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EDINBURGH: Lashed by cold winds and overlooking choppy, steel-gray North Sea waters, the breathtaking sand dunes of Scotland’s northeastern coast rank among Donald Trump ‘s favorite spots on earth.

“At some point, maybe in my very old age, I’ll go there and do the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen,” Trump said in 2023, during his New York civil fraud trial, talking about his plans for future developments on his property in Balmedie, Aberdeenshire.

At 79 and back in the White House, Trump is making at least part of that pledge a reality, traveling to Scotland on Friday as his family’s business prepares for the Aug. 13 opening of a new course it is billing as “the greatest 36 holes in golf.”

While there, Trump will talk trade with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a meeting he’s said will take place at “probably one of my properties.”

The Aberdeen area is already home to another of his courses, Trump International Scotland, and the president also plans to visit a Trump course near Turnberry, around 320 kilometers away on Scotland’s southwest coast.

Using this week’s presidential overseas trip – with its sprawling entourage of advisers, White House and support staffers, Secret Service agents and reporters – to help show off Trump-brand golf destinations demonstrates how the president has become increasingly comfortable intermingling his governing pursuits with promoting his family’s business interests.

The White House has brushed off questions about potential conflicts of interest, arguing that Trump’s business success before he entered politics was a key to his appeal with voters.

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers called the Scotland swing a “working trip.” But she added that Trump “has built the best and most beautiful world-class golf courses anywhere in the world, which is why they continue to be used for prestigious tournaments and by the most elite players in the sport.”

Trump family’s new golf course has tee times for sale

Trump went to Scotland to play his Turnberry course during his first term in 2018 while en route to a meeting in Finland with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This time, his trip comes as the new golf course is about to debut and is already actively selling tee times.

It’s not cheap for the president to travel.

The helicopters that operate as Marine One when the president is on board cost between $16,700 and nearly $20,000 per hour to operate, according to Pentagon data for fiscal year 2022. The modified Boeing 747s that serve as the iconic Air Force One cost about $200,000 per hour to fly. That’s not to mention the military cargo aircraft that fly ahead of the president with his armored limousines and other official vehicles.

“We’re at a point where the Trump administration is so intertwined with the Trump business that he doesn’t seem to see much of a difference,” said Jordan Libowitz, vice president and spokesperson for the ethics watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It’s as if the White House were almost an arm of the Trump Organization.”

During his first term, the Trump Organization signed an ethics pact barring deals with foreign companies. An ethics frameworks for Trump’s second term allows them.

Trump’s assets are in a trust run by his children, who are also handling day-to-day operations of the Trump Organization while he’s in the White House. The company has inked many recent, lucrative foreign agreements involving golf courses, including plans to build luxury developments in Qatar and Vietnam, even as the administration continues to negotiate tariff rates for those countries and around the globe.

Trump’s first Aberdeen course has sparked legal battles

Trump’s existing Aberdeenshire course, meanwhile, has a history nearly as rocky as the area’s cliffs.

It has struggled to turn a profit and was found by Scottish conservation authorities to have partially destroyed nearby sand dunes. Trump’s company also was ordered to cover the Scottish government’s legal costs after the course unsuccessfully sued over the construction of a nearby wind farm, arguing in part that it hurt golfers’ views.

And the development was part of the massive civil case, which accused Trump of inflating his wealth to secure loans and make business deals.

Trump’s company’s initial plans for his first Aberdeen-area course called for a luxury hotel and nearby housing. His company received permission to build 500 houses, but Trump suggested he’d be allowed to build five times as many and borrowed against their values without actually building any homes, the lawsuit alleged.

Judge Arthur Engoron found Trump liable last year and ordered his company to pay $355 million in fines – a judgment that has grown with interest to more than $510 million as Trump appeals.

Golfers-in-chief

Family financial interests aside, Trump isn’t the first sitting US president to golf in Scotland. That was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who played in Turnberry in 1959. George W. Bush visited the famed course at Gleneagles in 2005 but didn’t play.

Many historians trace golf back to Scotland in the Middle Ages. Among the earliest known references to game was a Scottish Parliament resolution in 1457 that tried to ban it, along with soccer, because of fears both were distracting men from practicing archery – then considered vital to national defense.

The first US president to golf regularly was William Howard Taft, who served from 1909 to 1913 and ignored warnings from his predecessor, Teddy Roosevelt, that playing too much would make it seem like he wasn’t working hard enough.

Woodrow Wilson played nearly every day but Sundays, and even had the Secret Service paint his golf balls red so he could practice in the snow, said Mike Trostel, director of the World Golf Hall of Fame.

Warren G. Harding trained his dog Laddie Boy to fetch golf balls while he practiced. Lyndon B. Johnson’s swing was sometimes described as looking like a man trying to kill a rattlesnake.

Bill Clinton, who liked to joke that he was the only president whose game improved while in office, restored a putting green on the White House’s South Lawn. It was originally installed by Eisenhower, who was such an avid user that he left cleat marks in the wooden floors of the Oval Office by the door leading out to it.

Bush stopped golfing after the start of the Iraq war in 2003 because of the optics. Barack Obama had a golf simulator installed in the White House that Trump upgraded during his first term, Trostel said.

John F. Kennedy largely hid his love of the game as president, but he played on Harvard’s golf team and nearly made a hole-in-one at California’s renowned Cypress Point Golf Club just before the 1960 Democratic National Convention.

“I’d say, between President Trump and President John F. Kennedy, those are two of the most skilled golfers we’ve had in the White House,” Trostel said.

Trump, Trostel said, has a handicap index – how many strokes above par a golfer is likely to score – of a very strong 2.5, though he’s not posted an official round with the US Golf Association since 2021. That’s better than Joe Biden’s handicap of 6.7, which also might be outdated, and Obama, who once described his own handicap as an “honest 13.”

The White House described Trump as a championship-level golfer but said he plays with no handicap.

PARIS : Software giant Microsoft is at the center of cybersecurity storm after China-linked hackers exploited flaws in SharePoint servers to target hundreds of organizations.
While such cyberattacks are not new, the scale of the onslaught and the speed with which the hackers took advantage of freshly discovered vulnerabilities is fueling concern.
Dutch startup Eye Security warned Saturday of online attacks targeting SharePoint file-sharing servers, with Microsoft quick to confirm the report and release patches to protect systems.
The vulnerability allowed hackers to retrieve credentials and then access SharePoint servers kept at users’ facilities, according to Microsoft.
Cloud-based SharePoint software was safe from the problem, the company said.

Eye Security determined that more than 400 computer systems were compromised by hackers during waves of attacks.
Targets included government organizations in Europe, the Middle East and the United States — among them the US nuclear weapons agency, media reports indicated.
“On-premises SharePoint deployments — particularly within government, schools, health care and large enterprise companies — are at immediate risk,” cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks warned in a note.
Microsoft has not disclosed the number of victims in the attacks.
SharePoint had more than 200 million active users as of 2020, according to the most recent figures available from Microsoft.

Microsoft has attributed the cyberattacks to groups backed by China.
The culprits are believed to include Chinese state actors known as Linen Typhoon and Violet Typhoon along with a group called Storm-2603 which “is considered with moderate confidence to be a threat actor based in China.”
The Typhoon groups have been active for a decade or more, and are known for intellectual property theft as well as espionage, according to Microsoft.
Less was known about Storm-2603 and its motives.
“Investigations into other actors also using these exploits are ongoing,” Microsoft said, urging users to patch SharePoint servers to avoid becoming hacking victims.
Cybersecurity specialist Damien Bancal noted in a recent blog post that he found “ready-to-use exploit code” for the vulnerability at a popular website.

The assault on SharePoint servers is the latest in a series of sophisticated attacks carried out by state-sponsored groups against “the Microsoft ecosystem,” according to Bancal.
In 2021, attacks by a Chinese hacker group known as Silk Typhoon compromised tens of thousands of email servers using Microsft Exchange software.
Microsoft’s success at making its software commonplace in offices and homes also makes it a prime target for hackers out to steal money or information.
Microsoft software can hold sensitive and valuable information.
“It’s not Microsoft that is being targeted, it’s its customers,” said Shane Barney, head of information security at US-based Keeper.
Targeting Microsoft programs is a means to an end, and tomorrow it could be software from another company, said Rodrigue Le Bayon, head of Orange Cyberdefense computer emergency response team.

China is not the only nation backing hacker operations as countries around the world hone cyber capabilities, according to Le Bayon.
Nevertheless, China is repeatedly singled out by companies and goverments hit by hacks.
Western countries have accused hacker groups allegedly supported by China of conducting a global cyber espionage campaign against figures critical of Beijing, democratic institutions, and companies in various sensitive sectors.