Tag Archives: legal news

Blog, Family, Legal News, Military Laws

‘It’s Shameful:’ New Law Tackles Maternity Care for Female Veterans

The Department of Veterans Affairs will be able to invest more in maternity care for female veterans and the federal government will be required to study the health of active-duty and former service members who have had babies or are trying to get pregnant after Congress passed legislation Tuesday.

The Protecting Moms Who Served Act, passed by the House in a 414-9 vote and now heading to President Joe Biden for a signature, allows the VA to spend $15 million to improve coordination between the VA hospitals that treat female veterans and the community facilities that provide their obstetrics care.

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Blog

The Celebrity-Backed Green “Fintech” Company That Isn’t as Green as It Seems

Aspiration is among a group of companies that provide banking and financial services, and promise to help the environment. But so far its marketing is greener than its reality.

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You can save the planet with a swipe of your bank card. That’s the enticing proposition made by a company called Aspiration, which promises to take the leftover change from customers’ purchases and use it to plant trees around the world. Aspiration is on track to spend $149 million this year marketing that message, according to its financial documents, considerably more than the revenues the company expects to take in.

“Clean rich is the new filthy rich,” Aspiration proclaims on billboards across New York, Texas and California. Other ads, ubiquitous on social media, feature images of Aspiration’s debit card, which depicts a green treescape and is made from recycled plastic. The likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Orlando Bloom, Robert Downey Jr. and Drake have invested in the company. Aspiration has received enthusiastic press coverage (with the exception of a critical dissection by New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway). And the company won further headlines in September for its reported $300 million, 23-year sponsorship deal with the Los Angeles Clippers, which will feature Aspiration’s name on signs inside the Clippers’ new arena, give the company a role in sustainability initiatives and put its logo on the jersey of every Clippers player.

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Blog, Criminal, Legal News, Organized Crime

Investigators hunting for mafia-linked union boss Jimmy Hoffa – whose 1975 disappearance featured in The Irishman – dig up a New Jersey landfill

  • Hoffa was 62 when he vanished after a restaurant meeting on the outskirts of Detroit in July 1975, and his body has never been found
  • His death is widely believed to have been ordered by Anthony Provenzano, a capo with the Genovese crime family and head of a New Jersey teamsters union
  • The search for Hoffa has seen multiple sites dug up over the decades, mainly in the Detroit area
  • Several rumors over the years have also pointed to New Jersey locations but nothing has ever been confirmed
  • In 2019 a dying former worker on a landfill in Jersey City said that his father, in 2008, told him he was given Hoffa’s body and told to bury it
  • On October 25 and 26 this year FBI teams from Detroit and Newark dug part of the former landfill site in the hunt for steel barrels 
  • The FBI has not discussed their findings but finding Hoffa’s remains would end a mystery 46-years in the making 

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Blog, Drug Companies, International, Legal News, Organized Crime

How Yachts Contribute to Trans-Atlantic Cocaine Trade

A yacht, found off the coast of Portugal with the country’s largest-ever haul of cocaine, illustrates how these smaller, private vessels have become a favored modus operandi to move cocaine between Latin America and lucrative European markets.  

Portuguese and Spanish authorities seized 5.2 tons of cocaine, valued at $232 million, on a yacht 550 kilometers off the coast of Portugal on October 18.

The drug bust represented the largest cocaine seizure in Portugal in 15 years. It marked the largest cocaine seizure ever on a yacht, according to Luis Neves, the director of Portugal’s police force for criminal investigations.

The operation was part of an investigation that began in early 2021 into how vast quantities of cocaine from Colombia and Venezuela were being moved to Europe via private yachts, according to a press release issued by Spain’s National Police.

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Blog, Business Law, Criminal, International, Legal News, Organized Crime

Chile to Dubai, a Thriving Route for Gold Traffickers

Chile has become a convenient exit point for illegal gold from the Amazon, with Dubai emerging as a consistent destination for such shipments.

Leaders from three groups that are part of a so-called “Gold Cartel” – the Farías, Herrera and González clans – were recently arrested for smuggling over 500 kilograms of gold from Chile to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Multiple properties, vehicles, a sailboat, an apartment, and over 500 million dollars worth of currency were also seized.

Of the 35 individuals arrested, only six have faced formalized charges of illicit association, smuggling, tax crimes and money laundering, while the other 29 were released.

The Chile to Dubai route has also been exploited by other traffickers. Most famously, Harold Elías Vilches Pizarro began a highly organized and large-scale gold trafficking operation in Chile in 2013 at just 20 years of age. Among his first contracts was arranging the sale of almost 3 tons of gold to a Dubai-based supplier over 12 months. The sale was potentially worth more than $100 million, and Vilches stood to make up to $6 million in profit. To facilitate exports, Vilches falsified documents to show his company could supply the quantities of gold demanded by the UAE company.

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