Ukraine has a new defense minister confirmed:
Ukraine's parliament has voted overwhelmingly in favor of President Petro Poroshenko's choice for a new defense minister.
The Verkhovna Rada endorsed Stepan Poltorak, who is currently chief of the National Guard, in a 245-1 vote on October 14 .
Poltorak replaces Valeriy Heletey, who was criticized over the Ukrainian military's performance in combating pro-Russian separatists who continue to hold large portions of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions after fighting that has killed more than 3,660 people since April.
Heletey handed in resignation on October 12 after only three months on the job.
When announcing his candidate to replace Heletey on October 13, Poroshenko praised Poltorak for his "professionalism and patriotism" and said Poltorak had turned the National Guard into a formidable fighting force in a short time. (UNIAN, Reuters, and AFP)
As our news desk reports, the Russian authorities are holding a census in the occupied region of Crimea:
The population count, which began on October 14 and ends on October 25, is the first on the Black Sea peninsula since Russia annexed it from Ukraine in March.
Crimean Statistics Service official Yelena Tvirovich told journalists that residents will be given a census form with 33 questions.
They include address, type of housing, family status, income, and ethnic identity.
The census comes amid what rights activists say is a crackdown on Crimean Tatars, a Turkic-speaking Muslim group whose members largely opposed the annexation.
According to a 2001 census, Crimea's population was 2.34 million, with more than 60 percent identifying themselves as Russian, 24 percent as Ukrainian, and 12.4 percent as Crimean Tatars.
Russia held a nationwide census in 2010 and plans another in 2020. (RIA Novosti and TASS)
Reuters reports on Russian hackers attacking NATO, Ukraine:
Russian hackers exploited a bug in Microsoft Windows and other software to spy on computers used by NATO, the European Union, Ukraine and companies in the energy and telecommunications sectors, according to cyber intelligence firm iSight Partners.
ISight said it did not know what data had been found by the hackers, though it suspected they were seeking information on the Ukraine crisis, as well as diplomatic, energy and telecom issues, based on the targets and the contents of phishing emails used to infect computers with tainted files.
The five-year cyber espionage campaign is still going on, according to iSight, which dubbed the operation "Sandworm Team" because it found references to the "Dune" science fiction series in the software code used by the hackers.
The operation used a variety of ways to attack the targets over the years, iSight said, adding that the hackers began only in August to exploit a vulnerability found in most versions of Windows.
ISight said it told Microsoft Corp about the bug and held off on disclosing the problem so the software maker had time to fix it.
A Microsoft spokesman said the company plans to roll out an automatic update to affected versions of Windows on Tuesday.
There was no immediate comment from the Russian government, NATO, the EU or the Ukraine government.
Researchers with Dallas-based iSight said they believed the hackers are Russian because of language clues in the software code and because of their choice of targets.