News

Former Indian diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar in a fulsome blog post entitled “Iran to hit Israel hard with soft power” celebrates the recent appointment of one-time Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif as the new Iranian president’s strategy deputy.

Translated from doublespeak into plain English, what Bhadrakumar seems to be saying (and he seems to say it with confidence and authority) is that as Irans implements its “revenge” against Israel he will use Zarif and his connections to the American university community to sweet-talk and bamboozle the usual useful idiots in academia into excusing his government’s planned violence and terror.

Zarif obtained both his M.A. and Ph.D. from the Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver in the 1980s. While serving as foreign minister from 2013-2021 and most likely earlier, he was believed by some reliable sources in American intelligence to be orchestrating a sophisticated campaign of targeting and recruiting certain faculty and foreign students for spying and Iranian active measures against Israel and its ally the United States.

There is some speculation that Zarif may also be tasked in the coming months with upping even further Iran’s game of orchestrating domestic unrest within the U.S. itself.

Read article

A sweeping operation by the multinational law enforcement agency Interpol has led to the arrest of 300 organized crime supects as well as the seizure of over $3 million in assets and 720 bank accounts.

The criminal syndicates targeted were based in West Africa, particularly Nigeria. The most prominent group is known as Black Axe which, according to Interpol, “used money mules to open bank accounts worldwide and is now under investigation in over 40 countries for related money laundering activities”.

In addition to Nigeria, countries where suspects have been targeted include Venezuela, Argentina, and Colombia. According to a confidential source the Dominican Republic may also be possibly on the list.

Read article

A Virginia court has demanded that the parent organization of the National Students for Justice in Palestine, the group reportedly behind many of the anti-Israel demonstrations on American college campuses this past spring, to hand over financial records.

The parent organization, known as American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), has been accused in a lawsuit by survivors of the Oct. 7 massacre, of funding Hamas and other international terrorist organizations.

Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares has been conduncting a broader investigation into AMP’s international connections since 2016.

Read article

Fictitious trade deals with phony invoices purporting to show transactions in everything from metal products to bulk food orders have been used to launder billions of dollars on behalf of Russian oligarchs and their organized crime associates, according to an investigation by the Organized Crime & Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

Known as the “Troika Laundromat”, the scheme relied on “counterparties” in the form of prominent financial institutions to the transactions. OCCRP lists among them Citigroup Inc., Raiffeisen, and Deutsche Bank.

According to OCCRP, “the dozens of companies in the system also generated $8.8 billion of internal transactions to obscure the origin of the cash.”

Read article

Might an obscure and complex South Dakota bond scam that the press has systemically ignored be the key to the House investigations into the Bidens, “foreign influence”, and related matters?

An author with our affiliate site thegloboscope.com thinks so.

You’ve probably heard only indirectly, if at all, of the Wakpamni Lake Community, which is technically a tribal government entity, that is part of Oglala Sioux tribe whose land consists of 2.2 million acres in South Dakota covering the Pine Ridge Reservation.

But less than a decade ago the Wakpamni Lake Community was swindled out of $64 million by various well-connected political and financial operatives in Colorado, California, and Washington DC through a massive fraudulent bond scheme. 

The scheme ties directly to the current administration in Washington.

Read article

Money laundering is the third largest global industry, accounting for up to $4 billion annually and as much as 5 percent of the global economy.

It also stifles economic development, especially in the Global South, and contributes in a major way to growing social and economic inequality.

Yet the scourge is often ignored by both the press and given short shrift by the financial industry as well as government officials.

To learn all the dirty details of this dirty business and how it affects you, not to mention the entirety of civil society, watch this excellent video by Hue Dang, a world-renowned specialist on the topic.

Watch video

The 20^th century dawned with the “promise” of world peace and prosperity growing from brilliant new technologies, burgeoning egalitarian states, and the prospect of global political-economic cooperation – it collapsed into chaos, genocide, holocausts, environmental destruction, with 70 million souls lost in the great wars and perhaps another 50 million in the 1918 flu pandemic.

Yet the century’s second half, in spite of nuclear and Cold War threats, brought “rising tides” of wealth over poverty, foodstuff abundance, even more amazing technologies, and, in its final decades, it witnessed Eurasia’s re-opening and renewed prospects of “global convergence.”

Still, alas, we find ourselves in a new century wondering if civilization hasn’t gotten dicey and dangerous, again. We observe new military conflicts, economic disruptions, energy supply panic, pandemics, one million souls a week flooding into urban centers, and many others trapped in modern slavery and human trafficking. We find ourselves disillusioned, living a 21st century angst, on a darker side of this “globalization.” What’s going on?

Learn more from prominent wealth manager Gary Bedford.

Watch videos