Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is overseas strutting his stuff at the big boys’ table at the G7 and NATO conferences. But Canada is no longer one of the seven biggest economies, and is a laggard in terms of its NATO commitments. Due to mediocre growth, high taxation, low productivity and over-regulation, Canada hasn’t made the cut for a while, but stays in the G7. Both Italy and Canada are smaller, in terms of nominal gross domestic product, than.
Illustration by Michael Byers, Published 14:00, Apr. 20, 2021
On March 7, 2018, Vincent Ramos was sitting alone at the Over Easy restaurant in Bellingham, Washington, just across the border from his home, in Richmond, British Columbia. He didn’t protest when a phalanx of cops marched in and arrested him. Speaking to the
Bellingham Herald, the restaurant owner said Ramos “seemed like a mellow guy.”
It’s not mentioned in the account of his arrest, but the first thing officers likely did after they cuffed Ramos was reach into his pocket and grab his BlackBerry. That device, and the network it connected to, was at the heart of a sprawling FBI indictment that accused Ramos of racketeering activity involving gambling, money laundering, and drug trafficking. But that doesn’t quite cover the scale of his operation.
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A advertisement for the now defunct Phantom Secure, which law enforcement officials say sold encryption services to criminal gangs
Assets worth $4 million have been seized by authorities in Singapore from the former CEO of Phantom Secure, a now-defunct encrypted telecommunications services provider that offered services to transnational organized criminal syndicates. The confiscated funds are now being transferred to the U.S., according to the Justice Department.
Canada-based Phantom Secure s chief executive, Vincent Ramos, and four of his associates were indicted in 2018 on charges that they operated a criminal enterprise that facilitated the transnational importation and distribution of narcotics through the sale and service of encrypted telecommunications devices and services (see: