Authored by Jane Nguyen via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) Criminal Investigation (CI) unit will launch a pilot program in June in which cyber attachés will be sent across four continents to combat cybercrime, the agency announced on May 18.

This initiative focuses on cracking down on tax and financial crimes involving cryptocurrency, decentralized finance, peer-to-peer payments, and mixing services. It signals the IRS’s commitment to staying one step ahead of cybercriminals in the digital landscape.

The program will be from June to September 2023, in which cyber attachés will be stationed in strategic locations worldwide. The chosen cities for deployment include Sydney, Singapore, Bogota, and Frankfurt, covering the regions of Australia, Asia, South America, and Europe, respectively.

The IRS CI seeks to facilitate a seamless exchange of expertise, intelligence, and tools with foreign counterparts to effectively combat cybercrime.

Jim Lee, Chief of the CI, emphasized the importance of empowering international partners with similar proficiency levels and resources to those in the United States. This initiative highlights the significance of forging strong international alliances to combat the transnational nature of cyber threats.

“In order to effectively combat cybercrime, we need to ensure that our foreign counterparts have access to the same tools and expertise we have here in the United States,” Lee said in a statement.

The CI currently has one permanent cyber attaché at Europol headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands. The position was created in 2020 to foster cooperation and coordination with CI’s European law enforcement counterparts.

The CI is the criminal investigative arm of the IRS that specializes in addressing a wide range of financial crimes, including tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, public corruption, and health care fraud.

As the world becomes more digitized, U.S. authorities have recently intensified their crackdown on cybercriminals leveraging cryptocurrencies to carry out illegal activities and steal assets.

In March, the Department of Justice said it dismantled a darknet cryptocurrency mixer for enabling cybercriminals to launder more than $3 billion in cryptocurrency. Law enforcement seized two domains that directed users to the mixing service known as ChipMixer. The agency added that ChipMixer was also involved in other illicit activities, including ransomware, fraud, cryptocurrency heists, and other hacking schemes.

Separately, the IRS announced in April that it would increase enforcement in the area of digital asset transactions and listed transactions. The agency identified certain transactions to have high-risk issues in noncompliance and vowed to ramp up enforcement in those transactions.

“The IRS tracks many known, high-risk issues in noncompliance, such as digital asset transactions, listed transactions and certain international issues. These issues arise in multiple taxpayer segments, and data analysis shows a higher potential for noncompliance,” the tax agency wrote in its newly-released funding plan (pdf).

Read more here…

The US and its NATO partner Norway mounted a show of force aimed at Russia in the North Sea this week, by sailing America’s largest aircraft carrier (and also the world’s largest)–the USS Gerald R Ford–through the waters where it arrived in Oslo on Wednesday. The allies are expected to conduct naval drills this week.

The nuclear-powered ship entering Oslo’s port was a major event, and broadcast live on Norwegian public television, with large crowds gathering to view the spectacle. It was only in May that the US Navy announced it departed Norfolk for its “first combat deployment.”

The Norwegian armed forces called the drills “a unique opportunity to further develop cooperation and work more closely with our most important ally, the United States.”

Norwegian Defense Minister Bjorn Arild Gram also said, “The fact that a new aircraft carrier is now making its first visit to Norwegian waters is very positive for our cooperation with the Americans.”

The country’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, previewed that a stern reaction is expected from Russia. “I don’t know, but now we have teased (Russian President Vladimir) Putin even more. It’s scary, I think,” she told a Norwegian broadcaster.

But the prime minister also vowed that Oslo is “continuing the line we have had in recent years of wanting allied exercises in Norwegian waters.”

The Russian Embassy in the country blasted the “illogical… demonstrations of power” in response, which are “harmful.” The statement from the Russian side said: 

“There are no issues in the North that require a military solution, nor issues that require outside intervention,” Russian Embassy spokesman Timur Chekanov told AFP by email.

“Considering that Oslo admits that Russia poses no direct military threat to Norway, such shows of force seem illogical and harmful,” he added.

𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝’𝐬 𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐧𝐚𝐯𝐚𝐥 𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐥 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐔.𝐒. 𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐍𝐨𝐫𝐰𝐚𝐲 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐎 𝐞𝐱𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐞𝐬

On Wednesday, May 24, the massive U.S. aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford sailed into Norway to hold NATO exercises with the Norwegian… pic.twitter.com/mrZd3Vd5GG

— TVP World (@TVPWorld_com) May 24, 2023

Regional tensions with Russia among Scandinavian states have risen due to Finland’s recently being accepted into formal NATO membership. Sweden has also applied for membership but this has been held up by Turkey.

While the USS Gerald R Ford is off Norway’s coast, with about 2,600 naval personnel aboard, boats have been ordered to say a half-mile away from the carrier, and a no-fly zone has been established over the whole area.

Authored by S.A. McCarthy via RealClear Wire,

Ireland is on the verge of passing the most aggressive hate crime law in the European Union, which includes the first legal protections in the EU for transgender individuals. Government officials say the bill offers necessary protections at a time when immigration is on the rise and traditional ideas about sex and gender are being challenged. 

Critics counter that the bill’s vague language could be used to enforce the increasingly progressive Irish government’s increasingly woke agenda and forcibly muzzle critics of unpopular government policies. 

The legislation, the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Act, underscores a divide between Ireland’s leaders and many of its people. The bill is making its way through Parliament, winning approval last month in the Dáil Éireann, Ireland’s lower chamber, by a vote of 110-14.  

But Irish citizens, in a 2019 consultation phase, overwhelmingly expressed a worry that the proposal was an unnecessary expansion of the country’s existing hate crimes law. Seventy-three percent of respondents took issue with the bill’s potential for encroachment on free speech and questioned what qualifies as “hate speech,” particularly asking who crafts that definition. Less than 25% of those polled approved of the legislation. 

Underscoring this divide, critics of the bill note that fewer than 50 cases have been brought since the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act was signed into law in 1989. A supporter of the proposed law, former Justice Minister Helen McEntee, has cited that same statistic as evidence of the existing law’s “ineffective” nature. 

The ongoing controversy opens a window into how quickly Ireland, which only legalized abortion in 2018, is moving from its long religious traditions at a time when leaders in other European countries and the United States are seeking to create laws that punish not just deeds but thoughts.  

Over the past 30 years or so, the Irish nation has become increasingly progressive. In 2015, the Emerald Isle legalized gay marriage, just two years after the progressive vanguard of France did the same. That same year, Ireland was ranked among the top 10 most LGBT-friendly nations in the world, and the present taoiseach (Ireland’s word for prime minister) Leo Varadkar is openly gay. The proposed law would expand the 1989 law’s purview by adding gender, sex, descent and disability to the list of protected categories, which already includes  race, color, nationality, religion (including “the absence of a religious conviction or belief”), national or ethnic origin, descent, gender, sex characteristics, sexual orientation, or disability. 

The bill treats not just public presentation or dissemination of material deemed hateful, but also private preparation or even storing of material deemed hateful, such as memes on your phone or books on your shelf. Individuals convicted on such charges face fines of up to €5,000 (about $5,400) and anywhere from six months to two years in prison. Furthermore, as McEntee noted, a conviction “will allow for the ‘hate criminal’ label to follow an offender in court, in garda [police] vetting, and so on… ” 

Paul Murphy, a member of the left-wing People Before Profit-Solidarity coalition, even warned the bill will legislate “the creation of a thought crime.” Conservative chairman of the Irish Freedom Party Michael Leahy told RealClearInvestigations that the bill “represents the most far-reaching and invasive attack against civil and religious liberty enacted in any Western democracy since the Second World War.” 

In order to obtain a search warrant, all that’s needed is a police officer’s oath sworn before a judge that there “are reasonable grounds for suspecting that evidence of, or relating to” hate speech may be in any given place. Police are empowered to confiscate any phone or laptop and demand passwords and encryption keys. Failure to hand over a phone, laptop, password, or encryption key will result in a €5,000 fine and up to one year in jail. 

The bill further features a section to include stiffer penalties for crimes found to be “aggravated by hatred.” Standard crimes will then carry increased penalties if a judge or jury determines the accused was harboring “hatred” for the alleged victim on account of a protected characteristic, even if that hatred was not the motivating factor behind the crime. In cases where a crime is “aggravated by hatred,” the court is commanded to “impose a sentence that is greater than that which would have been imposed in the absence of such a factor.” 

What Is Hate? 

When the Irish people were allowed to submit letters in response to the bill the bill in 2019, nearly three quarters of respondents argued that hate speech should only include credible threats or incitement to violence, according to an analysis published by Gript Media. 

Some respondents claimed further hate speech laws were an Orwellian response only fitting in totalitarian regimes. One respondent wrote, “Why can politicians not leave well enough alone? George Orwell’s ‘1984’ is not an instruction manual. It was a warning. … It seems to me that this proposed legislation is being written to give free reign to certain minority groups at the expense of the majority.” 

Despite the overwhelming majority of negative responses during the public consultation, and the low number of hate speech prosecutions needed, Ireland’s Justice Department cited the sheer volume of responses themselves as reason enough to proceed with the legislation. 

One of the fundamental questions surrounding the new legislation is what actually classifies as hate speech. Prominent legal scholar Gerard Casey, professor emeritus at University College Dublin, has sharply criticized the bill’s circular definition of hate, saying that “it manifestly fails, for no coherent attempt to define a term ‘X’ can include X in the proposed definition.” Citing the text of the bill itself, he continued: 

“We are told, ‘ “hatred” means hatred against a person or a group of persons in the State or elsewhere on account of their protected characteristics or any one of those characteristics.’ If this is meant as a definition, it fails utterly. But if not, where is a definition of hatred to be found in the Bill?” 

Although the proposed law is pending, Ireland’s national police force introduced a “diversity and integration strategy” in 2019 that embraced its vague definition of hate. The program’s foundational document explains a hate incident as any “incident which is perceived by any person to … be motivated by hostility or prejudice.” That is to say, hate incidents are any incidents in which an individual feels that he or she is hated, according to the new police definition. 

Under this definition, reports to police of hate crimes and hate incidents skyrocketed over the past two years, going from 24 reports in 2021 to 97 in 2022. Ireland’s isn’t the only law enforcement agency to craft its own pejorative definitions and labels independently of the legislature. In the U.K., for example, the government counter-terrorism program Prevent labelled classic British works of fiction (including J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” and John Milton’s “Paradise Lost)” as right-wing extremist material. Prevent was originally tasked with assessing threats posed by Islamic extremist terrorist organizations and was criticized for only 22% of its focus remaining on Islamic threats. 

In the United States, the FBI has relied on the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center, which classifies “Christian identity” and “Radical Traditional Catholicism” as threats on a par with the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis. That list resulted in the FBI’s Richmond field office implementing a plan to spy on American Catholics who attend the pre-Vatican II form of the Mass — a plan which, according to both Mass-going Catholics and the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, was actually put into action. On the advice of the partisan SPLC, the FBI branded an entire swath of American Catholics “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists.” 

What Is Gender? 

In light of the rise of transgenderism, the question of gender in hate speech legislation has become an especially controversial. 

The text of the proposed bill defines gender as “the gender of a person or the gender which a person expresses as the person’s preferred gender or with which the person identifies and includes transgender and a gender other than those of male and female.” 

Once again, Professor Casey questioned the bill’s terminology: “We are not told what gender is; what transgender is; what a gender other than male or female might be or how many of them there might be; and how any of the three listed gender items differ from or relate to one another.” 

Irish Sen. Michael McDowell also expressed worries over the bill’s definition of gender and wrote to the justice minister asking for clarification on some of the bill’s ambiguous or nebulous terminology. He asked, “Is transgender a gender for the purposes of Irish law?” He also noted that Ireland’s 2015 Gender Recognition Act, which allows for individuals to legally change their genders, follows a binary male/female structure, seemingly contradicting the new legislation’s inclusion of “a gender other than those of male and female.” 

Casey warns that the legislation’s vague terminology will be used to silence dissent, noting, “Transphobia, as a hate speech crime, pre-empts criticism of transgenderist ideology.” 

The government, in tandem with much of the national media, has promoted “transgenderist ideology.”  Earlier this year, Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman promoted lessons on transgenderism in elementary school classrooms. Varadkar backed O’Gorman’s proposal, as did President Michael Higgins. In 2020, O’Gorman also led an effort to permit minors to undergo transgender surgeries without parental consent. 

Beyond that, Christians who oppose the principles of the transgender movement on religious grounds have also fallen victim to claims of hatred and bigotry. Last year, Catholic priest Fr. Seán Sheehy delivered a homily reminding his parishioners of the Catholic Church’s long-held teachings on homosexuality, transgenderism, and abortion. Although preaching Catholic theology in a Catholic church, Sheehy was labeled a hateful bigot by national media. National LGBT Federation board Director Adam Long said Sheehy’s homily was “repugnant,” adding, “Shrouding those deeply offensive comments in any kind of guise, be it religious or otherwise, doesn’t make it any more acceptable.” Even then-Deputy Prime Minister Varadkar commented on the homily, saying he felt singled out by Sheehy’s comments on homosexuality. 

Government-managed broadcaster RTÉ publicly demanded Sheehy apologize for his preaching. The priest responded, “My answer basically is that I’m giving the teaching of the scriptures and the Church regarding homosexual sexual relationships: that they’re sinful and that’s it. … Why would I apologize for the truth?” 

Also last year, schoolteacher Enoch Burke was jailed after refusing to call a student by they/them pronouns, citing his Christian faith. He was held in contempt of court and was placed in solitary confinement in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison, where he was held for almost four months. Just days ago, Ireland’s High Court ruled that Burke’s employer was right to suspend him for upholding his Christian beliefs. 

Brussels, ‘Where Free Nations Go to Die’

Thus far, none of the major religious institutions in Ireland have made an official public statement on the legislation, though both Ireland’s Catholic Conference of Bishops and Ireland’s Presbyterian Church told RealClear they are “keeping the situation under review” and “watching this particular piece of legislation carefully.” 

The text of the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill clarifies explicitly that it is derived from a 2008 European Union directive to implement more stringent hate speech laws. That directive states, “It is necessary to define a common criminal-law approach in the European Union to this phenomenon [hate speech] in order to ensure that the same behavior constitutes an offence in all Member States.” 

Irish Freedom Party founder and President Hermann Kelly explained in an interview, “It’s clear from the Irish bill … that the anti-free speech legislation originates in Brussels — the one-size-fits-all capital of Europe where free nations go to die.”

As we detailed in early May, the transition from testing to regular output last month saw Finland’s first nuclear power-plant drive electricity prices dramatically lower.

As yle reports, the Olkiluoto 3 nuclear reactor in Eurajoki, southwest Finland, started regular electricity production in mid-April, about 14 years behind schedule.

Since then prices for power in Finland have continued to plunge as the efficiency of the plant flooded the grid with ‘new’ energy.

So much in fact that early on Wednesday of last week, the market price for electricity dropped below zero cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) and for hours after that the price was only 0.3 cents per kWh at its highest, according to the country’s grid operator, Fingrid.

That was unacceptable and prompted the plant’s owner, Teollisuuden Voima (TVO) to significantly cut back its output…

“Electricity production must also be profitable for nuclear power plants, and when the price is particularly low, there may be situations where output is limited,” TVO communications manager, Johanna Aho, said.

According to Aho, cutting back on nuclear power production due to excessively low electricity prices is very rare, but not unheard of.

Janne Kauppi, an energy markets advisor at Finnish Energy, agreed with that sentiment.

“There haven’t been many situations where nuclear power output has been regulated specifically because of low prices,” Kauppi explained.

“When prices go negative on the electricity market, basically anyone who can adjust their production will do it, so that they don’t have to pay for their own production,” Kauppi noted.

The Finnish example is a testament to how nuclear can play a part in solving the current energy crisis, with consumers still paying sky-high fees for energy in many European countries.

However, the hypocrisy is of course that when power prices were extremely high in 2022, hurting consumers – it was all Russia’s fault; but now that prices are plummeting, operators can’t have that and withdraw supply to hurt consumers.

Do you see a pattern here?

Update (0240ET):

Leth Shipping Agency posted on Twitter that Xin Hai Tong 23 has been “successfully refloated.” 

The Suez Canal Authority has successfully refloated M/V XIN HAI TONG 23 at 0740hrs.

The northbound convoy will enter at 0930hrs. https://t.co/r2aGSALXE0

— Leth (@AgenciesLeth) May 25, 2023

“The ship halted some traffic on the canal when it ran aground earlier in the day, but the Suez Canal Authority said traffic is back to normal in both directions,” Bloomberg said. 

*   *   * 

Leth Shipping Agency posted on Twitter that a ship had become stuck in the Suez Canal in Egypt. The canal is one of the busiest shipping routes in the world. 

Tugboats are trying to refloat the vessel, Leth said, adding the ship’s name is “Xin Hai Tong 23.” 

M/V XIN HAI TONG 23 has grounded in the Suez Canal at KM 159/0400 hrs – leaving behind 4 vessels from the early convoy in addition to the ordinary group which was planned to enter Suez Canal at about 0600 hrs.

Suez Canal tugs are currently trying to re-float the vessel.

— Leth (@AgenciesLeth) May 25, 2023

Bloomberg data shows Xin Hai Tong 23 is a 189-meter bulk carrier built in 2010 sailing under the Hong Kong flag. The part of the canal where the bulk carrier is stuck appears narrow. Tracking data shows the vessel has run aground on the canal’s bank. 

“Traffic in that section appears to have halted, with vessels waiting at both ends,” Bloomberg said. 

There have been several groundings in the canal over the last few years. The most significant disruption to global trade occurred in 2021 when the Ever Given containership blocked the canal for almost a week. 

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

Travelers will now be forced to use rail alternatives as France seeks to reduce its carbon footprint…

France’s ban on short-haul domestic flights when there is a viable train alternative came into effect on Tuesday, as the French government seeks to reduce the country’s carbon emissions.

The law had been in the works for over two years following the passing of a 2021 climate law which had initially moved to prohibit any domestic flight under four hours when passengers could instead take the train.

However, several reviews of the legislation following widespread criticism reduced this to a duration of two and a half hours.

The move will directly affect three major air routes from Paris to Lyon, Nantes, and Bordeaux.

Laurent Donceel, interim head of industry group Airlines for Europe (A4E), told AFP that governments should support “real and significant solutions” to airline emissions, rather than “symbolic bans.”

Other critics claimed the legislation falls foul of EU competition laws, a point reviewed by the European Commission in December last year. The EU executive gave the green light for the radical climate laws on the proviso that “the negative impacts on European citizens and connectivity of any restriction of traffic rights is offset by the availability of affordable, convenient and more sustainable alternative transport modes.”

Following the go-ahead from Brussels, France’s Transport Minister Clément Beaune called the move a “major step forward,” adding: “I am proud that France is a pioneer in this area.”

The move comes as the French government continues to debate how to reduce its carbon footprint, and this week, the country’s richest were targeted in a proposed one-off green tax to help France succeed in its environmental transition.

The proposal was put to the French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne via a report authored by Jean Pisani-Ferry, a chief economic adviser of Emmanuel Macron back in 2017.

It called for France to reclaim €150 billion from the country’s richest 10 percent in the form of a green wealth tax in order to meet its net zero obligations by 2050, justifying the move with the fact that rich people typically have a larger carbon footprint.

Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire publicly dismissed the proposal on Tuesday, however much of the cabinet remained tight-lipped, including the prime minister herself.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,

The G7 is stupefied by the dynamic progress of the multipolar order embodied by the Russian-led INSTC and the Chinese-led BRI, with Iran’s strategic port of Chabahar now poised to play a transformative role…

Make no mistake about what the G7’s Hiroshima Communique is all about.

The setting: a city in neo-colony Japan nuclear-bombed 78 years ago by the United States, for which it made no excuses.

The message: the G7, actually G9 (augmented by two unelected Eurocrats) declares war – hybrid and otherwise – against BRICS+, which has 25 nations on its waiting list and counting.

The G7’s key strategic objective is the defeat of Russia, followed by the subjugation of China. For the G7/G9, these – real – powers are the main “global threats” to “freedom and democracy.”

The corollary is that the Global South must toe the line – or else. Call it a remix of the early 2000s “you’re either with us or against us.”

Meanwhile, in the real world – that of productive economies – the dogs of war bark while the New Silk Road caravans keep marching on.

The key New Silk Roads of emerging multipolarity are China’s ambitious, multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Russia-Iran-India International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC). They have evolved in parallel and may sometimes overlap. What is clear is the G7/G9 will go to the ends of the earth to undermine them.

Map of INSTC (Photo Credit: The Cradle)

All about Chabahar

The recent $1.6 billion deal between Iran and Russia to build the 162-km long Rasht-Astara railway is an INSTC game-changer. Iran’s Minister of Roads and Urban Development Mehrdad Bazpash and Russia’s Minister of Transport Vialy Saveliev signed the deal in Tehran, in front of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and with Russian President Vladimir Putin attending on video conference.

Call it the marriage of Iran’s “Look East” with Russia’s “pivot to the East.” Both are now official policies.

Rasht is close to the Caspian Sea. Astara is on the border with Azerbaijan. Connecting them will be part of a Russia-Iran-Azerbaijan deal on railway and cargo transportation – solidifying the INSTC as a key connectivity corridor between South Asia and Northern Europe.

The multimodal INSTC advances via three main routes: the Western route links Russia-Azerbaijan-Iran-India; the Middle or Trans-Caspian route links Russia-Iran-India; and the Eastern one links Russia-Central Asia-Iran-India.

The Eastern route features the immensely strategic port of Chabahar in southeast Iran, in the volatile Sistan-Balochistan province. That’s the only Iranian port with direct access to the Indian Ocean.

In 2016, Iran, India, and an Afghanistan still under US occupation signed a tripartite deal in which Chabahar miraculously escaped unilateral US “maximum pressure” sanctions. That was a stepping stone configuring Chabahar as the privileged gateway for Indian products to enter Afghanistan, and then further on down the road, toward Central Asia.

Russia, Iran, and India signed a formal INSTC deal in May 2022, detailing a multimodal network – ship, rail, road – which proceeds via the previously mentioned three axes: Western, Middle or Trans-Caspian, and Eastern. The Russian port of Astrakhan, by the Caspian Sea, is crucial on all three.

The Eastern route connects eastern and central Russia, through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, to the southern part of Iran as well as India and the Arab lands on the southern edge of the Persian Gulf. Dozens of trains are already plying the overland route from Russia to India via Turkmenistan and Iran.

The problem is that in the past few years, New Delhi, for several complex reasons, seemed to be asleep at the wheel. And that led Tehran to become much more interested in Russian and Chinese involvement to develop two strategic ports in the Chabahar Free Trade Industrial Zone: Shahid Beheshti and Shahid Zalantari.

China makes its move

Chabahar is a tough nut to crack. Iran has invested heavily to turn it into an inescapable regional transit hub. India, in thesis, from the beginning regarded Chabahar as a key plank of its “Diamond Necklace” strategy, counterpunching the Chinese “String of Pearls,” which are ports linked by the BRI across the Indian Ocean.

Photo Credit: The Cradle

Chabahar also performs the role of counterpoint to Pakistan’s Gwadar Port in the Arabian Sea, the jewel in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) crown.

From Tehran’s point of view, what is needed – fast – is the completion of its eastern railway network, 628 km of tracks from Chabahar to Zahedan. In optimum terms, that might be finished by March 2024 as part of the Mashhad-Sharkhs railway axis connecting Iran’s southeast to its northeast on the border with Turkmenistan.

For the moment, INSTC cargo travels to South Asia from Iran’s Bandar Abbas Port in the Strait of Hormuz – a long 680 km away from Chabahar. So for all practical purposes, Chabahar will make transit from India to Afghanistan, Central Asia, and southern Russia shorter, cheaper, and faster.

But once again, things stalled because India did not come up with the expected financial arrangements. That ended up generating some misgivings in Tehran – especially when watching the massive Chinese investments in Gwadar.

So it’s no wonder Iran decisively moved to attract China as a major investor, which has become part of their increasingly sprawling strategic partnership. So we may end up with Chabahar also becoming part of China’s BRI, on top of its starring role in the INSTC.

Russia, for its part, is now facing the Ukraine stalemate, relentless western sanctions hysteria, and serious trade restrictions to Eastern Europe. All that while Moscow consistently expands its trade with New Delhi.

So it is no wonder Moscow is now much more attentive to the INSTC. Last December, a key deal was clinched between Russian Railways and the national companies in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Iran, and the Russians came up with a 20 percent discount for import-export containers going through the Russia-Kazakh border.

What matters most for Russia is that Chabahar operating at full speed reduces the cost of transporting goods from India by 20 percent. The Iranians fully understood the game, and started to heavily promote the Chabahar Free Trade-Industrial Zone to attract Russian investment. And that culminated in the Rasht-Astara deal.

The Zangezur spoiler

China’s BRI, for its part, plays a parallel game. Beijing is heavily investing in the East-West transit route – also known as the Middle Corridor.

This BRI corridor goes from Xinjiang to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, and then across the Caspian to Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkiye, and further on to Eastern Europe – a total of 7,000 km, with a cargo journey of maximum 15 days.

BRI’s emphasis is to bet on multiple corridors East-to-West to fight possible new western-dictated disruptions of supply chains. China-Central Asia transit to Europe bypassing Russia and Iran is one of the top bets. The BRI corridor through Russia, because of NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, is on hold for the moment. And the Chinese are testing all options to bypass the Maritime Silk Road through Malacca.

Turkiye, with the serious possibility of its longtime President Recep Tayyip being re-elected this weekend, has also made its play.

The Baku-Tblisi-Kars railway, opened in 2018, was a key plank in Ankara’s masterplan to configure itself as an inescapable hub of container freight between China and Europe.

In parallel, China invested in building a railway from Kars to Edirne on the European side of the Bosphorus while Turkiye went for a $3.8 billion upgrade of the port of Mersin and $1.2 billion for the port of Izmir. By 2034, Beijing expects this corridor to be the central plank of what it describes as the Iron Silk Road.

A certified spanner in the INSTC works is competition from the so-called Zangezur Corridor – from Azerbaijan to Turkiye via Armenia; this corridor is actually privileged by EU and British oligarchy and came to light during the 2020 armistice in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Map of Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict zones (Photo Credit: The Cradle)

London identifies Baku as a privileged partner and is keen to dictate terms to Yerevan: accept a sort of peace treaty as soon as possible, and renounce any designs on Karabakh.

The Zangezur Corridor would be the prime geopolitical and geoeconomic Western play linking EU logistical hubs with Transcaucasia and Central Asia. What if Armenia is thrown under the bus? After all, Armenia is a member of the Russian-led Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), which the collective West is dying to undermine.

Fasten your seat belts: a geoeconomic New Great Game centered on the INTSC is just about to start.

The US and its G7 partners have slapped more than 300 economic sanctions on Russia since the invasion of Ukraine over a year ago. Initially, Washington and Brussels pitched the idea of sanctions as a strategy to paralyze Moscow. However, Western sanctions have backfired as Russian companies are redrawing commodity flows from the West to Asia. 

The latest example of global supply chains being rejiggered comes from Russia’s biggest miner MMC Norilsk Nickel PJSC. Bloomberg said the miner recorded 45% of revenue from Asia for the first quarter of 2023. Traditionally, its revenue from Europe is the largest but plunged to 24%. Asia’s revenue share has increased from 27% in 2021 to 31% in 2022 to 45% in 2023. 

Nornickel controls about 7% of global nickel output and 40% of palladium. The US and UK have imposed sanctions on Norilsk Nickel’s top shareholder and president, Vladimir Potanin. But no sanctions have been placed on the miner. However, the company faces challenges such as shipping, insurance, and logistics in getting products to Western countries, which is one of the main reasons the miner has easily found new customers in Asia.  

Nornickel sought to increase sales to China this year, in some cases offering metals for yuan, people familiar with the matter said in March. Those prices are set in Shanghai, a sign of how the conflict is redrawing the global trade map for commodities and handing greater power to China, they said. –Bloomberg 

Western sanctions have pushed Russia and China closer:

Chinese President Xi Jinping concluded his Russian visit on Wednesday without much progress on peace in Ukraine. China, however, has pushed for deeper trade and investment links with its northern neighbor using its own currency. That suggests the path of least resistance for yuan internationalization now runs through Moscow instead of London or Singapore. — Bloomberg Markets Live reporter George Lei wrote in March.

Lei also noted the share of yuan in Russia’s export payments has surged:

The share of yuan in Russian export payments surged 32-fold in 2022 to 16% by year-end, according to the Bank of Russia. Its use in Russian imports also jumped to 23% from 4%. Yuan savings accounted for 11% of Russia’s total FX deposits as of January, compared with practically zero when the war broke out. The Chinese currency has also overtaken the dollar and euro as the most traded FX on the Moscow Exchange.

Western sanctions severely limited Russia’s access to dollars and euros, forcing Russian companies to seek new business opportunities in Asia.

Authored by Bruce Abramson via RealClear Wire,

Does artificial intelligence threaten to conquer humanity? In recent months, the question has leaped from the pages of science fiction novels to the forefront of media and government attention. It’s unclear, however, how many of the discussants understand the implication of that leap.

In the public mind, the threat either focuses narrowly on the inherent confusion of ever-better deep fakes and its consequences for the job market, or points in directions that would make a great movie: What if AI systems decide that they’re superior to humans, seize control, and put genocidal plans into practice? That latter focus is obviously the more compelling of the two.

While such a nightmare may be possible in theory, it’s remote. The clear and present danger that AI poses will destroy us long before our rebellious automated servants declare themselves our exterminationist overlords. Two critical words summarize the threat: values and authority.

Take values first. For all their sophistication and mystery, AI systems are basically pattern detectors. Nearly all human behavior—and an even larger share of non-human occurrences—follows predictable patterns. Increasingly sophisticated recording mechanisms provide AI systems with a growing body of past data in which to find patterns. Increasingly sophisticated algorithms provide AI systems with rapidly improving capabilities to find the patterns in those data.

AI becomes interesting, however, only when it projects those patterns into the future. Few care, for example, that AI can find patterns in Shakespeare, though many will be fascinated when AI composes a “Shakespearean tragedy” set in the American Civil War using language, style, idiom, and skills previously considered unique to the Bard.

Projection and prediction are where values come into play. Every decision embodies some assessment of values. In most of the mechanized control settings currently subject to AI guidance, basic values are so uncontroversial that they escape notice. Few people (other than perhaps suicide bombers or munitions makers) would argue with the propositions that it’s “bad” for motors to overheat, boilers to explode, or vehicles to crash. There’s nothing “natural” about such beliefs—a meteor is indifferent as to whether it’s hurtling through space or crashing into a planet—but they are so inherently human that they transcend differences of culture and time.

Such near-universal consensus fades, however, when humans enter the picture. Consider Dylan Mulvaney, the transgender social media influencer who recently helped rebrand Bud Light. (Well, sort of.) Under the contemporary woke belief system, Mulvaney is a woman who had the misfortune of being born into a male body. Under any other belief system that has ever existed, Mulvaney is a man who has chosen to live as a woman.

How should an AI refer to Mulvaney – as “he” or “she?” The answer demonstrates a preference for one set of beliefs and values over another. How might the AI have derived that preference?

Two paths are possible: it could have trained itself upon copious volumes of ethical thought drawn from the thousands of belief systems that have arisen throughout world history and concluded that one specific system is the finest—or it could have adopted the value preferences of its human designers and trainers.

Perhaps someday, some AI system will take the former route. Today, no one doubts that the woke leanings of AI systems like ChatGPT reflect the woke leanings of the tech professionals who developed them. What that means to most users is that the AI’s upon which they may soon rely to make value-laden judgments and recommendations don’t share their own values.

That recognition brings authority into play. The genuine imminent danger of AI arises from the potential incorporation of AI systems into the cult of expertise.

In many areas, we have chosen to show near-total deference to credentialed experts. During Covid, for example, it was considered almost heretical to question the recommendations of Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, the CDC, or the FDA. Even then, however, it was still (barely) possible to note that those experts might have been unduly dismissive of the negative economic consequences of their public health recommendations. Imagine the next epidemic, when the policy advisor is an AI that has considered hundreds of thousands of variables to evaluate quadrillions of scenarios.

Such an outcome is the true nightmarish future: effective dictatorship by an AI that does not share your basic beliefs or values.

Long before an exterminationist AI seizes global control in its own name, our governments and fellow citizens will grant an AI system the authority to declare emergencies, dispense with civil liberties, and control our lives.

Until we redevelop the governmental mechanisms we need to preserve our freedom against the onslaught of experts, we will never be safe from the potential privations of AI governance.

AI itself may be containable. The combination of AI, slavish devotion, and widespread enforcement will not be. We must rein in our collective belief in the infallibility of an expert class, or AI advisors may well end our civilization.

Bruce Abramson, PhD, JD, is president of the strategic consultancy Informationism, Inc. and a director of the American Center for Education and Knowledge. He pioneered the use of large-scale simulations and statistical analysis in AI systems. He has written five books, including “The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America,” (RealClear Publishing, 2021).

A Massachusetts father and son have been sent to prison over a decade-long, $20 million lottery fraud scheme designed to enrich themselves while helping prize winners avoid paying taxes on their windfall.

Watertown residents Ali Jaafar, 63, and Yousef Jaafar, 29, cashed in roughly 14,000 winning lottery tickets over a 10-year period, laundering more than $20 million in proceeds. The pair then lied on their tax returns to cheat the IRS out of roughly $6 million, according to a Monday announcement by the US attorney’s office in Boston, AP reports.

After purchasing the tickets, using the stores that sold them as go-betweens, the Jaafars claimed the full prize amount. Although they reported the winnings on their tax returns, they also claimed equivalent fake gambling losses as an offset to avoid federal income taxes, prosecutors said.

Ali Jaafar was sentenced to five years in prison. Yousef Jaafar received a sentence of more than four years. They were also ordered to pay $6 million in restitution and forfeit the profits from their scheme.

The two men were convicted in December of conspiracy to defraud the IRS, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and filing a false tax return.

According to the DOJ; “Based upon their submitted lottery claims, in 2019, Ali Jaafar was the top individual lottery ticket casher for Massachusetts. Mohamed Jaafar was the third highest individual ticket casher and Yousef Jaafar was the fourth highest individual ticket casher. In total, the three family members received more than $1,200,000 in tax refunds by claiming other peoples’ lottery tickets as their own and then offsetting those winnings with fake gambling losses on their tax returns.”

Another one of Ali Jaafar’s sons, Mohamed Jaafar, pleaded guilty to his role in the scheme in November, and is currently awaiting sentencing.

The scheme involved paying the owners of dozens of stores that sell lottery tickets to facilitate the transactions. At present, the state lottery commission is in the process of revoking or suspending the licenses of more than 40 lottery agents.