Is the US concerned about nerve gas attacks in Great Britain?

No!!! Can you???? Where in God's name do you live?

Tech workers in San Franciso and Silicon Valley find that their salaries do not go quite as far. Even though the average annual salary for a tech worker in the San Francisco metro area is $125,233, a soaring cost of living means that San Franciscan techies have closer to $102,734 to spend.Sep 29, 2017
The 10 cities where tech salaries go the furthest - CNBC.com
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/29/the-10-cities-where-tech-salaries-go-the-furthest.html

6. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, California
Average salary adjusted for cost of living: $102,286
Average salary unadjusted: $126,937

The poisoned former spy Sergei Skripal was initially reluctant to believe the Russian government had tried to kill him, according to a new book, and despite selling secrets to MI6 was an “unashamed Russian nationalist”.

Skripal struggled to come to terms with his situation following the novichok attack on him and his daughter, Yulia, the author and BBC journalist Mark Urban writes.
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Urban’s book, The Skripal Files, is published this week. In it, Urban recalls a series of meetings with Skripal in summer 2017 when the Russian spy was living quietly and apparently safely in an MI6-bought house in Salisbury.

According to Urban, Skripal said he was reluctant to to be quoted directly, explaining: “You see, we are afraid of Putin.” He did not believe he was personally in danger, but wanted to avoid making public statements so Yulia Skripal and his son, Sasha, could visit him freely from Moscow.

Urban discovered that Skripal spent much of his day watching Russia’s Channel One, a pro-Kremlin state broadcaster. He adopted “the Kremlin line in many matters”, the journalist writes, “even while sitting in his MI6-purchased house”, especially over Moscow’s fraught relations with Ukraine.

Skripal, a former paratrooper, supported Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and referred disparagingly to Ukrainians as “simply sheep who needed a good shepherd”. Skripal also refused to believe Russian troops had entered eastern Ukraine covertly, saying that if they had, they would have quickly reached the capital, Kiev.

The book does not answer the key question as to why Skripal’s former organisation – the GRU – tried to kill him shortly before Russia’s presidential vote. His two would-be assassins – Col Anatoliy Chepiga and “Alexander Petrov”, a pseudonym – are career intelligence officers, the government believes.

Urban corroborates reports that Skripal briefed western intelligence agencies after his move to the UK in 2010, following a spy swap. He travelled to the US in 2011, the Czech Republic in 2012, and Estonia. Last summer, he spent a week in Switzerland briefing its intelligence service, Urban writes.

Still, these visits fail to explain why Moscow would try to kill him with novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent.

There are fresh details of Skripal’s career as an undercover British asset. In summer 1996, an unnamed MI6 intelligence officer recruited him. At the time, Skripal was stationed at Russia’s foreign mission in Madrid. He had previously served in Malta and was a member of the GRU’s Spanish “residency”.

In exchange for $3,000 (£2,300), Skripal handed over details of the GRU’s organisation and command structure. This arrangement continued after he was recalled to Moscow. There were no face-to-face meetings with British spies, but Skripal wrote sensitive information in a book in invisible ink.

His wife, Lyudmila, travelled to Spain and delivered the book to Skripal’s MI6 case officer. The officer gave Skripal a gift – a model English cottage – which later sat on the shelf of his Salisbury home. Skripal was betrayed by a mole inside Spanish intelligence, Urban writes, and arrested in 2004.

Skripal’s current whereabouts are unknown. Yulia Skripal has indicated that she intends to return to Russia at some stage, but so far appears not to have done so.

In a rare personal comment on the Sergei Skripal scandal, Russian President Vladimir Putin lambasted the former double agent as a “traitor” and “scum.” The sooner the media noise around Skripal ends, the better, Putin said.

Some media outlets are “pushing through a theory that Mr Skripal is some sort of a rights activist. He’s plainly a spy. A traitor to his homeland. There’s such a thing – being a traitor to the homeland. He is one,” Putin said on Wednesday, speaking at the Russian Energy Week International Forum in Moscow.

“Imagine, if there’s a person in your country who betrayed it. How would you treat him?” Putin added. “He’s plainly scum.”

Putin also said the whole Skripal affair had been blown out of proportion, adding that “the faster [the media campaign] ends, the better.”

The UK government has accused Russia's military intelligence service of being behind four high-profile cyber attacks.

The National Cyber Security Centre says targets included firms in Russia and Ukraine; the US Democratic Party; and a small TV network in the UK.

World Anti-Doping Agency computers are also said to have been attacked.

Files later emerged showing how British cyclists Sir Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome had used banned substances for legitimate medical reasons.

At the time, some of the attacks were linked to Russia - but this is the first time the UK has singled out the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service.

British police think the men who carried out the Salisbury poisoning in March worked for the same group.

Dutch security services expelled four Russians over a cyber plot in April targeting the global chemical weapons watchdog, officials said.

The operation by Russia's GRU military intelligence allegedly targeted the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague.

The OPCW has been probing the chemical attack on a Russian ex-spy in the UK.

The allegations are part of an organised push-back against alleged Russian cyber attacks around the world.

Earlier, UK government accused the GRU of being behind four high-profile cyber-attacks whose targets included included firms in Russia and Ukraine; the US Democratic Party; and a small TV network in the UK.

Russia has called the accusations a "diabolical cocktail" of allegations.

The four suspects identified by Dutch officials had diplomatic passports and included an IT expert as well as support agents, officials said.

They hired a car and were seen to be scouting to carry out a closed access hack operation targeting the OPCW.

A laptop seized from the suspects was found to have been used in Brazil, Switzerland and Malaysia.

In Malaysia it was used to target the investigation into the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 over rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine in 2014, killing all 298 people on board. Earlier this year Dutch-led international investigators concluded that the missile belonged to a Russian brigade. Russia has denied any involvement in the plane's destruction.

Transparency - the tool to counter Russia

When Theresa May addressed MPs on 5 September - revealing the identities of two Russian agents suspected of the Salisbury poisoning - she said the UK and its allies would step up their collective efforts against the country's military intelligence agency, known as the GRU.

In particular, she promised to deploy what she called "the full range of tools from across our national security apparatus in order to counter the threat posed by the GRU."

Well, we now know what she means.

And the biggest tool in her box is what officials call the shining light of transparency.

The revelations about how the British and Dutch security agencies disrupted the operations of the GRU are astonishing in their detail and their openness.

This is not what secretive intelligence agencies normally do.

But the willingness of both countries to be so candid illustrates how determined both they and some other western governments are to try to push back against what they see as a concerted pattern of Russian aggression.

"I imagine Mr Putin is shouting at one or two people right now," a cheerful British official told me.