In a Hong Kong courtroom, a young banker’s promising career came to a very public end. Lam Chun-yin, 32, a former customer relationship manager at China Construction Bank (Asia), had been living with a terrible secret: he had falsely authenticated letters of credit worth more than $1.6 billion, and in return he had accepted cryptocurrency bribes worth over $470,000. When he pleaded guilty in District Court, the outcome was all but certain, but the sentence still landed heavily. Judge Ernest Lin Kam-hung did not treat him as a youthful offender deserving of mercy. Instead, he said that deterrent sentences are…

In the tense, high-stakes world of special operations, missions are often planned with meticulous precision, leaving little room for error. So when a team of armed US personnel were preparing to board a vessel on a mission that had been greenlit just hours earlier, the atmosphere was charged with the kind of anticipation that only comes from knowing a single mistake could have international consequences. Military aircraft had already taken to the sky, their engines humming a low, ominous drone over the ocean. The objective was clear: intercept a ship suspected of carrying materials linked to a nuclear weapons program.…