Yxxx,2017-06-29,A,001,Bs-4C,E2
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National Edition
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VOL. CLXVI . . . No. 57,643
THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2017
© 2017 The New York Times Company
Printed in Chicago
$2.50
For Kentucky, G.O.P. HOLDS OUT
A Fear the Cure OPTION OF FIXING
Will Be Worse
PRESENT CARE ACT
McConnell’s Cuts Hurt
in His Home State
NOD TO BIPARTISANSHIP
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
BRENDAN HOFFMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
A day after a ransomware attack in Ukraine, people gathered in central Kiev, which was closed to traffic for Constitution Day.
HACKS RAISE FEAR Attackers May Seek Ukrainian Chaos, Not Cash
OF N.S.A. ARSENAL
Russia Suspected for a
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
Critics Say Agency Must
Lock Down Its Tools
By NICOLE PERLROTH
and DAVID E. SANGER
Twice in the past month, National Security Agency cyberweapons stolen from its arsenal
have been turned against two
very different partners of the
United States — Britain and
Ukraine.
The N.S.A. has kept quiet, not
acknowledging its role in developing the weapons. White House officials have deflected many questions, and responded to others by
arguing that the focus should be
on the attackers themselves, not
the manufacturer of their weapons.
But the silence is wearing thin
for victims of the assaults, as a series of escalating attacks using
N.S.A. cyberweapons have hit
hospitals, a nuclear site and
American businesses. Now there
is growing concern that United
States intelligence agencies have
rushed to create digital weapons
that they cannot keep safe from
adversaries or disable once they
fall into the wrong hands.
On Wednesday, the calls for the
agency to address its role in the
latest attacks grew louder, as victims and technology companies
cried foul. Representative Ted
Lieu, a California Democrat and a
former Air Force officer who
serves on the House Judiciary and
Foreign Affairs Committees,
urged the N.S.A. to help stop the
attacks and to stop hoarding
knowledge of the computer vulnerabilities upon which these
weapons rely.
In an email on Wednesday
evening, Michael Anton, a spokesman for the National Security
Council at the White House, noted
that the government “employs a
disciplined, high-level interagency decision-making process for
disclosure of known vulnerabilities” in software, “unlike any
other country in the world.”
Mr. Anton said the administration “is committed to responsibly
balancing national security interests and public safety and security,” but declined to comment “on
the origin of any of the code
making up this malware.”
Beyond that, the government
has blamed others. Two weeks
Continued on Page A6
KIEV, Ukraine — The day
started like most for Roman N.
Klimenko, an accountant in Kiev
who had just settled in at his desk,
typing at a computer keyboard
and drinking coffee. He was unaware that concealed within his
tax preparation software lurked a
ticking bomb.
That bomb soon exploded, destroying his financial data and
quickly spreading through computer systems vital to Ukraine’s
government — and beyond. The
cyberattack, on Tuesday, was
caused by a virus similar to one
that wreaked global havoc less
than two months ago.
Both had the appearance of
hacker blackmail assaults known
Bomb That Erupted
in Tax Software
as ransomware attacks: screens
of infected computers warn users
their data will be destroyed unless
ransoms are paid.
But in Ukraine’s case, a more
sinister motive — paralysis of the
country’s vital computer systems
— may have been the motive,
cybersecurity experts said on
Wednesday. And many Ukrainians cast their suspicions on Russia.
Cybersecurity experts based
their reasoning partly on having
identified the group of Ukrainian
users who were initially and improbably
targeted:
tax
accountants.
All are required by law to use a
tax preparation software such as
that made by a Ukrainian company, M.E.Doc. The software that
runs on Microsoft Windows-based
computers was recently updated.
Microsoft issued a statement on
Wednesday saying it “now has evidence that a few active infections
of the ransomware initially
started from the legitimate M.E.Doc updater process.”
Cybersecurity experts said that
whoever launched the assault —
on the eve of a holiday celebrating
Ukrainian independence — must
have known that M.E.Doc softContinued on Page A6
WHITESBURG, Ky. — Dewey
Gorman, a 59-year-old banker
who has struggled with opioid addiction, had just gotten out of the
hospital in this tiny central Appalachian city when he heard the
word from Washington: His fellow Kentuckian, Senator Mitch
McConnell, had delayed a vote to
repeal the Affordable Care Act. He
felt torn about that.
“It’s broken. It’s broken very
badly,” Mr. Gorman said of former
President Barack Obama’s signature health care law. “But if they
want to take away insurance from
22 million people — a lot of them
would come from these mountains. That would be devastating
to our area.”
Perhaps nowhere has the
health care law had as powerful an
impact as in Kentucky, where
nearly one in three people now receive coverage through Medicaid,
expanded under the legislation.
Perhaps no region in Kentucky
has benefited as much as Appalachia,
the
impoverished
eastern part of the state, where in
some counties more than 60 percent of people are covered by
Medicaid.
And in few places are the political complexities of health care
more glaring than in this poor
state with crushing medical
needs, substantially alleviated by
the Affordable Care Act, but
where Republican opposition to
the law remains almost an article
of faith. While some Senate moderates say the Republican bill is
too harsh, Rand Paul, Kentucky’s
other Republican senator, is
among Senate Republicans who
say they are opposed to the current bill for a different reason:
They believe it does not go far
enough to reduce costs.
Mr. McConnell, who was reelected handily in 2014, seems
committed to his party’s pledge to
repeal the Affordable Care Act
even if it might hurt some
constituents back home. A study
last year by the Kaiser Family
Foundation found that the percentage of uninsured in Kentucky
dropped from 18.8 percent in 2013,
the year the health law was put in
place, to 6.8 percent — one of the
sharpest reductions in the country.
Here in Whitesburg, a city of
roughly 2,000 people at the base of
Pine Mountain, Mr. Gorman’s sentiment seems to be the prevailing
one. In nearly two dozen interviews with health care workers
and patients, at the hospital and at
a nonprofit clinic run by the MounContinued on Page A14
Deal on Existing Health
Law Could Emerge if
Senate Bill Fails
By ROBERT PEAR
and THOMAS KAPLAN
WASHINGTON — With his bill
to repeal the Affordable Care Act
in deep trouble, Mitch McConnell,
the Senate majority leader, raised
an alternate possibility on Tuesday: Either Republicans come together, or he would have to work
with Democrats to shore up the
deteriorating health law.
That raised a tantalizing prospect: bipartisanship.
The idea is not so far-fetched.
For years, Republicans and
Democrats
have
explored
avenues for changing or improving President Barack Obama’s
health care law, from tweaks to the
requirement for employers to offer health insurance to revisions
involving how the marketplaces
created under the law operate.
Mr. McConnell had hoped the
Senate would pass the repeal bill
this week, but he met resistance
from moderate and conservative
members of his caucus. He spent
much of his time on Wednesday in
discussions with Republican senators, seeking agreement on the
substance of a revised bill.
Republican senators said that
Mr. McConnell wanted to finish
work on the legislation by Friday,
submit it for analysis by the Congressional Budget Office and then
press the Senate to take it up after
a weeklong break for the Fourth of
July.
“I think it’s going to be very difficult” for Republicans to reach
agreement on a bill this week, said
Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine. But, she added, “you
never know.”
Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, was even more
skeptical. “Pigs could fly,” he said.
Republicans have talked for
Continued on Page A15
MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EPA
Senators Dean Heller and Susan Collins oppose the bill.
Crackdown by Turkey Strikes
At Heart of Kurdish Identity
FRANK FRANKLIN II/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Knicks announced on Wednesday that Phil Jackson was out as the team’s president.
Jackson Leaves Knicks, His Mission Incomplete
THE BRIGHT SIDE, MAYBE
By SCOTT CACCIOLA
When Phil Jackson rejoined the
Knicks as their president in 2014,
he brought considerable bona
fides with him: his record 11 championships as the coach of the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles
Lakers. At his introductory news
conference he pledged to “create a
team that loves each other and
plays for each other.”
Jackson had other things going
for him, too. He was already enshrined in the Naismith Memorial
Basketball Hall of Fame, and he
The triangle offense is likely gone,
and the Knicks may not be too awful. SportsThursday, Page B9.
had long been an iconic figure for
New York fans, who remembered
his contributions as a player in the
team’s glory days in the early
1970s. By recruiting Jackson, the
Knicks were dipping into their
past in hopes of building their future.
And who better than Jackson to
end the franchise’s ragged run of
A Power Play in Hong Kong
President Xi Jinping, on his first visit
since 2014 demonstrations, will project a
sense of Beijing’s control.
PAGE A8
Abuse Charges for Pope Aide
Australia’s senior prelate, a top adviser
to Pope Francis, has been accused of
sexual assault.
PAGE A7
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey — Gosto’s kebab shop is not the only
diner on its block, let alone on its
street. It is, however, the one that
perhaps reveals most about the
threat to Kurdish culture.
Its owner and manager — the
cheery, chubby Vural Tantekin —
turned to the kebab trade only in
January, after the city authorities
sacked most members of his municipally run theater troupe.
“The reason,” said Mr. Tantekin,
during an interview squeezed between kebab orders, “was to stop
us from performing in Kurdish.”
For people like Mr. Tantekin,
the fate of Diyarbakir’s theater
troupe is emblematic of an ongoing assault on Kurdish culture at
large.
Since the founding of the Turkish republic in 1923, which enshrined a monocultural national
identity, the country’s sizable
Kurdish minority — around 20
percent of the population — has
often been banned from expressing its own culture or, at times,
from speaking the Kurdish language.
Turkey’s current leader, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, loosened many
of these restrictions toward the
end of the last decade, in what
some described as a “Kurdish
opening.” But repression began
again after a cease-fire with Kurdish militants fell apart in 2015. It
accelerated further during the
crackdown that followed last
year’s failed coup.
The crackdown was nominally
intended to target the plotters of
the putsch. But it has also been
used as a smoke screen to squeeze
Continued on Page A10
NEW YORK A16-19
BUSINESS DAY B1-8
ARTS C1-6
The Creeping Commute
An Emphasis on Skills
Life After ‘The Tonight Show’
Large crowds slow down trains, which
creates more crowding in a vicious
circle that can last for hours. PAGE A18
“New collar” technology jobs that focus
on workers’ skills and not their college
degrees offer a different route to better
pay and the middle class.
PAGE B1
Jay Leno talks about doing stand-up
hundreds of nights a year and appreciating the new talk-show hosts. PAGE C1
A Sanctuary City’s Defense
INTERNATIONAL A4-11
underachievement and dysfunction? The fact that Jackson, over
the decades, had cultivated a Zen
master image only made his return more intriguing.
But after three years of mismanagement and miscalculations, and after many cryptic
tweets and mangled relationships, the Jackson era in New
York came to a sputtering, unceremonious end on Wednesday when
the Knicks announced that he was
out as team president.
In the end, not even a legendary
winner could shape the Knicks
Continued on Page A19
By PATRICK KINGSLEY
New York City asserts that its policy on
illegal immigration is in compliance
with federal law.
PAGE A19
Big Payouts From Banks
The nation’s largest banks passed the
latest Federal Reserve stress test, and
then raised their dividends.
PAGE B3
NATIONAL A12-15
Man Demolishes Monument
It took two years for Arkansas
organizers to erect a tribute to the Ten
Commandments, but the marker was in
pieces hours later.
PAGE A13
SPORTSTHURSDAY B9-13
What’s This Art Worth?
THURSDAY STYLES D1-8
American Chic in Paris
At the latest men’s wear shows, international fashion designers look to the
United States for inspiration.
PAGE D1
Peek Into FIFA. What Next?
Writers and Fashion Choices
A report shed light on a tainted World
Cup bidding process, but it cannot be
the end of the story. On Soccer. PAGE B10
From Samuel Beckett to Zadie Smith,
authors have always gone their own
way when it comes to style.
PAGE D2
A museum in Detroit has asked artists
to use only items from dollar stores in
their works for a new exhibit. PAGE C1
EDITORIAL, OP-ED A20-21
Nicholas Kristof
PAGE A20
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