UN-backed investigators allege torture and sex crimes in Myanmar detention facilities
Nicholas Koumjian was speaking as the international independent team he heads released its latest annual report on Tuesday, focusing on a one-year period running through June 30.
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Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Florida governor says state will open ‘deportation depot' immigration jail
Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, said on Thursday that the state will open a second immigration jail, as a federal judge weighs whether to close the controversial existing facility in the Everglades known as 'Alligator Alcatraz'. DeSantis painted the forthcoming detention center at the shuttered Baker correctional institution in Sanderson as supplementary to the remote tented camp. He also said the facility would hold up to 1,300 undocumented immigrants awaiting deportation. 'We need additional capacity beyond what we're already doing down in south Florida. There's a massive part here at Baker that isn't being used. [It's] ready-made infrastructure,' DeSantis announced during a press conference at the disused jail 50 miles north of Gainesville. Baker was closed in 2021 after numerous reports of excessive violence and abuse of inmates by guards. The governor gave no timeline for its opening, but said the facility, which he said would be called 'the deportation depot', would be operational soon. 'We're not rushing to do it right this day, but they're doing what they need to do to get it done with all deliberate speed,' he said. 'It's a priority for the people of this state, it's a priority for the people of this country.' The development came on the heels of district court judge Kathleen Williams hearing final arguments in Miami on Wednesday in a lawsuit filed by an alliance of environmental groups seeking to close Alligator Alcatraz. Related: Ice deported boy with cancer and two other US citizen children to Honduras, suit alleges The six-week old facility has been beset by allegations of 'inhumane' conditions including detainees held in cages in excessive heat, broken toilets and air conditioning, inadequate food, and a claim this week that a respiratory virus was running rampant. Williams last week issued a two-week restraining order halting new construction at the Everglades detention facility, while allowing operations there to continue. She said she would decide whether to renew it before its 21 August expiration. In a statement, the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the plaintiffs claiming the camp was causing irreversible destruction to the ecologically sensitive wetlands, said it was 'optimistic' that the Alligator Alcatraz facility would be closed while the lawsuit proceeds. 'We're feeling hopeful that the strong case we've made over the last few days will move the court to pump the brakes on this dangerous detention center,' said attorney Elise Bennett, the group's Florida and Caribbean director. DeSantis made no mention of the lawsuit on Thursday, but confirmed the state's emergency management department, which operates Alligator Alcatraz on behalf of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice) using a range of private contractors, was working in haste to have the camp at Baker opened. 'We're taking yet another step in supporting the important mission that President Trump was elected to implement, securing the border and enforcing immigration laws, and removing illegal aliens,' he said. DeSantis highlighted a number of other steps his administration had taken, including banning so-called sanctuary cities for undocumented immigrants and forcing state law enforcement agencies to support or participate in Ice actions. 'We have done more on this than any other state by a country mile,' he said. DeSantis said he had originally looked at opening an immigration jail at Camp Blanding, a joint military training base west of Jacksonville, but his staff had concluded that Baker was a better option because it was a 'one-stop shop' close to Lake City airport and its longer runway. 'The reason is not to house people indefinitely; we want to process and return illegal aliens to their home country. That is the name of the game,' he said.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
How Binance's Yi He became ‘the most powerful woman in crypto'—and steered the company past its biggest ordeal
When Yi He was a girl in the 1980s, she walked to the well for water and relied on kerosene lamps at times to light the house. Things are different now. Today, Yi He is a celebrity to millions of Chinese and a multibillionaire thanks to her reported 10% stake in the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, where she wields enormous influence as a cofounder and senior executive. Still, life has not been easy. Binance's other cofounder, the flamboyant Changpeng Zhao, went to prison last year in the United States as part of a $4 billion plea deal. The situation created a huge business challenge for Binance and for Yi He, a painful personal one since Zhao was not only the company's CEO but is the father of her young children. Today, Binance appears to have weathered the ordeal. Zhao has served his sentence, and Binance, despite incurring the sort of blow that would have crippled most companies, is still on top as the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange. Yi He has been instrumental in achieving this, and after years of wielding power behind the scenes, is taking on a more public role running Binance. In a rare interview, Yi He told Fortune about her journey from poor village girl to crypto billionaire, the tests she faced during Binance's year of crisis, and her vision for an industry that is fast transforming global finance. The common touch In the course of her life and career, Yi He has overcome many obstacles—one of which has been learning English, which she only took up four years ago in her mid-thirties. During a long Zoom interview, He acquits herself well, only falling back on her translator when she struggles to explain a Chinese idiom or proverb. The power of communication is something Yi He knows well. At Binance, she is renowned for her marketing and customer service skills, which helped vault the exchange to the biggest in the world in less than a year. To this day, she prides herself on listening to Binance clients on Telegram, X, WeChat, and any other platform where they might be found, and insists everyone else do the same. She has famously required that everyone who comes to work at Binance spend a few weeks on the front lines of customer service. Yi He describes a recent encounter with a university student who had sent $500 worth of crypto to the wrong wallet, a common mistake and one that typically means the funds are gone for good. Yi He, though, took the time to track down and recover the misdirected funds, recalling how the student had told her, 'It's a small figure for you but everything to me.' Yi He says she can empathize with such stories given her own experience growing up poor in Sichuan province, where she lost her father at age 9 and, when she was 16, spent long hours working to promote soft drinks outside a supermarket. Though she ultimately made her way to university—He pauses to recall the delights of being in a library for the first time—and a career as a TV host, she says her humble beginnings mean she can still relate to Binance's many customers of modest means. Yi He's tale has echoes of Jennifer Lopez's 'Jenny From the Block,' a song about a beautiful woman who keeps the common touch even after she is rich and famous—the sort of story Americans lap up. But that's not how it plays in China, says Eowyn Chen, CEO of crypto firm Trust Wallet, who formerly worked for Yi He at Binance. According to Chen, Chinese people are less inclined to root for the underdog, and are more likely instead to hurl insults at those who have risen above their station. Chen says Yi He is the regular target of articles and social media barbs that seek to demean and ridicule her, but that her response is to turn negative rhetoric against those lobbing it. 'She tells people, 'Sure, I came from a crappy background and made good, so why don't you do the same?'' says Chen. Yi He, whom Bloomberg dubbed 'the most powerful woman in crypto,' has climbed to the top of the blockchain world using this mix of smarts, hustle, and cockiness—qualities she shares with her cofounder and romantic partner. Building Binance When Changpeng Zhao launched Binance in 2017, he had already built an outsize public persona as CZ, by which he is universally known today. Zhao built up the CZ mythology by taking outsize risks—like selling his Shanghai apartment in 2014 to buy more Bitcoin—and by enthusiastically joining in the daily shitposting for the very online community known as Crypto Twitter. Zhao asked Yi He to join Binance in its early days but only after she had first recruited him years earlier, when she persuaded him to join her as chief technology officer at the exchange OKCoin (now OKX) in 2014. The pair shared an enthusiasm for crypto but other qualities as well. Zhao, like Yi He, spent his early years in an unheated, rural schoolhouse until his father immigrated to Canada where, in high school, Zhao worked minimum wage jobs at Chevron and McDonald's. Zhao is also inclined to clap back at those who mock his background, even retweeting memes of himself in a Golden Arches uniform. It was during their time at OKCoin that the pair became a couple as they gained experience operating a massive crypto business. Today, the pair, who never married but remain romantically involved, work closely as parents and business partners. Yi He is co-owner with Zhao of Binance's venture capital arm turned family office, YZi Labs, and owns at least 10% of shares in the parent company, according to the Wall Street Journal. On the nature of her relationship with Zhao, Yi He asked not to be quoted on the record and instead provided a written statement: 'My personal life is independent from my professional life. My achievements and capabilities as cofounder are often overlooked with my personal life in question,' she wrote, while touting a Binance user base of 280 million customers. Whatever the personal dimensions of the relationship, the professional side of it has proved highly effective, with Yi He roughly serving as the Binance equivalent of Sheryl Sandberg, the executive who helped build Facebook in its early days while helping to ground the then-unpolished CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. In practice, this has meant Zhao occupying the role of Binance's larger-than-life frontman and product visionary, with Yi He fanning massive growth through aggressive promotions, including car giveaways. Her approach found favor with the Chinese community abroad and also in China, where crypto is technically banned but still hugely popular, in part because it is an easily transferable asset beyond the reach of government capital controls. A Binance employee who asked not to be named so as to discuss the firm's executives described Yi He as an exacting boss, but one who supports employees and advocates for those around her. In discussing Binance's day-to-day operations, Yi He said a core tenet at the company is 'founder culture,' a phrase from the tech world that describes firms that retain the original drive of their early startup days. In the case of Binance, those early days were defined in part by a willingness to play fast and loose with regulation, and to hopscotch from country to country in response to government scrutiny. While that strategy helped fuel Binance's incredible growth, it has at times also been the company's biggest weakness—one that caused it to lose its most prominent founder. Binance after CZ By early 2023, the walls were closing in. Following the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX exchange the previous year, the Biden administration redoubled its efforts to bring the crypto sector to heel—with a particular focus on the sector's biggest player, Binance. The company's lawyers had been in discussions with the Justice Department about various allegations for years, but finally the time had come to make a deal. In September of 2023, the agency announced a sweeping settlement that would not only see Binance pay a whopping $4.3 billion fine—the largest of its kind in corporate history—but also force Zhao to step down as CEO and plead guilty to charges of failing to implement adequate anti-money-laundering measures. Both the Wall Street Journal and Reuters, meanwhile, cited multiple unnamed sources to claim the agency sought to force Yi He to leave the company as well. ('Binance's plea agreements with the U.S. regulators are a matter of public record,' said a company spokesperson.) Despite this massive blow to both its treasury and leadership, Binance two years later remains the biggest crypto exchange by far under Zhao's successor, Richard Teng. A former top regulator from Singapore, Teng has helped the company implement a raft of compliance measures and project a new image that suggests it has evolved beyond the fast-and-loose tactics of its early days. In January, Binance also took a major step—for the first time introducing a formal board structure, featuring seven members including Teng and three independent directors. Despite all this, a former employee at the company told Fortune that the power at Binance very much resides where it always has—with Zhao, Yi He, and two other early Binance executives, Lilai 'Roger' Wang and Wei 'Sonny' Zhou. The person, who asked not to be identified in order to speak candidly, added that Yi He has a final say in all personnel matters and exerts the greatest authority when it comes to customer experience decisions. The Binance spokesperson, meanwhile, said the claim is not accurate and that the company's culture encourages employees to exercise a high degree of autonomy, and added that Zhou left the firm three years ago. The founder of a venture capital firm, meanwhile, described Binance as a company run with an 'iron fist' that, despite dealing with new legal constraints and the challenge of running a sprawling global operation, is in no danger of losing its place as market leader. This assessment appears to be supported by recent data, supplied by CoinGecko, that shows Binance holding on to the lion's share of trading activity—39% of volume on centralized exchanges in June—despite the emergence of new competitors: For Yi He, Binance's ongoing dominance comes as a validation of her customer-first strategy, and of the company founder's personal devotion to crypto—a technology she views as transformational, to the same degree that the arrival of the internet changed traditional media and TV. Yi He predicts that crypto will accelerate its push into the conventional financial system through stablecoins and other blockchain technologies and that, in five to 10 years, both realms will be fully integrated with each other. On a personal level, Yi He says the mass adoption of crypto feels like yet another massive technological change she has experienced since the days of her girlhood not so long ago, when her house didn't have electricity or running water. As for the trials she's experienced along the way, she cites a Mongolian proverb: 'Since you have spoken well, do not speak of pain. If you speak of the good, do not mention the pain.' This story was originally featured on Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Murdered Hamas hostage Itzik Elgert tortured to death, autopsy reveals
The autopsy revealed that Itzik's body arrived with extensive trauma, including multiple broken ribs, a fractured nose, and damaged toes – injuries suggesting brutal and sustained physical abuse Itzik Elgert, an Israeli hostage whose body was returned in February in the framework of a hostage deal with Hamas, was tortured to death during interrogation in captivity, his brother Danny Elgert revealed in a post on X/Twitter on Thursday. 'Today, after my brother's autopsy, the facts are clear: Itzik did not die of a heart attack. He was tortured to death,' his brother wrote. According to Danny, the autopsy found that Elgert's injuries, including multiple broken ribs, a fractured nose, and broken toes, were sustained by brutal physical abuse. 'He was murdered with extreme cruelty,' Danny added. Autopsy showed severity of trauma Although the forensic institute was unable to declare Elgert's precise cause of death legally, its findings concluded that the severity and nature of the fractures were consistent with the sort of trauma that causes death if inflicted on a living body. Elgert's brother slammed the government's handling of the hostage situation, implicitly blaming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: 'Cause of death – Mr. Neglect,' he wrote. Roughly six weeks earlier, Danny had described the circumstances surrounding his brother's disappearance. He said that Hamas interrogators believed Elgert was a pilot, in part due to an eagle tattoo on his arm, and took him away for questioning. He never returned. 'My brother was with hostage Edan Alexander. The terrorists suspected that he was a pilot because of his tattoo. They then took him away, and he never came back,' Danny recalled. 'Idan asked where he was, and they told him: 'He's gone.'' 'Itzik is dead, murdered, because they thought he was a pilot,' Elgert's brother said. Elgert was kidnapped during Hamas's October 7 massacre. His body was returned to Israel during the final phase of the first stage of the hostage deal earlier this year. He was buried near his home in Kibbutz Nir Oz. Hundreds gathered for the funeral to pay their last respects.
