While you weren't paying attention, Trump just signed an Executive Order to expand the Bank Secrecy Act.
The order will likely disproportionately affect green card holders, naturalized citizens, and low income households.
Take this as your monthly reminder that the BSA is a piece of garbage that should burn in hell along with Richard Nixon.
Zelensky’s favorite oligarch, Rinat Akhmetov, known for having bought himself a yacht for 500 million dollars, has carried out another interesting act and set a new record.
He bought an apartment in Monaco for 550 million euros.
I would like to remind you what exactly oligarch Akhmetov earns his money from.
He earns money from electricity in Ukraine.
This is the sector to which Brussels sends our European taxes.
This is the sector that, almost every month, receives tens and hundreds of millions of euros “to support Ukraine’s energy system.”
Just think about it — during a war, earning from an industry that we support with our taxes, a person buys a yacht for 500 million, and then an apartment for 550 million.
This is a challenge, this is mockery, this is simply a spit in everyone’s face.
@Sovrnty@Rajatsoni@SenWarren The world also needed protection from Afghanistan, Libya, etc. , right? Second, Warren mentioned insulin so perhaps you should inform her
Israel has just killed Lebanese journalist Fatima Ftouni. I am honoured to have known her.
Just at the beginning of the month she reported on Israel killing seven members of her own family live on air.
@wanglaurentceo Something like that, if confirmed, should not just "end careers", but be immediately investigated and prosecuted. Imposing collective punishment on civilians is an international crime.
@deborahlipstadt@UNWatch I may be a "horrible horrible person", but I am neither accused of war crimes/crimes against humanity before the @IntlCrimCourt, nor paid to defend a state accused of Genocide before the @CIJ_ICJ.
I can live with that.
US sanctions have turned United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese into a global financial outcast, leaving her unable to open any bank accounts or use credit cards in any country after being added to the US Treasury Department’s list of specially designated nationals.
Albanese said, "This is not about law but about power," noting that the sanctions have effectively cut her off from the global financial system, with even banks willing to help refusing out of fear of secondary US sanctions.
Members of her family, including her husband who works at the World Bank, face potential sanctions risks that could include fines of up to one billion dollars or twenty years in prison simply for conducting financial transactions with her, making her "shunned" even in the simplest daily dealings.
@FCJP_JP Does it makes sense to print even more for the sake of innovation so that we benefit today instead of in 100y? If so, why not accelerate innovation even more? Or perhaps ask our grandparents if back then they'd rather faster innovation our purchasing power
BREAKING: Google Gemini released a new feature called Guided Learning.
You can now use it to learn literally anything, step by step, like a personal tutor.
Here’s how to access it 👇
Last year, US banks spent $5.9 Billion on financial crime compliance and only managed to recover around 1% of illicit activity.
This was highlighted in yesterday’s SEC financial surveillance roundtable, along with many more really good arguments against the BSA’s surveillance regime.
HOWEVER, there were also a many things that were such an incredible twist of reality that I will be highlighting some of them here, because I find it important to broadcast to the world how nonsensical these notions are.
Namely, some of the participants seemed to have the understanding that privacy was something you could sell to the private sector as a compliance solution...
And that these compliance technologies they are building(tm) would grant people privacy because information about them was not *public*, but could be selectively disclosed to, for example, the Government or blockchain surveillance firms, to perform KYC, AML and sanctions checks.
Former FinCEN official Carole House specifically attempted to redefine privacy frameworks altogether:
Calling herself a “good cybersecurity nerd,” she claimed that nothing in existing privacy frameworks "points to that privacy must be attained via unbreakable anonymity," and that there are "elements of privacy that can end up not necessarily involving consent."
(For those who remember Carol, she is also the one who argued for applying sanctions to bitcoin miners.)
Privacy is not the power to selectively let someone else reveal you to the world, and the introduction of such notions are about as sensical as claiming that GoogleMail will give me privacy because it doesn’t publish my entire inbox on the Internet.
All this and more in the article quoted – it’s a long read but a good resource to get an idea what the people advising the Government think without having to sit through 3.5 hours of this yourself 🫡
Throwing it back to this inspirational story. Now Marcos is cancer-free, continues to practice the Wim Hof Method daily, AND he’s become an ultra athlete. 💪
Listen to his full story here:
https://t.co/aNiNVc6yAD
Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani schools a western journalist on why 'peace talks' between the neck and the sword are never really about peace.
The video is 55 years old, NOTHING CHANGED!
It seems that our rulers, here in the 'liberal' West, have homed in on a new way of turning a person into a non-person.
Here is a man, Hüseyin Doğru, a German journalist (of Turkish origins, but not a dual citizen) whom the EU authorities have found a novel, immensely cruel, way of punishing for his coverage of, and views on, Palestine.
The German authorities learned a lesson from my case. Not wishing to be answerable in court for any ban on pro-Palestinian voices (similar to the court case I am dragging them through currently), they found another way: A direct sanction by the EU utilising some hitherto unused directive, one introduced at the beginning of the Ukraine war, that allows Brussels to sanction any citizen of the EU it deems to be working for Russian interests. Clinging to the argument that Hüseyin’s website/podcast used to be shown also on Ruptly (among other platforms), they are using this directive aimed at an ‘anti-Russian asset’ to destroy a journalist who dared oppose the Palestinian genocide.
In practice, this means that Hüseyin’s bank account is frozen; that if you or I were to give him cash to buy groceries or make rent then we would be considered his accomplices and subject to similar sanctions; it also means that if he were a civil servant, he would be fired; if he were a student he would be expelled from his university; if he received a pension it would be suspended; if he received any social benefit it would be frozen. It also, astonishingly, means that he cannot leave Germany!
Last, but definitely not least, it means that Hüseyin cannot sue his government for turning him into a non-person but only challenge the European Commission in Brussels – where he is not even allowed to go!
Need I say more? Is it not abundantly clear that we live, today, in a nominally liberal Europe where, in a jiffy, your political and human rights can be rescinded, including your right to challenge your government in a court of law?
https://t.co/VEx5xMjlBB