Months since Gaza’s nominal ceasefire began, Palestinians continue to be killed and maimed in drone and airstrikes, including the enclave’s police force which is crucial to peace and reconstruction efforts, the UN human rights office (OHCHR) said on Wednesday.
Blog
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In Animal Study, Nanobots Repair Spinal Cords
For my entire career as a neurologist the ability to repair an injured spinal cord has been one of the holy grails. There has always been promising new research that definitely increases our knowledge but doesn’t lead to an effective treatment. This is not for lack of trying – I also remember the period when Christopher Reeve was a tireless promoter of […]
The post In Animal Study, Nanobots Repair Spinal Cords first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.
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The Abundance Agenda’s Anti-Tenancy Blindspot
As the housing affordability crisis in the U.S. has intensified, it has also become a political flashpoint. In response, a growing bipartisan consensus has coalesced around a supply-oriented solution: remove the regulatory barriers—including zoning restrictions and environmental review requirements—that stand in the way of developers building more housing; eventually and inevitably, by the laws of…
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Armenia Asked to Freeze Magnitsky-Linked Funds
Shortly after the Swiss Supreme Court ordered the confiscation of funds tied to the notorious Magnitsky tax fraud, the money quietly vanished. In April, Europe’s top human rights watchdog sounded the alarm, revealing that millions of dollars had been drained from Swiss accounts and redirected into financial institutions in Armenia and Israel.
But despite the explicit warning from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), authorities in Yerevan took no visible action.
Now, new transaction records have revealed exactly where a portion of that money landed in the Armenian financial system—and the apparent regulatory paralysis that allowed it to sit there untouched. The inaction has forced Hermitage Capital Management, the primary victim of the underlying $230 million fraud, to intervene directly and demand that Armenian prosecutors finally step in.
The story of Hermitage Capital Management sits at the center of one of the most consequential human rights and corruption scandals in modern Russian history. It is a saga defined by a brazen, state-backed $230 million tax fraud, the death of the whistleblower who exposed it, and a relentless global crusade to track down the stolen wealth and punish those responsible.
The origins of the scandal date to 2007, when corrupt Russian officials raided the Moscow offices of Hermitage, an investment fund managed by the American-born British financier Bill Browder. During the raid, officers seized corporate documents, using them to illegally hijack the fund’s holding companies. The perpetrators then fabricated massive financial losses under these stolen corporate identities, allowing them to extract a fraudulent $230 million tax rebate from the Russian treasury.
To unravel the theft of his companies, Browder hired Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax lawyer. Magnitsky successfully exposed the labyrinthine scheme and courageously testified against the corrupt officials who orchestrated it.
Retaliation was swift. The very officials Magnitsky implicated orchestrated his arrest on fabricated charges. In 2009, after enduring nearly a year of severe abuse and deliberate medical neglect in a Moscow detention center, he died in his cell.
In the wake of Magnitsky’s death, investigators began tracing the stolen $230 million across the globe and eventually discovered that the Russian businessman Denis Katsyv had used a portion of the laundered money to buy luxury real estate in Manhattan through his company, Prevezon Holdings.
The revelation prompted a high-profile money laundering lawsuit by the United States government, which Prevezon settled for nearly $6 million in 2017.
Ultimately, the exposure of this vast financial web and the tragedy of Magnitsky’s death catalyzed a profound shift in international law. It spurred the creation of the Magnitsky Act, a landmark legal framework now deployed by Western nations to freeze the assets of corrupt officials and human rights abusers worldwide.
According to documents cited by the Armenian investigative outlet Hetq, a partner of OCCRP, 523,569 Swiss francs (about $592,000) were transferred on Feb. 12 from the Katsyv’s UBS account to Landmark Capital, an Armenian investment firm. The funds were processed through Switzerland’s Incore Bank AG before being directed to the Yerevan-based Evocabank.
The PACE report sounded the alarm just weeks later, expressing “serious concern” that Swiss authorities had permitted Katsyv to withdraw approximately 6.5 million Swiss francs ahead of a pending confiscation order, noting explicitly that the capital was dispersed to Armenia and Israel.
Instead of launching a probe into the flagged funds, Armenian financial institutions and regulators have retreated behind confidentiality laws, effectively shielding the transaction from public accountability.
Evocabank declined to answer specific questions from Hetq regarding the transfer, citing banking secrecy, though it maintained that it strictly adheres to Armenia’s anti-money laundering laws. Landmark Capital similarly refused to confirm whether Katsyv was a client, pointing to securities-market confidentiality rules.
More striking is the apparent lack of internal communication among Armenia’s state authorities. The country’s Central Bank stated that its Financial Monitoring Center is prohibited from disclosing information about specific transfers. As a result, the Prosecutor General’s Office confirmed to Hetq that it had received no information from the Central Bank regarding transfers involving Katsyv or his affiliated companies in 2025 or 2026.
Prosecutors also noted they had received no requests for legal assistance from Swiss authorities, effectively leaving the money in a regulatory blind spot.
Frustrated by the inertia, Hermitage Capital has moved to force Yerevan’s hand.
According to Hetq, Hermitage recently dispatched formal complaints to Armenia’s Prosecutor General, Anna Vardapetyan, and the head of the Central Bank’s Financial Monitoring Center, Astghik Karamanukyan. The letters demand that authorities freeze or preserve the funds, investigate alleged money laundering, and review the role of Armenian financial institutions under anti-money laundering regulations
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Dozens of Azerbaijan Companies Manage Russian ‘Shadow Fleet’ Tankers
During the past couple years, a wave of newly established Azerbaijani firms quietly took charge of the safe management of dozens of oil tankers that are now under EU and U.K. sanctions for their role in Russia’s “shadow fleet” operations.
Brussels and London have targeted the tankers for their involvement in shipping Russian crude oil and petroleum products. Those exports have been sanctioned in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
At least 31 International Safety Management (ISM) companies were registered in Azerbaijan between 2023 and 2025, according to documents obtained by reporters.
The companies managed sanctioned vessels — either before or after the ships were targeted between 2024 and 2026 — according to Equasis, an international agency that monitors shipping for safety reasons.
Seven of these companies no longer serve as managers for sanctioned vessels, having passed on the responsibilities to others among the 31 Azerbaijan firms.
Isaac Levi, who leads Europe-Russia policy at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air , told OCCRP that ISM companies are the “operational backbone of shipping.”
They handle “safety compliance and crewing to maintenance and insurance coordination,” he said, but in the shadow fleet, they also “often provide a layer of operational legitimacy that can obscure who ultimately owns or controls the vessel.”
He added the owners of these firms choose opaque jurisdictions, because they offer “anonymity, weak disclosure rules, and limited regulatory scrutiny… all of which make it easier to obscure who is really operating or profiting from a vessel.”
“In the shadow fleet, that lack of transparency is often a purposefully built in feature and way of reducing risk of being sanctioned,” Levi said.
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Could lifting weights actually help you live longer?
Regular weight training can significantly reduce the risk of early death, research suggests. -
FSD meeting and weekly recap 2026-05-29
Check out the important work our volunteers accomplished this week and at today’s Free Software Directory (FSD) IRC meeting.
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We’re Fighting Mass Surveillance Tech—and Winning
EFF is on the front lines of the fight against tech-enabled tyranny, but we aren’t alone. Our team depends on your help to fight back against the surveillance state.
People around the world are pushing back against the mass surveillance that undermines privacy and free expression for everyone. You can help during EFF’s spring membership drive.
One of the people who joined the fight for digital rights is EFF client Will Freeman. Will created the website DeFlock.me to reveal the dangers of automated license plate readers (ALPRs)—cameras that collect location data on every vehicle they see and upload that to a massive nationwide police database. Deflock.me turns the tables by enlisting ordinary people to track the locations of tens of thousands of ALPR cameras.
But when the police spy-tech company Flock Safety went after Will’s website with legal threats citing trademark law, he saw it for what it was: an attempt to silence critics and dim the light on mass surveillance.
The company will try everything it can to downplay the criticism, but EFF will be right there demanding accountability.
“I was totally unprepared to receive a cease & desist letter. I can see how most people would be bullied into submission by a threat like that. That’s when I remembered Dave Maass from the EFF introduced himself via email several weeks before, so I reached out for help,” Freeman says.
And that’s when EFF stepped in. Recognizing DeFlock.me as a quintessential expression of grassroots advocacy and a form of criticism protected by the U.S. First Amendment, EFF’s lawyers helped Will fight back. And the Big Surveillance Tech flinched.
But these battles against Flock’s Spying tools rage on. In cities around the country, privacy advocates are pressuring officials to block or end contracts for ALPRs—and winning. The company will try everything it can to downplay the criticism, but EFF will be right there demanding accountability.
Get the new Claw Back member t-shirt featuring a fierce feline swatting at community surveillance. You might empathize with him, but there’s a better way. Let’s end the law enforcement contracts, harmful practices, and twisted logic that enable mass spying in the first place.
“I’m really grateful the EFF was able to step in and help. Without them, free speech would be only for those wealthy enough to defend themselves against billion dollar companies. We’ve grown a lot since then and are expanding our efforts to expose and push back against mass surveillance on our streets,” Freeman says.
stop mass surveillance tech today when you join EFF
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The Pentagon Is Running an AI Propaganda Mill Targeting Latin America
The United States is feeding Pentagon propaganda to internet users in Latin American countries using a new AI-laden content mill, an investigation by The Intercept has found.
La Tilde quietly began development early this year and appears to still be a work in progress, pitching itself as a modern media brand for Latin American audiences with articles published in both Spanish and English. Its name references the accent mark emphasizing vowels in Spanish; “news with an accent” is the site’s catchphrase.
“The tilde is not an ornament. It is a millennial arrow designed to provide direction, save space, and turn up the volume,” a narrator states in a promotional video for the site bearing telltale signs it was AI-generated, such as a newspaper whose sloppily rendered headline reads “SO THEE HOUTIERRER TO TO GHAHOBATEE,” followed by imagery of two medieval monks. “That is why we place the accent on what matters. From the regional pulse and your well-being, to the big ideas and the global context.”
So far, La Tilde’s coverage amounts to an unusual blend of personal finance tips (“Why instant payments matter so much for your business and your wallet”) and articles extolling the value of U.S. military operations in Latin America (“Operation Absolute Resolve: The mission that captured Nicolás Maduro and set a new standard for precision and coordination”).
Its article on the U.S. abduction of the Venezuelan president praises the mission in Trumpian prose, calling it “The Perfect Operation – Coordination, Timing and Precision at an Unprecedented Scale,” and “a military operation of coordination and accuracy never seen before.” Citing “information obtained exclusively by La Tilde,” it describes the operation’s tactical brilliance, flawless execution, and incredibly precise coordination of military assets in the air and on the ground.
If this reads like Pentagon a press release, that’s because it is. An explanation for its glowing coverage of the U.S. military can be found after clicking a small link tucked at the bottom of the site. “La Tilde is a product of an international media organization publicly funded from the budget of the United States Government,” its About page reads.
This easily missed disclosure language is identical to two other Pentagon-sponsored propaganda sites recently revealed by The Intercept.
Targeting audiences, foreign or domestic, with state-run information campaigns remains a politically sensitive topic, and a token disclosure that La Tilde is a U.S.-funded platform allows the American government to say it technically informed readers about the actual source of the information.
According to a defense official familiar with U.S. information operations, La Tilde is operated as a military messaging platform for U.S. Special Operations Command South, or SOCSOUTH, which executes special forces missions throughout South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. When asked about SOCSOUTH’s role behind La Tilde, spokesperson Trevor Wild replied with the text of the site’s About page noting that it’s a government operation, but declined to comment further.
U.S. Southern Command, or SOUTHCOM, which is broadly responsible for coordinating military assets in the countries La Tilde targets, denied involvement. SOUTHCOM “does not fund, operate, or have any official association with La Tilde,” according to spokesperson Steven McLoud, who did not respond to further questions.
Unlike most news websites, La Tilde carries no bylines, masthead, or mention of actual staff of any kind. Although the site claims it employs “dozens of freelance reporters and content creators,” at least some of the site appears to have been generated by a large language model. Running articles through Pangram, an AI-text detection service, produced multiple hits for both English and Spanish writing either partially or entirely written by machines (though such tools are known to deliver false positives).
Emerson Brooking, a fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and former Pentagon cyber-policy adviser, told The Intercept he was struck by site’s shoddiness, describing it as “AI all the way down.”
Despite the low quality of AI-generated articles, this approach could help the Pentagon spin up propaganda efforts faster than in the past. “If you can generate new content and even news fronts at the flip of a switch, your influence operations can shift target and focus much more quickly,” Brooking said. “That seems to be the thinking behind recent AI-powered Russian and Chinese networks, for instance.”
An analysis of subdomains hosted on LaTilde.co reveals the site plans to launch bespoke versions for readers in Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Panama, and Peru.
Some pro-U.S. content is clearly tailored to these national audiences. An article filed to the site’s “In Good Hands” section highlights the benefits of U.S.–Panamanian joint jungle warfare training exercises, regaling readers with how “temperatures and heart rates climb at the Cristóbal Colón Naval Air Base as Panamanian security forces push forward through the ‘Green Mile,’ the demanding final test of the Combined Jungle Operations Course.” Such joint initiatives are, according to La Tilde, a bulwark against China’s efforts to engage in similar joint exercises in Latin America. Rather than engage with “Beijing’s predatory practices,” the article suggests countries should follow Panama’s lead and “seek training opportunities closer to home or with longstanding partners such as the United States.”
The article makes no mention of the controversy surrounding PANAMAX, a joint military exercise between SOUTHCOM and the Panamanian forces that has sparked increased protest on the grounds it violates national sovereignty. Permanent U.S. military installations in Panama were shuttered in 1999 as part of a 1977 treaty between the two countries; Panamanian opposition parties decried the reestablishment of an American military presence under the guise of joint exercises as a “camouflaged invasion.” Participants in the 2025 PANAMAX exercise La Tilde is pushing include the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, previously known as the School of the Americas, a Pentagon training institute whose graduates included thousands of Latin American death squad gunmen and dictator Manuel Noriega.
The importance of military and intelligence-sharing compacts with the U.S. is a recurring theme. “Far from weakening sovereignty, this kind of cooperation can strengthen it,” one article says.
Other stories from La Tilde argue the American side of Latin American controversies, similarly downplaying issues of national sovereignty. One piece describes how the U.S. abduction of Maduro “has reawakened a long-contained hope among millions of Venezuelans inside and outside the country.” Another alleges Ecuador is a nexus of the international cocaine trade, echoing claims the Trump administration has used to expand Operation Southern Spear, SOUTHCOM’s Caribbean airstrike campaign that has killed more than 200 civilians to date.
It’s unclear who exactly is operating the site on a day-to-day basis. A similar network of military propaganda pages, descendants of an Obama-era information warfare program called the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, appears to be administered by military contractor General Dynamics Information Technology. Renée DiResta, who co-authored a 2022 report on online propaganda efforts backed by U.S. Central Command, told The Intercept that the TRWI successor websites share a common Google Ads identifier code owned by General Dynamics, according to a recent comprehensive analysis of the network she conducted. La Tilde also runs a legal disclosure with identical language as those sites.
General Dynamics did not respond to multiple requests for comment about La Tilde.
Halcyon Group International, another information warfare contractor that operates Diálogo Américas, a similar pseudo-news site backed by the Pentagon, told The Intercept it was not involved with La Tilde.
Design of the La Tilde website was subcontracted to Antpack, a Colombian digital marketing firm. Multiple files hosted on the site created by the AI image-generation service Midjourney contain the word “Antpack” in their name. The Intercept signed up for a user account on La Tilde, part of planned functionality that will let readers comment and save articles for later. Once registered, The Intercept was able to view comments left on a non-public version of the site used by its developers, who posted under names corresponding to LinkedIn profiles of Antpack employees. Antpack did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
U.S. Special Operations has a long record of leading the American internet propaganda efforts, ranging from high-tech efforts to less-sophisticated projects like phony online newsrooms. SOCOM has since 2018 operated the Joint Military Information Support Operations Web Operations Center, which coordinates information warfare and online psychological operations.
The Intercept reported in 2023 that SOCOM was working on acquiring state-of-the-art “deepfake” video fabrication technologies to “generate messages and influence operations via non-traditional channels,” according to procurement documents. La Tilde appears to be using low-effort AI tools rather than anything cutting-edge. Art accompanying its stories often includes portion of the prompt used to quickly generate the image in the file name, and shows mixed results, such as a rendering of the White House portico missing several of its columns or a diploma with garbled text. Photographs illustrating pro-SOUTHCOM messaging, however, are drawn from the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, an official Pentagon media library.
“The intent is probably to fill these sites with generic material, build an audience base, and then slip in more pieces of explicit propaganda, like that rather fulsome recounting of the U.S. attack on Venezuela,” Brooking said. “This is how you build these sorts of networks. But the content is lazy, the AI is bad, and the required disclosures make the whole thing a farce.”
The post The Pentagon Is Running an AI Propaganda Mill Targeting Latin America appeared first on The Intercept.
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Ecuadorian Cartel Boss Fights Extradition in Spain, Accusing President Noboa of Assassination Plot
A notorious Ecuadorian drug lord fighting extradition in a Spanish court made an explosive claim, accusing Ecuador’s president and interior minister of orchestrating the 2023 assassination of a prominent presidential candidate.
Wilmer Chavarría, widely known by his alias “Pipo”, appeared before Spain’s National Court to contest his transfer to Ecuador, where he is wanted to serve a 16-year sentence for three homicides. But during the Monday hearing, the presumed leader of the powerful Los Lobos criminal organization argued that sending him back to his home country would be a death sentence.
“The only reason they want to take him to Ecuador is to silence him; if he arrives in Ecuador, he is a dead man,” his defense team told OCCRP following the hearing.
According to his lawyers, Chavarría testified that Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa and Interior Minister John Reimberg were behind the brazen daylight murder of Fernando Villavicencio, a journalist and anti-corruption presidential candidate who was gunned down by hitmen just days before the 2023 election.
The defense also asserted that Chavarría had “gathered many proofs of the linking of Noboa with drug trafficking,” though no such evidence was immediately made public during the proceedings.
The dramatic allegations introduce a volatile new dimension to the international tug-of-war over Chavarría, who is considered one of South America’s most elusive and dangerous criminal figures. Spanish prosecutors argued that his extradition to Ecuador is legally appropriate.”
Further complicating his fate is a competing extradition request from the United States, where Chavarría faces federal charges for allegedly attempting to traffic five tonnes of cocaine.
His legal team has woven the U.S. request into its broader narrative of a conspiracy, alleging that there is a “pact between the United States and Noboa to deceive the Spanish authorities.” According to this theory, Chavarría would be sent first to the U.S. and eventually to Ecuador, “where they are going to eliminate him to prevent him from telling what he knows about Noboa and Reimberg.”
Chavarría’s path to the Spanish courtroom reads like a narco-thriller. Authorities say he faked his own death in Ecuador in 2020 before slipping into Spain in 2022 using a forged Colombian passport. Along the way, investigators allege, he underwent seven separate facial reconstructive surgeries to evade detection.
His run ended in November 2025, when Spanish police captured him in the coastal city of Málaga.
The Spanish National Court is expected to issue a ruling on his extradition in the coming weeks. Whether he is sent to face justice in Quito, tried in the United States, or remains in Europe, Chavarría’s explosive accusations ensure that his case will continue to cast a long shadow over the highest levels of the Ecuadorian government.
