Tag: news

A Nigerian social media star named “Hushpuppi” was extradited to the U.S. from Dubai late last week to face fraud charges, including allegations of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars.

The “star”, whose actual name is Ramon Olorunwa Abbas has 2.4 million followers on Instagram, according to Bloomberg. Have you ever heard of him? No. Us neither. 

Regardless, his schtick seemed to be regularly posting photographs of himself on private planes and in luxury cars, while wearing expensive designer clothing. 

But on July 2, he was flown to Chicago and the next day was posing next to a judge.

The U.S. Department of Justice says he now faces charges “alleging he conspired to launder hundreds of millions of dollars from ‘business email compromise’ (BEC) frauds and other scams.”

According to the DOJ, “The affidavit alleges that Abbas and others committed a BEC scheme that defrauded a client of a New York-based law firm out of approximately $922,857 in October 2019. Abbas and co-conspirators allegedly tricked one of the law firm’s paralegals into wiring money intended for the client’s real estate refinancing to a bank account that was controlled by Abbas and the co-conspirators.”

In BEC frauds, a computer hacker gains unauthorized access to a company’s e-mail account and tries to trick staff into wiring out money. 

The DOJ release continues: “The affidavit also alleges that Abbas conspired to launder funds stolen in a $14.7 million cyber-heist from a foreign financial institution in February 2019, in which the stolen money was sent to bank accounts around the world. Abbas allegedly provided a co-conspirator with two bank accounts in Europe that Abbas anticipated each would receive €5 million (about $5.6 million) of the fraudulently obtained funds.”

Finally, he is accused to trying to scam an English Premier League football club out of $124 million: “Abbas and others further conspired to launder hundreds of millions of dollars from other fraudulent schemes and computer intrusions, including one scheme to steal £100 million (approximately $124 million) from an English Premier League soccer club, the complaint alleges.”

“BEC schemes are one of the most difficult cybercrimes we encounter as they typically involve a coordinated group of con artists scattered around the world who have experience with computer hacking and exploiting the international financial system,” said United States Attorney Nick Hanna.

“This case targets a key player in a large, transnational conspiracy who was living an opulent lifestyle in another country while allegedly providing safe havens for stolen money around the world. As this case demonstrates, my office will continue to hold such criminals accountable, no matter where they live.”

He was arrested last month in Dubai and was handed over to the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice. He has yet to hire a lawyer and was last represented by a public defender. Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission says they are also investigating. 

He faces up to 20 years in the U.S. if convicted of conspiring to engage in money laundering. 

Via AlMasdarNews.com,

Israel announced on Monday that it had successfully launched a reconnaissance satellite into space in its first experiment in this field. The announcement came from the spokesperson of the Israeli army, Avichay Adraee, who tweeted:

“The Ministry of Defense confirmed that the space administration at the Research and Development Directorate and the Space Industries Authority succeeded by launching the Horizon 16 reconnaissance satellite into space, at four in the morning Jerusalem time.”

Adraee continued: “I am talking about an electric optical survey satellite that is equipped with advanced technical capabilities, and it will be subjected in the near future to a series of tests to determine its suitability and performance level.”

This move by Israel comes just a few months after Iran successfully launched its first satellite into orbit.

In a signal to Israel’s regional enemies, the Israeli Army spokesman issued messages hailing the launch in Arabic and other regional languages:

{وَهُوَ الَّذِي خَلَقَ اللَّيْلَ وَالنَّهَارَ وَالشَّمْسَ وَالْقَمَرَ ۖ كُلٌّ فِي فَلَكٍ يَسْبَحُونَ} فيديو من إطلاق #القمر_الصناعي الإسرائيلي #أفق16 إلى الفضاء فجر اليوم، ليسبح مع الفلك رافعًا اسم #إسرائيل عاليًا، وهو قمر استطلاع بصري مزود بقدرات تقنية متقدمة. pic.twitter.com/eT761o0Tuc

— افيخاي ادرعي (@AvichayAdraee) July 6, 2020

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to hint at this while hailing the successful launch. He said the launch “very much increases our ability to act against Israel’s enemies, near and far alike. It greatly expands our ability to act on land, at sea, in the air and also in space.”

And an Israeli Air Force space program official said of the launch:

“Our network of satellites lets us watch the entire Middle East — and even a bit more than that.” 

The Iranian launch, which was condemned by the United States and its allies, marked the first time that the Islamic Republic was able to successfully send a satellite into orbit.

Greece and Turkey are once again at odds over the fate of one of Christendom’s largest and oldest churches, built under Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the 6th century, and surviving changing empires throughout history.

The Church of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was – prior to the Turkish takeover of Byzantium in 1453 – Constantinople’s most famous church and center of the Orthodox Christian world. Under the modern Turkish state it’s gone from mosque to museum to ‘protected’ UNESCO world heritage site, despite still being considered by Greece and Greek visitors, as well as Russian pilgrims, a church.

But now Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and lawmakers are eyeing changing its status back to a mosque, which has outraged Athens. Russia has also chimed in, with both the Kremlin and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill condemning any potential move to turn Hagia Sophia into a mosque. 

“We by all means hope that Hagia Sophia’s status as a world heritage site will be taken into consideration,” a Kremlin spokesman said Monday.

“Of course, this is a world masterpiece beloved by tourists coming to Turkey from all over the world and especially by tourists from Russia who not only recognize Hagia Sophia’s tourist value but also it’s sacred spiritual value,” he added.

Turkey’s top court is said to still be debating the move. There are still multiple tens of thousands of indigenous Christians in Istanbul and in parts of Anatolia, mostly Greek, Syriac, and and some few remnant Armenian Christians. These ancient communities say Erdogan has newly unleashed a war on Turkey’s Christians. 

The Russian Orthodox Church slammed the potential Turkish move as “unacceptable” and a “violation of religious freedom”. The statement said: “We can’t go back to the Middle Ages now” — referencing centuries where Ottoman policy severely suppressed Christians throughout Asia Minor. 

The controversy has unleashed a storm on social media, which has included those against turning Hagia Sophia into a mosque envisioning it as a church once again:

The Church of Holy Wisdom pic.twitter.com/rtsByIuEiQ

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) July 5, 2020

Erdogan however, has interpreted it as a matter of “asserting Turkey’s sovereignty” over the site. Turkey argues that it can legally do what it wants with monuments and historic places within its sovereign territory.

Mike Pompeo has even weighed in on the side of the Greek government, urging that it be kept as a museum. 

“We urge the government of Turkey to continue to maintain the Hagia Sophia as a museum, as an exemplar of its commitment to respect Turkey’s diverse faith traditions and history, and to ensure it remains accessible to all,” the US Secretary of State said within the last weeks.

Erdogan is unlikely to have a pluralist compromise in mind. Humiliating the millions of Christians who see an ancient home in Hagia Sophia may, to him, be a small price to pay—or even a bonus.https://t.co/H2b54Ia11c

— Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) July 1, 2020

Echoing Greek politicians, the leader of the Orthodox Church of Greece, Archbishop Ieronymos II, issued a provocative statement saying of the Turks, “they won’t dare!”

Greek television quoted the top clergyman as saying: “They (the Turks) play whatever games are in hand. This is one more game. I believe they won’t dare.”

Critics of Erdogan and his AKP have long said he and the party have Islamist and neo-Ottoman aspirations. One prominent lawyer and human rights activist with UN Watch commented that:

Turkey now occupies more Arab territories — Syria, Iraq, Libya — than any other country in the world. Yet when the U.N.’s human rights council next week will hold its regular debate on “Occupied Arab Territories,” Turkey’s name won’t be mentioned even once. Isn’t that odd?

Turkey has also lately caused tensions within the NATO alliance, especially over Libya policy and repeat violations of a UN arms embargo.

Turning Hagia Sophia into a mosque after almost a century as a museum would be but one more symbolic provocation, albeit a serious one further worsening Greece-Turkey relations, and risking Moscow’s wrath as well.

Meanwhile, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople – who represents the Orthodox Church and its some 300 million adherents worldwide, is still in residence in Istanbul. He and his predecessors have been barred from using Hagia Sophia as a place of prayer since the 15th century, though over the years there’s been a few provocative instances where Greek clergy were said to have stealthily entered the now museum to “illegally” conduct Christian worship.

* * *

Authored by Giulio Meotti via The Gatestone Institute,

The United States abolished slavery 150 years ago, and has affirmative action for minorities. It is the country that elected a Black president, Barack Obama — twice! Yet, a new movement is toppling one historic monument after another one, as if the US is still enslaving African-Americans. Activists in Washington DC even targeted an Emancipation Memorial, depicting President Abraham Lincoln, who paid with his life for freeing slaves.

Today slavery still exists in many parts of Africa and Middle East, but the self-flagellating Western public is obsessively focused only on the Western past of African slavery rather than on real, ongoing slavery, which is alive and well — and ignored. For today’s slaves, there are no demonstrations in the streets, no international political pressure, and virtually no articles in the media.

“We must not forget that Arab-Muslims have been champions in this field,” Kamel Bencheikh, a Muslim poet, wrote in Le Matin d’Algerie.

“Emirs and sultans bought entire convoys of young black ephebes to make into eunuchs to guard their harems. And this continued with Ottoman emperors…. Even today, Mauritania and Saudi Arabia are still housing their own Ku Klux Klan. Slavery is still the order of the day in Nouakchott [Mauritania]. As for Riad, all you have to do is find out about young Asian girls that the potentates hire as maidservants”.

An investigation by BBC Arabic found that domestic workers in Saudi Arabia are even being sold online in a slave market that is booming.

According to Bencheikh, George Floyd’s death was an opportunity for many in Europe to turn a respectable fight into an unimaginable depravity.

“So, on the Place de la République in Paris or the Avenue Louise in Brussels, there are vengeful thugs, fed with hatred, taking advantage of the allotments that these two countries offer them, and attacking the past of those who enabled them to free themselves from their dictatorships…

“In France and Belgium, we do not execute apostates, crucify heterodox people, throw stones at unfaithful women, spit at heretics…

“… this anti-racism is biting its tail to turn into racism. You only have to see the angry crowd, the drool on their lips, to realize that we are dealing with people who have come to insult the white man guilty of having had, more than a hundred years ago, inappropriate gestures or shameful thoughts, and to insist, like the wolf in La Fontaine who said to the lamb: ‘If not you, then your brother’… Totalitarianism is among us again”.

He calls it a “Stalinism of communitarianism (sectarian politics) that makes itself into an indigenous victimization”. People who fled from Bouteflika and Gaddafi, the oppressors and tyrants of Kinshasa and Niamey, “come and spit incomprehensible hatred in Paris or Brussels”.

Bencheikh’s article shows just one brave group of dissidents in the Islamic world who are defending the West better than the Westerners are doing. These dissidents love freedom of expression and conscience; they know the difference between democracy and dictatorship; they enjoy religious tolerance, pluralism in the public sphere, and they outspokenly criticize the practice of Islam from which they fled. They also know that arousing historic and racial resentment is a dangerous game. For political Islam, their voices are revealing and devastating. For Western multiculturalism, they are “heretical” and annoying. Le Figaro pointed to this paradox: “Seen by their communities as ‘traitors’, they are accused by the elites in the West of ‘stigmatizing'”.

In The Spectator, Nick Cohen, explained:

“In the liberal orientalist world view the only ‘authentic’ Muslim is a barbarian. A battery of insults fires on any Muslim who says otherwise. They are ‘neo-conservatives,’ ‘native informants,’ and ‘Zionists’: they are as extreme as jihadists they oppose, or, let’s face it, worse…”.

Like Bencheikh, Algerian author Mohammed Sifaoui reminds all of us that “Mauritania, in North Africa, is the most slavery-supporting country in the world today. Qatar in the Middle East is as well, just as much, [as is] Saudi Arabia, under the banner of the Guardians of the Holy Places of Islam”.

The author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who fled her homeland of Somalia and now live in the US, writes:

“What the media do not tell you is that America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you. We have our problems and we need to address those. But our society and our systems are far from racist“.

Black, female and gay, the apex of “intersectionality.” According to Andrew Sullivan:

“‘Intersectionality’ is the latest academic craze sweeping the American academy. On the surface, it’s a recent neo-Marxist theory that argues that social oppression does not simply apply to single categories of identity — such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. — but to all of them in an interlocking system of hierarchy and power. “

For the intersectional activists, the US is the world’s biggest oppressor. Not Saudi Arabia or Iran. Hirsi Ali, who fled Somalia and experienced female genital mutilation, knows about oppression better than anti-statues activists. According to Hirsi Ali, writing in The Wall Street Journal:

“When I hear it said that the U.S. is defined above all by racism, when I see books such as Robin DiAngelo’s ‘White Fragility’ top the bestseller list, when I read of educators and journalists being fired for daring to question the orthodoxies of Black Lives Matter—then I feel obliged to speak up… America looks different if you grew up, as I did, in Africa and the Middle East”.

Writing in Le Monde and Le Point, Algerian writer Kamel Daoud indicted this hypocrisy. “There is an instinct for death in the air of the total revolution”, Daoud notes.

“According to some, the West is guilty by definition, we find ourselves not in a demand for change but, little by little, in [a demand for] destruction, the restoration of a barbarity of revenge”.

Daoud calls these “anti-Western Soviet-style trials”.

“It is forbidden to say that the West is also the place to which we flee when we want to escape the injustice of our country of origin, dictatorship, war, hunger, or simply boredom. It is fashionable to say that the West is guilty of everything”.

In Le Point, Daoud states that “with the great announcement of antiracism, the Inquisition returns”.

Daoud has been accused by twenty leftist academics, in an appeal in Le Monde, of “orientalist clichés” and “colonialist paternalism”. This new accusation of racism serves publicly to shame, mark and disqualify a politician or an intellectual who comments with too much frankness on the damage of multiculturalism.

Zineb el Rhazoui, a Moroccan-born anti-Islamist French journalist facing death threats, recently said:

“The only racism I suffer from comes from North Africans. For the Algerians, I am a Moroccan whore. For Moroccans, I am an Algerian whore. For both, a ‘whore of the Jews'”.

Arabs threaten other Arabs for speaking the truth about real racism and Islamization. They are the invisible victims of racism in France. Rhazoui claimed that “France is one of the most tolerant and least racist country in the world” and that real threat is not racism, but communitarism [importance placed on groups rather than individuals], denounced as well by French President Emmanuel Macron.

The Iranian writer Abnousse Shalmani, born in Tehran but now living in Paris, said to Le Figaro:

“The new anti-racism is racism disguised as humanism (…) What resonates in this discourse is the prison of victimization….It implies that every white person is bad –– as witnessed by the recent debunking of the statues of Victor Schoelcher, father of the abolition of slavery, in Martinique — and that every black person is a victim“.

While the economist Thomas Piketty, in Le Monde, invited the West to make amends for its colonial past, the Franco-Senegalese author, Fatou Diome, called for the abandonment of a discourse on decolonization:

“It is an emergency for those who do not yet know that they are free. I do not consider myself colonized. The catchphrase on colonization and slavery has become a business”.

The “ideology” is simple: colonialism is supposedly still at work, people from formerly colonized countries continue to be oppressed, in particular Muslims who are said to be targets of a “racist” and “Islamophobic” hate. In this view, “White Western males” are always the oppressors, and the minorities are always victims.

A prominent anti-racism campaigner, Rokhaya Diallo, has said that France is “racist” in an opposition between “the dominator” and “the dominated”. It is a view that sees racism everywhere, especially where it does not exist. It has also produced many of the disasters of multiculturalism throughout Europe by making it impossible to criticize the consequences of mass immigration and Islamist separatism. The French author Pascal Bruckner has called this stance “imaginary racism“. It is a penitential creation that leads the public in the West — even though presumably no one in the West either was a slave or had a slave — to believe that anti-Western hatred is deserved.

The border between this Marxist view, in which someone always has to be a victim, has become porous with Islamism. In the movement named after Adama Traoré, the “French George Floyd“, you will find an alliance of organizations such as SOS Racisme and Muslim Salafists. Human rights organizations also rally with the “Union of Islamic Organization of France”, considered fundamentalist.

Manuel Valls, the former French prime minister, in an interview with Valuers Actuelles magazine said, “Human rights associations have been lost and have opened the doors to Tariq Ramadan”. This instead of taking the side of the many great Muslim reformers. Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes:

“Reformers such as Asra Nomani, Irshad Manji, Tawfiq Hamid, Maajid Nawaz, Zuhdi Jasser, Saleem Ahmed, Yunis Qandil, Seyran Ates, Bassam Tibi and Abd al-Hamid al-Ansari must be supported and protected… These reformers should be as well known in the West as Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and Havel were generations earlier.” Instead, so-called human rights associations, politicians and the media have chosen to back political Islam.

By contrast, a group of 12 writers put their names to a statement in the French magazine Charlie Hebdo warning against Islamic “totalitarianism”.

“After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all”.

Among the 12 signatories, eight came from the Islamic world.

These anti-Islamist Muslim intellectuals were not born free; they fled dictatorships for democracies, where they still suffer death threats and abuses, but where they are far freer and prouder of the West than those Westerners who know only freedom but now practice a dreadful feeing of guilt — mostly for things they did not do.

The West not only turns its back the new slave markets; the UN Human Rights Council actually welcomes states such as Sudan, where tens of thousands of women and children from mostly Christian villages were enslaved during Jihadi raids; Kenya and Nigeria, where the police last fall rescued hundreds of men and boys chained in an Islamic school; Pakistan, where Christians are condemned to servitude, and Mauritania, where two in every 100 people are still held as slaves. It is the same UN Human Rights Council that now, thanks to pressure by African countries, wants to investigate “systemic racism in the US”. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo noted:

“If the Council were honest, it would recognize the strengths of American democracy and urge authoritarian regimes around the world to model American democracy and to hold their nations to the same high standards of accountability and transparency that we Americans apply to ourselves”.

It is high time for the United States to stop funding the United Nations. The United Nations is being used to perpetuate injustice, not stop it.

Real slave traders and racists — those who believe Western societies and values should not exist at all — most likely look at the current Western self-flagellation and cheer their approval.

China has slammed what it calls the United States flexing its muscles in the South China Sea to try to provoke tensions and conflict among countries of the region. But the Pentagon has called the maneuvers by two supercarriers sent to the region days ago, namely the USS Ronald Reagan and USS Nimitz, an act of standing up “for the right of all nations to fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows” and further as a “symbol of resolve”.

Each carrier has 90 or more aircraft and about 6,000 personnel, making it a significant display of force off China’s coast. Given this, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is said to be tracking their movements closely, with Chinese vessels said to be within eyesight of the US carriers. 

The carriers have been conducting flight drills since exercises commenced on July 4. Nimitz commander Rear Admiral James Kirk told reporters in a telephone interview: “They have seen us and we have seen them” – in reference to a nearby Chinese flotilla.

Interestingly, the US Navy and Chinese state-run newspaper Global Times had an exchange this weekend after on Sunday GT issued a veiled threat hyping Beijing’s advanced missile arsenal. China has a wide selection of anti-aircraft carrier weapons like DF-21D and DF-26 “aircraft carrier killer” missiles, the state-run paper said. 

It then said any aircraft carrier movement in the region “is at the pleasure of PLA”.

“And yet, there they are,” the Navy Chief of Information Twitter account posted, saying the US ships “are not intimidated” because their exercises and navigation are “at our discretion”.

And yet, there they are. Two @USNavy aircraft carriers operating in the international waters of the South China Sea. #USSNimitz & #USSRonaldReagan are not intimidated #AtOurDiscretion https://t.co/QGTggRjOul

— Navy Chief of Information (@chinfo) July 5, 2020

The carriers are holding some of the Navy’s largest exercises in recent years in the area, which is frequently beset upon by American destroyers sailing within 12 miles of certain islands developed by China that are the subject of competing international claims.

The exercises also involve four other warships as well, along with round-the-clock fights and missions.

Authored by Lawrence Sellin via WIONews.com,

After six months of exhaustive investigation, the global scientific community has been unable to identify the natural source of COVID-19, that is, the when, where and how it “jumped” from animals to humans.

Some now imply that we may never know the natural origin of COVID-19.

In a news article recently published by the international science journal Nature, the progress, or lack thereof, identifying the natural source of COVID-19 was reviewed.

According to the article, COVID-19 probably originated in bats, specifically horseshoe bats, which host two closely related coronaviruses, named RaTG13 and RmYN02, whose genomes are 96% and 93% identical to COVID-19, respectively.

Both coronavirus samples were isolated from bats in Yunnan Province, RaTG13 in 2013 and RmYN02 in 2019, and were studied in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Wuhan is where the outbreak of COVID-19 originated and about 1,000 miles from Yunnan.

The Nature article does not mention that RaTG13 is actually a duplicate of another bat coronavirus, BtCoV/4991, about which there is nearly no published experimental data since it was isolated in 2013, despite clearly being a Potential Pandemic Pathogen.

That is, except for the structure, analyzed only by Chinese scientists, practically nothing is known about RaTG13.

The Nature article also does not mention that the receptor-binding domain of RmYN02 showed only a 61.3% sequence identity with COVID-19, meaning it is highly unlikely that RmYN02 could even bind to human cells.

The Nature article suggests that pangolins (scaly anteaters), might be an intermediate host because some pangolin coronaviruses “share up to 92% of their genomes” with COVID-19, presumably bridging the gap between bats and humans.

When asked about that possibility, Dr Ralph Baric, a coronavirus expert from the University of North Carolina, in a March 15, 2020 interview, stated unequivocally that pangolins were not the source of COVID-19:

“Pangolins have over 3,000 nucleotide changes – no way they are the reservoir species [for COVID-19], absolutely no chance.”

Nevertheless, the receptor-binding domain of COVID-19 is structurally closer to pangolins than bats indicating a recombinant event, in this case, likely artificial.

In fact, Ralph Baric and Zheng-Li Shi, the “bat woman” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, conducted just such an artificial receptor-binding domain insertion from a newly isolated bat coronavirus (SHC014) onto the “backbone” from SARS-CoV, the coronavirus responsible for the 2003 pandemic.

In a December 9, 2019 interview, Dr Peter Daszak, President of the EcoHealth Alliance and a long-time collaborator with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, presumably referring to the Ralph Baric- Zheng-Li Shi experiments, stated “you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily” inserting a spike protein “into a backbone of another virus.”

Thus, an artificial recombinant event carried out in the laboratory would be a far better explanation of pangolin-like structures appearing on a bat coronavirus backbone than one occurring in nature, at least given the current state of knowledge.

The most conspicuous sign of COVID-19 genetic manipulation is the presence of a furin polybasic cleavage site, a structure that is not present in any of the coronaviruses so far identified as possible direct ancestors.

The authors of the RmYN02 article stretch credulity even further by claiming that RmYN02 has a precursor cleavage site.

In reality, it is a weak attempt to offer a naturally-occurring explanation for the presence of the furin polybasic cleavage site in COVID-19.

Unfortunately, the amino acid sequence PAA, the insertion cited by the authors, is chemically neutral, totally unlike COVID-19’s polybasic PRRAR sequence and PAA has no ability to cleave anything.

Based on the actual evidence, it is unlikely that RmYN02 is a natural close relative of COVID-19.

Although COVID-19 appears to have been “pre-adapted” for human infection, the artificial insertion of the furin polybasic cleavage site may explain a potentially significant point mutation in COVID-19 that may have increased its infectivity.

According to the article “The D614G mutation in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein reduces S1 shedding and increases infectivity,”, over the course of the human pandemic, one amino acid position has changed from aspartic acid to glycine, increasing the stability of the spike protein and, thereby, making COVID-19 more infectious.

As suggested by the authors, that mutation may have been what is known as a “positive selection” to compensate for the structural instability created after the artificial insertion of the furin polybasic cleavage site.

The burden of proof is now on China to demonstrate that COVID-19 is naturally-occurring because most of the available evidence indicates otherwise.