At least 37 million people have been displaced by America's 'war on terror' in less than 20 years

John Haltiwanger
Sep 8, 2020
Bush delivering a speech to crew aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, as the carrier steamed toward San Diego, California on May 1, 2003. Larry Downing/Reuters

At least 37 million people have been displaced by America's "global war on terror," according to a new report from Brown University's Cost of War project.

The number of displaced people could be as high as 59 million, the report states.

Displacement has caused "incalculable harm to individuals, families, towns, cities, regions, and entire countries physically, socially, emotionally, and economically," the report states.

The federal government's price tag for the war on terror is over $6.4 trillion, and it's killed over 800,000 people in direct war violence

At least 37 million people, and possibly up to 59 million, have been displaced by America's "global war on terror" since it was launched by former President George W. Bush's administration nearly 20 years ago, according to a new report from Brown University's Cost of War project.

The report says that it offers the first comprehensive picture on how many people have been displaced by the conflicts waged by the US as part of the so-called "war on terror."

"The US post-9/11 wars have forcibly displaced at least 37 million people in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria. This exceeds those displaced by every war since 1900, except World War II," the report states.

Millions of others have been displaced in smaller conflicts involving US forces in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Niger, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia, according to the report.


To put this into perspective, 37 million is nearly equivalent to the population of California — the most populous state in the US.

A little over 25 million of those who've been displaced have returned home, the report added, going on to say that "return does not erase the trauma of displacement or mean that those displaced have returned to their original homes or to a secure life."

Displacement has caused "incalculable harm to individuals, families, towns, cities, regions, and entire countries physically, socially, emotionally, and economically," the report states, emphasizing that the total number of displaced people does not fully capture the impact of losing one's home and more.

FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump makes an unannounced visit to U.S. troops at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan Reuters

The report was issued just days before the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, which fostered major changes across the globe and continue to have a reverberating impact on America's approach to foreign affairs. Overall, the war on terror is widely viewed as a massive failure that cost the US an exorbitant amount of money and resources, to say nothing of the loss of life.


According to the Cost of War project, the federal government's price tag for the war on terror is over $6.4 trillion, and it's killed over 800,000 people in direct war violence.

The US still has troops in Afghanistan, which it invaded in October 2001, and the Trump administration is engaged in ongoing, tenuous peace talks with the Taliban. Historians generally agree that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 catalyzed the rise of ISIS, which fostered an entirely new conflict in Iraq and Syria, as well as terror attacks worldwide. Meanwhile, though Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011, Al Qaeda has not been totally defeated.

How coronavirus took hold in North America and in Europe

Early interventions were effective at stamping out coronavirus infections before they spread, according to a new study. 

Combining virus genomics with epidemiologic simulations and travel records, the research shows that in both the United States and in Europe, sustained transmission networks became established only after separate introductions of the virus that went undetected.

Date:September 10, 2020

Source:University of Arizona

FULL STORY

Global spread of coronavirus, concept illustration (stock image).
Credit: © solvod / stock.adobe.com

A new study combines evolutionary genomics from coronavirus samples with computer-simulated epidemics and detailed travel records to reconstruct the spread of coronavirus across the world in unprecedented detail.

Published in the journal Science, the results suggest an extended period of missed opportunity when intensive testing and contact tracing might have prevented SARS-CoV-2 from becoming established in North America and Europe.

The paper also challenges suggestions that linked the earliest known cases of COVID-19 on each continent in January to outbreaks detected weeks later, and provides valuable insights that could inform public health response and help with anticipating and preventing future outbreaks of COVID-19 and other zoonotic diseases.

"Our aspiration was to develop and apply powerful new technology to conduct a definitive analysis of how the pandemic unfolded in space and time, across the globe," said University of Arizona researcher Michael Worobey, who led an interdisciplinary team of scientists from 13 research institutions in the U.S., Belgium, Canada and the U.K. "Before, there were lots of possibilities floating around in a mish-mash of science, social media and an unprecedented number of preprint publications still awaiting peer review."

The team based their analysis on results from viral genome sequencing efforts, which began immediately after the virus was identified. These efforts quickly grew into a worldwide effort unprecedented in scale and pace and have yielded tens of thousands of genome sequences, publicly available in databases.

Contrary to widespread narratives, the first documented arrivals of infected individuals traveling from China to the U.S. and Europe did not snowball into continental outbreaks, the researchers found.

Instead, swift and decisive measures aimed at tracing and containing those initial incursions of the virus were successful and should serve as model responses directing future actions and policies by governments and public health agencies, the study's authors conclude.

How the Virus Arrived in the U.S. and Europe

A Chinese national flying into Seattle from Wuhan, China on Jan. 15 became the first patient in the U.S. shown to be infected with the novel coronavirus and the first to have a SARS-CoV-2 genome sequenced. This patient was designated 'WA1.' It was not until six weeks later that several additional cases were detected in Washington state.

"And while all that time goes past, everyone is in the dark and wondering, 'What's happening?'" Worobey said. "We hope we're OK, we hope there are no other cases, and then it becomes clear, from a remarkable community viral sampling program in Seattle, that there are more cases in Washington and they are genetically very similar to WA1's virus."

Worobey and his collaborators tested the prevailing hypothesis suggesting that patient WA1 had established a transmission cluster that went undetected for six weeks. Although the genomes sampled in February and March share similarities with WA1, they are different enough that the idea of WA1 establishing the ensuing outbreak is very unlikely, they determined. The researchers' findings indicate that the jump from China to the U.S. likely occurred on or around Feb. 1 instead.

The results also puts to rest speculation that this outbreak, the earliest substantial transmission cluster in the U.S., may have been initiated indirectly by dispersal of the virus from China to British Columbia, Canada, just north of Washington State, and then spread from Canada to the U.S. Multiple SARS-CoV-2 genomes published by the British Columbia Center for Disease Control appeared to be ancestral to the viral variants sampled in Washington State, strongly suggesting a Canadian origin of the U.S. epidemic. However, the present study revealed sequencing errors in those genomes, thus ruling out this scenario.

Instead, the new study implicates a direct-from-China source of the U.S. outbreak, right around the time the U.S. administration implemented a travel ban for travelers from China in early February. The nationality of the "index case" of the U.S. outbreak cannot be known for certain because tens of thousands of U.S. citizens and visa holders traveled from China to the U.S. even after the ban took effect.

A similar scenario marks the first known introduction of coronavirus into Europe. On Jan. 20, an employee of an automotive supply company in Bavaria, Germany, flew in for a business meeting from Shanghai, China, unknowingly carrying the virus, ultimately leading to infection of 16 co-workers. In that case, too, an impressive response of rapid testing and isolation prevented the outbreak from spreading any further, the study concludes. Contrary to speculation, this German outbreak was not the source of the outbreak in Northern Italy that eventually spread widely across Europe and eventually to New York City and the rest of the U.S.

The authors also show that this China-to-Italy-US dispersal route ignited transmission clusters on the East Coast slightly later in February than the China-to-US movement of the virus that established the Washington State outbreak. The Washington transmission cluster also predated small clusters of community transmission in February in California, making it the earliest anywhere in North America.

Early Containment Works

The authors say intensive interventions, involving testing, contact tracing, isolation measures and a high degree of compliance of infected individuals, who reported their symptoms to health authorities and self-isolated in a timely manner, helped Germany and the Seattle area contain those outbreaks in January.

"We believe that those measures resulted in a situation where the first sparks could successfully be stamped out, preventing further spread into the community," Worobey said. "What this tells us is that the measures taken in those cases are highly effective and should serve as a blueprint for future responses to emerging diseases that have the potential to escalate into worldwide pandemics."

To reconstruct the pandemic's unfolding, the scientists ran computer programs that carefully simulated the epidemiology and evolution of the virus, in other words, how SARS-CoV-2 spread and mutated over time.

"This allowed us to re-run the tape of how the epidemic unfolded, over and over again, and then check the scenarios that emerge in the simulations against the patterns we see in reality," Worobey said.

"In the Washington case, we can ask, 'What if that patient WA1 who arrived in the U.S. on Jan. 15 really did start that outbreak?' Well, if he did, and you re-run that epidemic over and over and over, and then sample infected patients from that epidemic and evolve the virus in that way, do you get a pattern that looks like what we see in reality? And the answer was no," he said.

"If you seed that early Italian outbreak with the one in Germany, do you see the pattern that you get in the evolutionary data? And the answer, again, is no," he said.

"By re-running the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into the U.S. and Europe through simulations, we showed that it was very unlikely that the first documented viral introductions into these locales led to productive transmission clusters," said co-author Joel Wertheim of the University of California, San Diego. "Molecular epidemiological analyses are incredibly powerful for revealing transmissions patterns of SARS-CoV-2."

Other methods were then combined with the data from the virtual epidemics, yielding exceptionally detailed and quantitative results.

"Fundamental to this work stands our new tool combining detailed travel history information and phylogenetics, which produces a sort of 'family tree' of how the different genomes of virus sampled from infected individuals are related to each other," said co-author Marc Suchard of the University of California, Los Angeles. "The more accurate evolutionary reconstructions from these tools provide a critical step to understand how SARS-CoV-2 spread globally in such a short time."

"We have to keep in mind that we have studied only short-term evolution of this virus, so it hasn't had much time to accumulate many mutations," said co-author Philippe Lemey of the University of Leuven, Belgium. "Add to that the uneven sampling of genomes from different parts of the world, and it becomes clear that there are huge benefits to be gained from integrating various sources of information, combining genomic reconstructions with complementary approaches like flight records and the total number of COVID-19 cases in various global regions in January and February."

"Our research shows that when you do early intervention and detection well, it can have a massive impact, both on preventing pandemics and controlling them once they progress," Worobey said. "While the epidemic eventually slipped through, there were early victories that show us the way forward: Comprehensive testing and case identification are powerful weapons."

Funding sources for this study include the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the European Research Council, the Wellcome Trust and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Coronavirus Rapid Response Programme.



Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Arizona. Original written by Daniel Stolte. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


Journal Reference:
Michael Worobey, Jonathan Pekar, Brendan B. Larsen, Martha I. Nelson, Verity Hill, Jeffrey B. Joy, Andrew Rambaut, Marc A. Suchard, Joel O. Wertheim, Philippe Lemey. The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in Europe and North America. Science, Sept. 10, 2020; DOI: 10.1126/science.abc8169

 

Climate change, infectious disease seen as major threats: survey

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Climate change and the spread of infectious disease are seen as the top threats by the majority of people in 14 economically advanced nations surveyed by the Pew Research Center.

In similar surveys conducted by the Washington-based center in 2013, 2016, 2017 and 2018, the chief threats were seen as climate change and terrorism.

For the latest survey, published on Wednesday, Pew questioned 14,276 adults living in Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, South Korea, Sweden and the United States between June 10 and August 3.

"In a year when the COVID-19 pandemic has dominated news headlines around the world, it is perhaps unsurprising to discover that majorities in 14 countries surveyed this past summer see the spread of infectious disease as a major threat to their countries," the authors of the survey said.

A median percentage of 70 percent cited climate change as a major threat to their countries, followed by the spread of infectious diseases with 69 percent, terrorism (66 percent), cyberattacks from other countries (65 percent) and the spread of nuclear weapons (61 percent).

Other major threats cited included the condition of the global economy and global poverty.

"In terms of relative rankings, climate change outpaces or ties infectious disease as the most frequently mentioned 'major threat' in eight of 14 countries polled," Pew said, including seven of the nine European countries surveyed.

In the European nations, "climate change remains the topmost perceived threat, even as people there also express grave concern about the risks posed by infectious disease."

In the United States, climate change was most commonly cited first as a major threat followed by cyberattacks from other countries, terrorism, the spread of nuclear weapons and climate change.

In two countries, Australia and Denmark, cyberattacks were most commonly cited as the major threat.

"With the global economy hard hit by COVID-19 related disruptions, concerns about the global economy have increased substantially in most of the countries since the question was last asked in 2018," Pew said.

"Majorities in 10 of the 14 countries polled describe the condition of the global economy as a major threat."

This view was particularly pronounced in Britain, where 65 percent cited the world's economic situation as a major threat, up from 41 percent two years ago, Japan (74 percent, up from 52 percent) and France (67 percent, up from 46 percent).

Post-COVID, more in West see China as major power: study

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© 2020 AFP

 

Survey finds no detectable alien radio signals across 10 million stars

8 September 2020 Astronomy Now

 

Dipole antennas making up the Murchison Widefield Array in Australia. Image: Dragonfly Media

THEY LOOK LIKE PHAGES

Astronomers using the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope in Australia surveyed a patch of sky around the constellation Vela known to include at least 10 million stars, on the lookout for radio emissions that could indicate the presence of one or more technological civilisations.

The result?

“We found no technosignatures – no sign of intelligent life,” said Chenoa Tremblay, a researcher with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO.

Tremblay and Steven Tingay, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, or ICRAR, used the MWA to observe the sky around Vela for 17 hours, a survey they said was more than 100 times broader and deeper than any previous study.

The MWA’s wide field of view allowed the researchers to observe millions of stars at the same time, looking for powerful emissions at frequencies similar to FM radio.

Even though they did not find any such emissions, “the amount of space we looked at was the equivalent of trying to find something in the Earth’s oceans but only searching a volume of water equivalent to a large backyard swimming pool,” said Tingay.

“Since we can’t really assume how possible alien civilisations might utilise technology, we need to search in many different ways,” he said. “Although there is a long way to go in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, telescopes such as the MWA will continue to push the limits. We have to keep looking.”

The findings are reported in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia

 

Previewing the Sun’s fate: a white dwarf blazing in the colourful shroud of a planetary nebula

10 September 2020 Astronomy Now

A star balances the inward pull of the gravity generated by its mass with the outward pressure generated by fusion reactions in its core. When all the available fuel is exhausted, fusion stops, gravity triumphs and the core collapses. What happens after that depends on how much mass the doomed star had in the first place. For stars with between about 10 and 25 solar masses, the end result is a neutron star with about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun crammed into am unimaginably dense city-size sphere. The cores of heavier stars can collapse past the neutron star stage, becoming black holes and effectively dropping out of the known universe. For stars like the Sun, the outer atmosphere is blown out into space while the core shrinks down to the size of a terrestrial planet. The result is a white dwarf. This image of NGC 2440, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2007, shows a brilliant, extremely hot white dwarf shining in the centre of expanding clouds of gas from the doomed star’s blown-off outer atmosphere. Ultraviolet light from the white dwarf, one of the hottest known, makes the gas in the so-called planetary nebula glow.

 

Gather Moon rocks for us, NASA urges private companies

The US wants to become a leader in the exploitation of resources found in the soil or subsoil of asteroids and the Moon

NASA on Thursday announced it was in the market for Moon rocks, and wants to pay companies to scoop out the dirt, take a photo, and then have it ready for collection by a future mission.

The contract doesn't actually involve getting to the Moon itself—a feat only achieved by the national space agencies of three countries—but instead envisages companies designing a robot that NASA or major private sector players can then launch.

"NASA is buying lunar soil from a commercial provider! It's time to establish the regulatory certainty to extract and trade space resources," tweeted administrator Jim Bridenstine.

The US wants to become a leader in the exploitation of resources found in the soil or subsoil of asteroids and the Moon, a policy outlined in an executive order by President Donald Trump last year, despite an absence of international or legal consensus on the best way to manage extraterrestrial mining.

The major space treaties are vague on the question.

For the current tender, it has asked companies from around the world to present proposals to collect 50 to 500 grams of Moon rock, or regolith, from anywhere on the surface, provide imagery to prove it, then transfer sole ownership to NASA.

Companies would set their own bids, and be paid 20 percent up front with the remainder upon successful completion of their mission.

NASA anticipates that the contracts will be worth some tens of thousands of dollars, according to the tender documents.

In a blog post, Bridenstine wrote that NASA would determine collection methods at a later date, but it wasn't clear whether that meant the rocks would be collected by future astronauts and stay on the Moon or be brought back to Earth.

The mission represents a proof of concept as NASA looks to return humans to the lunar surface by 2024 and then set its sights on Mars, harnessing the resources of the Moon and using it as a waypoint.

NASA hopes to excavate lunar ice from the polar regions to supply both drinking water and to split the molecules apart to make rocket fuel for the onward journey.

The space agency is increasingly relying on a public-private model, where it no longer assumes the entire cost of developing and operating missions, but instead contracts out services to private space companies.

SpaceX, for instance, carries cargo for NASA to the International Space Station and recently completed a successful test flight to take astronauts too

NASA goes private for 1st astronaut lunar landers in decades

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© 2020 AFP

BRASIL

Deforestation, Invasions and Mining Spread in Indigenous Lands near the Xingu River

In 2019, the Apyterewa and Trincheira Bacajá protected areas experienced their highest levels of deforestation since their ratifications

Sep.9.2020 2:20PM
Fabiano MaisonnaveLalo de Almeida
MANAUS and SÃO PAULO

In the Amazon, makeshift cities populate the mouth of the forest, close to mining or deforestation. Established in 2016, Vila Renascer continues to grow. Every day, houses, evangelical churches, bars, restaurants, auto repair shops, gas stations, markets, electricity poles, and even small hotels appear. By law, however, none of this should exist: the village exists in the Apyterewa Indigenous Land (TI) of the Parakanã people, approved in 2007.

The presence of non-indigenous people in Apyterewa began in the early 1980s. Their withdrawal was one of the environmental license conditions for constructing the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant on the Xingu River, which crosses the region. Instead, their numbers increased. In the Michel Temer government (MDB), the Ministry of Justice ignored the STF's determination and paralyzed the removal of squatters and invaders of bad faith, that is, who entered the area aware that it was an indigenous land.
  

Vila Renascer, in Apyterewa's land. ( Foto: Lalo de Almeida/ Folhapress ) - Folhapress

After the government's retreat, there were new invasions and the opening of new mining sites. This movement exploded in late 2018 and early 2019, with the promise of Jair Bolsonaro to revise land demarcations. Deforestation spread to the Bacajá Trench, of the Xikrin people, while the illegal market for lots within indigenous lands gained strength.

The result is that, in 2019, Apyterewa lost 8,420 hectares of forest, the highest rate of deforestation since its approval, 13 years ago. Bacajá Trench had 5,600 hectares deforested, also the biggest loss of vegetation cover since the approval, in 1996. The numbers are from the Prodes system, from Inpe (National Institute of Special Research), which measures from August to July of the following year.

Translated by Kiratiana Freelon

https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/scienceandhealth/2020/09/deforestation-invasions-and-mining-spread-in-indigenous-lands-near-the-xingu-river.shtml

Amazon survey finds more than half of US workers say coronavirus has left them underemployed

by Charisse Jones   SEPTEMBER 9, 2020

More than half of the U.S. workers seeking work say their job hunt is due to the coronavirus pandemic.

That's a key finding of a new survey by e-commerce giant Amazon, which found that a quarter of U.S. workers are looking for new employment, while 27% say that at least some of their skills won't be of use in the job market in the next five years.

The survey, conducted by Morning Consult between Aug. 21 and 28, comes at a time when the nation's unemployment rate hovers at 8.4% as the economy haltingly returns from a shutdown sparked in the spring to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Among workers, 36% say they are not working as many hours as they want to or are taking on tasks that don't tap their primary skills. And of that group, 53% say they are underemployed or underutilized because of the pandemic.

Amazon released the poll on the eve of a career fair it is hosting on September 16 to fill tens of thousands of positions.

What slowdown? Amazon seeks to hire 33,000 people

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©2020 USA Today
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

North Korean hackers steal billions in cryptocurrency. How do they turn it into real cash?

For Pyongyang’s hackers, the heist is the easy part. Actually getting their hands on the money is a different story.

by Patrick Howell O'Neill September 10, 2020

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un waves to photographers.GETTY | CARL COURT/STAFF

For years, North Korea’s Kim dynasty has made money through criminal schemes like drug trafficking and counterfeiting cash. In the last decade, Pyongyang has increasingly turned to cybercrime—using armies of hackers to conduct billion-dollar heists against banks and cryptocurrency exchanges, such as an attack in 2018 that netted $250 million in one fell swoop. The United Nations says these actions bring in vast sums which the regime uses to develop nuclear weapons that can guarantee its long-term survival.

But there is a big difference between hacking a cryptocurrency exchange and actually getting your hands on all the cash. Doing that requires moving the stolen cryptocurrency, laundering it so no one can trace it, and then exchanging it for dollars, euros, or yuan that can buy the weapons, luxuries, and necessities even bitcoins cannot.

“I’d say the laundering is more sophisticated than the hacks themselves,” says Christopher Janczewski, a lead case agent at the IRS who specializes in cryptocurrency cases.

Janczewski sees a lot of action these days. He led investigations into the recent hack that affected verified Twitter users, and into the Bitcoin-funded activities of the darknet’s largest site for images of child sexual abuse. Janczewski was most recently the lead investigator in a case to trace and seize $250 million in cryptocurrency from an unprecedented streak of multimillion-dollar hacks allegedly carried out by the North Korean hacking team known as Lazarus Group.

And, he says, Lazarus’s tactics are continuously evolving.

Washing dirty money clean

Once Lazarus has successfully hacked a target and taken control of the money, the group attempts to cover up its trail to throw off investigators. These tactics typically involve moving coins to different wallets and currencies—for example, switching from ether to Bitcoin.

Related Story

How the North Korean hackers behind WannaCry got away with a stunning crypto-heist

The so-called Lazarus group has used elaborate phishing schemes and cutting-edge money-laundering tools to steal money for Kim Jong-un’s regime.


But the North Korean playbook has evolved in the last few years. One tactic, known as a “peel chain,” moves money in rapid and automated transactions from one Bitcoin wallet to new addresses through hundreds or thousands of transactions in a way that both hides the source of the money and lessens the risk of setting off red flags. Another approach, called “chain hopping,” moves the money through different cryptocurrencies and blockchains to get it away from Bitcoin—where every transaction is posted to a public ledger—and into other, more private currencies. The idea is to make the trail go cold or, better yet, raise false alarms for investigators.

The Lazarus laundering operation, says Janczewski, involves creating and maintaining hundreds of false accounts and identities, a consistent level of sophistication and effort that underlines just how important the operation is for Pyongyang. It’s extremely difficult to name a precise amount, but experts have estimated that North Korea relies on criminal activity for up to 15% of its income, with a significant portion of that driven by cyberattacks.
A quiet arms race
  

Stealing cryptocurrency is far from the perfect crime, however. Police and regulators were once almost clueless, but they now have years of cryptocurrency investigation experience under their belts. In addition, they are gaining increasing levels of cooperation from exchanges, which face government pressure and want greater legitimacy. Investigators have moved from being perpetually on the back foot to being more proactive, with the result that many exchanges have responded with new rules and controls that simply did not exist before. Blockchain surveillance tools are powerful and increasingly widespread, proving that cryptocurrency is not as anonymous as popular myth might have it. It turns out the state still has plenty of power even in this cypherpunk world.

No matter how many peels and hops a hacker might throw the stolen cryptocurrency through, the effort usually comes up against an undeniable fact: if you’re trying to exchange a huge amount of cryptocurrency for US dollars, you’ll almost inevitably have to bring it all back to Bitcoin. No other cryptocurrency is so widely accepted or so easily converted to cash. Though new coins and privacy technologies have been emerging for years, Bitcoin and its public ledger remain “the backbone of the cryptocurrency economy,” says Janczewski.

That means the ultimate destination of the coin is often an over-the-counter trader—a bespoke operation in a country like China that can turn coin into cash, sometimes with no strings attached. These traders often ignore legal requirements, like the know-your-customer laws that make many bigger cryptocurrency exchanges risky places to launder stolen billions.

“What we used to see was just Bitcoin transactions between a theft and the movement toward over-the-counter traders that enable Lazarus to get out of Bitcoin. That’s relatively straightforward,” says Jonathan Levin, the founder of the cryptocurrency investigation firm Chainalysis. “Now there are a lot more currencies involved. They are able to move through obscure currencies, but eventually they end in the same spot, which is moving it back to Bitcoin and through the over-the-counter market.”

Over-the-counter operations are the preferred way for Lazarus to move millions in Bitcoin into cash.

And the business is enormous: the top 100 over-the-counter traders engaging in money laundering receive hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin every month, accounting for around 1% of all Bitcoin activity.

Bitcoin-fueled illegal activity does not account for most use of blockchains, but it does remain significant and continues to grow, according to Chainalysis. Ransomware, for example, is a billion-dollar business made possible by cryptocurrency, while anonymous darknet markets moved over $600 million in Bitcoin in 2019.

“There is a sophistication higher than we’ve seen in the past,” Levin says. “Some of that has been successful, but with the US increasingly taking action and exchanges responding to requests to freeze funds and seize assets, these techniques may not be that effective moving forward.”

When will we see ordinary people going into space?

Space is more accessible than ever. But we're still a long ways from seeing the average person taking a trip into orbit and beyond.

by Neel V. Patel  September 9, 2020

Astronaut Bruce McCandless II on a spacewalk in 1984.NASA


Every week, the readers of our space newsletter, The Airlock, send in their questions for space reporter Neel V. Patel to answer. This week: How the average person can go to space.

What are the opportunities for ordinary citizens to go into space? If there is so much being done to help make space more accessible, why aren’t we seeing a bigger push to see the average person go into space? —Corey


This question reminds me of an episode of The Simpsons. Frustrated by the dearth of public enthusiasm for the US space program, NASA decides to drum up support by sending “the average person”—Homer—into space. The stunt ends in near disaster when Homer’s antics (beginning with smuggling a bag of potato chips into the capsule) destroy the navigation equipment, almost killing himself and the crew.


The average person is more intelligent than Homer, but the episode (which first aired in 1994, and features Buzz Aldrin as a guest star) actually raises some issues that still resonate today. Spaceflight still isn’t an endeavor the average person could be expected to handle without rigorous training. It’s not like taking a flight across the globe. There are intense physical rigors involved in riding a rocket into orbit and living in microgravity for more than a few days. There’s the psychological toll of living and working in such a small space for so long. Emergencies can prop up at any moment, requiring a very calm disposition even when your life and your crewmates’ lives are at stake. That’s why astronauts train for years before they actually fly into space.

The other issue is money. It’s still really, really, really expensive to send people into space, and those who are not bankrolled by a government or a wealthy company have to pay their own way. When SpaceX launches its mission around the moon in 2023, the six to eight passengers scheduled to go will include Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. It’s not clear how much he’s paying for the trip, but one has to assume it’s more than most of us could ever dream of making in our lifetimes. NASA wants to offer opportunities for tourists and private citizens to visit the International Space Station, and it would only charge $35,000 a night to pay for food and life support. But that’s not taking into account launch costs for a seat aboard the capsule that actually goes to the ISS (which could be up to $52 million).

That doesn’t mean space will always be closed off to the average person. Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are looking to offer suborbital flights that will take people into space for a few minutes and allow them to experience weightlessness and get a view of Earth from high above. The training for these missions is far from intense, and anyone who’s healthy should be able to go. Virgin Galactic flight reservations are $250,000. Elon Musk has said his eventual goal is for a one-way ticket to Mars aboard Starship to cost about the same, but that’s decades down the road. Space will never be cheap, but it will get cheaper.