Donald Trump, his aides and allies went on the offensive on Sunday, over what the president claims is un-investigated corruption involving Joe Biden and his son in Ukraine.
Related: Ukraine furore confirms Giuliani as Trump's most off-kilter advocate
Continue reading...Biden calls for congressional inquiry into call in which Trump reportedly pressed Ukraine leader for damaging information
Donald Trump lashed back at his critics on Saturday, as questions swirled in the latest scandal to hit his White House and his target, Joe Biden, called for a congressional investigation of “an overwhelming abuse of power”.
Related: Ukraine imbroglio confirms Giuliani's as Trump's most off-kilter advocate
Continue reading...The man once called America’s Mayor has become the loosest of cannons, embroiling his boss in an election-meddling furore
On Thursday night Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and troubleshooter-in-chief, went on CNN to defend his boss against the latest scandal swirling round him.
Related: Rudy Giuliani's quest for dirt on Biden via Ukraine – a timeline
Continue reading...White House has refused to turn a national security official’s formal whistleblower complaint over to Congress
Donald Trump pressed the new leader of Ukraine this summer to investigate Joe Biden, multiple reports say, as Democrats condemned what they saw as a clear effort to damage a political rival.
It was the latest revelation tied to an explosive whistleblower complaint that sparked a showdown between congressional Democrats and the Trump administration. Trump officials have refused to turn over the complaint by a national security official or even describe its contents.
Continue reading...Kyiv and Moscow each released 35 prisoners in a dramatic exchange that resulted in freedom for 24 Ukrainian sailors taken captive by Russia. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was on the runway at Kyiv’s airport to greet the released prisoners and there were emotional scenes as family members were reunited
Continue reading...Vladimir Tsemakh, who was arrested in June, may be part of prisoner swap deal with Russia
A Ukrainian court has released a potential suspect and key witness in the shooting down of MH17, as Russia’s president said the two countries were working on a deal to swap prisoners.
Vladimir Tsemakh had bragged on video of commanding an anti-air brigade in separatist-held east Ukraine and indicated he hid evidence of a Buk missile system, the kind Dutch investigators say shot down the Malaysia Airlines jet with 298 people on board.
Continue reading...Measles kills 37 in first half of 2019 as number of cases tops figure for whole of last year
The dramatic surge in measles across Europe is putting lives at risk, experts have said, as official figures showed the number of cases in the first half of 2019 outstripped that for the whole of last year.
Data released by the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed nearly 90,000 cases and 37 deaths were reported across 48 of the 53 countries in the WHO European region in the first six months of 2019.
Continue reading...Sapiens author said he had authorised revisions to all his books in order to reach ‘diverse audiences around the world’
Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari has acknowledged that he authorised replacing criticism of Vladimir Putin with criticism of Donald Trump in the Russian edition of his bestseller, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, saying that Russian censors would not have allowed him to publish the original text.
Earlier this week, Newsweek reported that the Russian translation of 21 Lessons blunted Harari’s criticism of Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014.
Continue reading...Volodymyr Zelenskiy expected to command outright majority with 42% of the vote
Ukraine’s comedian-turned-president is on course for full domination of the country’s political scene after early results from Sunday’s parliamentary elections indicated his newly founded Servant of the People party would win a majority of seats.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a political neophyte whose only previous experience was playing the president in a television sitcom also called Servant of the People, won presidential elections in April and called for early parliamentary elections soon after his inauguration.
Continue reading...Supreme court clears way for Dmytro Firtash to face trial on bribery charges
Austria’s supreme court has upheld a decision granting a request by the US to extradite the Ukrainian tycoon Dmytro Firtash on bribery charges.
A US grand jury indicted Firtash in 2013, along with a member of India’s parliament and four others, on suspicion of bribing Indian government officials to gain access to minerals used to make titanium-based products. Firtash denies wrongdoing.
Continue reading...Delegation leaves Council of Europe assembly in protest at readmission of Russian MPs
The Ukrainian delegation at the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe has walked out in protest after Russian MPs were allowed to return to the human rights body five years after the annexation of Crimea.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said he was disappointed by the decision of the assembly (Pace) to readmit Russian members, while the head of the delegation said Ukraine would halt its work at the assembly.
Continue reading...Truth or consequences, a parlour game in which players are penalised for dishonesty or wrongdoing, is mostly fun – but it also reflects a broad moral consensus about the unacceptability of lying. This long-held belief is deeply rooted in popular culture. Truth or Consequences was the title of a postwar American TV quiz show whose success was so great that a New Mexico town was named after it. Put simply, and as a general rule, most people expect that if you tell whoppers, you get punished.
Why, then, do so many modern leaders seem to think they can lie and get away with it? A propensity to deny, dodge or disown the consequences of political actions is spreading globally like a toxic virus. There was a time, as David Miliband, the former foreign secretary, argues in this year’s Fulbright Lecture, when public accountability was on the rise. Not any more. In what he calls the age of impunity, “those engaged in conflicts around the world believe they can get away with anything, including murder”.
Continue reading...Four suspects, three of them Russian, will face murder charges for the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in 2014, international investigators have said. A trial is due to start next March in the Netherlands. The suspects were named as Igor Girkin, a former colonel of Russia’s FSB spy service; Sergey Dubinskiy, employed by Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency; Oleg Pulatov, a former soldier with the GRU’s special forces Spetsnaz unit; and Leonid Kharchenko, a Ukrainian man.
Legal process essential even if those charged over killing of 298 passengers never go to jail
Wash kits, bags of duty-free shopping and sections of overhead compartment lay strewn across the fields. In one spot, there was a stack of holiday reading. The body of a young Malaysian boy had landed outside a babushka’s cottage.
The aftermath of the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was a landscape of carnage and chaos. Parts of the plane and its contents landed across several kilometres of the normally peaceful Ukrainian countryside, where villages had already been disturbed by months of war and people now witnessed bodies falling from the sky.
Continue reading...Four named as first to be charged over death of 298 people on flight downed over Ukraine
Four suspects will face murder charges for the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, three of them Russians, international investigators said on Wednesday, with a trial due to start next March in the Netherlands.
Almost five years after the plane was downed over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board, prosecutors said there was enough evidence to bring criminal charges.
Continue reading...Inquiry expected to name first four suspects over downing of flight that killed 298 in 2014
Dutch prosecutors are to identify suspects and file the first criminal charges over the 2014 downing of flight MH17 over east Ukraine which killed 298 people in the worst atrocity in five years of war between Ukraine and Russia-backed separatists.
The charges are likely to target members of a Russia-backed separatist movement and may include Russian service personnel who commanded or helped transport the anti-aircraft missile system used to bring down the plane.
Continue reading...Photographer Tom Skipp visited Chernobyl and nearby Pripyat, its replacement town Slavutych, and the abandoned sites of the region – meeting the people behind the disaster: from the liquidators who worked at the fallout site, to the resettlers and the community who live and work in the area now
I arrived in Ukraine on the eve of the 32nd anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. I had not intended for it to be the focus of my time in Kyiv, but leading up to my departure it became an obsession. My arrival in Kyiv on 25 April 2018 was maybe happenstance of planning but I was impelled to head straight from the airport to Slavutych. This was the town built to replace Pripyat and host the evacuated personnel of the Chernobyl power plant, after the decision was made to continue power production following the disaster. All of the Soviet republics were called upon to hurriedly help with the construction of what would eventually be the last atomic town.
Continue reading...Ukraine's new president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, took the oath of office on Monday and immediately announced he was dissolving parliament and calling a snap election, aiming to win seats in a legislature still dominated by politicians loyal to his predecessor
Continue reading...Human rights body had stripped Moscow of its voting rights over 2014 Crimea annexation
Russia will remain in the Council of Europe after ministers at the human rights organisation moved to end a bitter dispute following the annexation of Crimea.
Meeting in Helsinki, ministers of the 47-nation body voted overwhelmingly in favour of a declaration that said “all member states should be entitled to participate on an equal basis” in the council’s committee of ministers and parliamentary assembly.
Continue reading...Artem Tkachuk, 18, of Piranhas film is believed to have been attacked by a ‘baby gang’ in city
An actor who appeared in an award-winning film about child criminals in Naples has been stabbed by an alleged member of one of the Italian city’s “baby gangs”.
Artem Tkachuk, 18, originally from Ukraine, played a young mobster in The Piranhas, which told the story of the phenomenon of baby gangs, criminal groups led by youngsters, in Naples.
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