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We all witnessed some of the most shocking and confounding political events of our lifetime: the careening last stage of Donald J. Trump’s reelection campaign, the president’s audacious election challenge, the harrowing mayhem of January 6, the buffoonery of the second impeachment trial. But what was really going on in the inner sanctum of the White House during these calamitous events? What did the president and his dwindling cadre of loyalists actually believe? And what were they planning?

Michael Wolff pulled back the curtain on the Trump presidency with his #1 bestselling blockbuster Fire and Fury Now, in Landslide, he closes the door on the presidency with a final, astonishingly candid account.

In the bestselling tradition of The Swerve and A Distant Mirror, The Verge tells the story of a period that marked a decisive turning point for both European and world history. Here, author Patrick Wyman examines two complementary and contradictory sides of the same historical coin: the world-altering implications of the developments of printed mass media, extreme taxation, exploitative globalization, humanistic learning, gunpowder warfare, and mass religious conflict in the long term, and their intensely disruptive consequences in the short-term.

As told through the lives of ten real people—from famous figures like Christopher Columbus and wealthy banker Jakob Fugger to a ruthless small-time merchant and a one-armed mercenary captain— The Verge illustrates how their lives, and the times in which they lived, set the stage for an unprecedented globalized future.

Even in the midst of a nationwide surge of bias and incidents against them, Asians from coast to coast have quietly assumed mastery of the nation’s technical and intellectual machinery and become essential American workers. Yet, they’ve been forced to do so in the face of policy proposals―written in the name of diversity―excluding them from the upper ranks of the elite.

In An Inconvenient Minority journalist Kenny Xu traces elite America’s longstanding unease about a minority potentially upending them. Leftist agendas, such as eliminating standardized testing, doling out racial advantages to“preferred” minorities, and lumping Asians into “privileged” categories despite their deprived historical experiences have spurred Asian Americans to act.

Meet Persephone Wilder, a displaced genius posing as the wife of an American diplomat in Namibia. Persephone takes her job as a representative of her country seriously, coming up with an intricate set of rules to survive the problems she encounters: how to dress in hundred-degree weather without showing too much skin, how not to look drunk at embassy functions, and how to eat roasted oryx with grace. She also suspects her husband is not actually the ambassador’s legal counsel but a secret agent in the CIA. The consummate embassy wife, she takes the newest trailing spouse, Amanda Evans, under her wing.

Propulsive and provocative, Embassy Wife asks what it means to be a human in this world, even as it helps us laugh in the face of our own absurd, seemingly impossible states of affairs.

Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky will address Australia’s parliament on Thursday evening by video, the parliament was told.

Employment Minister Stuart Robert told parliament on Thursday morning that Zelensky would make an address by video facility at 5.30pm (0730 GMT), parliament records showed.

The central Chinese government played an “unprecedented role” over the past year in efforts to direct the outcome of elections in Hong Kong, the US State Department said on Thursday.

That finding was one of several included in the annual Hong Kong Policy Act report to Congress on the state of democratic freedoms in Hong Kong, mandated by legislation that codified US relations with the city after the British handover in 1997.

Following reports of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Mariupol carried out by Russia, Australia’s foreign minister, Marise Payne, said that if confirmed it would a “further wholesale breach” of international law.

Australia will impose financial sanctions and travel bans on an additional 67 Russians over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, Foreign Minister Marise Payne said on Thursday, April 7, taking the total number of people and entities sanctioned to almost 600.

A string of “sabotage” incidents in open source software is reigniting discussions of how to safeguard projects that underpin digital platforms and networks around the world. Many of the recent incidents have been dubbed “protestware” because they relate to open source developers making code changes to express support for Ukraine amidst Russia’s invasion and ongoing attack of the country.

In some cases, open source software has been modified to display anti-war overlays or other messages of solidarity with Ukraine. In at least one instance, though, a popular software package was modified to deploy a malicious data wiper on Russian and Belarusian computers. This wave of protests in open source comes just a couple of months after a seemingly unrelated incident in which a maintainer sabotaged two of his widely used open-source projects out of apparent frustration stemming from feeling overworked and under-compensated.

The scene seemed more suited to an Austin Powers spy farce than a John le Carré cold war intrigue.

“I told Moscow that you are such a good boy,” lieutenant colonel Sergey Solomasov, a spook working for Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, told his Slovak contact, Bohus Garbar. “Moscow decided that you’ll be a hunter.” 

But Solomasov — on paper, Russia’s deputy military attaché in Bratislava — was wrong. Garbar did not get a chance to hunt. Instead he was the hunted: Slovak agents had filmed the meeting with his handler.

A “Stalinist” mass purge of Russian secret intelligence is under way after more than 100 agents were removed from their jobs and the head of the department responsible for Ukraine was sent to prison.

In a sign of President Putin’s fury over the failures of the invasion, about 150 Federal Security Bureau (FSB) officers have been dismissed, including some who have been arrested.

Western sanctions and condemnations intended to pile pressure on Vladimir Putin instead seem to be rallying Russians behind him.

What they’re saying: The more horrific the allegations against Russia — such as the apparent massacre of civilians in Bucha— the stronger the impulse to reject them as lies, says Grigory Yudin, a sociologist at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences.

ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre has launched the Understanding Global Disinformation and Information Operations website alongside this companion paper.

In the five weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, scores of articles have drawn upon history to explain Moscow’s actions and intent. Some point to the Soviet suppression of a democracy movement in Hungary in 1956, while others draw lessons from the Russian Federation’s assault on the Chechen city of Grozny in 1999.

In a recent CNN interview, retired US General David Petraeus praised the very determined and skilled defensive performance of the Ukrainian forces, but also observed that: “… the Russians are just surprisingly unprofessional. They clearly have very poor standards when it comes to performing basic tactical tasks such as achieving combined arms operations… They are very poor at maintaining their vehicles and weapon systems and have abandoned many of them. They are also poor at resupply and logistical tasks.”

Last November, three months before Russian forces would invade Ukraine, Russia launched a Nudol missile interceptor that blew up Cosmos 1408, a defunct Soviet satellite, in the process flinging at least 1,400 bits of debris into low Earth orbit. The weapons test unsubtly demonstrated Russia’s anti-satellite military capabilities, which are comparable to those of China and the United States.

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti chats with academic and political scientist Amy Zegart about her new book, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence (Princeton University Press, February 2022). Zegart is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, where she is also a professor of political science.

Historian and writer Ben Macintyre presents a series on bluff and guile in battle. With the help of experts and historians he looks at military deception in different historical periods, and tells the stories of commanders and armies who have either used it to their advantage – or fallen foul of it.