Featured Story
🎯 Fed Probes Morgan Stanley’s International Wealth-Management Practices. At issue is how the bank vets foreigners and the origins of their money before taking them on as customers. WSJ
Top Stories
🌎 Triad Weed: How Chinese Marijuana Grows Took Over Rural Maine. Key sites were purchased over the past three years by single adults, primarily from New York and Massachusetts, using cash or financing arranged through a handful of mortgage companies. Maine Wire
🌎 Putin rakes in extra €1B for his war chest via Bulgaria sanctions loophole. Taking advantage of a unique exemption to the EU’s Russian oil ban, Bulgaria allowed millions of barrels of Russian oil to reach a local Russian-owned refinery. Politico
🌎 US universities including Cornell, Harvard and MIT raked in $13B in ‘undocumented contributions’ from foreign donors. A sizable portion of the funds were said to be donated from authoritarian regimes around the globe including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, China and the UAE. NY Post
🌎 GOP Subpoenas Hunter and James Biden in Impeachment Probe. The subpoenas issued Wednesday mark a significant escalation in the unwinding impeachment investigation. Messenger
🌎 Russia Turns to Longtime Arms Customers to Boost War Arsenal. Russia has sought to retrieve parts from defense systems it had exported to countries such as Pakistan, Egypt, Belarus and Brazil. WSJ
🌎 UK Sanctions Gold Trader and Miners in New Russian Clampdown. The UK government targeted Russian gold miners, the largest refiner and a Dubai-based trader involved in routing funds to Moscow as part of a package of fresh sanctions tied to the country’s gold and oil sectors. Bloomberg
🌎 U.S. Bill Proposes Outlawing Government Use of China-Made Blockchains and Tether's USDT. Government officials would no longer be able to use networks developed by China that power crypto transactions. CoinDesk
🌎 EU balks at US, Israeli pressure for new Hamas sanctions. EU diplomats cited a range of reasons to explain why the bloc hasn’t hit Hamas — already named as a terrorist group — with fresh sanctions. Politico
🌎 Feds bust high-end brothel network used by elected officials. Three individuals have been arrested on charges of operating a “high-end brothel network” in Massachusetts and Virginia with a clientele that included elected officials, military officers and government contractors with security clearance. CNN
🌎 10 Gambino mobsters indicted over violent attempts to take over NYC garbage hauling and demolition industry. They each face between 20 and 180 years in prison for the laundry list of crimes they’re accused of — many so brutal they’d make Tony Soprano grin. BBC
.png?upscale=true&width=800&upscale=true&name=ILLICIT%20EDGE%20(1200%20%C3%97%20200%20px).png)
