Plus: Meet the Law Clerk Driving Trump Bonkers at His New York Fraud Trial...
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12/4/23

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Happy Monday!  It's December 4, and we're tracking top stories to start your week: Qatargate Files, countering Hamas' financial network, Russian army snaps up Chinese off-road buggies, the law clerk driving Donald Trump bonkers, and much more...

 

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Featured Story

 

🎯 Qatargate Files: Hundreds of leaked documents reveal scale of EU corruption scandal. Evidence from the European Parliament's graft investigation provides a record of more than 300 alleged attempts to manipulate EU democracy. Politico 

 

Top Stories

 

🌎 Countering Hamas’s Financial Network: Cutting off Hamas’s financing is made more challenging by the lack of international unity on Hamas’s status as a terrorist organization. Lawfare

 

🌎 Russian army snaps up Chinese off-road buggies popular in U.S. Purchase of hundreds of all-terrain vehicles made by Shandong Odes could put exports to west at risk. FT

 

🌎 Meet Allison Greenfield, the law clerk driving Trump bonkers at his fraud trial. In Donald Trump's civil fraud trial, his attorneys have spent a disproportionate amount of time on the judge's principal law clerk. Insider

 

🌎 How Suspects Laundered Billions in Singapore for Years. Though the recent arrests have led to the seizure of more than S$1 billion in bank accounts alone, it may just be the tip of the iceberg, with at least eight suspects at large. Bloomberg

 

📌 Top 10 Ways Money Launderers Are Caught Red-Handed Illicit Edge

 

🌎 Former US ambassador arrested in Florida over Cuba dealings. A former American diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia has been arrested in a long-running FBI counterintelligence investigation. AP

 

🌎 Why crypto was the perfect tool for criminals and kleptocrats. Crypto’s ethos, after all, wasn’t just to make transactions more secure, but also to offer anonymity to anyone who wanted it. CNN

 

🌎 U.S. Official Reveals Drastic Punishment for Russia. The U.S. aims to halve Russia’s energy revenues by 2030, and diplomat says western sanctions will continue ‘for years to come’ to curb Moscow’s war machine. Newsweek

 

🌎 North Korea's state hackers stole $3 billion in crypto since 2017. While cryptocurrency exchanges are at the top of their targeting list, they've also been linked to attacks against individual users and venture capital firms. Bleepingcomputer

 

🌎 Venezuelans approve takeover of oil-rich region of Guyana. For Mr. Maduro, stoking a geopolitical crisis provides a way to shift the domestic conversation at a moment when many Venezuelans are pressing for an election that could challenge his hold on power. NYT

 

🌎 Rockefeller Brothers Fund funding pro-Hamas groups. Samidoun, founded in 2011, condemned the UK in 2021 for classifying Hamas a terrorist organization, and cheered the Oct 7 terrorist incursion. NY Post

IN THE NEWS

China

 

🇨🇳 ‘We cannot let China get these chips’: Commerce Secretary Fortune

 

🇨🇳 House Speaker Johnson Drops China Investment Curbs From Defense Bill Bloomberg

 

🇨🇳 Orgs with China ties used NYC students in anti-Israel propaganda NY Post

 

🇨🇳 Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive worked wonders on his bureaucrats’ waistlines Guardian

 

More news...

Russia

 

🇷🇺 The gambit to slash Russia's oil profits and undercut Putin's war in Ukraine Yahoo!

 

🇷🇺 One App To Rule Them All: Coming Soon To Russia's Internet RFE

 

🇷🇺 Russian Gas Glut Shows Austria Still in Kremlin’s Energy Orbit Bloomberg

 

🇷🇺 U.S., allies pressure Liberia, Marshall Islands, Panama over Russia oil sanctions Reuters

 

More news...

Corruption & Financial Crime

 

💸 Paraguayan official resigns after signing agreement with fictional country Telegraph

 

💸 Vietnam reels from historic €11.4 billion corruption scandal DW

 

💸 Businessman Who Bought Dominica Passport and Funded U.K. Tories Now Under Investigation in India OCCRP

 

💸 Ryanair Finds Suspect Engine Components as Fake-Part Case Brews Bloomberg

 

More news...

Crypto & Cyber

 

🔐 Ransomware attack causes outages at 60 credit unions CNN

 

🔐 Spanish man faces 20 years in prison for teaching North Korea how to evade US sanctions using cryptocurrencies Insider

 

🔐 Breaches by Iran-affiliated hackers spanned multiple U.S. states AP

 

🔐 28 Indian Crypto Service Providers Have Registered With Country’s Anti-Money Laundering Unit CoinDesk

 

More news...

"If you must break the law, do it to seize power: in all other cases observe it." --Julius Caesar

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