Last May, in the weeks leading up to his presidential inauguration, Volodymyr Zelensky learned that a man named Rudy Giuliani wanted to meet with him. The name was only distantly familiar. But the former mayor of New York City was the personal attorney of the president of the United States… Zelensky understood that it might be hard to say no.
President Donald Trump urged Ukraine’s president to work with Attorney General William Barr on a potential investigation into Joe Biden, according to a White House readout of a July call, adding a damaging new dimension to the scandal that is engulfing Trump’s presidency.
Also Read: Why Trump Relishes The Upcoming Impeachment Battle
And: Inside Trumpworld, Public Defiance Vs. Private Anxiety Over Impeachment
Ukraine’s new president-elect, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, is in many ways the ideal poster boy for the antiestablishment trend currently sweeping world politics. A media-savvy TV celebrity who has never previously held political office, he has made a virtue of his inexperience by posing as an everyman candidate untainted by the rot within the system.
Photo by Irvan Smith on Unsplash
All across Maersk headquarters, the full scale of the crisis was starting to become clear. Within half an hour, Maersk employees were running down hallways, yelling to their colleagues to turn off computers or disconnect them from Maersk’s network before the malicious software could infect them, as it dawned on them that every minute could mean dozens or hundreds more corrupted PCs.
Given the tense state of U.S.-Russian relations and the paucity of high-level contacts, there are strong arguments for Trump to hold a summit with Putin. However fractured the relationship, it makes sense for the world’s two nuclear superpowers to sit down together and re-establish some of the channels of communication that were cut off after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and war in southeastern Ukraine.
The high-profile purchase of an opulent home on The Peak in 1998 by a Hong Kong-based businessman was cover for the purchase of what would become China’s first aircraft carrier. Xu Zengping, 65, the People’s Liberation Army Navy proxy who bought the unfinished carrier from a Ukrainian shipyard, said the purchase of the HK$220 million (US$28.1 million) luxury home in 1998 was aimed at convincing the outside world that he had the financial capability to turn the 300-metre Varyag into a floating casino. It instead became China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, which was commissioned in 2012.
In a post-Cold War world, the fear of nuclear holocaust has receded from the global consciousness. Donald Trump’s threat of unleashing “fire and fury like the world has never seen” against North Korea was an untimely and unwelcome reminder of a past, perilous era. Even by Trump’s standards these statements were a new low. And they are dangerous. History teaches us that the journey from political logorrhea to global disaster can be terrifyingly short.
The first six months of 2017 have seen an inordinate number of cybersecurity meltdowns. And they weren’t just your standard corporate breaches. It’s only July, and already there’s been viral, state-sponsored ransomware, leaks of spy tools from US intelligence agencies, and full-on campaign hacking. And that’s just the beginning.
When a ransomware outbreak exploded from Ukraine across Europe yesterday, disrupting companies, government agencies, and critical infrastructure, it at first appeared to be just another profit-focused cybercriminal scheme—albeit a particularly vicious and damaging one. But its origins in Ukraine raised deeper questions. After all, shadowy hackers have waged a cyberwar there for years, likely at Russia’s bidding.
