friday, March 2, smuggling the weapons-grade nerve agent Novichok in a small counterfeit perfume bottle. They ferried the chemical on suburban trains and the Tube through central London to a hotel, where nonfatal quantities of Novichok were...

Police have named and charged in absentia two Russian suspects in the novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury. Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov flew into Gatwick on an Aeroflot flight on 2 March, two days before the Skripals were poisoned with the nerve agent.

Moscow issued a stern warning to the US on Friday against ramping up sanctions against Russia, saying the Kremlin will retaliate with economic, political and unspecified “other” measures. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s warning reflects Russian fears over the impact of new restrictions on its economy and assets, including the ruble, which has lost nearly 6 percent of its value this week on sanctions jitters, according to Reuters. In a sign of how seriously Russia is taking the threat, strongman Vladimir Putin discussed what the Kremlin called “possible new unfriendly steps by Washington” with members of his Security Council. They said...

Christopher Steele expressed concern last year at a Senate committee’s request for information about the former British spy’s anti-Trump dossier, according to text messages recently provided to Congress. “Would it be possible to speak later today please? We’re very concerned by the Grassley letter and it’s possible implications for us, our operations and our sources. We need some reassurances,” Steele wrote in a March 7, 2017 text message to Bruce Ohr, who then served as deputy assistant attorney general. Steele, a former MI6 officer, was seemingly referring to a March 6, 2017 letter that Senate Committee on the Judiciary Chairman...

A man and woman found unconscious in Wiltshire were exposed to Novichok - the same nerve agent that poisoned ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal, police say. The couple, believed to be Charlie Rowley, 45, and Dawn Sturgess, 44, fell ill at a house in Amesbury on Saturday and remain in a critical condition. Police say no one else has presented with the same symptoms. There was "nothing in their background" to suggest the pair were targeted, the Met Police said. Home Secretary Sajid Javid will chair a meeting of the government's emergency Cobra committee later to discuss the developments

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Monday that the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy in Britain “clearly came from Russia” and “certainly will trigger a response."

Germany's intelligence service BND had in the 1990s obtained from a Russian informer a sample of the poison used against ex-double agent Sergei Skripal, German media reported Thursday, drawing a link to Moscow as the origin of the toxin. Britain has accused Russia of carrying out the nerve agent attack against Skripal and his daughter Yulia in March, but Moscow has denied the claims and argued that the country never had any programmes to develop the chemical weapon, known as Novichok. But German newspapers Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit as well as regional public broadcasters NDR and WDR said their...

(Reuters) - British police declared a major incident late on Tuesday after it said a man and a woman in a critical condition may have been exposed to an unknown substance near the southern English town of Salisbury. “Wiltshire Police and partners have this evening declared a major incident after it is suspected that two people might have been exposed to an unknown substance in Amesbury,” the police said in a statement. {snip} Amesbury lies seven miles (11 kms) to the north of Salisbury, where in March Russian former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter ….

Just came across an intriguing theory about Sergei Skripal, the former Soviet/Russian military intelligence agent who spied for Britain, and, along with his daughter Yulia, was nearly killed this spring by a dose of the nerve agent Novichok in the town of Salisbury, England, where they live. In a March 21 interview on the John Batchelor Show, Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. Copley further explained (or tried to explain) to Batchelor (who kept cutting him off): “The people who wished...

The substance used on Sergei Skripal was an agent called BZ, according to Swiss state Spiez lab, the Russian foreign minister said. The toxin was never produced in Russia, but was in service in the US, UK, and other NATO states. Sergei Skripal, a former Russian double agent, and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with an incapacitating toxin known as 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate or BZ, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, citing the results of the examination conducted by a Swiss chemical lab that worked with the samples that London handed over to the Organisation for the Prohibition of the Chemical...

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Sunday voiced alarm over the growing “alienation” between Russia and the West, stressing the need for dialogue as post-Cold War tensions peak. Speaking to the Bild am Sonntag newspaper, Steinmeier said last month’s poisoning of a former Russian spy in England, which Britain and its allies blame on Moscow, was “a very serious incident”. “But we should be at least as worried about the galloping alienation between Russia and the West, the consequences of which stretch far beyond this case,” the former foreign minister said. Moscow vehemently denies involvement in the nerve agent poisoning of...

SALISBURY, England (Reuters) - Yulia Skripal has left hospital more than five weeks after she and her father, a former Russian spy, were poisoned with a nerve agent in an attack that has sparked one of the biggest crises in the West’s relations with the Kremlin since the Cold War. -snip- The Skripals were in a critical condition for weeks and doctors at one point feared, even if they survived, they might have suffered brain damage. But the Skripals’ health since then has begun to improve rapidly. Yulia, 33, has been discharged from Salisbury District Hospital, Christine Blanshard, medical director...