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  • Authorities Intercept Millions in Fake Banknotes and Coins Across Europe, US

    Europol said Wednesday that authorities from 18 countries seized an estimated 1.2 billion euros ($1.43 billion) in counterfeit currency in a six-month operation targeting criminal networks that distributed fake banknotes and coins through postal services.

    The operation, led by Austria, Portugal and Spain and carried out between June and November 2025, intercepted more than seven million counterfeit items, including 4.8 million euros, $2.3 million, 23,302 pounds and 4,800 Swiss francs. More than 90 percent of the fake currency originated in China, the agency said.

    Romanian officials alone seized over 4.8 million altered-design euro banknotes and dismantled a storage site holding more than 223,000 counterfeit notes, while additional actions in Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States uncovered more than 220,000 fake coins in multiple currencies.

    The coordinated crackdown, involving customs and police agencies across Europe and the U.S., has triggered 70 new investigations, Europol added.

  • Latest Autism Data

    In April of 2025, HHS secretary RFK Jr. stated: “The autism epidemic is running rampant,” said U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “One in 31 American children born in 2014 are disabled by autism. That’s up significantly from two years earlier and nearly five times higher than when the CDC first started running autism surveys in children […]

    The post Latest Autism Data first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

  • Civilians and aid operations under fire as Sudan airstrikes intensify

    Escalating aerial attacks in Sudan are killing children, damaging schools and striking United Nations facilities, placing civilians and humanitarian workers at growing risk, the UN warned on Wednesday. 

  • West Bank: UN rights chief warns against deepening Israeli control over Palestinian land

    UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk called on Wednesday for Israel to rescind recent measures to expand control over Palestinian lands in the occupied West Bank. 

  • Measles cases drop in 2025 across Europe and Central Asia, but outbreak risks remain

    Measles cases across Europe and Central Asia declined by 75 per cent in 2025 compared to 2024, according to preliminary data released on Wednesday by the World Health Organization (WHO), which warned of remaining outbreak risks.

  • Research careers – what you need to lead

  • Pluralistic: Europe takes a big step towards a post-dollar world (11 Feb 2026)

    Today’s links


    An old-fashioned credit-card imprinter; its handle is a cracked and dirty American flag. Under the slip is a gold Trump Card. Looming over the imprinter is the top half of Trump's face, brooding and squint-eyed; it has been altered to increase its orangeness, to add bloodshot sclera to his eyes, and to add liver spots. At its bottom, the face merges with a bubbling, hellish cauldron of smoke and flame.

    Europe takes a big step towards a post-dollar world (permalink)

    There’s a reason every decentralized system eventually finds its way onto a platform: platforms solve real-world problems that platform users struggle to solve for themselves.

    I’ve written before about the indie/outsider author Crad Kilodney, who wrote, edited, typeset and published chapbooks of his weird and wonderful fiction, and then sold his books from Toronto street-corners with a sign around his neck reading VERY FAMOUS CANADIAN AUTHOR BUY MY BOOKS (or, if he was feeling spicy, simply: MARGARET ATWOOD):

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation

    Crad was a hell of a writer and a bit of a force of nature, but there are plenty of writers I want to hear from who are never going to publish their own books, much less stand on a street-corner selling them with a MARGARET ATWOOD sign around their necks. Publishers, editors, distributors and booksellers all do important work, allowing writers to get on with their writing, taking all the other parts of the publishing process off their shoulders.

    That’s the value of platforms. The danger of platforms is when they grow so powerful that they usurp the relationship between the parties they are supposed to be facilitating, locking them in and then extracting value from them (someone should coin a word to describe this process!):

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/07/usurpers-helpmeets/#disreintermediation

    Everyone needs platforms: writers, social media users, people looking for a romantic partner. What’s more, the world needs platforms. Say you want to connect all 200+ countries on Earth with high-speed fiber lines; you can run a cable from each country to every other country (about 21,000 cables, many of them expensively draped across the ocean floor), or you can pick one country (preferably one with both Atlantic and Pacific coasts) and run all your cables there, and then interconnect them.

    That’s America, the world’s global fiber hub. The problem is, America isn’t just a platform for fiber interconnections – it’s a Great Power that uses its position at the center of the world’s fiber networks to surveil and disrupt the world’s communications networks:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden

    That’s a classic enshittification move on a geopolitical scale. It’s not the only one America’s made, either.

    Consider the US dollar. The dollar is to global commerce what America’s fiber head-ends are to the world’s data network: a site of essential, (nominally) neutral interchange that is actually a weapon that the US uses to gain advantage over its allies and to punish its enemies:

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

    The world’s also got about 200 currencies. For parties in one country to trade with those in another country, the buyer needs to possess a currency the seller can readily spend. The problem is that setting up 21,000 pairwise exchange markets from every currency to every other currency is expensive and cumbersome – traders would have to amass reserves of hundreds of rarely used currencies, or they would have to construct long, brittle, expensive, high-risk chains that convert, say, Thai baht into Icelandic kroner to Brazilian reals and finally into Costa Rican colones.

    Thanks to a bunch of complicated maneuvers following World War II, the world settled on the US dollar as its currency platform. Most important international transactions use “dollar clearing” (where goods are priced in USD irrespective of their country of origin) and buyers need only find someone who will convert their currency to dollars in order to buy food, oil, and other essentials.

    There are two problems with this system. The first is that America has never treated the dollar as a neutral platform; rather, American leaders have found subtle, deniable ways to use “dollar dominance” to further America’s geopolitical agenda, at the expense of other dollar users (you know, “enshittification”). The other problem is that America has become steadily less deniable and subtle in these machinations, finding all kinds of “exceptional circumstances” to use the dollar against dollar users:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/26/difficult-multipolarism/#eurostack

    America’s unabashed dollar weaponization has been getting worse for years, but under Trump, the weaponized dollar has come to constitute an existential risk to the rest of the world, sending them scrambling for alternatives. As November Kelly says, Trump inherited a poker game that was rigged in his favor, but he still flipped over the table because he resents having to pretend to play at all:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar

    Once Trump tried to steal Greenland, it became apparent that the downsides of the dollar far outweigh its upsides. Last month, Christine Lagarde (president of the European Central Bank) made a public announcement on a radio show that Europe “urgently” needed to build its own payment system to avoid the American payment duopoly, Visa/Mastercard:

    https://davekeating.substack.com/p/can-europe-free-itself-from-visamastercard

    Now, there’s plenty of reasons to want to avoid Visa/Mastercard, starting with cost: the companies have raised their prices by more than 40% since the pandemic started (needless to say, updating database entries has not gotten 40% more expensive since 2020). This allows two American companies to impose a tax on the entire global economy, collecting swipe fees and other commissions on $24t worth of the world’s transactions every year:

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/europe-banks-launching-product-break-101215642.html

    But there’s another reason to get shut of Visa/Mastercard: Trump controls them. He can order them to cut off payment processing for any individual or institution that displeases him. He’s already done this to punish the International Criminal Court for issuing a genocide arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, and against a Brazilian judge for finding against the criminal dictator Jair Bolsonaro (Trump also threatened to have the judge in Bolsonaro’s case assassinated). What’s more, Visa/Mastercard have a record of billions (trillions?) of retail transactions taking place between non-Americans, which Trump’s officials can access for surveillance purposes, or just to conduct commercial espionage to benefit American firms as a loyalty bonus for the companies that buy the most $TRUMP coins.

    Two days after Lagarde’s radio announcement, 13 European countries announced the formation of “EuroPA,” an alliance that will facilitate regionwide transactions that bypass American payment processors (as well as Chinese processors like Alipay):

    https://news.europawire.eu/european-payment-leaders-sign-mou-to-create-a-sovereign-pan-european-interoperable-payments-network/eu-press-release/2026/02/02/15/34/11/168858/

    As European Business Magazine points out, EuroPA is the latest in a succession of attempts to build a European payments network:

    https://europeanbusinessmagazine.com/business/europes-24-trillion-breakup-with-visa-and-mastercard-has-begun/

    There’s Wero, a 2024 launch from the 16-country European Payments Initiative, which currently boasts 47m users and 1,100 banks in Belgium, France and Germany, who’ve spent €7.5b through the network:

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/europe-banks-launching-product-break-101215642.html

    Wero launched as a peer-to-peer payment system that used phone numbers as identifiers, but it expanded into retail at the end of last year, with several large retailers (such as Lidl) signing on to accept Wero payments.

    Last week, Wero announced an alliance with EuroPA, making another 130m people eligible to use the service, which now covers 72% of the EU and Norway. They’re rolling out international peer-to-peer payments in 2026, and retail/ecommerce payments in 2027.

    These successes are all the more notable for the failures they follow, like Monnet (born 2008, died 2012). Even the EPI has been limping along since its founding, only finding a new vigor on the heels of Trump threatening EU member states with military force if he wasn’t given Greenland.

    As EBM writes, earlier efforts to build a regional payment processor foundered due to infighting among national payment processors within the EU, who jealously guarded their own turf and compulsively ratfucked one another. This left Visa/Mastercard as the best (and often sole) means of conducting cross-border commerce. This produced a “network effect” for Visa/Mastercard: since so many Europeans had an American credit card in their wallets, European merchants had to support them; and since so many EU merchants supported Visa/Mastercard, Europeans had to carry them in their wallets.

    Network effects are pernicious, but not insurmountable. The EU is attacking this problem from multiple angles – not just through EuroPA, but also through the creation of the Digital Euro, a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Essentially, this would give any European who signs up an account with the ECB, the federal bank of the Eurozone. Then, using an app or a website, any two Digital Euro customers could transfer funds to one another using the bank’s own ledgers, instantaneously and at zero cost.

    EBM points out that there’s a critical difficulty in getting EuroPA off the ground: because it is designed to be cheap to use, it doesn’t offer participating banks the windfall profits that Visa/Mastercard enjoy, which might hold back investment in EuroPA infrastructure.

    But banks are used to making small amounts of money from a lot of people, and with the Digital Euro offering a “public option,” the private sector EuroPA system will have a competitor that pushes it to continuously improve its systems.

    It’s true that European payment processing has been slow and halting until now, but that was when European businesses, governments and households could still pretend that the dollar – and the payment processing companies that come along with it – was a neutral platform, and not a geopolitical adversary.

    If there’s one thing the EU has demonstrated over the past three years, it’s that geopolitical threats from massive, heavily armed mad empires can break longstanding deadlocks. Remember: Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the end of Russian gas moved the EU’s climate goals in ways that beggar belief: the region went from 15 years behind on its solar rollout to ten years ahead of schedule in just a handful of months:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/05/contingency/#this-too-shall-pass

    This despite an all-out blitz from the fossil fuel lobby, one of the most powerful bodies in the history of civilization.

    Crises precipitate change, and Trump precipitates crises.

    Hey look at this (permalink)


    A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

    Object permanence (permalink)

    #15yrsago Realtime API for Congress https://web.archive.org/web/20110211101723/http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2011/the-real-time-congress-api/

    #15yrsago Steampunk fetish mask with ear-horn https://bob-basset.livejournal.com/156159.html

    #10yrsago Facebook’s “Free Basics” and colonialism: an argument in six devastating points https://web.archive.org/web/20160211182436/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/facebook-and-the-new-colonialism/462393/

    #10yrsago UK surveillance bill condemned by a Parliamentary committee, for the third time https://web.archive.org/web/20250523013320/https://www.wired.com/story/technology-ip-bill-surveillance-committee/

    #10yrsago Haunted by a lack of young voter support, Hillary advertises on the AOL login screen https://web.archive.org/web/20160211080839/http://www.weeklystandard.com/hillary-reaches-base-with-aol-login-page-ad/article/2001023

    #10yrsago Celebrate V-Day like an early feminist with these Suffragist Valentines https://web.archive.org/web/20160216100606/https://www.lwv.org/blog/votes-women-vintage-womens-suffrage-valentines

    #10yrsago Elements of telegraphic style, 1928 https://writeanessayfor.me/telegraph-office-com

    #10yrsago Disgraced ex-sheriff of LA admits he lied to FBI, will face no more than 6 months in prison https://web.archive.org/web/20160211041117/https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-ex-l-a-county-sheriff-baca-jail-scandal-20160210-story.html

    #5yrsago Apple puts North Dakota on blast https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/11/rhodium-at-2900-per-oz/#manorial-apple

    #5yrsago Catalytic converter theft https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/11/rhodium-at-2900-per-oz/#ccscrap

    #5yrsago Adam Curtis on criti-hype https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/11/rhodium-at-2900-per-oz/#hypernormal

    #5yrsago Dependency Confusion https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/11/rhodium-at-2900-per-oz/#extra-index-url

    #1yrago Musk steals a billion dollars from low-income Americans and sends it to Intuit https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/11/doubling-up-on-paperwork/#rip-freefile

    Upcoming appearances (permalink)

    A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


    A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

    Recent appearances (permalink)


    A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

    Latest books (permalink)


    A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

    Upcoming books (permalink)

    • “The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

    • “Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

    • “The Post-American Internet,” a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

    • “Unauthorized Bread”: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

    • “The Memex Method,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


    Colophon (permalink)

    Today’s top sources:

    Currently writing: “The Post-American Internet,” a sequel to “Enshittification,” about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1027 words today, 26735 total)

    • “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

    • “The Post-American Internet,” a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

    • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

    This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

    Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

    How to get Pluralistic:

    Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

    Pluralistic.net

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    https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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    https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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    https://doctorow.medium.com/

    Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

    https://twitter.com/doctorow

    Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

    https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

    “When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla” -Joey “Accordion Guy” DeVilla

    READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (“BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

    ISSN: 3066-764X

  • Anna’s Archive Quietly ‘Releases’ Millions of Spotify Tracks, Despite Legal Pushback

    Anna’s Archive Quietly ‘Releases’ Millions of Spotify Tracks, Despite Legal Pushback

    Anna’s Archive is generally known as a meta-search engine for shadow libraries, helping users find pirated books and other related resources.

    However, last December, the site announced that it had also backed up Spotify, which came as a shock to the music industry.

    Anna’s Archive initially released only Spotify metadata, and no actual music, but that put the music industry on high alert. Together with the likes of Universal, Warner, and Sony, Spotify filed a lawsuit days later, hoping to shut the site down.

    Through a preliminary injunction targeting domain registrars and registries, the shadow library lost several domain names. However, not all were taken down, and with the addition of a new Greenland-based backup, the site apparently pushed through with the feared Spotify data release.

    Millions of Music Files

    While there hasn’t been an official announcement or a formal listing on the torrent page, several people have spotted dozens of new Spotify download links in the torrents.json file hosted on the site. These files were added on February 8, presumably with a single seeder.

    At the time of writing, we count 47 new music torrents, plus a new metadata torrent. These releases all contain 60,000 files, except for a smaller batch, bringing the total to roughly 2.8 million files. That’s roughly 6 terabytes of music.

    In addition, there’s a massive 29 GB ‘seekable’ metadata file, which likely acts as the index for the 2.8 million tracks that use abstract Spotify track IDs as names.

    Some of the torrent data

    torrent json

    On Reddit, the mysterious releases are actively discussed in various threads. They do indeed contain music files, ranging from a few hundred kilobytes to several megabytes. The filenames reference what appear to be Spotify track IDs but contain no artist names or song titles. Instead, they likely match Spotify’s internal cache format.

    The music files themselves come with embedded media information and metadata, including song, album, artist, and publisher, among others. If applicable, the cover art is also included.

    Media information

    media information

    The torrents are labeled “pop_0,” which, based on Anna’s Archive’s earlier blog post, refers to the popularity rank. The site previously said it planned a staggered release, based on how popular releases are, but additional batches could follow.

    Defying the Injunction

    The release comes despite a preliminary injunction signed by Judge Jed Rakoff on January 16. That order explicitly prohibited Anna’s Archive from hosting, linking to, or distributing the copyrighted works, and also targeted third-party intermediaries, including domain registries, hosting companies, and Cloudflare.

    Anna’s Archive previously appeared to comply, at least in part. The site’s dedicated Spotify download section was removed and marked as “unavailable until further notice.” However, the new torrents suggest that this was a temporary measure rather than a lasting retreat.

    Until now, only metadata had been released publicly, compressed into roughly 200GB. The actual music files, which the lawsuit specifically sought to prevent from being distributed, are of much bigger concern.

    What’s Next

    Given the gravity of the situation, Spotify and the labels are not expected to sit idly by. Anna’s Archive previously said it archived roughly 86 million music files, and almost 300 terabytes in total, so there could be more to come.

    Whether the music companies will also monitor people who share these files for potential legal follow-ups is unknown, but they will do their best to keep the pressure on intermediaries.

    The music companies already have a court-ordered injunction that compels domain name registrars and registries to make the site inaccessible. However, we have observed that companies and organizations that fall outside the U.S. jurisdiction don’t automatically comply with these.

    At the time of writing, Anna’s Archive has not publicly commented on the new release yet. Spotify informed us that the company has no further comments at this time and referred us to the preliminary injunction it obtained in U.S. court last month.

    From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

  • Epstein Bought Venezuelan Oil Bonds on Advice From Chávez-Era Insider

    Jeffrey Epstein bought Venezuelan oil bonds issued by the hardline socialist state’s national oil company, according to newly-released documents. He was advised in the purchases by Francisco D’Agostino, a businessman currently wanted in Venezuela on charges of money laundering and criminal association.

    Emails included in the files released by the U.S. Department of Justice show that D’Agostino visited the Caribbean island owned by Epstein, which is at the center of sex trafficking allegations against him.

    In correspondence between the two men, D’Agostino advises Epstein in his purchase of bonds issued by Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA).

    After talking business with D’Agostino, who holds both Venezuelan and Spanish citizenship, Epstein bought at least $4.5 million in oil bonds beginning in 2012. The bonds were set to mature in 2015 — during the period when Venezuela’s oil revenues collapsed, as corruption at PDVSA increased and production plummeted.

    D’Agostino did not respond to requests for comment, which were sent by email and via his assistant by phone. OCCRP also emailed a lawyer who represented D’Agostino in Italy, but did not receive a response.

    OCCRP was unable to obtain comment from PDVSA before publication.

    ‘I had so much fun’

    D’Agostino’s relationship with Epstein appears to have begun not in a financial institution or boardroom. Instead, emails refer to their meeting during a visit by D’Agostino to Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Little Saint James — which was sometimes referred to as “Little Saint Jeff’s.”

    “I had so much fun in Little St Jeffery…and Jane, the water gazelle is really stunning…what a beautiful and smart girl,” D’Agostino wrote to Epstein in October 2012.

    “I enjoyed very much talking to you and would love to continue=to explore the different possibilities to make some money together,” D’Agostino added in the email. “I see the beginning of fun longlasting friendship.”

    In October 2012, D’Agostino proposed a series of meetings in Caracas, which suggests he enjoyed a high level of access to Venezuela’s political and economic elite.

    Among those he proposed introducing Epstein to was Baldo Sansó, a financial adviser to PDVSA and brother-in-law of Rafael Ramírez, then president of the state oil company. OCCRP sent questions to an email address in Sansó’s name, but did not receive a response.

    Epstein appears to have chosen to wait for the outcome of the October 2012 presidential election before making any plans to travel to Venezuela. When D’Agostino informed him that populist President Hugo Chávez had won his fourth term by approximately 10 percent, Epstein replied succinctly: “Great.” 

    An email from December 2012 shows D’Agostino keeping Epstein up to date about Chávez, who had been diagnosed with cancer and was rumored to be close to death.

    “It seems very acccurate that Chavez has about 6 months left or less,” D’Agostino wrote, adding that Venezuela’s constitution would require elections within 30 days of a president dying. 

    “I think there is a very high probability that someone from the Chavez movement, but less radical will win the elections,” he predicted.

    As political uncertainty pervaded in Venezuela, emails in January 2013 show Epstein offering to host D’Agostino again on his private island, telling him to “visit when you like.”

    D’Agostino responded: “By the way…how is my water gaselle???” Epstein replied that she was “here and naked.”

    Chávez died on March 5, 2013. His loyalist, Nicolás Maduro, won elections the following month. It is unclear whether Epstein ever made the planned visit to Caracas.

    Increased Exposure

    Over the two years following that exchange of emails, Epstein increased his exposure to Venezuela’s oil sector, placing direct orders for additional purchases of PDVSA bonds. 

    Meanwhile, the industry suffered a steep descent.

    Venezuela’s oil revenues fell by 40 percent over 2014 and 2015, reportedly due to low prices. As the years wore on, PDVSA would be severely undermined by corruption, decimating Venezuela’s oil industry. The U.S. imposed sanctions on the entire oil sector in 2019.

    That same year, Epstein was arrested on U.S. federal sex trafficking charges and later found hanged in his New York City jail cell, in a death ruled a suicide. American prosecutors were preparing to try him for allegedly abusing dozens of underage girls at his homes and elsewhere. He had pleaded not guilty.

    D’Agostino himself came under scrutiny in the years after making contact with Epstein, and following his death.

    One of the influential people he suggested introducing Epstein to was his alleged business associate Alejandro Betancourt López, a co-founder of Derwick Associates.

    Derwick received contracts to build power plants directly from Venezuelan state companies without going through a competitive bidding process, OCCRP has reported. The company then overcharged the government by $2.9 billion, according to the Venezuelan chapter of the anti-corruption group Transparency International. 

    Betancourt did not respond to a request for comment, but told OCCRP in 2021 that he was innocent of the corruption allegations against him.

    On November 6, 2012, D’Agostino wrote to Epstein: “Alejandro Betancourt, my business partner, and I are available to meet you Monday November 19th. Shall we have lunch? Your place?”

    Multiple lawsuits alleged that D’Agostino was a key figure in Derwick’s operations. These included a 2013 civil suit by a Washington lobbyist and former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, Otto Reich, which accused him and several executives of bribery and racketeering linked to the energy contracts. That case was dismissed in a U.S. court for lack of jurisdiction. 

    D’Agostino has consistently denied holding a position at Derwick, and has not been charged or convicted in the alleged fraud. In 2024, Spain’s National Court reportedly opened an investigation into former executives of Derwick — including D’Agostino — over that alleged financial fraud, which involved Spanish companies.

    D’Agostino was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2021 for “ties to a network attempting to evade United States sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector.” Treasury removed him from its sanctions list last year.

    Last month, D’Agostino was reportedly arrested on an international warrant from Venezuela, where he has been charged with money laundering and criminal association. 

    D’Agostino was detained while attempting to cross the border from Italy to France. He was released after Italian judges ruled he would be at risk of suffering inhumane or degrading treatment if imprisoned in Venezuela.

  • Sunbed ads spreading harmful misinformation to young people

    Hundreds of TikTok, Instagram and Facebook ads made misleading claims about health benefits, BBC finds.