Warren Buffett is not a Jew; in fact, he describes himself as an agnostic.

Still, the billionaire investment guru, who made big news in May when his Berkshire Hathaway corporation bought an 80 percent share in the Israeli metalworks conglomerate, Iscar, for $4 billion, for years has been making his mark on the U.S. Jewish community back home — although sometimes in a roundabout way.

“Proportionally, if you look at the number of Jews in this country and in the world, I’m associated with a hugely disproportionate number,” said Buffett, the second-richest man in the world. His life, he added, “has been blessed by friendship with many Jews.”

The Israeli government stands to reap about $1 billion in taxes on Buffett’s purchase of Iscar. Shortly after announcing the deal, Buffett said he was surprised to learn that a Berkshire subsidiary, CTB International, was purchasing a controlling interest in another Israeli company, AgroLogic.

In Israel — which Buffett plans to visit in the fall — the hope is that the deals will have longer legs: Buffett himself has not ruled out future purchases there and, considering his status as a leading investor, observers say others also may take a look at Israeli companies now that Buffett has done so.

“You won’t find in the world a better-run operation than Iscar,” Buffett says. “I don’t think it’s an accident that it’s run by Israelis.”

Among the first companies Buffett acquired after launching Berkshire Hathaway, the Omaha-based investment and insurance giant, was The Sun Newspapers of Omaha, then owned by Stan Lipsey, one-time chairman of The Jewish Press, Omaha’s Jewish newspaper.

“At the time, the Omaha Club did not take Jewish members, and the Highland Country Club, a golf club, didn’t have any [non-Jewish] members,” Lipsey recalled. “Warren volunteered to join the Highland” — rather than the Omaha — “to set an example of nondiscrimination.”

Buffett happily recalls the fallout from his application.

“It created this big rhubarb,” he said. “All of the rabbis appeared on my behalf, the [Anti-Defamation League] guy appeared on my behalf. Finally they voted to let me in.”

But that wasn’t the end of the story, Buffett said. The Highland had a rule requiring members to donate a certain amount of money to their synagogues. Buffett, of course, wasn’t a synagogue member, so the club changed its policy: Members now would be expected to give to their synagogues, temples or churches.

But that still didn’t quite work, Buffett recalls with a laugh, because of his agnosticism.

In the end, the rule was amended to ask simply that members make some sort of charitable donation, and the path to Buffet’s membership was clear.

“He’s an incredible guy,” said Lipsey, today the publisher of the Buffalo News. In 1973, The Sun won a Pulitzer Prize in local investigative specialized reporting for an expose on financial impropriety at Boys Town, Neb.

“Warren came up with the key source for us knowing what was going on out there,” Lipsey said.

Buffett himself researched Boys Town’s stocks to bolster the story, Lipsey added.

In the 1960s, Omaha Rabbi Myer Kripke decided to invest in his friend Buffett’s new business venture. Their wives had become friendly, he said, and the foursome enjoyed playing the occasional game of bridge together.

“My wife had no card sense and I was certainly no competition to Warren, who is a very good bridge player and a lover of the game,” said Kripke, rabbi emeritus of Omaha’s Conservative Beth El Synagogue. “He’s very bright and very personable and very decent. He is a rich man who is as clean as can be.”

Kripke, father of the noted philosopher Saul Kripke, bought a few shares in Berkshire Hathaway and quickly sold them, doubling his money, he said.

Recognizing a good thing when he saw it, he bought a bunch more shares in his friend’s company, shares that by the 1990s had made Kripke — who says he never earned more than $30,000 a year as a rabbi — a millionaire.

Asked if he credits Buffett with his financial success, he didn’t hesitate.

“Entirely, yes,” he said. “I never had much of an income.”

The Sun newspaper group was not Buffett’s only early purchase of a Jewish-owned company. In 1983, sealing the deal with a handshake, Buffett bought 90 percent of the Nebraska Furniture Mart from Rose Blumkin, a Russian-born Jew who moved to the United States in 1917.

In 1989, he purchased a majority of the stock in Borsheim’s Fine Jewelry and Gifts, a phenomenally successful jewelry store, from the Friedman family.

“He has many friends in the Jewish community,” said Forrest Krutter, secretary of Berkshire Hathaway and a former president of the Jewish Federation of Omaha.

Buffett’s former son-in-law, Allen Greenberg, is a Jew, and now runs the Buffett Foundation, much of whose work has dealt with reproductive rights and family-planning issues. Buffett’s personal assistant is Ian Jacobs, who goes by his Hebrew name, Shami.

Buffett himself counts the late Nebraska businessman Howard “Micky” Newman and philanthropist Jack Skirball as among his “very closest friends.”

Further, Buffett said his “hero and the man who made me an investment success” was Ben Graham. Graham, along with Newman’s father, Jerry, ran a New York fund called Graham-Newman Corp.

“After besieging Ben for the three years after I received my degree from Columbia, Ben and Jerry finally hired me,” Buffett said. “I was the first gentile ever employed by the firm — including secretaries — in its 18 years of existence. My first son bears the middle name Graham after Ben.”

Alcatraz island  was known“The Rock” closed 62 years ago, and San Francisco has channeled the public’s macabre fascination with life inside the notorious prison to turn it into one of the city’s top tourist attractions.

For $13.95, tourists can also take home a replica tin inmate cup, which had the advantage back in the day of not being able to be broken into shards that could become a weapon.

Carson Brock, a 24-year-old from Cincinnati who voted for Trump, said from the prison’s gift shop that he favors preserving Alcatraz’s history over reopening. “But if that’s what he wants to do, then I guess so be it,” he said.

One Alberta resident touring the island was reticent to share her views, but concluded: “We’re Canadian, we don’t really care.”

Visitor Mike Neville, another Trump supporter, said he thinks turning Alcatraz back into a prison would be cost-prohibitive. The 61-year-old, visiting from Colorado Springs, Colo., has a better plan: “I always liked the idea of turning it into a casino.”

Report: All Horses in 151st Kentucky Derby Were Descended from Legendary Secretariat

 

Automobile manufacturing continues to be a major source of employment across America, employing over a million people in 2025.

From Detroit’s “Motor City” heritage in Michigan to emerging plants in Southern states like Kentucky and Alabama, the U.S. has several vehicle manufacturing hubs.

This infographic ranks the top 10 U.S. states by total auto manufacturing jobs as of February 2025, using preliminary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics which only provides data for the top 10 states. It breaks down employment by vehicle manufacturing and assembly, body/trailer manufacturing, and vehicle parts manufacturing.

America’s Auto Manufacturing Hubs by Employees

Together, the top 10 states employ over 520,000 workers in auto manufacturing—making up more than half of the industry’s nationwide employment.

Here’s how the top 10 states stack up by auto manufacturing employment, as of February 2025:

States in the Midwest remain the centers of auto manufacturing in America.

Michigan leads the pack with 164,000 auto manufacturing jobs, accounting for over 15% of all such jobs in the country. Its dominance is driven by legacy automakers like Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis (previously Chrysler), who have significant manufacturing footprints in Detroit.

States like Indiana and Ohio are also heavily invested in parts production, with Indiana also leading in bodies and trailers manufacturing.

Meanwhile, Southern states are becoming increasingly important for vehicle manufacturing, with Kentucky and Alabama attracting investments from foreign automakers like Toyota, Hyundai, and Mercedes-Benz.

Overall, employment in U.S. auto manufacturing is down 12.7% from a year ago, with the parts manufacturing segment taking the biggest hit at -17.8%. California has seen the biggest decline in jobs in this segment, dropping 6.5% from February 2024 levels.

The State of the U.S. Auto Industry

The U.S. auto industry is facing speed bumps from the latest round of tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, which include a 25% levy on imported auto parts and completely built up vehicles.

S&P Global forecasts that U.S. light vehicle sales will fall by 700,000 units in 2025, and North American production will decline by nearly 1.3 million units as a result of the new tariffs. Increased manufacturing costs from tariffs on auto parts are also likely to result in higher vehicle prices.

 

 

 

 

 

As seen on

Real estate has always been a safe investment, 2009 economic crisis notwithstanding. But it has generally been the middle class, upper class, and commercial real estate that has appealed the most to private equity firms.

Today, things have changed. Affordable and low-end housing, especially the manufactured home park markets, have been increasingly targeted by institutional investors and private equity firms. They’re buying them like crazy at a time when the industry itself is expanding.

Absolutely insane. Wall Street private equity firms are now buying up American mobile home parks and skyrocketing rents up to 60% on people.

“These communities have become the target of a new kind of landlord, private equity. Private equity firms are increasingly getting involved. Some of the biggest investors in America have moved into this industry. People living at a local mobile home park outraged over the sharp increase in lot rents. Rents were raised by nearly 60%.”

Resident: “I worked for 45 years. There is no American dream anymore. All it is survival.”

“Homes of America has gone on a buying spree spending nearly $300 million to acquire 138 parks across 17 states. They’ve raised rents and aggressively evicted residents.” and that’s just ONE FIRM buying, there are many more.

Resident says “I don’t know what I’m gonna do. Hope that I don’t wake up tomorrow. Death crossed my mind.” She can only afford one more month of rent

How much more will the American People continue to take?

It’s the captive-audience-nature that appeals the most. The investment may require a long time to turn a major profit, but time is on the side of the investors who want to continue making profits for years or even decades.

HOW INTERNATIONAL MONEY LAUNDERING WORKS!

Every few weeks, fireworks light up the night sky in Cambodia, set off by scammers to salute their biggest swindles.

By the time the shells pop and crackle, somebody’s life savings are probably gone. Maybe the victim fell for an online romance scam or bought into a fake cryptocurrency exchange. Whatever the scheme, the money has vanished, sucked into a complex money-laundering network that moves billions of dollars at a dizzying speed.

The F.B.I., China’s Ministry of Public Security, Interpol and others have tried to combat scammers, who ​often lurk on social media and dating apps, luring people into bogus financial schemes or other ruses. Telecom companies have blocked numbers. Banks have issued repeated warnings.

Yet the industry persists because its money-laundering operation is so efficient. Unsuspecting victims worldwide lose tens of billions of dollars each year, money that must be scrubbed of its criminal origins and deposited into the legitimate economy. The money-laundering system is so hydra-headed that when governments strike it in one place, it pops up in another.

This underworld peeks out in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, home to a global clearinghouse for money launderers. It can be glimpsed, too, in the coastal city of Sihanoukville, a notorious refuge for fraudsters. Scammers ply their trade from call centers, operating in fortified compounds or on the upper floors of unfinished high-rises. Seaside restaurants are packed with money launderers and other criminals doing business over spicy Chinese food.

Image

Outside the Golden Sun Sky Casino & Hotel in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, in March. Documents show that the British and American authorities have linked this casino to online scammers and human trafficking.

We obtained a cache of documents, a kind of money-laundering handbook, and spoke to nearly a half-dozen scammers and their launderers. The documents are not linked to any one scam or victim but reveal a method for moving illicit money that has proved all but impossible to stop.

The map locates the Cambodian capital city of Phnom Penh, in south-central Cambodia, as well as the southern coastal city of Sihanoukville.

By The New York Times

The money launderers are as vital to criminals as getaway drivers are to bank robbers. Without them, there would be no loot.

Once scammers persuade strangers to part with their savings, they need to quickly move money from one account to another, and one country to another, before ​their targets discover the ruse and alert their banks​ or the police.

In the end, the money arrives “clean” — with virtually no trace to the original scam.

So how does it get done?

Following the trail led us, surprisingly, to an established financial conglomerate in Cambodia called Huione Group.

This is not a back-alley shop with a side hustle in cleaning dirty money. Huione is an established firm that does brisk and legitimate business in Southeast Asia and has satellite companies in other parts of the world. Its QR codes are everywhere in Cambodia — customers use them to pay their bills in hotels, restaurants and supermarkets. Huione ads are plastered along major highways. Its suite of financial services include banking and insurance.

But Huione (pronounced Hu-WAY-wahn) is a constellation of affiliates, and not all of them are legitimate. One arm offers bespoke money laundering services, according to the documents, which come from the company, and interviews with two people who are directly familiar with the operation. They spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for their safety. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

Another affiliate openly runs an online bazaar for criminals to find money launderers. The precise size of this marketplace is practically impossible to measure, but the analytics firm Elliptic has linked it to $26.8 billion in cryptocurrency transactions since 2021. The industry is so opaque that it is difficult to separate legitimate transactions from illegal ones, but Elliptic says the bazaar is the world’s largest illicit internet market.

Hun To, a cousin of Cambodia’s prime minister, is a director of one Huione company.

Huione’s clients include large criminal enterprises, such as a group in Myanmar that exploits human trafficking victims, according to a scammer, a money launderer and examinations of their cryptocurrency trade by the analytics firms Elliptic and Chainalysis.

Huione is a constellation of affiliates. The headquarters of one of its companies, Huione Pay, is in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

And yet, this money-laundering network operates with impunity. The group has never been targeted for sanctions by any government. The cryptocurrency company Tether has frozen some of the group’s accounts, at the behest of unspecified law enforcement officials, and the messaging app Telegram has shut down some of its channels. But neither measure made a lasting effect.

This is how it works.

Imagine you’re a scammer, cheating people out of their life savings. You need a way to get money out of countries around the world. You need a matchmaker.

A matchmaker is a trusted intermediary who will shepherd your loot home. A good matchmaker has a worldwide network of people, known as mules, who can move money within hours.

The money mule can be a person or a shell company that controls a local bank account or a cryptocurrency wallet.

Once you find a matchmaker, he will deposit money into escrow, essentially ensuring he won’t run away with your money along the way.

Now you are ready to start your scam.

Let us say that you’ve tricked someone into sending you $40,000.

Step 1: You, the scam boss, cut a deal with a matchmaker. For a U.S. scam, the matchmaker typically demands 15 percent of the proceeds for himself and his mules.

Step 2: Your matchmaker finds the right mules for the job, and gets you a deal.

Step 3: The matchmaker sends you the mule’s bank account or crypto wallet details. You send that information to your victim.

Step 4: Your victim sends $40,000 to your money mule’s account.

Step 5: The mule moves the money from one account to another account and eventually converts it to cryptocurrency.

Step 6: Finally, the mule takes a cut for his services and sends the rest to the matchmaker. The matchmaker pays himself, and gives you $34,000.

Moving Bricks

Huione makes money at every step of the process.

First, one affiliate, which until recently was called Huione Guarantee, hosts the marketplace where scammers can find matchmakers. The matchmakers are essential to the system and their work is so repetitive that the Chinese name for it is “moving bricks,” according to Yanyu Chen, an anthropologist who studies money-laundering schemes in Cambodia.

The online bazaar is made up of thousands of chat groups on Telegram.

Some Huione Pay branches advertise money-exchange services, including converting between Tether cryptocurrency and U.S. dollars.

On these Telegram channels, anonymous users advertise money laundering services with the wink and nod of barely disguised language. The posts are public; anyone with the Telegram app can see them. Some merchants also sell stolen personal data, applications for impersonating others and other essential services to scammers.

One channel, called “Demand and Supply,” had more than 400,000 users with hundreds of daily messages, including advertisements for money-laundering services. After we sent questions to Huione Group and others in late February, Telegram said it had removed the channel. But another quickly sprung up, with some 250,000 members joining within a week.

Huione Guarantee did not respond to repeated requests for comment but has denied its relationship with Huione Group, the financial conglomerate. It even changed its name in October, shedding the Huione name. But it told customers on Telegram that Huione Group remained one of its “strategic partners and shareholders.”

Second, the bazaar guarantees the laundering transactions. Why? Because there is little honor among thieves, and scammers get scammed, too. To prove their credibility, matchmakers and money mules pay a deposit to Huione Guarantee, which holds it in escrow. This assures scammers that nobody will abscond with their money (or if someone does, that person will lose some of their own money).

The price to launder money is determined by the crime committed to get it. Scams like impersonating government officials incur a higher cost because the victims are more likely to call the police or alert their banks.

Location affects the price, too. Launderers charge up to 60 percent to clean money in China. That is because the country has tightened controls since 2020, arresting thousands of people and freezing large sums of money in a nationwide crackdown.

China and Cambodia have agreed to collaborate on law enforcement operations, leading to multiple arrests of mostly lower-level criminals. This has not made a dent on the scamming and money-laundering industries.

While the matchmaker deals are worked out privately, one-on-one, the bazaar makes money, too. It sells ads on public groups, charges maintenance fees for private groups and takes small cuts from deals. Most of the transactions are denominated in the cryptocurrency Tether, but some are conducted in cash, gold and through bank transfers. (The bazaar even issued its own cryptocurrency last year.)

The bazaar denies any criminal association in disclaimers posted on its website and on Telegram channels. “All business in the public groups is provided by third-party merchants, which has nothing to do with Huione Guarantee,” one post says.

Third, another Huione affiliate, Huione International Pay, is more directly involved in laundering money. It is a matchmaker itself, according to internal company documents and two people familiar with its operations.

The documents and insiders indicate that Huione International Pay operates with the efficiency of a legitimate, professional bank. It is based inside the conglomerate’s headquarters in Phnom Penh, a glass and concrete building with two panda statues standing guard by the entrance.

Huione International Pay operates out of the conglomerate’s headquarters in Phnom Penh, according to two people familiar with the operation.

One company department handles customer relations for scammers and other illicit actors. Another monitors Telegram channels. A third department tracks money mule accounts in at least a dozen countries, according to internal documents we reviewed.

Huione’s companies operate with a veneer of legitimacy in a country with “very limited regulatory enforcement, if any at all,” said John Wojcik, a threat analyst with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The conglomerate’s obscure ownership structure creates challenges for targeted law enforcement, he said.

But even if Huione were shut down, other operators would quickly replace it, according to Mr. Wojcik.

“We can already see competitors now positioning themselves,” he said.

The National Bank of Cambodia, which regulates financial institutions, said the government was committed to ensuring that “financial transactions are safe and transparent.” It said the government was working to comply with international anti-money-laundering recommendations.

The national bank said that it had not renewed a license for Huione’s payment service (the one with the QR codes) to operate in Cambodia because it “did not meet the renewal requirements.” Huione quickly announced plans to register its business in Japan and Canada.

Hunting Mules

Money mules are the people who run the bank accounts and wallets.

Some mules open these bank accounts using fake identities, which artificial intelligence has made easier to create, according to Elad Fouks, who monitors fraud for Chainalysis.

Mules spread out the deposits and withdrawals to make them less noticeable to banks. Transactions below $10,000, for example, are less likely to draw attention. Most accounts and virtual wallets that are used for money laundering are active only for a few weeks or months.

Still, the mules — and not matchmakers or scammers — run the highest risk of getting caught.

In one U.S. court case that outlines the mechanics of such operations, the lead defendant, Daren Li, ran a money mule syndicate that registered 74 U.S. shell companies to launder nearly $80 million. The companies set up accounts at Bank of America and elsewhere.

When victims sent money to the accounts, the funds quickly moved to a bank in the Bahamas. From there, the money was used to purchase Tether cryptocurrency held on the exchange Binance.

Within days, the money moved to another virtual wallet.

Mr. Li worked with Huione International Pay to launder money, according to records we reviewed. But both the F.B.I. and the Secret Service declined to confirm the link. Mr. Li pleaded guilty in November to conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Payday

Imagine, once again, that you are a scam boss. Something has gone wrong: Your mule has been arrested; the bank froze his account; or maybe he ran off with your money.

In these cases, your matchmaker arbitrates disputes.

If the mule is at fault, the matchmaker will help retrieve the deposit from escrow and get it to you. If nobody is to blame, the losses are chalked up to the cost of doing business.

But, if all goes well, you will have your payday, usually in Tether, which you can convert to U.S. dollars at a casino or using Huione’s payment company.

The buildings adjacent to the Golden Sun Sky Casino & Hotel in Sihanoukville have hosted large scam operations, British authorities say.

You can use that money to pay your employees.

These days, scamming operations mimic professional institutions, employing thousands of people in marketing, sales and human resources departments. Often, many employees are victims of human trafficking who are coerced into scamming faraway targets. Some scammers even model their organizations on 19th century company towns, paying wages only after employees complete a season of work. Until then, workers receive company credit.

The wages enrich the restaurants, casinos and brothels that make a killing from captive employees who are often confined to fortified compounds.

Also on the scammer payroll are attractive models who are paid to join video calls and persuade victims to part with their cash. Some of them swap their faces using artificial intelligence.

Scammers, like everyone else, have to pay their landlords — for housing and, in their case, for protection.

And then there are the behind-the-scenes services, many of which can be bought through Huione’s bazaar. Scammers pay software developers to build websites that imitate investment platforms. They need internet and computer infrastructure. And they pay thieves to steal personal data on potential victims: national identification numbers, credit card information, location data and even details about previous hotel stays.

Some of the money will go to dealerships that sell luxury cars. Some is used to buy property in places like London and Dubai.

And of course, some of it will go to fireworks.

 

Planned Parenthood President Makes $904,000