Turkish jets bomb Islamic State militants, marking pivotal shift and end of tacit truce ADVERTISING Turkish jets bomb Islamic State militants, marking pivotal shift and end of tacit truce ISTANBUL (AP) — Last month, the first edition of the Islamic
Turkish jets bomb Islamic State militants, marking pivotal shift and end of tacit truce
ISTANBUL (AP) — Last month, the first edition of the Islamic State group’s Turkish-language magazine contained not a word of criticism of the Turkish government. This week, the second edition calls Istanbul occupied territory and blasts President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a tyrant.
The difference? Turkey has started to crack down on the group under Western pressure and Islamic State now sees Turkey as the enemy, raising the stakes in the struggle against the extremist network. And Turkey’s decisive response on Friday — airstrikes on Islamic State targets and 290 arrests nationwide — show how seriously the nation is now taking a threat it had long downplayed.
The abrupt shift in Islamic State’s Turkish propaganda magazine shows just how quickly a tacit truce has come apart.
But the underlying changes have not happened overnight. Islamic State — also known by acronyms ISIS and ISIL — has spent years building its network inside Turkey, even as Turkish security services monitored the group to glean valuable intelligence.
“There is significant evidence that ISIS has built a network and an infrastructure in Turkey to support its operations in both Syria and Iraq,” said Andreas Krieg, an analyst at King’s College London. “Turkey has never thought that these jihadists would ever become a problem for Turkey itself. Quite on the contrary, they were under the impression that jihadists who wanted to go to Syria are embarking on a local — not a global — jihad.”
Email is forever: New inquiry into material on Clinton’s private server hits her campaign
WASHINGTON (AP) — A new letter by intelligence investigators to the Justice Department says secret government information may have been compromised in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private server, underscoring an inescapable reality for her presidential campaign: Email is forever.
Clinton, the former secretary of state and now the leading Democratic presidential candidate, wants to focus on the economic issues she and her team believe will drive the next election. But they remain unable to fully escape the swirling questions surrounding her decision to run her State Department correspondence through an unsecured system set up at her New York home.
The inspector general of the U.S. intelligence community recently alerted the Justice Department to the potential compromise of classified information arising from Clinton’s server. The IG also sent a memo to members of Congress that he had identified “potentially hundreds of classified emails” among the 30,000 that Clinton had provided to the State Department — a concern the office said it raised with FBI counterintelligence officials.
Though the probe is not criminal and does not specifically target Clinton, the latest steps by government investigators will further fuel the partisan furor surrounding the 55,000 pages of emails already under review by the State Department.
A statement from the intelligence inspector general, I. Charles McCullough, and his counterpart at the State Department, Steve Linick, said that McCullough’s office found four emails containing classified information in a limited sample of 40 emails.
Ukraine’s new police on charm offensive in Kiev in the government’s first visible reform
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — Only a few months ago, Kiev residents would normally avoid the police if they could help it. The officer would be of no use on a complaint — or worse, would demand a bribe.
Not any longer. These days, Kiev residents approach members of a new police force that has hit the streets — and even ask to take a picture with them. It’s being welcomed as the Ukrainian government’s first visible reform since it came to power in February 2014.
In the first phase of a comprehensive overhaul, the entire traffic police corps of Kiev was disbanded and replaced on July 4 by a retrained force — with new powers to make arrests as well as issue speeding or parking tickets. The police reform ultimately aims to retrain, and possibly replace, the entire Ukrainian Interior Ministry, including elite inspectors on serious crimes such as murder and corporate fraud. The initiative is supported by the United States and managed by Eka Zguladze, who was in charge of a largely successful police reform in her native Georgia.
One of the pledges of the new Kiev government, which took over last year after pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country, was to combat rampant corruption in Ukraine’s police. Just as in neighboring Russia, Ukraine’s police corps was perceived as chronically extorting bribes and harassing citizens.
The new government decided to start from scratch. The first phase replaced the old traffic police with a new 2,000-strong patrol team trained by Ukrainians who had themselves received instruction from American officers. While the traffic police were suspended rather than sacked, it is still not clear whether the old cops will be able to come back.
Greece formally requests new IMF loan, enabling fund to join in talks on a 3rd bailout
ATHENS (AP) — Greece on Friday invited the International Monetary Fund to participate in its negotiations with European creditors over a vital third bailout — talks that are expected to start next week after a few days’ delay and must conclude before Greece faces another big repayment Aug. 20.
Negotiators are now expected to arrive in Athens over the weekend with talks probably starting Monday, Greek officials said.
Athens is looking to secure yet another bailout — the third since its finances imploded in 2009 — worth 85 billion euros ($93 billion) over three years. Without the money, the country faces imminent bankruptcy and a probable exit from the shared euro currency.
The letter to the IMF, signed by Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos, formally requests a new bailout from the fund. That is in accordance with the preliminary third bailout agreement Greece struck with its European partners on July 12, which called for IMF financing and monitoring for Greece from March 2016 — when current IMF financing ends.
The letter said Athens believes it will take “several quarters” before the Greek economy faces up to its challenges “and returns to a vigorous and sustainable path to growth with fairness and social inclusion.”
Trump’s whirlwind tour exposes deep divisions among Hispanics in border city
LAREDO, Texas (AP) — There was an audible gasp from the gathered crowd as Donald Trump’s 757 lifted off the tarmac.
“Oh my God. Wow,” said Gina Gil, 48, after an excited shriek, reaching for her 11-year-old-nephew. “I think it’s a historic moment, ma’am. Seriously, I really do.”
Gil was referring to Trump’s visit Thursday to Laredo, Texas, a small city on the U.S.-Mexico border where the Republican presidential candidate spent less than an hour touring the border, bragged to reporters about the danger he faced, proclaimed Hispanics love him, and stopped traffic with a presidential-sized motorcade.
Yet beyond the spectacle The Donald seems to create wherever he goes, the billionaire businessman’s visit exposed evidence of a divided community whose overwhelmingly Hispanic population both decried Trump as racist and cheered his hardline immigration views. Interviews during and after the whirlwind tour with more than a dozen local residents underscored the danger Trump represents to the GOP’s relationship with Hispanic voters and his appeal to a vocal segment of frustrated voters, many Hispanics among them, who see a glaring problem on the nation’s southern border that requires attention.
Jessica Gonzalez, 79, a retired housewife who was born and raised in Laredo, said she’d watched as the city she’d grown up in had changed, with restaurants replaced with Mexican food and new people coming in.
