The British leader said police identified the poison as a “military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia.”
She said Russia either engaged in a direct attack against Britain or lost control of the nerve agent it developed. Britain will not tolerate such a “brazen attempt to murder innocent civilians on our soil,” she warned.
.. Skripal was jailed in Russia in 2006 for selling state secrets to British intelligence for 10 years, but he was released in 2010 as part of a high-profile spy swap. His daughter has been living in Russia but has also spent long periods in England. The two remain in critical condition at a Salisbury hospital.
.. Immediately after May’s remarks, the Russian government denounced her speech as a spectacle designed to mislead. “It is a circus show in the British Parliament,” the Tass news agency quoted Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova as saying.“The conclusion is obvious: It’s another political information campaign, based on a provocation.”
.. May said British investigators have concluded that the chemical used in the attack was part of a group of Russian nerve agents known as Novichok.
.. Russia views some defectors as legitimate targets for assassinations
.. Novichok was developed in Moscow in 1987 at the State Union Scientific Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology. That government laboratory was described by one of its top officials in the 1990s as “the leader in the technology of chemical destruction.”.. he doubted that Russia would provide any detail, beyond denials. But the two-day pause was likely designed as “a way for the British government to prepare everyone for a robust response.”.. Several lawmakers suggested that Britain pass its own version of America’s 2012 Magnitsky Act
.. Dmitry Kiselyov, the broadcast journalist, suggested it was all a plot to ruin the games for Russia and get British allies to boycott the World Cup.
“Why not poison him?” Kiselyov said. “Is he so valuable? And do it with his daughter to turn it into a real tear-jerker for the public.”
Hollywood Producer in the Spotlight in Netanyahu Probe
Israeli police said last month that they had questioned Mr. Milchan—who has financed Academy Award-winning movies such as “12 Years a Slave” and “Birdman”—about whether he gave Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gifts in return for favors.
.. Mr. Netanyahu has denied wrongdoing. “It is allowed, according to the law, to accept presents from friends,” the prime minister said in response to questions at a January session of Israel’s parliament, after the probes were first reported publicly.
.. Mr. Milchan has had connections with several Israeli politicians over the years. Ehud Olmert, who later served as Israel’s prime minister, came up with “Pretty Woman” as the title for the 1990 film produced by Mr. Milchan, according to a 2011 biography, “Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan.”
.. Police are investigating whether Mr. Netanyahu in return lobbied former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for a visa for Mr. Milchan, Israeli media reported.
According to former U.S. officials, Mr. Netanyahu asked U.S. officials in 2014 to intervene at the State Department to renew a visa for Mr. Milchan.
.. In his role as an Israeli agent, Mr. Milchan helped procure equipment from the U.S. for Israel’s secret nuclear program, according to the biography, which said Mr. Milchan served as an officer for Israel’s now-defunct Bureau of Scientific Relations.
.. Mr. Milchan’s business partner in the U.S., Richard Kelly Smyth, was charged in 1985 with smuggling materials to Israel that could be used for nuclear purposes. Mr. Smyth was charged with breaking U.S. export laws and spent 16 years on the run before being convicted in 2002 and sentenced to 40 months in prison. Mr. Milchan wasn’t accused of any wrongdoing.
Why Trump Can’t Quit Steve Wynn
Wynn expressed optimism about Cruz’s chances within the crowded GOP field. Wynn then lambasted Trump, the frontrunner at the time, castigating the real-estate mogul’s record as a “businessman” and “casino owner.” Wynn snickered about how Trump’s Vegas property stood pitifully far from the Strip, the stretch of land coveted by any hopeful casino or hotel owner in the city. “He was just clowning on him,”
.. So when, on the eve of Trump’s decisive victory in the Nevada caucus two months later, the candidate touted his support from none other than Steve Wynn, Cruz’s camp was stunned. Wynn, standing alongside fellow casino mogul Phil Ruffin, beamed from the crowd.
.. In the space of a year, Wynn would become a member of the president’s cadre of informal advisers, his hand-selected finance chair of the RNC, and as such, an indispensable fundraiser for the party.
.. Multiple Republican sources say Wynn’s retreat from the political scene will have a lasting and negative impact on the GOP’s fundraising prowess. “No small number of GOP lawmakers have stayed at Wynn Resorts in the last two years and relied on him for donations,” the Republican strategist Steve Schmidt said. “This could be devastating.”
.. not one seemed to think that the president would simply sever ties with Wynn.
.. The initial bout of friction between Trump and Wynn dates back to the 1990s, when the two engaged in a vicious legal battle over Wynn’s efforts to expand to Atlantic City that included allegations of fraud, money laundering, perjury, and even claims that an investigator working on behalf of Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts Inc. had become a mole for Wynn’s Mirage Resorts,
.. “They hate each other’s guts. It’s like poison,”
.. The president still nurses the wound of those years and the insults Wynn lobbed at him
.. “It was always just billionaire ego bullshit,” said one Trump campaign official who witnessed their exchanges. “Like, ‘Haha, my building is a couple feet taller than your building.’ That kind of thing.”
.. Yet far from keeping Wynn at a distance, Trump seemed insistent on tightening their relationship. “They became pretty close,”
.. the president took great pleasure in how their roles had reversed.
.. During the transition, Wynn bordered on “sycophantic” in his outreach .. particularly on the topic of China.
.. Wynn, who runs a massive casino operation in Macau, often urged Trump to reconsider his pledge to be “tough on China.”
.. Wynn then volunteered to arrange entertainment for Trump’s inauguration
.. Not even Wynn’s extensive rolodex of celebrities could help him nab the artists he wanted most, including Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, and Elton John. “As soon as he’d get close to bringing one on, word would leak out, and they’d immediately deny,” the source said. “Steve got very frustrated. He was clearly upset.”
.. it raised a record-breaking $107 million in the first three quarters of 2017
.. “He’s been a bigger success as a fundraiser than people thought he would be,
.. Wynn spoke with no notes, “as he’s mostly blind.” (Wynn suffers from a degenerative eye disease.)
.. The Wall Street Journal reported that Wynn hand-delivered a letter from the Chinese government urging the return of Miles Kwok, the Chinese businessman who fled the country, seeking asylum in the U.S.
.. But one source directly familiar with the matter remembered notably how Wynn was able “to work Trump up into a tizzy” over the situation, playing into the president’s well-known desire “to get the bad guys out” of the country.
.. “The president will want to keep Steve around him. He likes him—he’s gonna be last to throw a rock at a buddy of his.” Which means that Wynn’s access to Trump could very well continue unfettered—in the shadows, off the schedule, as it largely has been until now.
David Boies: the super-lawyer who fell to earth
He has aided fallen financiers including AIG’s Hank Greenberg and Enron’s Andy Fastow.
.. But he is also an inveterate risk taker — a lover of the action in Las Vegas as well as at his firm Boies Schiller & Flexner — who goes the extra mile for clients. He did a favour for Mr Weinstein, and it is costing him in the court of public opinion.
Mr Boies signed a contract on July 11 hiring a business intelligence firm called Black Cube to spy on Mr Weinstein’s accusers, The New Yorker magazine reported. Run by former Israeli intelligence agents, its operatives used false identities to gain the trust of the people in the case and collect information about them. Its objectives included helping Mr Weinstein “stop the publication of a negative article in a leading NY newspaper”.
However, the mis-step by Mr Boies was hardly an isolated incident. After allegations emerged in 2015 that the blood tests designed by Silicon Valley laboratory Theranos were inaccurate, Mr Boies could be found sitting on the board of the company while his firm was providing it legal advice.
.. he would listen to his mother read and memorise the information. His powers of recall served him well.
.. His courtroom style is notoriously disarming. His attire — typically, a Lands’ End jacket and trousers — comes straight from the heartland. But his questions are hard. After he was done with Westmoreland, the general said he wished he had a lawyer like Mr Boies.
.. Mr Boies matched wits so successfully with Bill Gates that the software supremo was left shaken. “I’m the one with the good memory,” Mr Gates protested to Vanity Fair. “He’s the one trying to confuse people.”
.. Mr Olson. “He has overcome a reading disability. He processes information very, very quickly. He remembers things very well.”
.. He is a man known for conducting several telephone conversations at once. Even as he was responding to the Weinstein scandal, Mr Boies returned to the headlines in a controversial dispute involving American football.