Tag: police state

Wells Fargo Suspends Travel to China After Communist Regime Blocks Top Banker from Leaving

Wells Fargo suspended travel for all of its employees to China on Thursday after the Chinese government slapped an exit ban on banker Chenyue Mao.

Mao is an American citizen who was born in Shanghai. She is a managing director for Wells Fargo, working from an office in Atlanta. According to the bank, her duties include helping international companies manage their working capital in different countries.

Mao specializes in “factoring,” the practice of selling accounts receivable to third parties. The seller gets cash immediately, while the buyer or “factor” proceeds to collect on the invoices they purchased at a discount. Companies that do business overseas often find factoring preferable to running debt collections operations in foreign countries.

In June, Mao was elected as chairwoman of FCI, a global industry organization for international accounts receivable. FCI was called Factors Chain International when it was established in 1968, and factoring remains one of its primary interests, but it has diversified into other aspects of finance and debt collection across national borders.

When it announced Mao’s election as chair of its executive committee, FCI noted she had over 21 years of experience with factoring and has worked at Wells Fargo for over a decade. During that time, she was credited with growing “annual import-factoring flows to 2.6 billion euros (over $3 billion in U.S. dollars) while fostering innovation in open-account solutions.”

FCI said her goals as chairwoman included recruiting more banks to the organization and “expanding import-factoring know-how within the network.”

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Brazil Raids Bolsonaro’s Home, Orders Him To Wear Ankle Monitor After Trump Blasts Leftist Country

The Brazilian Supreme Court ordered that police raid former President Jair Bolsonaro’s home and place an ankle monitor on him on Friday, escalating its targeting of the conservative leader as President Donald Trump defends him.

After the Brazilian Supreme Court issued search warrants and restraining orders on Bolsonaro, federal police raided his home, and the former president was banned from contacting foreign officials, Reuters reported. Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes cited a “concrete possibility” of Bolsonaro fleeing the country when he issued the order.

Brazil’s increased pressure on Bolsonaro comes shortly after President Trump defended his political ally and blasted the Brazilian Supreme Court for its “witch hunt” targeting Bolsonaro. Trump also imposed a 50% tariff on Brazil last week, citing the country’s “insidious attacks on Free Elections, and the fundamental Free Speech Rights of Americans.”

“The way that Brazil has treated former President Bolsonaro, a Highly Respected Leader throughout the World during his Term, including by the United States, is an international disgrace,” Trump said in a letter to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “This trial should not be taking place. It is a Witch Hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY!”

Moraes specifically called out Trump’s tariff on Brazil in his Friday order, arguing that it is intended to create an economic crisis in Brazil and interfere with the country’s judicial system.

On Thursday, Trump posted a letter on Truth Social that he sent to Bolsonaro, which read in part, “I have seen the terrible treatment you are receiving at the hands of an unjust system turned against you. This trial should end immediately! I am not surprised to see you leading in the polls; you were a highly respected and strong leader who served your country well.”

Bolsonaro told Reuters that he believes the Supreme Court’s move on Friday is in response to Trump’s recent comments. The former Brazilian president called Moraes a “dictator” and denied that he had any plans to flee the country.

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“Settlement tsunami”: Chicago spends more than double city budget on police misconduct settlements

The City of Chicago is searching for financial solutions amidst hundreds of pending police misconduct cases, spending more than double the $82 million budget.

Eight years ago, police burst down the door of the Mendez family home unannounced, pointing guns at Hester and Gilbert Mendez, and their sons Peter and Jack (who were 9 and 5 at the time) – only to find they’d raided the wrong apartment.

After years stuck in the legal pipeline, between COVID delays and multiple changes in the judge presiding over the case, Mendez et al. v. City of Chicago finally began on Monday, April 21, 2025 in Courtroom 1941 at the Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse in Chicago. 

The Mendez family was seeking financial compensation for their rights being violated and the trauma their children endured. 

The city of Chicago has already spent more than $164 million in taxpayer money this year on police misconduct settlements and judgments – more than double its $82 million budget. With hundreds of cases pending, including from people alleging torture by notorious former officers, the Mendez case illustrates how these situations often play out: the city launches into a costly trial, putting families through trauma and stress, only to settle for a large sum at taxpayer expense. Officials say there’s a better way to do it – offering substantial settlements earlier – not the unfairly small settlements that the city often uses to avoid trial, as lawyers see it; or ideally avoiding police misconduct in the first place. 

During the Mendez family’s trial, a now 17-year-old Peter Mendez described on the stand how he was traumatized on the evening of November 7, 2017. “My life flashed before my eyes, my heart was pounding, and I thought maybe I could die.”

To this day, the event has left Jack, the youngest child, with the same recurring nightmare of police shooting his mother, cuffing and taking his father away to jail, and separating him and his brother as they get taken to different orphanages. 

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Cocky cop jailed for stealing bitcoins had log of his crypto theft in his office

A former cop in the United Kingdom was sentenced to five and a half years in prison Wednesday after pleading guilty to covering up his theft of 50 bitcoins seized during an investigation into the now-defunct illicit dark web marketplace Silk Road.

In 2014, the former UK National Crime Agency (NCA) officer, Paul Chowles, assisted in the arrest of Thomas White, a man “who had launched Silk Road 2.0 less than a month after the FBI had shut down the original site in 2013,” the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said in a press release.

Chowles was tapped to analyze and extract “relevant data and cryptocurrency” from White’s seized devices, specifically due to Chowles’ reputation for being “technically minded and very aware of the dark web and cryptocurrencies,” CPS said.

Like US cops busted for stealing bitcoins from Silk Road seizures, Chowles’ theft was brazen. In 2017, he transferred 50 of 97 seized bitcoins from one of White’s wallets to a public address, then used a cryptocurrency mixer called Bitcoin Fog to break up the bitcoins into smaller amounts “in an attempt to hide the trail of the money,” CPS said.

At the time, the bitcoins were worth about $80,000, but today, they’re valued at nearly $6 million.

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The Wearables Trap: How The Government Plans To Monitor, Score, And Control You

“When the states legalize the deliberate ending of certain lives… it will eventually broaden the categories of those who can be put to death with impunity.”—Nat Hentoff, The Washington Post, 1992

Bodily autonomy—the right to privacy and integrity over our own bodies—is rapidly vanishing.

The debate now extends beyond forced vaccinations or invasive searches to include biometric surveillance, wearable tracking, and predictive health profiling.

We are entering a new age of algorithmic, authoritarian control, where our thoughts, moods, and biology are monitored and judged by the state.

This is the dark promise behind the newest campaign by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, to push for a future in which all Americans wear biometric health-tracking devices.

Under the guise of public health and personal empowerment, this initiative is nothing less than the normalization of 24/7 bodily surveillance—ushering in a world where every step, heartbeat, and biological fluctuation is monitored not only by private companies but also by the government.

In this emerging surveillance-industrial complex, health data becomes currency. Tech firms profit from hardware and app subscriptions, insurers profit from risk scoring, and government agencies profit from increased compliance and behavioral insight.

This convergence of health, technology, and surveillance is not a new strategy—it’s just the next step in a long, familiar pattern of control.

Surveillance has always arrived dressed as progress.

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Backroom Politics and Big Tech Fuel Europe’s New Spy Push

A hastily arranged gathering within the European Union is reigniting fears over a renewed push for sweeping surveillance measures disguised as child protection.

Behind closed doors, a controversial “Chat Control” meeting, scheduled for Wednesday, has raised alarms among digital rights advocates who see it as a thinly veiled attempt to subvert the European Parliament’s current stance, which expressly prohibits the monitoring of encrypted communications.

Despite no formal negotiations underway between the Parliament, Commission, and Council, Javier Zarzalejos, the rapporteur for the regulation and chair of the Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee (LIBE), has chosen to hold what is being described as a “shadow meeting.”

Notably, this comes over a year after the Parliament reached a compromise aimed at defending fundamental rights by shielding private, encrypted exchanges from warrantless surveillance.

The meeting’s guest list, obtained by netzpolitik.org, painted a lopsided picture.

Government and law enforcement figures from Denmark, including its Justice Ministry, which has put forward an even stricter proposal, are slated to attend, alongside Europol, representatives from Meta and Microsoft, and several pro-surveillance NGOs like ECPAT.

Also expected is Hany Farid, a US academic affiliated with the Counter Extremism Project, an organization known for its close relationships with intelligence agencies.

What was missing from the invitation list until late Monday was any representation from civil liberties groups or organizations that have consistently pushed back against warrantless monitoring.

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DHS Secretary Suggests Liquid Carry-On Limits On Flights Might Be Eased

More changes could be coming to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), including on whether more liquids can be taken through airport security, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem suggested on July 16.

“But I will tell you—I mean the liquids—I’m questioning. So that may be the next big announcement is what size your liquids need to be,” Noem told NewsNation in a live interview with The Hill published on July 16, referring to the amount of liquids people can transport through security in their carry-on bags. “We’re looking at our scanners.”

The TSA website says that you “are allowed to bring a quart-sized bag of liquids, aerosols, gels, creams and pastes in your carry-on bag and through the checkpoint,” but are “limited to travel-sized containers that are 3.4 ounces (100 milliliters) or less per item.”

Noem’s comment comes just days after she announced that the TSA has lifted its mandate for travelers to take off their shoes at security checkpoints.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary said that her office is “working with several different companies with technologies to give us competitive bids on what they actually do.”

She added that DHS is “working to see what we can do to make the traveling experience much better and more hospitable for individuals, but also still keep safety standards.”

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Trump signs bill cracking down on fentanyl, strengthening drug penalties

President Donald Trump has signed legislation designed to strengthen penalties for offenses involving fentanyl and its related analogs.

At a White House ceremony, Trump signed the HALT Fentanyl Act alongside politicians and families whose loved ones have since perished as a result of fentanyl.

Trump described the bill signing as a “historic step toward justice for every family touched by the fentanyl scourge as we signed the HALT Fentanyl Act into law.”

“We’ll be getting the drug dealers, pushers, and peddlers off our street, and we will not rest until we have ended the drug overdose epidemic,” Trump said. “And it’s been getting a little bit better, but it’s horrible.”

The Act targets unauthorized fentanyl analogs, not the FDA-approved fentanyl used in hospitals for anesthesia and pain management. That medical-grade fentanyl remains classified as Schedule II, meaning it’s highly regulated but still legal for medical use. The reclassification simply closes loopholes that previously allowed underground chemists to tweak fentanyl’s molecular structure and evade federal law.

“The bill also makes several other changes to registration requirements for conducting research with controlled substances, including:

  • Permitting a single registration for related research sites in certain circumstances,
  • Waiving the requirement for a new inspection in certain situations, and
  • Allowing a registered researcher to perform certain manufacturing activities with small quantities of a substance without obtaining a manufacturing registration,” the legislation’s webpage states.

The legislation, which received bipartisan support in both the House and Senate, permanently places all fentanyl-related substances, including synthetic variants of the opioid, on Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act. The bill also offers law enforcement more ability to combat the spread of the substance and imposes harsher punishments for anybody convicted of possessing or distributing it.

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Welcome To The Land Of The Free… Until You Express An Opinion

Britain’s cancel culture is a purposely designed social credit system.

Say the wrong thing, and you’re done for. One ‘offensive’ tweet? Straight to prison.

Say a silent prayer? You’re nicked.

Point out that men don’t have wombs, or that climate change hysteria is exaggerated? You’re sacked and shunned.

Post a meme that contradicts a government orthodoxy or expresses concerns about illegal immigration? Congrats, you’re now persona non grata and at risk of being given a holiday at His Majesty’s pleasure.

Welcome to the land of the free… until you express an opinion…

Great Britain, 2025, where the air is thick with sanctimonious twaddle, and our inalienable rights are under attack from the self-proclaimed elite. Those pompous, hypocritical overlords of ‘correct’ thinking have decided our words, thoughts, and even our chickens need their approval. Free speech? In the U.K., members of the public are in prison for sending a single tweet. And just wait until they roll out digital ID (the so called BritCard) and the Stasi levels of censorship which will follow.

The Establishment has closed its grip harder than Keir Starmer on free Arsenal tickets. Wielding censorship like a sledgehammer and telling us what constitutes ‘approved truth’ as though we’re living in Orwell’s 1984.

But fear not, because there’s a growing rebellion. Increasing numbers of Brits simply aren’t having it anymore. They see through this dystopian farce, preferring instead to give it the middle finger. Our great nation isn’t China or North Korea (though they’d like it to be). Britain is the crucible of free speech and has long championed open expression across literature, the arts and politics.

Amidst the madness, we salute a titan of liberty: John Milton, whose Areopagitica in 1644 stands as a blazing beacon for free speech. With a poet’s fire and a rebel’s heart, Milton faced down Parliament’s suffocating book licensing laws, daring to proclaim that truth thrives only when it wrestles openly with falsehood. “Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” he thundered, crafting a vision of Britain as a place for ideas, where no censor’s pen could silence the quest for truth. His words, a clarion call against tyranny, sowed the seeds for our nation’s proud claim as a bastion of free expression.

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