Aggregator

The St. Louis Board of Aldermen will discuss two bills that would give an estimated $725,000 to the Department of Health.

A faith-based non-profit is holding its second annual gala Thursday night.

Police in St. Charles, Lincoln, and Warren counties are being honored Thursday night.

The former business manager for the St. Louis Police Union is suing the union.

The center of the Democratic political world is in St. Louis for the next few days, starting Thursday morning. That’s because the fall meeting of the Democratic National Committee or 'DNC', is taking place downtown at the Marriott Grand Hotel on Washington Avenue.

This year’s month-long festival is even bigger than in the past.

“Natural wine is not as well understood yet in the Midwest as in Paris, but it’s definitely coming,” says one expert.

To pass a package of tax credits designed to expand affordable child care will require getting by the “knuckleheads” in the state Senate, Missouri Chamber of Commerce President Dan Mehan said Wednesday. As he greeted the audience and panelists at a forum on the state’s child care needs in Columbia, Mehan blamed the defeat of […]

The post ‘Critical infrastructure’: Missouri child care shortage called a crisis for employers appeared first on Missouri Independent.

WASHINGTON — One of Thomasina Brown’s favorite books is a memoir about a girl who deals with the grief of losing her father and struggles with her sexual identity. Brown, a 16-year-old student at Nixa High School in Nixa, Missouri, said in an interview that she felt a connection with the book, as she grieved […]

The post First Amendment advocates fight growing number of U.S. book bans appeared first on Missouri Independent.

by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

For months, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his allies have defended Thomas’ practice of not disclosing free luxury travel by saying the trips fell under a carve-out to the federal disclosure law for government officials.

But by not publicly reporting his trips to the Bohemian Grove and to a 2018 Koch network event, Thomas appears to have violated the disclosure law, even by his own permissive interpretation of it, ethics law experts said. The details of the trips, which ProPublica first reported last month, could prove important evidence in any formal investigation of Thomas’ conduct.

Thomas’ defense has centered on what’s known as the personal hospitality exemption, part of a federal law passed after Watergate that requires Supreme Court justices and many other officials to publicly report most gifts.

Under the exemption, gifts of “food, lodging, or entertainment received as personal hospitality” don’t have to be disclosed. The law provides a technical definition of “personal hospitality.” It only applies to gifts received from someone at that person’s home or “on property or facilities” that they or their family own. A judge would generally not need to disclose a weekend at a friend’s house; they would need to report if someone paid for them to stay at the Ritz-Carlton.

Numerous ethics law experts have said that gifts of transportation, such as private jet flights, must be disclosed under the law because they are not “food, lodging, or entertainment.”

Thomas has laid out a different view of the disclosure requirements. In his financial disclosure released in late August, Thomas asserted that the personal hospitality exemption extended to transportation. Justice Samuel Alito has made the same argument in an op-ed where he elaborated on his reasoning: private jets would count as “facilities” under the law’s definition of personal hospitality. In this view of the disclosure requirements, a key question would be whether the person providing a private jet flight actually owned the jet. So, for example, Thomas would not need to report flights on his friend Harlan Crow’s private plane because Crow owns it.

Thomas and Alito’s position is incorrect, many experts said, because it simply ignores the statute’s language: that the personal hospitality exemption only applies to food, lodging, or entertainment.

But there’s an additional reason the newly revealed trips should have been disclosed.

ProPublica recently reported that in 2018, Thomas traveled on a Gulfstream G200 private jet to Palm Springs, California, to attend a dinner at the Koch political network’s donor summit. He didn’t hitch a ride on a jet owned by a friend. Instead, he flew there on a chartered plane: a jet available through an Uber-like service that lets wealthy individuals rent other people’s planes. The owner of the jet at the time, Connecticut real estate developer John Fareri, confirmed to ProPublica that he didn’t provide the plane to Thomas and that the Palm Springs flight was a charter flight. That means someone else — not the owner — paid.

A Koch network spokesperson said the network didn’t pay for the flights. Because Thomas didn’t disclose the trip, it’s still not clear who chartered the plane. Jet charter companies told ProPublica the flights could have cost more than $75,000.

Experts told ProPublica they couldn’t think of an argument that would justify not disclosing the Palm Springs trip. “Even using Thomas’ flawed logic about the personal hospitality exception, there’s no way this chartered flight fits into that exception,” said Kedric Payne, a former deputy chief counsel at Congress’ ethics office.

Thomas and his attorney did not respond to questions about why he didn’t disclose the flight or if he paid for it himself. After the Palm Springs donor event, the plane flew to an airport outside Denver, where Thomas appeared at a ceremony honoring his former clerk, then back to northern Virginia, where Thomas lives.

Thomas’ undisclosed trips to the Bohemian Grove present a similar issue. As ProPublica reported last month, Thomas has for 25 years been a regular at the Grove, an all-men’s retreat held on a 2,700-acre property in California. Thomas has been hosted by Crow, who is a member of the secretive club, and stayed at a lodge there called Midway. Members typically must pay thousands of dollars to bring a guest, according to a Grove guest application form obtained by ProPublica and interviews with members.

Crow does not own the Grove nor does he own the lodge where Thomas has stayed. Experts said in these instances again, even by Thomas’ own characterization of the rules, he appears to have violated the law by not disclosing the trips.

“It makes a mockery of the statute,” said Richard Painter, who served as the chief ethics lawyer for the George W. Bush White House. Painter said that if charter flights and trips to Grove don’t need to be disclosed, “you could call everything personal hospitality. Broadway show tickets. A first-class ticket on Delta Air Lines. A trip on the Queen Mary.”

Following ProPublica’s reporting on Thomas’ failure to disclose gifts earlier this year, members of Congress sent a complaint to the Judicial Conference, the arm of the judiciary responsible for implementing the disclosure law. In April, the Judicial Conference said it had referred the matter to a committee of judges responsible for reviewing such allegations.

The law says that if there is “reasonable cause” to believe a judge “willfully” failed to disclose information they were required to, the conference should refer the matter to the U.S. attorney general, who can pursue penalties. But that would be unprecedented. As of May, the Judicial Conference said it had never made such a referral. The committee’s process appears to be ongoing.

In his filing in August, Thomas said that his view of the disclosure rules was based in part on conversations he had with staff at the Judicial Conference. Thomas did not respond to questions about the advice he received. A judiciary spokesperson declined to comment on whether it was ever the Judicial Conference’s position that gifts of private jet flights didn’t need to be reported.

This March, the judiciary revised its regulations to make explicit that private jet travel must be disclosed because transportation is not covered by the personal hospitality exemption. Experts said the update merely clarified what was always the case. (ProPublica reviewed other federal judges’ financial disclosure filings and found at least six recent examples of judges disclosing gifts of private jet travel before the regulations were updated.)

More than a decade ago, Thomas’ disclosure practices came under scrutiny following research by a watchdog group and a story in The New York Times about his relationship with Crow. Democratic lawmakers wrote to the Judicial Conference in 2011, saying that Thomas had failed to report the sources of his wife’s income and that he “may” have also received free private jet trips without reporting them.

What happened after that remains opaque.

In a four-sentence letter the following year, the secretary to the Judicial Conference said that the complaint had been reviewed. “Nothing has been presented,” he wrote, “to support a determination” that Thomas improperly failed to report gifts of travel. The letter did not detail what steps the conference took, the reasoning behind its decision or what information it had been presented with.

At the time, nothing in the public record had established that Thomas had ever accepted undisclosed private jet flights. But Thomas’ attorney Elliot Berke has cited the 2012 letter as vindication of Thomas’ practices. “The Judicial Conference issued a letter confirming that Justice Thomas had not improperly failed to disclose information concerning his travel,” Berke wrote.

ProPublica asked the Judicial Conference for details on the 2012 episode, including whether the committee conducted an investigation and an explanation of its ultimate conclusion: Did it determine that private jet flights need not be reported? Or did it determine that it wasn’t clear if Thomas had actually accepted such a gift?

A Judicial Conference spokesperson declined to comment.

Yes guitarist Trevor Rabin will release his new album, Rio, on October 6. It will be his first solo album of vocal material in 34 years — so, what took him so long?  Rabin…

Source

The anti-labor law firm Littler Mendelson’s reputation is a premier example of the limitations in existing labor law.

Non-union businesses tend not to publicly report workplace injuries and illnesses. Unionized businesses generally do.

What looked like a knotty but possible way forward promises to be undone by congressional chaos agents.

Once known for strong employee-management relations, its workers now say staffing and pay need to rise to attract and retain the staff Kaiser needs.

by Cezary Podkul

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Mr. Big had a problem. He needed to move what he called “fraud funds” back to China, but a crackdown was making that difficult. So in August, Mr. Big, who, needless to say, did not list his real name, posted an ad on a Telegram channel. He sought a “group of smuggling teams” to, as he put it, “complete the final conversion” of the stolen money by smuggling gold and precious stones from Myanmar into southern China, in exchange for a 10% cut.

It’s unclear whether Mr. Big ultimately succeeded; his ad has since been deleted, and ProPublica was unable to reach him. But the online forum where he posted his ad says a lot about why Americans and people around the world have found themselves targeted by an unprecedented wave of fraud originating out of Southeast Asia, whose vast scale is now becoming apparent. In a single recent criminal investigation, Singapore police seized more than $2 billion in money laundered from a syndicate with alleged ties to organized crime, including “scams and online gambling.”

The Telegram channel that featured Mr. Big’s plea for assistance was a Chinese-language forum offering access to “white capital” — money that has been laundered — “guaranteed” by a casino operator in Myanmar, Fully Light Group, that purports to ensure that deals struck on the forum go through. Fully Light also operates its own Telegram channels that advertise similar services. One such channel, with 117,000 participants, featured offers to swap cryptocurrency for “pure white” Chinese renminbi or “white capital” Singaporean dollars. (Telegram took down that channel after ProPublica inquired about it. Fully Light did not respond to requests for comment.)

The presence of a casino in facilitating such deals is no coincidence. A growing number of gambling operations across Southeast Asia have become key pillars in a vast underground banking system serving organized criminal groups, according to new research by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The research has not been published, but the agency shared its findings with ProPublica.

There are now over 340 physical casinos across Southeast Asia (as well as countless online ones), and many of them show accelerating levels of infiltration by organized crime, according to the UNODC. The casinos function as “a shadow banking system that allows people to move money quickly, seamlessly, jurisdiction-to-jurisdiction, with almost no restriction,” Jeremy Douglas, UNODC’s top official in Southeast Asia, told ProPublica in September. That has made money laundering “easier than ever before,” he said, and it’s been “fundamental to the expansion of the transnational criminal economy” in the region — especially cybercrime.

As ProPublica reported in detail last year, Southeast Asia has become a major hub for cryptocurrency investment scams that often start as innocent-sounding “wrong number”-type text messages. The messages frequently originate from seedy casino towns in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, where criminal syndicates lure workers with the promise of lucrative jobs, only to force them to work as online scammers. UNODC’s map of known or suspected scam compounds shows a clear overlap with gambling hubs in Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia, where allegations of forced online scam labor have become so widespread that they recently prompted Interpol to issue a global warning about the problem, which the international police agency said was occurring on “an industrial scale.”

Gambling has long attracted organized crime, but never more than in Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and the Philippines, where loose regulations and endemic corruption allow casinos to operate with little oversight or responsibility to report suspicious transactions. Before the COVID-19 pandemic began, officials in those countries wooed Chinese casino operators in an effort to attract foreign direct investment. Criminal bosses, facing a crackdown in China and sanctions imposed by the U.S., began investing in casinos and cutting deals to run their own special economic zones in Myanmar and elsewhere where they could operate unfettered.

When the pandemic struck in 2020, travel restrictions emptied newly built casinos, hotels and offices of workers and visitors across the region. Criminal syndicates repurposed the facilities to house online fraud operations and turned to human smugglers to staff them up. (For example, when Philippine authorities raided several online gambling operators between May and August, they discovered more than 4,400 laborers, most of them human trafficking victims forced to perpetrate online fraud.)

Online casinos can be easily used for money laundering: They often accept cryptocurrency deposits that can be converted to virtual chips and placed in bets or cashed out in currency, making them seem like proceeds of legitimate gambling. That method of money laundering is becoming increasingly common in Southeast Asia.

Physical casinos have their own attractions for money laundering. They have become a draw for a parallel industry of junket operators, who organize gambling trips for high-rollers. Those junkets also attract organized criminal groups that need to move money across borders and do so using junkets’ gambling accounts, according to recent prosecutions by Chinese authorities. Last year, 36 individuals connected to Suncity Group, once one of the biggest junket operators in the world, were convicted in China of facilitating about $160 million in illegal cross-border payments and transactions. The company’s ex-CEO, Alvin Chau, is in jail for running a criminal syndicate and other charges.

In northeast Myanmar, Fully Light Group has emerged as a “multi-billion-dollar business conglomerate and a key player” in casinos and illegal online gambling, according to research by Jason Tower, Myanmar country director for the United States Institute of Peace. “These are not normal casinos in any way,” Tower said, because they’re located in what he calls “criminal enclaves” that are more under the control of organized crime than any government authority. For instance, Tower found hundreds of criminal convictions by Chinese courts related to illegal casinos, fraud, kidnapping, drugs and weapons charges in the Kokang Special Administrative Zone, near Myanmar’s border with China, where Fully Light is based. In its review, UNODC found Kokang casinos — both those owned by Fully Light and by others — also played a major role in money laundering. They operate Telegram channels that openly advertise money laundering services, including some that link back to official Fully Light channels and offer the company’s guarantee to cross-border exchanges of cryptocurrencies. Some Fully Light-affiliated Telegram channels include solicitations to participate in what are known as money mule “motorcades” that move funds through multiple cryptocurrency wallets or bank accounts.

Billions of dollars more are likely flowing into the region, thanks to online scams that show no signs of abating. Nick Smart of the cryptocurrency analytics firm Crystal Blockchain has been tracing the flows of crypto funds deposited into online platforms that are set up to look like investing sites in order to fleece victims. Following the money trail from just one such website, which he suspects to be linked to criminal organizations in Myanmar, led him to a wallet that also pooled funds from 14 other known crypto scams. The wallet received about $44 million in various cryptocurrencies between December and July, when it ceased activity. With thousands of such websites popping up every day, victims’ losses are easily “in the billions,” said Smart, the director of blockchain intelligence at Crystal.

The global cybercrime spree has prompted countries across the region to take a bolder tack. In June, Thailand cut off electricity to two cyberfraud hot spots across its border with Myanmar (with disappointing results). More recently, Thai officials shut down six illegal cellular towers suspected of providing internet service to scam compounds in Myanmar. Chinese authorities have also arrested thousands of their own citizens in dramatic operations that included a humiliating perp walk of hundreds of suspected cybercriminals across a border crossing from Myanmar to China’s southern Yunnan Province on Sept. 6.

On Sept. 26, UNODC unveiled an agreement with China and the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations to jointly combat organized crime and human trafficking linked with casinos and scams. An action plan accompanying the agreement calls on the countries to “make anti-money laundering and wider anti-corruption efforts a higher priority.”

But the challenge is steep. Even as multiple countries crack down, Laos, one of the poorest nations in the region, is getting ready to allow online gambling operators to set up shop within its borders and target foreigners.

And governments need to broaden their focus. Anti-money-laundering regulations often zero in on bank cash transfers of $10,000 or more. The UNODC’s Douglas said governments will need to turn their attention to casinos and other nontraditional financial players. “Everyone’s been focusing on transactions of $10,000 going through banks and flagging suspicious transactions,” Douglas said, “and these guys are moving millions around the corner through the casino, laughing at the system.”

Grist designed a model metropolis for an era of high temperatures, using the coolest technology available.

“We’re increasingly finding that it’s not true that these are just ecological voids where nothing is living there.”

The parrot, a gift for the St. Louis Zoo's new Bird House in 1930, quickly became an embarrassment.