Category: Corruption

Lawmakers in the Alabama state legislature have voted for a bill that would require parental controls and NSFW content filters to be enabled on every phone and tablet sold in the state. House Bill (HB) 298, or the Protection of Minors from Unfiltered Devices Act, cleared the state House with an overwhelming 70-8 vote, with two dozen members abstaining from voting, last week. Now in the Senate, HB 298 is seeing success after the bill’s sole sponsor, state Rep. Chris…

A Lebanese judge questioned the country’s embattled central bank governor Wednesday and confiscated his Lebanese and French passports following an arrest warrant from France over corruption charges, judicial officials said. Riad Salameh left immediately after questioning by Judge Imad Kabalan in Beirut, the officials said on condition of anonymity in line with regulations. The questioning lasted about 80 minutes, they said. France, Germany and Luxembourg are investigating Salameh and his associates over myriad alleged financial crimes, including illicit enrichment and…

NEW YORK – Wall Street stocks fell again on Wednesday on rising anxiety over US debt ceiling talks as a critical deadline nears without an agreement. President Joe Biden offered to freeze government spending at current levels, a move that would reduce the deficit by US$1 trillion (S$1.3 trillion) and marks a concession to congressional Republicans. The US government could run out of money to pay for its existing obligations as early as June 1, according to Treasury Secretary Janet…

For a brief moment of time, a judge in Arizona conspired with a vindictive politician to pretend the First Amendment didn’t exist. Senator Wendy Rogers — who was censured by the state senate last year for stating her political opponents should be hanged — took litigious offense at the methods deployed by journalist Camryn Sanchez, who covers the state senate for the Arizona Capitol Times. Sanchez wanted answers on Senator Rogers’ seemingly excessive travel expenses, something supposedly owed her because…

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The United States announced at a U.N. conference on Wednesday nearly $524 million in additional humanitarian aid for the Horn of Africa that aims to put a spotlight on the extreme effects of climate change and the worst drought in the region in 40 years — and the need for more than $5 billion. The U.N. has appealed for $7 billion and has received just $1.6 billion — far from enough to help the 43.3 million…

  (Bloomberg) — Blackstone Inc. Chief Executive Officer Steve Schwarzman said the investment giant is in talks with several US regional banks to explore purchases of assets and loans they originate. “Pressure on those regional banks won’t just come from the markets,” he said in a video interview Wednesday for the Qatar Economic Forum in Doha. “It will come from regulators, and that will make them less apt to provide credit.” Regional banks’ retreat from lending to swaths of the…

The landmark decision comes as heat-trapping greenhouse gas concentrations are at record levels – “higher than at any time over the last 800,000 years”, WMO warned. Data from Earth and space The new Global Greenhouse Gas Watch will combine observations from Earth and from space with modelling, to fill critical information gaps. It will build on WMO’s experience in coordinating international collaboration on weather prediction. The agency said that the exchange of data will be “free and unrestricted”, in support…

German police have carried out raids in seven states in a probe into climate campaigners suspected of forming or backing a criminal group because of their controversial activities. Seven people aged 22 to 38 are suspected. No arrests have been made. For months Last Generation (Letzte Generation) has disrupted traffic in German cities and performed stunts like hurling mashed potato at an art work. Chancellor Olaf Scholz has condemned their campaign as “completely crazy”. Some 170 police took part in…

  Labor authorities have recognized that the mental illness suffered by an executive of the Japanese leg of Swiss watchmaker Swatch Group Ltd was caused by bullying at the hands of the branch’s president, constituting an industrial accident, the employee’s union said Wednesday. The executive, a Japanese woman in her 50s, claims she was relentlessly scolded by the president of Swatch Group (Japan) KK, a female foreign national, and subjected to power harassment, as workplace bullying is referred to in…

LONDON – Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said on Wednesday it had provisionally found five major global banks allegedly broke UK competition law by exchanging sensitive information on government bond trading activities in one-to-one online chats. In a statement, the watchdog alleged Citi, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Morgan Stanley and Royal Bank of Canada each unlawfully shared information by participating in one or more one-to-one conversations in Bloomberg chatrooms between a small number of traders at varying times between 2009…

(Washington, DC) – President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and legislators from his party have effectively paralyzed the country’s independent transparency and data protection agency by blocking nominations to fill vacant seats on its board, Human Rights Watch said today. The Senate should move swiftly to fill the three vacant seats. The National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information, and Data Protection (INAI) is the independent agency charged with enforcing transparency and data protection rules in Mexico. It has played an…

SINGAPORE – Financial institutions are required to alert the police and the financial regulator if they suspect that a transaction could be related to a crime, although there is no threshold set for when they must flag these activities. They are also required to step up their measures to manage the higher risks of money laundering and terrorism financing posed by customers such as wealthy individuals, said a Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) spokesman on Tuesday. MAS said financial institutions…

ZURICH – Switzerland’s Federal Administrative Court has received 230 claims against the country’s financial regulator Finma after it wrote off the value of Credit Suisse’s AT1 bonds, the court said on Tuesday. The claims related to 2,500 individual parties, a court spokesman told Reuters. The court in the north-eastern Swiss city of St Gallen, declined to say whether the time limit for filing further claims had expired or the amount of compensation claimed. The bond holders have sued Finma after…

Wells Fargo has agreed to pay $1 billion to settle a pension fund-led lawsuit that accused the bank of defrauding shareholders by misleading them over the progress it was making to rectify a slew of scandals. The Public Employees’ Retirement System of Mississippi, the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Pension & Relief Fund and the state of Rhode Island were among the lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit, filed in June 2020 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The…

First Citizens BancShares Inc, which acquired Silicon Valley Bank following its collapse, sued HSBC Holdings PLC on Monday, accusing it of poaching more than 40 of the failed bank’s employees in order to launch its own U.S. venture banking business. The lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court says HSBC violated federal law by hiring away the workers so it could gain access to Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) trade secrets including information about clients in the tech and healthcare sectors….

Epstein’s old emails and calendar contain plenty of information to raise eyebrows about some of the most wealthy and well-known socialites. One of the biggest names in Epstein’s rolodex is the prolific philanthropist and megabillionaire Bill Gates. No longer just known for his computer programming savvy and lectures on greenhouse gases, Mr. Gates’ personal acquaintances are starting to peek through thanks to the investigative work of the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal reported that Jeffrey Epstein allegedly had…