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The Justice Department on Monday unsealed charges against the co-director of a Maryland think tank, alleging he acted as an illegal arms broker and unregistered agent for the Beijing government while also seeking to help China obtain Iranian oil in violation of U.S. sanctions.
Gal Luft, a dual U.S. and Israeli citizen, is accused of recruiting and paying a former high-ranking U.S. government official – and advisor to then president-elect Donald Trump -- on behalf of principals based in China in 2016 without registering in the U.S. as a foreign agent as federal law requires.
The 57-year-old fugitive has become a key figure in Republican-led corruption investigations into President Joe Biden, accusing him, son Hunter Biden and other family members of having improper financial arrangements with the China-controlled energy company CEFC. The White House and Biden family representatives have issued broad denials of such claims of corruption as being false and without merit.
A longtime energy security analyst who splits his time between Maryland and Israel, Luft has accused Biden family members of bribery and of having received payments from individuals with ties to Chinese military intelligence or energy firms.
Luft, whose Institute for the Analysis of Global Security focuses on energy security, has denied wrongdoing in tweets in which he also claimed the Justice Department case against him is politically motivated.
Senator Ron Johnson, one of several prominent Republicans to tout Luft as a whistleblower witness, also suggested in a July 9 tweet that the Justice Department case against Luft is connected to his alleged interest in exposing Biden family corruption.
"Is DOJ trying to silence Dr. Gal Luft from publicly exposing Biden family corruption?" asked Johnson, R-Wisc., the top Republican on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. "The American people deserve the truth and Dr. Luft must have the chance to testify before Congress."
The revelation came courtesy of Pedro Magalhães, a renowned blockchain developer and the mastermind behind Iora Labs, a leading tech consulting firm.
After Brazil’s Central Bank shared the source code of its nascent digital currency, Magalhães dove deep into the world of 1s and 0s, reverse-engineering the open-source code.
His surprising find was that the Central Bank of Brazil had embedded several operative functions into the code. These functions could allow account freezing, balance augmentation or reduction, and the movement of currency between addresses.
Interestingly, the digital real pilot runs on Hyperledger Besu, an Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible blockchain, operated privately.
The Bank of America (BofA) says that Ripple is an example of a company that is making an impact with blockchain and its use case for cross-border payments.
In a recent report, BofA analysts say Ripple is an exception to blockchain’s relatively modest effect on international payments systems, particularly in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region.
The banking giant also says that APAC, as one of the main regions blazing a trail in financial technology, is likely on a path toward abandoning physical cash.
“By presenting every digital option, from consumer payments via QR codes on mobile devices, to real-time corporate treasury and wholesale settlements, to central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and crypto, APAC is heralding new opportunities for all stakeholders to finally abandon hard cash.”
Central banks interested in exploring “some form” of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) rose to 93%, according to a 2022 Bank of International Settlements survey.
60% of central banks said that the emergence of stablecoins and other crypto assets has accelerated their work on CBDCs. These central banks generally attach more weight to a broader set of motivations for issuing a CBDC,” the BIS noted.
In an audacious move to stabilize its faltering economy, Zimbabwe has commenced trials for a gold-backed digital currency.
This bold step comes as the African nation continues to grapple with staggering inflation rates, forcing its citizenry into an awkward dance with the devaluating local currency.
If successful, Zimbabweans will soon be conducting transactions with a digital token, the stability of which will be hinged on the universally recognized value of gold.
On Thursday, the New York Fed and its partners announced that a three-month digital dollar pilot for global payments had shown promising results.
This represented a notable spurt of progress in American monetary innovation, and it’s no surprise it came on the wholesale side of central bank digital currencies, which pertains to transactions between financial institutions.
Last week, Russian state sources reported that the emerging BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa] economies are planning to introduce a new gold-backed currency at the bloc’s summit next month in South Africa.
That has spurred many countries to accelerate their exploration of CBDCs — including calls for a gold-backed digital BRICS currency — which in turn has heightened the urgency around the West’s own CBDC efforts.
it’s noteworthy that the successful experiment reported last week by the New York Fed and its partners made use of a (private, permissioned) blockchain — a design element that many CBDC projects eschew.
Central banks also remain interested in some of the more exotic innovations to come out of decentralized finance, as demonstrated by an interim report published late last month by Project Mariana, a collaboration between the Bank for International Settlements and monetary authorities in Europe and Asia exploring digital upgrades to foreign exchange markets.
The interim report confirms that the initiative is continuing to incorporate crypto-native innovations like liquidity pools, automatic market makers, and cross-chain bridges.
The recent Fourth of July holiday was a working day in most parts of the world, and people still want to make payments on U.S. bank holidays and on weekends," said Tony McLaughlin, head of emerging payments and business development at Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions.
This is one key use case for the Regulated Liability Network, a blueprint for a proposed regulated financial market infrastructure that would operate a shared ledger with central bank, commercial bank and electronic money on the same chain, settling transactions instantly.
The ledger and network design was recently tested by several banks and other financial services players in a 12-week proof of concept that included Bank of New York Mellon, Citibank, HSBC, PNC Bank, Swift, TD Bank, Truist Bank, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, Mastercard and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The technology was provided by Digital Asset and SETL and hosted by Amazon Web Services. Sullivan & Cromwell provided legal services, and Deloitte provided advisory services.
A proof of concept study into an interoperable network for wholesale payments has concluded that a global, near-real time, 24/7, dollar payment system could be delivered through the Regulated Liability Network (RLN) concept.
The RLN is a theoretical payment infrastructure designed to support the exchange and settlement of regulated digital assets. It would address issues with current traditional payment systems around speed, cost, off-hours availability and the settlement process. The study explored ways to address these while maintaining safe and efficient payments.
The study, carried out by a working group of members of the US financial services sector, successfully simulated two experiment payments — one with domestic interbank payments and one with cross-border payments in USD. It identified shared ledger technology as a potential solution to support payment innovation after successfully simulating both scenarios.
Axelar and Microsoft are partnering to further advance the adoption of blockchain technologies by building a data integration and interoperability layer that will deliver easier blockchain onramps for everyone, from enterprises to Web3 startups. By connecting isolated networks and simplifying complex integrations, the collaboration aims to unlock growth and innovation opportunities for developers and businesses.
Axelar and Microsoft have also agreed to explore innovative solutions that will further advance the maturity of the Web3 industry, such as seamlessly connecting private with public blockchains and leveraging Azure OpenAI services to create entirely new experiences in Web3.
As the global crypto market capitalization sits around $1.2 trillion, some industry players are looking to build upon enterprise businesses to grow the pool and potentially bring in greater adoption. The key companies, tactics and business models to bring that in is yet to be determined, but that isn’t stopping some web3 startups from diving in together.
“I think a lot of disruptive real-world adoption is not going to come from enterprises, but startups that create new ideas,” Leonard Dorlöchter, co-founder of Peaq network, told TechCrunch+. “We expect a lot of adoption earlier in web3, but in the next five years, tokenization of assets of any kind will happen.”
ELOOP is a token-based car-sharing blockchain project that allows community members to share the revenue of its electric car fleet in Vienna. The cars are Teslas powered on the Polkadot blockchain via Peaq network, which builds applications for vehicles, robots and devices.
Dorlöchter thinks that machines like Teslas should be able to “provide goods and services autonomously.” His company built blockchain infrastructure to help create applications like ELOOP’s, to form decentralized car sharing and onboard Teslas onto its network.
originally posted by: Observationalist
a reply to: G005E
Full reduction gets us a Palindrome number
SOROS=23
16961=23
16961 google search lead me to SolarWinds help desk. Was SolarWinds owned by Soros?
Intelligence officials worry that SolarWinds might presage something on that scale. Certainly, the hackers had time to do damage. They roamed around American computer networks for nine months, and it is unclear whether they were just reading emails and doing the things spies typically do, or whether they were planting something more destructive for use in the future.
After the thriller "Sound of Freedom" beat out Disney's "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" for the top spot over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, the mainstream media didn't waste much time piling on the hate.
Shown in only 2,600 theaters, the Angel Studios film is based on the life of Tim Ballard, a former U.S. Department of Homeland Security agent who left his job because he wanted to do more to rescue children from modern-day slavery. With a bold message calling for the freedom of millions of children enslaved in human trafficking, the film's signature line declares, "God's children are not for sale."
Calling the movie a "QAnon-adjacent thriller" — whatever that means — The Guardian "fact-checked" the box office tally, pointing out that "Indiana Jones" had already been in theaters for five days before "Sound of Freedom" came out.