Why Fico Sees Uzbekistan as a Model for Europe
BRATISLAVA — Slovakia's prime minister has some advice for fellow EU leaders striving to navigate the current turmoil: Politics is overrated.
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Yahoo
23 minutes ago
- Yahoo
US Rep. Danny Davis won't run for reelection, backs state Rep. La Shawn Ford as his successor in Congress
Danny Davis, the 83-year-old dean of Illinois' U.S. House delegation and a voice for progressive politics for decades, announced Thursday that he will not seek election to a 16th term representing his downtown and West Side district — the latest move in a generational change sweeping the state's and nation's political scene. Davis also announced his endorsement of veteran state Rep. La Shawn Ford in a budding primary contest to succeed him for the Democratic nomination in March. Ford had announced his congressional bid in May but said he would not run if Davis had sought another term. With his announcement Thursday that he wasn't running for reelection, Davis will serve as chairman of Ford's campaign. Davis' decision to retire at the end of his current term in January 2027 creates the fourth open-seat congressional contest for Illinois Democrats next year. U.S. Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Schaumburg and Robin Kelly of Matteson have opted to seek the seat of retiring U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, along with Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton. And U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Evanston announced in May she would not seek a 15th term in Congress. All four districts are regarded as safely Democratic, meaning the winners of next year's March 17 Democratic primaries will be the heavy favorites in the general election. Davis' endorsement of Ford, who has been in the state legislature for 18 years, comes as many others have expressed an interest in succeeding Davis for the 7th Congressional District seat. In addition to Ford, at least eight people have filed to run, including attorney Richard Boykin, a former Cook County commissioner and Davis' former chief of staff. 'Congressman Davis is among the most impactful public servants of his generation,' Boykin wrote in a statement Thursday that didn't address Davis endorsing someone else. 'I am proud to have worked alongside him as he passed his first major piece of legislation — an amendment to the Access to Jobs Program that helped provide grants to transportation companies to connect people in urban areas to jobs in suburban communities.' Chicago businessman Jason Friedman has also filed to run for the seat. And also on Thursday, after news of Davis' announcement broke but before the congressman's morning news conference, Chicago City Clerk Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin announced she planned to run for the seat. Conyears-Ervin challenged Davis for the congressional seat in 2024 but lost in the Democratic primary. Before he made his announcement, Davis acknowledged his age and nodded to the fact that others were lining up to succeed him in Congress. 'I'm no spring chicken,' Davis told the Austin Weekly News on June 13. 'Most people my age retired years ago.' Davis said he had been consulting supporters, his physicians and constituents. But he also acknowledged his tenure in the House and the role seniority plays on Capitol HIll, adding, 'I'm a senior member of Congress, not just a member.' Despite facing pressure in previous campaigns from younger challengers pushing a message of change, Davis survived primary reelection battles with the backing of the current Democratic establishment, a contrast to the old Democratic guard that he once fought against to win public office. Known for a deep, authoritarian bass voice that could have been used to voice movie trailers — and for his constant companion, his walking stick — Davis' tenure encompassed an evolution of Chicago politics over nearly a half century in public life. An Arkansas native, Davis after college moved to Chicago, where he was a community organizer with the Greater Lawndale Conservation Commission and also served as a teacher in the city's public schools. He and other civil rights advocates were part of the 1960s Chicago Freedom Movement led by the Rev. Martin Luther King to challenge racial discrimination in city housing, education and employment. In 1979, he was elected 29th Ward alderman as a political independent, directly challenging the remnants of the Chicago machine three years after Mayor Richard J. Daley's death. He worked for the election of Harold Washington as the city's first Black mayor in 1983. In 1984 and 1986, he unsuccessfully challenged U.S. Rep. Cardiss Collins and, four years later, lost in taking on incumbent county Treasurer Ed Rosewell, but he won an at-large seat on the Cook County Board. In 1991, he entered the race for Chicago mayor in challenging incumbent Richard M. Daley in the Democratic primary and finished second, 33 percentage points behind. Two decades later, he dropped a mayoral campaign in favor of former ambassador and U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun as a Black 'unity' candidate who unsuccessfully challenged front-runner Rahm Emanuel's bid to succeed Daley. It was in 1996, when Collins retired, that Davis launched his congressional career. He won a 10-way Democratic primary race for the 7th Congressional District seat, defeating a field that included then-County Board member Bobbie Steele and then-Aldermen Dorothy Tillman, 3rd, Ed Smith, 28th, and Percy Giles, 37th. The general election in the heavily Democratic district was a political formality. Davis, a member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, is widely considered to be one of Congress' most progressive members as he often leans to the far-left of Democratic Party politics. He has long supported Medicare for All, pushed for the Green New Deal energy initiatives, advocated for a higher federal minimum wage and voted against the Iraq War in 2002. In 2013, he co-signed a letter with other Democratic members of the state's U.S. House delegation urging the General Assembly to approve marriage equity. His 15-year-old grandson's murder by two teens who fought over a pair of Air Jordans prompted Davis to call for 'every unit of government to call a state of emergency' to boost social and economic development in the city's neglected neighborhoods. 'I know what it feels like to have a loved one whose life was wiped out unnecessarily for no apparent reason,' Davis testified in 2019 before the Oversight Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee. 'I have attended the funeral of so many children in my communities whose wonderful lives were interrupted by gun violence. I feel the devastation.' His tenure has not been without controversy. In 2004, he attended a religious ceremony at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., where he crowned the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who declared himself the Messiah, and Moon's wife, 'the King and Queen of Peace.' Davis in 2018 called Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, who has made antisemitic and homophobic remarks, an 'outstanding human being.' He later backtracked on his praise, saying, 'Let me be clear: I reject, condemn and oppose Minister Farrakhan's views and remarks regarding the Jewish people and the Jewish religion.' In 2024, Davis easily won a five-way Democratic primary with 52% of the vote, which included overcoming challenges from Conyears-Ervin and Kina Collins, a progressive organizer. Two years earlier, in a largely two-person primary race, Collins put a scare into Davis when he won by a relatively close margin, 52% to 46%. Collins also challenged Davis in 2020, losing the Democratic primary 60% to 14%. 'I'm calling this a victory … for senior citizens,' Davis told supporters after his 2024 primary win. But during the first half of this year, Davis had raised only $54,000. He had nearly $115,000 in his federal campaign bank account as of July 1, however, he also listed more than $66,000 in campaign debts. In a 2010 oral history that is part of the Chicago anti-apartheid collection at Columbia College, Davis reflected on what was then an already lengthy political career. 'Although I've won offices, I've lost them. I've campaigned. I've spent a lot of money, I've spent a lot of time, energy, and effort,' Davis said. 'I've neglected a lot of people that I love, I've neglected a lot of people that I like and would love to have spent more time with them. But the necessities of politics and the desire to do it kind of forced me to do what I do,' he said. Solve the daily Crossword
WIRED
25 minutes ago
- WIRED
The Kremlin's Most Devious Hacking Group Is Using Russian ISPs to Plant Spyware
Jul 31, 2025 12:00 PM The FSB cyberespionage group known as Turla seems to have used its control of Russia's network infrastructure to meddle with web traffic and trick diplomats into infecting their computers. PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: WIRED STAFF; GETTY IMAGES The Russian state hacker group known as Turla has carried out some of the most innovative hacking feats in the history of cyberespionage, hiding their malware's communications in satellite connections or hijacking other hackers' operations to cloak their own data extraction. When they're operating on their home turf, however, it turns out they've tried an equally remarkable, if more straightforward, approach: They appear to have used their control of Russia's internet service providers to directly plant spyware on the computers of their targets in Moscow. Microsoft's security research team focused on hacking threats today published a report detailing an insidious new spy technique used by Turla, which is believed to be part of the Kremlin's FSB intelligence agency. The group, which is also known as Snake, Venomous Bear, or Microsoft's own name, Secret Blizzard, appears to have used its state-sanctioned access to Russian ISPs to meddle with internet traffic and trick victims working in foreign embassies operating in Moscow into installing the group's malicious software on their PCs. That spyware then disabled encryption on those targets' machines so that data they transmitted across the internet remained unencrypted, leaving their communications and credentials like usernames and passwords entirely vulnerable to surveillance by those same ISPs—and any state surveillance agency with which they cooperate. Sherrod DeGrippo, Microsoft's director of threat intelligence strategy, says the technique represents a rare blend of targeted hacking for espionage and governments' older, more passive approach to mass surveillance, in which spy agencies collect and sift through the data of ISPs and telecoms to surveil targets. 'This blurs the boundary between passive surveillance and actual intrusion,' DeGrippo says. For this particular group of FSB hackers, DeGrippo adds, it also suggests a powerful new weapon in their arsenal for targeting anyone within Russia's borders. 'It potentially shows how they think of Russia-based telecom infrastructure as part of their toolkit,' she says. According to Microsoft's researchers, Turla's technique exploits a certain web request browsers make when they encounter a 'captive portal,' the windows that are most commonly used to gate-keep internet access in settings like airports, airplanes, or cafes, but also inside some companies and government agencies. In Windows, those captive portals reach out to a certain Microsoft website to check that the user's computer is in fact online. (It's not clear whether the captive portals used to hack Turla's victims were in fact legitimate ones routinely used by the target embassies or ones that Turla somehow imposed on users as part of its hacking technique.) By taking advantage of its control of the ISPs that connect certain foreign embassy staffers to the internet, Turla was able to redirect targets so that they saw an error message that prompted them to download an update to their browser's cryptographic certificates before they could access the web. When an unsuspecting user agreed, they instead installed a piece of malware that Microsoft calls ApolloShadow, which is disguised—somewhat inexplicably—as a Kaspersky security update. That ApolloShadow malware would then essentially disable the browser's encryption, silently stripping away cryptographic protections for all web data the computer transmits and receives. That relatively simple certificate tampering was likely intended to be harder to detect than a full-featured piece of spyware, DeGrippo says, while achieving the same result. 'It's a creative approach: 'What if we just got on the ISP they're connecting through and use that control to turn off encryption?'" she says, describing what she believes to be Turla's thinking. 'This path gives them a massive amount of plaintext traffic that can likely be used for espionage purposes, because it's coming from highly sensitive individuals and organizations like embassies and diplomatic missions.' The details of how Turla's ISP-based redirection technique works remain far from clear. But Microsoft writes in its report that it likely uses the Kremlin's SORM system for ISP- and telecom-based communications interception and surveillance, a decades-old system initially created by the FSB and now widely used in Russian domestic intelligence and law enforcement. Microsoft declined to comment on which countries' embassies in Moscow were targeted in the campaign or how many there were, though DeGrippo notes that Microsoft warned the victims it identified. Turla's use of Kaspersky software as a cover for its malware installation technique suggests that the US embassy may not have been a target, given that Kaspersky software is banned on US government systems. Microsoft declined to comment on whether the US embassy was targeted. Microsoft didn't say how it had linked the hacking campaign to Turla specifically—a typical tightlipped approach from the company's security team, which often declines to divulge its sources and methods to avoid helping hackers evade detection. 'This is a threat actor that we have watched closely for a very long time,' DeGrippo says. Turla has a decades-old a reputation for innovating hacking methods, from USB-based worms designed to penetrated air-gapped systems to piggybacking on cybercriminals' botnets—and ApolloShadow likely isn't the first time the group has hijacked ISPs to plant malware. Slovakian cybersecurity firm ESET has pointed to what may have been a similar technique used to infect victims with fake Flash installers. The same company has also documented what it believed was likely a similar trick likely used by the Belarusian KGB's hackers, and how the commercial spyware FinFisher was likely installed on targets' devices using that same ISP-level access. But Turla's latest campaign would represent the first time that ISP-based infection has been used to disable encryption on target computers, a potentially stealthier form of espionage. Microsoft's DeGrippo notes that Turla's technique is effective in part because it doesn't take advantage of any particular software vulnerability, so it can't be patched. 'It doesn't leverage any zero-day or other vulnerability,' DeGrippo says. 'It's about getting onto the network infrastructure your target is using and controlling things from there.' That said, there are defenses Microsoft recommends for potential victims of Turla's style of ISP-based espionage technique: Use a VPN, for instance, to shield your internet traffic from your internet service provider, or even a satellite connection to bypass an untrusted ISP altogether. Multifactor authentication, too, can limit hackers' access even when they've successfully stolen a victim's username and password. DeGrippo argues that Turla's use of the technique for domestic spying inside Russia should serve as a warning to anyone traveling, living, or working in a country that has untrusted communications infrastructure. Similar ISP-level hacking, she notes, could easily be adopted by other cyberespionage groups around the world and used anywhere national internet and telecom infrastructure are potentially bent to the will of that country's intelligence agencies. 'If you're a target of interest traveling or working in countries that have these state-aligned ISPs that perhaps have surveillance powers or lawful intercept capabilities,' DeGrippo says, 'you need to concern yourself with this.'
Bloomberg
25 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
Ukraine's Anti-Graft Forces Still Feel Pressure From Zelenskiy
Ukraine's anti-corruption officials fear that pressure will remain from President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's administration even after he backed down over a measure to strip anti-graft agencies of their independence. Anxiety is lingering that Kyiv may still undermine the work of the country's two main anti-corruption agencies, through pressure on investigators or removing their directors, according to people familiar with the matter. Those concerns are shared in the capitals of Kyiv's allies, according to a European official.
