In 2002, President George W. Bush tried to recite an old proverb: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” What emerged instead was: “Fool me once, shame on… shame on you. Fool me… you can’t get fooled again” (see video).

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What to do and where to go at MJBizCon 2025? The answer may depend on your role in the cannabis industry.

What MJBizCon 2025 sessions should you attend? is a post from: MJBizDaily: Financial, Legal & Cannabusiness news for cannabis entrepreneurs

As Russian bombs continued to pound Ukraine, a different conflict has blown up over plans to end that almost four-year-long war. The Trump administration on Nov. 20, 2025, formally presented Ukraine with a 28-point proposal to end the war, and President Donald Trump announced the country had until Thanksgiving to sign it. But Ukraine and its European and U.S.

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The United States should not kid itself. It will not recover its manufacturing position from China in any foreseeable future.

According to World Bank data, in 2024 the US’s GDP of US$29.2 trillion was 60 percent larger than China’s US$18.7 trillion. But China’s manufacturing sector, worth US$4.7 trillion and representing 25 percent of the country’s GDP, was 60 percent larger than the US’s, worth US$2.9 trillion and representing 10 percent of GDP. Simply put, the economic calculus is daunting.

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The 2025 G20 Summit was held in Johannesburg on 22–23 November 2025. The United States (US) abstained from participating in the summit due to its diplomatic rift with the host, South Africa. President Xi Jinping also did not attend the summit, and Premier Li Qiang represented China. Russian President Vladimir Putin also did not participate in the summit. However, this did not dampen the spirit of the deliberations, and at the end of the summit, G20 members adopted the declaration by consensus.

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Deterring China from launching an attack on Taiwan is a central focus of U.S. and allied security planning. This planning encompasses creation and revision of military strategies, the establishment of partnerships with like-minded nations, and the gaming and simulation of conflict scenarios. Restrictive economic measures, such as sanctions, are also part of the deterrence toolkit. However, the timing, effectiveness, and desirability of these measures remain uncertain.

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As President Trump traveled to the Indo-Pacific in late October for his first summit with new Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae and the APEC Summit hosted by President Lee Jae-myung in South Korea, the U.S.

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The landmark critical minerals agreement between Australia and the United States is vital to both nations’ security and sovereignty. Like AUKUS, it is about competing with China.

But to enable it we now need also to look beyond building mines and processing. This is because the agreement signed carries an inherent vulnerability. The very partnership designed to reduce China’s coercive leverage is increasingly relying on Chinese technology to give effect to its objectives.

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Keeping the peace in the Cold War was a matter of MAD, or mutually assured destruction, with both the U.S. and Soviet Union racing to develop and amass ever more deadly weapons to keep the other at bay and maintain an uneasy status quo.

The problem, according to Benjamin Wilson, was the chief proponents of that early brand of arms control, an elite group of science advisers, “wore a progressive face” but ended up “protecting existing structures and domestic arrangements, foreclosing the possibility of more radical transformations.”

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President Donald Trump has again floated the idea of sending Americans $2,000 from tariff revenue, but a new analysis suggests the import taxes won’t bring in enough money to cover the checks.

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Fine points of the law are likely to dominate legal arguments in the case before the Supreme Court challenging the Trump administration’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs. Facts, however, matter and should play an important, even dominant, role.

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Engagement between Australia and the United States on critical minerals has matured from technical cooperation into a strategic partnership, aligning resource security with clean energy and defense priorities. Both governments recognize the urgency of diversifying supply chains as China entrenches its dominance across critical mineral extraction and processing. US policy has so far delivered strong domestic signals and backed its producers, but outcomes of its recent allied contributions remain to be seen.

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To borrow the words of my colleague, CFR Senior Fellow Heidi Crebo-Rediker, in the pages of Foreign Affairs, critical minerals today are “America’s most dangerous dependence.”

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Cryptocurrency exchange Bitzlato, better known to the Russian-speaking segment of the market, has been taken down as part of an “international cryptocurrency enforcement action,” the U.S. Justice Department announced. The Russian owner of the platform has been arrested for his role in the alleged transmission of illicit money. Bitzlato claimed it was hacked.

US, France Hit Cryptocurrency Exchange Bitzlato, Russian Co-founder Detained in Miami

U.S. authorities have apprehended Anatoly Legkodymov, a resident of China, on charges that his Hong Kong-registered crypto trading platform, Bitzlato, processed illicit funds worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The Russian, a co-founder and majority owner of the exchange, was arrested by the FBI in Miami on Tuesday, a high-ranking official from the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) revealed.

Speaking during a press conference, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said that Justice Department agents and prosecutors, working with the U.S. Treasury Department and French law enforcement, have “disrupted Bitzlato, a China-based cryptocurrency exchange, notorious for laundering criminal proceeds from the darknet” and ransomware attacks. She also stated:

Today, the Department of Justice has dealt a significant blow to the crypto crime ecosystem.

Legkodymov is accused of operating the exchange as a “high-tech financial hub that, in his own words, catered to ‘known crooks’,” Monaco explained. She went on to allege that Bitzlato was a “crucial financial resource” for Hydra, the largest darknet market, with Russian roots, which was shut down in April, last year, by the German police with the support of U.S. agencies.

According to the DOJ, Hydra buyers funded illicit purchases from crypto accounts hosted at Bitzlato while sellers of drugs, stolen financial information and hacking tools sent criminal proceeds to accounts at the exchange, collectively amounting to $700 million in direct and indirect transfers between 2018 and 2022.

The deputy attorney general also said that the participants in the operation have engaged in a “coordinated campaign of disruption.” This included law enforcement actions in a number of European countries and the seizure of Bitzlato’s servers. By midday Wednesday, Bitzlato’s website was replaced by a notice saying that the service had been seized by French authorities, Reuters reported.

Crypto Exchange Bitzlato Claims It Was Hacked, Halts Withdrawals

Also on Wednesday, the operators of Bitzlato announced on Telegram, that the exchange had suffered a hacking attack. They told users that withdrawals had been suspended indefinitely and asked them to refrain from sending coins to the platform until the issue is resolved.

“Our service was hacked, part of the funds was withdrawn from the service,” the exchange said, noting that the attackers were able to steal a small portion of the funds without specifying the amount. It also sought to assure customers in a second message that their assets were not lost, stating:

For all victims, we guarantee a refund.

“As a security measure, we have disabled the service, we ask you not to replenish the wallets of our service until the work is restored,” Bitzlato reiterated, adding that its team was working on the problem. At the time of writing, the platform is still offline.

The hack presumably took place after on Tuesday the exchange announced maintenance scheduled for Thursday, Jan. 19, “aimed at improving the operation of the service and its security.” The notice informed users it will halt transactions between 5 and 9 a.m. Moscow time.

“We strongly recommend that you organize your work activities taking into account the amendments in order to avoid unpleasant situations,” the platform advised customers, informing them that it plans to disable deposits, withdrawals and trading.

Bitzlato launched in 2016 under the name Changebot and later became a cryptocurrency exchange offering peer-to-peer (P2P) trading services. It lists pairs of the Russian ruble with BTC, ETH, USDT, and other digital coins which can be bought and sold with a variety of payment methods.

Online crypto exchangers like Bitzlato are popular in Russia and the former Soviet space but as crypto assets are yet to be fully regulated in the region, they are often targeted by authorities across the Commonwealth of Independent States. A report recently revealed that the Belarusian judiciary has imposed a hefty fine on the operator of one such platform.

Do you expect other similar operations against crypto trading platforms in the near future? Share your thoughts on the subject in the comments section below.

Russian institutions have responded to a call from а public movement for joint efforts to identify cryptocurrency transfers related to drug trade. The anti-drug organization, Stopnarkotik, recently asked the interior ministry and the central bank to investigate alleged connections between U.S.-sanctioned crypto exchange Suex and a darknet market operating in the region.

Russian Authorities Respond to Stopnarkotik’s Request for Action Against Drug Trade

The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation (MVD) and Bank of Russia have agreed to cooperate with the All-Russian Public Movement Stopnarkotik on identifying financial flows involving cryptocurrencies obtained as a result of drug sales. The Russian online news portal Lenta.ru reported on the agreement, quoting a letter from a high-ranking MVD official.

The letter signed by Major General Andrei Yanishevsky, head of the Drug Control Department at the Interior Ministry, has been issued after a working meeting with representatives of the anti-drug organization. It comes in response to Stopnarkotik’s call for the two institutions to carry out an investigation focused on Suex, a Russia-based OTC crypto broker, and its links to other companies and banks.

In September, the U.S. Treasury Department blacklisted the Czech-registered entity Suex OTC s.r.o. which operates out of physical offices in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The crypto platform is suspected of processing hundreds of millions of dollars in coin transactions related to scams, ransomware attacks, darknet markets, and the infamous Russian BTC-e exchange.

Since launching in 2018, Suex is believed to have received over $481 million in BTC alone. Close to $13 million came from ransomware operators such as Ryuk, Conti, and Maze, over $24 million was sent by crypto scams like Finiko, $20 million came from mixers, and another $20 million from darknet markets such as the Russia-targeting Hydra, blockchain forensics firm Chainalysis detailed in a report.

In its request to the Russian authorities, following the announcement of the U.S. sanctions, Stopnarkotik noted that Suex had been “involved in money laundering for the largest drug-selling platform.” The organization pointed out that the market’s drug trafficking in the Russian Federation amounts to an estimated $1.5 billion a year or more.

It also mentioned the name of one of Suex’s co-founders and highlighted its alleged connections with other crypto companies and financial institutions such as Exmo, a major digital asset exchange in Eastern Europe, financial services company Qiwi, a leading payment provider in Russia and the CIS countries, as well as the Ukraine-based Concord Bank.

Stopnarkotik asked Bank of Russia to provide its assessment on the matter, check if the operations of Suex and other entities are being conducted in accordance with the law in Russia, and consider blocking Russian payments to a Ukrainian organization.

“We received a response from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Central Bank. We also had a personal meeting with the Ministry of Internal Affairs so that they had an understanding of how we receive information, including about money laundering,” the movement’s chairman, Sergei Polozov, has been quoted as saying. He added that the Russian Interior Ministry is ready to accept Stopnarkotik’s data and work together with the organization.

Do you expect the cooperation between Stopnarkotik and Russian government institutions to develop further? Tell us in the comments section below.