The Trump family has allegedly been discussing a possible investment in the crypto exchange Binance—a deal that, especially in light of Binance’s multi-billion-dollar valuation, would raise a host of conflict-of-interest questions. The discussions were first revealed by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, which also reported that Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, is simultaneously seeking a presidential pardon after pleading guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money-laundering laws.

Zhao disputed the Journal’s reporting, posting on X Thursday that the paper “got the facts wrong” and that he’d “had no discussions of a Binance US deal with … well, anyone.”

On top of the ethical issues raised by the possible entanglement of executive clemency powers with a lucrative financial transaction, such an investment deal could also turn the Trump family into business partners with a Middle Eastern royal family.

News of the alleged Binance talks comes one day after an Abu Dhabi-based investment firm, MGX Fund Management, announced it is making a $2 billion investment in Binance, securing a minority stake in the exchange. MGX’s chairman is Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan—who is the national security adviser for the United Arab Emirates and brother of the UAE’s current ruler, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Antoine Semenyo has been one of the standout players at Bournemouth this season, with his form capturing the attention of several top clubs, including Arsenal. The Ghanaian forward has been a key figure in Bournemouth’s impressive performances, as the team has exceeded expectations this campaign. Semenyo’s skill and contributions have made him one of the most sought-after players, and it is clear that his future may lie away from the South Coast club.

Arsenal are reported to be keen on adding Semenyo to its squad, particularly as it looks to revamp its attack at the end of the season. The Gunners have been monitoring his performances closely, recognising his potential to provide depth and quality to their forward line. However, Arsenal will not have a clear run at signing Semenyo, as their North London rivals, Tottenham Hotspur, are also interested in securing his signature.

Tottenham are preparing to make its move for the winger, with reports suggesting that they will put forward an offer worth €40 million to see if Bournemouth are willing to sell. A report from Caught Offside indicates that Spurs are keen to test the waters with this initial offer to determine whether the Cherries will accept a deal at that price. While it is unclear whether €40 million would be enough to convince Bournemouth to part with Semenyo, it is evident that Tottenham are serious about its pursuit of the player.

In light of this, Arsenal must act quickly and decisively if they are to secure the Ghanaians’ signature. Semenyo’s potential has already attracted significant interest, and Spurs’ move for the player demonstrates that they are prepared to compete fiercely for top talent. Arsenal will need to ensure they make an attractive offer, or they risk losing out to their rivals.

The Trump White House is taking extra steps to try to deliver on the president’s signature campaign promise to conduct the largest mass deportation operation in US history. In an internal US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) memo from February obtained by the Washington Post, the administration instructs immigration officers to look for potential targets for “expedited removal,” a process that enables fast-track deportations without a court hearing.

The memo reportedly identifies migrants who crossed the border unlawfully between ports of entry, as well as those who were allowed into the country but haven’t applied for asylum, as examples of people whose deportations could be facilitated under this program. It also mentions immigrants who lawfully presented themselves at ports of entry but lacked documents or “misrepresented themselves.”

That could potentially include migrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Cuba who came to the United States as part of a Biden-administration parole initiative the Trump administration has since terminated, in addition to those who used a now-defunct Customs and Border Protection (CBP) application to make appointments to come apply for admission at the US-Mexico border.

The decision to boost “expedited removal” likely signals Trump’s growing frustration with the pace of interior immigration and enforcement and deportations, which he and border czar Tom Homan consider insufficient in light of the goal of deporting around 1 million people a year. Just a couple of weeks ago, the president removed Caleb Vitello from his role as ICE acting director, in what was widely seen as a sign of Trump’s impatience.

More than a decade ago, the Center for Investigative Reporting had a big investigation into how the Department of Veterans Affairs was worsening the opioid overdose crisis, and a big idea: Could they take the impactful work CIR was already doing and make a weekly radio show with the potential to change laws and change lives?

“We weren’t sure if any public radio stations would even air it,” said Al Letson, who back then was the new hire asked to host this brand-new investigative radio show.

You’ve probably got a sense of what happened next: Reveal’s VA investigation sparked outrage. Radio stations did want to run their work. And today, the award-winning show is celebrating its 10th anniversary on more than 500 stations nationwide.

This week on Reveal, the team looks back at how they got here, from investigations into water shortages in drought-prone California to labor abuses in the Dominican Republic, and we hear from the journalists behind Reveal’s first decade of impactful reporting. 

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The world’s largest island is known for its vast ice sheet, sprawling fjords and abundance of wildlife—from polar bears to narwhals. 

It’s also one of the latest targets in President Donald Trump’s bid for US energy and military expansion. Since his first term, Trump has talked of securing Greenland for its critical minerals, untapped oil reserves, opportunities for military positioning and central location in the international shipping network, particularly as melting sea ice opens up new trade routes. Now, he is pushing for a Greenland land grab with renewed vigor, offering to purchase the island from Denmark or even potentially take it by force. 

But the same warming temperatures that may transform the island into a trading hotspot are making it more inhospitable to development, research shows. Thawing permafrost and ice triggers landslides along jagged fjords and destabilizes the landscapes that infrastructure would need to lie on top of, while loose sea ice makes passing through Greenland’s waters a perilous journey. 

This story was originally published on the author’s substack, Field Notes with Alexander C Kaufman, to which you can subscribe here.

Costa Rica is positioning itself to take on Taiwan—and not just in the exports of pineapples.

In 2023, the Central American nation forged a new partnership with the United States to start manufacturing more semiconductors as Washington looked for new and less geopolitically sensitive sources of microchips. Last March, the Costa Rican Ministry of Foreign Trade issued an 80-page National Semiconductor Roadmap outlining plans for expanding the country’s so-called “Silicon Jungle.”

Any concerns that President Donald Trump might retreat from the Biden administration’s initiative were put to rest last week when Secretary of State Marco Rubio specifically singled out semiconductors during a summit with Costa Rican Rodrigo Chaves Robles.

On Thursday, Attorney General Pam Bondi boasted that she had “declassified and publicly released files” related to the crimes of the dead and well-heeled pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Because this is the Trump administration, though, that release was carried out in a bizarre and hamfisted fashion, with binders of materials handed out to 15 right-wing, pro-Trump figures handpicked by the administration. While the recipients exuberantly waved them around for the cameras just outside the White House, it quickly became obvious that these particular files, which included flight logs and a heavily redacted contact list, presented nothing new. Some had already been public for close to a decade. 

Some MAGA figures denounced the release, while others suggested a new conspiracy.

Over the course of the day, the “release” devolved into a broad-scale civil war on the right, with Bondi accusing the FBI of failing to follow her declassification orders, and the MAGA influencers who were involved in the stunt trying to defend their role. In a predictably short period of time, some of those influencers quickly suggested that a deeper conspiracy was afoot. 

“These swamp creatures at SDNY deceived Bondi, Kash, and YOU,” tweeted conservative commentator and binder recipient Liz Wheeler, who seemed to be pinning the blame on FBI agents in the Southern District of New York, the federal court district where both Epstein and Maxwell were charged. “Be outraged that the binder is boring. You should be. Because the evil deep state LIED TO YOUR FACE.”

This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here.

In December, Popular Information reported that Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun purchased $30 million in crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial (WLF), a new venture backed by President Donald Trump and his family. Sun’s purchase resulted in a cash windfall for Trump. On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Sun sent a joint letter to a federal judge, asking for a stay of Sun’s case. Today, the judge granted the SEC’s request.

In March 2023, the SEC charged Sun and three of his companies, accusing him of marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a crypto token. The SEC accused Sun of wash trading, which involves buying and selling a token quickly to fraudulently manufacture artificial interest. Sun was also charged with paying celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, and Soulja Boy, for endorsing his crypto “without disclosing their compensation,” which violates federal law.

A few weeks after Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Sun publicly announced that he had become WLF’s largest investor, buying $30 million of its tokens. Sun added that his company, TRON, was “committed to making America great again.”

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In the open grasslands of South Dakota, not far from the dramatic rock formations of Badlands National Park, lives one of the continent’s cutest, fiercest, and rarest animals: the black-footed ferret.

Black-footed ferrets, weasel-like animals with distinctive dark bands around their eyes and black feet, are ruthless little hunters. At night, they dive into burrows in pursuit of juicy prairie dogs, their primary food source. Without prairie dogs, these ferrets would not survive.

From as many as a million ferrets in the 19th century, today there are only a few hundred of these furry predators roaming the Great Plains, the only place on Earth they live. That there are any black-footed ferrets at all is something of a miracle. In the 1970s, scientists thought black-footed ferrets were extinct, but a twist of fate, and an unprecedented breeding effort led by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, brought this critical piece of the prairie ecosystem back from the brink.

In the fall of 1984, when I was a senior in high school in Washington, DC, the protests at the South African Embassy began. Civil rights leaders met with the ambassador of South Africa on Thanksgiving Eve. Timed for maximum press coverage, that meeting became a sit-in, and that sit-in launched a movement. Soon, there were protests at consulates across the country. College students held rallies, built “shantytowns,” and pushed their schools to divest.

Area high school kids like me got in on protesting the embassy too. And we had a soundtrack. “Free Nelson Mandela” had been released by the Specials in March. The leader of that British ska band, Jerry Dammers, later admitted he didn’t know much about Mandela before he went to an anti-apartheid concert in the UK, where a long-simmering boycott movement was rolling into a boil. The DC music scene was pretty wild then—a bouillabaisse of go-go, R&B, punk, New Wave; there was breakdancing in the hallways during lunch hour—and for some of us, ska was sort of a unified field theory. Musically but also culturally. (If you have a racist friend / now is the time, now is the time for your friendship to end.)

But it wasn’t just kids who cosplayed in checked socks or porkpie hats. In 1985, a month after I started college, Artists Against Apartheid recorded Steven Van Zandt’s “(I Ain’t Going to Play) Sun City”—essentially the music world launching its own boycott on South Africa. The song was not (like, at all) great, but the wild cross-genre supergroup—DJ Kool Herc, Lou Reed, Bonnie Raitt, Gil Scott-Heron, Pat Benatar, Bono, and Miles Davis to name but a very, very few—guaranteed continual rotation on a relatively new cultural phenomenon: MTV.

We were getting a collective education: Because South Africa was so dependent on Black labor and exports, if industrialized nations withheld trade and investments, we could backstop Black South Africans who’d been directly resisting the Afrikaner regime for decades. So, suddenly, amazingly, we did. By 1986, Congress had imposed sanctions on South Africa and banned direct flights to it. Coca-Cola became the first major company to pull out of South Africa. Sports teams joined the musicians in refusing to play there. Divestment battles raged on campuses and boardrooms for the rest of the ’80s. And they worked. South Africa’s economy ground to a near halt. Mandela was freed in 1990, and negotiations to wind down apartheid began. By 1994, free elections were held and Mandela became president.

Arsenal are currently without a fit first-choice attacker, yet they opted not to explore the transfer market for free agents, a decision that could prove costly in their Premier League title race against Liverpool. With key players unavailable, the Gunners have struggled to maintain consistency, and their latest setback against West Ham highlighted their growing concerns in attack.

Last weekend, Arsenal fans were thrilled when their side secured a late victory against Leicester City, courtesy of two goals from Mikel Merino off the bench. Encouraged by his impact, Mikel Arteta rewarded the Spaniard with a start against West Ham, hoping for a similar performance. However, Arsenal failed to replicate that success and suffered a disappointing home defeat.

The loss exposed the extent to which injuries have disrupted the team. With no natural goal threat in attack, Arsenal lacked cutting edge in the final third and struggled to create clear chances. The absence of key attacking players has undoubtedly weakened the squad, and no one has been able to step up and fill the void.

Sky Sports’ Nick Wright highlighted how Arsenal’s struggles stem from their injury crisis, emphasising that any team would face similar difficulties with so many absentees. Speaking on Sky Sports, he said:

“It was no great surprise that they struggled in attack. Any side would without their four main attackers. The absences of Kai Havertz, Bukayo Saka, Gabriel Martinelli, and Gabriel Jesus were keenly felt. The paucity of options available to Mikel Arteta was summed up by him sending on two left-backs, Oleksandr Zinchenko and Myles Lewis-Skelly, when chasing the game in the second half.”