The former Russian double agent left close to death after a nerve agent attack in Salisbury had written to President Vladimir Putin asking to be pardoned and to be allowed to visit his home country, a friend has claimed. Vladimir Timoshkov, a friend of Sergei Skripal, said he regretted having spied for the British and wanted to return to Russia to visit his family. In 2006 Colonel Skripal was jailed by the Russian for selling secrets to MI6 and came to Britain in 2010 as part of a spy swap, setting up home in Salisbury.

Russia's EU ambassador has suggested a UK research laboratory could be the source of the nerve agent used in the attack on an ex-spy and his daughter. Vladimir Chizhov told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show Russia had "nothing to do" with the poisoning in Salisbury of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. He said Russia did not stockpile the poison and that the Porton Down lab was only eight miles (12km) from the city.

The clock is ticking towards the British-set deadline of midnight Tuesday for the Kremlin to explain why a Russian developed military-grade nerve agent was used to poison a former Russian double agent and his daughter in a small cathedral town in south England. No one in the British government is holding their breath for a Russian response — or an adequate one, from London’s point of view.

Russia has said it successfully launched a hypersonic missile described by Vladimir Putin as an ideal weapon when he unveiled new armaments earlier this month. The Kinzhal missile was launched from a MiG-31 aircraft that took off from an airfield in south-western Russia, the defence ministry said. “The launch went according to plan: the hypersonic missile hit its target,” the ministry said.

U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said on Tuesday he had not seen evidence of Russia trying to meddle in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, but it is "highly likely" Moscow will try to do so. "We have not seen evidence of a robust effort yet on the part of Russia, but we know their malign activities continue to exist," Coats told a Senate armed services committee hearing.

A self-described Russian "seductress" is asking for US help to escape a Thai detention center in exchange for information on alleged links between US President Donald Trump and Russia, according to her Instagram account. Anastasia Vashukevich, who also goes by the name Nastya Rybka, says she's being held in Thailand after being arrested on February 26, along with nine other Russians, in the city of Pattaya for running so-called "sex training" sessions.

Presidential son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner has had his security clearance downgraded — a move that will prevent him from viewing many of the sensitive documents to which he once had unfettered access. Kushner is not alone. All White House aides working on the highest-level interim clearances — at the Top Secret/SCI-level — were informed in a memo sent Friday that their clearances would be downgraded to the Secret level, according to three people with knowledge of the situation.

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte is not an autocrat and is taking seriously a report by the U.S. intelligence community that names the firebrand leader among the threats to democracy in Southeast Asia, his spokesman said on Wednesday. The report, produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, places Duterte alongside Cambodia's Hun Sen, the Rohingya crisis and Thailand's military-backed constitution as impediments to democracy.

Special counsel Robert Mueller on Friday filed his first criminal charges against Russian nationals and businesses in his investigation of Russian government influence in the 2016 election and collusion with the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald Trump. The defendants are accused of working in conjunction with the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, which is also under indictment for allegedly conducting information operations to influence the 2016 election in the United States.

The Czechoslovak secret agent who met Jeremy Corbyn during the Eighties claimed last night that the Labour leader knew he was a spy and said the MP had supplied information to the Communist regime.

Russian cyberspies pursuing the secrets of military drones and other sensitive U.S. defense technology tricked key contract workers into exposing their email to theft, an Associated Press investigation has found. What ultimately may have been stolen is uncertain, but the hackers clearly exploited a national vulnerability in cybersecurity: poorly protected email and barely any direct notification to victims.

President Donald Trump’s Justice Department had reason to suspect that former Trump campaign associate Carter Page was a Russian agent, according to a Republican memo. The contentious and secret memo, allegedly created by Republicans to discredit the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, shows that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein approved an application to continue surveillance of Page, sources told The New York Times.

The European Union on Wednesday accused Russia of pumping out thousands of pieces of disinformation in an "orchestrated strategy" aimed at destabilising the bloc. Russia faces a barrage of accusations of interfering in a string of seismic political events, including the British vote to leave the European Union, the US election of President Donald Trump and the Catalan independence crisis.

The arrest of the former agent, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 53, capped an intense F.B.I. investigation that began around 2012 after the C.I.A. began losing its agents in China.

Three months after U.S. officials asserted that Russian intelligence used popular antivirus company Kaspersky to steal U.S. classified information, there are indications that the alleged espionage is related to a public campaign of highly damaging NSA leaks by a mysterious group called the Shadow Brokers.

The takeover of artificial intelligence seems to be a done deal. The open questions are: When will machines outperform us? Will they annihilate us? And: Should self-driving cars kill one pregnant woman or two Nobel prize winners? Artificial Intelligence is a complex riddle for all sorts of experts. It’s full of magic, mystery, money, mind-boggling techno-ethical paradoxes and sci-fi dilemmas that may or may not affect us in some far or near future.

Reality Winner grew up in a carefully kept manufactured home on the edge of a cattle farm 100 miles north of the Mexican border in a majority-Latino town where her mother, Billie, still lives. From the back porch, a carpet of green meets the horizon, and when a neighbor shoots a gun for target practice, a half-dozen local dogs run under the trailer to hide. Billie worked for Child Protective Services, and in Ricardo, Texas, the steady income made her daughters feel well-off; the fact that they had a dishwasher seemed evidence of elevated social standing.

British spies believe that it is proved "beyond any reasonable doubt" that the missile launcher that downed the MH17 jet over Ukraine in 2014 was supplied and later removed by Russia. The disclosure is contained in a short paragraph buried in the annual report of parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee, spotted by Bellingcat, an investigative site that has worked extensively on the Ukraine conflict.

Ukraine’s security services (SBU) arrested two different men suspected of spying for Russia, one working for the cabinet of ministers, another serving in Kiev’s own intelligence ranks, within 24 hours of each other. "As we speak, the illegal activity of another citizen of Ukraine who acted against the national interest and for Russia’s intelligence services, is being documented,” Vitaly Mayakov, the deputy head of Ukraine’s main investigative department said Thursday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin receives reports of U.S. counterpart Donald Trump’s tweets because they’re considered to be official White House statements, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. Everything Trump posts on his Twitter account “is regarded in Moscow as his official statements,” Peskov told reporters on a conference call Tuesday. “Obviously, it’s reported to President Putin, along with other information about the official statements of politicians and heads of state from other countries.”