FORMER RUSSIAN SPY LIKELY WAS POISONED AT FRONT DOOR

LONDON» The Russian ex-spy and his daughter left critically ill in a nerve agent attack three weeks ago probably were poisoned at the front door of their home in southwestern England, British police said Wednesday. It was the first time police have said where they thought Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia might have been poisoned. The highest concentration of nerve agent found so far was on the Skripals’ front door in Salisbury.

Ecuador cuts Assange’s internet at embassy.

QUITO,

ECUADOR» Ecuador’s government said Wednesday it has cut off WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s internet connection at the nation’s London embassy after his recent activity on social media decrying the arrest of a Catalan separatist politician.

In a statement, officials said Assange’s recent posts “put at risk” the good relations Ecuador maintains with nations throughout Europe and had decided as of Tuesday to suspend his internet access “to prevent any potential harm.”

Assange has since gone silent on social media.

Greenland melting faster than at any time in past 450 years.

Scientists who crossed western Greenland with a fleet of snowmobiles, pulling up long cylinders of ice at camps a little more than a mile above sea level, have found evidence that the vast sheet of ice is melting faster than at any time in the past 450 years at least — and possibly much longer than that.

That’s worrisome, because the snow that has fallen on the island over millennia — now compacted into ice — could raise sea levels by 20 feet if it completely melted.

In recent years, as Arctic air and ocean temperatures have risen, Greenland has been losing more ice through melting on its surface and through iceberg breaks at its periphery. It’s currently contributing almost a millimeter annually to the rising of the oceans, more even than Antarctica.

Launch of NASA’s new flagship space telescope delayed.

NASA will postpone the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope by at least a year, to May 2020, the agency announced Tuesday.

The delay may increase the cost of the mission — the bigger and more powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope — beyond the $8 billion funding cap established by law. If that happens, the JWST will need to be reapproved by Congress. It’s yet another setback for the ambitious but beleaguered mission, which has been in the works since 1996.

Woman sues after rental home was used to shoot pornography.

MARTHA’S

MASS.» A Massachusetts VINEYARD, woman has filed a federal lawsuit accusing her tenant of using her Martha’s Vineyard home to shoot pornographic videos without telling her.

The lawsuit filed this week says Leah Bassett had no idea when she rented out her home in 2014 that it would be used to shoot adult films.

Bassett says the filmmakers used “nearly every room of her home for their porn production purposes,” including her bedrooms, sofas, dining room table and laundry room appliances.

Bassett says the “highly disturbing discovery” has caused her emotional and psychological distress.

The lawsuit was filed against the adult film company, Quebec-based Mile High Distribution Inc., and several individuals.

Stephen Roach, an attorney for Mile High, says the matter arose out of a basic landlordtenant dispute and the allegations in the complaint are “unfounded.”