Courier network carried millions of dollars in cash to Lebanon on commercial flights, treasury department says
The US treasury department announced sanctions on Thursday against 10 people it says formed a courier network that smuggled hundreds of millions of dollars to Hezbollah by carrying cash onboard commercial flights between Iran, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon.
The office of foreign assets control (OFAC) said the network allowed Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group,to obtain foreign currency and dodge sanctions outside the formal banking system. The treasury department linked the operation to a scheme once associated with Behnam Shahriyari, a now-deceased finance official for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force.
Continue reading...José Mejía Hernandez, 45, who was hospitalized for his injuries, was then transferred to an ICE office and fitted with an ankle monitor
A man in Virginia was hospitalized with a brain injury and severe bruising all over his face after he was arrested by US immigration agents, according to his lawyers, who shared photos and medical records with the Guardian.
José Mejía Hernandez, 45, was walking to a bus stop in Arlington on the morning of 11 August when two agents got out of an unmarked vehicle and started chasing him, according to one of his lawyers, Margaret Hellerstein. The man recalled being hit by some kind of stun gun, but did not remember what happened after that, only waking up hours later in the hospital, Hellerstein said.
Continue reading...First lady appears at Rose Garden event; White House faces scrutiny over top Trump aide Natalie Harp
An FBI team seized electronic devices from former US representative Eric Swalwell at the San Francisco airport on Saturday, then raided his home in Washington, DC, the next day, CNN reported Thursday.
The raid is part of a federal investigation into the sexual assault allegations which ultimately drove the Bay Area Democrat to resign from office in April, sources familiar with the investigation told CNN. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department subsequently opened criminal investigations on Swalwell.
Continue reading...Ex-White House ethics tsar calls it ‘shocking’ that executive assistant to US president didn’t have clearance for a year
The White House faced fresh questions on Thursday over whether Donald Trump’s closest aide, Natalie Harp, had access to US government secrets without security clearance.
Harp, who is executive assistant to the US president, worked at the White House for a year without the routine clearance, the MS Now network reported on Thursday. She refused to file the relevant forms for unknown reasons, according to two unnamed sources cited by MS Now.
Continue reading...First lady appears at Rose Garden event; White House faces scrutiny over top Trump aide Natalie Harp
An FBI team seized electronic devices from former US representative Eric Swalwell at the San Francisco airport on Saturday, then raided his home in Washington, DC, the next day, CNN reported Thursday.
The raid is part of a federal investigation into the sexual assault allegations which ultimately drove the Bay Area Democrat to resign from office in April, sources familiar with the investigation told CNN. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department subsequently opened criminal investigations on Swalwell.
Continue reading...State sought to stop system off coast of Santa Barbara from resuming operations after Trump ordered its reopening
A controversial oil pipeline can continue to operate off the California coast after a judge gave it the green light this week, despite the opposition of state regulators and environmental groups.
The system off the coast of Santa Barbara resumed operations earlier this year for the first time in more than a decade after Donald Trump ordered Sable Offshore Corporation to reopen it, citing US energy needs during the war in Iran. It had been closed since 2015 when a burst pipe caused one of California’s worst oil spills, and its reopening was supposed to be governed by a federal consent decree.
Continue reading...Jessica Bowie, 35, of Albany, allegedly planned to deploy explosive before fleeing to IS-controlled territory in Syria
US authorities arrested and charged a New York woman with planning to carry out an Islamic State-inspired attack on the state’s capitol building in Albany, the justice department said on Thursday.
Jessica Bowie, 35, of Albany, was charged with planning to deploy an explosive device at the state capitol with the intention of killing public officials and destroying “as much of the building as possible” before fleeing to IS-controlled territory in Syria, according to John A Eisenberg, assistant attorney general for national security.
Continue reading...
Harp, a former One America News Network show host, has emerged as a key gatekeeper to the president
An FBI team seized electronic devices from former US representative Eric Swalwell at the San Francisco airport on Saturday, then raided his home in Washington, DC, the next day, CNN reported Thursday.
The raid is part of a federal investigation into the sexual assault allegations which ultimately drove the Bay Area Democrat to resign from office in April, sources familiar with the investigation told CNN. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department subsequently opened criminal investigations on Swalwell.
Continue reading...Agreement is among largest third-country deportations driven by Trump administration’s immigration crackdown
Twenty deportees from the United States arrived in Liberia on Thursday, as part of a new agreement that will see the west African country receive as many as 1,200 people under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The group arrived at the Roberts international airport outside the capital, Monrovia. The Liberia-US agreement is one of the largest third-country deportation arrangements pursued by the administration since Trump returned to office last year.
Continue reading...A growing backlash against AI data centers is spilling into local politics, with residents in more than a dozen communities pushing recall elections against officials who approved projects. "People are standing up and saying, 'Sorry, we don't want these data centers in our communities for a number of reasons,'" Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, said in an interview. "'If you can't have the guts to stand up to some large corporation, you should not continue serving in office.'" The New York Times reports: In Festus, Mo., critics of a local data center project gathered enough signatures in May to force a vote to remove the mayor and City Council members who had approved a $6 billion data center, though the effort is tied up in legal wrangling. In Mason, Mich., residents will vote in November over whether to recall a City Council member over a vote to create zoning rules for data centers. Voters in Yukon, Okla., will also decide in November whether to recall their mayor after the town moved to sell land to a data center developer. And residents of Independence, a city of 121,000 that is 10 miles from Kansas City, will vote on whether to remove Mr. Perkins on Sept. 1. Some local officials have already lost their jobs in the face of data center concerns in regularly scheduled elections. Last year, two members of the Georgia Public Service Commission lost their seats amid concern about data centers' driving up electricity prices. A Virginia state delegate, Geary Higgins, also lost his job last year after his opponent branded him "Data Center Geary." [...] Independence would be one of the first municipalities to hold a data-center-motivated recall election. A judge this month rejected a legal challenge by Mr. Perkins and others, who argued the recall violated Missouri's Constitution.
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This week on “Uncanny Valley,” Andy Greenberg discusses sitting in on a war game simulating a cyberattack from the Chinese hacking group Volt Typhoon