Turkey air strikes: PKK targeted by air force jets | Hackers who breached corporate wires made millions off insider trading | Donald Trump is an aimless, angry leader - WP Editorial
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Turkey launched a series of overnight air strikes against Kurdish militants, aimed at 17 targets in the south-east, the army says.
The targets were in Hakkari province on the border with Iran and Iraq.
Turkey has seen increasing violence in recent weeks between the military and Kurdish separatists.
The strikes come a day after nine people were killed in a wave of attacks on security forces, some of them in the south-east.
The PKK has said it was behind one of those - the bombing of an Istanbul police station in which four people died.
In a statement, the PKK named three of its members who died in the attack and during a subsequent clash with Turkish security forces.
A ceasefire in the long-running conflict with the group appeared to disintegrate in July, when Turkey began bombing PKK camps in northern Iraq, at the same time as launching air strikes on Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria.
At least 50 people have died in the renewed violence.
Tuesday's air strikes are being widely interpreted as retaliation for the attacks conducted on Monday, says the BBC's Selin Girit in Istanbul.
Early on Tuesday morning, further attacks took place. The Turkish military said Kurdish militants had attacked an army base in Sirnak, in the south-east. A soldier died of his wounds in hospital.
Dawn raids also saw 16 people who were allegedly members of the Patriotic Revolutionist Youth Movement, being taken into custody according to the state-run agency Anadolu.
And overnight, there were more shoot-outs between Turkish forces and militants in three other cities.
Turkey has for the last couple of weeks hit targets of the PKK in its strongholds in the remote mountains of northern Iraq and south-eastern Turkey.
Kurdish fighters, some from the PKK, have secured significant victories against IS in Syria and Iraq.
But the PKK accuses Turkey of using its campaign against IS as cover for taking on the separatists - something the government denies.
Turkey, like a number of Western countries, considers the PKK a terrorist organisation.
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An international hacking ring armed with tens of thousands of corporate secrets pocketed more than $100 million from illicit trades, targeting a core vulnerability of the financial system in one of the digital age's most sprawling insider-trading schemes, federal investigators said Tuesday.
Since 2010, more than 30 hackers and traders across the U.S., Ukraine, Russia and other countries coordinated to steal and profit from more than 150,000 press releases, which were scheduled to be delivered to investors from corporate wire services Business Wire, PR Newswire and Marketwired.
With advance details on financial performance and corporate mergers from dozens of companies — including Bank of America, Boeing, Ford Motor, Home Depot, defense contractor Northrop Grumman and Smith & Wesson — the team made rapid and lucrative trades from shared brokerage accounts, funneling the money through shell companies and offshore bank accounts in Estonia and Macau.
Unlike the recent high-profile hacks of health insurers and government agencies, the sophisticated hacks targeted not just people's identities, but corporate intelligence, and some hackers and traders were even aided by former broker-dealers registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
By breaking into the wire services, some of Wall Street's most vital and unnoticed information hubs, investigators said the hackers and traders were able to defraud investors on a massive scale while leaving no public trace, a worrying development for the increasingly intricate networks that keep the financial world online.
The “brazen scheme ... was unprecedented in terms of the scope of the hacking, the number of traders involved, the number of securities unlawfully traded and the amount of profits generated,” SEC Chair Mary Jo White said Tuesday at a Newark news conference alongside Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson. “The traders were market-savvy, using equities and options … to maximize their profits.”
The years-long subterfuge highlights the hidden danger of modern finance and the broader Web, in which any one compromised link in the larger chain can quietly endanger the system for years. The hackers, experts said, didn't have to breach many individual companies or vacuum up a large amount of files to succeed. Instead, they hit data-rich clearinghouses knowing exactly what they wanted, ensuring an efficient attack.
"With these financial schemes, it didn’t used to be this tailored. It used to be more smash-and-grab, where they'd go in, siphon off whatever they can and sell it on the underground," said Jen Weedon, manager of threat intelligence at FireEye, a cyber-security firm. "Now cyber-criminals are looking more and more like these organized nation-state groups: They have a supply chain, they have a division of labor and they have customers with requirements that they're going off and executing on."
The scheme was detailed in a sweeping lawsuit filed by the SEC, which announced civil charges against 32 defendants. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn and New Jersey also filed criminal charges. Federal agents on Tuesday began arresting suspects Tuesday, with nine facing criminal charges for their role in grabbing $30 million in profits.
Authorities said they have also seized a house boat, an apartment complex, a shopping center and a dozen other properties, as well as more than a dozen brokerage accounts holding $6.5 million.
Two Ukrainian hackers, Oleksandr Ieremenko, 23, and Ivan Turchynov, 27, were said to have spearheaded the scheme, by cracking into the newswires and then listing the information on secret outposts accessed by traders in the U.S., Russia, Ukraine, Malta, Cyprus and France.
The hackers, who breached the wires and swiped employee credentials through a series of attacks, shared the stolen intelligence with a black-market network of traders, who would then pay the hackers a cut of their ill-gotten profits, indictments show.
Speaking in Russian, Turchynov said in an online chat in 2011 that rogue traders who made money from the hacked information would need to share a cut of their "seasonal" profits, according to the indictment. He added, "If you get really high with time you pay a fixed amount of dough a month."
The hackers, who called the early-accessed filings "fresh stuff," masked their movements through proxy servers and stolen employee identities, and recruited traders with videos showcasing how swiftly they could steal corporate data before its release. Traders kept "shopping lists" of the releases they wanted from select public companies, many of whom were large Fortune 500 conglomerates with heavy interest in market trading.
The ability to see a stock's near-future generated windfalls at warp speed; in one instance, traders made half a million dollars in 36 minutes. In a 2013 scheme, the traders bought more than $8 million in shares of Align Technology after stolen documents showed that the medical-device maker's revenues had recently soared. One day later, when the news went public, the traders cashed out for a profit of more than $1.4 million.
The hackers tapped an armament of brute-force, injection and "spear-phishing" attacks, bulldozing through security systems, implanting malicious code or persuading employees to click on booby-trapped links.
SEC investigators unraveled the scheme with the help of "enhanced trading surveillance" technology, White said, which can comb through millions of financial trades, track suspicious behavior and otherwise sniff out threats to "the integrity of our markets."
The charged traders included Vitaly Korchevsky, 49, an investment advisor who ran once managed mutual funds for Morgan Stanley; Arkadiy Dubovoy, 50, and Igor Dubovoy, 28, a father-and-son team living in Alpharetta, Georgia; and a relative, Pavel Dubovoy, 32, in Ukraine.
The traders were helped by four co-conspirators in Alpharetta and Suwanee, Georgia; Glenn Mills, Pennsylvania; and Brooklyn, two of whom were formerly broker-dealers registered with the SEC. The indictments and complaints did not list attorneys for those charged.
In 2013, investigators said, the team explored even newer ways of defrauding trades, including tricking sellers by rapidly buying and cancelling trades, which one called a "special daytrading strategy."
These hackers aren't alone in setting their sights on hyper-profitable market-moving events. In December, FireEye told the Federal Bureau of Investigation that another hacker group, called FIN4, had targeted the computer networks of more than 100 health care, law and pharmaceutical firms, hoping to grab insider intelligence on "impending market catalysts" that could help the group rake in cash from lucrative trades.
The case also echoes a decade-old scheme masterminded by two employees of Estonian financial-services firm Lohmus Haavel & Viisemann, whose theft of Business Wire releases netted them nearly $8 million in illicit profits before their arrest. The firm agreed to a civil settlement and $14 million in fines.
The wire services said they were cooperating closely with federal investigators, and Business Wire, a subsidiary of Warren Buffett's investment empire Berkshire Hathaway, said it had hired a cybersecurity team to test its systems and ensure its "network is fully operational and secure.”
Company chief executive Cathy Baron Tamraz said in a statement that Business Wire leads multiple security audits every year. But "despite extreme vigilance and commitment," Tamraz said, "recent events illustrate that no one is immune to the highly sophisticated illegal cyber-intrusions that are plaguing every aspect of our society."
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By Editorial Board August 10 at 5:37 PM
“I DON’T frankly have time for total political correctness,” Donald Trump said at the Republican presidential debate last week. “And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either.” We agree — if political correctness is understood to mean self-censorship of controversial but legitimate views, for fear of social ostracism.
Where we part company with Mr. Trump is his apparent belief that calling people who disagree with him “pigs,” disparaging their looks or launching crude insinuations seemingly about their menstrual cycles amounts to some kind of brave rebellion against convention — rather than self-indulgent vulgarity. Mr. Trump seems to have confused political correctness with decency and civility; we need less of the former but more, much more, of the latter.
Keep that in mind the next time someone piously informs you that, whatever else you can say about him, Mr. Trump has touched a nerve, or tapped a feeling, or struck a chord. Frustration with politics transcends party these days, though in the case of Mr. Trump’s campaign, the nerves, feelings and chords in question belong to the much-aggrieved Republican Party “base.” It’s angry, we are told, because it sent a GOP majority to Washington which promptly betrayed its promise to repeal Obamacare and otherwise turn policy to the right.
A couple of points about Mr. Trump’s following and its anger: It does not represent a majority of the GOP, much less the country; 23 percent of Americans identify as Republicans, and Mr. Trump is the choice of about a quarter of them, for now. Furthermore, their anger is unfocused and, to the extent it’s rooted in racially tinged perceptions of illegal immigration or of the nation’s first black president, repellent. And finally, even the most justified political anger is not a political program.
Anyone — we’re tempted to say any moron — can grab a torch and run in front of the mob. What takes talent is what you might call political anger management: to identify legitimate complaints and turn them in a constructive direction, on behalf of a governing prescription. Mr. Trump, with his simplistic demands for a massive tariff on Chinese imports, or his insistence that the Mexican government is deliberately sending criminals to the United States, shows no sign of possessing such a capability. He shows no sign of acknowledging the need for it.
The truth is that Mr. Trump is not telling people the truth. The problem with the GOP is not the corruption or pusillanimity of the party’s leaders; it is the implausibility of the Republican base’s demands. Yes, Republicans control Congress, but what part of “even Republicans can’t agree on everything,” or “presidential veto,” or “political reality” does the “base” not understand?
Come to think of it, any politician of either party who promises to fix or change or overthrow Washington through sheer force of personality or ideological purity is misleading the voters. Yes, the political process is flawed, maybe even broken, but it’s all we have. Serious presidential candidates will be spending the next few months explaining how they propose to make it work on behalf of people’s real-world needs and interests. They’ll be trying to redeem American politics, not debasing it.
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Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner, delivers his closing statement. (Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)
CLEVELAND
It was billed as The Donald Trump Show, and the Republican front-runner delivered. He mugged. He pouted. He projected outrage without being troubled by specificity or fact. When he got punched — and the moderators threw haymakers all night — he stuck out his chin and punched back.
Eugene Robinson writes a twice-a-week column on politics and culture, contributes to the PostPartisan blog, and hosts a weekly online chat with readers. In a three-decade career at The Post, Robinson has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper’s Style section.
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Trump made it through the first Republican debate by avoiding the one mistake that could have seriously damaged his insurgent campaign: sounding like a professional politician. For that reason alone, he seemed to me the clear winner.
I watched the debate at the House of Blues in downtown Cleveland with a crowd of true-believer conservatives at a viewing party sponsored by the American Conservative Union. It might not have been a representative sample of Republican primary voters, and I should note that there was an open bar. So my observations should not be confused with actual political science.
That said, it was fascinating that Trump got the loudest cheers, by far, from the beginning of the debate until about three-fourths of the way through, when either exhaustion or the bar began to take a toll and the crowd’s attention seemed to wander.
The Trumpiest moments of the GOP debate(2:34)
From taking a jab at Rosie O'Donnell to consoling Sen. Rand Paul on a difficult night, here are Donald Trump's memorable lines from his first GOP presidential debate. (Fox News Channel)
Anyone who thought the Fox News moderators might go easy on the GOP field, or at least its leader, was mistaken. Yet when Bret Baier maneuvered Trump into acknowledging that he might run in the general election as an independent, there were oohs and aahs — but no catcalls. When Megyn Kelly pressed him on the crude and hurtful things he has said about women, Trump’s shrug — “What I say is what I say” — got a laugh, and his attack on “political correctness” drew applause. When Chris Wallace burrowed in on his four corporate bankruptcies, Trump’s explanation that he was just playing by the rules went over just fine.
One particularly telling moment, I thought, came when Trump was asked about his previous support of Democrats, including likely nominee Hillary Clinton. The gist of Trump’s answer was this: Hey, I gave lots of money to politicians of both parties because that’s what rich and powerful people do, and in exchange they get access and influence. It’s a rotten system but that’s the way it works, and let’s not pretend otherwise.
I think that exchange might help befuddled politicians and pundits understand the Trump insurrection. That is how the system works. For voters who feel powerless and marginalized, I believe it is refreshing and perhaps liberating to hear an insider talk honestly about the role big money plays in politics.
Will Trump’s poll numbers continue to rise? I have no idea. But I think the GOP establishment is whistling past the graveyard if it thinks the Trump bubble has burst.
It was impossible this week to walk anywhere in this lakeside city’s revivifying downtown without bumping into members of the Republican Party’s political elite, and conversations with them suggested a kind of magical thinking: Somehow, they assume, this whole Trump thing will go poof and disappear. Order will be restored to the GOP universe.
That may come to pass. But I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen Thursday night.
Oh yes, there were nine other men on that stage at Quicken Loans Arena. The consensus here seemed to be that Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who just squeaked into the prime-time debate, had a good evening and should continue his rise in the polls. There was also a lot of buzz about Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), who some saw as smooth and almost Obama-esque in a hopey-changey kind of way.
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The many faces of Trump from the GOP debate
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From Donald Trump’s slam on Rosie O’Donnell to his incendiary comments on illegal immigrants, here are Trump’s many faces and memorable lines from his first GOP presidential debate.
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From Donald Trump’s slam on Rosie O’Donnell to his incendiary comments on illegal immigrants, here are Trump’s many faces and memorable lines from his first GOP presidential debate.
“I cannot say, ‘I have to respect the person, who is not me,’” Trump said about possibly running a third-party campaign if he isn’t tapped as the GOP nominee, “We want to win, and we will win. But I want to win as the Republican. I want to run as the Republican nominee.”John Minchillo/AP
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Jeb Bush, by my reckoning, had a fair-to-middling night. I felt no passion from the House of Blues crowd for anything he said. If he ends up being the nominee, it will be because the party falls in line, not in love.
The political cognoscenti seem to think that neurosurgeon Ben Carson had a terrible evening. I wouldn’t be surprised if his poll numbers went up. Just a hunch, but he came across as genuine and charming.
As for the “kiddie table” debate held earlier Thursday, the conventional wisdom is right: Businesswoman Carly Fiorina was the star and should at least vault into the top 10. I think she’s wrong about most everything, but she’s sharp as a tack.
The GOP race is full of excitement. There’s one problem: On most issues, from women’s health to national security, the party is far out of step with the general electorate. Keep that in mind as this political version of “Game of Thrones” continues to unfold.
Read more from Eugene Robinson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. You can also join him Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for a live Q&A.
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The many faces of Trump from the GOP debate
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From Donald Trump’s slam on Rosie O’Donnell to his incendiary comments on illegal immigrants, here are Trump’s many faces and memorable lines from his first GOP presidential debate.
Caption
From Donald Trump’s slam on Rosie O’Donnell to his incendiary comments on illegal immigrants, here are Trump’s many faces and memorable lines from his first GOP presidential debate.
“I cannot say, ‘I have to respect the person, who is not me,’” Trump said about possibly running a third-party campaign if he isn’t tapped as the GOP nominee, “We want to win, and we will win. But I want to win as the Republican. I want to run as the Republican nominee.”John Minchillo/AP
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In the first Republican debate, the klieg light that Donald Trump always carries around with him revealed four or five presidential candidates who, under the right circumstances, could beat Hillary Clinton. (Trump was not among them.) But there was also a moment that could predict the defeat of the GOP in 2016.
No, I’m not talking about Sen. Ted Cruz heaping praise on Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi — a military-backed ruler who jails journalists and has sentenced hundreds of opponents to death or life in prison — as a model in dealing with Islamism. And no, I am not talking about Sen. Rand Paul’s smirk when New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie raised the memory of 9/11 victims and their families.
The single most important event of the campaign so far was Trump raising his hand and refusing to commit to the eventual GOP nominee. At that moment, Republicans saw a likely dystopia. Trump has gotten a hint of what it might be like to stand on the only stage sufficient to his self-image. He thinks that a Trump-branded White House might actually be possible. It is not a view held by any serious political observer. That doesn’t matter. Some public figures — Harold Stassen, Eugene McCarthy — never recovered from the beatific vision, and spent the rest of their lives trying to recover it.
Trump will flame out. And since he is constitutionally incapable of accepting fault, he will blame the GOP for arson. As someone prone to conspiracy theories — on presidential birth records, vaccines and the scheming Mexican government — Trump is probably gathering string to prove a plot against him involving Megyn Kelly, the GOP establishment and the American Gynecological and Obstetrical Society. So he is keeping his third-party options open.
Trump’s actual performance in the debate demonstrated the real reason he will flame out. He called the other candidates “stupid” while failing to show mastery of a single policy issue. If you actually listen to him and try to follow his reasoning, the result is the intellectual version of a hangover.
The Trumpiest moments of the GOP debate(2:34)
From taking a jab at Rosie O'Donnell to consoling Sen. Rand Paul on a difficult night, here are Donald Trump's memorable lines from his first GOP presidential debate. (Fox News Channel)
Trump says that the campaign finance system is broken, which he knows because he took full advantage of it to buy politicians. So we are being told: You should elect me to protect you from people like me. The taking of graft, it seems, is deeply corrupt, while the giving of graft is just part of the game. The Trump syllogism: Every politician is bought by billionaires. Only billionaires can fund their own campaigns to avoid being bought. Therefore only billionaires can save us from billionaires.
Listen again: During the debate, he boasted of taking his investors — who are not “babies” but “killers” — for a ride, utilizing bankruptcy laws to his advantage, then divesting from Atlantic Citybefore its economy crashed. This fits the image of the coldhearted, capitalist fat cat better than anything Mitt Romney managed. Trump plays monopoly with other people’s money, then mocks them as suckers for trusting him.
I realize there is little upside in analyzing Trump’s words. Those who support him are not looking for fancy language, or political correctness, or logical coherence, or human decency — all those establishment poses. They would rather have a candidate who accuses a woman of being hormonal, then repeats the charge that she is a “bimbo,” then tries to cover up the whole mess with a clumsy deception.
In a parliamentary system, Trump might found his own party and win a few seats in the legislature (the Italians, after all, once elected a professionally active porn star to parliament). In the United States, the options are all or nothing. As a third-party candidate, Trump could easily tip a close election to Clinton. How do Republicans persuade him to choose nothing?
The best, maybe only, option is to ensure that his poll numbers deflate quickly, making it obvious that a lavish campaign for the Republican nomination and, later, the difficult task of getting on 50 ballots will end in humiliation. This will require establishment Republicans to stop playing political bank shots off his rise and make clear he has moved beyond the boundaries of serious and civil discourse. And it will require conservative populists to recognize that an alliance with Trump is effectively tying their movement to an anvil (the RedState summit disinvitation is a good start).
It is better to risk a short-term backlash than a predictable, long-term political disaster. So Trump’s inevitable self-marginalization must be given a push.
Read more from Michael Gerson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook .
Donald Trump and his many Megyn Kelly comments(1:27)
Donald Trump continues to defend himself after his controversial comments about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly. (Alice Li/The Washington Post)
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It was the yuks, not the bucks.
Hillary Clinton suggested that it wasn't donations that made her go to Donald Trump's wedding a decade ago, it was the mogul and Republican candidate's abilities as an entertainer.
During the recent GOP primary debate in Cleveland, Ohio, Trump claimed his money was the reason Clinton attended one his 2005 wedding to model Melania Knauss, but that's not how the former secretary of state remembers it.
Following a campaign event in New Hampshire on Monday, Clinton laughed at Trump’s assertion that she had “no choice” but to attend.
“I didn’t know him that well. I mean I knew him, and I happen to be in Florida, and I thought it was going to be fun to go to this wedding, because it’s always entertaining,” Clinton quipped when asked about Trump’s remark following her town hall at Exter High School.
“It’s all entertainment. I think he’s having the time of his life, saying what he wants to say getting people excited both for and against him.”
Then-senator Clinton was present at the nuptials in Palm Beach, Florida, and she and her husband attended the reception together.
At the GOP debate, Trump said that Clinton had “no choice” but to attend the wedding, because of how much money he donated to her foundation.
Clinton spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri responded by saying the comment “hurts [Clinton’s] feelings.”
And in New Hampshire on Monday, Clinton herself acknowledged that her attendance at the wedding is more “troubling” now that Trump is running for president.
Clinton also called Trump’s recent comments following the GOP debate about Fox News host Megyn Kelly “outrageous,” but said that it’s a “mistake” just to focus on Trump, as “what a lot of men on that stage said was offensive.”
“While what Donald Trump said about Megyn Kelly is outrageous, what the rest of the republicans are saying about all women is also outrageous,” Clinton said. “Megyn Kelly is a strong woman and more than capable of defending herself against Trump. I’m worried about what Republican policies would do to the rest of America’s women.”
Clinton’s comments came during a press avail with reporters following her townhall where she rolled out her plan to tackle the rising cost of college and student debt.
After a series of questions from reporters regarding Trump, Clinton eventually threw up her hands in exasperation when, finally, asked about student debt.
“Oh really?!” Clinton said, sarcastically. "What does Donald Trump have to say about college affordability? I would wonder."
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In photos selected Monday by Wall Street Journal editors, children prepare for the first day of school in Kentucky, India gets ready for Independence day, and more.
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