A 92-year-old woman in Arizona accused of fatally shooting her 72-year-old son over his plans to put her in an assisted living facility has been arrested on suspicion of murder. Anna Mae Blessing was taken into custody on Monday and was being held in lieu of $500,000 bail. She told detectives she had confronted her son over his intentions to put her in the care facility because, he had said, she was difficult to live with. Blessing said she should be “put to sleep” for her actions and had intended to kill herself after the incident.

UK couple exposed to nerve agent critical

Counter-terror police called in after pair exposed to same substance used in recent attack

A British couple left critically ill in an English village were exposed to Novichok — the same nerve agent used in the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in the nearby city of Salisbury this year, police said on Thursday.

Counter-terrorism police are now leading the investigation into the incident after tests at the Porton Down defence laboratory confirmed the nature of the substance, which Britain says is a Soviet-made military grade nerve agent. “It’s the same nerve agent. Whether we can ever tell if it’s the same batch will be up to scientists to determine,” Neil Basu, head of counter-terrorism police, told media. “The priority for the investigation team now, is to establish how these two people have come into contact with this nerve agent,” he added. Basu said there was no evidence to suggest that the man and the woman, named locally as Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess, “were targeted in any way”.

The two fell ill last Sunday in Amesbury, close to where former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia collapsed on a bench on March 4 in an incident that sparked a bitter diplomatic crisis with Russia. “The possibility that these two investigations might be linked is clearly a line of enquiry for us,” Basu said. However, Basu assured that there was no evidence the man and the woman had “recently visited any of the sites that were decontaminated after the poisoning of the Skripals.This remains a low risk to the general public,” he said. “We’re satisfied that if anyone was exposed to that level of nerve agent by now they would be showing symptoms,” he added.