Category: government corruption

U.S. immigration authorities detained and revoked the visa of a Russian scientist who opposes the war in Ukraine and had been conducting genetic research at Harvard Medical School, her friends and colleagues said this week. Ksenia Petrova was stopped at Boston Logan International Airport on Feb. 16 after returning from a personal trip in France. U.S. officials revoked her research visa for failing to properly declare frog embryos she had brought with her, according to The Harvard Crimson. U.S. Customs…

US President Donald Trump expressed optimism about his working relationship with Jeff Bezos and the future of The Washington Post, alleging that Bezos privately criticised the newspaper’s staff. In an interview with OutKick’s Clay Travis, Trump claimed Bezos lamented the financial losses from running the publication and voiced frustrations about its newsroom employees. “They actually did a couple of bad articles on him,” Trump said. “He said, ‘This is crazy, I lose my fortune running this thing and they’re out…

Democracy Now speaks with Democratic Congressmember Al Green of Texas a day after he was censured by the House of Representatives for disrupting President Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress on Tuesday night. His dramatic protest came near the start of Trump’s record-long speech. In instantly iconic images, Green rose and shook his walking cane at the president on the rostrum, telling him “You have no mandate” to cut vital government programs. Green was ejected from the chamber. This comes…

Video: The asset-management giant BlackRock, which has invested huge amounts in Russian state-owned energy and banks, and which is also invested in rebuilding Ukraine, is now buying property that will give them control over 43 ports in 23 countries, including the ports of Balboa and Cristobal, located at either end of the Panama Canal. Other ports are in Mexico, the Netherlands, Egypt, Australia, Pakistan and elsewhere.

The Trump administration has suspended delivery of all US military aid to Ukraine, a White House official has said, blocking billions in crucial shipments as the White House piles pressure on Ukraine to sue for peace with Vladimir Putin. The decision affects deliveries of ammunition, vehicles, and other equipment including shipments agreed to when Joe Biden was president. It comes after a dramatic blow-up in the White House on Friday during which Donald Trump told Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he was…

Unusually for him, Donald Trump made no great fuss as he signed one drily worded executive order last Tuesday. Public attention was distracted that day – by the headline-grabbing drama of Elon Musk bludgeoning his way through the federal bureaucracy, by immigrants deported to Guantánamo Bay, and by the torrent of other directives Trump has issued since his inauguration last month. But Trump’s 69th executive order of his second presidency, under the deceptive title of “Ensuring accountability for all agencies”,…

Austria’s legal fight against Hungarian nuclear reactors built by Russian companies is valid, the adviser to the EU’s top court ruled. Back in 2017, Brussels approved a Budapest request to finance the construction of a new nuclear power plant, Paks II, in the heart of the country. It was to be built by a Russian company, Nizhny Novgorod Engineering. Austria sued and lost a lower court case in 2022. Today, the advocate general of the Court of Justice of the…

Feb 21 (Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday filed a rare judicial misconduct complaint, accusing the judge hearing a challenge of President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender people in the military of “hostile and egregious misconduct.” The complaint, said U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes in Washington, D.C., violated the judicial code of conduct by disrespecting a Justice Department lawyer and failing to uphold the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary. During two hearings in the case this…

Officials in St. Petersburg announced controversial plans to equip thousands of the city’s surveillance cameras with ethnicity recognition software, the Kommersant business newspaper reported Thursday. Oleg Kapitanov, head of interethnic relations for the St. Petersburg city government, said around 8,000 of the city’s 102,000 cameras will feature the new ethnicity recognition technology. According to him, the system will help combat “the formation of ethnic enclaves” and “prevent social tension.” Kapitanov said the St. Petersburg city government purchased an ethnic recognition software…

Brazil’s prosecutor-general said Tuesday that former leader Jair Bolsonaro knew and agreed to a plan to poison his successor and current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, as part of an attempted coup that would have allowed him to remain in power. Prosecutor-General Paulo Gonet formally charged Bolsonaro and 33 others with participating in a plan to keep Bolsonaro in power following his 2022 election defeat. The alleged plot also included a plan to poison Lula and shoot dead Supreme Court Justice Alexandre…

Note: View the settlement agreement here. Health Net Federal Services Inc. (HNFS) of Rancho Cordova, California and its corporate parent, St. Louis-based Centene Corporation, have agreed to pay $11,253,400 to resolve claims that HNFS falsely certified compliance with cybersecurity requirements in a contract with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to administer the Defense Health Agency’s (DHA) TRICARE health benefits program for servicemembers and their families. In 2016, Centene acquired all of the issued and outstanding shares of Health Net…