内容摘要：“Given the Trump Administration’s mission to indiscriminately deport our nation’s immigrants – without due process, in violation of the Constitution and federal immigration law, and, in some cases, in defiance of court orders – it is deeply disturbing that Avelo has determined that its partnership with ICE is ‘too valuable not to pursue,’” Padilla’s office said in a news release.

“Given the Trump Administration’s mission to indiscriminately deport our nation’s immigrants – without due process, in violation of the Constitution and federal immigration law, and, in some cases, in defiance of court orders – it is deeply disturbing that Avelo has determined that its partnership with ICE is ‘too valuable not to pursue,’” Padilla’s office said in a news release.

If access to power is the currency that Angel and Doolan peddled, gold is the calling card of a string of — at times rival — smuggling operations.One of the gangs is run by Kamlesh Pattni, a businessman who in the 1990s was accused of pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars belonging to the Kenyan exchequer through a gold smuggling scheme. He was charged but never convicted. Al Jazeera’s undercover operation shows that Pattni is now involved in a similar scam in Zimbabwe, exporting gold to Dubai and then laundering both the money and the precious metal.

Pattni’s biggest competitor, a gold smuggler named Ewan Macmillan, also offered to help launder money for Al Jazeera’s reporters. Like Pattni, Macmillan, uses a group of couriers to transport hundreds of kilos of gold per week from Zimbabwe to Dubai, where it is then laundered through a web of companies and false invoices. Central to Macmillan’s operations is his business partner Alistair Mathias, who advises clients on how to cleanse their dirty cash.Finally, Al Jazeera obtained details of how Simon Rudland, one of Zimbabwe’s richest men, launders money through both Zimbabwean and South African companies. Rudland is the owner of Gold Leaf Tobacco, one of southern Africa’s biggest cigarette brands, especially on South Africa’s black market.These smuggling gangs have official licenses from Zimbabwe’s central bank that allow them to sell the country’s gold in Dubai, documents accessed by Al Jazeera show. They are expected to return the proceeds from those sales back to the central bank.

Instead, Pattni, Macmillan and Matthias have a well-oiled money laundering mechanism in place. They told Al Jazeera’s undercover reporters to set up shell companies in Dubai that would serve as a front for gold trade. The legitimate money earned from the sale of Zimbabwean gold in the emirate would be transferred to the bank accounts of these shell firms. And the smugglers would instead carry the dirty cash back with them to Harare, where they would deposit it with the central bank.“So, it’s very clean that way,” said Mathias, Macmillan’s partner.

When asked about the findings of Al Jazeera’s investigations, Pattni said no allegation of criminal wrongdoing had been upheld against him in Kenya. He denied involvement in any kind of money laundering, as well as employing anyone to smuggle cash or offering to deal with funds he knew originated from illegal sources. He said that when he met with our undercover team, he thought he was meeting with an investor who wanted to sell a stake in hotel businesses and “to divest of a portfolio in China into gold buying and mining in Zimbabwe”.

Alistair Mathias denied that he designed mechanisms to launder money and said that he had never laundered money or traded illegal gold. He told us he had never had any working relationship with Ewan Macmillan.His colleagues in the research team agreed.

“Our work is the starting point for all the investigations that are now needed to confirm and understand the implications of these exciting findings,” said co-author Savvas Constantinou, also from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy.Is there other evidence of extraterrestrial life?

The findings of the Cambridge-led team follow a series of breakthroughs in recent years that have excited scientists about the possibilities of finding life beyond Earth.In 2011, NASA scientists announced that they had found chemicals that are components of DNA on meteorites that had landed in Antarctica. The chemical traces they had discovered couldn’t have been the result of contamination after the meteorites landed on Earth. The only explanation – that asteroids and comets could contain the building blocks of life.