Switzerland seizes $857m of assets as the daughter of Uzbekistan's ex-leader is charged with fraud.

By Jack Queen A Georgia judge on Wednesday said he was “very skeptical” that Donald Trump and 18

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Binace, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, will pay over $4bn to US officials after admitting to unlicensed money transfers, sanctions violations, and willfully failing to institute anti-money laundering protections, federal officials announced on Tuesday. The oversights allowed trading with sanctioned nations like Iran, Cuba, and Syria, and failed to institute systems to report suspicious potential transactions with terror groups, according to the Treasury Department. “Binance was allowing illicit actors to transact freely, supporting activities from child sexual abuse to illegal narcotics to terrorism,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellensaid on Tuesday. Changpeng Zhao, the founder of and CEO of Binance, is also stepping down, and will pay a $50m fine after pleading guilty to related charges. He could face up to 18 months in prison. “I made mistakes, and I must take responsibility,” the executive wrote on X. “This is best for our community, for Binance, and for myself.” Federal officials described a wide-ranging set of problems at the crypto exchange, which at times handled two-thirds of global crypto trades. “It willfully enabled hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions between American users and users subject to US sanctions,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in remarks on Tuesday. “And its platform accommodated criminals across the world who used Binance to move their stolen funds and other criminal proceeds. “Binance prioritized its profits over the safety of the American people.” The massive penalty, one of the largest in US financial regulation history, will also go towards resolving inquiries from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen), and the Office of Foreign Assets Control. On multiple occasions, Binance leadership intentionally took steps that allowed dangerous and illegal transactions to take place, according to the Justice Department. Binance knew it served US customers, meaning it had to register with FinCen and implement anti-money laundering controls, but “chose not to comply,” per the DOJ. Rather than set up these protections, the company created a separate Binance.US platform in 2019, while seeking to encourage VIP customers to obscure their accounts and continue using the main exchange, officials said. “Binance executives, including Zhao, made a plan to contact VIP customers and help the VIP register a new account for an offshore entity and transfer holdings to that account,” the DoJ said in an announcement of the agreement on Tuesday. “Binance employees also called US VIPs to encourage them to provide information that suggested the customer was not located in the United States.” The company, knowing it had US customers, also failed to introduce controls that would stop them from making trades with sanctioned jurisdictions like Iran, resulting in over $898m in trades between US and Iran-based users between January 2019 and May 2022. At one point, according to the DoJ, Zhao told employees it was “better to ask for forgiveness than permission,” while in another instance, a compliance employee wrote in a message, “We need a banner ‘is washing drug money too hard these days - come to binance we got cake for you.’” In a statement on Tuesday, Binance acknowledge making “criminal violations.” “These resolutions acknowledge our company’s responsibility for historical, criminal compliance violations, and allow our company to turn the page on a challenging yet transformative chapter of learning and growth,” the company wrote. “With the compliance and governance enhancements enshrined in our commitments, we can begin to share our vision for Binance’s exciting future and the future of the crypto industry.” The company also emphasised that the resolutions don’t allege Binance misappropriated user funds or engaged in market manipulation. Richard Teng, the company’s former global head of regional markets, will take over as CEO, according to Binance. The massive agreement with federal regulators will also require Binance to accept the appointment of a government monitor to oversee the business and bar Zhao from involvement with the company until three years after the monitor is appointed, according to court records viewed by The New York Times. Notably, the Securities and Exchange Commission was not a part of the Binance agreement. The SEC sued Binance and Zhao in June, alleging that they used companies beneficially owned by Zhao to inflate trading prices and make money off customers, allegedly mixing customer funds with Binance money. “While we take the SEC’s allegations seriously, they should not be the subject of an SEC enforcement action, let alone on an emergency basis. We intend to defend our platform vigorously,” the company responded at the time in a statement. “And, to be clear: any allegations that user assets on the Binance.US platform have ever been at risk are simply wrong, and there is zero justification for the Staff’s action in light of the ample time the Staff has had to conduct their investigation,” the company added in the statement. The massive settlement comes just weeks after FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty in federal court of defrauding customers on his popular cryptocurrency exchange out of billions of dollars. Bankman-Fried’s defence team has vowed to fight the charges.

By Panu Wongcha-um BANGKOK (Reuters) -Thailand's billionaire former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said on Tuesday he would return home in

A Russian drone attack over the city of Lviv, Ukraine, early on Tuesday 19 September heavily damaged a warehouse facility and injured a 26-year-old man, according to the regional governor. Maksym Kozytsky reported that 15 out of 18 drones were intercepted. Footage from the ground shows flames raging from a warehouse, as firefighters battle to control the blaze. The state emergency service said the fire, caused by the drone attack, has reached 9,450 square meters. A total of 27 out of 30 Shahed drones were intercepted Monday night across Ukraine, according to the Air Force report. Read More

David Letterman returned to his old stomping grounds on Monday, November 20, eight years after he bid farewell to the show

Gilgo Beach serial killer suspect Rex Heuermann has been hit with a lawsuit over $70,000 in unpaid wages to a former assistant at his Manhattan architecture firm. In what marks the latest legal problem for the accused murderer, New York state’s Labor Department sued Mr Heuermann on Tuesday for labour violations. The lawsuit accuses the 59-year-old father-of-two of failing to pay outstanding damages to former employee Donna Sturman. From February 2017 to March 2018, Ms Sturman worked as an executive assistant at RH Consultants & Associates – the architecture business Mr Heuermann founded in 1994. During her employment, Mr Heuermann and his firm paid her below New York’s state’s minimum wage – effectively stealing $20,908.10 in wages from her, according to the suit. This included $9,454.56 in vacation pay that Ms Sturman was owed. In 2021 – two years before he was arrested on suspicion of being the serial killer who terrorised the shores of Long Island one decade before – Mr Heuermann and his firm agreed to settle the lawsuit for $84,945.84. As well as the unpaid wages, the settlement included interest, damages and civil penalties. Since then, Mr Heuermann has made just one payment of $16,385 and so still owes $68,560.84 in payments, the lawsuit claims. The lawsuit is the least of Mr Heuermann’s troubles as he sits behind bars charged with the murders of three women. The 59-year-old married father-of-two was taken into custody on 13 July when he left his architecture firm office in Midtown Manhattan and officers swooped on him in the centre of the city. He was charged with the murders of Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy and Amber Costello. He is also the prime suspect in the murder of Maureen Brainard-Barnes – who was last seen alive in early June 2007 in New York City and who, with the three other women, is known as the “Gilgo Four”. All four women worked as sex workers and disappeared after going to meet a client. They were all found in December 2010 within one-quarter mile of each other, bound by belts or tape and some wrapped in burlap – their bodies dumped along Gilgo Beach. They are among 11 victims whose remains were found along the shores of Long Island in 2010 and 2011, sparking fears of one or more serial killers. His arrest is said to have caught his loved ones off guard and plunged them into Vess Mitev, who began representing his adult children Victoria Heuermann, 26, and Christopher Sheridan, 33, after their father’s arrest, told The Independent that the family are now living in a “surreal hellscape”. “The Heuermann children have been living in a constant, surreal, waking nightmare,” he said. “Just because the news coverage doesn’t continue or it’s not in the news on a daily basis each day, for them it’s every day, it’s every moment. It’s the moment they wake up to the moment they go back to sleep again. “It’s a situation you wouldn’t want to wish on anyone. It’s not a reality.” He added: “Their focus has just been on managing their basic daily needs. We have specific, fundamental needs that we require to survive as people and that has really been their primary goal as their resources have been depleted completely or are no longer available to them. “Their basic needs such as food, clothing, shelter and a safe space to sleep in have been all but obliterated. They’re trying to piece back together those very basic but yet so vital things that most of us take for granted.” Mr Mitev also hit out at the “wild conspiracy theories” that the family may have known about his alleged crimes saying that they “shouldn’t even be dignified with a response”. “These allegations shouldn’t even be dignified with a response,” he said. “But they are emblematic of someone with a thirst for the spotlight – an unquenchable thirst.” The pushback comes after Long Island attorney John Ray accused Mr Heuermann’s wife Asa Ellerup of being involved in her husband’s alleged killing spree. Speaking at a press conference last month, Mr Ray – who represents the families of two Gilgo Beach victims Shannan Gilbert and Jessica Taylor – claimed that Ms Ellerup should be treated as a suspect in the case. “It’s part of one large criminal enterprise,” he said. “She should be considered a suspect and not just a bystander or someone who’s been victimised by her husband.” Mr Ray has offered no evidence for this claim and Long Island officials are not treating Ms Ellerup, Ms Heuermann or Mr Sheridan as suspects. Court documents laying out the case against Mr Heuermann have stated that his family members were all out of town at the time of the killings. When asked about the allegations levelled by Mr Ray, Mr Mitev slammed the fact that the “wild conspiracy theories” should even need to be addressed. Instead of fending off unfounded claims about their own lives, Mr Mitev said that Victoria and Christopher are simply trying to survive after being thrust into the national spotlight when their father was arrested for three of the murders that terrorised the Long Island shores over a decade ago. At the time of his bombshell arrest, the adult children still lived with their father and mother Asa Ellerup at the family home in Massapequa Park – a stone’s throw from Gilgo Beach where victims’ bodies were dumped. Mr Mitev has previously revealed that the family are considering legal action against Suffolk County officials after they say their home was left “in a deplorable condition” from the two-week long police search. Photos reveal holes cut out of bathtubs, the garden excavated and belongings strewn all over and piled up high in the home that the family of four shared. Since then, Mr Heuermann’s children and wife have been spotted sitting outside their home – as Mr Mitev said the inside of the home is too much of a mess to be in. “The reason they’ve been photographed so much on the front porch is not because that’s where they congregate but it’s that they have nowhere to sit inside because of the absolute ransacking of the home,” he said. For now, the family members are just thankful for the kindness of strangers after receiving an outpouring of support from an unlikely source. Melissa Moore, the daughter of the notorious Happy Face Killer Keith Hunter Jesperson, launched a GoFundMe campaign to help them as she compared their experiences discovering that a close family member had spent years leading a “double life” as an alleged serial killer. As of 6 September, the GoFundMe had topped $53,000 in donations. “They really do appreciate the outpouring of support and emotional solidarity. They’re not looking for anything and not looking for any of this,” said Mr Mitev. “The one thing they want is to get some semblance of private life back.” Read More Attorney for Gilgo Beach murder suspect’s children hits back at claims family knew about alleged crimes Police investigating claim that missing South Carolina woman was last seen with Gilgo Beach murders suspect Scandal-plagued former Gilgo Beach police chief arrested for soliciting sex from undercover officer in park

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Hundreds of thousands of Afghans living in Pakistan faced the threat of detention and deportation on Wednesday, as a government deadline for them to leave...

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