Commentary Culture Investigations

Photo Credit:Devil image, like a Renaissance painting

Pixabay // Pixabay Content LicenseBy Alicia ColonEvil is out there. But so are the signs of good.

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AT via Magic StudioBy Thomas KolbeRising interest rates, record insolvencies, and permanent recession — the looming economic crisis in the EU is taking shape.

On May 31, the Israeli military posted a video showing what it claimed was its first tank to cross the Litani River in southern Lebanon.It’s significant because it shows a lone IDF tank crossing a line that, just weeks earlier, had marked the limit of Israel’s invasion into Lebanon in this latest conflict.

Europol is aiming to become a powerful police force with far-reaching surveillance powers. But in an attempt to deliver in the fight against serious cross-border crime, the agency has apparently gone rogue itself, this investigation reveals: Secret data analysis platforms have put innocent citizens at risk, an issue that remains unresolved today.

After ICIJ’s Cancer Calculus investigation exposed a market for falsified Keytruda, two sources confirmed Friday that Mexican authorities found vials labeled as the anti-cancer drug in the raid.

Thousands of children in the throes of mental health crises are turned over to foster care each year by parents who can’t access – or afford – the treatment they need, according to a first-ever database of such “relinquishments” created by The Imprint, with support from the Fund. More than 20 years ago, a report […]
The post Grantee investigation tracks extent of parents surrendering their kids to foster care to get mental-health treatment appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism.

So much for Seth.
Rep. Seth Moulton’s bid for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts ended Tuesday in an inglorious defeat in the Democratic primary at the hands of the incumbent, Senator Ed Markey, 80.
At 10 and a half months, Moulton’s Senate bid lasted longer than his 2020 presidential campaign, which expired in August 2019 after 4 months. He managed to win the endorsement of the Boston Globe, the state’s largest newspaper. But Moulton, a 47-year-old ex-Marine with three degrees from Harvard, didn’t win enough votes in the primary to proceed, leaving his Senate race with the same outcome as his presidential campaign: a loss. [With XX votes reported he was trailing xx to xx.]
The significance goes beyond Moulton’s political career. It points to the difficulty of dislodging an incumbent senator—news that will come as no solace to John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, but that may help reassure Susan Collins, Republican of Maine. It points to the tenuous road for moderate candidates in Democratic primary politics. Most of all, though, it is a demonstration that totally abandoning whatever principles you had, or were pretending to have, is no recipe for victory.
Malleability is sometimes counted as a political plus, as in the hoary joke about the politician who says, “those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.” But Moulton managed to take that approach so far in his 2026 campaign—running away from any of his own moderate positions that might conceivably differentiate him from Markey—that the overall effect was less self-deprecating than it was abjectly pathetic. Instead of pragmatic, Moulton seemed inauthentic.
Among the areas where Moulton flip-flopped:
Business, taxes, and class warfare. One of his three degrees from Harvard is an MBA, and Moulton kicked off his presidential campaign in 2019 by pointedly declaring, “I’m not a socialist.” He denounced tax increases on the rich as “class warfare.” As a member of Congress, he has not signed on as a cosponsor to two pieces of tax-the-rich legislation.
Yet as a Senate candidate, he’s promising a $3.5 trillion tax increase based on “a national wealth tax on mega-millionaires.”
Israel. Moulton started out pro-Israel. On October 7, 2023, he said, “I stand firmly with Israel and unequivocally affirm its right to defend itself and its people.” He called the Harvard student organization letter holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the violence “intellectually weak and morally repugnant,” declaring, “I cannot recall a moment when I’ve been more embarrassed by my alma mater.” In December 2023, he criticized Harvard’s then-president, Claudine Gay: “Moral leadership rarely comes in the form of defensive explanations. People are ‘confused’ because you refused to unequivocally state that advocating genocide has no place in the Harvard community. … Wouldn’t it have been powerful to see university leaders join together in committing to combat the shocking rise of antisemitism in America, rather than uniting to avoid answering a simple question.”
Yet Moulton kicked off his Senate campaign with an attack on the main pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, performatively refusing to accept donations from it. He also pledged to return all the money he had accepted from AIPAC, which he failed to do. Instead, he returned the funds he’d received from the group in the 2026 cycle.
Cultural issues. In a November 2024 post-election interview with the New York Times, Moulton suggested that the Democrats could benefit from being less doctrinaire on the issue of men in women’s sports: “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” The remarks came after Trump soared to victory over Kamala Harris in part on the basis of a television commercial highlighting Harris’s response to a 2019 ACLU questionnaire in which she said she supported taxpayer-funded sex-change operations for illegal aliens. “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” the ad said.
Yet in the Senate campaign, Moulton apologized for those comments. “To the trans community, feeling the weight and the pain of the Trump administration policies, I deeply recognize your trauma, and I’m sorry if my comments hurt you. That was not my intention,” Moulton said during an August 3, 2026 debate. “I’m a proud sponsor of the transgender bill of rights, a proud repeat cosponsor of the Equality Act, and I have a 100 percent record with the Human Rights Campaign. If you’re in the trans community, or you’re a trans kid feeling the weight of the Trump administration and the Supreme Court, you matter, you’re valued, and I will always have your back.”
The cumulative effect of it all was to leave Massachusetts voters confused about what Moulton stood for other than his own ambition for higher office. The evolutions seemed awfully convenient for appealing to the left-leaning Massachusetts Democratic primary electorate, but they wound up turning off voters by appearing calculated rather than conviction-based. Maybe Moulton will be considered for the role of Secretary of Veterans Affairs in the next Democratic administration, or some transportation-related job—he’s a high-speed rail enthusiast. Until then perhaps he will seek employment in the private sector, equipped with the painfully earned newfound knowledge that the public—even a segment of it as skewed as the Massachusetts Democratic primary electorate—can easily detect a phony.
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The crypto billionaire and Democratic megadonor Chris Larsen is pouring millions into Republican primaries through the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition, a PAC devoted to climate activism led by the scandal-plagued former executive director of the Sierra Club, Michael Brune. The two are strange bedfellows: Brune has branded crypto, the industry in which Larsen made a fortune, a “climate catastrophe” that facilitates “money laundering and fraud.”
Larsen, Ripple Labs’s cofounder, contributed $6 million to the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC. Several solar companies and climate-oriented hedge funds also contribute to the PAC. (Jigar Shah, a former Biden administration energy loan czar who allegedly engaged in “pay-to-play” schemes involving his cronies, has contributed $50,000 to the coalition.) The group tapped Brune to lead the operation after he resigned from Sierra Club in 2021 amid an internal investigation into “abuse and misconduct.” That investigation concluded that Brune had tolerated a culture of “anger and aggression” and led to a “Restorative Accountability Process.”
Invest in Tomorrow’s aim, according to PAC leaders and donors, is to “punish” and “take out” Republicans who oppose tax credits for solar and renewable energy firms. The group spent $2 million against Trump-backed Rep. Andy Ogles (Tenn.) in his primary race and $1 million against Rep. Ralph Norman (S.C.) in his Senate campaign. It also spent roughly $640,000 in the GOP’s Texas attorney general primary to attack Rep. Chip Roy (Texas), a longtime opponent of renewable-energy incentives. Ogles, Norman, and Roy lost those primaries.
Larsen and Brune make for strange bedfellows. Brune, who also stoked controversy at the Sierra Club in 2020 for calling group founder John Muir a “racist,” has been an outspoken critic of cryptocurrency and called for more regulation of the industry. In 2022, Brune said that a lack of regulations for the industry would create “a climate catastrophe” and an “increased risk of money laundering and fraud.”
In 2015, the Obama administration sued Ripple Labs, which operates the cryptocurrency XRP, in the first ever lawsuit against a cryptocurrency exchange for failing to implement a system “to protect its products from use by money launderers or terrorist financiers.”
Larsen has decried efforts to regulate the industry, railing earlier this year against Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) as “violently anti-crypto.”
Larsen, who has amassed a $15 billion fortune through Ripple Labs, has argued that XRP and Ripple’s technology are significantly more energy-efficient than Bitcoin, which is mined with energy-heavy supercomputers. And while Larsen has criticized Bitcoin, one of Ripple Labs’s first angel investors was the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund, a cryptocurrency venture capital fund.
And Larsen and Ripple Labs are supporters of the cryptocurrency industry writ large. Ripple Labs has contributed $93 million to Fairshake, a super PAC that backs pro-crypto congressional candidates.
Brune has been on Larsen’s payroll since his ouster from the Sierra Club. Larsen’s charity, the Larsen-Iam Climate Change Foundation, paid Brune $1.4 million for “environmental advisory” services in 2023 and 2024, according to tax filings.
Larsen, who funds the foundation largely with shares of XRP, has paid more than $500,000 to Ken Kurson, the former publisher of the New York Observer and a former Ripple Labs board member who has written extensively about crypto. Ripple Labs removed Kurson as a board member after the Department of Justice indicted him on cyberstalking charges related to his ugly divorce. President Donald Trump pardoned Kurson, who has close ties to Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, in 2021.
The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition relies heavily on so-called meddle ads, in which partisan groups run ads to influence voters of the other party.
The PAC’s ads make no mention of climate change or renewable energy. Instead, they paint the PAC’s Republican targets as insufficiently conservative. The ads attacking Ogles called him “Lyin’ Andy Ogles” and touted Ogles’s Republican challenger Charlie Hatcher as “the America First Conservative.” The ads against Norman call the pro-Trump, hardline conservative a “MAGA traitor.”
The PAC directs its ads, using a tactic called “microtargeting,” at social media users with interests in “light beer” “motorboat,” “football,” and “hunting,” according to data published by Facebook.
Larsen and his comrades are by and large liberal Democrats. Larsen, who lives in the liberal stronghold of San Francisco, has contributed $555,700 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the largest PAC supporting House Democrats. Larsen contributed $500,000 to Lone Star Rising PAC, which is backing James Talarico’s Texas Senate campaign, and nearly $12 million to support Kamala Harris in 2024, according to campaign finance records.
While the coalition’s “meddle ads” may trick many voters—as noted, all three of its conservative targets lost their primaries—the PAC leaders are more than happy to acknowledge their controversial political strategy.
“This is political warfare,” Larsen, who cofounded Ripple Labs in 2012, said in a recent interview. Larsen singled out Roy as “the biggest enemy for solar in Congress,” adding that “there has to be a consequence to that.”
“We’re running these ads that are coming from a MAGA perspective because we want to win,” Brune said in the same interview.
Shah, the former Biden administration energy loan czar, has also described the PAC’s strategy, saying that it was created to teach anti-solar Republicans that there would be “real consequences” for attacking the industry.
The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition has indicated it will continue its efforts beyond primary races. Tom Matzzie, the group’s chairman, said his group will “take this fight across the country through November.” The PAC has $3.2 million cash on hand as of July 31, according to campaign disclosures.
Invest in Tomorrow Coalition, Ripple Labs, and Brune did not respond to requests for comment.
The post Crypto Billionaire Taps Scandal-Tarred Crypto Critic To Meddle in GOP Primaries appeared first on .

KUALA LUMPUR — NexG Berhad kini berdepan cabaran besar untuk memulihkan keyakinan pasaran selepas syarikat itu merekodkan kerugian

Kemelut dalaman yang sekian lama membelenggu NexG Berhad akhirnya menemui noktah apabila tokoh korporat Melayu, Datuk Ishak Ismail,