Category: Crime

Treasury officials have been accused of being asleep at the wheel on breaches of confidential government information. Officials were grilled on their knowledge of potential breaches of confidential Treasury data by former PwC partner Peter Collins, who has been referred to federal police to investigate the allegations. Greens senator Barbara Pocock hit out at Treasury’s decision to sign new confidentiality agreements with Mr Collins after they became aware of a possible breach. While Treasury officials told the committee they had…

WASHINGTON – US regulators sued Binance and its CEO Changpeng Zhao on Monday for allegedly operating a “web of deception,” piling further pressure on the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange and sending bitcoin to its lowest in almost three months. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) complaint, filed in a federal court in Washington, DC, listed 13 charges against Binance, Zhao and the operator of its purportedly independent US exchange. The SEC alleged that Binance artificially inflated its trading volumes and…

“On Saturday, June 3, 2023, the President signed into law … H.R. 3746, the ‘Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023,’ which suspends the public debt limit through January 1, 2025, and increases the limit on January 2, 2025, to accommodate the obligations issued during the suspension period,” it said. The bill also rescinds certain unobligated balances, expands work requirements for a number of federal programs, modifies environmental review processes, and terminates the suspension of federal student loan payments. Earlier, Biden said…

NEW YORK, May 30 (Reuters) – Bankrupt OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma can shield its owners, members of the wealthy Sackler family, from opioid lawsuits in exchange for a $6 billion contribution to the company’s broader bankruptcy settlement, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Tuesday. The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that U.S. bankruptcy law allows legal protections for non-bankrupt parties, like the Sacklers, in extraordinary circumstances. In a majority opinion written by 2nd Circuit Judge Eunice…

We’ve written a lot about AB 2273, California’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC) that requires websites with users in California to try to determine the ages of all their visitors, write up dozens of reports on potential harms, and then seek to mitigate those harms. I’ve written about why it’s literally impossible to comply with the law. We’ve had posts on how it conflicts with privacy laws and how it’s a radical experimentation on children (ironically, the drafters of the…

Epstein’s calendars show the financier meeting with A-listers including tech billionaires Bill Gates and Peter Thiel, music executive Tommy Mottola, artist Jeff Koons, magician David Blaine, and filmmaker Woody Allen – all after being required to register as a sex offender as part of the sweetheart plea deal that allowed him to serve less than two years under house arrest.  Allen, whose ex-wife and her children have accused him of molesting one adopted daughter and who married his other adopted…

Aderrien Murry, 11, called the police as his mother asked — but when officers arrived, one of them shot him in the chest. A new lawsuit says officials failed to train and supervise its officers. Courtesy of Nakala Murry The family of Aderrien Murry has filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Indianola, Miss., and at least two police officials, after an officer shot 11-year-old Murry in the chest after the boy placed a 911 call on May 20….

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — On the way to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton becoming a rising figure in the GOP, his wife, Angela, used to entertain crowds with a guitar and a song. “I’m a pistol-packin’ mama, and my husband sues Obama,” she sang at campaign events and Republican clubs in Texas. When it came time for the high school teacher and guidance counselor to launch her own political career, a $2 million loan from her husband propelled Angela Paxton…

PORTLAND, Ore.—After a six-week trial in Portland, a federal jury found three former executives of Aequitas Management, LLC, and associated companies, guilty today for their roles in a vast fraud conspiracy. Evidence at trial showed the conspirators raised nearly $300 million from defrauded investors. Robert J. Jesenik, 63, former chief executive officer of Aequitas and resident of Lake Oswego, Oregon; Andrew N. MacRitchie, 59, formerly of Palm Harbor, Florida; and Brian K. Rice, 56, of Portland were found guilty of…

CISA warned of a recently patched zero-day vulnerability exploited last week to hack into Barracuda Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances. Barracuda says its security solutions are used by more than 200,000 organizations worldwide, including high-profile companies like Samsung, Mitsubishi, Kraft Heinz, and Delta Airlines. The U.S. cybersecurity agency also added the bug (CVE-2023-2868) to its catalog of security flaws exploited in the wild based on this evidence of active exploitation. Federal Civilian Executive Branch Agencies (FCEB) agencies must patch or…

Mila Antonova – a bridge player who multiple media reports this week claim had an affair with Gates starting in 2009 – was captured in a newly unearthed photograph walking alongside Chapman in New York City. The picture, which is believed to have been taken in 2009 or 2010, around the same time as Gates’ alleged trysts with the decades-younger Antonova, the newspaper claims. The report adds that Antonova was an “associate and financial beneficiary of the late financier and…

The value of frozen Russian private assets under sanctions increased from 18.9 billion euros in December to 24.1 billion euros in late May, the newspaper said. As many as 1,473 individuals and 205 firms from Russia have been sanctioned by the EU, German media added. After the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Western countries have imposed comprehensive sanctions against Russia, including the freezing of nearly half of the country’s foreign currency reserves – amounting to about $300 billion. The European Union alone has frozen assets of Russian entities and individuals worth dozens of billions of dollars under 10 packages of sanctions.

In March, Der Spiegel claimed a yacht called ‘Andromeda’ had allegedly been used by a team of divers to sabotage the Nord Stream pipelines. The publication cited the discovery of traces of explosives in the cabin of the vessel and fake identification documents that were used in the hiring of the boat.  The outlet’s most recent report indicates that metadata from an email sent to enquire about the renting of the yacht “leads to Ukraine.” The president of a presumed…

Jeffrey Epstein was many things: a sexual predator, a friend to the rich and powerful and, for many years, a lucrative customer of the nation’s largest bank. Now the bank, JPMorgan Chase, faces a reckoning for its nearly 15-year relationship with the disgraced financier, one that could cost it a big payout in two civil lawsuits that claim the bank ignored warnings that he was trafficking teenage girls for sex because it was profiting from its relationship with him. New…

When then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull called for heads to roll after the 2016 census was pulled offline – amid fears IBM’s data servers hosting the survey had been infiltrated – the American enterprise technology giant made an important decision. IBM ran most of the big mainframe systems that had powered core government functions for several decades, earning it billions of dollars a year in fees and making the Australian government one of its top global clients. No census data was…

Justice Akintayo Aluko of the Federal High Court, in Lagos has ordered 27 commercial banks in the country, to placed Post-No-Debit (PND) on the accounts of a tourism company, ‘La Campagne Tropicana Beach Resort’ over alleged N46, 798, 095.94 . The judge, made the order of Mareva injunction on May 17, 2023, while granting an Exparte motion marked FHC/L/CS/746/2023, filed and argued by Barrister George C. Duru, on behalf of Ecobank Nigeria Limited and ETI Specialized Resolution Company Limited The…