Perspective - Coda Story

The performative war on money laundering

Oliver Bullough — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:11:58 +0000

Dutch friends like to tell me that their nation’s primary characteristic is bluntness, and the Netherlands’ Court of Audit has done nothing to challenge the stereotype with its bracing assessment of the country’s and, by extension, the world’s failure in fighting money laundering. Published last month, after an extensive analysis of the country’s efforts to stop dirty money, the Court’s report concludes that the system is expensive, discriminatory, and — possibly — completely ineffective. No one has really checked on that last point, so they can’t be sure, which if anything makes it all worse.

The Netherlands hosts the largest port in Europe, and is therefore home to a vast smuggling industry — Dutch politicians not infrequently warn that it’s becoming a narco-state — which requires an equally vast money laundering industry to service its profits. The Court of Audit set out to check the government’s response to this challenge, concluding that it cost banks €1.6 billion a year. It’s a price tag that has increased by almost 17% between 2021 and 2024, during which time the number of reports the banks’ 13,000 compliance officers made more than doubled.

“We think it is important that these employees make a meaningful societal contribution to preventing and combatting money laundering. There is no evidence that shows that they do,” the report witheringly observes.

The court sent surveys out to “politically-exposed people” (PEP is a jargon term meaning anyone in a position of power, or a close relative or associate) asking about their experiences. One person’s 83-year-old mother was asked to explain the source of an inheritance she received after the PEP applied for a loan. It is an eye-opening section, revealing how process is prioritised over any kind of judgement about where the risk of money laundering genuinely lies, but the real shock is in the section about different religious groups, which shows how the transactions of immigrant-focussed churches and mosques are systematically checked more thoroughly than local Protestant or Catholic congregations.

“A bank told a mosque that it was not possible to collect so much money after a prayer meeting,” the report notes. “The mosque’s trustees said the bank could come and see for itself but the bank declined. Feeling powerless and unable to deposit the money with the bank, the trustees hid it in the mosque.”

Imagine if we had an ongoing health crisis. And imagine that the government had created an expensive, intrusive system to tackle it, which was generating an endlessly increasing amount of paperwork, employing thousands of people and actively discriminating against religious and ethnic minorities. Surely, someone would at least put in the hours to check if the system worked, whether it was making people healthier, and assess therefore whether all these bad side effects were justified?

With anti-money laundering policy, that is simply not happening. It’s based on faith rather than facts: we just need to do more of the same thing, and eventually we’ll get the results we want; if we don’t, we need to do the same thing even more. Interestingly, Texan judge Jeremy Kernodle — fresh from gutting the Corporate Transparency Act — has returned to the fight against anti-money laundering regulation. He has killed Geographic Targeting Orders, which were supposed to collect information around real estate transactions. “FinCEN’s explanations are vague, conclusory, and unpersuasive,” the court ruled. “The fact that some bad actors have conducted non-financed real estate transactions does not make such transactions categorically ‘suspicious.’”

I’m not saying I agree with Mr. Kernodle, because I don’t, but I don’t think pushback on anti-money laundering orthodoxy is necessarily a bad thing, since it obliges us to think more deeply about what actually works, rather than just going along with ineffective old policies. I hope people outside the Netherlands read the Court of Audit’s report and start wondering whether this approach isn’t long past time for a complete overhaul.

How do you solve a problem like crypto?

It’s quite unusual for there to be a divide in the UK’s anti-corruption community, which tends to agree on technocratic solutions to the problems around illicit finance, but one has emerged around the role of cryptocurrencies in political donations. Spotlight on Corruption doesn’t think the government’s moratorium on crypto donations goes far enough. There needs to be a ban, they argue, in primary legislation with additional safeguards. I agree.

The folks at RUSI, on the other hand, think a moratorium on crypto donations is a better idea since it would prime the country to take regulating cryptocurrencies more seriously, and prepare the way for them to be widespread. Take a look, judge for yourself, and let me know what you think. The difference may reflect deeper and unresolvable political differences in how countries should respond to globalisation, but it’s an interesting one to think about.

One thing I think we all agree on is the need for an urgent overhaul of all rules around electoral finance, while there’s still an honest system to approve them.

On that note, interesting news from Cambodia, which has extradited Li Xiong to China. Xiong, who is accused by governments worldwide of playing a key role in the now-collapsed Huione group, which was laundering money for crime syndicates on an industrial scale, with particular expertise in cryptocurrencies. Of course, the criminals have not stood still and have new markets up and running, but it is striking how quickly the extradition went ahead.

In contrast, the legal proceedings around the mammoth tax fraud exposed two decades ago by Sergei Magnitsky grind tortuously on, with the culprits still safe in Russia. They certainly enjoyed themselves in Europe for a while, however, as a court case in Paris shows. “The spending spree included: €668,517, ($771,703) at a Parisian art and antique gallery; €696,015 ($803,445) across two high-end French women’s fashion brands; €96,814 ($111,757) at a luxury jewellery store in Courchevel, an exclusive ski resort in the French Alps; and €127,182 ($146,813) for a Courchevel tour package.”

There are few things that reveal the moral bankruptcy of the regime in the Kremlin more than this case. It’s not enough that corrupt officials could kill a good man who exposed their $230 million theft from the Russian people, but the Russian state then shielded them while they splashed the loot on European luxury holidays, and continues to do so to this day.

Nothing on the same scale is happening in the United States of course, but still this analysis of how enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is being politicised is a bit grim: “The transformation of U.S. antibribery tools into economic weapons also threatens to undo the global system the United States helped establish to punish business corruption.”

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Memeification and digital slop: AI and the fog of war

Nic Dawes — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:02:59 +0000

A funny thing happened on the day OpenAI announced it was shutting down Sora, its video generation app: Iran went all in on synthetic propaganda and very quickly started winning the global meme war. The timing is a coincidence, no doubt, but it is the kind of coincidence that illuminates.

Watching the explosive virality of the clips offers a powerful lesson in asymmetric media operations. They deploy cultural sophistication, an understanding of online communities and the enormously powerful creation tools made available by American tech companies, tools that give everyone on the internet access to a personal reality distortion field — drones, but for your feed.

On Wednesday, as Donald Trump was trying desperately to talk down the oil markets with hints of a deal, a stream of videos, carefully calibrated for U.S., regional and third country audiences rolled out on X via embassy accounts, Russia Today, and disaffected Maga influencers. The clips, by broad social media consensus, are good. Some lean heavily on the extremely online grammar of the U.S. right. Some remix Hollywood characters and likenesses in exactly the way that OpenAI’s now nixed billion-dollar deal with Disney was supposed to sanction. Others lean more heavily into Islamic iconography, featuring Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu as worshippers of Baal, the foreign demon god who figures in both the Quran and the Hebrew Bible. The Lego movie is an especially rich resource, but so are TikTok formats, and the kind of idealized AI figures beloved of Trump administration meme makers. You can watch a few of them here.

Notably, faked war footage is far from the dominant format. All of these clips foreground and celebrate their own artificiality: some are sentimental, some triumphal, many are full of the gleeful adolescent wit of gamers on discord forums.

https://twitter.com/politblogme/status/2036909041566306565?s=20

Researchers have long been warning that generative tools will undercut the authority of visual evidence, compounding and accelerating the damage created by slower, cruder forms of fakery: photoshop, selective editing, even gaming clips passed off as combat footage. Of course, we are already there, and have been for a while. Russia has been the paramount master of this game, in Ukraine and in its ongoing influence operations around the world. But others have learned quickly. Last year, when India and Pakistan were engaged in a brief aerial battle, social media bullshit overwhelmed and compromised traditional coverage. More recently, Israel’s obliteration of Gaza was accompanied by a sustained and comprehensive blizzard of visually compelling misinformation, propaganda, and official lies.

That continues. On March 28, Israel killed three journalists in a targeted strike in Southern Lebanon, claiming without evidence that one of them, Ali Shoaib, was a member of Hezbollah’s Radwan forces. They later distributed a photograph of him in military fatigues to reinforce the point, but explained to Fox news that in fact, they’d had to photoshop the uniform in because no such picture existed.

Meanwhile, in the Trump administration’s domestic war on immigrants and political opponents, we’ve seen a complete resetting of norms around the tone of official communication and any expectation that it is rooted in fact. Nowhere was that more evident than in the altered footage posted by the White House of the arrest of the prominent Minneapolis activist Nekima Levy Armstrong in January. In the video, shared by the official White House handle, a handcuffed Levy Armstrong is sobbing, her skin visibly darkened. In fact, she had faced arrest calmly.

Questioned by reporters about this blatant falsification, deputy White House communications director Kaelan Dorr responded: "Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.” Collapsing the distinction between a meme and the factual record with the aid of AI is the final step in this administration's insistence that its preferred narrative simply is reality.

The problem for the White House and its allies is that their choices in tech policy, official communication, and press freedom level the playing field for information war in ways that Tehran’s media strategists understand and they, for all their immersion in online worlds, do not.

Iranian propagandists know that the currency of visual information online has already been completely debased. They’ve dealt with it plenty, and no doubt practiced it themselves in regional battles for narrative dominance. Their insight is that as cheap and easy as it is to create and distribute fakes, returns on the effort of mobilizing what disinformation researchers call “coordinated inauthentic action” are diminishing. They still do it, but it isn’t where the action is.

Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have, in a very practical sense, wrought this moment in concert with Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, JD Vance and Donald Trump. At their urging, the U.S. has surrendered unrivaled dominance in scarce, expensive information and cultural assets in exchange for a political economy of media that widely distributes cheap, abundant ones.

Tech leaders and conservative politicians have worked consistently for a decade to deprecate the trustworthiness of American journalism and constrain its liberties. They have smeared its practitioners as “enemies of the people”; they have captured the commanding heights of the broadcast and culture industries through crony deals, and they have launched an assault on both press freedom and standards, two assets that once made American news outlets the envy of the world. Needless to say, the economic collapse of traditional media companies fostered by Google’s and Meta’s advertising duopoly only served to deepen the damage. Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post shuttered its Middle East bureaus just days before the war began.

Meanwhile, lying from agency podiums and the Oval Office, makes Karoline Leavitt barely distinguishable from Baghdad Bob, Iraq’s minister of information in 2003 whose surreal, truth-dodging press conferences during the U.S.-led invasion made him a global laughingstock. And the DOGEing of both the nominally independent Voice of America, as well as the state department’s Global Engagement Center leaves the administration with neither broadcast nor digital counter-propaganda assets.

When no one can be trusted with the actual truth, we are left with the AI equivalent of 19th-century editorial cartoons, produced at industrial scale and distributed globally. America has little advantage in that war, particularly when it is at a moral, political and legal nadir.

If anything, Iran, which combines repression with an enormously rich literary culture, film scene and advertising market brings serious capabilities to the fight.

Of course, the ebbing of information power was already under way during the first Trump administration, and during Joe Biden’s term in ways that are indissociable from broader democratic decline. The “trust and safety” architecture adopted by big platform companies was designed — implicitly if not always visibly — to conserve information authority, and ensure that it functioned in broadly pro-democratic ways.

After the disastrous failures of the Rohingya genocide — which rights groups and UN investigators blamed Facebook for facilitating — and the fears surrounding the manipulation of the U.S. electoral environment in 2016, there was a clear threat to the commercial and political health of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Tech companies, governments, researchers and human rights experts devised rules and norms for content moderation grounded in existing standards, tools for detecting coordinated inauthentic behavior, and a framework for crisis response.

The community of practitioners and institutions that sprung up to combat the flesh-eating virus attacking the body politic were working with bandaids in the battlefield hospital even before Covid, a coordinated attack from the right, and the second Trump victory hit them, but they succeeded in imposing some limits. That project now lies in ruins.

The Stanford Information Laboratory has been shut down. Trust and Safety teams at Meta and X have been disbanded. The national security arm of the project, centered around the State Department is gone, and private funding for countering misinformation has largely dried up.

Where are the hyperscalers, the AI titans, whose tools are being so effectively deployed, in all of this?

The trust and safety people who do work at OpenAI are dutifully putting out reports every few months. They are detailing how they foiled efforts to use ChatGPT for a Chinese influence campaign aimed at Sanae Takaichi, the Japanese prime minister, and exposing a Russian content mill feeding African newspapers. “Pro-tip for governments,” wrote Head of National Security policy Sasha Baker on LinkedIn of the February report. “Please don’t use our products to spread lies online.”

Governments, in the world of Sam Altman’s “democratic AI” do not include that of the United States. OpenAI has not mentioned a single U.S. ally — let alone the administration itself — in these reports.

OpenAI has hired multiple ex-Clinton, Obama and Biden officials, and in their work a weird, attenuated piece of the old national security approach to information integrity lives on, alongside the project of selling products to the Pentagon. The company’s leaders clearly treat these issues as a complement to messaging around Western AI, or a picayune adjunct to the bigger questions of AI risk, which are handled way up in the organizational stratosphere, as they are at Anthropic.

Perhaps the larger lesson is that you can’t really shut down Sora, or put AI-generated video back in its box. If you choose to prosecute an illegal war of choice after surrendering the hard-won high ground of a robust, democratic information environment, high tech weaponry will not offset the deficit. On the contrary, you will have compounded the risk of both tactical failure and strategic geopolitical defeat. When that happens, and in some ways it already has, those who made this war, and their enablers in Silicon Valley, will have only themselves to blame.

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Our corrupt world, run by oligarchs for oligarchs

Oliver Bullough — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 12:47:51 +0000

One difficulty in writing about corruption is explaining what it is. You’re either too specific — “it’s taking bribes”. Or too vague — “it’s being bad”. Another difficulty is obtaining the raw material to analyse: corrupt people don’t tend to speak openly about it, which means you’re left looking at corruption’s visible manifestations, which is like trying to understand a virus only from its spots.

So huge kudos to Earth League International for producing a detailed, specific and thoughtful report on how corruption facilitates wildlife crime globally, which is packed full of lessons for the study of corruption in general as well. Corruption is a system, everything is connected. It’s the water in which criminals swim, and it will drown the rest of us if we let it.

Earth League International embeds investigators in corrupt networks all over the world, and reveals how it is so much more than just the “abuse of entrusted power for private gain” and their report quotes multiple specific examples. The choice for an official standing in the way of a Transnational Criminal Organisation (TCO) is not between taking a bribe and being honest, it’s between taking a bribe and having a family member killed.

“Corruption tilts the playing field of justice by turning some officials or even agencies into additional arms of criminal networks, akin to painting a group of white chess pieces red and then commencing a match, giving the criminal side a decided advantage”, notes the report. And, it adds, “Transnational Criminal Organisations are savvy about which officials they approach, assessing weaknesses such as debt or family ties that may make them more vulnerable to financial offers or threats.”

It estimates the value of global wildlife-related crime at over $1 trillion annually, which is an astonishing amount of money, but an important point to take is that this is not a separate form of corruption. The same border officials that wave through illegal shipments of timber or shark fins also help with other forms of smuggling. The money that criminals funnel into politics undermines democracy in all ways. “Corruption is not the sole purview of less wealthy nations. It is everywhere. During investigations into illegal wildlife trafficking for (traditional Chinese medicine) in Europe, for example, Earth League International found enablers in San Marino, Italy, Belgium, and Poland,” notes the report.

There is something grimly ironic that so much of the despoliation that is making things worse for everyone is driven by the trade in “medicine” and thus a desire to make the world better. In reality, of course, pangolin scales and totoaba swim bladders are no more medicinal than my toenail clippings. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this is the demand for hallucinogenic toad venom, as detailed in this excellent article from a few years ago, which supposedly helps us all access the inner divine, but which is meanwhile wiping out the unfortunate toads that secrete it. “Most harvesters don’t have a consciousness about the sacredness of the species”, said a toad practitioner. “It’s just a hustle business.”

On a more geopolitical and less psychedelic level, this report on how Russia is repurposing its influence networks in Europe so as to maintain its fossil fuel exports show that other forms of corruption have huge environmental impact of their own. “The time for polite half-measures is over. Stronger enforcement, embargoes and tariffs on Russian fossil fuels to cripple exports, personal sanctions, and transparency rules are the only way to dismantle Russia’s covert influence architecture,” it concludes.

I’d add to that: we all need to build renewable energy sources like there’s a war on, because there is, and democracies urgently need to gain the freedom to act independently of autocracies’ control of fossil fuel supplies. You can’t act freely if someone’s hands are around your neck.

So, what’s the answer? As so often with financial crime, it’s possible to be overawed by the scale of the challenge. But the important thing is just to start. Here’s a manifesto from a coalition of British environmental groups, which gives some ideas. I particularly approve of this one: “government should introduce comprehensive protections and safeguards for whistleblowers, followed by financial incentives, to enable whistleblowers to disclose evidence of corruption and money laundering”.

Of course, corrupt officials are not just standing still while we agonise about how to stop them. I am particularly alarmed by the potential appeal of modern prediction markets for allowing politicians, military officers or anyone to profit from their privileged access to advance knowledge of government actions. Here’s a remarkable story about how people betting on the specific details of the Iran War sent death threats to a Times of Israel journalist whose reporting threatened to lose them a wager.

U.S. lawmakers have introduced a bill, the BETS OFF Act, for which acronym they deserve credit — to crack down on the markets that encourage this kind of behaviour, which was also observed in the hours leading up to the U.S. attack on Venezuela. “There’s no getting around the fact that any prediction market where somebody knows or controls the outcome of a bet is ripe for corruption,” said Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. “When events that involve good and evil, life and death become just another financial product, morality no longer matters and the soul of America is fundamentally corrupted.”

On that note, I see that someone is trying to juice the price of the $TRUMP memecoin by inviting its biggest holders to dinner at Mar-a-Lago, apparently with a speech by President Donald Trump (or whoever that is in the decidedly weird picture accompanying the announcement — Nigel Farage in a blond wig?), and an exclusive audience for the 29 biggest holders. The president, should he attend, will not, however, be accepting gifts, which is a weight off my mind. I had been worrying that this whole event was a bit dodgy.

The announcement of the event did boost the price of the $TRUMP tokens, as presumably did the announcement that Tether head Paolo Ardoino would be the headlining speaker, a remarkable turnaround for someone whose company was, just 18 months ago, having to vehemently deny it was the subject of a Department of Justice probe. Whether corruption will continue to be seriously investigated and punished, in a newly transactional world order, remains to be seen. The signs, though, are not promising.

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Iran’s cryptocurrency enablers

Oliver Bullough — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:55:00 +0000

There has never been a better time to be a billionaire. It’s official, Forbes says so, and it’s got the numbers to prove it. Top of the magazine’s annual list is, of course, Elon Musk who is only a Bernaud Arnault (worth about $147 billion) and some change away from being the world’s first trillionaire.

But to get the real headliner, we need to drop down to number 17 where we find Changpeng Zhao ($110 billion, since you ask), founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance and business partner of the Trump family’s own crypto firm. Centibillionaires are old hat now but CZ is, as far as I can tell, the first centibillionaire on the Forbes list to have been pardoned by the U.S. president for egregious financial criminality. That feels like quite a big deal so congratulations to him.

CZ’s pardon last October was, according to the White House, because his 2023 plea deal and $4.3 billion fine for enabling money laundering on an industrial scale were the result of “an overly prosecuted case by the Biden administration” and part of a war on cryptocurrency.

Awkwardly for all concerned, Binance is now suing the Wall Street Journal after it reported that $1 billion had moved through the company to Iran-backed terror groups. And the Wall Street Journal has not only declined to spike the story, it has doubled down by reporting that the Justice Department is now investigating the firm’s actions. “The Wall Street Journal couldn’t determine whether the Justice Department is investigating Binance itself for potential misconduct, or solely the customers on its platform,” the WSJ said. But either way, considering the White House has committed to wiping out Iran’s support of terror groups and upended the global energy markets in its quest to do so, the news reports alleging that CZ’s company enabled those same groups would surely be embarrassing for all concerned, were any of them the kind of people capable of embarrassment.

After all, the fact that Iran is using crypto on a huge scale to evade the sanctions placed on its activities, and to support foreign proxies like Hezbollah, with the active connivance of some of the biggest companies in the crypto world, could only be a surprise to the most witlessly incurious of numbskulls. Or perhaps, I suppose, they are all making so much money from crypto that they don’t care who else might be.

While we’re on the subject of Trump, he’s at No. 640 on the list of billionaires as I write this, nearly tripling his wealth in just the last two years. Forbes has this very apropos explanation: “Donald Trump has presided over the most lucrative presidency in American history, adding billions to his net worth, largely by cashing in on crypto.”

But, I hear you ask, what about non-billionaires? How are the few billion of us whose net worth isn’t counted in the billions doing? Well, not great. And I’m beginning to feel a bit concerned about what this all means for democracy. “The widening gap between the rich and the rest is at the same time creating a political deficit that is highly dangerous and unsustainable,” said Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar back in January, and the situation has gotten worse since then.

The Bank of England’s animal stories

I spend a lot of time at the moment talking in public about money laundering because of my new book. Top of my list for policy suggestions for tackling financial crime, if anyone were to ask, is that governments should stop printing large denomination bills: $100 bills, €200 notes or — worst of all — Switzerland’s colossal 1,000-france banknote are little used by ordinary people, but extremely helpful for criminals looking to transport large amounts of wealth in a small space.

So, in one way it was great that Britain was temporarily convulsed by controversy around banknotes last week. It’s high time we talked more about them. Could this spell the end of the UK’s own big bill: the £50, of which the Bank of England issued almost an extra 30 million last year, even though pretty much the only people that ever use them are criminals and tax dodgers? Would Britain finally get serious about ending the epidemic of financial crime?

No, of course not, the controversy was entirely about the Bank of England’s decision to replace the pictures of people on its next series of banknotes with pictures of animals. For some reason, badgers were mentioned. Also otters. “It says all you need to know about the lack of seriousness of the Bank,” said former business secretary Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, without any apparent irony, considering his own spectacular lack of seriousness in agreeing to comment on this absurdly unserious confection.

A sledgehammer that cracks nuts

While researching the anti-money laundering system that has grown over the last few decades, I have come to find it strange that there isn’t more public disquiet over the powers that governments have awarded themselves to check ordinary people’s transactions. When there is concern, it tends to come from crypto/libertarian bores (the kind of people who talk about ‘Operation Choke Point 2.0’), so perhaps no one else wants to be associated with it. But I think the situation would be a bit healthier if more of us engaged with what is being done to us in ways that we can get.

I obviously think that tackling money laundering is of huge importance, but I am coming round to the view that more public pushback over exactly how that is being done would be good. It would force policymakers to justify what they’re doing, and therefore come up with some techniques that actually work, instead of the ineffective but intrusive mess we have at the moment.

To cut a long story short, I found this contribution from the Dutch non-profit organisation ‘Privacy First’ to be interesting. “Instead of managing risk, banks seek to eliminate it by withdrawing altogether from customers or sectors perceived as problematic. The burden of compliance and over-enforcement often falls not on criminals, but on already marginalised communities with limited access to remedies,” it says.

I agree with that, and I agree also with its argument that beneficial ownership transparency should not be absolute. Were there to be opt-outs from ownership registries for vulnerable people, there would be less scope for rich crooks to argue that shell company transparency is a violation of their human rights.

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Why Kleptocrats go to war without a care in the world

Oliver Bullough — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 13:22:25 +0000

Kleptocracy is a global system, which allows crooks, thieves, oligarchs, tycoons, and the like to enjoy their wealth while evading any responsibility to the society where they obtained that wealth. It infects different countries to different extents, and I’ve been very impressed by the Bloomberg investigations into how kleptocratic the Iranian elite has become. If you’d like a shortcut to those investigations, this new video is worth watching. Obviously, Iran’s regime has been vicious and aggressive from the start, but I do think there is a new kind of vicious aggression that develops when a country’s elite becomes kleptocratic, and thus is — in essence — colonising its own country.

If it is extracting wealth, hiding that wealth offshore and thus secure in its future, it is able to take risks and make decisions without concerning itself about their effect on ordinary people. “While ordinary Iranians contend with a collapsing currency, rising prices, fuel shortages and now war, elites like (Hossein) Shamkhani have translated political lineage into global capital — buying property abroad, securing foreign passports and moving freely through systems that everyday citizens cannot enter,” Bloomberg notes.

Much of the elite’s ability to enrich itself has come from its evasion of Western sanctions, which Iranians have had decades of practice in learning how to dodge. And the role of cryptocurrencies in enabling Iran’s kleptocrats is clearly significant, as demonstrated by this report from Chainalysis. But of course the backbone of the corruption has been the elite’s control over trade, and thus its ability to move value to safe havens like Dubai (that’s not looking as safe as it did of course but, don’t worry, the money can easily find a new home), which gives it the security to fire missiles without worrying too much about retaliation.

In this though, I’m not sure Iran is particularly unusual. A lot of the governments involved in the crisis in the Middle East are a bit like those F. Scott Fitzgerald characters who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness”.

Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has been dancing on the edge of a corruption trial for the best part of a decade, ever since he was indicted in 2019 for, among other things, accepting “hundreds of thousands of pounds in luxury gifts from billionaire friends”. Donald Trump’s family has assets worth more than double what they were just two and a half years ago. The earnings from crypto alone are enough to guarantee the most comfortable of futures. These two are very definitely careless people, as is everyone around them.

If this ill-planned military adventure ends badly, then the elites of none of the combatant countries will end up suffering in the way that ordinary Iranians, Israelis or Americans will. This sense of impunity infects much of the discussion of the war: how, for example, could someone who feels any connection to other people be exulting in their death in the way that U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth does? In this bloodthirstiness, as in so many other aspects of kleptocracy of course, Russia led the way, but the rest of the world is catching up and I don’t think we’re ready for what that will look like.

An important aspect of this, again long visible in Russia with its dreadful public services and military failure in Ukraine, is that corruption does not just enrich elites, it also degrades state capabilities. “Corruption at the top always rolls downhill. Once it becomes open and acknowledged, it leads to corrupt and slovenly acts throughout a system,” as Phillips Payson O’Brien argues, in a piece which builds on another article in which he lays out how the Russian model might be worth applying to much of what’s happening in the United States.

This of course adds fresh weight, not that it’s needed, to the urgency of shoring up defences not just against foreign interference in the democratic processes of those countries that still have them, but to getting big money out too. It’s great that a U.S. politician has, for the first time, taken the Political Integrity Pledge and won (though admittedly only a primary), but just to get to the stage of standing in the general election, he’s had to raise more than $20 million. Too much of that and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

This week at Tether

Talking about real money, the latest episode of Tether watch is a weird one: our favourite crypto concern has just invested $50 million in a smart mattress company. Now admittedly, that isn’t even two days’ worth of last year’s profits, so it’s not exactly a big deal for CEO Paolo Ardoino but it’s still sufficiently sinister to be worthy of mention.

I find it disturbing enough that tech companies are harvesting our browsing history to make money from, but it’s a whole other level to have Tether — Tether!?! — monitoring what people get up to in bed. It’s all, apparently, about personal sovereignty, which is to say you should stop trusting big companies with your data and instead trust it to Tether, including with what’s happening in your head: “Paolo's $200 million acquisition of a majority stake in brain-computer interface company Blackrock Neurotech may not be because he is optimistic about the size of the brain-computer interface market, but because he does not want the brain-computer interface to be controlled by others”.

Historians are going to be so confused by this; assuming of course that there will still be historians, which may be an over-optimistic assumption about a future with brain-computer interfaces.

The need to know your enemy

I’ve been talking to quite a lot of people about money laundering of late, and one of the enduring problems is the lack of reliable ways to gauge the scale of the problem. We’ve been saying it’s between 2% to 5% of the world economy since the late 1990s, but beyond repeating that age-hallowed guesstimate, how do you measure it?

Often we turn to other measures, such as how many suspicious activity reports get filed, or how many fines get imposed. So, on that note, is it good or bad that the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority imposed fines last year of just £124 million, a decline of 78% from half a decade earlier? Maybe this means there’s 78% less crime? Or maybe it means that the FCA has stopped investigating 78% of crime? Or maybe 2021 was just a really big year for fines (which it was)? Or maybe something else happened?

The answer to this is that we should properly investigate money laundering not just criminally but also academically, looking at gaps in statistics and devising new methods of measuring how large the criminal economy is, rather than rely on proxies for it. That would not only help us identify what to target, but also help us see what techniques are working as criminal wealth rises and falls. As it stands, it feels like we’re waging a war without a clear idea of where the enemy is, and what the final goal might be, and there’s quite enough of that going on elsewhere at the moment.

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The AI-powered ‘forever wars’ start now

Simon Allison — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 13:55:00 +0000

Between them, the United States and Israel struck more than 2,000 targets within the first 24 hours of their war with Iran.

For even the largest militaries, it is an almost impossible task to identify, select and then precisely locate such a high volume of targets. But the U.S. military had some help. Claude, the “next generation AI assistant” built by Anthropic, was used in the planning of ‘Operation Epic Fury’. This, even though the Department of War recently labeled Anthropic a “supply chain risk”.

Anthropic is one of the world’s leading AI companies. Together with Palantir, another Big Tech company, it has been working since 2024 with the Pentagon to embed its systems in military decision-making – creating what is arguably the operating platform of present-day U.S. warfare and intelligence. Even though secretary of defense Pete Hegseth said the company “delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal” and that the government would “cease all use of Anthropic's technology,” the company is too integrated into modern U.S. warfare for it not to be essential to the U.S. attack on Iran. The question might be not whether companies like Anthropic can ringfence their tech but whether the Pentagon might just commandeer it.

Craig Jones, an academic who studies automated kill chains at the University of Newcastle, has told reporters that “the AI machine is making recommendations for what to target, which is actually much quicker in some ways than the speed of thought.” Similar AI systems have been used by Israel to coordinate its bombing campaign in Gaza, which is among the most destructive in human history.

Among the first hits in the United States and Israel’s aerial bombardment of Iran was the Shajarah Tayyebeh primary school for girls, in the southern town of Minab. It was a Saturday morning, and school was in session. According to Iranian state media, at least 165 people were killed, mostly young girls between the ages of seven and 12. Another 96 were severely injured. Eyewitness and open source intelligence reports corroborate the claims of mass civilian casualties. Both Iran and Israel have denied responsibility. The United States has said it is “looking into” allegations that the school was destroyed by one of its missiles. Maybe, given the volume of the bombardment, they’ve lost track.

It is too soon to know why the school was targeted – or whether it was an error. Either way, the U.S. military’s reliance on AI raises difficult questions.

AIs get things wrong all the time. Maybe it’s an extra finger in an AI-generated image, or a ‘hallucinated’ reference in a research report. Or, maybe, an algorithm sends a missile to the wrong address. That’s why Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that weapons “that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets” are simply not reliable enough. That position — along with Anthropic’s refusal to allow Claude to be used for mass domestic surveillance (although they are just fine with foreign surveillance) — led to the Pentagon cancelling a $200-million contract with the company on Friday, the day before the attacks on Iran began. The Department of War immediately signed a new deal, minus any ethical guardrails, with OpenAI.

Anthropic’s confrontation with the Pentagon has burnished its reputation as an “ethical” AI company. But it may have found its ethical backbone too late. Critics argue that even within Anthropic’s “red lines”, there is enormous potential for abuse, while a “human in the loop” does not necessarily prevent mistakes — raising questions about who, exactly, is responsible when these mistakes result in fatalities. Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for Palestine, accused Amazon, Google and Microsoft in a 2025 of being “complicit in genocide” for providing cloud storage systems to the Israeli military. Anthropic’s integration into the U.S. military has been much deeper.

While Israel and the U.S. are waging an AI-powered war, Iran is responding with a technological revolution of its own. The Islamic Republic has pioneered the production of low-cost one-way attack drones, most notably the Shahed-136, which costs just $34,000 to produce and as much as $4 million to shoot down. These are battle-tested: Russia has launched an estimated 57,000 Shahed-type drones in its war against Ukraine. Despite U.S. reliance on its own high-tech AI-powered systems, an American version of the Shahed also made its debut, alongside Claude, in the attack on Iran.

In response, Iran has aimed more than 1000 drones at neighboring Gulf states since the war broke out on Saturday. Hundreds have been shot down, but even the most sophisticated air defences struggle with this sheer volume, and dozens have struck their targets, threatening to prolong this war and cause more damage to U.S. allies than anticipated. It is significant that these targets included at least three Amazon data centers in Dubai and Bahrain. Just last month, Amazon announced that it was making Anthropic’s Claude available to its Middle Eastern customers. Claude experienced two global outages this week — it is not clear if these were related to the data center attacks.

Tech evangelists promise that artificial intelligence will, one day, cure cancer, end poverty and greatly increase our quality of life. But the new technology’s most obvious impact has been on warfare. For those with access to them, AI systems like Claude make it dramatically easier to bomb hundreds of targets at the same time — and much harder to figure out who is accountable when something goes wrong. On Truth Social, Donald Trump — who has promised to stop wars, not start them — posted approvingly that technology and munitions now mean Wars “can be fought ‘forever,’ and very successfully.”

As the bombing of Iran continues, we are not far from a time when AI not only parses data to select targets, it actually chooses when to pull the trigger. And advanced AI models have far fewer qualms, for instance, about deploying nuclear weapons than humans faced with similar scenarios. One day, when — if — war crimes investigators are able to pin down exactly who is responsible for killing dozens of young girls in Minab, tech bosses may find themselves implicated alongside military and political leaders. “The AI did it” can’t be their defense.

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Can a Task Force set up to punish the little guy, take on Trump?

Oliver Bullough — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 13:55:00 +0000

This is going to be a big year for the Financial Action Task Force, the world’s standard-setter on money laundering regulations, under its new president Giles Thomson. Quite apart from the standard folderol of plenary meetings, reports and publications, it is due to send a mission to assess the United States.

This whole process will not be quick, and there will be the usual abundant opportunity for acronyms, circumlocution and horse-trading. But eventually the hooves are going to have to hit the road. There is simply no way of hiding the fact that, under Donald Trump, the United States has broken its promise to bring greater transparency to shell companies; nor that it has scaled back prosecution of financial crimes, pardoned convicted financial criminals, and unleashed a crypto frenzy.

Throughout its history the FATF, set up by the G7, has been able and willing to overlook transgressions from big countries that it wouldn’t tolerate from smaller ones. It punished the remote island states of Niue and the Marshall Islands in its first ever blacklist for their lack of transparency around shell companies, for example, while merrily tolerating the fact that not even the Federal Bureau of Investigation could figure out who owned a corporation in Nevada. Nauru got punished for moving dirty Russian wealth while the UK and Switzerland didn’t.

The FATF’s structure, which ensures it is dominated by large economies, is a classic example of how, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. But, in the past, those large economies have at least pretended to go along with its recommendations. They’ve made promises, passed legislation, convened working groups, said the right things: all of which has given everyone the diplomatic cover they need to keep each other off the naughty step.

Trump’s not doing any of that, and it’s hard to believe that he’s going to change that habit. If the FATF criticizes his administration, I think we can safely assume Trump won’t take that well, and could — if past behavior is any guide — pull the United States out. But if the FATF doesn’t criticize what he’s been up to, it will lose all credibility.

Speaking for myself, I think the FATF’s conception, structure and techniques are all flawed, perhaps irreparably, and that it has been part of the problem, rather than part of the solution, for most if not all of its 37-year history. Perhaps, therefore, Giles Thomson should get ahead of the looming fiasco by declaring a complete overhaul of the whole organization, re-examining its recommendations, its memberships, its strategy, and more.

What are the chances of that happening? Well, here’s some news from the Pacific: “Papua New Guinea one step away from being blacklisted, global money laundering watchdog warns”. Is Papua New Guinea the problem? No. Do we get anywhere by pretending that it is? Also no. Will the FATF carry on regardless anyway? I would love to be surprised by the answer to that question.

The need to clean house

I’m a big fan of this video from Transparency International’s UK chapter, which lays out the inglorious history of corruption in British politics, and urges the government to be more ambitious in its new piece of legislation. TI has pointed out three areas where it thinks the government should go further, and I agree with all of them, but I would also like to see a complete ban on crypto donations, which would help prevent compliance departments being overwhelmed by automated efforts to circumvent donation limits.

I would also urge you to read this comment piece from RUSI about the threat to democracy posed by big funders from the American right, which has significance far beyond British politics. The world’s remaining democracies have been slow to recognize how radically the values of many U.S. billionaires have diverged from what we traditionally associate with conservatism, and to shore up their defences against them. “The task now is to strengthen our democratic guardrails — calmly, transparently and proportionately — before those boundaries are redrawn by others,” the writers Neil Barnett and Eliza Lockhart conclude.

Transparency International’s Russian chapter has been in exile since 2022 for obvious reasons (last year, for example, it had to issue a statement to argue that “fighting corruption is not terrorism”) but it has continued to conduct really valuable investigations into how illicit wealth flows in and out of its home country, including a recent one detailing the use of shell companies in the UK’s tax havens to trade with Russia, and identifying $8 billion worth of transactions.

The worst offender as a source of opaque companies was the British Virgin Islands, though Bermuda was also a problem, moving sanctioned products — including lead and zinc — as well as oil and other fossil fuels, a surprisingly large number of yachts, and a jet that ended up belonging to Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov (whose ill-health is, apparently, once more the subject of speculation, poor chap).

“For many years now, we have observed a dysfunctional equilibrium in which illicit financial flows, tax evasion, sanctions circumvention, and other forms of misconduct are channelled through firms and intermediaries registered in unaccountable jurisdictions,” TI-Russia notes. Fortunately, however, the British government is hosting an illicit finance summit this June and so has the perfect opportunity to set an example by making sure this kind of thing stops happening on the territory it’s responsible for if nowhere else.

Here’s an interesting story from the Netherlands, where luxury firm Louis Vuitton was fined half a million euros for failing to identify customers spending large amounts of cash. This case was part of an investigation into the Chinese money laundering technique known as ‘daigou’, in which value is transferred internationally not via the financial system but by buying expensive objects and then reselling them in China. High-end fashion is often used in the system, and it will be intriguing to see if other countries follow the Dutch lead and investigate unusual cash purchases.

And here’s a piece on our favorite crypto company Tether, which is apparently valued by market participants at between $200 and $350 billion. That is less than estimates made in the summer, but still an awful lot of money. Fun fact: finance firm Cantor Fitzgerald has a five percent stake in Tether, which is thus worth $10 to $17.5 billion, via a convertible bond. Another fun fact: Cantor Fitzgerald is owned by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s children.

Interesting question, would the prospect of your family earning a windfall of that size affect how stringently you would approach the regulation of a financial institution accused of involvement in industrial-scale money laundering? Lutnick, who led Cantor Fitzgerald for over 30 years, is of course not the kind of man who would let petty cash cloud his judgement, so this question is of academic interest only, but still, worth thinking about.

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The strike, the illusion of regime change, and what comes next

Jim Muir — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 08:34:29 +0000

That Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, should disappear, or be disappeared, from the scene was not a novel notion.

Throughout my nearly five years in Tehran at the turn of this century, speculation about his health and longevity was a near-constant background hum. He was reported, or rumoured, to be mortally stricken by prostate cancer, his constitution already weakened by an assassination attempt in 1981 that left his right arm largely useless. Who would succeed him was far from clear, and the object of further speculation.

As he lived on into more recent times, reaching the same age of 86 attained by his predecessor – the Islamic Republic's founding father Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – the prospect of his demise became a more immediate issue, though the question of succession remained equally shrouded in uncertainty. As Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei was the commanding voice behind the ruthless crackdown that took the lives of tens of thousands of citizens early this year in the latest and greatest of many escalating protests, at which the slogan "Marg Bar Diktator!" — Death to the Dictator! — became an increasingly prominent slogan.

Their wish was confirmed to be true at 5 a.m. local time on Sunday morning by Iranian broadcasters. The previous morning, Khamenei’s compound in Tehran was demolished as the Israeli-American onslaught got under way while the Ayatollah was heading a meeting of the Defence Council. That ensured that top military figures were also killed, including the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Pakpour, the Army Chief of Staff Abdolrahim Musavi, and Khamenei's top military adviser, Ali Shamkhani, who had been wounded but survived the attack in June last year.

The Iranian leadership appears to have been caught by surprise, as it was last year when the opening Israeli strike, which culled many top military leaders as well as nuclear scientists, was launched between two rounds of indirect negotiations between Iran and the U.S. Oman, which was mediating the talks, was furious then, denouncing Israel as the real destabilising factor in the region.

Perhaps the Iranian leaders — and the Omani mediators — thought that such a dirty trick could only be pulled once. But it has happened again, with no evidence that the talks in Geneva had broken down. The chief Omani negotiator, Badr Albusaidi, was livid. Only hours before the strike, he was in Washington for meetings “to explain that a peace agreement between the U.S. and Iran is now within reach. No nuclear weapons. Not ever. Zero stockpiling. Comprehensive verification. Peacefully and permanently. Let’s support the negotiators in closing the deal.”

After learning of the attack, he expressed his outrage in another tweet: “I am dismayed. Active and serious negotiations have yet again been undermined. Neither the interests of the United States nor the cause of global peace are well served by this. And I pray for the innocents who will suffer. I urge the United States not to get sucked in further. This is not your war.”

But Donald Trump and the U.S. were already thoroughly sucked in, and it was indeed their war, or at least his. According to the Israelis, the date had been decided jointly weeks before, after months of planning. Which meant that the Geneva negotiations, focused on the nuclear issue, were simply deceptive camouflage designed to give time for the U.S. to complete the marshalling of its biggest naval and air buildup in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Trump and the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu soon made it clear that the campaign now had little to do with the niceties of Iran's nuclear programme: the agenda was regime change in Tehran, and a surprise attack to decapitate the regime was an essential element.

With Iran's air defences largely taken out in last year's 12 days of war, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Hundreds of air, missile and drone strikes were carried out on missile launchers, military bases and other targets around the country, with inevitable "collateral damage", including a girl's primary school in the southern town of Minab where scores of children were reported killed.

People gathered in Tehran's Revolution Square to mourn the assassination of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on March 1, 2026.

The Iranians did their best to live up to their dire warnings of deadly reprisals against Israel, and against American bases and allies on the Arab side of the Gulf and elsewhere. Missiles hailed down on airports and other installations in Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and even Oman, despite its active mediation. While some U.S. bases may have been hit, so too were many civilian sites such as Dubai's iconic Burj al Arab hotel. Explosions too are being heard in Beirut, after Hezbollah fired rockets and drones at northern Israel to "avenge" Khamenei's death and the Israel Defense Forces struck back.

Air traffic was halted throughout a region rich in international hubs, sowing chaos worldwide. Iran's declaration that the strategic Strait of Hormuz was closed to shipping forced cargo shippers to suspend the voyages that transport some 20% of the world's oil and a lot of liquid gas, causing tremors through international markets. Once again, a decision taken by a tiny circle of men in Washington, Jerusalem and Tehran instantly rewired daily life, reminding us who actually gets to pull the global emergency brake.

What all this would do to Iran's relations with the Arab side of the Gulf was one of many open questions. While Oman was actively mediating, the other Arab oil states had been pressing the Americans not to allow a campaign that would predictably destabilise the region, and declaring their airspace not available for any hostilities. But any sympathy for Tehran quickly evaporated when the missiles started flying in: the Gulf Arab states closed ranks.

Trump and the Israelis made it clear that this was not one quick spectacular strike, but an ongoing campaign that would last days, perhaps even weeks. Presumably at the end, Iran would find its missile capabilities "obliterated," in Trump's favourite term, along with any nuclear activities.

Once the bombs stop falling, Trump and Netanyahu urged, the Iranians should come out of their basements and take over a government that would be theirs for the taking. A historic opportunity that would likely not recur for generations, Iranians were told.

But it is hard to imagine such regime change being wrought remotely from the skies. The regime lost little time in filling the leadership vacuum, setting up a three-man ruling council in line with the constitution, composed of the President, Masood Pezeshkian, the head of the Judiciary, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, and Ayatollah Alireza Arafi from the Council of Guardians. All regime loyalists, and the latter two noted hard-liners. So business as usual as far as they are concerned. But the fact is that the assassination of the Supreme Leader and the attendant bludgeoning of the regime's capabilities will inevitably usher in a new and unpredictable phase in Iran's turbulent history.

On the streets, reactions were fractured: jubilation in areas that had long chanted “Death to the dictator”, state-promote mourning in others, but also fear and a grim resignation, an understanding that power vacuums are often filled with fresh repression or civil war.

A smooth transition to a peaceful democracy is about the least likely scenario among the many possibilities. So too is an imminent return of the monarchy, with a comeback by Israeli-backed Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah ousted by the 1979 revolution. So far there has been no sign visible to the outside world of a split in the ranks of the defenses built up by the Islamic Republic, which still has regular military forces numbering around 400,000, Revolutionary Guards of up to 190,000, and its auxiliary militia enforcers, the Basij, who may be able to mobilise around a million at street level.

There must be much anger among regime loyalists, which may fall on the heads of any opposition protestors who imagine they can move in and take over the reins of government from the bombed-out wreckage of the Islamic Republic. The U.S. military is not likely to be able to remain engaged in the detail of defanging the regime once the main thrust of the campaign is done. But Israel likely will. Its equivalent of the CIA, the Mossad, has spent years building up formidable intelligence at street level, and will be doing its utmost to continue hamstringing the regime from within and fomenting opposition.Among the many unanswerable questions is whether all this will lead simply to chaos and fragmentation, which is probably Israel's preferred outcome, or to a more compliant regime willing to compromise with the U.S. in order to get crippling economic sanctions lifted. As Trump concedes the war might last weeks, who knows what Iran will eventually emerge from the smoke and the rubble?

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The phoney war: Will the U.S. strike a decisive blow against Iran?

Jim Muir — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 13:55:00 +0000

Will he or won't he? The Middle East is on tenterhooks as the U.S. continues to build up a massive and menacing military posture around Iran, threatening an attack that could trigger a conflagration whose tremors would be felt throughout the region.

If anybody hoped that the man on whose word it all hangs, President Donald Trump, might clarify his intentions in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, they were disappointed.

Speaking 36 hours before a third round of indirect and ultimately inconclusive talks with the Iranians in Geneva on Thursday, he said, "My preference is to stop this problem through diplomacy but one thing is for certain, I will never allow the world's number one sponsor of terror, which they are by far, to have a nuclear weapon...they want to make a deal, but we haven't heard those secret (sic) words, 'We will never have a nuclear weapon.’”

In the run-up to the Geneva talks, led on the U.S. side by real estate moguls Steve Witkoff and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, Iranian officials voiced optimism that a deal could be struck and insisted they would be flexible on the nuclear issue. Various formulas were being bandied around, such as Iran sending abroad half of its estimated 300kg of highly enriched uranium and diluting the rest under supervision, participating in a regional consortium for peaceful enrichment and so on.

In theory, for Iran to say "We will never have a nuclear weapon" should not be an issue — it has said all along that it is not pursuing that goal, which is banned by a fatwa. Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi posted on X this week that Tehran “will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon.” Which begs the question as to why it has enriched uranium to 60% — short of weapons grade but well beyond the levels needed for peaceful civilian purposes.

Witkoff and Kushner will be vigilant for signs of Iranian duplicity and foot-dragging. But with another set of talks ending with no deal apart from promises of more talks, both sides might simply be playing for time, Iran to delay the feared blow, and the U.S. to finish assembling the assault force, its biggest mobilization of naval and air power in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

There is strong apprehension in the region that the huge and costly U.S. buildup must mean business. American bombs and missiles would hit Iran. The Iranians would make good on their threat to make it a regional war, not a symbolic retaliation as happened in the 12-day war in June last year after American bunker-buster bombs hit Iran's nuclear facilities in Isfahan, Natanz and Fordow. This time Iranian missiles would target U.S. military assets, bases on the Arab side of the Gulf and elsewhere, and perhaps oil installations. And Israel. The Israelis would hit back hard. Hezbollah in Lebanon would do its best to join in, prompting a further massive Israeli response.

There were ominous straws in the wind. The U.S. withdrew non-essential personnel from bases in the Gulf, and from its embassy in Beirut. The Israelis reportedly warned Lebanon that if Hezbollah joined in, they would hit back at government targets, including Beirut airport, which were unscathed throughout the earlier hostilities. They stepped up their daily attacks on suspected Hezbollah targets, including a big missile attack on February 20 on the eastern Beqaa valley which left 12 dead, including eight Hezbollahis. Since the November 2024 ceasefire, Hezbollah has not fired so much as a peashooter at Israel while well over 400 of their people have been killed in Israeli attacks on Lebanon.

Does all this mean the doomsday scenario is inexorable? Are the Americans set on a clear game plan, with identified objectives and the means to attain them?

Apparently not. Trump is reportedly receiving divided counsel from his advisers, military and political, some more hawkish and others more cautious than others. Above all, he has an eye on the looming mid-term elections in November. He was elected on a platform of ending the "forever" wars in the Middle East, yet could be on the brink of starting another one, which would not go down well with part of his MAGA base or the public in general.

The signs are that he was hoping the swashbuckling display of power would intimidate the Iranians into buckling. Witkoff admitted Trump was puzzled that Iran had not capitulated. “Why, under this pressure, with the amount of sea power and naval power over there, why haven’t they come to us and said, ‘We profess we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do?’ And, yet, it’s sort of hard to get them to that place,” he told Fox News. Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi explained: "It's because we're Iranian."

Trump's adrenalin was clearly set pumping by the adventure in Venezuela, where a similar military buildup culminated in the operation to abduct President Nicolas Maduro. But Iran is not Venezuela. It is a highly militarized regime which has spent 47 years preparing its internal and external defences, and which has different power bases that make it hard simply to decapitate. There is no magic bullet that might not set the region on fire.

Taking out the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i (who is also a religious leader, and this is Ramadan) would not be likely to bring about a change in regime behavior as in Venezuela. Bringing the regime down altogether would require a prolonged and detailed campaign that the U.S. military machine might not be able to sustain.

That's where Israel comes in. Some White House advisers reportedly believe it would play better politically for Israel to strike first rather than the U.S., and thus force Iran to retaliate. Like Trump, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a man with an eye on impending elections (October at the latest) is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who makes no secret of his ambition to see the Iranian regime brought down. Netanyahu — backed by almost the entire Israeli political spectrum — is clearly champing at the bit, but aware of the danger of being seen to drag the U.S. into a potentially messy embroilment. One reason perhaps for the unusually discreet nature of Netanyahu's sixth visit to the White House on February 11 — in through the back door, no lovefest press appearances.

Which may also actually have been a sign that the two allies might not be on the same strategic page. Plunging Iran into fragmentation and chaos would absolutely fit Israel's playbook, but not necessarily America's. The two are working at cross-purposes in Syria, where the Israelis are pushing against a strong central government which the U.S. is supporting, even against its erstwhile Kurdish allies in the north-east.

If there are two constants in the current equation, they are that the Iranian people’s disillusionment and rage against the regime will not go away, and neither will Israel's desire to overthrow it. But if Trump does not share that goal, he will have to find a face-saving way to wriggle off the hook he has created with his ostentatious military buildup.

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Why we must make elections cheap again

Oliver Bullough — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 13:55:00 +0000

I like writing about the huge consequences of tiny details: a compromise made at a G7 meeting in 1989 by people who didn’t know what they were doing that now defines all anti-money laundering work; an opportunist deal among London bankers in the mid-1950s which created the globalized financial system; things like that (read my books if you want more.)

Few tiny details are more consequential than the rules around democratic processes, and particularly those that define who pays for them: just look at the effects of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in a dull-sounding case in 2010. A lot of other democracies are looking at the U.S. right now and thinking they’d like to avoid replicating this experiment with endless money, which is one reason why the UK has a new ‘Representation of the People Bill’.

As it stands, it looks like a big missed opportunity.

Much of the requirement for the tighter rules proposed in the bill is the need to tackle foreign interference, a concern stoked by suggestions that the Kremlin helped secure victory for both Brexit and Donald Trump in 2016. Although I can see why we don’t want Vladimir Putin near our political systems, I’ve always thought these concerns missed the point: home-grown oligarchs dislike democracy as much as Russian ones do and, since they are more numerous, richer and far better-connected, we should worry about them more.

So, it is a great shame that the UK’s new bill hasn’t imposed a cap on political donations to prevent the kind of funding arms race that has infected the United States, and which is gearing up in the UK too, or stripped away a lot of the unnecessary complexity in the existing regulations that create the kind of loopholes exploited in the Brexit referendum. Most importantly, it has failed to address the growing threat of cryptocurrencies and impose the same kind of ban on crypto donations that Ireland has.

A democracy is sovereign, and a crucial defence of that sovereignty is ensuring only actual voters fund its operations. British law enforcement agencies acknowledge that they already don’t have the resources they need to keep up with what bad actors are doing with crypto, so why would politicians take the risk of allowing crooks to buy influence by making it easier for them to hide what they’re doing?

“If you put an element of crypto in what is already a complicated and sometimes lengthy trail to hide the true source of the funds, you are just adding another layer of complexity. Anything we can do to take away that friction is good,” said Rachael Herbert, director of the National Economic Crime Centre, to a parliamentary committee.

It is not too late to close this gap in the bill, and to prevent it from becoming one of those little details with huge consequences. Blocking cryptocurrencies will not solve the problem caused by oligarchs’ assault on democracy, but at least it would help not make it worse, and it is always easier to mend things before they break.

On that note, credit to Daniel Lobo-Lewis for trying to use some of the mechanisms of the unregulated U.S. political funding system for a good cause (“Give us money to get money out of politics. It makes sense if you don't think about it too hard”) by creating the political integrity project. He’s built a tracker so you can see how much cash different candidates have raised, and which of them have pledged to try to get money out of politics, and it’s a lot of fun to play around with.

Here’s what it looks like when there is unfettered money in politics. Lobbyists for crypto firms are planning to spend $263 million on the midterm elections this year. That is not only more than the entire oil and gas industry spent in 2024, but more than double the total spent by all parties in the UK’s last general election. This is not healthy.

I’ve largely avoided writing about the Jeffrey Epstein revelations, because I don’t feel like I have anything to add to what everyone else has already said, but they do spectacularly demonstrate the size of the threat posed to girls in particular and society in general when the political, cultural, financial and economic elites of a country become entangled, give each other money, do each other favours, and generally take over the world.

Preventing this kind of collusion is why it’s important to keep big money out of politics, so at least there is a source of power in society that’s independent of the oligarchs.

Crooks thriving in chaos

While on the subject of human trafficking, Chainalysis has produced this alarming report on how crypto helped traffickers move their profits last year, including from child sexual abuse material (CSAM), with a staggering 85% increase in them dong so over 2024.

“CSAM networks have evolved to subscription-based models and show increasing overlap with sadistic online extremism (SOE) communities, while strategic use of U.S.-based infrastructure suggests sophisticated operational planning,” the report notes.

The report gives more evidence for how Chinese money laundering networks based in Southeast Asia are using cryptocurrencies to expand their influence globally (as they also are in fraud), with business deals coordinated via the encrypted messaging app Telegram, and laundered via sophisticated techniques beyond the reach of law enforcement even at the best of times.

And this is not the best of times, what with the United States having abdicated its traditional role as the only country serious about investigating, prosecuting and convicting financial criminals.

“Enforcement is now solely in Washington’s hands, allowing politically driven cases to proceed or be stifled,” noted John Lothian in this scathing commentary contextualised by the FT. “Given the pardons issued by President Trump, there has never been a better time to be a crook. This chaotic formula for enforcement is a disaster or a cluster of disasters waiting to happen, given the explosive growth in retail futures trading, prediction markets, and legitimized crypto trading… ‘God help us’ is the last defence.”

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First, they came for the journalists

Isobel Cockerell — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Hundreds of journalists are forced into exile each year, from every corner of the world. As authoritarianism and censorship rise, reporters are among the first to feel the pressure — pushed out of their homes and separated from the careers, sources and communities they’ve built. The number of journalists forced into exile is rising. In Latin America alone, more than 900 journalists were forced into exile between 2018 and 2024. Almost half of the journalists killed around the world last year were by Israeli forces in Gaza; the tally is close to 300 for the duration of the war. The genocide created impossible conditions for Palestinian journalists, forcing some to flee the Gaza strip entirely.

In a digitized, connected world, exile doesn’t mean silence. Using open source intelligence techniques, encrypted messaging, and data, journalists can report in real time from thousands of miles away, serving communities they can no longer reach in person.

We spoke to four journalists from four countries who have spent the past decade working in exile. Some left gradually, step by step. Others had only hours to abandon their lives. Every year, hundreds more join them — barred from returning home, facing imprisonment or persecution if they do, uncertain when or whether they’ll see their families again.

Still, they keep reporting. These are their stories.

Ekaterina Fomina – Russia

When Ekaterina Fomina was working as a reporter in Moscow, her favorite kind of journalism was old-school shoeleather reporting: traveling to far-flung regions of Russia, knocking on doors, talking to rural families who lived most of their lives offline. “My main tools were my legs and arms,” she said.

In the lead-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Fomina began to grasp that one day soon, she might have to leave the country. Media outlets across Russia were facing intense pressure. As each day passed, the government implemented new censorship and repression laws. “We knew that if the government labeled us an “undesirable organization”— a criminal label in Russia — we could be arrested,” she said. Every newsroom had some kind of contingency plan in place for leaving, but the plans were vague and abstract. Fomina and her colleagues made sure they had visas ready in their passports for Europe, in case they had to leave quickly. “But we were not ready for a real tragedy.”

Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and Fomina went into overdrive, covering the war.

“The polarization, the open war towards another country, made me realize that my position in society was completely different from those of many people around me. It was very difficult for me to accept that my fellow citizens could support such cruelty,” she said. “In the first weeks of the war, seeing this support made me realize that it would be very hard to live in this country.”

Fomina — who was reporting for the independent outlet iStories — understood it would be impossible to cover the war from inside the country without facing prosecution. “The only option was to leave the country and continue covering the war openly.”

It was not immediately obvious how long she would be away for. Her friends and colleagues reassured her that this wouldn’t last forever, but she wasn’t so sure. “Everything was unpredictable, and it was unclear how it would affect our destinies,” she said. She had no illusions that she would ever come back to Russia.

“I don’t even remember the whole process of escape, because in the very first days of the war my colleagues and I were constantly working — covering events, talking to people on both sides, but especially people in Ukraine.” In the meantime, she packed up her life in one day. She packed just one suitcase, giving a few things to her mother, and throwing the rest away. She took a handful of souvenirs from Russia — gifts from friends and family, a T-shirt with Cyrillic letters on it, talismans of the life she was leaving behind.

In the middle of a cold March night in Moscow, she said goodbye to her mother and grandmother, not knowing when she would see them again. “The scale of my personal tragedy couldn’t be compared to the scale of the tragedy happening in Ukraine. Only years later can I evaluate how awful, how tragic, and how traumatic those events were for me. But at that moment, it was just a feeling of adrenaline,” she said. “At an intuitive level, I felt that this was the last peaceful moment of my life in Russia.”

Living in exile in Europe, Fomina began to reorient her reporting techniques. She could no longer be a shoeleather reporter, using her legs and arms as tools and knocking on doors. She began investigating war crimes using open-source intelligence techniques.

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Not long into her exile, she investigated Russian soldiers who had been there during the massacre in Bucha. She started by tracing evidence from a survivor’s phone. The phone and its calling credit had been confiscated by Russian soldiers, then used to call their families back home. When it ran out of credit, the soldiers left it behind. One survivor recovered it and gave it to Fomina. Using investigative techniques and leaked data, she identified the numbers on the call log as belonging largely to relatives — mothers and wives — of Russian soldiers. She was then able to verify precisely which soldiers had been deployed in the area.

For her work on this investigation, Fomina was arrested in Russia in absentia in the summer of 2024. Then, on March 31, 2025, a Moscow court sentenced Fomina to 8.5 years in prison for disseminating “fake news” about Ukraine out of “political hatred.”

“On the one hand, you know that you did everything right,” Fomina said, describing her schooling, her education, her constant pursuit of the truth in journalism. “But on the other hand, you are facing such limitations and such punishment.”

“I suppress my trauma in order to continue doing this,” she said. “But I can’t stop doing my work because the war crimes are continuing.”

It is now four years since Fomina fled Russia. Barring a dramatic regime change in the future, there’s no prospect she’ll ever return.

Luz Mely Reyes - Venezuela

Luz Mely Reyes left Venezuela in slow motion. In 2015, she was the editor-in-chief Efecto Cocuyo, a small newspaper in Caracas. “Our heart as journalists was not to be too close to power. Power can be very seductive. But when you are too close to power you can lose the heart of your duty. So we tried always to be close to the common people,” she said.

In 2018, a Venezuelan politician and opposition member called Fernando Albán mysteriously fell from a tenth-floor window while being held in custody. Nicolás Maduro’s government said he jumped. Reyes wasn’t so sure. “I asked questions on my Twitter account — why was he on the 10th floor, how did he jump?” she recalled. After tweeting, she turned her phone off to focus on writing. Suddenly, her husband’s phone began to ring. It was a tip-off: police were discussing Reyes’ tweet online, and talking about detaining her. Reyes scrambled to leave the country, only coming back a few months later when the dust had settled.

All too soon, she had to leave Venezuela again — this time because of her coverage of a journalist who had been arrested in the middle of a blackout.

And so her wandering years began. Whenever Reyes felt too much pressure from the authorities, she would leave Venezuela for extended periods, spending time in neighboring Brazil and Colombia, before slipping back into Venezuela when she felt it was safe.

“I had to accept that I wouldn’t be able to live in Venezuela anymore,” she said. But she continued to shuttle back and forth. The authorities canceled her passport twice, threatened to imprison her, increasing the pressure all the time. Her team told her how it didn’t make sense to be in Venezuela — that she couldn’t do her work properly while she was constantly in hiding, on high alert.

Finally, after five years of this, she booked a one-way ticket out of Venezuela. She now lives in Austin, Texas, and doesn’t know if she’ll ever go home.

“I had been struggling for about five years to accept that the government was expelling me from the country. I finally accepted that I was in exile — because if you can’t return to your country without the risk of being persecuted, well, you’re an exile.”

Reyes hasn’t stopped working for the people of Venezuela. During the US military strike on Venezuela and the capture of Maduro, she mobilized her sources and contacts across the country. She and her team livestreamed updates for ten hours straight, confirming the facts, debunking disinformation as the extraordinary events of January 3 unfolded.

She feels the pain of being away from home acutely. “They say there are seven stages of grief when you’re forced to migrate. One grief I always have is for the landscape, for the weather, for the beach, for the space I was in, for the sun,” she said. “It’s very physical. I feel like a tree that has been ripped out of the ground.”

There is no job she would rather do, though. “If I had to do it all over again, I would choose to be a journalist.”

Zahra Joya - Afghanistan

Zahra Joya’s world changed forever over just a few days in August 2021. On August 14, she was working in Kabul as editor-in-chief of Rukhshana Media, an Afghan women’s journalism platform. The following day, Kabul fell to the Taliban. Joya joined the chaos of people fleeing the country out of Kabul airport. She arrived in a hotel room in London on August 26 — in less than a fortnight, everything she knew was gone. “Everything vanished overnight,” Joya said. From her hotel, she couldn’t stop reporting.

“I personally was safe, but when I looked back to all our achievements, to all the work that we had done, it gave me this chance to rethink my circumstances. I realized I could not stop my work. So we continued.”

Rukhshana Media’s burgeoning team scattered to the four winds following the collapse — some made it out of Afghanistan like her, others took shelter within the country, where it was no longer safe for them to keep working openly.

Founded in 2020, Rukhshana Media is a platform for female journalists — a space for stories by and about women in Afghanistan. It was named after an Afghan teenager who was stoned to death after being accused of adultery in 2015.

Joya had to find a way to keep Rukhshana Media alive. She began, frantically, to build a completely new team, from thousands of miles away.

“It was a terrible moment of my life. It was something I never, ever imagined I would go through,” she said. ““It was impossible for me to not think about Afghanistan just because I was outside.”

Joya scoured social media for new reporters. Then came the complex problem of how to hire them. How to look after journalists on the ground in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, keep them anonymous, and keep them safe, from thousands of miles away? She drew up a security plan and a code of conduct for her team. “I tell my colleagues, “please prioritize your safety. No information is worth your safety.”” She decided not to tell each reporter who their colleagues were, so that if they were captured by the Taliban, they would have no information to hand over under interrogation.

Bathed in the glow of her computer in her government-issued hotel room in London — where she stayed for a year — Joya worked and worked to publish as many stories as possible from on the ground in Afghanistan.

“For the women of Afghanistan, one of the only ways to raise their voices is through media,” Joya said, describing how Afghan families often call her asking for help, asking if she can write about their situation. Families of female activists call Joya as soon as their relatives are imprisoned by the Taliban.

“I feel guilty sometimes because people rely on me. They’re inside the country and they want to raise their voice,” she said. “My colleagues are taking their life in their hands to gather information.”

To evade capture, Rukhshana Media’s reporters often need to switch phone numbers without warning, meaning people can go dark at any time, and there are panicked moments where Joya doesn’t know what’s happened to them.

In September 2025, the entire country went dark without warning. The Taliban had shut down the internet completely — stating it was being blocked "for the prevention of vices." All of Joya’s contacts, reporters and sources stopped responding.

“Afghanistan was cut off from the world. It was terrible. It reminded us of the fall of Kabul all over again. We had no idea what was going on in the country,” she said. When the internet came back on, her work continued, the pace relentless — and it hasn’t stopped since.

Jesús Adonis Martínez Peña - Cuba

The idea for El Estornudo — a narrative journalism magazine covering Cuba — started on a balcony in Havana in 2015. A group of young people, many of them university students, gathered together and talked about their dream to tell the stories of Cuba on their own terms.

“It was a time of bilateral tension between the United States and Cuba, and the situation in Cuba wasn't as serious in terms of the social, political, and economic crisis as it is now,” remembers the editor-in-chief of El Estornudo, Jesús Adonis Martinez Peña. Widespread internet had not yet arrived in Cuba, but more and more people were getting access every day, and new media outlets were springing up –– “basically in what had been, up until that point, a wasteland in terms of independent media.”

Together, the young journalists drafted a manifesto for their magazine, which they published on March 16, 2015, Journalist’s Day in Cuba.

“In Cuba, the press is a neo-colonial republic. With flags, coats of arms, statutes, organizations, prizes, forums, infinite debates — but without independence,” they wrote. “If you want to know Cuba beyond the clash of slogans and the three or four topics recycled by the contemporary media world, you have to read this magazine.”

They decided to call their magazine ‘El Estornudo’ — The Sneeze. The name, they said, reflected their own reflexive need to “react against the prevailing climate, the urgent need to expel something.”

More than a decade has passed since that balcony brainstorming session. “Ten years later, and here we are. And most of our founders are scattered around the world,” Peña, who is now based in Chicago, said. Peña himself believes he can still go back to Cuba if he stays low-profile, doesn’t work, and just sees his family. But a number of his colleagues can’t. “My colleague who edits the magazine with me, they wouldn’t even let him board the American Airlines flight.”

The situation for Cuban journalists is specific to the island. “In Cuba, no one is going to shoot us in the head for journalism,” the Estornudo staff wrote in their founder’s letter ten years ago. This still holds true today — and it’s important, Peña said, “to respectfully acknowledge the realities for our colleagues in the region, in Central America, in countries like Mexico, where there are journalists being killed. We have the imperative, the duty, to do journalism under our own specific conditions of totalitarianism.” Reporters in Cuba exist within an insidious culture of fear and control. “The press is constantly under siege by state security. They monitor our colleagues, restrict their movements within the island, put police patrols in front of their houses — it functions almost like a temporary house arrest,” Peñam said. “There have been arrests, interrogations; they put pressure on the families of journalists too, pushing them into exile too.”

Since the Trump administration’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the subsequent blocking of Venezuelan oil to Cuba, the country has been plunged into fresh crisis. President Trump has called on Cuba to “make a deal before it’s too late” and threatened to implement Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the “next President of Cuba.” Looking on, Peña’s team has been on high alert. They’re preparing themselves for every outcome — from a spiralling social crisis resulting from the U.S.-imposed fuel blockade, to a direct American attack on Havana. “We are considering every scenario, and we are not ruling anything out. And whatever happens, we are ready to report.”

Drop in Illustrations by Teona Tsintsadze.

The Age of Exile

This story is part of our Age of Exile series, which explores how displacement has evolved from historical punishment into a defining condition of our time—one that reveals profound transformations in how we construct identity, maintain community, and exercise power across borders. In an era where digital connection enables presence without physical proximity, exile has become more complex, more global, and more central to understanding our world. Explore The Age of Exile series

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The war against corruption: Why corruption is winning

Oliver Bullough — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 13:55:00 +0000

Transparency International has published its annual Corruption Perceptions Index and, for once, I think this rather tiresome survey of how likely various countries’ public officials are to be crooked has something important to tell us. Generally speaking, the CPI spends its time informing us that poor countries have worse governance than rich countries, which is not a very useful insight. What it fails to do is tell us that a significant reason for this fact is that rich countries make it very easy for poor countries’ rulers to steal from their subjects, obscure the theft, and spend the proceeds on property in Mayfair, Miami or St Moritz.

But I do think it’s important that, this year, influential Western countries are sliding down the rankings: the United States has dropped to its lowest-ever score and last year’s crackdown on independent media and judges haven’t even been reflected in that score yet. “We’re seeing a concerning picture of long-term decline in leadership to tackle corruption,” noted TI. “Even established democracies, like the U.S., UK and New Zealand, are experiencing a drop in performance. The absence of bold leadership is leading to weaker standards and enforcement, lowering ambition on anti-corruption efforts around the world.”

Hopefully, TI’s index and its grave conclusions will help galvanize opposition to the pro-oligarch policies that are infesting the world, and help to stave off oligarchical takeover in places that are still doing okay. That is, I suppose, valuable.

Still, I haven’t changed my opinion that the Corruption Perceptions Index should be abolished. It is absurd that Hong Kong is ranked as the 12th cleanest jurisdiction in the world, while China — the country it exists to loot — is 76th. Just as ridiculous is the position of the United Arab Emirates at 21st in the list, considering its growing role as a lynchpin of global kleptocracy, including from Russia (ranked a lowly 157).

The United Kingdom may have fallen to 20th but that is still far too high for a country that, by its own admission, launders a hundred billion pounds a year. That’s equivalent to the entire GDP of Kenya, which is down at 130 in the list.

You simply cannot understand corruption on a country-by-country basis because kleptocracy is a globalized phenomenon, and anything that suggests you can — particularly something so crude as a league table — is too misleading to be useful.

Talking about multijurisdictional wizardry, check out this report from the FACT coalition on how U.S. companies structure their affairs. Thanks to new accounting rules, it is possible to see how and where U.S. corporations pay tax. Some of the results are pretty remarkable: Boeing pays more tax in Germany than in the United States; Tesla pays only $28 million to the U.S. Treasury, fully 27 (!) times less tax than it pays in China.

Of course, a large chunk of these companies’ profits barely get taxed at all, but instead are routed to countries that treat them generously, of which Ireland, the Netherlands, Bermuda and Singapore are particular standouts.

The fact that this information is disclosed is good, because it allows ordinary citizens to see how big companies win special treatment, and hopefully thus increases public pressure for fair taxation. I would not therefore be at all surprised if some skilled and energetic lobbyists are right now working very hard to make sure the disclosures end as soon as possible.

Of course, you do not need to leave the United States to obtain complicated corporate structures, as shown in this recent piece from Bloomberg, about how the Russian oligarch, party-goer and billionaire Suleiman Kerimov opened a Delaware-based trust to, er, manage assets held by a Liechtenstein-based foundation but originating from his business empire in Russia, where he remains a member of the upper house of parliament. But then Kerimov was sanctioned in 2018 for what the first Trump administration called “worldwide malign activity”. He was specifically accused of bringing millions of euros into France in suitcases, using it to purchase villas, and evading taxes on them (there’s no school like the old school).

Despite the sanctions, Kerimov continued to benefit from the trust, according to Bloomberg. But the Treasury Department has gradually been catching up with everyone involved: a $216 million fine for a venture capital firm in June; an $11.5 million settlement from a private equity firm in December; and a $1.1 million fine for an attorney around the same time.

I’d like to say that hopefully this will focus minds on the majesty of sanctions and the importance of complying with them. And there are certainly some — such as the excellent folks of Collectif Sassoufit who are campaigning against corruption in Congo — who want the United States to designate more people, since justice can’t be obtained at home. I, however, think it’s time to have a serious reconsideration of Western over-reliance on sanctions, particularly in the light of the way that the United States is using them now.

If you want an example of what I mean, consider the case of Kimberly Prost, an impeccably-credentialled Canadian judge at the International Criminal Court who was sanctioned because the White House didn’t like the way she’d authorised investigations into U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan (other ICC staff were also sanctioned for investigating other alleged American and Israeli transgressions), and who suffers repeated indignities as a result. “I have an e-reader,” she said. “it’s not even an American product, but for some reason, I assume tied to the payment, I’d purchase books, I’d start to read them and then they’d disappear.” You just, she admitted, “sort of end up using cash a lot.”

Frivolous sanctions like this are just driving countries to find ways around the restrictions (it’s notable that banks in Canada, the UK, and the Netherlands are happy to keep serving her, and it seems unlikely they’d be doing that without permission from their respective governments) and, in decades to come when genuine criminals can bank with impunity, future generations will despair at how U.S. governments wasted the powerful weapon that was their dominance of the global financial system.

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Why the law lets financial criminals off the hook

Oliver Bullough — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 13:55:00 +0000

There’s a story I often tell when I talk about my new book: a couple of years ago, an adviser to a senior politician here in the UK asked me for some suggestions for policy proposals for tackling financial crime. I told him I’d like more resources for law enforcement agencies. His reply: “that’s not going to get us many headlines, is it?”

This story is intended to illustrate how one of the reasons for the world’s failure to stop money laundering is that politicians are addicted to the sugar rush of new policy announcements, but shun the hard work of enforcing old ones. But it’s indicative of a problem with journalism too. Journalists like to talk about shiny new things — crypto! AI! — and ignore the old ones that we’ve already reported on.

This is the lesson I draw from the horror of the Jeffrey Epstein revelations, with the rich, powerful men dividing up the world between themselves. Crooks and thieves may invent new tools, but they’re always designed to do the same old job: steal. A world-weary shrug — “politicians on the take? How is that a story? Bring me something new” — just lets them off the hook.

So in a small gesture towards being the change I want to see in the world, this week’s newsletter is about massive problems that have been going on for so long that everyone’s kind of forgotten about them, but which we should still be trying to solve because they’re still massive problems.

Global Financial Integrity, a research and advocacy organisation in Washington DC, has been arguing for almost two decades that we need to spend as much time looking at how illicit value flows through the trade system as we do looking at the financial system. In simple terms, by lying on the documentation that accompanies trade shipments, exporters can suck wealth out of poorer countries and — according to GFI’s analysis — have been doing so on a vast scale for decades.

In its latest analysis of trade flows out of Sub-Saharan African nations, GFI has identified “a renewed intensification of trade misinvoicing risks across the region”, with an average of $112.97 billion in value disappearing each year over the past decade, and at an accelerating rate. This total significantly exceeds that of the countries’ new debt over the same period, meaning that they should be seen effectively as net creditors to the world, rather than as net debtors.

“Illicit outflows on the scale observed in Africa have dire consequences for development. Every dollar siphoned out of African economies is a dollar not taxed or invested at home,” GFI concludes.

This phenomenon is often called ‘Trade-Based Money Laundering’, and is central to how illicit finance works, including the business model of the giant new ‘Chinese Money Laundering Networks’, but policy proposals for how to tackle it are sorely lacking.

There has been, however, no shortage of suggestions for how to stop criminals being able to hide their identities behind shell companies when moving illicit funds. Corporate transparency has been pushed by the Financial Action Task Force since its earliest days.

Efforts to achieve that goal have foundered in the European Union and the United States, but the UK has been a bright spot, with its notoriously filthy corporate registry of a decade ago adopting new rules to clean itself up. It would be nice to think this would mean we’d no longer see insiders from ex-Soviet republics using UK-registered companies to arrange questionable deals, but here’s the Organised Crime and Reporting Project to set us right.

“Two UK companies with no prior record in the mining industry have won tens of millions of dollars in Uzbek state procurement contracts,” the report states. “One was owned, on paper, by a septuagenarian British bookkeeper with no evident ties to Central Asia. The other, by a UK corporate services provider that for years managed corporate structures that shielded their true ownership from public view.”

The real meat in this sandwich, however, is how — after the journalists asked questions about the companies — their owners were able to seamlessly change the inconsistent pieces of information in the registry, much of it backdated, despite the supposedly more stringent new requirements.

I know this may all seem a bit academic because, thanks to the gutting of the U.S. Corporate Transparency Act, it’s easier, cheaper and murkier to use an American shell company these days anyway, but it’s important to remember that the battle hasn’t yet been won anywhere.

And one of the reasons it hasn’t been won is incompetence by underfunded and under-supported regulatory bodies. This was once again on display in the disastrous attempt to punish a British lawyer for allegedly persecuting a whistleblower who helped to expose the workings of the vast OneCoin scam.

Everything about the case has been a fiasco: the fact that the fraud happened in the first place; the fact that the fraudster was able to retain a British lawyer; the fact that the regulatory action took eight years to happen; the fact the tribunal threw the case out; and now the fact the regulator is on the hook for everyone’s costs. I would say this has achieved nothing, but it’s worse than that: now the regulators have a reason to be even more timid than they already are.

It means that theft keeps happening and even when efforts are made to find the stolen wealth and punish those responsible, the damage has already been done. For instance, it’s good that UK prosecutors are launching a case against Nigeria’s notorious former oil minister, but how much better would it have been if theft hadn’t been so easy in the first case?

Of course that’s not to say that we shouldn’t talk about shiny new problems too, so here’s this week’s instalment of Tether watch. Fair warning — it is unusually gross, even by the low standards of this newsletter’s most regularly-appearing crypto company.

“Private Telegram groups for the sharing of secretly taken footage of women and girls take payment via the popular Chinese digital payments systems Alipay and WeChat Pay, as well as the cryptocurrency Tether.” One group “offers access to more than 40,000 videos of secretly taken footage from hotels, homes and public toilets for a $20 ‘V.I.P.’ membership”.

Tether denies any wrongdoing, and says that it cooperates with dozens of law enforcement agencies worldwide. It’s clearly doing something right anyway, since it claims to have made more than $10 billion in profits last year, having issued $50 billion worth of new crypto currency, and has launched a separate stablecoin — USAT, as opposed its normal USDT — for the American market.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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How Stablecoins make it easy to sidestep sanctions

Oliver Bullough — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 14:33:34 +0000

In recent years, Western countries have been very reliant on sanctions as a tool of foreign policy and I think it’s a mistake. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that sanctions are law enforcement by press release. They punish people without a trial, with little if any chance of appeal, while outsourcing all the hard work to private companies.

There’s a small insight into what this looks like in practice from a fine imposed on Britain’s Bank of Scotland last week over its failure to notice that a new customer had been sanctioned for his role in Russian-occupied Crimea. He had registered with a slightly-different spelling of his name — “a changed character and an additional character in the forename, a missing middle name and a changed character in the surname” — which briefly out-foxed the bank’s compliance systems.

I’ve written about this particular gentleman’s adventures in transliteration before. Having opened the account, the bank failed to notice that although he had been removed from the European Union’s sanctions list, he had not been removed from the equivalent UK list, meaning that for 18 days he had access to financial services he should not have had, until various automatic systems and manual checks caught up with him.

In the circumstances, the Bank of Scotland is probably happy to pay its 160,000-pound fine, which also serves to remind financial institutions to invest in all possible compliance-related software, to employ more people who can check and double-check everyone and everything, just in case the next fine is bigger and comes with sharper teeth.

The upshot is that sanctions just got more expensive, more laborious and more complicated. But have they got any more effective? For that, we need to remember what they were supposed to achieve. “Our actions, taken in coordination with partners and allies, will degrade Russia’s ability to project power and threaten the peace and stability of Europe,” said then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in February 2022, when announcing a first tranche of sanctions, to which many others have since been added, in many countries.

Now, I’m not saying this hasn’t been completely without effect – Russian oil revenues dropped sharply last year, for example — but it’s important to remember she was talking almost exactly four years ago, which means Ukraine has been resisting Vladimir Putin’s Russia for longer than either the USSR or the USA spent fighting Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Whatever the argument about the effectiveness or otherwise of sanctions in eventually stopping Putin’s war machine, you have to agree that they haven’t worked very quickly.

And this creates a problem. As with incompletely applied restrictions on money laundering, sanctions imposed without other enforcement mechanisms fail to defeat the people they’re aiming at, while incentivising them to learn how to circumvent restraints.

So what’s the solution? Should we just give up on sanctions altogether and create a financial free-for-all equivalent of this year’s Enhanced Games, when cheating will be legalised so a rich man “with a mission to build superhumanity” can pay poorer people to take performance-enhancing drugs and see what happens?

You might think that’s a rhetorical question to which the answer is “OBVIOUSLY NOT!!!”, but that’s kind of what’s already happened. In April, Donald Trump’s Department of Justice decided to step back from the Biden administration’s policy of trying to make crypto companies obey the law. “The Department will no longer target virtual currency exchanges, mixing and tumbling services, and offline wallets for the acts of their end users,” the deputy attorney general said in a memorandum titled ‘ending regulation by prosecution’.

It is hard to over-stress quite how wildly this Enhanced Games-esque policy diverges from the approach taken towards money laundering since 1970, when the authors of the Bank Secrecy Act specifically stated that banks were responsible for the criminal acts of their clients, a financial anti-doping policy subsequently adopted by the whole world.

What’s been the result of the White House’s unilateral surrender? Obviously, it’s too early to see the full effects, but the general outlines of a catastrophe are already visible.

“Illicit cryptocurrency addresses received at least $154 billion in 2025. This represents a 162% increase year-over-year, primarily driven by a dramatic 694% increase in the value received by sanctioned entities,” said Chainalysis, the respected crypto investigations organisation. “We must caveat that this figure represents a lower-bound estimate based on illicit addresses we’ve identified to date.”

That means sanctioned entities moved almost seven times more value via crypto in 2025 than in 2024! That whole approach of using Western dominance of the financial system to restrain geopolitical adversaries is gone, and who knows what, if anything, will replace it.

Stablecoins now account for 84% of all illicit volume, according to Chainalysis, which also separated out the booming business being done by Chinese money laundering networks, which are seizing an ever-greater share of the market with their “industrial-scale processing capacity, operational resilience, and technical sophistication”.

US officials love stablecoins, since their issuers tend to buy Treasury bills to guarantee their assets’ value, which helps provide some extra support for the long-term U.S. policy of piling debt onto future generations rather than raising taxes on presidents’ wealthy friends. But if the approach now involves handing a sanctions-evasion opportunity to mobbed-up Chinese kleptocrats, Russians and others, then it is even more disastrously short-termist than it already appears.

Stablecoin giant Tether, by the way, may be buying a lot of U.S. government debt but is also hedging its bets and investing heavily in gold, of which it buys two tonnes a week. Of course, it keeps its stash in nuclear bunkers in Switzerland. Because why wouldn’t the people behind Tether want to resemble Bond villains even more than they do already? Next month perhaps they’ll announce a new corporate headquarters inside a Japanese volcano, with its own shark pool, stealth catamaran, and space station.

And that’s before we get to the effect of artificial intelligence on how criminals can complicate and obfuscate crypto laundering schemes, something I’ve been hearing about for a while. “The intersection of AI and cryptocurrency reflects the operational reality of contemporary jihadism,” notes one rather terrifying report. “Current counter-terrorism finance systems” it warns, “are structurally misaligned with how terrorists use crypto today.” I see no sign that any government minister anywhere is close to being ready for any of this, or to be honest, even aware that it’s happening.

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Always on the outside: Exile isn’t about the country you leave

Garry Pierre-Pierre — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 14:10:01 +0000

The rumor spread like a storm. One moment it was a whisper in a small Ohio town; the next, it was tearing across newspaper headlines and through talk shows nationwide: Haitians in Springfield were eating cats and dogs.

By the time it reached my inbox, I already knew the lie was out there. What arrived was the first backlash — a venomous email that made clear how deeply the lie had seeped into the American bloodstream. At The Haitian Times, we’ve spent years reporting on Haitians as whole people: musicians, entrepreneurs, artists, families who create, build, celebrate, and endure. We’ve also covered the darker chapters — gang violence, earthquakes, cholera, and migration through unforgiving terrain.

But this lie — this grotesque, calculated fabrication — landed like a punch to the chest. Because it wasn’t just a rumor. It was a diagnosis of how America still sees us.

People imagine exile as geography — leaving one home for another. But exile can also be internal, a quiet ache carried from room to room. Mine began not through my own displacement but by watching my parents live out theirs. Though I’m not technically an exile, I grew up in a household where exile seeped through the walls. My parents were part of the early wave of Haitian migration to New York — educated, middle-class, ambitious. In Haiti they had status. In America they had survival.

50 years on, and belonging still felt conditiona l— granted just until someone decided to snatch it away.

Springfield wasn’t an anomaly. It was a lie engineered to trigger the oldest reflex in this country: the instinct to believe the worst about Black people. Say anything about us — no matter how implausible — and a segment of America will nod along, ready to turn virulent fiction into unimpeachable fact.

In September 2024, during the U.S. presidential campaign, the lie leapt from fringe conspiracy to national talking point. J.D. Vance — then Donald Trump’s running mate — first amplified the claim, asserting that Haitian migrants in Springfield were abducting and eating pets, even after local officials told his staff the allegations were baseless.

Days later, during his first and only debate with Kamala Harris, Trump repeated the claim on national television, declaring that in Springfield, Haitian immigrants were “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats.” On air, the moderator cited the city manager’s office, which said there were no credible reports of pets being harmed by immigrants.

Fact-checkers, including Reuters, also found no evidence. But by then, the damage was done.

Springfield had been on our radar for years. Haitians there had been followed, attacked, and robbed as they carried cash to send home. We’d reported on those incidents, and on how a small Midwestern city struggled to absorb a new Haitian community.

We knew Haitians were no longer settling exclusively in New York or Florida. We were migrating to the Midwest, the Southwest, and the Deep South — regions less accustomed to us and often less welcoming.

At The Haitian Times, we pushed back forcefully against the pet-eating hoax — publishing extensive reporting that debunked it, amplifying local officials’ denials, and demanding accountability. For that, we paid a price. Over the following months, our inboxes and message boards filled with blistering attacks — emails drenched in racism and vitriol, accusing us of lying, covering for “savages,” or participating in imagined conspiracies. The more we insisted on truth, the more determined some were to punish us for it.

We planned two town halls in Springfield — one with local officials, another with the Haitian community. Both were canceled amid bomb threats, rising hostility, and word that white supremacist groups intended to march through the city. Local leaders told us plainly: they could not guarantee our safety.

Then came a phone call I will never forget.

Macollvie Jean-François Neel, our special projects editor, called me early on the Monday after she returned from Springfield. Her voice was taut but steady. She had been doxxed and swatted — targeted by a form of harassment in which someone makes a false emergency report to provoke an armed police response. An anonymous email to Catholic Charities in Rochester, New York, claimed a brutal murder had occurred at her Brooklyn home.

Seven NYPD officers surrounded her house. Guns holstered but ready.

A “wellness check,” they called it.

Every Black family in America knows how quickly such encounters can turn deadly. Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency technician in Louisville, Kentucky, was killed in her apartment during a botched late-night police raid. Officers fired more than 30 rounds. She never stood a chance. Atatiana Jefferson, a 28-year-old Black woman in Fort Worth, Texas, was shot through her bedroom window while playing video games with her nephew. Police had arrived for a “welfare check” after a neighbor noticed her door ajar. They never announced themselves. She was killed within seconds.

For many white Europeans, these stories sound unimaginable. For Black Americans, they form a grim, familiar pattern. The dangerous imagination of others is often deadlier than any reality.

After Macollvie finished recounting the incident, I closed my laptop and went on my daily walk, my stride propelled by fury. For nearly an hour I marched through my neighborhood’s nature trail, furious at the fragility of our lives, of the threats to our safety in this country we call our own. Back home, still simmering, I wrote two posts — one on LinkedIn, one on Twitter. They were raw, unfiltered. Within hours, both went viral. Messages poured in. Television bookers reached out. Reporters sought analysis. Allies offered solidarity. Everyone wanted me to turn this wound into words.

And then it clicked: Exile isn’t about a country you leave. It’s about the distance between who you are and who the world insists you must be.

Rally in solidarity with the Haitian community at Boston Common in Boston in September 2024, after the story of Haitian migrants eating pets went viral on social media. Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images.

A large-scale ground mural depicting Breonna Taylor at Chambers Park in Annapolis, Maryland. The mural was organized by Future History Now in partnership with Banneker-Douglass Museum and The Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture. Patrick Smith/Getty Images.

The dual exile

My mother worked in a SoHo garment factory long before the neighborhood became a destination, taken over by galleries and loft apartments. She came home with fingers pricked from sewing needles, the smell of machine oil clinging to her clothes. “School is your salvation,” she’d tell me. “Don’t end up like me.” My stepfather worked as a mechanic at the United Postal Service. My uncles drove taxis, worked factory shifts, held multiple jobs that drained their dignity by the hour. Their friends slid down the American class ladder: teachers became janitors, accountants cleaned office buildings, nurses tended to the elderly in strangers’ homes. Edwidge Danticat once said her Barnard classmates remarked on the irony of our lives in the U.S.: “In Haiti we had maids; here we were the maids.”

My mother, her husband and I, Elizabeth, NJ.

On weekends my parents and their friends gathered in cramped salons across Brooklyn and Queens — passing around rum, grief, gossip. They spoke of a bright, sun-washed Haiti they carried on their person like a pressed flower. They dreamed of returning once the regime fell.

They would turn the music up as loud as the room would allow and sing along to “Haiti”, the iconic ballad by Skah-Shah, then the darling of the Haitian community. I watched their faces as they belted out the lyrics — laughter and grief sharing the same space in their eyes, their voices cracking and rising together.

This morning I woke up with tears in both eyes.
I miss my country. Haiti chérie.

Oh God, give me strength.
My family back home criticizes me when I don’t write letters.
They don’t know my heart is broken.
Life in New York is hard.

https://youtu.be/SY5ukYOkZg8?si=n0r1UW3HDZXV-C8p

Skah Shah - Haiti.

As the band slipped into a long, melodic instrumental passage, something shifted. Hips and heads began to sway. Conversation faded. A small living room in Brooklyn filled with movement, with a kind of quiet, shared trance — half celebration, half mourning. This was not simply music; it was a ritual, a way of keeping Haiti alive when distance and circumstance conspired to erase it.

What filled that room was nostalgia — not sentimental, not indulgent, but heavy and necessary. A longing for a homeland that remained painfully present and impossibly distant at the same time. Haiti was close enough to sing to, to dance with, to invoke by name. And yet it was far enough away to break hearts nightly, right there on American couches, under American ceilings.

That was exile, long before I had a word for it.

But the Duvaliers never fell, the regime never changed.

François “Papa Doc” Duvalier ruled through terror. His Tonton Macoutes disappeared intellectuals, tortured dissidents, murdered without hesitation. When he handed power to his nineteen-year-old son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc,” in 1971, the repression modernized but did not cease.

By the early 1980s — two decades after they had left — my parents acknowledged a truth that crushed them: they would never return home. Haiti had changed. They had changed. Their exile had hardened.

I came of age as part of a bridge generation linking Haiti and America, carrying our parents’ grief in one hand and our futures in the other.

And yet, there were moments of joy — brief flickers where we felt we belonged in America. In elementary school, making the basketball team thrilled me. In high school, soccer became a sanctuary. Team sports offered respite from isolation, a glimpse of camaraderie, a doorway into American culture. For a while, I thought that was what belonging meant, what it felt like — this rush, this folding into something larger.

My buddies and I striking a pose, Elizabeth, NJ.
Summer league team Sunshine Football Club, Elizabeth, NJ

The closest I ever came to that sensation of belonging was in college, at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. The historically Black university sits atop one of the city’s seven hills, and when I arrived it felt less like a campus than a citadel — an elevated space of Black thought, ambition, and self-possession. Almost immediately, I felt the intellectual electricity that coursed through the student body. Most students came from Florida, but many arrived from the Midwest and the Northeast, carrying with them different accents, histories, and shades of Blackness.

I sought out FAMU deliberately. Growing up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, tensions between Haitians and African Americans simmered constantly. There was suspicion on both sides. We didn’t understand one another. We didn’t speak the same way. We didn’t trust one another. I remember telling my mother, shortly after arriving in New York, that I was surprised by how many Haitians there were. She laughed and said there weren’t — that I was mistaking Black Americans for Haitians. That confusion captured something essential: in America, Blackness is often flattened, stripped of its histories and distinctions.

FAMU took what was flattened and gave it shape. It was a place where learning how to navigate white power in America was not incidental but central to the institution’s mission. Late at night, between studying and watching Black Entertainment Television, we debated politics, culture, and survival — how we would confront the world waiting beyond campus. That search for connection carried me to West Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer in Benin and Togo, where I deepened my Pan-African quest to understand the relationship between continental Africans and the diaspora.

Still, even in that Black oasis, belonging proved brittle. The mother of a woman I was dating despised me. One day, she looked me in the eyes and said, flatly, that Haitians ate cats. It was a chilling reminder that even among our own, exile stuck to us, a second skin.

It was with this inheritance — the contradictions, aspirations, flashes of connection — that I founded The Haitian Times in 1999. Not just as a newspaper, but as a repository for our stories, where they could be kept without distortion. It was a ledger of our collective presence. A home for a scattered people. Over 25 years, the paper has chronicled immigration battles, homeownership milestones, the rise of Haitian nurses in American healthcare, the emergence of entrepreneurs, artists, and scholars reshaping Haitian American identity. We became a mirror — and often a megaphone — reflecting a community still discovering how to belong.

But journalism, too, would show me my place.

When I joined The New York Times, I was welcomed but not fully claimed. Editors called one of my beats “immigration.” I called it covering immigrants — the lifeblood of New York’s buses, subways, corner stores, and neighborhoods. I wrote about cab drivers navigating midnight streets, nannies raising other people’s children, shopkeepers who kept entire blocks alive. Immigrants animated the city; I simply made them visible.

Yet I always operated with one hand on the door. The profession embraced me, but not always my perspective. The city was my subject, but rarely my home.

Running The Haitian Times deepened this duality. By day, I covered life in America; by night, I remained tethered to Haiti’s turmoil and beauty.

Two places claimed me. Neither fully let me in. That was the essence of my dual exile: belonging everywhere and nowhere at once.

My mother Yvette sitting on top of the car, surrounded by her friends, Elizabeth, NJ.
Family gathering in Jamaica, Queens

The rotating outsider

After 50 years in America, I’ve learned that each generation selects its “other”: Italians; Jews; Irish; Chinese; Indians. Each group, at different moments, was caricatured and feared. Over time — through numbers, proximity, and the strange elasticity of whiteness — they moved inside the circle.

I’ve seen this happen among South Asians. Some came with little money, scraping by as taxi drivers, convenience store owners, warehouse workers. Their stories echo the struggles of the countless immigrants navigating America’s lower rungs. But others arrived with advanced degrees, English fluency, caste and class privilege, and global networks. Many entered the American middle and upper-middle class swiftly, achieving what sociologists call adjacency — not whiteness, but a comfortable (and falsely comforting) proximity to power.

When Zohran Mamdani, an Indian-Ugandan-American of considerable social and cultural privilege, became the city’s first Muslim and first South Asian mayor, his victory — powered by a multiracial, multi-class coalition — showed how adjacency can become influence, and how an immigrant-led movement can capture the helm of America’s largest city.

But Haitians do not enjoy adjacency.

We arrived at the intersection of Blackness and foreignness — the two most enduring definitions of “other” in American life. We did not come through elite work visas or tech pipelines. We fled dictatorships, poverty, violence. We arrived with determination but often without capital, language, or protection. And in America, race does not rotate like ethnicity does.

A white ethnic group can become white-er.

A Black immigrant group can only become Black-er.

This is why the Springfield lie metastasized so quickly and so easily. Why strangers felt entitled to weaponize their fear against my colleague. And yet the irony is astonishing. Haitians are cast as permanent outsiders in a country we helped shape from its earliest days. It was a Haitian, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, who founded the city of Chicago. Haitian refugees fleeing the revolution ignited cultural, political, and demographic transformation in New Orleans. In 1779, more than 500 free Black soldiers from Saint-Domingue, the Chasseurs-Volontaires, fought alongside American revolutionaries in the Battle of Savannah. They bled for a nation that today treats their descendants as intruders.

The outsider label is not simply a misunderstanding. It is deliberate erasure.

A color lithograph produced by Ackerman & Sons in 1930, depicting the cabin of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the first permanent settler of Chicago. Chicago History Museum/Getty Images.

Always on the outside

Bob Dylan — my favorite poet of contradiction — wrote a line that has lived with me for decades:

“Always on the outside of whatever side there was.”

The moment I heard it, I recognized myself. It linked me to a lineage of Black artists and intellectuals for whom exile became a survival strategy: Richard Wright. James Baldwin. Chester Himes. Nina Simone. They left because America made it too hard to breathe, too hard to think, too hard to exist with dignity.

Baldwin said leaving America saved his life. In Paris he found the distance he needed to see his country clearly — and to write about it with a heat that still sears.

Sometimes I wonder what might have happened had I chosen their path.

But I stayed, remaining in the place that wounded me even as I strove to be the change that I wanted to see in America. Journalism allowed me to confront exile directly, to define myself before others misdefined me or my community. It gave me a language for the fracture I had always felt both within and without.

There is a line often attributed to Baldwin — not literal, but true to his philosophy: The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.

So, I made something. A newsroom. A community institution. A bridge for the bridge generation.

But creation did not erase exile. It only gave it form — Springfield, Macollvie’s swatting, my parents’ sacrifices, the precariousness shadowing every Black immigrant life. These moments showed me that America will welcome our labor, our tragedies, our “resilience” — but still choose not to welcome us. I am not on the outside because I failed to belong. I am on the outside because America’s borders of belonging were never drawn with people like me in mind.

François Duvalier is shown with his wife Simone, September 1957, Haiti.
Duvalier, Jean Claude 'Baby Doc' (center) surrounded by military personnel 1972, Haiti.
Haitians march past the gleaming white National Palace after "Papa Doc" took over the Presidency for Life, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1964. Bettmann / Contributor.

Claiming belonging

After Springfield, after Macollvie’s ordeal, after months of racist email invective and those two viral posts, I realized something else: Belonging in America is not given, is not granted. It is claimed. It is not secured by citizenship, longevity, or contribution. It is forged through community, through institutions, through memory.

But even those who would claim belonging, now face the anger and aggression of those who would deny it to them. In recent years, The United States has witnessed:

ICE raids tearing families, schools and cities apart
Asylum seekers detained in maximum security prisons
The Muslim ban, the casual abuse directed at those from “shithole” countries
Family separations at the southern border
The normalization of open xenophobia
The resurgence of white supremacist violence

Under the Trump presidency, these are not expressions of our worst selves. They are public policy. They reveal a nation increasingly comfortable with cruelty, increasingly hostile to outsiders, increasingly eager to weaponize belonging. And now the question is: What will post-Trump America look like?

Even when the man exits the stage, the movement he unleashed will outlive him. Suspicion once fringe is now mainstream. Scapegoating once coded is now explicit. Viewing neighbors as threats is common currency.

These currents are not confined to the United States. Across Europe — from France to the U.K., Italy to Hungary — immigration has become a proxy for deeper anxieties about culture, identity, and power. Borders harden. Parties shift rightward. The definition of “belonging” becomes forbiddingly narrow.

For immigrants — especially Black immigrants — this means we must build parallel structures of safety, connection, and truth. We cannot rely on our nations to protect us. We must protect ourselves.

Mural displaying the face of Breonna Taylor, David McAtee, Sandra Bland, George Floyd and others in Louisville, Kentucky. Joshua Lott for The Washington Post via Getty Images.

In recent months, I’ve found myself returning to what happened in Springfield in August and September 2024, and to the question that kept rising in the quiet afterwards: How did we find the will to continue to report, to insist on telling our truth even when fear crept inside our own newsroom, to insist that we had a right to be here, to be seen and to be heard?

For me, the answer arrived slowly, like a figure emerging through fog. There are forces in this country — loud, coordinated, and intentional — that want people like us to feel like exiles. They want us to retreat into silence, to internalize the idea that we are perpetual outsiders whose presence can be erased with a rumor, a smear, a threat.

My parents and their peers had lived under Duvalier’s dictatorship, where fear was a currency and silence a survival tactic. They fled a regime that demanded their obedience through terror. But in these United States, I refused to reenact their posture of cowering and running.

America likes to imagine itself as a shining city on a hill — a beacon, a north star. But Springfield revealed an America where the light feels less like a guiding glow and more like a rotating lighthouse beam: illuminating some, ignoring others, blinding many.

After 50 years, I have learned this: Exile describes where others place you. Belonging is what you build with your own hands.

So I stand my ground. Not because I believe in the myth of the hill, but because I believe — fiercely — in our right to stand upon it.

Even if America insists on keeping me just outside the circle, I will stand outside it and keep writing. From this vantage, I can see my country clearly enough to tell the truth about it. And I can see Haiti clearly enough to honor it. I can see my parents clearly enough to understand their sacrifices. And I can see the next generation: those Haitian American children who will read our stories and recognize themselves within them.

That — more than safety, more than acceptance, more than any passport — is belonging.

This essay is an adaptation from his upcoming memoir “Always on the Outside.”

The Age of Exile

The post Always on the outside: Exile isn’t about the country you leave appeared first on Coda Story.

Imagining the unimaginable annexation of Alberta

Natalia Antelava — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:51:53 +0000

There was nothing special about the scenes from Edmonton: orderly lines of people in winter coats snaking across a snowy park, bare trees stark against a pale winter sky, the mundane choreography of civic participation playing out in a provincial capital most Americans couldn't locate on a map.

Albertans queuing to sign a petition, even one to secede from Canada, could never compete for attention with the tragic, disorienting developments that filled the first long month of 2026: the ICE shooting in Minneapolis, Donald Trump's bombastic threats to annex Greenland, and Canadian prime minister Mark Carney's tense warnings from Davos about middle powers ending up "on the menu."

But for those who've tracked how sovereignty collapses, these winter queues had an eerie resonance.

Almost as soon as he took office for his second term, Trump began calling Canada "the 51st state," declaring that the country "only works" if it becomes part of the United States. He'd refuse to use proper titles, referring to Canadian prime ministers as "Governor Trudeau" and later "Governor Carney." He posted altered maps showing Canada as U.S. territory. It played as crude humor, vintage Trump bluster designed to dominate the news cycle and unsettle an ally he viewed as weak. But by January 2026, as Trump’s threats to annex Greenland dominated headlines, his drip-drip taunting of Canada had calcified into something concrete on the ground in Alberta, had given shape and momentum to a once low-key secessionist sentiment.

The Alberta Prosperity Project needs 177,732 signatures by May to trigger a referendum on secession from Canada. Their representatives claim they've made "repeated visits" to Washington to meet with senior Trump administration officials, meetings they say took place inside the kind of secure facility reserved for discussing classified intelligence.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly declared that Alberta should "come down into the U.S." as a "natural partner." Republican Congressman Andy Ogles told the BBC that Albertans "would prefer not to be part of Canada and be part of the United States because we are winning day in and day out." According to the separatists' own materials, their vision includes a "common market" with the U.S., zero tariffs, adoption of the U.S. dollar and construction of two oil pipelines through American territory. Spokesperson Jeffrey Rath has claimed the U.S. would potentially provide a $500 billion line of credit to the newly independent Alberta.

A participant holds a placard outside the Alberta Legislature in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, on May 3, 2025. Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images.

Widening the Overton window

A referendum on Albertan secession, should it happen, appears almost certain to fail. Polls show only 24% of Albertans support joining the U.S., with 65% strongly opposed. Most media outside Canada has treated this as a fringe story. But the language being used by the Trump administration in support of secession is becoming a textbook example of how the Overton window shifts: say the outrageous thing, let it be dismissed as mischievous troublemaking, and then watch as domestic actors race to occupy the newly opened political space. Repeat until the "absurd" becomes debatable, and the debatable becomes negotiable. When a U.S. Treasury Secretary publicly advocates for a Canadian province to secede and join America, he's not predicting the future — he's manufacturing a present in which such conversations become possible. There’s no master plan; the chaos itself creates opportunity.

The timing matters. Mark Carney has emerged as the strongest voice pushing back against Trump's increasingly aggressive rhetoric, most notably in his Davos speech warning that middle powers risk ending up "on the menu." Daniel Béland, a political scientist at McGill University who studies Canadian federalism, sees Alberta separatism as potentially serving a strategic purpose for the Trump administration: "Mark Carney is standing up to Trump. We saw what happened in Davos, right? So maybe they see that what's happening in Alberta is weakening both Canada and Carney."

The reason this story matters has less to do with the petition itself than with the narrative infrastructure being built around it. Recently, the exiled Russian news agency Meduza obtained a manual that the Kremlin had distributed to state-owned and pro-government media outlets instructing them how to cover Trump's Greenland standoff. The directives were explicit: emphasize that territorial expansion is what "strong countries" do, that Trump is "aiming for Vladimir Putin's success," that conflicts with European countries "will be forgotten, but the territories will remain." Journalists were told to frame NATO as "collapsing" and Putin as "forcing America to engage in equal dialogue" while European leaders "halfheartedly protest on social media."

For Russian and Chinese state outlets, coverage of Albertan separatism is in keeping with the broad narrative that Western alliances are fracturing and sovereignty is negotiable for resource-rich regions. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, meanwhile, has spent the past year articulating what he calls a doctrine of "hemispheric defense," framing Canada not as an ally but as territory that needs to be controlled. A "rapidly changing" Canada, he has said, in which 25% of the population is "foreign-born" means "these people are hostile to the United States of America." Canada, Bannon claims, “is the next Ukraine."

While Bannon has spoken extensively about hemispheric defence and Canada’s strategic value as a U.S. protectorate, there's been no official movement towards such a goal — no Pentagon study, no Congressional authorization hearings, no legal pathway to annexation. Trump can troll, Bannon can theorize, Bessent can advocate, but no one appears to be seriously suggesting executing a plan. The damage isn't in the doing, it’s in the destabilization, it’s in normalizing the conversation.

A parallel playbook doesn't mean identical outcomes. There will be no little green men, no masked special forces in Calgary. But in 2014, when Russia entered Crimea, it wasn't military occupation alone, it began with the systematic deployment of narratives that made annexation appear inevitable, even locally driven, before troops ever arrived. And now the Kremlin argues hypocrisy when the United Nations Secretary General says the principle of the “self-determination of peoples has a number of requisites.”

Déjà vu

My view is shaped by what I've witnessed: Russian-backed separatists taking over my grandparents' house in Abkhazia in the 1990s, years of reporting from South Ossetia before Russia seized it in 2008, and standing outside a Ukrainian military base in Perevalnoe in 2014, watching Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms take control while Moscow denied they were even there.

Map of Ukraine locating territories claimed by Russia (Including Crimea, which was annexed in 2014) as of August 17, 2025. GUILLERMO RIVAS PACHECO,JEAN-MICHEL CORNU/AFP via Getty Images.

The annexation of Crimea showed how the ground for seizing sovereignty is laid through manufactured political theater. A politician whose party won 4% of the vote in 2010 was installed at gunpoint and held a referendum under occupation that reported 96.7% of people supported joining Russia. He's still in charge.

Provinces and regions challenge sovereignty regularly. In Scotland's 2014 referendum on whether it should be independent of the United Kingdom, nearly 45% voted ‘yes.’ Catalonia's 2017 referendum saw 48% back independence from Spain before Madrid blocked it through force, both physical and legal. Quebec came within 1% of secession in 1995, a margin so narrow it prompted federal legislation defining how provinces could leave.

What distinguishes Alberta isn't the referendum mechanism, it's the involvement of a foreign power. In every previous case, challenges to sovereignty remained internal disputes. Spain's government opposed Catalonia, but secessionists didn’t visit France to seek €500 billion in credit from the French government. Canada addressed Quebec's grievances, but the U.S. Treasury Secretary at the time didn't suggest that Quebec should "come down into the U.S."

The overt encouragement of Albertan secession is without precedent among Western democracies. Canada faces provocation by a superpower neighbor whose cabinet officials actively encourage provincial secession, whose political figures meet separatist leaders in secure intelligence facilities, and whose state apparatus treats a G7 ally's territorial integrity as negotiable. "This is something that, at least to my knowledge, is unprecedented," says Béland, referring to US State Department meetings with Alberta separatists.

The architecture of erosion

The conditions in Alberta and Crimea are, of course, fundamentally different: no troops, no armed separatists, and Alberta is a democracy in which roughly 76% oppose joining the U.S., if not necessarily Albertan independence. What's comparable though is the vocabulary being used in the U.S.: the systematic framing of sovereignty as conditional, resources as rightfully belonging to a more powerful neighbor, and local grievances as requiring external "solutions."

The rhetorical architecture that made Crimea possible is now being constructed around Alberta. That architecture requires foundation stones, and Alberta has them. When the province joined Canada in 1905, Ottawa retained control of Alberta’s natural resources though Ontario and Quebec got to keep theirs. This inequity was corrected in 1930, but the resentment lingered. In 1980, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau imposed a 25% federal tax on Alberta's oil and seized control of pricing. The backlash was fierce: unemployment soared, projects collapsed, and "let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark" became a rallying cry. Separatist movements have flared and faded for decades, always returning to the same core grievance: Alberta produces 90% of Canada's oil, Canada sells 95% of it to the United States, yet Alberta feels like a resource colony for Eastern Canada's benefit.

Russia exploited similar dynamics in Crimea: real economic marginalization, language politics, the feeling of being a colony for Kyiv's benefit. External powers don't create these grievances, but they weaponize them. And just as in Crimea, it's indigenous populations raising the alarm first. The Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation filed a lawsuit arguing that Alberta cannot hold a referendum without indigenous consent, and explicitly warning that a referendum "will enable foreign interference from the most powerful neighbor to the south." In Crimea, the indigenous Tatar population boycotted the 2014 referendum and suffered systematic repression afterward.

Alberta's premier, Danielle Smith, has walked a careful line, speaking about her desire to stay a part of Canada while defending the need to hold a referendum. She met Trump at Mar-a-Lago days before his inauguration last year, speaking of the "need to preserve our independence while we grow this critical partnership." But when the referendum petition was approved, she framed it as a democratic duty: "You need to have a pressure-release valve on issues that people care about." According to the Globe and Mail, Canadian defense officials have recently modeled a U.S. invasion scenario for the first time in over a century: a theoretical planning exercise, not an operational war plan. The modeling assumed American forces would overcome Canadian positions in as little as 2 days, prompting examination of asymmetric responses: sabotage, drones, dispersed resistance. Officials stressed an invasion remains highly unlikely. But allies don't conduct theoretical exercises in fratricide unless something fundamental has shifted.

The shifting burden

Stories matter. The current collapse of Europe's post-Cold War security arrangement began with narratives that made that collapse imaginable.

From the mid-2000s, Russian state television started hosting marginal voices questioning Ukraine's right to exist. In 2008, the Russian daily Kommersant reported that in a private meeting, Putin told George W. Bush that Ukraine was "not even a state" and that the Kremlin would be encouraging secession in both Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Six years of this rhetoric made Ukrainian sovereignty negotiable before a single soldier crossed the border.

Trump has spent over a year declaring Canada "only works" as part of the United States while his Treasury Secretary publicly advocates for Alberta's secession and Bannon, whose finger is frequently firmly on MAGA’s pulse, calls the country "hostile" and "the next Ukraine." Béland warns that the damage from this process extends beyond the referendum's outcome: "Even if the ‘no’ wins, the remain side wins, and even if it's an easy victory... having a referendum campaign is highly divisive in and of itself, and it opens the door to potential U.S. interference."

Sovereignty doesn't collapse with a single referendum. It erodes in the accumulation of moments when defending it appears unreasonable, when maintaining it requires constant justification, when the burden of proof shifts from those who would divide to those who would preserve.

With additional reporting from Masho Lomashvili

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The new boss? Not the same as the old boss

Oliver Bullough — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:55:00 +0000

In the good old days, all a money launderer had to do was take a bag full of cash into a bank, hand it over, and walk out with a cashier’s cheque. Annoying rules and regulations have long made that kind of thing difficult/laborious, but fortunately for launderers they now have crypto-for-cash brokers who do the same job.

We’ve seen the same pattern all over the world — a criminal hands cash to a middleman, and receives cryptocurrency in exchange — but rarely has it been so well explained as in this affidavit attached to the indictment of Jorge Figueira, a 59-year-old Venezuelan charged this month with laundering more than a billion dollars.

In some ways, this was a very old-fashioned scheme, with funds derived from the South American drugs trade being shuttled between as many as seven different accounts to confuse any pursuers before being transferred to their recipients. Were it not for the crypto element, this could have happened at any time since the 1980s, but it is the crypto element I want to focus on: and, once again, it was Tether’s USDT.

“Basically, it is used for what we are doing,” said Figuera in a tapped phone conversation transcribed in the affidavit. “It is used to transfer money in a quick way, even to make it get to jurisdictions that have some type of issues, etc. For example, to send it to China… Let me be clear with you, (USDT) is used a lot for laundering money.”

The USDT was transferred specifically on the Tron blockchain which, said FBI Special Agent Stephen Walker, “is commonly used by individuals involved in money laundering.” You may be rolling your eyes that I’m talking about Tether yet again. And while a day may come, to egregiously misquote Aragorn, Son of Arathorn, when I don’t bang on about USDT, it is not this day. Because there is an important point to make here.

Last week, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went to Davos as part of a strong U.S. team that wasted no time in expressing its contempt for everyone else in Europe, if not the world. “With President Trump, capitalism has a new sheriff in town,” Lutnick wrote in the Financial Times. (Question to American readers: is this kind of clichéd Wild West tosh as jarring to your ears as it is to mine when a UK politician does that whole “my dear chap” posho act?)

On the face of it, the indictment of Jorge Figueira does indeed look like the stereotypical muscular American sheriff in action again, ropin’ up the bad hombres and bringin’ ‘em into town tied to his saddle. America has after all historically been very good at prosecuting financial criminals. But this new sheriff operates in new ways.

It was Lutnick’s company Cantor Fitzgerald — overseen since last February by his sons Kyle and Brandon — that provided Tether with the services it needed to operate, which back in 2023 no other major institution would provide. With Tether valued at perhaps $500 billion thanks to the healthy demand for its products from people like Figueira, Cantor’s own windfall from it could total $25 billion, enough to vault members of Lutnick’s family into the stratospheric wealth club.

The owner of the Tron blockchain meanwhile — our old friend Justin Sun, consumer of a $6.2 million banana, generous investor in the Pitcairn islands, and so on — has been a substantial investor in the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial, although the relationship has not been entirely smooth.

I have no personal experience of the American Old West, but I’ve watched a lot of Westerns, and traditionally a good sheriff’s family members do not profit mightily from companies named in the indictments that the sheriff brings, nor from those that help the sheriff’s strategic enemies build a whole new system outside of the sheriff’s jurisdiction. (If you’d like a more extensive, thoughtful and sophisticated version of this argument, without the silly jokes, I think this is a very interesting paper.)

Because it’s not just money laundering where companies like Tether are implicated. “The Central Bank of Iran has acquired at least $507 million in USDT, the US dollar-backed stablecoin,” notes Elliptic in this new piece of research. “The CBI also appears to be constructing a ‘sanctions-proof’ banking mechanism that replicates the utility of international dollar accounts. By treating USDT as ‘digital off-book eurodollar accounts’, the regime creates a shadow financial layer capable of holding US dollar value outside the reach of U.S. authorities.”

I’m sure everyone has either watched, read, or read about Mark Carney’s speech at Davos, and I think his conclusions — about mid-sized countries needing to help each other in this uncertain new world — apply as well to financial crime as they do to geopolitics. Their law enforcement agencies need to band together and start investigating the kind of companies that have been welcomed into the United States, and to stop relying on the U.S. to do their job for them because the new sheriff in town really is not like the old one. Perhaps these middle powers could call their cooperation “a posse.”

At present, however, I can see no recognition of the urgency of this task, although I notice that the European Union’s Anti-Money-Laundering Agency has laboriously ticked one more bureaucratic box in the mammoth task of thinking about maybe beginning to actually start doing something. Meanwhile, the UK has heroically completed part of a consultation into whether it should slightly change its own AML regulatory set-up.

One of the offshore centres I wrote about in my last book was Gibraltar, which has not had nearly as much scrutiny as places like the British Virgin Islands, partly because it specialises in gambling rather than kleptocracy, but also because a particular kind of Brit sees any criticism of The Rock as tantamount to spitting at the royal family.

But there are serious problems in this strange little overseas territory, with worrying implications for the governance of a place that has previously been central to several European smuggling networks and could easily become so again. “Sir Peter Openshaw’s findings are clear as light and day: the man running Gibraltar had tried several times to hobble a police investigation into matters relating to national security, which was grossly improper,” says this Transparency International report, which deserves reading.

My new book is very shortly to be out in the wild, and has even had a nice review, so I am doing lots of events (come along!) in which I tell people about how dreadful the world’s money-laundering system is and hopefully don’t leave them so depressed that they break down and cry, which in this line of work is always a risk.

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Launderers turn to the Euro, and an Arctic tax haven?

Oliver Bullough — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 13:55:00 +0000

It’s an accepted truth in much of the English-speaking world that the European Union is sclerotic, sluggish and weighed down by bureaucracy. Now that may or may not be true in the formal economy, but in the criminal world, a key statistic has indeed suggested that for several years European crooks have been falling behind.

The value of banknotes in circulation is a useful proxy for the size of the illicit economy, because they are used less than ever by ordinary people in ordinary transactions. So a primary source of demand for physical cash comes from criminals and money launderers. Since 2022, however, while the value of all the physical US dollars, Australian dollars, and pounds has been rising, the value of Euro banknotes in circulation has stagnated.

This is especially notable because, in the giant €200 bill, the European Central Bank provides a super-convenient banknote for transporting large values around in a relatively small box.

But it’s happy days for those looking for the green shoots of a revival in European criminal dynamism. In December, the value of Euro banknotes in circulation finally hit its first new all-time high — of €1.619 trillion — since June 2022, when it was €17 billion lower. Interestingly, however, the share of €200 bills in that total is falling. Consumers appear to prefer €100 bills and, if there are any money launderers out there able to explain why that is, please get in touch.

The Geenland gyp

I’m not going to express an opinion on the embarrassing idiocy of Donald Trump’s “policy” on Greenland, but I am interested in what the world’s biggest island would look like as the 51st state (as proposed in this bill from the improbably-named Congressman Randy Fine) from a financial crime perspective.

Greenland may be larger than Alaska, but it is the world’s least-densely populated territory, with only 57,000 inhabitants. That’s about the same number as people in Carson City, Nevada where there’s so little going on that it’s almost a relief to escape to the comparatively vast Reno, which isn’t something I’d otherwise imagine myself saying about such a barren wasteland. Greenland has a tenth of the population of Wyoming, the current least-populous US state, which might give you a clue about why I’m concerned should Greenland be accepted into the warm embrace of the USA. In recent decades, many of America’s least-populous states have enthusiastically embraced financial secrecy as a useful source of additional income, in that it allows them to swipe business/tax revenue from their larger fellows.

South Dakota and Delaware are the most famous examples, but Wyoming, Nevada, Alaska, Oregon and others are involved too. It is famously easier to get a shell company up and running than a library card in many states, and those companies help their anonymous owners evade tax, launder money, hide stolen wealth, and more.

One of the reasons for this phenomenon is that it’s just so much easier for lobbyists to get pieces of enabling legislation passed through the legislatures of small states, which have fewer competing industries and smaller numbers of lawyers. Now, if that’s the case in Wyoming, just imagine what it would be like in Greenland – laws could be rushed through in minutes, rather than hours. There’s no tax revenue to speak of, so why bother having any taxes at all? It would be a criminality haven for the ages.

It would, I admit, be quite amusing to watch the fury of Republican-voting states as they lost all this lucrative business to somewhere whose accession to the Union they had so enthusiastically endorsed. There would also be a tremendous irony in the extent to which shady Chinese and Russian money could pour through a secrecy haven even murkier than Delaware, considering the stated justification for the mooted annexation. But, more broadly, this would be absolutely awful for democratic accountability and other good things, so let’s hope it never happens.

Tether rides in with the cavalry

Tether, issuer of the world’s largest stablecoin USDT, has frozen $182 million worth of crypto that it thinks is linked to Venezuelan sanctions evasion. In this, it repeats a pattern familiar from its playbook of jumping aggressively to enforce Western governments’ rules just as soon as it has absolutely no choice about it.

The fact that Caracas was relying on USDT to fund most of its oil trade was common knowledge, helping both to support a corrupt and dictatorial regime and to ensure a healthy source of demand for Tether’s signature product for years. The same was previously true of Garantex, a Russian crypto exchange much used by criminals and sanctions evaders, which continued to shift large amounts of USDT for two years after it was designated by US authorities. When Garantex was finally shut down in a laborious joint operation by Finnish, German and US authorities, Tether rushed into belated action, freezing $23 million. Similarly, it hurried to assist US authorities only after Trump had sent in special forces to kidnap the Venezuelan president, thus keeping the money flowing till the bitter end.

It shouldn’t be necessary to say it, but this isn’t supposed to be how anti-money laundering works. The whole point of global standards is that companies report their suspicions to the authorities and freeze accounts while those suspicions are investigated, so that assets can be confiscated if shown to be of criminal origin.

With Tether, however, it appears to be the other way round, that is keeping silent for as long as possible until the authorities compel them to act, which may help explain why USDT is proving to be so very popular. After all, who wouldn’t want a version of the dollar without any of the downsides?

Tether insists that it does cooperate with law enforcement agencies, and recently announced a partnership with the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime. “Supporting victims of human trafficking and helping prevent exploitation requires coordinated action across sectors,” said Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, in a recent joint statement with the UN agency. There is a grim irony to this, considering that USDT remains the currency of choice for the horrific scam farms of Southeast Asia, where huge numbers of trafficked people are abused if they fail to meet their fraud targets.

“Aside from [the messaging app] Telegram, the cryptocurrency Tether also plays a key role in scam markets — the popular “stablecoin” is the preferred tool for all of the markets’ money-laundering transactions,” noted this analysis from Wired. “Tether and Telegram’s efforts to combat the ballooning scam industry’s use of their tools is comparable to Southeast Asian law enforcement’s minimal, often performative shows of raiding scam compounds, only to allow them to rebuild and resume operation.” Or indeed Tether’s performative rush to freeze Venezuelan crypto holdings.

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An execution stayed: Why the Islamic Republic might cling to power in Iran

Jim Muir — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 10:17:07 +0000

The current wave of unrest is the most serious internal challenge to the Islamic Republic since it emerged after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1979.

But does it mean the regime is at its last gasp? Or will these events be added to a long list of inconclusive revolts that started well before the "Green Revolution" that followed the 2009 election, through to the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement in 2022?

The latest signs are that the protests may be waning. But there are at least three new elements that make this latest uprising different and which may rise again later even if the regime survives.

The protests were kicked off by the Bazaar in Tehran, the conservative mercantile class, normally the last to want to rock the boat. Like a bushfire, it spread with lightning speed to towns and cities across the country, fuelled by grievances that had surfaced in previous protests. So, the initial impulse came from the country's disastrous economic situation. With the national currency, the Rial, losing 84% of its value over the past year alone, inflation had brought crushing hardship to many despite the regime's efforts to apply bandaids to the gaping wounds. The involvement of the Bazaar gave the protests a new depth. The second novel element was the sudden emergence, around ten days into the uprising, of Reza Pahlavi, son of the ousted Shah, as a figurehead for the protests. "Javid Shah, Long live the Shah!" became one of the main battle cries of the protesters. The dissident movement lacked unity, leadership and a shared platform. The hope was that Reza Pahlavi could act as a unifying figure who might oversee a transition to a democratic future.

Adopting him may have been a sign of desperation, but it was also a red rag to the regime, a provocation impossible to ignore. A third new feature was the unprecedented level of outside interference, whose direction and intentions were far from clear at the outset. Fresh from abducting Nicolás Maduro and vowing to "run" Venezuela, Donald Trump seemed in the mood for further adventures, urging Iranian "patriots" to keep protesting, and telling them that help was on the way. Much would clearly depend on what form that "help" would take. But by tying it so clearly to Iran's internal situation rather than the nuclear or missile issues that underlay the 12-day Israeli-U.S. war on Iran in June last year, Trump's intervention was giving the uprising a dimension it lacked before.

All this amounted to what the regime clearly saw as a potentially mortal threat, and it reacted with unprecedented ferocity. Though the full picture has yet to emerge because of the communications blackout, there are horror stories of overflowing morgues, many gunshot wounds to eyes and genitals, machine guns mowing down crowds, and many other brutalities that seemed to succeed in tamping down the flames. Opposition human rights groups believe the death toll is closer to 12,000 than the 2,000 initially announced by the regime, which was already a good deal higher than for previous uprisings.

Left in a purely Iranian context without the U.S. wild card, the regime, although rattled, seems to have survived another round of challenge, though with consequences that may surface later. As Israeli military analysts had pointed out, the Iranian authorities had many repressive tools they had not yet deployed. There was no sign of a crack in the loyalty of the security forces or of serious splits within the government. Bear in mind that the Revolutionary Guards (the IRGC), in addition to their powerful military machine and auxiliaries (the Basij), also wield huge economic clout on which hundreds of thousands of families depend.

If this round has been crushed internally, there will surely be another round later unless there is a radical change. The decision by activists to adopt Reza Pahlavi did not reflect a widespread longing for the monarchy; it was rather a signal that the opposition had given up hope of changing the regime from within, and that overthrow was the only way forward, with Pahlavi as the only visible symbol of defiance to rally around. But even Donald Trump cast doubt on the level of support inside Iran for the aspiring "Crown Prince."

The regime's only hope of treating the dire economic crisis swiftly and undercutting protest would be to bring about a lifting of ever-tightening sanctions, which means coming to terms with the Americans. And that raises the question of U.S. (or Trump's) intentions. In the 12-day war last June, Israel clearly wanted to continue a campaign of detailed bombing that could have led to regime collapse, while Trump was content with one spectacular strike. His instinct is not to get embroiled in lengthy open-ended hostilities.

Regime change in Iran would very likely produce chaos, and perhaps fragmentation of the country as a unitary state. It is very hard to imagine a smooth transition to democracy, and very easy to see Kurdish, Arab, Azeri Turkish, Sunni Baluchi, and other minorities splintering away as vying factions struggle for power in Tehran. That may suit Israel's playbook for regional disintegration, but the transactional Trump likes to do deals with unified states; witness Syria, where Israel favours a weak, decentralized state, but the U.S. wants a unified, cooperative one under al-Sharaa; and Venezuela, where Trump has left the regime in place and spurned the opposition despite removing Maduro.

If it remains committed to some form of action against Iran, the U.S, would have to calibrate its moves with great care. Striking nuclear or missile facilities again would likely have little effect on the regime, but would provoke a reaction against U.S. bases in the Gulf that might not be as cosmetic and choreographed as it was last June. American strikes against political, military or security targets would have to be sustained and detailed or would end up being ineffective or counter-productive, and if effective, could produce collapse and chaos. Might Trump dream of doing a Maduro on the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i, leaving the IRGC and others to do a deal? Anything is possible. But in Iran, nothing is simple.

While Israel was standing by watchfully and hoping for a tough U.S. response, there were countervailing pressures from America's Gulf Arab allies, deeply unsettled by the crisis. They don't want to be hit by an angry Iranian neighbor, while the possibility of regime collapse and fragmentation opens up all kinds of prospects of regional instability and danger. The signs are that these representations have hit home with Trump.

But Iran remains a mess with no easy resolution. And it's not going to go away.

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Russia lost Venezuela. Putin won everything else

Natalia Antelava — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 08:31:01 +0000

Sections:

A warning from Manila

Putin's long game

⇡

Over the past week, the world has been fixated on Venezuela. On the spectacle, the shock, the fallout. We have been watching something else too: Southeast Asia.

The Philippines chairs ASEAN this year. For months, Manila has anchored its South China Sea strategy in international law — the same law a UN tribunal used to rule in the Philippines’ favor against Beijing’s territorial claims. It is the foundation of everything: diplomacy, deterrence, legitimacy.

Then last week, the Philippines’ closest ally carried out a military operation in Venezuela, captured a sitting head of state, bombed the capital, and announced it would “run the country” to secure access to oil reserves. International law scholars are already calling it one of the most serious violations of the UN Charter in decades.

In Manila, opposition politicians and foreign policy commentators are warning that this leaves the Philippines strategically exposed. Not because they sympathize with Nicolás Maduro, but because you cannot invoke international law against China on Monday when your ally demolishes it on Friday.

This is exactly the vulnerability the Kremlin has spent years trying to manufacture: a world in which Western appeals to law sound selective, self-serving, and hollow.

For decades, Vladimir Putin has worked to exploit the gap between what the West says and what it does. Between the values it preaches and the compromises it makes. Between the “rules-based order” it defends and the shortcuts it takes when those rules become inconvenient.

In 2019, Fiona Hill — then Donald Trump’s Russia advisor — testified that Moscow had floated the idea of a Venezuela–Ukraine “swap.” If Washington wanted Russia out of its backyard, perhaps it should reconsider its position on Ukraine. At the time, many Western analysts dismissed this as bluster or fantasy.

What was missed is that this idea was not confined to back channels.

Around the same time, Russian state media was openly socializing the same logic — discussing Venezuela and Ukraine as interchangeable pieces on a geopolitical chessboard, normalizing the language of trade-offs and swaps. Not as scandal. Not as provocation. As realism.

Russia’s message was clear: this is how grown-up power works.

The swap was never really about Venezuela and Ukraine. It was about training audiences — at home and abroad — to accept that smaller countries are negotiable. That sovereignty is transactional. That influence is something you barter.

Putin was playing a long game.

Nearly seven years later, Donald Trump invoked the Monroe Doctrine and sent Delta Force into Caracas. Russia may have lost a client state. But it gained something more valuable: validation of its operating thesis that this is, in fact, how the world works.

Hours before the raid, Nicolás Maduro was hosting a senior Chinese envoy, discussing energy deals. Among his last public words before capture: “It’s the year of the horse and we gallop onward in perfect union.” Now China’s UN ambassador is denouncing “serious violations” at the Security Council. Meanwhile, in London, Keir Starmer — a former human rights lawyer who calls international law his “lodestar” — is biting his tongue to keep Trump onside. In Southeast Asia, diplomats are privately calling Venezuela a “dangerous precedent.”

Many pundits argue that Venezuela humiliates Putin by showing he is an unreliable ally. I think this misses the point.

Putin’s goal was never to be reliable. It was to prove that reliability, like sovereignty, is conditional. That the “rules-based order” was always just American hegemony with better marketing. That when push comes to shove, power trumps principle — and everyone knows it.

The logic is brutally simple: You cannot defend Kyiv’s sovereignty while “occupying” Caracas.
You cannot invoke international law against Russia while kidnapping heads of state yourself.
You cannot lecture Beijing about rules while rewriting them in real time.

The piece we are sharing with you today was written a year ago, on the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It traces how Putin dismantled Western moral authority step by step. What looked like isolated episodes — Georgia, Crimea, Syria, election interference — were in fact components of a single strategy: to expose and widen the gap between Western democratic ideals and how they are practiced.

That gap was not created by the Kremlin. But it has been effectively weaponized.

Democracy, individual rights, and the rule of law remain powerful ideas. They still mobilize people. They still inspire resistance. But from Manila to Caracas to Kyiv, we are now living in a world where the West’s failure to defend its own values has turned a Russian autocrat’s worldview into a global reality.

If this feels sudden, it isn’t. The piece below shows how carefully this moment was prepared.

Essay by Natalia Antelava

Our 2025 story, republished

How the West lost the war it thought it had won

On the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has reason to celebrate. He has scripted a new ending to the Cold War by exploiting the gap between Western democratic ideals and their practice

By Natalia Antelava

24 February 2025

Three years ago this week, as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, an extraordinary wave of global solidarity swept across the world. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets in cities from London to Sydney. Tech giants blocked Russian state media. Even Switzerland abandoned its neutrality to freeze Russian assets. Only five countries voted against a United Nations resolution calling for Russia to withdraw its troops from Ukrainian territory, compared to the 141 who voted in favor of it.

Today, that solidarity has been replaced by something no one could have imagined in February, 2022: the United States has refused to back an annual resolution presented to the UN General Assembly that condemns Russian aggression and demands the removal of troops. Instead, the leader of the world's most powerful democracy now repeats the Kremlin's false narrative that Ukraine started the war.

This stunning reversal of the U.S. position represents Vladimir Putin's greatest victory - not in the battlefields of Ukraine but in a war that most of us thought ended over 30 years ago: the Cold War.

Putin's win is no accident. For decades, he has been explicit about his ultimate goal: to return to the world of 1945, when the leaders of the U.S.S.R., U.S. and Britain sat around a table in Yalta to divide the world between them. The invasion of Ukraine three years ago was never about Ukraine - it was about reclaiming lost power and forcing the West back to the negotiating table. Putin’s success stems from the collective failure of the Western establishment, convinced of its own invincibility, to recognize his systematic dismantling of the order they claimed to defend.

It would be too simple to blame Donald Trump or any single political leader for finally giving Putin his seat at the table. This failure belongs to the entire Western establishment - including media organizations, think tanks, universities, corporations, and civil society institutions.

The values the West claimed for itself - defense of individual rights, rule of law, democratic values - were worth fighting for. But having “won” the Cold War, Western establishments grew complacent. They assumed the moral high ground was unassailable, dismissing those who warned it could be lost.

When Putin called the Soviet collapse "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," Western analysts dismissed it as rhetoric. When he told George W. Bush that Ukraine was "not a country," they treated it as diplomatic bluster. When he used his 2007 Munich speech to declare ideological war on the Western-led world order, they saw a tantrum.

Each subsequent action - from the invasion of Georgia in 2008, to the annexation of Crimea in 2014, from the downing of MH17, also in 2014, to the killing of opponents throughout Putin’s reign - was treated as an isolated incident rather than part of a carefully orchestrated strategy. When Georgian leaders warned that Ukraine would be next, the Obama administration ignored them, dispatching Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Geneva to meet her Russian counterpart and present him with the infamous "reset" button. When Baltic and Polish leaders pleaded for increased NATO deployments and warned about the Nord Stream pipeline's security implications, they were dismissed as paranoid.

"The Western Europeans pooh-poohed and patronized us for these last 30 years," former Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski told Politico in 2022. "For years they were patronizing us about our attitude: 'Oh, you know, you over-nervous, over-sensitive Central Europeans are prejudiced against Russia.'"

Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Three years later, the global solidarity that this invasion sparked has been replaced by Western accommodation of Putin's ambitions. Maximilian Clarke/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.

The lost victory

Meanwhile, inside Russia, Putin was perfecting the playbook that would eventually transform the West itself. His ideologues, like Alexander Dugin, weren't just discussing Russia's future - they were designing a blueprint for dismantling liberal democracy from within. Dugin, and the influential Izborsky Club think tank, understood that the key to defeating Western values wasn't to challenge them head-on, but to turn their contradictions against themselves.

It wasn't that Dugin had anything particularly compelling to offer. His vision of a post-liberal world order where traditional values trump individual rights was hardly original. But when he sat down with Tucker Carlson in April last year to present Putin as the defender of traditional values against the decadent West, his message resonated with conservatives because too many Westerners felt that liberal values had become hollow promises.

Many studies, like this from the Pew Research Center, showed that Americans were rapidly losing faith in their institutions. Rather than addressing these grievances, the Western establishment preferred to blame disinformation and foreign interference, dismissing citizens’ concerns and creating resentments that Putin proved masterful at exploiting.

Putin was also methodically building a global coalition that extended far beyond the West. While Western media focused on Russia's influence operations in Europe and America, Moscow was crafting a different narrative for the Global South. In Africa, Russian embassies bombarded newsrooms with op-eds positioning Russia as the successor to the Soviet Union's anti-colonial legacy. The message was simple but effective: Russia was fighting Western imperialism, not waging colonial war.

https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1785066534995714067

Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin speaks to Tucker Carlson in 2024. Long dismissed as a marginal figure by Western analysts, Dugin's ideas found a receptive audience as Western establishments failed to address growing public disillusionment.

Engineering the West's downfall

While Western governments spent billions setting up fact-checking initiatives and disinformation monitoring centers - always reacting, always one step behind - Putin was methodically building loose, agile networks that tapped into genuine popular anger about Western hypocrisy and double standards.

Putin's triumph lies not in offering better ideas or values - democracy, individual rights, and rule of law remain powerful ideals. His genius was in exploiting the growing gap between these principles and people's lived experiences"

The West's reactive stance allowed Putin to continuously set the agenda. The vast "counter-disinformation" industry - now effectively destroyed by Trump’s aid cuts- focused on debunking individual claims but consistently missed the bigger picture. From RT Arabic's dominant position in Lebanon to coordinated social media campaigns across Africa, Putin crafted narratives that positioned Russia as the champion of all those who felt betrayed and marginalized by the Western-led order.

"Russia's message lands well and softly," one editor from Johannesburg told me during a gathering of African editors in Nairobi in 2022. "The challenge for our team is to objectively navigate overwhelmingly pro-Russian public sentiment."

The success of this strategy is now undeniable. And yet, Putin offers little in return for his repudiation of the West. Democracy, individual rights, and rule of law remain powerful ideals. His genius was in exploiting the growing gap between these principles and people's lived experiences, a gap that Western establishments proved unwilling or unable to address.

This blind spot - coupled with the West’s inability to imagine losing - became the so-called free world’s greatest vulnerability. While liberal establishments were congratulating themselves on the "end of history," Putin was methodically working to rewrite its ending. While they dismissed the appeal of traditionalist values as backwards and parochial, he was building a global alliance of like-minded leaders and movements.

Putin's victory was never inevitable. At each step, Western institutions had opportunities to recognize and counter his strategy. Instead, their conviction in their own righteousness led them to consistently underestimate both the threat and the extent of their own failures.

Today, as Russian state media hosts celebrate their triumph and Trump prepares to negotiate Ukraine's surrender, the scale of Putin's achievement is breathtaking. He has succeeded where generations of Soviet leaders failed: not just in resisting Western influence but in fundamentally transforming the West itself.

The Cold War’s new ending is exactly as Putin scripted it. Not with the triumph of Western liberal democracy, but with its possibly fatal weakening. The Kremlin's guiding framework—where power is truth, principles are weakness, and cronyism is the only real ideology—now defines the White House as well.The question isn't how we got here - Putin told us exactly where he was taking us. The question is whether we can finally abandon our arrogant certainties long enough to understand what happened - and what comes next.

Your Early Warning System

Georgian nightmare: did a government knowingly poison its people?

Masho Lomashvili — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 14:00:00 +0000

On December 1, I, and thousands of my fellow Georgians, found out we might have been poisoned by our own government. The toxin was likely a chemical introduced in World War I and supposedly phased out by the 1930s: ‘bromobenzyl cyanide’, also known as ‘camite’.

We learned this from a BBC documentary. The government didn't admit any wrongdoing, let alone apologize. It didn't even launch a credible investigation. Instead, it followed a playbook now familiar across the world's democracies-in-decline: deny everything, attack the messenger, and punish the truth-tellers. Within days, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze threatened to sue the BBC — citing Donald Trump's recent lawsuit as precedent and calling the documentary “a cheap provocation orchestrated by foreign intelligence services.”

The State Security Service summoned Georgian doctors, protesters, and NGO workers who had spoken to the BBC, interrogating them under procedures typically reserved for serious crimes. The charge: assisting a foreign organization in activities harmful to Georgia's “national interests.” This kind of aggressive denial isn’t unique to Georgia. In 2023, for instance, the Indian government banned a two-part BBC documentary which explored the rise of Narendra Modi, including accusations that when he was chief minister of Gujarat, he enabled the slaughter of hundreds of Muslims in statewide riots. The Indian government described the documentary, in language strikingly similar to that used by the Georgian government, as “a propaganda piece designed to push a particular discredited narrative.” Just last month, the White House said the BBC was a “leftist propaganda machine.”

But the inconvenient truth is that I was there when the Georgian government sprayed us with chemicals. And I know how it felt.

Let’s rewind. Over a year ago, in November 2024, when the Georgian government announced that it was halting the constitutionally-promised integration process with the European Union, hundreds of thousands Georgians spontaneously flooded the main avenue in the capital Tbilisi. The government's announcement had taken the protesters by surprise. But, in turn, the ruling party, the Georgian Dream, clearly did not anticipate the size of the protests or the mood of the protesters.

I had left my house expecting another midsize protest. For a month, Georgians had been protesting against an election that had brought Georgian Dream back to power and that the country’s president at the time, Salomé Zourabichvili, said was a “Russian special operation.” I got there early and the crowd was nowhere near its peak, but as soon as I arrived, I knew this was something different. There were no speakers on platforms, no pre-planned messages brandished on placards. Instead, thousands of people stood together, some banging on metal barricades around the parliament building, and chanted ‘revolution’. You could feel the anger and frustration in the atmosphere.

I called a friend at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. “They are mobilizing all of us,” he warned me. “Even from other cities. Everyone’s been told it’s a red alert.”

What followed was a long, relentless night.

Police officers using water cannons on demonstrators on Dec. 1, 2024. Photo by Giorgi Arjevanidze/AFP via Getty Images

Crowd control quickly became punishment — an endless rain of teargas, watercanon and pepper spray, a storm of police beatings and fractured bones. On the first night of the protests alone, 207 people were taken to hospitals around the city. The protesters, most of whom had no protection, would scatter but gather again. Over and over for more than a week.

My friends, acquaintances, and protesters I have interviewed, often recall these days as a fever dream. Almost all of them have a dramatic story of what it felt like to be on the receiving end of the government crackdown. It was, agrees everyone, unprecedented. See, Georgians are no strangers to protests and neither to government crackdowns. But this time, everything was on steroids. Beatings by the Special Forces were savage and aided by uniformless, government-hired thugs. Rustaveli Avenue, the main drag, was covered in a thick fog of tear gas, the water canons seemed to have an endless supply of liquid that burned your skin as soon as it made contact with it. The smell of chemicals lingered in the air.

Protesters who managed to avoid being physically beaten, but couldn’t avoid the teargas and other measures, talked about experiencing violent coughing fits, spells of lightheadedness and nausea. In more severe cases, protesters passed out, vomited, had nose bleeds and a persistent skin irritation. Many people described these symptoms on social media, even as they kept going out each night to protest. “We were soaked, it was freezing, and I couldn’t breathe,” Tata Khundadze told me about being hit by sprays from the police water cannons. “My skin felt like it was on fire. It became too much — I lost consciousness.”

In the days that followed, Khundadze shared photographs online that showed a severe red rash on her hands and face. She developed open wounds on her skin that began to bleed. For several weeks after the incident, she continued to vomit, sometimes throwing up traces of blood. She thought maybe her capillaries had burst. “But in reality,” she says now, “who knows what happened, what we inhaled, what went into our lungs and what did not.”

Many protesters, including Khundadze, speculated that the government was using an unknown teargas spray. Local news outlets started asking questions. Doctors called on the government to ease the measures, some even signed a petition demanding the disclosure of the chemicals used during the crackdown. The government denied any wrongdoing. But public speculation continued. More people spoke about suffering prolonged effects, but without access to police records or chemical analyses, their suspicions remained unprovable.

The story stalled.

Then, this month BBC Eye released its hour-long documentary. After harrowing accounts from protesters about police brutality, the documentary turns its attention to what was in those water cannons. We hear from protesters, activists, lawyers and doctors who tried to sound the alarm. The viewer is introduced to Dr. Konstantine Chakhunashvili who, along with his brother, surveyed nearly 350 affected protesters. “Last year, on the 11th of December, after I left administrative detention, I found out that many of my friends were still experiencing nose bleeds,” he told me. “I wondered why.” Konstantine and his brother’s study found several irregularities compared to the effects of conventional riot control agents. But they couldn’t pinpoint what caused the irregularities.

The documentary-makers spoke to Lasha Shergelashvili, the former head of weaponry for Georgia's riot police. Shergelashvili, who left the ministry in protest after the brutal crackdowns, claimed that he tested a mysterious compound in 2009, before Georgian Dream came to power three years later. He described its effects as "probably 10 times" stronger than regular teargas and recommended against its use. Anonymous current officers confirmed that the same compound Shergelashvili tested in 2009 was used during the 2024 crackdown.

And then a key document surfaced. The BBC obtained a copy of the inventory of the Special Tasks Department, from 2019, listing two unnamed substances: “Chemical liquid UN1710” and “Chemical powder UN3439,” with instructions for mixing them. UN1710 is identified as a solvent. UN3439 takes longer. It’s a hazmat classification, not a chemical name. Experts are consulted, options eliminated. Eventually, only one substance fits the description: bromobenzyl cyanide — a WWI–era chemical agent.

While watching the documentary, I felt a strange mixture of emotions. I was angry but not in any way shocked or surprised. We discussed the documentary among friends and family, agreeing how disturbing the whole thing was. Then, in true Georgian spirit, we made jokes about it.

Tellingly, though, no one around me, including supporters of Georgian Dream, questioned whether the ruling party was capable of such evil.

"The Regime is poisoning us with chemical weapons" — similar stencils have started appearing in Tbilisi and other cities across Georgia. Illustration by Anna Jibladze

The government’s response was fast and furious. Officials and government-affiliated media dismissed the documentary as fake news spread by some shadowy global “deep state.” But their denials were inconsistent. The current minister of internal affairs denied the existence of ‘camite’ in their arsenal. But the minister at the time of the protests admitted that the government had had access to camite since 2009, though it did not use it. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Kobakhidze confirmed that there was indeed something in the water but refused to share what it was, before calling on the UK government to apologize on behalf of the BBC.

The Georgian government did launch an investigation into the “abuse of official authority.” It took barely a week for the investigation to conclude that the water was laced with a standard teargas agent. Even discounting the speed, the investigation was farcical — why did the government need an investigation to “find out” what chemicals it was spraying on protesters?

Meanwhile, a separate investigation was initiated into the people who had taken part in the BBC documentary. Konstantine Chakhunashvili, the doctor, was one of the main targets. Government spin doctors said the BBC’s conclusions around the use of camite rested entirely on his findings and were therefore not valid. But Chakhunashvili’s study never attempted to narrow down which chemicals caused the effects he had observed. With the government’s insistence that the documentary is the product of a foreign plot, it will likely be used to further limit the access of foreign journalists to Georgia, while tightening domestic media laws. And Chakhunashvili fears that academia won’t go unpunished either.

For me, the main thing the documentary gave me was some validation. As a journalist, I spent every day of the protests standing right on the dividing line between protesters and special forces. I inhaled absolutely every single chemical released onto Rustaveli Avenue that week and was directly hit by the spray from water cannons twice. On one of those nights, when I got back home at seven in the morning, my whole body was burning. I stood in the shower for an hour pouring water, a saline solution and even milk over myself, only to go to bed with my \ body still on fire. I coughed for months onward and still, a year later, I don’t feel like my breathing is back to normal. But now I know, I am just one of the people who suffered prolonged and mysterious after-effects, many of whom are now dealing with much more serious lung and heart ailments.

Two weeks after the revelations, it’s clear — whether specifically camite or some other hazardous compound — chemicals were used that caused injuries far beyond approved riot-control standards. Our speculations have been justified. Yet, with little hope for a proper international investigation, we are left in limbo, still wondering if the symptoms we felt were caused by sheer exhaustion and overwhelming amounts of gas and pepper spray, or if indeed, a World War 1-era chemical is, or was at some point, inside our bodies.

For people whose lives and health have been drastically altered by the events, it means that they will have to continue spending endless days and money, looking for medical answers on their own.

I am still unsure whether Georgian Dream understood exactly what they were doing. I think they were aware of at least the immediate effects of the mixture, but I cannot be certain that they fully planned to poison protesters with a chemical weapon. When a government is driven solely by its desire to hold onto power, its judgement becomes clouded. When you see fellow citizens with different, opposing views as enemies, limits dissolve. When there is no check on your actions and your power, you take reckless decisions. And one day, when you endanger the lives of your compatriots, your lucky streak, your immunity, might run out.

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Making corruption great again

Oliver Bullough — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 14:00:00 +0000

We all know corruption is bad for a society as a whole, which is why there are laws against it. But individual companies or people personally benefit from paying or taking bribes, so what’s stopping them: the fear of getting caught, or a desire to do business properly? Normally that’s a question we can’t definitively answer, but this spring the U.S. government — by pausing enforcement of its main anti-corruption law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) — gave us a perfect natural experiment.

“On the day of the executive order, former FCPA targets whose stocks are publicly traded experienced returns on equity markets that were about 0.69 percentage points higher than what would have been expected from stock market trends. The effects cumulated substantively, resulting in capitalisation gains for the portfolio of past targets of corporate corruption cases of about $39 billion and outsized returns to shareholders,” found three academics in a new paper titled ‘Making Bribery Popular Again?’.

The conclusion is clear. Investors thought that the threat to the future profitability of the 261 companies previously targeted for enforcement action was caused not by the corruption itself. What the investors didn’t like was the prospect of those companies being prosecuted for corruption. Once that threat was removed, they were happy to invest regardless of possible corruption. Interestingly, the average increase in the market capitalisation for the companies — $160 million — matched the size of the average fine previously imposed under the FCPA. Truly, capitalism is a magical thing.

To say that corrupt people and/or companies do well out of corruption may not sound particularly controversial, but this has important implications for how policies should be structured in a world where an important country has decided to stop doing the right thing. Enforcement matters and, if the U.S. has stepped back, everyone else needs to step forward.

The paper’s publication coincided with a report from Reuters looking at the impact on tax enforcement of the U.S. now that the government has sacked loads of tax enforcement agents and attorneys. Funnily enough, it isn’t great. Prosecutions have declined by 27%.

Again at the risk of being obvious: if you want people to be honest and to pay their taxes, you need to prosecute people that aren’t. Alternatively of course, if you don’t want either of those things, you can pause enforcement of key legislation, and sack everyone involved. After all, why bother going to all the trouble of changing the law when it’s so much easier to stop enforcing it? From there it’s a short hop to going full Kremlin and selectively enforcing the law against your enemies. Happy days.

It’s a sign of how grim global public debate has become that it’s genuinely refreshing that the UK’s new anti-corruption strategy so straightforwardly comes out and says corruption is a bad thing, and that the country will work harder to fight it. It’s a pretty good document, all being said, though it could be far more ambitious in how it tackles lobbying, abusive lawsuits, and conflicts of interest.

I was also sorry not to see firm commitments to toughen up rules around electoral funding: at the very least, there should be caps on donations, restrictions on the use of shell companies to disguise the identity of donors, and limitations on how foreign companies can route money into UK politics. “The strategy acknowledges that restoring trust in government is ‘the great test of our era’ yet it fails to address the elephant in the room,” said Daniel Bruce, the chief executive of Transparency International UK.

This is important. It doesn’t much matter how good the laws you pass to protect a country from dirty money are, if you don’t also secure its commanding heights against takeover by corrupt or ill-intentioned actors. Because they can then buy electoral victory and cease the enforcement of all those excellent laws, just like Trump did with the FCPA.

So it’s urgent that European democracies take steps to keep corrupting wealth out of their politics before it’s too late. We are accustomed to stories about Russian money, or Chinese money undermining democracy, but the White House’s national security strategy now explicitly states that America too intends to support European fascist (“patriotic”) parties. Liberal democracy is under attack from all sides and needs to get a lot better at defending itself.

An anti-corruption Oscars?

This is all a bit depressing, but it is the festive season so let’s cheer ourselves up a little. There are countless people toiling away at considerable cost to themselves to reduce corruption and to protect democracy, and they deserve a lot more recognition than they get. I’ve been talking to some friends about the best way to provide that, and obviously prizes are one idea.

The Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) has traditionally given an award to the “Person of the Year in Organized Crime and Corruption” to highlight villains, such as Bashar Al-Assad in 2024, or Danske Bank in 2018. But it has clearly decided that there is already more than enough irony in the world now that Donald Trump has won the first ever FIFA peace prize, so it’s changed focus and collected nominations for “Anti-Crime and Corruption Heroes” instead. Winners are due to be selected this month. This is a good initiative, and I’m looking forward to seeing who they choose.

Elsewhere, there’s the Allard Prize and the ACE award (you may have questions about an anti-corruption prize supported by Qatar, considering some of the ways its government goes about its business, but the list of previous winners includes lots of good people). It would be nice, however, if there was something ritzy and glamorous, an integrity Oscars where people committed to making the world better could be celebrated like Hollywood A-listers.

So, this is where you come in. Send in ideas. How would it work? Who should be nominated? Who should decide the winners? What should they win? Which top-end venue should host the ceremony? Should Ricky Gervais be brought in to do an incredibly dull comedy ‘roast’? Should we invite an oligarch and/or financial institution to sponsor it in return for naming rights (“the HSBC Anti-Corruption Champion of the Year”)? How often should President Trump win before we give someone else a turn?

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Can Britain clean up its overseas tax paradises?

Oliver Bullough — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 14:00:00 +0000

A century ago, British statesmen discussed creating a mighty Imperial Parliament, in which every part of their globe-bestriding empire would have representatives in London. That never happened and instead we have the significantly-less-glorious Joint Ministerial Council, in which leaders of the various British territories too small, too strategic or too volcanic to have yet become independent come to the UK and discuss things.

The British constitution is a ramshackle thing, bashed together over the centuries, and technically the government in London could just tell these Overseas Territories (OTs) what to do. But it prefers to be democratic about it, so the JMC is what we have instead. It matters because several of these OTs have long been among the world’s most egregious tax/secrecy havens – the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Bermuda were the top three in 2024’s Corporate Tax Haven Index – and it would be nice if they stopped.

Back in 2018, two backbench MPs persuaded parliament to pass a law forcing the OTs to open up their corporate registries, so as to stop them selling shell companies to the world’s financial villains, but progress has since been slow.

“If any Overseas Territory continues to defy the will of the U.K. Parliament, the Government should be prepared to escalate its response. All legal and constitutional options should be on the table to ensure these commitments are delivered in full and without further delay,” said Transparency International last month.

Not all the OTs are being defiant – Saint Helena is doing great, as are the Falkland Islands -- but most of them are not havens for shell companies so they’re not relevant. The one that matters most is the British Virgin Islands, and it is not knuckling down at all. To access the BVI’s register, you need a “legitimate interest”, and the owner of the company you’re looking at will be tipped off and be allowed to object.

“This mechanism could expose journalists or civil society organisations to physical or legal intimidation by those looking to hide their identity. It also provides the opportunity for those being investigated to liquidate or move illicitly obtained assets to avoid detection,” said TI (which also had other objections).

It’s hard to overstate quite how central the BVI’s shell companies have been to globalised financial crime. Impatience with its foot-dragging is completely understandable, but – at the risk of being that person – we do need to recognise that things are more complicated than they at first seem if we want a durable solution.

Almost three-fifths of the BVI’s budget comes directly from the fees paid by companies listed on its corporate registry, and the law firms and other services that work for those companies are a significant local employer. Previous transparency drives have clearly affected the islands’ attractiveness: it had more than 480,000 companies on its registry back in 2014, which was before the British government insisted that its police could access the database. It only has 360,000 now, and monthly incorporations have dropped from 12,000 to 7,000.

Before the BVI became a tax haven, it was extremely poor, and its current prosperity is entirely due to the attractiveness of its shell companies. Its politicians therefore are as reluctant to embrace transparency as a petrostate would be to join the global net zero movement, and no amount of finger wagging is going to change their minds.

Besides, London’s chances of having its wagging finger heeded were really not helped by the fact that the 2018 vote in parliament applied to Britain’s Caribbean tax havens but not to European counterparts like Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man. The MPs’ intentions may not have been racist, but the outcome was, which unsurprisingly rankled people in the BVI.

British politicians can of course tell OTs to find a new way to make a living because enabling kleptocracy is reprehensible; but then BVI politicians can reasonably reply that the only reason they were so poor to begin with was because Britain enslaved their ancestors, failed to compensate freed slaves, and then followed up with 150 years of neglect.

The solution to me is a genuinely just transition in which the U.K. recognises that, because it encouraged its OTs to become tax havens in the past in order to save its own budget, it now has a responsibility to help them find a new way to make a living in the future. This will take time, require thought/compromise, and cost money, but – unlike the current approach – it might actually work.

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Terrorism’s crypto financiers & Trump’s clemency habit

Oliver Bullough — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 14:00:00 +0000

It is bad for a financial institution to be convicted of helping to launder money, but it is catastrophic to be convicted of helping to finance terrorism. This is why the civil case recently launched in North Dakota against Binance, in which the crypto giant is accused of helping “Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Iran’s IRGC-QF, to move and conceal over one billion dollars through its global platform”, is so significant.

The suit has been brought on behalf of 306 American victims of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel, and alleges that Binance accounts transferred $300 million to Hamas and other terrorist organisations, and received $700 million from them, figures that dwarf the sums detailed in the criminal prosecution of Binance that led to its $4.3 billion fine two years ago.

“This was not a compliance lapse, it was a business model,” said Jonathan Missner, managing partner of Stein Mitchell Beato & Missner LLP, the law firm behind the case. “Our investigation shows that Binance built systems designed to evade oversight, using its off-chain network and weak controls to move enormous sums for sanctioned groups. This platform became a conduit for financing murder, kidnappings, and rocket attacks. The families deserve justice—and the public deserves transparency.”

In a previous case brought under the same legislation, Jordan’s Arab Bank was sued and – despite procedural wrangling that went on for years -- ended up settling with the victims for an undisclosed but significant sum of money.

Anything that forces Binance to start taking its responsibilities to victims of crime as seriously as it takes its willingness to accept money from perpetrators of crime is a good thing. And if you want to see how widespread those crimes can be, read this excellent investigation from the ICIJ which finds crypto platforms to be “awash with dirty money.” But there are always particular challenges around terrorism funding, which can have perverse outcomes.

In contrast to drug cartels, for instance, terrorists move relatively small amounts of money, which means financial institutions have to monitor a far larger array of transactions if they want to protect themselves from a lawsuit. Because terrorists use banks in the same way as anyone else does, what this tends to mean is that very large numbers of ordinary people lose their accounts just so compliance departments can be sure to sweep out the terrorists.

The result is the under-discussed phenomenon of debanking, which overwhelmingly affects Muslims and charities targeted towards Muslim beneficiaries.

“Humanitarian charities are facing banking barriers because banks are adverse to giving large transactions to countries they deem a risk, like Syria,” said Abdulsami Arjumand, a senior executive at the U.K.’s Muslim Charities' Forum. “Banks determined to avoid any heavy fines from the US treasury or the FCA act with very strict risk appetite… There is a balance to strike between securing aid and fighting financial crime. At the moment, we are far from that equilibrium.”

People excluded from traditional finance by this kind of inherent unfairness have turned to cryptocurrencies, and it would be a shame if the Binance case were to lead to the same injustices being imported into the crypto world as well.

A sidenote to the Binance case is the fact that the company’s founder – Changpeng “CZ” Zhao – was recently pardoned by Donald Trump who claimed that Zhao was the victim of an anti-crypto witch hunt by Joe Biden.

In reality, he was jailed (and his company fined $4.3 billion) because of Binance’s complete failure to maintain any kind of anti-money laundering programme. At the time, one Binance compliance staffer wrote: “We need a banner ‘is washing drug money too hard these days - come to binance we got cake for you’.” And though Zhao stepped down and Binance pledged to change its ways, it appears to have done little to stem the tide of dirty money flowing through its systems.

Zhao’s hard-to-explain pardon once again draws attention to the peculiar folkway of the U.S. pardon process. The presidential ability to pardon people derives from the States’ origins as British colonies. It is something that kings could do back in the 1770s. Technically, King Charles III can still pardon anyone he likes, though he almost never does, which is something else he doesn’t have in common with Donald Trump.

Of course there have been controversial pardons in the past, but often they come at the very end of a presidential term. Trump seems to be unusual in his willingness to hand them out this early. It must have been particularly demoralising for the prosecutors who worked hard to secure a conviction against David Gentile, only to see him released after serving just two weeks of a seven-year sentence for defrauding more than 10,000 people.

Binance denies any wrongdoing related to the Hamas case. Still, it does raise the interesting prospect of Trump having to defend his decision to pardon a man subsequently ruled to have helped Hamas move its money. But then, CZ was already convicted of helping Iranians, Syrians, North Koreans and the Russian occupiers of Ukraine move money in defiance of sanctions, and Trump hasn’t faced any backlash for pardoning him for all of that, so perhaps not.

A plague on both their houses

In unrelated but entertaining crypto news, there’s a spat brewing between the hip young dudes at Tether, and the boring old squares at Standard and Poor’s, after the rating agency cut its rating for the stablecoin issuer to its lowest possible level, which I thought was fair comment but which Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino got rather irate about. “Tether is living proof that the traditional financial system is so broken that it's becoming feared by the emperors with no clothes,” he wrote in one of a number of posts on X in which he demonstrated how little he cared about S&P’s opinion by talking a lot about it. He later posted a clip from the movie ‘The Big Short’, in which a rating agency employee defends the absurdly high ratings given to mortgage bonds before the 2007-8 financial crisis. That too, it must be said, is fair comment. It would be nice – rather like a rugby match between South Africa and England – if we could find a way for both Tether and S&P to lose.

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Tether, Trump and the twisty road to transparency

Oliver Bullough — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 14:00:00 +0000

A year ago, Britain’s National Crime Agency revealed how they had busted a giant Russian-run money laundering scheme, which was helping oligarchs, propaganda outlets and spy agencies to dodge sanctions. Now, it’s back with an update on its efforts that is both hopeful and alarming.

It’s good that they’ve managed to trace the network further, linking it to Russian-Moldovan-Israeli tycoon Ilan Shor and a bank in Kyrgyzstan, but also worrying that the organisation appears still be to be functioning. Two cash couriers were busted carrying around £2 million each, which also does not suggest the organisers are too stressed: you don’t carry that much money in one go if you’re concerned about being caught.

The core of the scheme is that the money launderers collect cash from criminals all over Europe, and swap it for the cryptocurrency USDT (I published this about the issue earlier this year), and so it remains. “Tether, from what we can see, at least, appears to still be the majority token used by these networks,” a law enforcement source said.

Perhaps the most interesting difference between the boring old banks and the exciting new crypto industry is that, if a boring old bank had been so deeply involved in moving so much criminal wealth, it would have been fined a nine-figure sum and forced to radically change its ways. But Tether suffers no such indignities. Thanks to the inflation of the Trump crypto bubble, Tether made profits of $10 billion in the first three quarters of 2025, and is still coining it, despite the publicity around this operation and many other allegations of money laundering.

It now owns 116 tonnes of gold, which is more than Greece, South Korea or the UAE. Last week Tether spent a billion dollars on Bitcoin, though that didn’t do much to arrest the slide in the Bitcoin price, which as I write this has dropped by a third since its peak in early October, and erased all of its gains since Trump’s 2024 election win. Tether also claims to own $135 billion of US government debt. So, to cut a long story short, it’s basically as potent as a reasonably-sized central bank, and doesn’t have to care what a law enforcement agency thinks of it.

“Look, you can point to various different parts of the global crypto infrastructure where you would say, ‘wouldn't it be great if you could rain fire upon them?’ And me, as a law enforcement professional, would say, ‘yeah, it'd be brilliant, right?’ But obviously, I don't have that capability at my fingertips,” the same law enforcement source said, which was pretty funny but also depressing.

Obviously, there’s not much anyone can do to limit crypto while Trump controls all branches of the U.S. government and his family members continue to do so well out of it, but it would be interesting to see what might happen if the Democrats won a majority in one or both of the houses of Congress, considering some of the questions they’re already asking.

“Every time a governance token is sold, three-quarters of that money goes directly to President Trump and his family, even for sales to entities linked to North Korea and Russia,” said Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jack Reed in a letter to the Department of Justice. That’s the kind of allegation that could lead to some spicy committee hearings.

A small step towards transparency

Dr David Richard Hull gained a small footnote in the history books last week when he became the first person to verify his identity on Companies House, the UK’s corporate registry, which is trying hard to move from being part of the problem to part of the solution (at least The Dark Money Files’ Graham Barrow said he was, and Graham Barrow does tend to know).

For a long time, it was generally reckoned that the easier and cheaper it was to create a company, the more vibrant and dynamic your economy would be, and in few places was this principle applied more enthusiastically than in the UK. This unleashed a tsunami of shell-company-powered money laundering, with criminals buying British corporations for less than the price of a round of drinks, and using them to hide their identities.

Eventually, officials realised that rampant financial crime was actually bad for the economy, rather than beneficial, so brought in new checks on the identities of those creating companies. There is a lot of mess to sweep away before the corporate registry is truly cleaned up, but this is a good start, though it would be even better if some of the more far-flung bits of British territory could be persuaded to embrace transparency as enthusiastically.

There are similar registration rules in most European Union countries, although their registries are not necessarily open to everyone, as this survey from Transparency International shows. Of course, the United States has given up on its efforts to open up corporate registries, despite convincing arguments that shell companies from lax states like Nevada are a clear threat to national security.

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Welcome to the age of exile

Natalia Antelava — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 13:07:17 +0000

Sara Kontar stands at the Lebanese-Syrian border taking photographs, knowing she cannot cross the line that separates her from her country. The French asylum law that saved her life is also a trap. A return to Syria would mean losing everything she's built in exile. And staying safe in Europe means an ongoing, undetermined separation from the place and people that made her. “I never stop feeling like I'm traveling,” she says about a life lived in apparently permanent transit. "This feeling never stops."

Halfway around the world, an exiled Uyghur linguist opens his laptop, connecting to students scattered across three continents for a language lesson that could have gotten him killed back home in Xinjiang. Abduweli Ayup spent 15 months in a Chinese prison for the crime of teaching children their mother tongue. Now he continues to teach, but the surveillance systems that drove him from his home have learned to follow him in exile.

Meanwhile, in rural Europe, a teenager felt so alienated by environmental catastrophe and urban modernity that he joined an off-grid settlement promising a return to "natural" living. His new community, with its disturbing historical “blood and soil” echoes, operates with the same transnational infrastructure as those fleeing persecution: Telegram networks, international gatherings, dispersed organizing.

And across the United States—once the ultimate destination for those fleeing authoritarianism—journalists, activists, and dissidents increasingly ask themselves a question that would have seemed absurd a decade ago: Where do we go when this place falls?

Each of these stories reveals a different piece of the puzzle: how displacement operates in our time, what sanctuary means, and what it costs to stay connected while trying to escape. Together, they map a fundamental transformation in how power operates in our era.

Understanding displacement in the 21st century has become central to understanding power itself: how it is exercised across borders, how resistance operates, and how communities reorganize around new forms of belonging. This is why we are launching “The Age of Exile”—a special series investigating displacement in the modern world. For our journalists, exile is not just a humanitarian crisis or a theme. It's a lens through which to see how the world is changing.

The changing nature of exile

Whenever I think of exile, I think of my childhood. I was 10 years old in Tbilisi, then in the midst of civil war, and life had become a long series of goodbyes. We watched our world empty out, family by family, week by week. There was no gas, no electricity, no food—just violence, darkness and bread lines stretching for hours. Every week, another family would come to say goodbye: aunts, uncles, school friends, the family from the fourth floor. They were leaving for anywhere that wasn't falling apart.

Those gatherings, in rooms thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of bubbling Turkish coffee, were layered with contradictions: their grief at leaving mixed with envy that we would remain rooted, our envy that they had found a way to escape, and underneath it all, our collective mourning for all that was being lost—not just families and individual relationships but the fabric of an entire world being torn apart.

Back then, leaving was akin to severing. Letters arrived less frequently. Phone calls were expensive, the crackling line a manifestation of the distance. Communities dispersed, connections frayed, memories faded. The families who left became stories we told about people who used to live here, whose apartments now housed strangers, whose children we'd never meet again.

That was exile then: an irreversible absence.

But that’s not exile now. Today’s exiles carry entire worlds in their pockets. They organize resistance across time zones, preserve languages through apps, watch homelands collapse in real time through livestreams they cannot look away from. They maintain influence and identity across continents in ways that would have seemed impossible just a generation ago.

But the same technologies enabling connection also enable persecution. Authoritarian regimes don't need to keep people imprisoned within borders—they can subject even those in self-exile to a form of remote control, of borderless authority. Surveillance systems follow activists across continents. Transnational repression turns safety into illusion and digital lifelines become tracking devices.

As democracy retreats globally, the space for sanctuary is shrinking. There are fewer and fewer places left to go. Belarusian activists now flee to Georgia only to watch the same "foreign agents" laws that they left behind become the law in Tbilisi, Nicaraguan dissidents who seek sanctuary in Costa Rica find that the Ortega regime's reach extends across the border. Burmese refugees in Thailand face detention, extortion, and the constant threat of deportation.

Technology has transformed exile, as it transforms everything. In host societies that feel overwhelmed by newcomers, in origin countries emptied of their young, in the digital networks connecting them, people feel increasingly displaced from the world around them, displaced from belonging itself. Some flee this alienation by seeking communities that operate transnationally, constructing new forms of identity and power that reshape host societies. Others discover sanctuary internally—what Soviet dissidents called "inner exile," the psychological condition of being present in your body but exiled from your world. When your homeland no longer feels like home even if you never leave it. When you exist geographically inside a country but spiritually, politically, ideologically outside it. This may be the most common form of exile our age creates: not fleeing across borders, but fleeing inward.

Most exile journalism tells essential stories—refugees fleeing war, journalists escaping persecution, dissidents seeking sanctuary. These stories matter. But they're symptoms of something deeper. We're investigating the root cause: how displacement itself has become the infrastructure through which power operates in the 21st century. Our Age of Exile series examines exile not as just a humanitarian crisis but as the perspective through which to understand much about how our world is changing. We’ll bring you stories from frontiers others miss: on how identity is constructed and across borders, on how communities can cohere even when scattered, and how the same technologies that enable resistance also enable surveillance.

Read these stories and please get in touch with me to share your own. I am on antelava@codastory.com

Where and how have you encountered exile: in your own displacement, in communities around you, in the feeling of being foreign in your own country? What stories do you want to see told? What questions demand answers? Your experiences and insights will shape this series, because mapping displacement in the 21st century means listening to voices from everywhere. Help us understand what it means to construct belonging when connection across borders enables both community and control.

The Age of Exile

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‘Iceberg, right ahead’ & the rise of Chinese laundries

Oliver Bullough — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 14:00:00 +0000

I’ve been reading journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new book about the 1929 crash, and it’s been sending me into a bit of a spin. The parallels between the financial speculation Sorkin details and the present day are remarkable. Meme coins – like $TRUMP and $MELANIA – may be the most remarkable of recent financial innovations. They have no intrinsic value, are not intended to have intrinsic value, and yet they soar in price, enriching their issuers, before collapsing and erasing everyone’s money. Why would anyone invest in them? Is everyone stupid? Well, why did people invest in new stocks in the late 1920s, despite the vertiginous valuations?

“They were not necessarily ignorant or dumb,” is how Sorkin describes it. “They might know, or guess, that an investment pool was manipulating the price. But if they got the timing right, even a total outsider could capture a bit of the upside before the pool ‘pulled the plug’ and dumped its shares back on the market.”

It’s a weird truth about pyramid schemes: they’re actually very profitable if you get into them early enough, and no one knows when the money’s going to stop flowing so people keep investing even after they know it’s a con. There are very many places in the book when it felt like it could be about 2025 – the importance of murky lending to supporting asset prices; the corruption of the political class; the arrogance of the strutting business tycoons; the insistence that predatory practices were actually “democratising finance” and so on.

Above all, I feel a constant melancholy over how none of the foot soldiers in this campaign had any idea about the size of the wave rearing over them, and how it would sweep away everything for a generation. The subtitle of the book refers to the 1929 catastrophe as “the greatest crash in Wall Street history”, and I worry that it might before too long be relegated to being the second greatest. Buy the book, that’s my advice, while you’ve got some money to spare.

So anyway, to distract myself from the depressing nature of my historical musings, I listened to the latest episode of The Laundry podcast, which is a thoughtful and in-depth interview with Elisa de Andro Madazo and Giles Thomson, respectively the president and vice-president of the Financial Action Task Force, the world’s standard-setter on fighting money laundering.

They are articulate and clearly both care and think deeply about their institution, as well as about their roles within it. They expressed careful and coherent opinions on the need to bring fairness and efficiency and effectiveness to a struggle that has (my words, not theirs) too often lacked all three.

But, in a world in which cryptocurrencies are sweeping aside controls on finance, the United States has given up on corporate transparency, criminal groups are driving sanctions evasion, Chinese money laundering gangs are gaining ever-greater influence, and Western laws are failing to tackle kleptocrats, everything they said just seemed so irrelevant. Once again the historical parallel for the FATF was an institution in the interwar years. The League of Nations was a bureaucracy that was well-meaning, tireless, thoughtful to the end, but completely ineffective when faced with challenges from powerful nations.

Laundering drug money

I mentioned Chinese money laundering organisations (CLMOs) above, and I’d like to draw your attention to this excellent new paper, from venerable British think tank RUSI, about their scope, approach and significance. The growth of Chinese gangs, and their rapid takeover of much of money laundering conducted for organised criminal groups (OCGs) over the last decade or so, is a remarkable and ill-understood phenomenon.

The secret of their popularity is not hard to understand, as the paper makes clear: “all the profit is made in China and therefore CMLOs can afford to offer their services to OCGs in the West for free, or close to free”. Traditional money launderers were charging Western criminals perhaps 15 percent to move money, so it is clear why OCGs would prefer to take their business to someone who’ll do it for nothing.

The CLMOs’ techniques are based around transferring value globally outside the banking system (i.e. by moving luxury goods, commodities, cryptocurrencies, etc) which means that much of the compliance system created under pressure from the FATF is essentially useless in detecting their activities.

But why have they been able to launder money so cheaply when their Western rivals could not?

I think the more important point to take from this is that they have been able to create their system because of restrictions imposed in both China and the West. Chinese capital controls have made it hard for wealthy citizens of the People’s Republic to get their money out of the country. Meanwhile Western drug laws have created a huge cash-rich criminal economy. It is by connecting this demand for cash (from Chinese people outside China) and supply of cash (from drug gangs in the West) that CMLOs have been able to corner the market.

This is perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I’m going to offer it anyway: if you need another reason to take drug supplies out of the hands of criminals, CLMOs are it. Prohibition hasn’t just failed on its own terms, it has created the liquidity for a vast underground economy being exploited by our geopolitical rivals.

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Dinosaur bones, lottery tickets & upside-down skyscrapers

Oliver Bullough — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 14:00:00 +0000

I am often rude about how utterly predictable financial criminals are in what they choose to buy – large watches, gold-spattered handbags, ugly yachts, etc – so I want to give a very small amount of credit to Su Binghai, a money launderer with an imagination. Okay, so he bought nine apartments in London, spending about $21 million just a week after he evaded police in Singapore. And, sure, he abandoned a collection of supercars in Singapore, all of which is tremendously dull. But then among the assets seized by Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) were “dinosaur remains, between 145 million and 157 million years old… of a mother and baby Allosaurus, as well as a Stegosaurus.” Dinosaurs! Aren’t they gorgeous? So much more beautiful than a boring old car.

The extinct mega-beasts were sold at a Christie’s auction last year for around $15 million, but are now in a warehouse, presumably ready to be resold, (unless the NCA plans to keep them. I can see the appeal of having something so magnificent as a dinosaur skeleton as a centrepiece in your house, although I do worry a little about the amount of dusting required, which may be why other money launderers have not invested in fossils. “I doubt that any of us will be dealing with one of these again,” said Judge Gavin Mansfield during the hearing. What a shame.

The value of the properties and fossils is a tiny fraction of the amount already recovered in Singapore in this case, which is said to have involved more than $3 billion, though it is troubling that many of the fugitives involved appear to have won effective immunity from prosecution in return for surrendering their assets.

Which cryptocurrency was involved in the scheme, I hear you ask? Well, funnily enough, it was Tether’s USDT like it always seems to be. Involvement in multiple scams has not been holding Tether back. Quite the reverse; in the first nine months of the year, it made $10 billion in profits, and expects to make $15 billion in 2025 as a whole. If Tether is not the most profitable company per employee in the world (it employs about 200 people), I’d like to know what is.

One of the few people who appears not to have been using Tether to hide illicit wealth was the former EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders. Though maybe he should have been. Reynders was recently charged with money laundering in Belgium in perhaps the strangest scheme I’ve read about this year. Reynders spent nearly $60,000 on lottery tickets in a single year.

Now, lotteries have been used by financial criminals for a long time. My favourite money laundering approach ever was one used in Puerto Rico in the 1980s when criminals would buy lottery tickets at a premium in cash, then (unconvincingly) explain to the authorities that their wealth was simply the result of weekly outbreaks of good fortune.

According to investigators, however, Reynders was doing something else. He was spending unusual amounts on lottery tickets and keeping the winnings. Why is this strange? Unlike gambling in a casino, lotteries are not a good way to launder money, because they distribute as prizes less than two thirds of what people spend on tickets, so you lose a huge amount on the trade. It’s really not very clever and, clearly, the unusual spending pattern raises the authorities’ suspicions. Reynders denies laundering money, and says he was just using private wealth. Whatever happened, he has a lot to explain.

The thankless task of crypto regulation

Reynders may not have tried to launder money via crypto, but many financial criminals do. And over in Washington, DC, regulators have got to do the boring-but-important work of figuring out how exactly the new GENIUS act controlling stablecoins will be implemented in practice. So credit to Transparency International U.S. for attempting to bend things in the direction of sanity. “A well-implemented framework can both support responsible innovation and prevent the kinds of corruption and financial crime that erode trust in financial systems and global markets,” it wrote in a letter to the Treasury Department.

Bitcoin prices may have taken a bit of a dip of late (no doubt irritating Donald Trump), but the crypto enthusiasm stoked by the White House shows no sign of abating. Senate Democrats sent a letter to the attorney general after Trump’s pardon of former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao with a killer final question/essay prompt: “Do you believe President Trump’s substantial business ties to Mr Zhao influenced his decision to issue a pardon? Explain.”

Richard Teng, who now runs Binance, has denied that his company supported Trump’s own (largely moribund) stablecoin USD1 to curry favour with the first family on his predecessor’s behalf. But considering quite how much money the Trumps have made this year (Trump’s net worth has risen by $3 billion, according to Forbes), it seems unlikely they’ll concern themselves overmuch with the rules, let alone the complex, detailed rule-making around the GENIUS act. On the one hand, this leaves the field open for organisations like TI-US to push for good regulations; on the other, Trump will do what he wants, regardless of the regulations.

The Neom debacle

Trump, though, is not yet a law unto himself. Unlike, say, the Saudi royals. I have a slight obsession with Neom, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s pet development involving a ski resort, a superyacht harbour and The Line, a ludicrous mirrored linear city which a gazillion architects have been designing at a gigundous profit. Anyway, thanks to the FT, we have a deeper dive into this vainglorious horror show than we’ve ever had before.

There are many, many cars in this pile-up: the 30-storey building that would supposedly hang from the top of an arch over the harbour, despite architects warning that it would inevitably fall on everyone’s yachts below; the “hundreds of shuttle cars running back and forth” to pick up the poo because normal sewage systems couldn’t be made to work; the fact no one realised that buying more than half of the world’s steel each year to build Neom would affect steel prices; the airport shuttle envisaged without any room for luggage; the giant pumps required to circulate water in the giant marina; the disaster in store for migratory birds faced with a 500- metre high, 170-km wide mirror and so on and so forth.

“I was in a conversation one day with two physicists, quantum physicists,” says Antoni Vives, then Neom’s chief urban development officer, in a documentary about The Line. “One of them looks at the other and looks at me, and says: ‘you know what, perhaps it’s the time of the poets now. We need poets’.” No, Antoni, we need satirists. Or maybe sedatives.

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Dubai’s blockchain blues & the Kyrgyz ‘cryptatorship’

Oliver Bullough — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Last week I went to Dubai. I didn’t much like it; Dubai feels as if the brief was to build a city but to leave out all the things that make cities good. Then again, I was there for a crypto conference. And my overall impression of that was – if Western sanctions are indeed shutting Russians out of the world economy, someone should tell the Russians.

The free ice cream at the gate was sponsored by a crypto company promising seamless exchanges between roubles and the dollar stablecoin USDT; an exhibitor offered to deliver you cash in an hour when you transferred them some crypto; and the title sponsor was A7A5, fresh from being sanctioned by the European Union, but very much alive, kicking, and cheerfully distributing stickers to people who took a spin on its wheel of fortune.

The centre of the hall was dominated by a crypto-trading competition, in which a number of people sat behind screens and sought to make a profit while against the clock. Despite the best efforts of two fast-talking Russian MCs, as a spectator sport, it had all the charm of watching an HR department finishing up the month’s payroll. Still, the competition drew the biggest crowd simply for the lack of other things going on.

None of the whales that might once have come to a Dubai crypto conference were present, now all the action has spectacularly moved to Washington, DC. Check out this Reuters investigation into how much cash The Trump Organization has made in just the first six months of 2025: “the U.S. president’s family raked in more than $800 million from sales of crypto assets in the first half of 2025 alone”, with “potentially billions more in unrealized ‘on paper’ gains”, mostly from foreign sources.

Those who did make it to Dubai intoned the usual verities about crypto ushering in a new age of liberty, despite the huge contradictions all around them. Particularly bewildering was a panel featuring Vít Jedlička, a Czech libertarian and founder of “start-up nation” Liberland, alongside Nabil Arnous, whose job is to bring investment into “Innovation City”, a newly-renamed AI-powered free trade zone in the absolute monarchy that is Ras Al Khaimah, one of the seven emirates that make up the UAE. The blockchain is powerful indeed if it can unite people from such supposedly opposite political poles.

Even more head-scratching to me though was a presentation by Reeve Collins, who co-founded Tether and was an early advocate of all things crypto, He came to Dubai to pitch his idea for “white label” stablecoins which would allow companies to put their name on a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency while leaving all the hard work of running the blockchain to someone else.

Why might companies want to do that? Because every time they sell something, they get to collect even more data about their clients than they already do, as well as earning profit from issuing money that currently goes to the government.

“Since this is programmable money, you get real data on all of the users, and you get to understand who are the power-users, who deserves more, who deserves to be rewarded,” Collins said. “This is loyalty points times a thousand. It really will supercharge what companies are able to offer their users, so they'll be able to extract more value.”

I kept expecting someone to speak up and point out how far his vision had strayed from cryptocurrencies as a tool for individual autonomy, rather than a tool that enables the world’s largest corporations to frack humanity even harder than they are now. But no one did. Instead, the conference moved onto a panel about how governments couldn’t be trusted.

At some point the music will stop, and none of us will have chairs, and there will be an almighty blow-up. The prospect slightly terrifies me.

Kyrgyzstan's crypto compulsion

For now, though, the music is very much still playing. Particularly in places like Kyrgyzstan, which seems to be doubling down on its strategy of becoming a ‘cryptatorship’ like El Salvador. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, the crypto billionaire who pleaded guilty to violating U.S. anti-money laundering laws and was recently pardoned by Trump – though the U.S. president claimed not to know Zhao – headed to Bishkek to talk up its transformation. “Had a great time in Kyrgyzstan in the past two days. I encourage more crypto companies to explore the country too,” he Xed.

There are already a number of crypto companies in Bishkek, including the sanctioned A7A5, and their close connections with the Kyrgyz government are of great interest to the country’s journalists. However, since Kyrgyzstan’s best investigative outlets – Kloop, Temirov Live and Ayt Ayt Dese -- have just been labelled as extremists, it will be difficult for reporters to bring attention to their findings.

“This is the first time in the history of Kyrgyzstan when media outlets have been labelled extremist,” said Kloop in a statement. “Now it is dangerous to like or share outlets’ material, or to circulate it. That could all be considered support for extremist organisations and the circulation of extremist material.” At least, “watching and reading it is currently safe.”

There used to be something admirable about Kyrgyzstan’s bloody-minded refusal to become a dictatorship like the other republics of Central Asia. Now there is something grotesque about the fact that it is the lure of crypto, a technology supposedly intended to enhance freedoms, that is helping to cement autocracy. The country is holding snap parliamentary elections on November 30. The president’s party, unsurprisingly, is expected to do very well.

Watching Kyrgyzstan heading towards autocracy is a reminder that the only plausible long-term solution to kleptocracy is for rich countries to stop enabling it. If Westerners started living up to their professed values, and made it impossible for crooks to buy property and launder money in the West, it would reduce the appeal of being one.

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A warning from the Gilded Age & an ‘end’ to the Khodorkovsky saga

Oliver Bullough — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 13:00:00 +0000

I read a lot of history books and often find myself wondering about how current events will be interpreted by future historians. I appreciate that some people might see this as an overly optimistic practice (“get real, loser, there won’t even be historians in the future, let alone ones able or willing to objectively interpret the past” etc) but I still find it valuable as a way to create a sense of perspective that can otherwise be hard to find.

So, what will historians make of the latest developments in the United States? On Thursday, the government sanctioned Russia’s two most significant oil companies, in what threatens to be a massive blow to the financial underpinning of a key geopolitical adversary. On Friday, however, the government pardoned Changpeng Zhao, a crypto tycoon who two years ago pleaded guilty to, among many other things, facilitating sanctions busting by Iran, also a key geopolitical adversary.

How do you interpret that contradiction, or the fact that the US government is currently not paying its employees, while spending hundreds of millions of dollars, albeit privately raised, on a new ballroom? This could provide material for a hundred newsletters, and no doubt has already done, but I think there is value in asking whether the sole consistent factor here is inconsistency, and whether that itself is significant.

This is what happens when individual people make decisions without oversight, scrutiny or process and, although there may be some value in rapid decision-making, it also makes it far more likely that the decisions reached will be illogical, inconsistent and corrupt. I have been reading a lot recently about the last time inequality was as high as it is now, which was the time before World War One, a time that Americans call the “Gilded Age” and Brits call the Edwardian period. That too was a time of conflicts, inconsistency and excess, when plutocrats built ludicrous houses for themselves, and awarded themselves vast pay deals, when politicians got assassinated and political movements appeared and disappeared with dizzying speed.

I try to be optimistic, because there’s no sense in being otherwise, but the parallel is worrying. After all, the period before World War I all ended with World War I. If I were a plutocrat, I would be working very hard to steer the horse in another direction, away from disaster, rather than spurring it on ever faster.

Restitution from Russia?

But look, like a refugee from a different galaxy, here comes news of what should be the end of the long-running legal challenge brought by shareholders in the ex-oil company Yukos against the Kremlin’s expropriation of their assets. The Kremlin lost, and now the shareholders can seek to claim tens of billions of dollars from state assets worldwide. This saga sort of began 22 years ago when the Russian authorities arrested the country’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, prosecuted him, and imposed such vast back tax bills that it could auction off his assets in a process that – funnily enough – was won by a state oil company run by a close ally of Vladimir Putin. It was an early sign of the kind of country Putin was building: kleptocratic, authoritarian, centralised, ruthless, and deeply stupid.

But the real beginning of the story was a decade earlier, when President Boris Yeltsin, attempting to build a different kind of Russia, one which followed international norms, signed the Energy Charter Treaty, an agreement designed to protect foreign investors’ stakes in national oil and gas industries.

The primary shareholders of Yukos were Russian but, like any competent global oligarch, they structured their ownership via multiple offshore entities so – when their company was taken away – they sued. And now, they have won in a process that is a memorial to the 1990s, and the odd alternate reality when globalisation was widely considered a good thing.

Obviously, Russia won’t abide by the judgement on its own territory, but the Yukos shareholders will continue their battles for various assets owned by Russia, such as this plot of land in London and these vodka brand names. “Real justice requires successful enforcement, so we will now focus all our efforts on enforcing against Russian state assets worldwide until every penny of the $65+ billion awards has been paid,” said Tim Osborne, who heads the shareholders’ company, which is called GML.

In that effort, however, he may well have competition. There is 210 billion euros of Russian state money frozen in the European Union, mostly in Belgium, and the EU is inching closer to using it to help Ukraine. The universe in which Russia happily deposited its assets in Western countries now feels like an alternative reality – one that historians will spend a lot of time dissecting.

Making criminals pay

International arbitration is a tricky game to play, however, or so the owners of P&ID may be feeling. In a complex (and, let’s be honest, rather imaginative) attempt to swipe a lot of Nigeria’s money, this small offshore company obtained a gas processing contract in 2010. Neither side did anything to fulfil the contract, then P&ID sued Nigeria and won a giant compensation award, the size of which has been growing larger still with the interest owed.

It is a case rife with allegations of corruption, professional misconduct and more, and mercifully the initial judgement in favour of P&ID was overturned. Last week, a court ruled that P&ID will have to pay the vast legal costs in sterling, rather than in naira, which will help Nigeria to avoid missing out on the advantageous exchange rate.

To say P&ID’s British lawyers have questions to answer is to understate how serious the allegations against them are, but regulators have so far done nothing. That is a very bad reflection on Britain’s ongoing facilitation of kleptocracy, and the state of its regulators.

Britain, in common with many other countries, has a very fragmented system of anti-money laundering regulation, so it is potentially good news that the government has proposed to combine many of the existing 23 regulators into “a small number” of bodies. Hopefully, this will mean the regulators are better funded, more motivated, and more willing to anger potentially powerful vested interests by actually investigating financial crime. “It is crucial that existing regulators do not take their foot off the pedal while we await legislation which could risk things getting a lot worse before getting better,” said Sue Hawley, of Spotlight on Corruption.

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