Tag: billionaires

Bill Gates and the Uncertain Future of Food Security

As we approach a winter of discontent and Global food systems go from bad to worse, there’s trouble in paradise.

At the root of these problems, Government responses to COVID-19 have contributed to a six-fold increase in famine-like conditions as global supply chains collapse, and field trials for gene-edited crops and farm animals begin in the UK.

Against this perfect storm, the UN’s World Food Systems Summit convened last month, with Member States joining the private sector, civil society groups and researchers, to bring about “tangible, positive changes” to the world’s food systems, and as the story goes, “drive recovery from COVID-19.”

But even if we could solve our problems using the same logic that created them, there are deeper, institutional problems undermining the integrity of the Summit.

Specifically, its corporate capture by one man, whose vision of the future of food security places the interests of civil society and farming communities in a different universe to the corporations he is beholden to.

A household name on the world stage of disaster-capitalism, there is more to Bill Gates than doomsayer-general terrorising the world’s population into a permanent state of suspended animation, and it typically involves the future of food security.

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Nevada Democrat Violates State Mask Mandate at Star-Studded Gala Honoring Chinese Billionaire

Rep. Susie Lee (D., Nev.) keeps violating her state’s indoor mask mandate. Photographic evidence obtained by the Washington Free Beacon shows the congresswoman partying without a mask for the second time in as many months, putting countless lives at risk with her irresponsible behavior.

Lee was spotted dancing at the Power of Love Gala in Las Vegas on Oct. 16. She wasn’t wearing a mask, even though Gov. Steve Sisolak (D., Nev.) imposed a state mandate that requires the use of masks in “indoor public settings,” regardless of vaccination status. Sisolak’s office did not return a request for comment on the reckless violation.

The ritzy gala, sponsored by Moët Hennessy, was thrown in honor of K.T. Lim, a Chinese-Malaysian billionaire. Lim’s company developed Resorts World Las Vegas, which hosted the celebrity-packed affair, where guests dined on “gourmet cuisine from celebrity chefs Wolfgang Puck and Bobby Flay,” and could bid on “luxury auction items” such as dinner with Jon Bon Jovi, a chess match with opera singer Andrea Bocelli, and a Lamborghini. Other VIP attendees included Demi Lovato, Jordin Sparks, and A.J. McLean of the Backstreet Boys.

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Refreshingly Honest Billionaire Says Media Purchase Will Be Used For Propaganda

The billionaire CEO of the multibillion-dollar corporation that recently purchased the news media outlet Politico has said that its newly acquired employees will be required to support Israel and the capitalist world order.

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the German publisher Axel Springer, said that Politico staffers will be required to adhere to a set of principles which include “support for a united Europe, Israel’s right to exist and a free-market economy, among others.”

“These values are like a constitution, they apply to every employee of our company,” Mr. Döpfner told WSJ. People with a fundamental problem with any of these principles “should not work for Axel Springer, very clearly,” he said.

I mean, how refreshing is that? How often does a billionaire corporation buy up a media property and just straightforwardly tell you they’re going to be using it to push propaganda? They even say what the propaganda will be. It makes you feel like your intelligence is being respected.

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The unsolved murder of an unusual billionaire.

Last Dec. 15, two real estate agents arrived at a sprawling modern house near the northern edge of Toronto. They were accompanied by a couple who were considering buying the 12,000-square-foot mansion at 50 Old Colony Rd., recently listed for just shy of C$7 million. With five bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a gym, a sauna, a tennis court, and underground parking for six cars, it was one of the more impressive properties on a street lined with grand homes. The sellers, pharmaceuticals billionaire Barry Sherman, 75, and his wife, Honey, 70, had lived there for more than two decades but were preparing to build a house closer to the center of the city.

The Shermans weren’t supposed to be home that day. It was midmorning, and a housekeeper was doing her semiweekly cleaning while another woman watered the plants. The tour took in the hexagonal entrance foyer, with its chandelier and black tile floors, and the spacious kitchen, soaked in natural light from a broad conservatory window over the sink. In the basement, the Shermans’ agent had something more unusual to show off: a lap pool and hot tub, handy in a city where winter weather can drag into April.

The pool was at the rear of the house, adjacent to a sunken garage and accessible from the rest of the basement by a long, narrow hallway. The agent, entering first, was the one who found them. Barry and Honey, spouses of more than 40 years, were side by side on the floor, their necks tied with men’s leather belts to a metal railing, about three and a half feet high, that ran around one end of the pool. Barry, heavyset with a crown of frizzy, thinning gray-and-brown hair, was seated, legs extended forward and crossed neatly at the ankles. Honey, who had a blond bob and an athletic frame, was slumped on her side and appeared to have been struck on her face. Their arms were drawn back, held in place by coats pulled down below their shoulders. Both were facing away from the water and fully clothed, although one of the belts seemed to have been taken from Barry’s trousers. It was impossible to tell how long they’d been dead.

Within hours, the deaths were the biggest story in Canada. Barry Sherman was the chairman of Apotex Inc., a privately held ­generic drug company that he founded in the mid-1970s. It’s now the ­country’s premier pharmaceutical manufacturer, accounting for as many as 1 in 5 Canadian prescriptions, and the rare large domestic drugmaker never to have been swallowed up by a foreign rival. With a fortune that the Bloomberg Billionaires Index placed at $3.6 billion at the time of his death, Sherman was Canada’s 18th-richest ­person, and he and Honey were among the country’s most generous philanthropists, supporting cultural and educational ­institutions, antipoverty organizations, and, despite Sherman’s avowed atheism, a panoply of Jewish causes.

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BILLIONAIRE LEON BLACK ALLEGEDLY RAPED A WOMAN IN EPSTEIN’S NEW YORK MANSION, NEW LEGAL DOCUMENTS CLAIM

This time last year, Leon Black, the then CEO and cofounder of private-equity giant Apollo Global Management, was one of the most powerful men on Wall Street and a pillar of New York society. The then 69-year-old billionaire was board chairman of the Museum of Modern Art, a trustee of Mount Sinai Hospital, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. 

Today, in new court documents, a former model is accusing Black of violently raping her at Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse in 2002. 

The woman, identified in the documents as “Jane Doe,” says Epstein arranged for her to give a $300 massage to Black when she was a financially struggling single mother living in New Jersey. But instead, she alleges, Black brutally assaulted her shortly after they entered the massage room on the third floor of Epstein’s mansion. A number of weeks later, she claims, Black paid her $5,000 cash to “help with her credit card debt.” The suit says Doe didn’t report the rape at the time because a friend warned her no one would believe her. 

“This claim is complete fiction and has no basis in fact or law,” a Black spokesperson said in a statement. “It is telling that it is asserted anonymously and concerns events that allegedly occurred some 20 years ago. We expect that the courts will see this bogus claim for what it is.”

The harrowing new allegation is included in documents filed today in New York Supreme Court by a former Russian model named Guzel Ganieva. In June, Ganieva sued Black for defamation after Black publicly denied Ganieva’s claims that Black “sexually harassed and abused” her. Ganieva’s lawsuit included allegations that linked Black to Epstein’s sex trafficking ring for the first time. It claimed that Black flew Ganieva to Palm Beach to have sex with Epstein in October 2008, when Epstein was serving time in a Florida jail for soliciting sex from a minor. The suit further alleged that Black made frequent comments about Epstein’s sexual depravity, including that Epstein flew “very young girls” aboard his private plane and that Epstein made money because “he takes care of the little girls” and was “doing a great job with it.”

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Attended Met Gala with Billionaire Seagram’s Heir Benjamin Bronfman

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) attended the 2021 Met Gala on Monday night with billionaire Seagram’s heir Benjamin Bronfman, who is dating her dress designer, Aurora James.

Ocasio-Cortez claimed her presence at the Met Gala clad in an ultra-fancy “Tax the Rich” dress was a political protest against the wealthy, and that she “punctured the 4th wall of excess and spectacle,” but critics say the move was a chief example of hypocrisy.

Moreover, Ocasio-Cortez — along with her boyfriend Riley Roberts — was spotted walking the red carpet with Aurora James and Benjamin Bronfman, who has an estimated net worth of $100 million, and whose father, Edgar Bronfman Jr., has an estimated net worth of $2.5 billion, as the family founded the Seagram’s drinks company.

While some argued that Ocasio-Cortez’s “Tax the Rich” dress was an insult to the wealthy people who donate to the gala, others pointed out that those whom government defines as “rich” are often middle and working class Americans.

President Joe Biden recently broke his pledge not to increase taxes on working-class Americans, as the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill would raise taxes on Americans making over $50,000 or more per year in the calendar year 2031.

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How Whitney Duan became China’s richest woman, then vanished without a trace

Once upon a time, Weihong “Whitney” Duan was the poster woman for the Chinese dream. 

After growing up poor, she wheeled and dealed her way to a billion-dollar fortune, making her name as China’s most successful female entrepreneur. 

Then, on Sept. 5, 2017, at age 50, she simply disappeared from the streets of Beijing. 

As her ex-husband Desmond Shum recounts in his new book, “Red Roulette,” (Scribner), out now, “she was last seen the day before in her sprawling office at Genesis Beijing, a $2.5 billion development project that she and I had built. There, Whitney had masterminded real estate projects worth billions more. And now suddenly she was gone.” 

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Jeff Bezos Is Building a 10,000-Year Clock Inside a Mountain

Engineers and contractors are building a massive, multi-room clock inside a mountain in West Texas—a clock that will tell time for the next 10,000 years. And despite an informal website with a whiff of Blogspot template, this is a Jeff Bezos project.

There are a lot of surprises in the story of the Clock of the Long Now. It’s the brainchild of Danny Hillis, a computer scientist and entrepreneur who first imagined the 10,000-year clock in 1986. Now, he’s a visiting professor at MIT Media Lab with a reputation for building supercomputers, autonomous dinosaur robots, and Disney theme park rides. He’s exactly the kind of guy who decides he wants to build a huge eon clock in a mountain.

How does the clock work? Well, the longness of the time involved is the big engineering challenge. The clock is designed to tick just once a year and chime once per millennium. Experts are blasting rooms out of the interior of the mountain in order to install steampunky piles of gears and flywheels. According to Bezos, the Amazon founder and richest man on the planet, the clock will be 500 feet tall, “all mechanical, powered by day/night thermal cycles,” and “synchronized at solar noon.”

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“He Takes Care Of The Little Girls” – Leon Black’s Ex-Mistress Shares Explosive New Details About “Best Friend” Jeffrey Epstein

A couple of weeks ago, we reported on the latest court filing made by Russian model Guzel Ganieva in her lawsuit against Leon Black. In the filing, she accused him of paying her millions of dollars in money and gifts in exchange for keeping the affair quiet.

But an amended filing released Monday includes even more explosive claims about Black’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Black has already been forced out of Apollo, the private equity giant he co-founded, months earlier than he had originally planned, despite an internal probe finding that his friendship with Epstein didn’t extend beyond his decision to pay him more than $150MM for tax advice. While many have speculated that Black’s explanation was a ruse (and a thin one at that), Ganieva makes several explosive new claims, hinting for the first time that Black knew exactly what Epstein was up to, while not directly accusing him.

In the amended filing, Ganieva alleges that Black “made multiple comments to Ganieva about Epstein’s sexual proclivities.” Black allegedly told Ganieva that Epstein flew “very young girls” aboard his private plane…and while the lawsuit doesn’t explicitly accuse Black of knowing that the girls Epstein trafficked were underage…it does claim that Black told Ganieva that Epstein made his money because he “takes care of the little girls” and was “doing a great job with it.”

She also claimed that she herself was trafficked to Epstein, saying that Black flew her to Florida in 2008 “without her consent, to satisfy the sex needs of Epstein, Black’s “best friend.”

Black’s legal team maintains that Ganieva’s account is a “work of fiction,” according to a report in Vanity Fair.

Black’s attorney, Dayna Perry, said in regard to the new claims that “Ms. Ganieva had six years to prepare her initial complaint in this case … She now claims to recall in August supposedly crucial events and connections that somehow had slipped her mind at the time of her June filing. But just like her June complaint, Ms. Ganieva’s story today is demonstrably and transparently false and betrays her willingness to say anything and fabricate a story in the hope something will stick.”

But Ganieva’s lawyers are reportedly subpoenaing flight records to see if they can prove she traveled with Black to Florida in October 2008. Evidence of this flight could be bad for Black, though we imagine his legal team will dismiss the records as irrelevant.

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