Demand for pangolins in Asia, where populations of these scaly mammals have dwindled, has driven traffickers to Africa, the only other continent where the increasingly endangered animals can be found. Nigeria has become a hub for pangolin trafficking and other illegal trading of wildlife. But authorities have been cracking down, recently arresting a Chinese national…
Britain’s National Crime Agency has warned of an “unprecedented risk” to young people from online groups that encourage teenagers to share sadistic and misogynistic material and to coerce others into sexual abuse, self-harm or violence. The agency, which is responsible for combating serious and organized crime in Britain, said Tuesday in an annual assessment of…
A group of volunteers searching for their missing relatives first received a tip last week about a mass grave hidden in western Mexico. When they arrived at an abandoned ranch outside La Estanzuela, a small rural village outside Guadalajara, they discovered three underground cremation ovens, burned human remains, hundreds of bone shards and discarded personal…
There are usually no international flights out of the airport in Mae Sot, a town on Thailand’s border with Myanmar. But in recent days, hundreds of people here boarded direct flights back home to China. They had been rescued from Myanmar, where they were ensnared in a 21st-century scourge — online scam mills that have…
Italian police officers on Tuesday arrested 181 people believed to be affiliated with the Cosa Nostra, as the Sicilian mafia is known, dealing what officials said was an “important blow” to a criminal organization that has held the region in its grip for generations. “Cosa Nostra is far from dead,” even after years of being…
Daniel Noboa was nowhere to be seen. And, yet, he was everywhere. On balconies. In the arms of various supporters. In the back of a truck. Cardboard cutouts of Mr. Noboa, Ecuador’s president, were ubiquitous at an election rally in a suburb of Quito, the capital, on Wednesday, as they are in many parts of…
Nighttime provides ideal cover for acts of sabotage in the sleepy fishing villages along the southern shores of Nova Scotia. Slashed buoys, stolen lobster crates, mysterious fires. These are just some of the acts of vandalism on the wharves where lobster fishers have been locked in battle for more than three decades. Lobstermen have a…
Standing behind heaping piles of drugs stacked in clear plastic bags and storage boxes, Toronto’s police chief last week announced the force’s largest-ever cocaine seizure, intercepted at the border in a truck entering from the United States. A few hours later, President Trump also addressed cross-border drug trafficking — but in his case to lay…
Taiza Carine da Costa got her first taste of gambling when she was just 9. Growing up in the rundown fringes of Rio de Janeiro, Ms. Costa’s godparents would send her down the block, a few coins in hand, to bet on a popular lottery that, though illegal, has been a staple of life in…
For centuries in Morlaix, a city of cobblestones and creperies on the Breton coast of France, the best-known dealers were the ones who traded in linen during the Renaissance and built a number of unique half-timbered houses in the middle of town. The new dealers are another story. France, long a major European market for…