The Hague, Netherlands

Russian hackers booted: Dutch authorities arrested and expelled two suspected Russian spies earlier this year for allegedly trying to hack a Swiss laboratory that conducts chemical weapons tests for the United Nations, Switzerland’s government revealed this week. The alleged target was the Spiez Laboratory, which analyzed samples of the deadly Novichok nerve agent used in the March poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in England. The two alleged hackers, who were not named, were arrested in The Hague in the spring. Stanislav Smirnov, a spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Switzerland, denied the allegations, calling them “a new antiRussian bogus story made up by the Western media.”