Hordes of industry executives will descend on the city to celebrate Hillary Clinton's nomination for president and renew close associations that vexed the Democratic standard-bearer throughout her primary battle with Bernie Sanders.

Blackstone, one of the nation's largest private equity firms, will hold an official reception in Philadelphia on Thursday featuring its president, Tony James, sometimes mentioned as a possible Treasury Secretary in a Clinton administration.

The financial contingent will be in an especially good mood following Clinton's selection of Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine as her running mate. Kaine has shown a willingness to fight for regional bank relief from the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. But more than that, he's not Elizabeth Warren, the potential VP pick that long had Wall Street terrified.

Former World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) President Dick Pound says the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is considering replacing the drug oversight body as punishment for recommending a blanket ban on Russian athletes at the Rio Olympics.

Pound, who led an independent investigation into allegations of state-sponsored Russian doping last year, believes recent attacks on WADA by IOC members are due to it wanting a body which won't challenge its authority.

"I've always thought the IOC's attacks on WADA were a diversion to take everyone's mind off how the whole Russian situation has been bungled," Pound told the Guardian.

"WADA did exactly what it was supposed to do - which is bring recommendations against Russia - but one of the stakeholders didn't like them."

This year is shaping to be a pivotal one for Sino-Russian defense ties. Both countries have agreed to boost the number of "exercises and events" planned for 2016. From Sept. 12 to 19, they held their sixth exercise in the Joint Sea series, conducting a naval warfighting drill in the South China Sea to enhance their ability to "jointly respond to maritime security threats." The Joint Sea series began in 2012 as an anti-submarine warfare and maritime rescue activity off the Chinese coast, near Qingdao. With each passing year, Joint Sea has grown in scope and complexity. The August 2015 iteration was reportedly the "largest ever," involving 23 surface ships, two submarines, over a dozen fixed-wing aircraft, and six helicopters in the Sea of Japan.

The series has captivated the U.S. national security community, with some observers cautioning that Beijing and Moscow may be drifting toward an alliance. It has also caught India's attention, with one analyst citing fears that the "growing intimacy" between both countries "could impact the balance of power in Asia." Context is important, however. Although the uptick in Sino-Russian military cooperation is striking, it pales in comparison to the United States' impressive portfolio of bilateral and multilateral (i.e., "combined") exercises.

Each year, U.S. Pacific Command participates in over 1,500 exercises, training events, and professional engagements with regional militaries. The vast majority of U.S.-led exercises pass with little fanfare here in the United States, but Beijing and Moscow tend to view them through a dark lens. In June, when U.S., Indian, and Japanese forces were underway in the Philippine Sea for exercise Malabar, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang remarked, "Everyone should keep an eagle eye on their true intentions." Likewise, Russia's Ambassador to NATO, Alexander Grushko, slammed the 43rd-annual BALTOPS naval warfare exercise in the Baltic Sea as evidence of NATO's "hostile policy" toward Moscow. Even U.S. officials have partaken in the war of words. Adm. Scott Swift, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, has criticized China and Russia for their decision to hold Joint Sea 2016 in the South China Sea — the first time the series has been held in that location. Adding to the controversy, reports abound of Chinese and Russian "spy ships" shadowing U.S.-led exercises, as well as aggressive Russian overflights and reactionary "snap" exercises.

Germany's foreign minister is calling for a temporary ban on all military aircraft flying over Syria to try and preserve the current ceasefire. Earlier US Secretary of State John Kerry demanded that only Russian and Syrian planes should be grounded.

Speaking at the UN General Assembly in New York, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that all military aircraft, including those belonging to the US, should be temporarily banned from flying over Syria for a week.

"The situation in Syria is now on a knife edge," Steinmeier said according to a statement tweeted by the Foreign Ministry in Berlin on Thursday.

The Central Investigative Committee has instigated two criminal cases into attempts to disrupt the voting held at the Russian embassy in Kiev, Ukraine, last Sunday as part of Russia's parliamentary elections.

The committee, which is the federal agency specializing on important crimes that attract a lot of public attention, reported on Thursday that it started criminal cases under articles "attack on institutions that are under international protection" and "using force to prevent a citizen from exercising their voting rights." In Russia these crimes carry punishment of up to 10 and up to five years in prison respectively.

Investigators also said that they decided to start the probes after receiving information about a violent rally held near the Russian embassy in Kiev late on September 16. According to reports, the protesters, many of whom were members of Ukrainian extreme nationalist groups, hurled smoke bombs on the embassy territory and fired at the building with a fireworks battery, causing damage to Russian state property.

US Vice-President Joe Biden says Europe could walk away from sanctions against Russia, unless Ukraine makes progress with economic and political reforms. At least five countries want to drop the sanctions, he warned.

"We know that if they give an excuse to the EU, there are at least five countries right now that want to say 'We want out'," of sanctions against Moscow, Biden said, speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations think tank in New York on Wednesday.

Biden added that he has spent two to three hours a week on the phone with the Ukrainian leadership since the crisis in that country began, and called on it to carry on with the reforms. The VP also acknowledged pressuring Germany, France and Italy to stick to the sanctions.

"There's an overwhelming instinct in Europe to say, 'Hey: before [Petro Poroshenko] became president, this was owned by Russia anyway. They had a puppet there. What difference does it make? What the hell's the difference? Why are you making us engage in these sanctions?'" Biden said, as cited by Reuters.

"I've been the guy on the back of Ukrainians - which was a thoroughly corrupt system when they came in - making the case that, 'You have to understand: everybody's willing to blame the victim, and you better straighten up and fly right,'" he added.

The weapons withdrawal from the line of contact in the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine will begin this week, one of the Ukraine's representatives in the Contact Group on Donbass, the former head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SCU) Yevgeny Marchuk said.

"The withdrawal schedule comes with the agreement, containing a 13-day deadline for its implementation. I think that the forces' disengagement is sure to begin this week," Marchuk said in an interview with the Ukrainian "Apostrof" e-paper.

He pointed out that on September 21 a very important framework agreement had been signed in the Belarusian capital of Minsk. 'If it is implemented diligently and honestly then a radically new process will begin. The agreement concerns the withdrawal of the military units possessing armored vehicles and small arms, from the line of contact. They will be pulled back from both sides of the line, three areas on the line of contact have been chosen for the implementation of this plan,' Marchuk explained.

From its inception, and well before it made $10 billion of earthquake aid money disappear, Bill and Hillary Clinton's Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) was a vicious joke on Haitians. The original name, Commission Intérimaire pour la Reconstruction d'Haïti, should have been simply translated as Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti. After all, it was the commission that was temporary, not Haiti. There was also no need to change the word reconstruction to the vague term recovery, unless one deliberately wanted to suggest the collection of something. As the I-HRC, however, the organization not only acquired Hillary Rodham Clinton's initials but also boasted that it would scoop up Haiti's reconstruction funds and turn the world's first black republic into a temporary construct. If Mrs. Clinton has become a zombie and the "I" in I-HRC has faded, this could easily be interpreted as a sign of the Haitian gods' wicked sense of humor.

This has been, as I said, a week for the news almost unlike anything I've seen here before. Mr. R.B. sent this article from Russia-watcher, The Saker, but before we get to that, a little context here for our readers outside the USSA.

As everyone knows, America is having its usual presidential race "fiasco", and the charges are flying fast and furious. Mr. Trump, in case you don't know, has repeatedly said the USSA's election system is horribly rigged. Well... duh... computerized and machine-rigged voter fraud and voting fraud have been rampant for decades, and became a major issue not when Mr. Trump made his statements, but when the Collier Brothers, Kevin and Ken, published a book in the 1990s called Votescam, which first raised the issue of computerized voting in a major nationwide way. People laughed, people scoffed, but eventually, try as the lamestream media did to demonize the whole notion, it took hold.

For Mr. Trump's efforts, the "opposition" party and its candicriminaldate (and Sith Apprentice) Darth Hillary, has been hollering that his supporters are racists, bigots, sexists, homophobes and Islamophobes, while Mr. Trump has been packing auditoriums with blacks, Hispanics, and yes, women (oh the horror!) and so on. Mind you, I'm not a fan of Mr. Trump, I'm just trying to convey for foreign readers of this site the climate in this country; it's hysterical in all senses of the term.

In the past, we've seen superuser rights exploit advertising applications such as Leech, Guerrilla, Ztorg. This use of root privileges is not typical, however, for banking malware attacks, because money can be stolen in numerous other ways that don't require exclusive rights. However, in early February 2016, Kaspersky Lab discovered Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Tordow.a, whose creators decided that root privileges would come in handy. We had been watching the development of this malicious program closely and found that Tordow's capabilities had significantly exceeded the functionality of most other banking malware, and this allowed cybercriminals to carry out new types of attacks.

Penetration

A Tordow Infection begins with the installation of a popular app, such as VKontakte, DrugVokrug, Pokemon Go, Telegram, Odnoklassniki or Subway Surf. In this particular case, we're not talking about the original apps but copies that are distributed outside the official Google Play store. Malware writers download legitimate applications, disassemble them and add new code and new files.