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  • Moldovan Vladimir Plahotniuc Sentenced to 19 Years for Crimes, Including “Billion Dollar Bank Fraud”

    A Moldovan court on Wednesday found businessman Vladimir Plahotniuc guilty of participating in the country’s ‘Billion Dollar Bank Fraud,’ sentenced him to 19 years in prison, and ordered the seizure of more than 1.1 billion Moldovan lei (roughly $64 million) in assets.

    The verdict by a panel of judges at the Chișinău Court said Plahotniuc “created and managed a criminal organization that committed several crimes, including fraud and money laundering, in particular the theft of financial means from the banking system of the Republic of Moldova with their subsequent laundering.”

    A former member of parliament, deputy speaker and leader of the Moldova’s Democratic Party, Plahotniuc was once one of the country’s most powerful political figures. Moldova’s Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office alleged he worked with former MP Ilan Shor and others to commit his crimes, including the theft of $1 billion — more than 10 percent of Moldova’s annual GDP — from three of the country’s banks.

    Plahotniuc is being held in preventive detention in Penitentiary No. 13 in Chișinău. He maintains his innocence and will appeal the verdict, said his lawyers.

    “Vladimir Plahotniuc’s defense team categorically rejects the sentence pronounced today and qualifies it as deeply illegal, manifestly unfounded and incompatible with the minimum standards of a fair trial,” defense lawyer Lucian Rogac told ZdG minutes after the verdict was handed down.

    The Chișinău Court also accepted a civil action filed by Moldova’s Ministry of Finance against Plahotniuc, ordering the collection of over some $60 million from Plahotniuc’s accounts. 

    “The civil action was admitted, the amount of approximately $60 million was ordered to be collected from the defendant’s account, which constitutes the damage caused by the devaluation of the three banks, including the default interest provided for by law,” Prosecutor Alexandru Cernei told ZdG, an OCCRP member center.

    The Legal Resources Centre from Moldova hailed the verdict as “one of the most significant rulings ever delivered in Moldova against a person long associated with the period of state capture.”

    “It matters not only because of who was convicted, but because it suggests that the justice system may finally be becoming capable of acting against individuals once seen as untouchable,” it said an analysis of the judgement. 

    Between 2012 and 2014, Plahotniuc and others allegedly facilitated Ilan Shor’s gaining of shareholdings of some commercial banks, while removing impediments from the control authorities, including the National Bank of Moldova and the National Financial Market Commission, Moldova’s Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office said in a press statement after the verdict.

    “Thus, the organization allegedly gained control over the administration of these institutions and over the lending processes, in order to subsequently fraudulently access loans in particularly large proportions, which were allegedly stolen through complex schemes and subjected to money laundering,” the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office said.

    Plahotniuc fled Moldova in June 2019 amid a dramatic power shift in the country. Shortly thereafter, Moldovan prosecutors requested Interpol issue an Interpol Red Notice for his arrest. However, the alert was later removed following Plahotniuc’s legal challenge, and his whereabouts remained unknown for years.

    He was arrested on an Interpol notice at Athens International Airport last July and finally extradited home to face charges. 

  • Your pint could come with a surprising health benefit

    Beer provides “substantial levels” of vitamin B6 into your diet, according to new research.

  • EFF Sues DHS and ICE For Records on Subpoenas Seeking to Unmask Online Critics

    Agencies Ignored EFF’s Public-Records Requests Regarding Unlawful Efforts to Locate People Who Criticized the Government or Attended Protests.

    SAN FRANCISCO – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) today demanding public records about their use of administrative subpoenas to try to identify their online critics.

    Court records and news reports show that in the past year, DHS has used administrative subpoenas to unmask or locate people who have documented ICE’s activities in their community, criticized the government, or attended protests. The subpoenas are sent to technology companies to demand information about internet users who are often engaged in protected First Amendment activity.

    These subpoenas are dangerous because they don’t require judges’ approval. But they are also unlawful, and the government knows it. When a few users challenged them in court with the help of American Civil Liberties Union affiliates in Northern California and Pennsylvania, DHS withdrew them rather than waiting for a decision.

    DHS and ICE have ignored EFF’s public-records requests for documents about the processes behind these subpoenas, so EFF sued Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

    “DHS and ICE should not be able to first claim that they have the legal authority to unmask critics and then run from court when users challenge these administrative subpoenas,” said EFF Deputy Legal Director Aaron Mackey. “The public deserves to know what laws the agencies believe give them the power to issue these speech-chilling subpoenas.”

    An administrative subpoena cannot be used to obtain the content of communications, but they have been used to try and obtain some basic subscriber information like name, address, IP address, length of service, and session times. If a technology company refuses to comply, an agency’s only recourse is to drop it or go to court and try to convince a judge that the request is lawful.

    EFF and the ACLU of Northern California in February ​wrote to Amazon, Apple, Discord, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Reddit, SNAP, TikTok, and X​ to ask that they insist on court intervention and an order before complying with a DHS subpoena; give users as much notice as possible when they are the target of a subpoena, so the users can seek help; and resist gag orders that would prevent the companies from notifying users who are targets of subpoenas.

    And EFF last week ​asked California’s and New York’s attorneys general to investigate Google​ for deceptive trade practices for breaking ​its promise​ to notify users before handing their data to law enforcement, citing the case of a doctoral student who was targeted with an ICE subpoena after briefly attending a pro-Palestine protest.

    EFF in early March filed public-records requests with DHS and ICE for their policies, procedures, guidelines, directives, memos, and legal analyses supporting such use of administrative subpoenas. EFF also requested all Inspector General or oversight records, all approval and issuance procedures for the subpoenas, all records reflecting how many such subpoenas have been issued, all communications with technology companies concerning these demands, all communications regarding specific named targets or programs, and all communications with the Department of Justice regarding such subpoenas.

    DHS and ICE have not responded, even though EFF requested expedited processing of its requests, which requires agencies to get back to requesters within 10 days.

    “The policies, directives, and authorization records governing the program have not been disclosed,” the complaint notes. “The legal basis asserted by DHS and ICE for using a customs statute to compel disclosure of information about persons engaged in constitutionally protected speech and association has not been made public.”

    For the complaint: https://www.eff.org/document/eff-v-dhs-ice-administrative-subpoenas-complaint

    For EFF’s letter urging tech companies to protect users: ​https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/02/open-letter-tech-companies-protect-your-users-lawless-dhs-subpoenas​

    For EFF’s letter urging state probes of Google: ​https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-state-ags-investigate-googles-broken-promise-users-targeted-government​

    Tags: 
    free speech
    privacy
    anonymity
    DHS
    ICE
    Contact: 
    Aaron
    Mackey
    Deputy Legal Director/Free Speech and Transparency Litigation Director
    amackey@eff.org

  • Pluralistic: It’s not a crime if we do it (to nurses) with an app (22 Apr 2026)

    Today’s links


    A 1950s killer robot with eye lasers; it has collected four bell jars in which float the heads of disembodied nurses. It is zapping one jar with its lasers. In the background is a golgotha, taken from a Dore Old Testament engraving.

    It’s not a crime if we do it (to nurses) with an app (permalink)

    If I could abolish one piece of received wisdom about tech policy, it would be this: “Tech moves at the speed of innovation and regulation moves at the speed of government, so regulation will always lag behind tech.”

    (If I could abolish two pieces of received wisdom about tech policy, the other one would be “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.” Decent treatment is not a customer reward program, and “voting with your wallet” only works if you’re a billionaire whose wallet is thicker than all the other wallets put together.)

    To be clear, there are times when tech enables new forms of conduct that don’t fit neatly into the existing policy framework. For example, we apply copyright to anyone who makes or handles a copy of a creative work, and that used to be a pretty good proxy for “someone in the supply chain of the media industry.”

    The problem is that computers work by making dozens and dozens of copies every time you click your mouse, and we all use computers for everything, and clicking a mouse doesn’t make you part of the entertainment business. The fact that we’ve had hyperinflation in “making and handling copies” but continued to apply an esoteric industrial framework to pretty much everything everyone does all the time is a huge problem that desperately needs fixing:

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/the-internets-original-sin/

    Copyright notwithstanding, tech generally does not outrun our capacity to regulate it. Rather, tech bosses come up with incredibly flimsy reasons why their business doesn’t fit into the existing regulatory framework, and policymakers accept these ridiculous excuses so readily that one can only assume they’re in on the racket.

    Take “fintech,” all those neobanks and the cryptocurrency junk and shitcoins and stablecoins and NFTs and so on that a group of pump-and-dumpers, money launderers and stock swindlers have pushed for more than a decade now. As Trashfuture’s Riley Quinn says, “Whenever you hear ‘fintech,’ you should think ‘unregulated bank.’” It’s not hard to apply existing regulations to these companies: they fall under banking law, usury law, securities law and gambling law.

    There’s no (good) reason not to apply these legal frameworks to the crypto industry – but there are plenty of bad reasons not to. The most obvious reason not to apply those regulations is that you are on the same side as the pump-and-dumpers, money launderers and stock swindlers. The reason we struggle to regulate fintech is that we just don’t want to.

    Then there’s Uber, which claimed that it wasn’t a taxi company, it was a “transportation network company,” which meant that none of the regulations we apply to taxis should apply to Uber. To call this a transparent ruse is to do great violence to the good, hardworking transparent ruses putting in the hard yards to run honest scams. “Uber isn’t a taxi company, it’s a transportation network company” is about as plausible as those t-shirts that read “It’s not a bald spot, it’s a solar-panel for a sex-machine.”

    Emboldened by the success of the “transportation network company” wheeze, Uber launched Uber Eats, claiming that it wasn’t a “food delivery company” but rather a “delivery network company.” This set up the template for a remorseless tide of new sex-machine solar-panels that have pushed Uber’s system of wage-theft and worker misclassification into an expanding constellation of labor categories.

    From fintech to price-fixing to gig-work, the entire industry runs on the very stupid proposition that “it’s not a crime if we do it with an app”:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading

    One of the worst of these sex-machine solar-panels is to be found in nursing, where a cluster of heavily capitalized apps that nurses must rely on to get shifts insist that they aren’t “healthcare staffing agencies,” rather, they are “healthcare worker platforms” that should be exempted from the regulations that we started applying to the former after a string of calamities and disasters.

    This phenomenon is detailed in eye-watering detail in “Uber For Nursing,” a must-read new report by Katie J Wells, Maya Pinto, and Funda Ustek Spilda for the AI Now Institute:

    https://ainowinstitute.org/publications/uber-for-nursing

    If “Uber for nursing” rings a bell, you might be thinking of “Uber for Nursing: How an AI-Powered Gig Model Is Threatening Health Care,” an earlier report that Wells and Spilda wrote for the Roosevelt Institute in late 2024:

    https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/uber-for-nursing/

    The Roosevelt Institute report contained many eye-popping findings, most notably that at least some of the leading national nursing gig-work platforms were using data-brokers to find out how much debt nurses were carrying, and offered lower wages to the nurses with the most debt, on the grounds that the most economically desperate nurses will accept the lowest pay:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

    The new report describes how, in the absence of a muscular policy response, these nursing gig-work companies have raised fantastic sums of money, some of which they have diverted to regulatory capture projects in a bid to states to recognize their solar-panel sex-machines, with great success. These companies haven’t merely refined their lobbying game, either – as a sphincter-puckering appendix detailing the experience of nurses with these apps shows, they have also made great strides in immiserating nurses and transferring their earning power to gig platforms and the hospitals that rely on them.

    This degradation of the work experience is characteristic of the new world of AI-powered jobs. AI isn’t taking workers’ jobs, but it is enshittifying them, with degrading, neurosis-inducing surveillance and high-handed discipline:

    https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/what-does-it-mean-to-work-under-algorithmic-eyes

    Algorithmic oversight is a terror for any worker, but it’s particularly bad when applied to healthcare workers:

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca

    But gig-work companies remain laser-focused on healthcare workers, likely because that is one of the only growing professions left in America. They’re trying to screw over healthcare workers for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: “That’s where the money is.” The implication here is that the 15% of the American workforce that is employed in the healthcare industry is on the front lines of the battle against gig-work and algorithmic management.

    Like parasites that attack the sick and weak, gig-work and algorithmic management come first for industries that are already bad for workers and the people they serve, making things much worse while insisting that they’re just trying to apply a cool digital fix to a broken analog system. That, too, was Uber’s playbook: attacking the medallion taxi system as corrupt and sclerotic – while replacing it with a system that’s corrupt, extractive and dynamic, able to evade all attempts to improve things for drivers and riders (such as drivers’ unions).

    That’s what’s happened with healthcare staffing agencies. These have long been a fixture in healthcare, partly because there was always a large cohort of skilled healthcare professionals who valued the flexibility of short term contracts (for example, “travel nurses”) and partly because hospitals love hiring contractors who aren’t part of their workers’ unions.

    Staffing agencies weren’t good. A string of scandals led to waves of regulations in states like Colorado, Minnesota and New York that required agencies to “register annually, disclose shareholders and executive officers, certify worker credentials, report to state authorities on the number of workers employed, document service rates charged to facilities, and list average wages paid to workers by job category.” These regulations also banned staffing agencies from locking up workers with noncompete agreements and ripping them off with finder’s fees.

    Rather than strengthening these protections, gig nursing platforms avoid them. Where staffing agencies secure multi-week contracts for travel nurses, gig platforms typically assign workers to single-day shifts. Where staffing agencies let nurses bargain for their scheduling needs, gig platforms present take-it-or-leave-it offers and no opportunities to speak to a human when things go wrong. And where staffing agencies evaluated the workers on their roster based on employer feedback, the gig platforms install apps that continuously surveil and evaluate workers, downranking them and cutting their hours and pay based on algorithmic judgments that are never explained and cannot be appealed.

    Platforms match nurses with shifts, claiming to regulators that they’re little more than a “job-notice board.” But when they pitch hospitals, they tell a different story, about their ability to use algorithms to erode wages and blacklist workers who make trouble. Healthcare gig-work apps push workers to accept shifts that require more travel and pay less, at facilities they don’t want to work at. Refusal to accept a shift can permanently compromise your ability to get future shifts, and/or lower the wage you’re offered in future.

    In addition to these poor working conditions and low wages, gig platforms have resurrected the prohibited practice of charging workers “finder’s fees,” by layering on junk fees that take money out of every paycheck. Staffing agencies aren’t allowed to do this, but the gig-work platforms’ “solar panel for a sex-machine” gambit transforms the finder’s fee into a “platform fee” that somehow escapes regulators’ grasp.

    How is it that a regulator can’t see that a “platform fee” is exactly equivalent to a “finder’s fee?” This is not a case of technology outpacing regulation – it’s a case of lawmakers colluding with profitable firms to evade regulation in order to steal from workers.

    The platforms are aslosh in investor cash – Clipboard Health, Intelycare, and Shiftkey are all valued at more than $1b, and Shiftkey just completed a $300m private equity raise. This leaves them with lots of ready cash to spend on regulatory entrepreneurship. In Georgia, Clipboard lobbied “to exempt gig nursing platforms from state unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation laws.” In Ohio, Shiftkey and Clipboard are pushing a bill “to classify gig nurses as independent contractors, exempting gig platforms from minimum wage and other worker protection laws.” In Utah, Nursa is praising a bill that a state senator called “lightest-touch regulation.” All in all, 17 states have nurse gig platform deregulation bills underway.

    In 2022, the healthcare gig-work platforms tried to get a California ballot measure to carve nursing platforms out of all state labor laws. They withdrew it, but pursued an “under the radar” approach to get the same thing by seeking changes in administrative rules, rather than state laws. Lobbying for administrative law changes to exempt healthcare gig-work platforms from regulation is also underway in Missouri, Louisiana and Utah.

    One bright light in all this comes from New York state, where a 2025 law “affirmatively recognizes gig nursing platforms as entities that must comply with the state’s healthcare staffing agency rules.” The existence of this law proves that the crisis of gig-work healthcare platforms is not an example of tech racing ahead of regulation. If New York’s state leg can figure out that a gig-work platform is just a staffing agency in app form, then other states can do so as well. If they don’t figure that out, that’s because they don’t want to.

    Sometime in this century, our political class and our financial class arrived at a consensus that Douglas Rushkoff describes as “go meta,” in his 2022 book Survival of the Richest:

    https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

    The “go meta” ethos insists that the most important, smartest and most valuable move is always away from productive labor. Don’t drive a cab: go meta and own a medallion that you rent to a cab driver. Don’t own a medallion, go meta and start a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don’t start a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and invest in a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don’t invest in a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and buy options in a gig-work ride-hailing company – and so on and so on, into ever more abstracted forms of gambling and rent-collection.

    The reorganization of the economy around parasitic middlemen and financial gamblers (but I repeat myself) is the real reason that we can’t regulate tech. Once you’ve decided that the most important party to a transaction is the person who has the option on the share on the platform on the license that the worker who actually does the job requires, of course you’re going to see a solar-panel for a sex-machine in every bald spot.

    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)

    #25yrsago PKD ratted out other SF writers to the FBI https://web.archive.org/web/20010428121230/https://www.linguafranca.com/print/0105/cover.html

    #15yrsago Weird Al snubbed by Lady Gaga, releases his parody without permission as fair use https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUxXKfQkswE

    #15yrsago How do you compete with free? A taxonomy of reasons to pay for digital files https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2011/apr/20/digital-free-persuade-pay-cory-doctorow?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

    #15yrsago iOS devices secretly log and retain record of every place you go, transfer to your PC and subsequent devices https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/apr/20/iphone-tracking-prompts-privacy-fears

    #10yrsago Before 1988 Olympics, South Korea sent ‘vagrants’ to camps where rape and murder were routine https://web.archive.org/web/20160420234916/https://bigstory.ap.org/article/c22de3a565fe4e85a0508bbbd72c3c1b/ap-s-korea-covered-mass-abuse-killings-vagrants

    #10yrsago Luxury overnight bus with sleeper cabins shuttles between LA and San Francisco https://www.inc.com/tess-townsend/sleepbus-gets-you-from-sf-to-la-for-50.html

    #10yrsago Volkswagen’s internal Dieselgate probe stuck because the company used code-words for its cheat software https://web.archive.org/web/20160419095045/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-19/vw-cheating-code-words-said-to-complicate-emissions-probe

    #10yrsago Chinese opsec funnies: your foreign boyfriend is a western spy! https://web.archive.org/web/20160420125125/https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/nsed/

    #10yrsago UK Chancellor exempts families of “Politically Exposed Persons” from money laundering scrutiny https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/04/uks-osborne-exempts-members-of-parliament-other-politically-exposed-persons-from-money-laundering-oversight.html

    #10yrsago Colorado school district wants to arm security staff with assault rifles https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2016/0419/Colorado-school-district-to-equip-security-workers-with-semiautomatic-rifles

    #5yrsago McDonald’s corporate wages war on ice-cream hackers https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

    #5yrsago Real penalties for covid evicters https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cfpb

    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 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

    • “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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

    • “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:

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    https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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    https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

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    https://doctorow.medium.com/

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    “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

  • Sri Lanka Cricket Chief Asked to Step Down Over Alleged Graft

    Sri Lanka’s president has asked the head of the country’s influential cricket board to resign over longstanding allegations of corruption and mismanagement at the sports body, local media reported Wednesday.

    Sri Lankan newspaper the Daily Mirror first reported that President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who was elected in 2024, asked Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) head Shammi Silva to voluntarily step down from his role. He reportedly responded by saying he wanted a week to decide.

    When contacted by OCCRP, SIlva refused to confirm or deny the report and did not respond to further requests for comment. Neither did Sri Lanka’s sports minister, Sunil Kumara Gamage, nor the International Cricket Council, the sport’s global governing body.

    Silva has proved to be a powerful and controversial actor in cricket-mad Sri Lanka. His seven years at the helm of SLC have been marred by persistent allegations of mismanagement and systemic corruption.

    The country’s former president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, in 2023 appointed a cabinet subcommittee, chaired by the country’s then-foreign minister that uncovered alleged governance failures, structural corruption risks, conflicts of interest, and irregularities in elections and voting procedures at SLC. It also criticised the club-based voting system, which critics argue enables entrenched control over the organisation, and recommended legal restructuring and stronger oversight mechanisms.

    The sub-committee also reviewed proposals from a separate reform panel led by retired Supreme Court Justice K.T. Chitrasiri, which recommended sweeping changes to SLC’s governance structure.

    The Chitrasiri Committee was formed following a governance crisis in 2023 that resulted in the ICC temporarily suspending Sri Lanka Cricket over concerns about political interference.

    Over the years, several prominent cricket figures, including former national captain Mahela Jayawardene and ex-test captain Sidath Wettimuny, have publicly raised concerns about how cricket administration is managed in Sri Lanka.

    An online petition launched several weeks ago calling for Silva’s removal under the hashtag #GoHomeShammi has gathered more than 16,000 signatures.

  • New Review Casts Doubt On Alzheimers Drugs But Is Controversial

    I have been following the story here of the newest Alzheimers drugs, the first to show that they can actually slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The benefits are modest, and come with the potential for serious side effects and a high price tag, but after decades of disappointment it was good to at least have a proof of concept that […]

    The post New Review Casts Doubt On Alzheimers Drugs But Is Controversial first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

  • Guatemala Blocks Reelection of Internationally Sanctioned Top Prosecutor

    Guatemala’s attorney general, María Consuelo Porras, has been officially ruled out for a third term, signaling the end of a controversial tenure that drew international sanctions and sparked a mass exodus of the country’s anti-corruption prosecutors.

    A national nomination committee excluded Porras from its final shortlist of six candidates submitted Monday evening. President Bernardo Arévalo—who previously called Porras “a danger to the country” and whom she actively tried to block from taking office last year—now has until mid-May to select her successor.

    Porras, named OCCRP’s 2023 “Person of the Year in Organized Crime and Corruption,” faced global infamy for allegedly protecting criminal networks. Since her election in 2018, critics say she weaponized her office to shield a powerful network of political and business elites known locally as the “pact of the corrupt.” This included protecting a government minister who confessed to participating in the sweeping Odebrecht bribery scheme—a case investigated by OCCRP and its partners. 

    Under her watch, the U.S., European Union, and U.K. levied heavy sanctions against her. Her office also helped dismantle a celebrated UN-backed anti-corruption commission and hounded dozens of justice officials into exile.

    “For me, Consuelo Porras’ departure … personally brings me relief, as well as hope for my people,” said Siomara Sosa, a former prosecutor imprisoned for three weeks in 2022 before fleeing on what SOS Defenders called spurious charges. 

    Juan Francisco Sandoval, the exiled former head of the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity, said her exclusion represents a fragile hope for democratic recovery. 

    “During these years, the Public Prosecutor’s Office ceased to be perceived as an instrument for prosecuting corruption and came to be seen … as an actor that selectively persecuted justice officials, journalists, and critical voices,” Sandoval said. 

    Beyond high-profile political persecution, critics point to the everyday impact of her tenure. Sosa noted that while Porras boasts of drastically reducing judicial backlogs, the numbers mask a reality of mass case dismissals. 

    “For example, in cases of girls under 14 who are raped, only 2 percent reach a sentence,” Sosa said. 

    Despite her exclusion from the shortlist, analysts warn the transition remains highly volatile. Dozens of legal injunctions could still stall the selection process, potentially prolonging Porras’ mandate beyond May 17. Furthermore, watchdog groups note the candidate pool remains compromised, with observers pointing out that four of the six remaining finalists have histories of irregular rulings or alleged links to criminal networks.

    Manfredo Marroquín, president of Transparency International’s Guatemalan chapter, Acción Ciudadana, warned that Porras could use her remaining weeks in power to push through final retaliatory cases against political enemies—or worse.

    “There’s a risk that she might want to hide evidence of everything that they did at the Attorney General’s Office, that they might start making documents disappear, burning files,” Marroquín said. 

    Once in office, the next attorney general will face the monumental task of rebuilding the justice system’s credibility. Experts say the new chief must immediately halt political persecutions, dismantle fabricated cases against exiles, and reactivate major corruption probes that were shelved during Porras’ tenure. 

    Porras did not respond to requests for comment.

  • France Opens Criminal Inquiry Into Lebanese Banks Over Crisis-Era Capital Flight

    French authorities have opened a landmark criminal investigation into the illegal transfer of funds out of Lebanon, targeting the European subsidiaries of major Lebanese banks in a move that could expose foreign financial executives to prosecution for their role in the country’s economic ruin.

    The inquiry centers on the French subsidiary of Bank Audi and Banque Richelieu France, an institution linked to Lebanon’s Société Générale de Banque au Liban (SGBL) and the prominent Lebanese banker Antoun Sehnaoui.

    Investigators are examining allegations of money laundering, breach of trust, handling of stolen goods, and criminal conspiracy. The probe represents the latest and most aggressive European effort to untangle the opaque financial maneuvers that drained Lebanon’s coffers as everyday citizens were locked out of their savings.

    William Bourdon, founder of the Paris-based anti-corruption group Sherpa, which helped spur the inquiry, called the investigation a watershed moment for international financial accountability.

    “It represents a first: at the European level, it is the first time that the criminal liability of foreign banks and their executives may be pursued,” Bourdon said, noting that accusations of tax fraud may also emerge as the case develops.

    The significance of the inquiry, Bourdon explained, lies in establishing the legal liability of European banking subsidiaries that allegedly participated in unlawful schemes coordinated with their parent companies in Beirut. He predicted the French probe “could also trigger a domino effect,” leading to similar criminal proceedings across other European nations.

    The investigation is the latest international attempt to assign blame for the financial meltdown that began in late 2019, an ongoing crisis that the World Bank has characterized as one of the worst in modern global history.

    The French inquiry stems from legal complaints filed in July 2025 by Sherpa and the Collective of Victims of Fraudulent and Criminal Practices in Lebanon. Initiated by the Financial Section of the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office, the case is being handled by the Central Office for Combating Corruption and Financial and Tax Offences.

    That specialized unit is already managing sprawling proceedings against Lebanon’s traditional political and financial elite, including former central bank governor Riad Salame and former Prime Minister Najib Mikati.

    In September 2025, French investigators opened a probe into fraud and money laundering allegations against Mikati and his brother, Taha. That investigation followed an April 2024 complaint—also filed by Sherpa and the Collective—accusing the Mikatis of systematically using offshore companies to acquire illicit assets in France.

    While the investigations into the Mikati family and the financial institutions are not formally linked, Bourdon noted that “clear connections exist in terms of the actors involved, the mechanisms at play in these proceedings, and the alleged facts.” He added that formal cooperation mechanisms between the distinct probes could eventually be considered.

    “The opening of this investigation also marks a further step in the internationalization of litigation related to the collapse of the Lebanon banking system,” Bourdon said.

    The French inquiry compounds the mounting legal troubles facing Sehnaoui. As chairman of SGBL and a titan of Lebanese finance, Sehnaoui is embroiled in a series of international challenges. These include a civil lawsuit filed in the United States against SGBL alleging money laundering and links to Hezbollah, as reported late last year by Daraj, a regional investigative journalism outlet.

    The banking probe also unfolds against the backdrop of ongoing criminal proceedings against Salame, the architect of Lebanon’s modern financial system, who led the central bank from 1993 to 2023. Salame, who has been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for financial crimes, remains a central figure in the push for accountability, facing a litany of corruption allegations at home and abroad.

    In the latest development in Beirut, an interrogation regarding a legal complaint filed against Salame by current Central Bank Governor Karim Souaid was postponed to May 4. The 75-year-old Salame failed to appear for the hearing, with his legal team citing medical reasons. That complaint centers on accusations of illicit enrichment and the embezzlement of central bank funds through a network of offshore shell companies.

  • World News in Brief: Insecurity in the Darfurs, 100 million live with landmine threats, Singapore execution moratorium

    The United Nations is deeply alarmed by continued insecurity in the Darfur region of Sudan and the heavy toll it is having on civilians, Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said on Wednesday. 

  • SECURITY COUNCIL LIVE: Regional war threatens Syria’s fragile transition

    The Security Council is meeting now at a critical juncture for Syria’s fragile transition. While the Iran-US ceasefire has temporarily eased regional spillover from Lebanon and elsewhere, conditions remain volatile in Syria. The reported US military withdrawal now completed, marks a milestone, yet the chamber faces a country grappling with deep internal fissures and external pressures. Follow full meetings coverage below and UN News app users should click here.