Category: government corruption

House Republicans have used the power of their new majority to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden’s business dealings, including examining foreign payments and other aspects of the family’s finances. Comer has obtained thousands of pages of the Biden family’s financial records through subpoenas to the Treasury Department and various financial institutions since January.

Most recently, Comer claimed one deal involving the Biden family resulted in a profit of over $1 million in more than 15 incremental payments from a Chinese company through a third party.

Both Comer and Grassley have accused both the FBI and Justice Department of stonewalling their investigations and politicizing the agency’s yearslong investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes.

Last month, an IRS special agent sought whistleblower protections from Congress to disclose a “failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition” of a criminal investigation related to the younger Biden’s taxes and whether he made a false statement in connection with a gun purchase.

Rioters smashed shop fronts and tried to set fire to police officers in Paris as up to a million people marched across France in May Day protests against President Macron’s reform to the pension age. Young men dressed in black from the anarchist “black block” movement were joined by hardline yellow vest protesters on a rampage at the front of the peaceful union-organised march, which moved through central Paris from the Place de la République to the Place de la Nation. The anarchists broke shop windows and bank frontages and set fire to bins as riot police on motorcycles moved in.

Officers using teargas and batons arrested several dozen violent protesters in the capital and at similar outbreaks on the edges of marches in Lyons, Toulouse and Nantes, which were staged by unions and left-wing parties as a “show of contempt” for Macron’s reform. About 12,000 police had been deployed for the marches after the interior ministry said it expected trouble from two or three thousand black block “wreckers” and violent followers of the yellow vest movement, whose protests inflicted heavy damage in Paris and other cities in 2018 and 2019.

Protesters from the radical climate movements were also active, spraying paint on shop fronts in the Place Vendôme, the central Paris home to jewellery shops, and also on the façade of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the contemporary art museum financed by LVMH, the luxury brand giant.

The U.S. is sending Ukraine about $300 million in additional military aid, including an enormous amount of artillery rounds, howitzers, air-to-ground rockets and ammunition as the launch of a spring offensive against Russian forces approaches, U.S. officials said Tuesday.

The new package includes Hydra-70 rockets, which are unguided rockets that are fired from aircraft. It also includes an undisclosed number of rockets for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, mortars, howitzer rounds, missiles and Carl Gustaf anti—tank rifles. The weapons will all be pulled from Pentagon stocks, so they can go quickly to the front lines. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the aid has not yet been formally announced.

The latest shipment comes as Ukrainian officials say they are readying a counteroffensive — with Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov declaring they are in the “home stretch, when we can say: ‘Yes everything is ready.’” Ukrainian officials have said they are stockpiling ammunition to stow it along potentially long supply lines.

Reznikov said Monday that the key things for the assault’s success would be “the availability of weapons; prepared, trained people; our defenders and defenders who know their plan at their level, as well as providing this offensive with all the necessary things — shells, ammunition, fuel, protection, etc.”

A new law that seeks to give Canadian artists a leg up online has left many influencers and tech giants alike seeing red.

They took out subway ads, they posted TikToks, but in the end, the score was Silicon Valley-0, Ottawa-1.

After many twists and turns, and over two-and-a-half years of review, the Canadian government has passed a new law that makes tech giants like YouTube and TikTok support Canadian cultural content.

The law, dubbed Bill C-11, gives the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) broad authority to regulate these platforms, much like they already do with radio and television.

The government says it is necessary to stop streaming giants from getting a free ride, and to promote local artists.

Although it’s still unclear what those final regulations will look like, the law has raised the ire of everyone from TikTokers to esteemed author Margaret Atwood.

Last weekend, Russian authorities moved one step closer towards potentially locking up Oleg Orlov, one of Russia’s most prominent and outspoken human rights defenders. On April 29, the prosecutor’s office formally indicted him on charges of repeatedly “discrediting” the Russian military, for which he faces a maximum three-year prison sentence. Authorities should immediately drop the charges.

Orlov is co-chair of Memorial, a leading Russian rights group. The government shut down Memorial in 2022 as part of the Kremlin’s effort to stifle critics and human rights work. Yet Memorial’s core activists continued their human rights work, some from abroad, and some, like Orlov, from inside the country.

On March 21, criminal investigators in Moscow interrogated Orlov, informing him they had opened a criminal investigation against him for repeated acts of “discrediting” Russian armed forces, based on his single-person anti-war pickets and his social media post containing his trenchant criticism of the war and of the government’ slide toward totalitarianism and fascism.  They released him later that day on his own recognizance.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned lawmakers Monday that the federal government could run short of money to pay its bills as early as June 1 unless the debt ceiling is raised soon.

Yellen acknowledged the date is subject to change and could be weeks later than projected, given that forecasting government cash flows is difficult. But based on April tax receipts and current spending levels, she predicted the government could run short of cash by early June.

“Given the current projections, it is imperative that Congress act as soon as possible to increase or suspend the debt limit in a way that provides longer-term certainty that the government will continue to make its payments,” Yellen wrote in a letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

The warning provides a more urgent timetable for what has been a slow-motion political showdown in Washington.

WASHINGTON – US President Joe Biden on Monday urged House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy to take the potential for an unprecedented US debt default off the table, warning that it would result in skyrocketing credit card and mortgage rates.

“America is not a deadbeat nation. We have never, ever failed to meet the debt,” Mr Biden told a small business event at the White House.

He said the threat of default by some Republicans in Congress was “totally irresponsible” and that it was essential to take that threat “off the table.”

“It would lead to higher interest rates, higher credit card rates, mortgage rates would skyrocket,” Mr Biden said.

JPMorgan Chase, one of the biggest banks in the U.S., is buying the troubled First Republic Bank’s deposits, a “substantial amount of their assets and certain liabilities,” JPMorgan Chase said in a press release Monday.

The California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation announced early Monday that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp had taken possession of First Republic.

This marks the third time the U.S. government has taken control of a U.S. lender this year.

First Republic is the third — and biggest — U.S. bank to fail this year. In March, federal regulators swept in to protect customers of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. Citing potential risk to the broader financial system, they took unprecedented action to insure all deposits at the two banks — even deposits that exceeded the FDIC’s $250,000 threshold for insurance.

All Britons will be called on to swear allegiance to King Charles III at his coronation, an oath hitherto reserved for British nobility.

It is a move that has upset anti-royalists.

Taipei, April 29 (CNA) The United States should engage with other democracies around the world to help Taiwan fend off threats from China, former U.S. national security adviser and outspoken China hawk John Bolton told a pro-Taiwan independence event in Taipei on Saturday.

“The U.S. response to help Taiwan against the Chinese threat has to be fully global,” Bolton said at the Global Taiwan National Affairs Symposium hosted by the World Taiwanese Congress, suggesting the establishment of “new structures of deterrence” against China.

Taiwan is “the center of gravity of the Chinese threat” to the world, said Bolton, who served as national security adviser under President Donald Trump from April 2018 to September 2019 and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006.

US President Joe Biden on Saturday, in a possible preview of a 2024 presidential campaign theme, attacked news outlets he said used “lies told for profit and power” to stir up hatred in the United States, as he coupled his remarks with pointed jokes about Fox News.

Speaking at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, Mr Biden referred to “truth buried by lies,” in an apparent reference to false conspiracy theories that his 2020 election win was the result of a massive voter fraud.

“Lies told for profit and power… lies of conspiracy and malice repeated over and over again designed to generate a cycle of anger and hate and even violence,” Mr Biden said.

That cycle, Mr Biden added, has emboldened local jurisdictions to ban books, and “the rule of law and our rights and freedoms to be stripped away”.

Zeroing in on what he characterised as “an extreme press,” Mr Biden at the same time joked that if he called Fox News “honest, fair and truthful, then I can be sued for defamation”.

The US central bank has said it failed to act with “sufficient force and urgency” in its oversight of Silicon Valley Bank, which collapsed last month in the country’s biggest bank failure since 2008.

The conclusion is one of the main findings from the Federal Reserve’s investigation of the episode.

It sparked global fears about the state of the banking industry.

The review comes as another US lender, First Republic, remains in trouble.

US regulators are reported to be working on a potential rescue for the struggling firm, which was the 14th largest bank in the US at the end of last year.

The U.S. government has sounded the alarm about a critical software vulnerability found in genomics giant Illumina’s DNA sequencing devices, which hackers can exploit to modify or steal patients’ sensitive medical data.

In separate advisories released on Thursday, U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned that the security flaw — tracked as CVE-2023-1968 with the maximum vulnerability severity rating of 10 out of 10 — allows hackers to remotely access an affected device over the internet without needing a password. If exploited, the bug could allow hackers to compromise devices to produce incorrect or altered results, or none at all.

The FBI carried out a search on Thursday morning at the Potomac, Md., home of former FTX executive Ryan Salame, the New York Times reported, citing two people with knowledge of the matter said.

The FBI, Salame and his attorney did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

Days before FTX filed for bankruptcy and Bankman-Fried stepped down as CEO, Salame informed the Securities Commission of the Bahamas that client assets held at FTX Digital Markets may have been transferred to Alameda, according to a court filing Wednesday by the agency.

He was one of the top political donors in the 2022 election cycle donating more than $23 million to Republican campaigns, according to OpenSecrets.

It’s been six weeks since the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank threatened to kick off a nationwide bank run. Now, U.S. regulators are due to issue their postmortem reports.

The Federal Reserve plans to release a report Friday on whether there were lapses in its oversight of Silicon Valley Bank that may have contributed to the bank’s failure.

Separately, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will also report Friday on how the regulator supervised New York-based Signature Bank, which failed days after the Silicon Valley lender.

The sudden implosion of two big regional banks rattled nerves throughout the financial system last month, forcing the federal government to take emergency steps to prevent a nationwide bank run.

BEIJING — Chinese leader Xi Jinping said Wednesday that Beijing will send an envoy to Ukraine to discuss a possible “political settlement” to Russia’s war with the country.

Beijing has previously avoided involvement in conflicts between other countries but appears to be trying to assert itself as a global diplomatic force after arranging talks between Saudi Arabia and Iran in March that led them to restore diplomatic relations after a seven-year break.

Xi told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a phone call that a Chinese envoy, a former Chinese ambassador to Russia, would visit Ukraine and “other countries” to discuss a possible political settlement, according to a government statement.

It made no mention of Russia or last year’s invasion of Ukraine and didn’t indicate whether the Chinese envoy might visit Moscow.

The Xi-Zelenskyy phone call was long anticipated after Beijing said it wanted to serve as a mediator in the war.