Corruption Ledger

PARIS: France said it would push to ease European Union environmental regulations on fallow farmland this week, as tractors blocked major highways out of Paris on Monday and nationwide farmers’ protests intensified. The French government on Friday dropped plans to gradually reduce state subsidies on agricultural diesel and promised a reduction in red tape and an easing of environmental regulations, but farmers’ organisations said that was not enough and pledged to step up the pressure. The head of France’s biggest…

A Hong Kong court has ordered the liquidation of China Evergrande, the real estate firm with more than $300bn (£236.1bn) of debts, amid deepening fears for the territory’s wider corporate health. Justice Linda Chan ruled Evergrande had been unable to offer a concrete restructuring plan to creditors – more than two years after defaulting on a bond repayment and after several court hearings over the lack of a restructuring plan. “It is time for the court to say enough is…

KYIV: Employees from a Ukrainian arms firm conspired with defence ministry officials to embezzle almost $40 million earmarked to buy 100,000 mortar shells for the war with Russia, Ukraine’s security service reported. The Ukraine’s SBU said Saturday that five people have been charged, with one person detained while trying to cross the Ukrainian border.If found guilty, they face up to 12 years in prison. The investigation comes as Kyiv attempts to clamp down on corruption in a bid to speed…

  The U.S. is reviewing its sanctions policy against Venezuela after a court in that country upheld a ban preventing presidential candidate Maria Corina Machado from holding office, the U.S. State Department said Saturday. The ruling by Venezuela’s Supreme Justice Tribunal on Friday means Machado, a 56-year-old industrial engineer, cannot register her candidacy for presidential elections scheduled for the second half of 2024. “The United States is currently reviewing our Venezuela sanctions policy, based on this development and the recent…

Vancouver, British Columbia — An official commission is about to get underway in Ottawa as Canada tries to determine to what extent China and other countries interfered in its last two elections. The investigation also will examine whether Russia and India interfered as well. All three countries have denied the allegations. Former Conservative Member of Parliament Kenny Chiu (Canadian House of Commons) Justice Marie-Josee Hogue will oversee the commission, which is the latest attempt to find out how countries — predominately…

  On Saturday, an Israeli airstrike in the Syrian capital resulted in the destruction of a building utilized by the Iran regime’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, leading to the death of a commander and one of his deputies, as reported by Syrian state media and the Iranian outlet, Iran’s Student News Network. The casualties were identified as members of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force, according to the Iranian media outlet closely associated with the Guard’s Basij branch. The strike, which occurred…

WASHINGTON: Fresh off his victory in the Iowa Republican caucuses, Donald Trump arrived in a Manhattan courtroom for the next high-stakes trial of his crowded legal calendar – this time in a defamation lawsuit by E. Jean Carroll, the writer who won a separate sexual-abuse case against him last year. US district judge Lewis Kaplan, who is overseeing the trial, has already held Trump liable for defaming Carroll, leaving it for a jury to decide how much damages he must…

Morgan Stanley will pay $249 million to settle a criminal investigation, as well as a related Securities and Exchange Commission probe. The SEC said the bank generated more than $100 million in illicit profits as a result of misconduct by Pawan Passi, the bank’s former head of its US equity syndicate desk, and another employee.  Morgan Stanley has been under investigation by the SEC since 2019 over its handling of block trades (a business that the bank dominates), and the…

REYKJAVIK: Residents of the Icelandic fishing town of Grindavik are facing a second evacuation as new volcanic fissures have opened nearby, prompting the National Commissioner of Police to issue an evacuation order, CNN reported. Grindavik, situated approximately 70 kilometres southwest of Reykjavik on the Reykjanes peninsula, had previously been evacuated in November due to heightened seismic activity that culminated in a volcanic eruption, emitting lava and massive plumes of smoke. The town, renowned for the iconic Blue Lagoon, a popular…

Perfectly timed to coincide with Anthony Fauci’s closed-door testimony before the US Congress, a recent bombshell report suggested, based on FOIA’d emails, that Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology met with Fauci at his National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), outside Washington, in June 2017.  According to the most popular version of the “lab-leak” theory, it is, of course, Shi’s research on coronaviruses in bats which is supposed to have given rise to the SARS-CoV-2 virus which…

At the height of the online file-sharing boom, the phrase ‘Sharing is Caring’ was a reminder that peer-to-peer file-sharing systems lived or died on the availability of upload bandwidth. Its presentation allowed it to be about much more than that. The ‘give to get’ philosophy forms part of the BitTorrent protocol even today, but Sharing is Caring was a phrase that could influence human behavior, to the benefit of the wider file-sharing movement, with no suggestion of pressure. Sharing is…

SEOUL: North Korea fired an apparent intermediate-range missile into the sea on Sunday, South Korea and Japan said, as tensions run high after Pyongyang’s recent launches of an intercontinental ballistic missile and its first military spy satellite. North Korea has stepped up pressure on Seoul in recent weeks, declaring it the “principal enemy”, saying the North will never reunite with the South and vowing to enhance its ability to deliver a nuclear strike on the US and America’s allies in…

Whatever the weather in Cuba this February, people may be feeling gloomy about the cost of living. The Cuban government is set to raise fuel prices fivefold at the start of next month. Havana says the move is a must, as it seeks funds to trim its deficit spending and buy needed goods from abroad. The change is not expected to have much of an immediate impact on the costs of vacation packages for Canadians looking to get away to the popular…

SEATTLE – When Microsoft opened an advanced research lab in Beijing in 1998, it was a time of optimism about technology and China. The company hired hundreds of researchers for the lab, which pioneered Microsoft’s work in speech, image and facial recognition and the kind of artificial intelligence that later gave rise to online chatbots such as ChatGPT. The Beijing operation eventually became one of the most important AI labs in the world. Mr Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder, called it…

A 29-year-old man in Ukraine was arrested this week for using hacked accounts to create 1 million virtual servers used to mine $2 million in cryptocurrency.  As announced today by Europol, the suspect is believed to be the mastermind behind a large-scale cryptojacking scheme that involves hijacking cloud computing resources for crypto-mining. By using the computing resources of others’ servers to mine cryptocurrency, the cybercriminals can profit at the expense of the compromised organizations, whose CPU and GPU performance is degraded…

Gonzalo Lira, a prominent commentator on the Russia-Ukraine war imprisoned in Ukraine for speech critical of the country’s government, has died after weeks of medical neglect by Ukrainian authorities. Chilean-American war commentator Gonzalo Lira died shortly before noon on January, 11, 2024 at a hospital in Kharkiv, where he had been imprisoned for eight months since he was accused of justifying Russian war efforts in Ukraine. Lira came to prominence in 2022 when he emerged as a critical voice in…