First Run News

(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the sign-up.) Good morning. Here’s what you need to know: • The extensive global cyberattack that began on Friday isn’t over yet.

Con Slobodchikoff and I approached the mountain meadow slowly, obliquely, softening our footfalls and conversing in whispers. It didn’t make much difference. Once we were within 50 feet of the clearing’s edge, the alarm sounded: short, shrill notes in rapid sequence, like rounds of sonic bullets. We had just trespassed on a prairie-dog colony. A North American analogue to Africa’s meerkat, the prairie dog is trepidation incarnate.

Con Slobodchikoff and I approached the mountain meadow slowly, obliquely, softening our footfalls and conversing in whispers. It didn’t make much difference. Once we were within 50 feet of the clearing’s edge, the alarm sounded: short, shrill notes in rapid sequence, like rounds of sonic bullets. We had just trespassed on a prairie-dog colony. A North American analogue to Africa’s meerkat, the prairie dog is trepidation incarnate.

PARIS — Against the regal backdrop of a grand reception room in youngest president in modern French history. In his short speech to mark the occasion, he encouraged the French to embrace the future, to hold him to a high standard and to join him in the hard work ahead. “I r

TEHRAN — As a college student studying mechanics, Hamidreza Faraji had expected after graduation to land a steady job with a fixed salary, a pension plan and the occasional bonus. He envisioned coming home at 6 p.m. to his family and vacationing at a resort on the Caspian Sea. But Mr. Faraji, 34, has long since given up on all that. These days, he said, the only people who lead such predictable lives are government employees.

President Trump’s abrupt dismissal last week of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, and his subsequent allusion to taped conversations with Mr.

WASHINGTON — As a senator, Jeff Sessions was such a conservative outlier on criminal justice issues that he pushed other Republicans to the forefront of his campaign to block a sentencing overhaul, figuring they would be taken more seriously. Now Mr. Sessions is attorney general and need not take a back seat to anyone when it comes to imposing his ultratough-on-crime views.

BEARS EARS NATIONAL MONUMENT, Utah — Ryan Zinke, the secretary of the interior, stepped into the desert last week at the edge of the 1.3-million-acre red-rock expanse that is roiling the West. Mr. Zinke had billed his visit as a listening tour, and a woman trailed with a camera phone, needling him to support her side. “Be nice,” he said, swinging around and shaking a finger at her in the view of those in the crowd, many in cowboy hats.

HONG KONG — Hackers in Vietnam have been attacking foreign companies and other targets for years, seeking information and using tactics that suggest links to the Vietnamese government, a cybersecurity company said Monday. The findings, laid out in a report released by the company, FireEye, come as companies and experts look beyond traditional sources of attacks like China and Russia

MOSCOW — Russia was again at the center of a global hacking scandal when computer systems the world over were frozen this weekend by a variant of malicious software known as WannaCry.