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Apes are big business — a gorilla baby can cost as much as $250,000 — but who exactly is buying these animals is often as opaque as the traffickers’ identity.

Ape trafficking is a little-known corner of the illicit wildlife trade, a global criminal enterprise that hauls in billions of dollars. But unlike the thriving business in elephant ivory, rhino horns, tiger bone wine or pangolin scales, ape smuggling involves live animals — some of the most endangered, intelligent and sensitive animals on Earth.

n central African towns (as elsewhere in the world), many chimpanzees are kept as pets. Congo’s president, Joseph Kabila, who lives in a riverside mansion in Kinshasa, the capital, has a large chimp locked up in a cage.

But poaching an ape is a serious crime in Congo, and nonprofit wildlife groups have been assisting the Congolese authorities in prosecuting offenders.

Water pumps powered by cheap and highly efficient solar panels are able to drill deep down into rapidly dwindling desert aquifers. The solar panels have helped generate bumper opium harvests year after year since farmers in southern Afghanistan’s poppy-growing belt began installing them around 2014.

The opium trade earned about $1.8 billion to $2.7 billion last year, the United Nations has estimated. Opium sales have provided 9 to 14 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, compared with 9 percent provided by legal exports of goods and services.

The solar arrays have been central to ensuring Afghanistan’s status as the global leader in opium.

The Taliban, for their part, have condemned opium as anti-Islamic, as Afghanistan’s poppy crop sustains addicts in Europe and the Middle East, as well as a huge number inside Afghanistan. But given their own deep ties to opium smuggling during the insurgency, Taliban leaders are walking a fine line between hypocrisy and holiness.

Now, solar power is a defining feature of southern Afghan life. Tiny solar panels power light bulbs in mud huts, and solar-driven pumps irrigate cash crops like wheat and pomegranates, as well as subsistence farmers’ vegetable plots.

Opium farmers now rely on at least 67,000 solar-power-fed water reservoirs across Afghanistan’s desert southwest, according to a European Union-funded research project by David Mansfield, a consultant who has studied illicit economies and rural livelihoods in Afghanistan for two decades.

The panels, which supplanted more expensive and less reliable diesel to run water pumps, have helped turn the desert green.

“For many opium farmers, abundant water is now a given,” he said. “No one perceives it to have a cost.”

“Do not destroy the fields, but make the fields dry out,” Gov. Maulave Talib Akhund said in a statement. He added, “We are committed to fulfilling the opium decree.”

The opium ban was met with a collective shrug this spring by southern farmers, many of whom were already harvesting their spring crops. Opium prices surged almost immediately, several farmers said, to roughly $180 per kilogram from $60 per kilogram.

But the Taliban have vowed to crack down on farmers who try to cultivate any new crops.

Dr. Mansfield said that determining how long the aquifers could continue to supply water was uncharted territory because no one had been able to conduct a rigorous scientific study of the desert groundwater.

“We have to continue to dig our wells deeper and deeper,” Mr. Armani said.

Even when prices are high, many poppy farmers say, they earn only about $2 a day for each family member. They are at the very bottom of a narcotic trafficking system in which profits increase exponentially from growers to middlemen to processing labs to major cross-border traffickers.

Farmers whose poppy fields were plowed under by the previous government could send their sons to paying jobs as soldiers or police officers — or to the constellation of unskilled jobs provided by the United States and NATO. But those options are gone, and unemployment has soared under the Taliban.

“Growing poppies is the only option to survive right now,” he said.

"We were at war all the time, all year round," Oh Ji-Heon, who fled the North in 2010

"In spring, there was the 'war of rice planting'. In summer the 'war of weeding'. Autumn was the 'harvest war' and in winter we fought the 'fishing war',"

The bottom line is that the average North Korean more or less believes the government version of reality," said long-time North Korea watcher Andrei Lankov

Although new technology -- smuggled mobile phones and MP3 players -- have allowed more outside news to creep in, North Koreans still live in the most censored, isolated society on the planet.

"North Koreans aren't paranoid or delusional. They just don't have access to a reality that would challenge the assumptions they are fed,"

But there are signs that the general atmosphere inside the country has shifted with the end of reservist military exercises.

Some European leaders are warning of a fresh migration crisis when sea waters warm again and more people choose to put their lives in the hands of smugglers.

Pope Francis is demanding that "every possible measure" be taken to protect young refugees as he marks the church's World Day of Migrants a day after the latest Mediterranean migrant shipwreck.

Italy's coast guard says only four people survived the sinking of a migrant ship off Libya's coast on Saturday. An estimated 100 people were aboard and only eight bodies have been recovered.

the absence of limits on the amount individuals or corporations can donate has contributed to the ongoing erosion of public confidence in the political process in the UK, according to one watchdog organization. "When donors are making contributions exceeding £20,000 ($31,000) -- and some are making donations well over £250,000 ($390,000) -- it's perfectly understandable you don't give away that kind of money without expecting something in return,"

n Norway, government funding accounted for 74% of political parties' income in 2010, according to Statistics Norway. And unlike in the U.S., where candidates and their supporters can buy as much television time as they can afford, political ads are banned from television and radio.

Corruption monitors say the lack of public funding in India, the world's largest democracy, has contributed to a staggering influx of under the table corporate contributions to candidates that has undercut the integrity of recent elections.

Intelligence reports received by India's Electoral Commission suggested that upwards of $2 billion in so-called "black money" will be spent to influence the Uttar Pradesh state elections this year, according to Anupama Jha, executive director of TI India."Everybody knows about black money," Jha told CNN. "Corporations are expected to donate no more than 5 percent of their profits, but they pay more than that under the table. Those who donate funds also control the politicians, and the politicians (become) more accountable to their sponsors than to their constituents."

ut it's not just corporate black money that's a problem, but the buying of votes in poor areas with hard cash, and sometimes with smuggled liquor.

In the 2009 election in Tamil Nadu, a state with a population roughly the size of France, 33.4% of voters received money from candidates' supporters for their vote, according to a poll by India's Centre of Media Studies -- and in 2011, voters were lured to the polls with blenders, grinders and other household appliances.

"This is why good people don't want to contest elections ... so ultimately you vote for corrupt people, because those are the only people you have to choose from."

The parties try to hijack whatever they can hijack in Russia," Panfilova told CNN

"There are two sets of rules in Russia -- one set for parties who are paying out of their own pockets, and another for the party and candidates with access to public resources," says Elena Panfilova, head of TI Russia.

While there are no limitations on the amount U.S. political parties can spend on televison ads, broadcast time in Russia is doled out on a limited basis, and is proportionate to the results of the last election.

Roughly $2 billion was spent by parties and candidates in the 2010 presidential election, according to Claudio Weber Abramo, executive director of TI Brazil.

Nearly 98% of winner Dilma Rouseff's campaign donations -- and 95.5% of her main opponent's -- came from corporations, says Abramo.Abramo says corporations donated 99.04% of all money spent in Sao Paulo, Brazil's most populous state, during the 2010 election -- a reflection mainly of voters' apathy and politicians' failure to form relationships with their constituents.

"The distribution of money reveals something deeper in the Brazilian political landscape, which is that citizens are not very much concerned about supporting parties and having a political life."While some observers want to ban corporate spending outright, Abramo says that will only make it harder to track corporate influence on politics in the country."The interests are still there even if you prohibit corporations from donating to candidates above the board," he told CNN. "They will do it in a hidden way, and they will lose visibility."

no reliable information exists for how much money was spent during the 2011 presidential election in Nigeria.

While Nigerian law gives the country's election commission the right to set a maximum spending limit for parties, the commission neglected to do so before the 2011 election, according to Magnus Ohman."Parties can do whatever they want, there's no limit to the amount they can spend," Ohman told CNN. "Candidates do have limits, but the money they get from their parties is excluded from that limit."

2011 elections were hailed as a step forward in Nigeria's evolution as a young democracy, the lack of restraint on political spending is a worrying development for election monitors."It really was an expensive election not only at a presidential level but also at the gubernatorial level, especially down in the south," said Ohman. "It's an electoral system where you need to spend."

UK corruption monitor Chandu Krishnan says an ever-increasing amount of money in elections is a global problem."In many countries across the world, the cost of elections is increasing," he told CNN. "If parties and politicians can't find the resources from the state, there is an increasing desperation to seek them from private sources -- and that is where the corruption comes in."

The goal of the military-run shop seemed to be to discourage people from buying weapons, and even gun lovers like Mr. García, 45, a regular at a local shooting club, said that was how it should be. “If you want to stop someone who gets mad at their wife or the world from running out and buying a gun and killing everyone, you have to make it hard,” said Mr. García, who waited two months for the approval to buy a .38-caliber pistol. “It’s the only way to make people think.”

The 1917 Constitution written after Mexico’s bloody revolution, for example, says that the right to carry arms excludes those weapons forbidden by law or reserved for use by the military, and it also states that “they may not carry arms within inhabited places without complying with police regulations.”

the largest weapons in Mexico’s single gun store — including semiautomatic rifles like the one used in the Aurora attack — can be bought only by members of the police or the military. Handgun permits for home protection allow only for the purchase of calibers no greater than .38, so the most exotic option in the pistol case here consisted of a Smith & Wesson revolver selling for $803.05.

Withdrawing the invitation was "the right thing to do", Monzer Akbik, the National Coalition's chief of staff, told the BBC.

Meanwhile, CNN and UK newspaper the Guardian are reporting claims that the Syrian regime tortured and killed thousands of detainees.

But Iran issued several statements on Monday rejecting any attempt to place conditions on its attendance at the conference

"understood and supported the basis and goal of the conference".

It is unclear whether Iran will be able to join the talks two days later, when they move to Geneva.

it shows a chilling systematic documentation of the bodies, each of which was photographed several times and given a number.

Some 55,000 photographs showing roughly 11,000 dead detainees were smuggled out of Syria by a defector who served as a military police photographer

In May last year, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry agreed to try to bring both sides together.

However, the National Coalition appears resolute that any transitional government will not involve President Bashar al-Assad.

American officials say that his government has facilitated the group’s rise not only by purchasing its oil but by exempting some of its headquarters from the airstrikes that have tormented other rebel groups.

The scramble for Syria’s oil is described by analysts as a war within the broader civil war, one that is turning what was once an essential source of income for Syria into a driving force in a conflict that is tearing the country apart. “Syria is an

The Western-backed rebel groups do not appear to be involved in the oil trade, in large part because they have not taken over any oil fields.

Violence has damaged pipelines and other infrastructure, aggravating energy shortages and leaving the country heavily dependent on imports from its allies.

Oil has proved to be a boon for the extremists of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, who have seized control of most of the oil-rich northern province of Raqqa. The group typically sells crude to middlemen who resell it to the government but sometimes sells it directly to the government, said Omar Abu Laila, a spokesman for the rebels’ Supreme Military Council.

“Selling the oil brings in more cash, so why not sell it to the regime, which offers higher prices?” he asked.

While other American officials discounted the possibility of tactical military cooperation between the group and Mr. Assad’s government, they said that Syrian intelligence had almost certainly infiltrated opposition groups, including the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and the Nusra Front, to track their activities.

Mr. Assad’s government has become increasingly dependent on its foreign allies and imports most of its fuel from Iran and Iraq, while Hezbollah smuggles diesel and gasoline over the border from Lebanon, according to regional oil experts.

But local tribal leaders objected, saying that would simply invite government airstrikes to destroy the plant. So they brokered a deal to keep a limited amount of gas flowing so the area would not be bombed, Mr. Abdy sa

Recently, however, most of the area’s rebel brigades have left the administration of the wells to an Islamic legal commission set up to run local affairs, he said.

Hezbollah, a Shiite movement, has sent fighters to support the Syrian Army, while Lebanon’s Sunnis largely support the Syrian rebels, and some have shipped them weapons or crossed the border to join them on the battlefield.

It accelerated the tempo of political violence, which is mostly fueled by deep splits between Lebanon’s Sunnis and Shiites that have been inflamed by the civil war in neighboring Syria.

While the neighborhood is residential, Hezbollah dominates the area. Posters of the group’s armed members who have died in battle adorn lampposts, and the group’s media office and construction company are nearby, as is the Lebanon office of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group.

The March 14th coalition, which includes the Future Movement, said in a statement that each victim was “a martyr mourned by all Lebanese.” The head of the Future Movement, Saad Hariri, a former prime minister, said that those killed were victims not only of terrorism, but also of “the involvement in foreign wars, especially the Syrian war.” Although the Future Movement officially disavows the use of violence, some members have smuggled arms to the Syrian rebels, and its leaders have lost ground to hard-line clerics who call for attacks on Hezbollah.

In a video statement last week, a cleric acting as a spokesman for the Abdullah Azzam Brigades said the group would not stop its bombings until Hezbollah withdrew its fighters from Syria and the Lebanese authorities released youths jailed for militant activities.

Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has said in speeches that the group is fighting in Syria against takfiris, meaning Sunni extremists who consider their opponents infidels. He has called them a threat not just to Shiites, but to the entire region.

If Putin admits his Ukraine adventure was a mistake, he will look incredibly foolish and the long knives will be out for him in the Kremlin. If he doesn’t back down, Russians will pay a huge price. Either way, that system will be stressed with unpredictable spillovers on the global economy. Remember: Russia’s 1998 economic collapse — also triggered by low oil prices and the moratorium it declared on payments to foreign debtors — helped to sink the giant American hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, sparking a near meltdown on Wall Street.

in an age when machines and software are ensuring that average is over for workers in developed countries, and everyone needs to be upgrading their skills, what happens to the developing Arab states and Iran, who have used oil money to mask their deficits in knowledge, education and women’s empowerment? Egypt’s military-led government is highly in need of Arab oil money to get through its crisis. A bit of good news: The Islamic State, which depends on oil smuggling, will fail at governing even faster than it already has.

Turkey now “needs more than $200 billion of foreign financing a year, more than a quarter of gross domestic product, to maintain its current level of growth.” There will be less Arab and Russian oil money for that and, last week, with Erdogan being criticized by the European Union (a big source of investment income) for arresting his opponents, the Turkish lira hit a low against the dollar.

olice say 279 people have been charged in the period from September 2015 to February 2016.

In January, a man was fined DKr5,000 (£517) for driving an Afghan family from the German border in September.

“I simply could not go home with the car empty. I did not think it was forbidden to take hitchhikers,”

I thought smuggling was when you pass a border and when you take money or benefit from it – not driving inside the country,” she said. “But unfortunately that seems to be the case in Denmark.”

“Denmark is no longer the number one in Europe on human rights, but at the bottom of the table. The past 10 years have seen the dismantling of Danish human asylum law,”

“The number of refugees coming to Denmark is dropping, but we speak about it as if we are Greece,” Søgaard said. “Common sense seems like a city in Russia right now, it seems such long way away.”

“There is a very different feeling among at least urbanised Danes, who see these prosecutions as unnecessarily punitive,”

“In a different climate the cases would have been dropped – in any other country it would impossible to prosecute, imaginable in Hungary perhaps,”

“It is an obligation as a person to act when you have the power to do something. You have to oppose laws that persecute other people,”

“I have been very worried that I could lose my right to stay here and be deported,”

Explosives experts said it was feasible the device shown in the photo could bring down a plane, depending on where it was located and the density of explosives in the soft drink can. The most vulnerable locations include the fuel line, the cockpit or anywhere close to the fuselage skin.

Experts added that the photo could also provide a key clue in tracking Islamic State as the detonator pictured was a commercial one, which could be traced back to its manufacturer.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said on Wednesday the U.S. government was not in a position to confirm "the veracity" of the magazine's claim.

activity is likely the reason," he said, referring to the crash.

"We do believe that terrorist

also published a photo of what it said were passports belonging to dead Russians "obtained by the mujahideen". It was not immediately possible to verify the authenticity of the published photos.The group, which has seized large swathes of Syria and Iraq, said it had exploited a loophole at Sharm al-Sheikh airport, where the plane originated, in order to smuggle a bomb on board.

The airport is widely used by budget and charter airlines to fly tourists to the nearby resorts on the Sinai coast.

said it had initially planned to bring down a plane belonging to a country participating in the U.S.-led coalition bombing it in Syria and Iraq, but it changed course after Moscow started its own air strikes campaign in Syria.

Islamic State's Egyptian branch, Sinai Province, claimed responsibility for the attack the day it happened but Egyptian officials were quick to dismiss talk of a bomb as premature.

were killed in the clashes, along with at least nine militants, the defence ministry said.

Correspondents say the attack is a huge security failure because the attackers were able to smuggle weapons into an area supposed to have been made secure by the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF).

Afghan Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani, speaking at the conference, called on Pakistan to help restart stalled peace talks with the Taliban.

Witnesses reported that some of the militants took families hostage and used them as human shields. They said they could hear Afghan soldiers calling on the fighters to let the women and children go.

Separately, the Taliban claimed to have captured Khanashin district in southern Helmand province. A local official confirmed the district had fallen.

Militant violence has increased across Afghanistan since the departure of most Nato and US forces last year.

The statement by the Taliban claimed that they had killed up to 80 soldiers. This figure could not be verified.

Afghan Taliban kill dozens at Kandahar airport

The attack continued until one gunman who had out on his own for several hours was killed late on Wednesday.

I had the most affectionate wife. I took my family out of Syria to escape the killing. My children could have had a future in Europe. Now I have lost my family, my world,” he said.

this week, another group of migrants, including six Afghan children, drowned after a rubber dinghy carrying them to Greece sank in the Aegean.

They are among more than 3,500 people who have died or been reported missing this year while trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe.

Ankara has stepped up a crackdown on people smuggling, arresting thousands of refugees, after it promised to curb the flow of refugees to Greece in exchange for financial aid from the EU.

The EU’s pledge of €3bn (£2.1bn) in aid for the 2.2 million Syrians now in Turkey is intended to raise living standards and persuade migrants to stay in the country rather than attempt the journey to the EU via the Greek islands.

, Donald Tusk, the president of the European council, recently told the Guardian that refugees arriving in Europe should be detained for up to 18 months in holding centres across the EU while they are screened for security and terrorism risks

The National Crime Agency (NCA) established that the gang trafficked drugs, packaged in colour-coded parcels and hidden behind false panels in the ambulances, from the Netherlands to the UK.

Sources within the NCA said they believed 20 different gangs around the UK relied on the ambulance racket for supplies of class A drugs.

He said: “The prosecution suggest this was a top-level, audacious, and – up to the point of interception and the arrests – a successful and lucrative criminal conspiracy.”

Inside the back of the ambulance, concealed behind panels in six “hides”, were neatly stacked, colour-coded packets of class A drugs, including cocaine with a street value of more than £30m and heroin worth £8m. Officers also found 60,000 ecstasy tablets.

The court was told that the company’s records showed the fake ambulance journeys had been “going on over weeks and months”. In all, at least 45 trips were made in 14 months.

Bijlsma was described in the court as Schoon’s right-hand man. The prosecution told the jury that a rivet gun was found with Bijlsma’s DNA on it. It said this gun was used to fasten the panels inside the ambulance.

"The two are trying to slaughter each other and they are still engaged in millions and millions of dollars of trade," Mr Szubin said of Syria and IS, in comments reported by Reuters news agency.

The US-led coalition has recently launched a military campaign, dubbed Tidal Wave 2, intensifying air strikes on IS oil fields, refineries and tankers being used by the group.

Other sources include taxation, drug and antiquities smuggling, robbery and kidnapping and the sale of electricity, it found.

And there is the relentless physical and psychological contraction of their communities,

“I don’t go anywhere,” said Maleka Jabir, 85, who said she inherited American citizenship from her father, a World War I veteran, and is so disabled from hunger and heart problems she can hardly walk

This portrait of life in Madaya is drawn from interviews with more than a dozen residents, conducted over several months and in recent days by telephone and over the Interne

While details of their experiences could not be independently confirmed, international aid workers who have visited the town or been in direct contact with groups on the ground provided accounts that echoed the residents’.

While parts of Homs and the Damascus suburbs have been blockaded for years, Madaya managed to survive relatively unscathed, until last summer

Both local residents and Hezbollah officials say most of the fighters in Zabadani are affiliated with a Syrian Islamist group called Ahrar al-Sham, and smaller numbers with the more moderate Free Syrian Army and the Qaeda-linked Nusra Front.

Looking for leverage, rebels allied with the local insurgents began blockading and bombarding Fouaa and Kfarya, two isolated, pro-government Shiite towns in Idlib Province, in Syria’s northwest.

The medical clinic in Madaya, which works with Doctors Without Borders, was bombed, and thus was moved to a basement. Mr. Mohammad, an anesthesia technician who has been acting as a doctor, said he was overwhelmed with cases he could not treat properly: broken bones, amputations, abdominal wounds

giving the most endangered children syrupy medicines, for the glucose, further depleting supplies.

Finding food was getting harder. Aid workers and residents said fighters on both sides profited from smuggling it across the lines.

“If the funds in national budgets and the European budget aren’t enough, let’s agree, for example, to raise a levy on every litre of gasoline,” Mr Schäuble told the daily newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. “Why not agree this at the European level if the task is so urgent?”

Mr. Gui is not the first Hong Kong-based publisher of sensitive political books to be arrested by the mainland police on unrelated charges. In 2014, Yiu Mantin, who had been planning to publish a book critical of President Xi Jinping, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for smuggling industrial chemicals.

A press officer for the Swedish Foreign Ministry did not immediately return a phone call and email sent outside of normal office hours.

There is no way to independently verify the reports by the Observatory and SANA; other opposition outlets have put the number of casualties lower.

The Observatory also reported Saturday that ISIS had killed or executed some 50 soldiers and 85 civilians during its offensive against al-Bagaliyeh.

Fighting between government and ISIS forces continued Monday, the Observatory reported.

The ISIS-affiliated news agency Aamaq said Sunday that 167 regime fighters had been killed and many more wounded. A video released by ISIS Sunday purported to show heavy artillery and tanks being used as well as abandoned regime positions.

Neighborhoods where the regime is holding out have been under siege by ISIS for a year, with medical supplies and food scarce and generators the only source of electricity. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has reported massive price inflation, as products had to be smuggled across the Euphrates River.

ISIS has stepped up offensives against several of these areas.

several neighborhoods, capturing and killing dozens of Syrian soldiers but also seizing many civilians, according to reports from activists.

As ISIS has gone on the offensive, Russia has stepped up its support for the regime in and around the city.

As the situation has worsened, some civilians have managed to escape the city, which had nearly 1.5 million inhabitants before the Syrian conflict began

Most of the city has been controlled by ISIS for well over a year, but some neighborhoods and the military airport to the south have remained in the hands of the regime

Most of the city has been controlled by ISIS for well over a year, but some neighborhoods and the military airport to the south have remained in the hands of the regime