The nerve agent used to poison Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury was delivered in a liquid form, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has said. A very small amount of the novichok nerve agent was used in the attack and the highest concentration was found at Skripal’s house, it emerged in a press briefing in the city. Work to decontaminate sites in Salisbury affected by the nerve agent is beginning, but will take months and involve almost 200 members of the armed forces. Nine sites had been identified as needing some sort of specialist cleaning, Defra said.

They include part of the Maltings shopping centre where the former Russian spy Skripal and his daughter collapsed, the Zizzi restaurant and Mill pub which they visited that day, and the family home on the outskirts of the city. The home of the police officer injured in the incident, DS Nick Bailey, also needs decontaminating.

Police previously said that they believed the pair had been poisoned at the front door of Skripal’s home. Specialists found the highest concentration of the nerve agent on the door, police said. Last week previously classified intelligence about the Salisbury attack claimed Russia had tested whether door handles could be used to deliver nerve agents. A small cordoned area of the cemetery where the remains of Skripal’s wife and son lie has been reopened after “extensive investigations and testing” established that it was not contaminated.(theguardian)…[+]

The European commission is seeking to force technology companies wherever they are based in the EU to hand over emails, text messages and app communications of terror suspects within hours of a court order. Under the plans, judges in one member state will be able to seize electronic evidence held on a service provider in another European country through a transnational European production order.

The powers would further cover the seizure of data held outside the EU by a tech company “offering services in the union and established or represented” in an EU member state. The information will have to be handed over by the service provider within 10 days of receiving the warrant, or as little as six hours in emergency cases.

Currently, depending on the legal vehicle, the time limits before which the tech companies need to respond to national courts can vary between 120 days to 10 months. Frans Timmermans, the European commission’s vice-president, said: “Electronic evidence is increasingly important in criminal proceedings. We cannot allow criminals and terrorists to exploit modern and electronic communication technologies to hide their criminal actions and evade justice.(theguardian)…[+]

Emmanuel Macron has likened the political divisions in Europe to a civil war and warned against growing illiberalism on the continent. In his first speech to the European parliament, the French president called for the defence of a European liberal democracy that offered protection of the rights of its minorities, and attacked those who took their countries out of the EU to pursue fairytale “adventures”.“I am for the most integrated and closest possible relationship after Brexit, and there’s a well-known solution – it’s called EU membership,” he said.

The vast majority of the speech was, however, about the future without the UK, and the need for the 27 other EU member states to be united in opposition to the emergence of the nationalist authoritarian traits of the past. Without naming the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who recently won a landslide victory after a campaign that played on voters’ fears of immigration, Macron was scathing of politicians who scapegoated migrants.  “There seems to be a certain European civil war: national selfishness and negativity seems to take precedence over what brings us together. There is a fascination with the illiberal, and that is growing all the time,” he told MEPs. “In the future, we must struggle to defend our ideals … This is a democracy that respects individual minority fundamental rights, which used to be called liberal democracy, and I use that term by choice. The deadly tendency which might lead our continent to the abyss, nationalism, giving up of freedom: I reject the idea that European democracy is condemned to impotence.(theguardian)…[+]