Michael Oswald’s film The Spider’s Web reveals how at the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it in a web of offshore islands. Today, up to half of global offshore wealth is hidden in British jurisdictions and Britain and its dependencies are the largest global players in the world of international finance.
Politico reports: Western countries are rushing heavy weaponry to Ukraine as the war enters what promises to be a deadly, and potentially protracted, new phase. Those deliveries are coming amid increasingly desperate pleas from Ukrainian battlefield commanders as they endure withering Russian artillery and rocket fire that could last weeks or months. Over the past two weeks, the Biden administration began shipping out $1.2 billion worth of howitzers, around 200,000 artillery rounds, armored vehicles, counter-battery radars and experimental new armed…
The New York Times reports: A New York judge on Monday held Donald J. Trump in contempt of court for failing to turn over documents to the state’s attorney general, an extraordinary rebuke of the former president. The judge, Arthur F. Engoron, ordered Mr. Trump to comply with a subpoena seeking records and assessed a fine of $10,000 per day until he satisfied the court’s requirements. In essence, the judge concluded that Mr. Trump had failed to cooperate with the…
The Associated Press reports: The far-right has gone mainstream in France. That’s the headline from the landmark showing by Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election. The fierce nationalist didn’t win Sunday. But she edged another step closer — snatching a victory of sorts from her defeat to reelected President Emmanuel Macron. With 41.5% of the vote, unprecedented for her, Le Pen’s anti-foreigner, anti-system politics of disgruntlement are now more entrenched than ever in the psyche, thinking and political…
Russian oligarchs and companies have been investing in London for two decades, encouraged by British politicians of all stripes, but critics say the ‘London laundromat’ cleans dirty money from Russia and across the globe. The FT examines why it took Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to put the issue in the spotlight and whether new sanctions and measures to tackle the problem go far enough. Read more at Financial Times
Nicholas Grossman writes: As the United States and other NATO countries send Ukraine weapons to fight Russian invaders, some left-wing critics have denounced the effort as warmongering escalation. For example, linguist professor and activist Noam Chomsky described American policy as “praising ourselves for heroism” while “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.” I fault no one for lamenting the destruction and hoping for peace, but that assessment misunderstands this war and America’s role in it. The decision of when to stop…
Viktor Yushchenko writes: Maksym Kurochkin is a playwright. For almost three years, he and 20 other Ukrainian playwrights had been planning to build a new theatre in the heart of Old Kyiv. The group found a magnificent old structure that they were busy renovating in order to open the Playwrights’ theatre on 12 March. On 24 February, Maksym and his colleagues awoke to the horrific sound of bombs. 12 March came and went. Instead of planning a grand opening for…
The New York Times reports: On the evening of Dec. 9, 2005, 17 days after Gerhard Schröder left office as chancellor of Germany, he got a call on his cellphone. It was his friend President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Mr. Putin was pressing Mr. Schröder to accept an offer to lead the shareholder committee of Nord Stream, the Russian-controlled company in charge of building the first undersea gas pipeline directly connecting Russia and Germany. “Are you afraid to work…
The Observer reports: Last week a familiar figure returned to the main square of the seaside town of Henichesk. Dressed in a three-piece suit, and sporting his familiar goatee and moustache, Vladimir Lenin was back on his pedestal. A statue of the Bolshevik leader had been erected outside the town’s main council building. Flying from the roof were the Russian and Soviet flags. All in time for Lenin’s 152nd birthday on Friday. Henichesk, however, is not in Russia. It is…
The Guardian reports: The highest echelons of the US media were once again in the spotlight this week, after CNN this week abandoned a newly launched streaming service and the New York Times appointed a prominent Bostonian to lead it. CNN+ will shut down on 30 April, about a month after it was launched with a $300m investment. The new owner of the network, Warner Bros Discovery – itself the product of a $43bn merger between AT&T and the Discovery…
Timothy Snyder writes: The City Council of Mariupol, Ukraine, was trying to make a point about mass death. Their city had been hit hardest by the Russian invasion, and thousands of corpses lay amid the rubble after weeks of urban warfare. After the revelation of Russian atrocities in Bucha and other cities in northern Ukraine, the elected representatives of the port city wished to remind the world that the scale of killing in the south was still higher. In dry…
The Daily Beast reports: As Russian troops tighten their grip on the strategic port town of Mariupol, their strategy is finally becoming clear. Russian military commander Rustam Minnekaev now says the second phase of President Vladimir Putin’s “special operation” is focused on establishing a “land corridor” from the Donbas all the way to Moldova, which would cut off the rest of Ukraine from the sea. “One of the tasks of the Russian army is to establish full control over the…
The Wall Street Journal reports: The far-right party of French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has begun paying a settlement of 12 million euros—equivalent to $12.94 million—to a Russian military contractor under U.S. sanctions, part of a debt restructuring that granted her party more time to repay a loan it took from a Russian bank, according to Russian and French government records. Aviazapchast JSC—a Moscow-based company that supplies Russian military aircraft and parts across the Middle East, Africa and Asia—took…
The New York Times reports: The European Union reached a deal on Saturday on landmark legislation that would force Facebook, YouTube and other internet services to combat misinformation, disclose how their services amplify divisive content and stop targeting online ads based on a person’s ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. The law, called the Digital Services Act, is intended to address social media’s societal harms by requiring companies to more aggressively police their platforms for illicit content or risk billions of…
Robert Schlesinger writes: “The market is rational and government is dumb,” Dick Armey, one of the leaders of the 1994 Republican Revolution, liked to say. That used to be a cornerstone of conservatism. Today, it’s increasingly the reverse. While they still mouth free-market platitudes, Republicans fulminate against corporate America for taking political positions that they oppose—without any apparent awareness, or a refusal to recognize, that such decisions reveal the free market in action: Conservatives’ culture-war positions are broadly toxic to…
Jamelle Bouie writes: Almost 60 years ago, the historian Richard Hofstadter described what he saw as the true goal of McCarthyism. “The real function of the Great Inquisition of the 1950’s was not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies or prevent espionage,” he wrote, “or even to expose actual Communists, but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Communist issue itself.” Likewise, in a much more recent…