Peru’s Congress voted to remove interim President José Jerí after prosecutors opened a corruption probe into undisclosed meetings with Chinese businessman Zhihua Yang.
Lawmakers cited possible illegal lobbying tied to Yang’s state concessions, while local reports linked another attendee to a timber-trafficking network.
The scandal broke after video of the meetings was leaked, showing Jerí arriving late at night to a restaurant in December 2025 with a hood pulled over his head, and again in January wearing sunglasses.
Jerí denied wrongdoing, saying the late-night meetings were about organizing a cultural event.
The decision from the Supreme Court, on the case of a child who sustained a brain injury at birth in 2015, could have significant cost implications for the NHS.
This story was originally published by ProPublica.
The warning on the government website was stark. Some products and remedies claiming to treat or cure autism are being marketed deceptively and can be harmful. Among them: chelating agents, hyperbaric oxygen therapies, chlorine dioxide and raw camel milk.
Now that advisory is gone.
The Food and Drug Administration pulled the page down late last year. The federal Department of Health and Human Services told ProPublica in a statement that it retired the webpage “during a routine clean up of dated content at the end of 2025,” noting the page had not been updated since 2019. (An archived version of the page is still available online.)
Some advocates for people with autism don’t understand that decision. “It may be an older page, but those warnings are still necessary,” said Zoe Gross, a director at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, a nonprofit policy organization run by and for autistic people. “People are still being preyed on by these alternative treatments like chelation and chlorine dioxide. Those can both kill people.”
Chlorine dioxide is a chemical compound that has been used as an industrial disinfectant, a bleaching agent and an ingredient in mouthwash, though with the warning it shouldn’t be swallowed. A ProPublica story examined Sen. Ron Johnson’s endorsement of a new book by Dr. Pierre Kory, who describes the chemical as a “remarkable molecule” that, when diluted and ingested, “works to treat everything from cancer and malaria to autism and COVID.”
Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican who has amplified anti-scientific claims around COVID-19, supplied a blurb for the cover of the book, “The War on Chlorine Dioxide.” He called it “a gripping tale of corruption and courage that will open eyes and prompt serious questions.”
A page recently pulled from the Food and Drug Administration’s website gave examples of false claims about treatments for autism and its symptoms. (Via Internet Archive)
The lack of clear warning from the government on questionable autism treatments is in line with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s rejection of conventional science on autism and vaccine safety. Last spring, Kennedy brought into the agency a vaccine critic who had promoted treating autistic children with the puberty-blocking drug Lupron. And in January, Kennedy recast an advisory panel on autism, appointing people who have championed the use of pressurized chambers to deliver pure oxygen to children, as well as some who support infusions to draw out heavy metals, a process known as chelation.
Kennedy has embraced various unconventional measures in his fight against what he views as a government system corrupted by special interests. In October 2024, shortly before Donald Trump won the presidency again, Kennedy vowed on social media that the FDA’s “war on public health” was about to end.
“This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma,” he wrote.
“People are still being preyed on by these alternative treatments.”
At his Senate confirmation hearing, Kennedy praised Trump for his wide search for a COVID-19 remedy in his first term, which Kennedy said included vaccines, various drugs and “even chlorine dioxide.”
The FDA, dating back to at least 2010, has urged consumers not to purchase or drink chlorine dioxide — frequently marketed as a “miracle mineral solution” — because “the solution, when mixed, develops into a dangerous bleach which has caused serious and potentially life-threatening side effects.”
The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) has previously reported on the removal of the FDA warnings page. The lack of a warning has also received attention in the Telegram channel Chlorine Dioxide Testimonies.
“Don’t forget the FDA quietly removed warnings about Chlorine Dioxide on their website earlier this year,” read a forwarded post in late December, to which over 100 people reacted with an applauding emoji.
The contributor added a wish for the future: that Kennedy and the FDA commissioner undertake official studies exploring chlorine dioxide’s effects in battling cancer. There currently are no warnings about chlorine dioxide on a consumer page on the FDA website. And HHS did not answer ProPublica’s questions about whether the agency endorses chlorine dioxide as a treatment for autism.
In his book, Kory also expresses optimism about what Kennedy will do. “What I really want is for the FDA to lift its restrictions on studying chlorine dioxide as a therapeutic,” he wrote. “That’s something I’m hoping might finally be possible under this new administration, especially with RFK Jr. as head of Health and Human Services.”
Many autism researchers and advocates have been wary of Kennedy due to his long-held stance that vaccines cause autism. Peer-reviewed studies conducted worldwide, published over decades in leading scientific journals, have rejected such a link.
Under Kennedy, however, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention overhauled its website on vaccines and autism to assert that studies supporting such a link have been ignored by health authorities.
The CDC page retained the headline “Vaccines do not cause Autism” but added an asterisk noting that the phrase remained “due to an agreement with the chair of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.” In order to win confirmation to his post, Kennedy had promised Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who is a physician, that he would not remove the statement.
Kennedy’s replacement of half of the 42 members of an interagency coordinating committee on autism provides another glimpse into where he wants to take federal policy.
The committee provides advice and recommendations on policies, research and services. It now includes people who have promoted unproven remedies for autism, including suramin, a drug developed to treat sleeping sickness in Africa caused by bites from a tsetse fly; hyperbaric oxygen therapy, typically used for decompression sickness and tissue damage; controversial language techniques; and chelation therapy.
The secretary is “perfectly willing to embrace bogus therapies.”
A 5-year-old autistic boy died in Pennsylvania in 2005 after a chelation session. Another 5-year-old boy died in Michigan last year in a hyperbaric chamber fire; his parents wanted him treated for an attention disorder.
The Autistic Self Advocacy Network in a statement said the newly reconfigured HHS autism panel is “overwhelmingly made up of anti-vaccine advocates and peddlers of dangerous quack autism ‘treatments.’”
HHS told ProPublica in an emailed statement that such claims are “false” and that the new members are experienced in research and clinical care. “They are committed to advancing innovation in autism research, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention to align federal policy with current gold-standard science,” HHS said.
Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told ProPublica that Kennedy’s removal of committee members with solid expertise in favor of people who support alternative medicine shows that the secretary is “perfectly willing to embrace bogus therapies.”
Another leading expert, Yale University professor emeritus Dr. Fred Volkmar, who edited the “Handbook of Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorders,” considered a definitive guide, said early diagnosis and proven treatments have led to dramatic improvements for people with autism. “These days, probably 70% to 75% of children on the autism spectrum will grow up to be fully independent or semi-independent adults.”
Sadly, however, he said, some parents fall prey to promises of easy and fast cures, when there are none. One of the dangers, he said, is that children are drawn away from treatments that are shown to be beneficial.
“It’s a shame that the federal government is not being more helpful to parents in understanding what does and doesn’t work,” Volkmar said.
Lebanon’s navy failed to raise alarms about a potentially deadly payload of ammonium nitrate aboard the MV Rhosus cargo ship during a 2013 inspection — seven years before the chemical caused a devastating explosion in Beirut that killed over 200 people.
Documents obtained by OCCRP show that the Rhosus was flagged for inspection by a U.N. maritime peacekeeping force when it arrived at the Port of Beirut in November 2013. The Lebanese navy boarded and examined the ship but failed to flag its combustible cargo, according to the documents.
“The vessel was clear and nothing illegal was reported,” the navy wrote in a brief report at the time.
The fact that this inspection took place was omitted from a comprehensive Lebanese Armed Forces report submitted to the Defense Ministry on August 9, 2020, five days after the blast, which destroyed a large swath of Beirut and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
Although the four-page report provided a detailed timeline of events related to the ship and its cargo, starting from even before it entered the port’s waters in 2013, it never mentioned the naval inspection.
The office of Lebanese President Joseph Aoun — who was commander in chief of the Armed Forces from 2017 until his election as president last year — did not respond to requests for comment. Questions sent to Lebanon’s military also went unanswered.
The new findings “raise serious questions regarding the responsibility of individuals, including those within the army, who inspected the M/V Rhosus and cleared it to be docked in Beirut’s port, despite the fact that it was carrying thousands of tons of unstable material,” said Lama Fakih, Global Program Director at Human Rights Watch.
“Officials also need to interrogate and explain why the army has never reported this November 2013 ship inspection. It is time for accountability for those responsible for the Beirut blast.”
A ‘Vessel of Interest’
The documents obtained by OCCRP show that on November 20, 2013, as the Rhosus was sailing into Beirut’s port, the UNIFIL Maritime Task Force — a U.N. peacekeeping body that helps Lebanon monitor its waters and prevent the unauthorized entry of arms — flagged it as a “vessel of interest.” They asked Lebanese authorities to inspect it, according to what is known as a “hailing report” issued by the task force that day.
The UNIFIL Maritime Task Force flags vessels as “of interest” if they exhibit suspicious behavior, carry suspicious cargo, or enter or leave the port unexpectedly.
UNIFIL did not respond to questions on why the Rhosus was flagged, and records from the time do not make it clear, although a document obtained by OCCRP that appears to have been attached to the hailing report mentions that it is carrying “amonion 2755 nitraton.”
The ship’s bill of lading also stated that it was transporting 2,750 tons of high-density ammonium nitrate, while a cargo manifest said the material was being sent to an explosives company in Mozambique.
The material was stored in bags labeled “Nitroprill HD,” with symbols indicating that there was hazardous combustible material inside, according to photographs of the cargo seen by OCCRP.
Later that night, the Lebanese naval forces sent a short report to UNIFIL, saying they had boarded and inspected the ship “in front of Beirut port.” It does not mention the ship’s contents.
Ammonium nitrate is used to make both fertilizers and explosives, and is regulated in Lebanon under the Weapons and Ammunition Law, which categorizes it as a “material used in the manufacture of explosives” if it has a nitrogen content above 33.5 percent.
The Lebanese Armed Forces, which include the navy, did not respond to questions on the inspection. UNIFIL said that its role in the operation had been limited to flagging the ship.
“Lebanon is a sovereign country,” it said. “Only the Lebanese authorities have the authority to decide whether and how to carry out a ship inspection.”
‘Criminally Negligent’
Hazardous cargo aside, the Rhosus was not in good condition in the months preceding its arrival in Beirut. In June 2013, a Lebanese inspection in the port of Saida found 17 defects in the ship, including hull corrosion and defective navigation equipment, according to maritime database Equasis.
Although it was allowed to dock in Beirut after its navy inspection, it was ultimately abandoned and impounded. The ammonium nitrate it carried was moved into a warehouse at the port in 2014.
It was left in unsafe storage conditions there for the next six years. Documents show that various Lebanese authorities — including the army, port authorities, customs, and government ministries — spent years debating which of them was ultimately responsible for disposing of the chemical. The derelict Rhosus, meanwhile, sank in port in 2018.
Five days after the explosion, following a request from the prime minister for a detailed account of the events, the army’s operations command addressed a report labeled “top secret” to the Ministry of Defense.
That report, which was signed by General Joseph Aoun, the current president, provides a detailed timeline of what happened to the Rhosus and its cargo. But it never mentions the navy’s 2013 inspection — nor that it had declared the vessel “clear.” It is unclear why the inspection is omitted.
The report does note that the army received warnings from port authorities in 2014 that the ammonium nitrate was dangerous and should be transferred to the army or re-exported. But the army refused to take charge of the chemical, saying it had no use for it, and no capacity to store or destroy it.
In an extensive 2021 review of the incident, Human Rights Watch found evidence that multiple authorities had been criminally negligent in their handling of the explosive cargo, by failing to recognize how dangerous it was, securing it poorly, and communicating inadequately with other authorities about the risk.
In early February, Lebanon’s official press agency reported that an indictment in the investigation was expected to be handed down soon.
“For too long victims and their families have waited for answers about who was responsible for the explosion that devastated Beirut and killed and injured so many,” Fakih of Human Rights Watch told OCCRP.
Following an investigation by OCCRP and its partners into how European parts are ending up used in Russian military drones attacking Ukraine, Ireland’s leader announced on Wednesday that his government would “pursue” the issue of Irish components ending up in Russian drones.
The Irish Times, one of OCCRP’s partners in the investigation, reported that Taoiseach Micheál Martin told the country’s parliament that there was no suggestion Ireland’s companies had engaged in anything illegal “but we will pursue this and we will follow this through and it is something concerning.”
“But obviously, the circumvention has been a feature in many areas of the war, in many aspects of supplies to Russia,” he added.
The investigation by OCCRP, Irish Times, De Tijd, The Kyiv Independent, Paper Trail Media/Der Standard, Infolibre and The Times found that despite European Union sanctions that prohibit direct exports to Russia, hundreds of components produced by European companies are still ending up in Russian drones.
The drones are being used by Russia’s military to cripple Ukraine’s energy grid, triggering a humanitarian crisis by exposing more than one million Ukrainians to weeks without power, water or heat in the winter.
The Irish Times reported he was responding to questions by Ireland’s Labour Party leader, Ivana Bacik, who said Irish components were being sold on and “appear in drones that are devastating Ukraine this winter,” and that 682 civilians had been killed by swarms of drones which were leaving people without power or water.
She then asked what the government was going to do to ensure components from the country did not end up in Russian weapons.
In answering her questions, Martin also noted that Ireland’s David O’Sullivan, former Secretary-General of the European Commission and current EU sanctions envoy, has been trying to deal with “circumvention of sanctions across the board.”
Airspace over the Texan border down of El Paso was abruptly closed last week when U.S. officials used a laser to shoot down what they said were Mexican cartel drones — but which reportedly turned out to be a party balloon.
In the wake of the debacle, Vanda Felbab-Brown, director of the Brookings Institution think tank’s Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors, spoke with OCCRP about the real ways in which Mexican cartels are deploying drones, and what the future holds as these violent groups face heat from the Mexican and U.S. governments.
We’re now hearing this was party balloons, not a phalanx of Mexican cartel drones, hovering over El Paso. But in your work you have discussed the ways some cartels do indeed use drones. Can you tell us a bit about what they’re used for?
Mexican cartels have been using drones for over a decade, for a wide variety of purposes. This includes monitoring where law enforcement is present. This includes smuggling drugs within Mexico to prisons, as well as other contraband like cellphones, but also across the U.S.-Mexico border. As drone payloads have become larger, this has become more feasible, although obviously the current drones are still not efficient for moving large amounts of cocaine.
They have also been using drones to conduct actual military attacks. This includes attacks against law enforcement officials. And they have been using drones for attacking their rivals or controlling populations in Jalisco. In Michoacán, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel has been using drones to [lay] mine fields to attack villages, and depopulate areas in order to control places where they aren’t as embedded as rival cartels.
U.S. President Donald Trump has said the cartels are running Mexico. How accurate is a statement like that?
Well, the cartels are certainly running parts of Mexico. Across the country, you have various parts of rural areas that are really controlled by the narcos. That doesn’t mean that the criminal group declares [the area to be] a republic of the criminal group, but they dictate terms to law enforcement and government officials on a wide variety of policy decisions, including whether officials can [provide licenses to] open more alcohol shops or bars, for example. They, of course, control how much or how little law enforcement at the local level can operate.
They have tremendous influence at the state levels through corruption and intimidation networks. And they have taken over not just illegal economies, but also many legal economies in Mexico, such as retail of consumer goods, alcohol, cigarettes, legal fisheries and legal logging. At least until the arrival of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration in 2024, they were expanding their territorial control, control over populations, control over legal economies and government officials, as well as elections.
Within the Sheinbaun administration, we see much more of a pushback against the cartels. This has been in part the result of Trump administration pressure. The Sheinbaum administration came in determined to do more for its own reasons, following the abject failures of the Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador administration, which essentially gave the cartels a carte blanche.
But in my view, it’s undeniable that the pressure from the Trump administration in various forms — the designation of the cartels as foreign terrorists organizations, tariffs, the verbal linkages between the USMCA [free trade agreement among the U.S., Mexico and Canada] and security issues, and of course, the threat of U.S military actions — are all creating very significant incentives for the Sheinbaum administration to take on the cartels more.
The one caveat I would say is if the Trump administration actually resorts to military actions, that will burn a lot of the leverage that it has achieved with the Sheinbaum administration. It is the threat of military action, the shadow of the foreign terrorist organization designation, as well as the tariffs that have created significant influence.
When the airspace over El Paso closed, some commentators thought it indicated the U.S. was about to attack Mexico. Did you think that?
I do think that military action is very well possible. Certainly, when running for president in 2024, Trump and most U.S. Republican politicians endorsed military strikes in Mexico. They believed this would be the end of the cartels. I don’t believe so. Nothing short of a prolonged multi-year counter-insurgency operation would be sufficient to destroy the cartels and of course the United States doesn’t have any appetite for that and Mexico would not put up with it.
So the military operations that are on the table are airstrikes, drone strikes, or limited special operations forces raids, which amount to the destruction of some drug labs and the arrests of some high value targets – policies that have been underway in Mexico with different levels of intensity over the past 20 or 25 years. They might feel good for some U.S. politicians, but they are not fundamentally going to change the lack of rule of law in Mexico and the high power of the criminal groups.
Last month, you wrote about how the cartels might respond to U.S. attacks. Can you briefly tell us what you think might happen?
How the cartels might retaliate will be a function of what kind of strikes would actually take place. If you have one or two limited strikes, it’s business as usual for them. Whether they are conducted by Mexican security with U.S. intelligence, or by U.S. military forces directly, they simply ride it out.
The cartels will try to mobilize political opposition against the strikes by amplifying nationalist messages, perhaps putting pressures on politicians to oppose U.S. actions and wrapping themselves in the mantle of nationalist Robin Hoods.
If we were to see sustained action by U.S. forces, then there are a variety of counter measures, from attacking Mexican government officials or Mexican forces to potentially attacking U.S. agents on the ground in Mexico, or U.S. military forces in Mexico. Consulates could become a target. But those are really high levels of escalation, and these are not going to be the first responses of the cartels.
They’ll first try to go after the Mexican targets. Eventually, the target list could also include U.S. people living in Mexico, of which there is at least one million, perhaps more. And ultimately, even perhaps targeting the homeland, not so much through violent assassinations — that is in the realm of the imaginable, although very, very unlikely.
And what about the possibility of cartel drone incursions?
The future is here. Criminal groups are using drones for a variety of reasons. And as we will see the increased use of commercial drones within countries, and perhaps across countries, to move products, in a few years, it will be harder and harder to distinguish which drones are legal drones carrying legal goods and which are drones carrying contraband.
Obviously, there will be mixing of those. Criminal groups might want to steal the electronic signatures of registered drones to pretend they are carrying legal cargo. Both increased legal traffic and illegal traffic, of course, generates all kinds of risks to air traffic, including inadvertent accidents.
And so both criminal groups flying drones and responses toward them might hamper civilian air traffic. Obviously, there will be an effort to optimize military and law enforcement responses, deploying countermeasures that have less disruptive effects. But both of them may snarl up traffic and hold up civilian uses of space, whether it’s for passengers or for cargoes.
Artificial intelligence solutions that transform the way food assistance reaches people facing hunger were on display during an exhibition at an AI meeting this week in New Delhi, India.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called on Wednesday for warring parties in Sudan to take urgent steps to protect civilians after at least 57 people were killed in separate drone strikes over two days this week.
A Russian man wanted in the U.K. for allegedly laundering money for a criminal network has a Maltese passport, according to the country’s official gazette.
Malta previously revoked his older brother’s citizenship after he was convicted in the same international cash cleaning operation.
Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) has announced charges against Alexander Kuksov, 23, putting him on its “most wanted” list. The NCA alleged he was “involved with an organised crime group responsible for the transfer and movement of multi-millions of pounds of criminal cash.”
The Times of Malta, OCCRP and Amphora Media previously revealed that Alexander Kuksov’s brother, Semen, was stripped of his Maltese citizenship last October, following his five-year sentence. Semen, 25, was convicted in the U.K. of involvement in the same group, which the NCA called a “professional banking service for criminals across the world.”
The brothers, together with their father Vladimir Anatolyevich Kuksov, appear on a list of people granted citizenship in 2022 by Malta. The Kuksovs appear to have been given citizenship just weeks before Russians were excluded from passport sales to wealthy investors after the Kremlin’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In July 2022 — about six months after receiving his Malta citizenship — Semen began managing “couriers to collect criminal money and deliver the laundered money overseas,” according to a statement by the U.K.’s Crown Prosecution Service.
The NCA now alleges that Vladimir Kuksov’s younger son was also involved in the criminal money laundering operation.
Lawyers for the elder Kuksov told OCCRP in 2024 that he had “no comment to make but notes that he and his adult son have lived separate lives for some years.”
Vladimir Kuksov did not respond to a request for comment about the new allegations against his younger son, Alexander, whose whereabouts are unknown.
The Kuksovs received Maltese passports through the country’s so-called “golden passport” program, which was eliminated this year following a damning judgement by the Court of Justice of the European Union.
The Community Malta Agency, which oversaw the citizenship-by-investment program, did not respond to questions about what actions it might take following the criminal charges against Alexander.
Under Maltese law, passports can be revoked if an applicant is sentenced within seven years of becoming a citizen to a jail term of a year or longer.
The charges announced by the NCA against Alexander have not been tried in court, and the money laundering allegations against him are not proven.
When the NCA announced its “Operation Destabilise” investigation in December 2024, it said the money laundering bust was its biggest in a decade, OCCRP reported at the time. The agency said the ring run out of Moscow and Dubai had been moving billions in cryptocurrency and hard cash for criminal operations, ranging from Russian ransomware attacks to street-level drug deals in the U.K.
Several alleged members of the network were sanctioned, and the NCA said it had arrested 84 people. Those arrested included Semen Kuksov, who later pleaded guilty to laundering more than $15 million of “criminally obtained cash,” according to the U.K. prosecution service.
The Malta Police Force did not respond to questions about the U.K. case against Alexander Kuksov, and whether it was investigating the allegations against him.