The News You Need, Monday, August 3rd, 2026
Sunday Times on the Kinahan crime family making Dubai their operating center, Sy Hersh on the crimes of Israel, Trump's Capital One bank accounts were shut down for suspicion of money laundering.
Why Does the Kinahan Cartel Make its Home in Dubai, and Can That Last?
The Sunday Times
Scott: A couple of years ago, I was asked by senior Emirati security officials to assist them in profiling a prominent businessman with a dodgy past and many run-ins with the law who was looking to set up operations in Dubai. The individual in question was at that point implicated in criminal proceedings in six different nations, each of them reflecting fraud, misrepresentations and money laundering. He had been convicted a couple of times, but usually he avoided personal accountability by surrendering some trusty underling to the criminal authorities to take the fall. But to me the most interesting part of the project was observing how the Emiratis reacted to the criminal practices of the target. They were impressed with the artful dodge and definitely didn’t view a criminal past and criminal proclivities as disqualifying. But there were limits. If it bumped up against the prospect of bad relations with an important ally or business counterpart, that was different.
The Sunday Times has run a significant study co-ventured with Bellingcat into the largest Irish crime syndicate, the Kinahans. Their business portfolio is impressive, heavily focused on drugs and human trafficking, but they have also made sanctions circumvention a central part of their work, aligning themselves with the IRGC and Hezbollah, for instance. This may have led them to turn Dubai into their operations center. No doubt that the Emiratis knew who they were and decided to tolerate them... for a while. But they may have become too notorious. In any event, this tale furnishes an excellent introduction to the role of organized crime syndicates in the global economy, and how they expand their business portfolios in alignment with terrorists and foreign intelligence services.
The fugitive leader of the Kinahan crime cartel risks arrest after losing the legal right to live in the United Arab Emirates, where he has sought sanctuary for the past decade.
Christy Kinahan’s residency visa to stay in Dubai expired in April, an investigation by The Sunday Times and the open-source investigative outlet Bellingcat has discovered. The UAE residency visa of Ian Dixon, one of the cartel’s most trusted lieutenants and the man poised to take control of the powerful transnational criminal organisation, has also expired.
Cartel bosses have openly lived extravagant lifestyles since fleeing Europe and moving to the Emirates about a decade ago, but the cartel faced a crackdown after our joint investigation in March revealed the links between the Kinahans and the Iranian regime.
Kinahan cartel: hunt for gang now linked to Iran and Hezbollah
Christy Kinahan’s eldest son Daniel was arrested in Dubai in April and is facing extradition to stand trial in Dublin for directing an organised crime gang.
Europe’s intelligence services believe Christy Kinahan is “deeply concerned” about his residency status. “He’s a tormented man, fearful he might be arrested and deported,” said one intelligence source.
The Kinahan family controls one of the most powerful transnational crime groups on the planet from the Emirates. It is responsible for smuggling the bulk of all cocaine reaching the streets of Europe. It also smuggles arms and offers money-laundering services to criminal gangs around the world. Its clientele includes Mexican and Colombian cartels, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, and the Iranian and Russian intelligence services.
Sy Hersh on the Undercovered Crimes of Israel
Charles: Eighty-nine year-old Seymour Hersh is the premier investigative reporter of his generation. As he approaches his tenth decade he shows no signs of slowing down.
Hersh has been a consistently harsh critic of the horrendous policies of Benjamin Netanyahu and the extreme right wingers in his cabinet.
Last week he pointed out that despite the ceasefire set last October, Israel troops, planes and drones continue to kill Palestinians in Gaza “at will,” including six killed and 34 injured last Wednesday by Israeli air strikes “largely ignored by the major media.”
Sy Hersh
Meanwhile the West Bank
has become a much more active Israeli killing zone, as the Israeli settlers, often backed up by religious fanatics in the Israel Defense Forces, have increased the pace of their attacks on the homes, crops and livestock of Palestinians The killings and beatings have reached the point that on Monday António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, saw fit to release a statement reminding the world that Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which began after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, are “a flagrant violation” of international law.
The numbers, as tracked by the UN’s human rights office, tell the story. Settler violations have reached an all-time high, climbing to a rate of 460 violent incidents per month. More than 2,200 Palestinians have been forced from their homes in recent months by what the UN called “continuous intimidation and violence.”
Capital One Shut Down Trump’s Accounts over Money Laundering
Bloomberg
President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on July 29. Photo: Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg
Scott: When Capital One shut down Donald Trump’s bank accounts in 2021, he responded with a lawsuit and claims of “debanking.” The move was widely assumed to have been a response to Trump’s direction of the Jan 6 storming of the Capitol Building. But now discovery in the lawsuit is making clear that the closing of the accounts has a different cause: strong and sustained concern that Trump was engaged in money laundering, particularly involving offshore sourced funds.
Capital One Financial Corp. said in a court filing late Friday that it closed accounts belonging to President Donald Trump’s sprawling real estate company in 2021 for legitimate reasons after an internal review by the bank’s anti-money laundering team. The lender made the revelation in a filing asking a judge to toss out a Trump Organization lawsuit accusing it of illegally “debanking” the president’s company because of political discrimination following the assault on the Capitol by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.
Capital One, which denies discriminating against Trump’s business, said the internal review was triggered by “transaction patterns” that “are among the types of activity flagged by federal banking guidance.” The bank said it’s only making the anti-money laundering review public now as a result of the litigation. The filing does not give details about the transactions at issue or accuse Trump or his company of wrongdoing. The decision to close the accounts was made as part of a process involving the lender’s anti-money laundering professionals “with decades of law enforcement experience,” the bank said.
“Capital One never publicized the termination decision nor its confidential internal process giving rise to the closure, and it permitted plaintiffs several months (and granted several extensions) to find new banking services, which they did,” the bank said in the filing. The case is part of a wave of lawsuits that Trump or his business interests have filed since he retook the White House last year, including another debanking lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase & Co. for closing Trump’s personal accounts in 2021.
In both cases, the banks say their customer agreements explicitly allow them to close accounts for any reason. JPMorgan also denies wrongdoing and is fighting that lawsuit.
“Capital One, along with other major banks, de-banked President Trump, his family, and his businesses for blatantly political reasons,” a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team said in a statement. “President Trump’s powerful lawsuit holds Capital One accountable for its disgraceful conduct, and we look forward to seeing this matter through to a just and proper conclusion.” The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment…
Capital One said in the filing that Trump’s company failed to present evidence of political discrimination, even after three months of receiving evidence from the bank.“To the contrary, those documents and plaintiffs’ own allegations make clear that Capital One closed plaintiffs’ accounts for anti-money laundering reasons,” the bank said. “The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review” by the bank’s anti-money laundering team “in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance.”
Right Wing Climate Denial in Europe Goes Up In Smoke
The Observer
Charles: Observer columnist Will Hutton details the way Donald Trump’s obscene denial of climate science has now infected the Conservative party in the UK.
For those keeping score, these are Trump’s main contributions to hastening the end of the planet by promoting as much carbon use as possible.
Trump bracketed advocates of the climate crisis with those who doubted that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. It was a hoax promulgated by alien socialists indifferent to making energy more expensive for working-class Americans.
Trump has pulled the US out of every international initiative setting targets for, and monitoring compliance with, reducing carbon emissions. He has revoked baseline standards for judging whether US greenhouse gas emissions are breeching dangerous levels. He has encouraged oil and gas drilling, and – amazingly – paid companies not to fulfil contracts to build windfarms. Every Biden incentive to develop renewable energy and challenge China’s pre-eminence in battery manufacture and wholesale electrification has been scrapped. Burn, baby, burn – literally.
Le Porge, south-western France
A decades-long cross-party consensus in Britain to reach net zero emissions by 1950 has now been shattered since Trump returned to the White House.
The Tory right, basking in its Brexit triumph, was looking for new woke enemies to slay, but even in the 2022 leadership campaign, Kemi Badenoch did not contest the targeting of net zero by 2050. But the devastating 2024 UK election defeat and then Trump’s victory changed the calculus. To deny the climate crisis, Trump-style, was the next populist cause.
In 2025, for the first time, more editorials in British newspapers urged less action on the climate crisis than more, although, according to analysis by the Carbon Brief website, papers such as the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Daily Express and the Times were careful to focus their ire less on the climate crisis (plainly happening) but rather the expense and irrationality of targeting net zero as a means to contain it.
So here we are. The hard right destroyed the consensus on EU membership and is now doing the same on the climate crisis. If Miliband is a loon, then so is King Charles, who farsightedly spoke to a friend of mine in deep despair the morning after the 2016 Brexit vote. He saw that the consensus underpinning the environment would soon go the same way as that underpinning EU membership. He was right.
