2022/06/12

Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments

The leak also contains texts between Kalanick and Emmanuel Macron, who secretly helped the company in France when he was economy minister, allowing Uber frequent and direct access to him and his staff.

2022/06/09

Mysterious Group of Companies Tied to Bank Rossiya Unites Billions of Dollars in Assets Connected to Vladimir Putin

Lawyers for Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich argue he should not be sanctioned because his ties to the Kremlin are weak, but new documents reveal he secretly had a years-long partnership with the Russian government in a forestry venture.

The Russian president, who cultivates a public image of abstemious patriotism, has been linked to a number of luxurious properties, including a vast palace on the Black Sea, acres of surrounding vineyards, a ski resort, and a villa north of St. Petersburg.

“It looks very compelling that Whyte has been acting as a proxy for Kostin,” said Tamara Makarenko, a veteran of the business intelligence sector extensive experience investigating oligarchs.

The family of Tatyana Golikova, the Deputy Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation for Social Policy, owns assets worth around $830 million, as Alexei Navalny’s team of investigators discovered. The list of real estate objects owned by the deputy prime minister’s family (Golikova herself, her husband Viktor Khristenko, and her stepson Vladimir Khristenko) features a house near Moscow with a floor area of 1,800 square meters, five villas in Europe, and several golf clubs. The investigators insist that she “earned” all this wealth by making vaccines for the national immunization campaign.

in Kyiv, a company called Milton Group threw a glitzy New Year’s party for its staff. To the strains of a pop-rock cover band, contortionists and fire-dancers whirled under neon lights as young salespeople revelled in the spoils of a record-breaking year selling investments in cryptocurrencies and stocks. The firm’s management distributed cash, cars, and other prizes. One star salesman got a free apartment for a year. But the real business of Milton Group was fraud. And even as its young employees partied in Kyiv, their victims across the world were losing their homes and assets.

Music in the brain

“the existence of music-selective responses in the brain does not imply that the responses reflect an innate brain system. An important question for the future will be how this system arises in development: How early it is found in infancy or childhood, and how dependent it is on experience?