The Metropolitan Opera is broadening its repertoire this season by performing more recent operas alongside classics like “La Boheme.”

The Ukrainian president thanks his air force, after most of the Russian drones were shot down.

Walton County officials appreciated the driver's kind gesture but warned against doing so 'in the middle of the road'

Ukraine’s leader has always been comfortable campaigning for help - now he’s having to negotiate.

WASHINGTON Allies of Mike Pence launched a Super PAC on Tuesday to garner support for the former vice

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.

Mike Pence says he wants to see an armed guard in every public school in America to try and prevent mass shootings rather than gun control measures. The former vice president told a CNN town hall that he believed there should be more gun-carrying security guards in American schools capable of taking down shooters. “We ought to fund an armed and trained security guard at every public school in America and we ought to do it now,” he told host Dana Bash. Bash pointed out that heavily-armed police had not prevented the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 students and two teachers were murdered. “That is why I always say trained and armed .... they have got to be trained. If it takes federal funding let’s do it,” said Mr Pence. “I just think we ought to end the conversation and Washington DC should stand up and provide the funding for a trained armed guard that can be part of the school community.” Mr Pence was also asked to justify his belief in expediting the death penalty for mass shooters, most of whom are killed or intend to die during the violence. “I follow these stories as closely as you do and of course our years in the White House we saw one tragedy after another and we see evidence in the aftermath that they went in without regard to whether they would survive, but I just believe in the deterrent of the law,” he said. “I believe that if perhaps we made it clear ... the Parkland shooter in Florida is going to spend the rest of his life in jail, that is not justice.” Mr Pence told the town hall that his “heart breaks” for Chicago, where his parents grew up, and the gun violence that has impacted the city. “We need to get serious and tough on violent crime and give our cities and states resources to restore law and order to our streets,” he said. Bash then had a surprising statistic for the former governor of Indiana. “I just want to say, because I’ve heard other people talk about Chicago, just for the record, the ATF data shows that more than half of the recovered guns used to commit crimes in Illinois in 2021, do you know where they came from? Indiana,” she told him. Read More Mike Pence news – live: At CNN town hall Pence says he won’t pardon Jan 6 protesters who called for his death Pence calls on DoJ not to indict Trump but stops short of saying he’d pardon him if elected in 2024 Mike Pence isn’t even a contender for 2024. Why are we pretending? Deputy Scot Peterson could have stopped Parkland school shooting but protected himself instead, trial hears

VELIZY-VILLACOUBLAY, France--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 18, 2023--

The UK attracted its biggest-ever orderbook for a conventional bond sale on Wednesday as investors look to lock

Astronomers have spotted the moment a black hole "turned on". While looking for the collision of a neutron star with another object, which should result in a kilonova (an explosion which reddens then fades over time), they stumbled upon an event which remained extremely bright. They soon worked out this light was because of supermassive black hole called J221951-484240 which had been on for around 10 months. But then they had to work out what had caused it, and got stuck between two causes, “J221951 is consistent with being nuclear, so the scenarios we are being left are a tidal disruption event or an active galactic nucleus,” lead author Dr Samantha Oates said as she presented the research at the National Astronomy Meeting 2023. “Looking at the spectrum it's consistent with both categories.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter A tidal disruption event (TDE) takes place when a star or a gas cloud gets too close to a supermassive black hole. The material is ripped apart, and begins to shine as the black hole feeds Alternatively, it could be an active galactic nucleus (AGN), the phase of a supermassive black hole where it is consistently feeding in a frenzy. “We hope in future to distinguish between these two scenarios,” Dr Oates concluded. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Two men at the centre of a scandal that rocked the world of competitive fishing get their punishment.

Here is what we know about Earle and Berrios, whose relationship has largely been the subject of rumors up until this point