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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,”

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.

“In the future, there will be millions of men who can’t marry, and that could pose a very big risk to society,

Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females — the equivalent of almost the entire population of California, or Poland, who will never find wives and only rarely have sex.

India, a country that has a deeply held preference for sons and male heirs, has an excess of 37 million males

The imbalance creates a surplus of bachelors and exacerbates human trafficking, both for brides and, possibly, prostitution.

Village life and mental health. Among men, loneliness and depression are widespread. Villages are emptying out. Men are learning to cook and perform other chores long relegated to women.

Housing prices and savings rates. Bachelors are furiously building houses in China to attract wives, and prices are soaring. But otherwise they are not spending, and that in turn fuels China’s huge trade surplus

In India, there is the opposite effect: Because brides are scarce, families are under less pressure to save for expensive dowries

Human trafficking. Trafficking of brides is on the rise. Foreign women are being recruited and lured to China, effectively creating similar imbalances in China’s neighbors.

Public safety. With the increase in men has come a surge in sexual crime in India and concerns about a rise in other crimes in both countries. Harassment of schoolgirls in India has in some towns sparked an effort to push back — but at a cost of restricting them to more protected lives.

Mr. Hernández is a key United States ally in the region, and the investigation could jeopardize the bilateral relationship and complicate the Biden administration’s efforts to invest $4 billion in Central America to address violence and corruption, reduce poverty and bolster the rule of law in an effort to stem migration to the United States.

During his brother’s trial, witnesses and prosecutors said Mr. Hernández had accepted millions of dollars for his and his party’s political campaigns in exchange for protecting drug traffickers.

In a series of Twitter posts on Monday, as jury selection in Mr. Fuentes’s trial got underway in Manhattan, Mr. Hernández again declared his innocence, saying that “with my election, the party ended” for drug traffickers.

Mr. Gutwillig, the prosecutor, did not mince words in his opening arguments on Tuesday: He called Honduras “a narco-state.”

Mr. Fuentes developed a relationship with Mr. Hernández, who took office in 2014, in a series of secret meetings in 2013 and 2014 during which the men “plotted to send as much cocaine as possible to the United States,” the prosecutor said. Mr. Fuentes paid Mr. Hernández $25,000 for the help.

The president also said he was embezzling aid money from the United States using fraudulent organizations, and siphoning money from the country’s Social Security system, according to the documents, which do not mention Mr. Hernández by name, describing him as “CC-4” — meaning co-conspirator 4 — though his identity is clear.

Mr. Hernández offered up the services of the Honduran armed forces and the attorney general’s office to facilitate cocaine transportation, and noted his own interest in accessing Mr. Fuentes’s cocaine laboratory, which was near Puerto Cortés, a major commercial shipping port, prosecutors said.

“The United States cannot remain silent in the face of deeply alarming corruption and human rights abuses being committed at the highest levels of the Honduran government,” Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, said in a statement.

It is unashamedly religious pronouncements such as this from Caviezel that have attracted widespread support from conservatives and right-wing influencers who have helped fuel Sound of Freedom’s surprise success.

Caviezel mentioned “the adrenochroming of children”, referring to a macabre blood-harvesting conspiracy theory circulating among some online communities. His controversial claims do not appear to have harmed Sound of Freedom’s prospects at the box office

The film, which has a reported budget of $14.5 million, was completed in 2018 and spent years bouncing around Hollywood after being rejected by major studios, including Disney.

The studio raised the cost of releasing Sound of Freedom through courting investments from the public, with about 7,000 people chipping in between $10 and $25,000 each.

Michael Grace, a Hollywood writer and producer, said the success of Sound of Freedom may convince studios to diversify from “woke” content.

“And it’s like they’re not realising it’s a business and they’re not asking ‘Are we going to make any money on this?’ They may look at this movie and realise it’s doing as well as Harrison Ford.”

Though prostitution is legal in India, those who practice it have long faced marginalization, violence and police harassment. A panel set up in 2011 to examine these issues has made a series of recommendations over the past six years, but none have been written into law.

In that order, the court identified two categories: consenting adults voluntarily employed in prostitution; and minors, trafficking victims and those eager to leave the industry.

“It is as if they are a class whose rights are not recognized,” the court added. “The police and other law enforcement agencies should be sensitized to the rights of sex workers who also enjoy all basic human rights and other rights guaranteed in the Constitution to all citizens. Police should treat all sex workers with dignity.”

The court also clarified that prostitutes should not be separated from their children.

India is among a small handful of countries, including Canada and New Zealand, that have instituted legal protections for prostitutes. Though performing sexual acts for money itself is legal, running a brothel and other related activities, like soliciting and pimping, are not.

Rights groups estimate that India has about 900,000 prostitutes. Most, they say, have been pushed into the work by crushing poverty and sometimes forced into it by human traffickers. Others have chosen it over other informal employment opportunities, researchers have found.

The Supreme Court order addresses something that the United Nations and other institutions have stressed: decriminalizing sex work is, alone, not enough to improve conditions for workers in the industry. Governments need to lift other impediments to ensure equal treatment.

Zareena, 55, who asked that only her first name be used because of the stigma attached to her profession, said that she had been trafficked into the sex trade at the age of 12 but that, as an adult, she chose to continue the work to support her four children.

When she heard about the court’s directive on Friday, she said, she was hopeful it would free prostitutes from the fear of being dragged into police stations, where they were often harassed for bribes.

The frustration has been compounded by the lack of recourse for Mr. Alefantis, his friends and employees. Yelp blocked the comments sections of Comet Ping Pong’s review page after reports of abusive comments and fake news in reviews. YouTube said it prohibits threats, harassment and hate speech and has tools for flagging violations and filing complaints for the site to take further action, but has largely not blocked comments on these videos. Twitter declined to comment, and Facebook did not have any further comment.

After employees and Mr. Alefantis complained to Reddit about how Comet Ping Pong was being targeted on the site, the #pizzagate discussion thread posted a warning that revealing personal information about individuals was prohibited.“We know that we have more work to do and we take our responsibility to address online abuse seriously,” Reddit said in a statement

Some 100 tons (91 metric tons) of cocaine passed through the Caribbean in 2013,

at least 90 percent of the drugs that enter Puerto Rico end up in the U.S.

suspects relying on go-fast boats, ferries, yachts and even cruise ships to transport drugs.

Cash seizures at Puerto Rico's main international airport are at an all-time high, according to the plan.

Drugs are blamed for more than 80 percent of killings in Puerto Rico,

Children who set foot on U.S. soil without authorization have long been afforded additional legal protections

Under that law, Mexican children can be transferred to Mexican authorities after being screened to ensure they are not victims of trafficking or persecution.

The Trump administration has denounced this patchwork of legal safeguards, arguing the protections encourage children from poor and often violence-plagued areas of Central America to journey north with the help of smugglers.

Citing the pandemic, the Trump administration has argued that migrant children are not entitled to these safeguards, and that the laws that created them are effectively inoperative as long as the CDC's orders remain in place.

Citing the CDC order, U.S. authorities have pushed 6,500 unaccompanied children back into Mexico.

They are the migrant children found by an "underground railroad" network of immigration lawyers, human rights activists and child advocates who support humanitarian-centered border policies.

The attorneys from the Federal Public Ministry say the time has come for Brazilian institutions to account for their role in slavery. They’ve called on Banco do Brasil to commit to some form of reparations.

The attorneys on Friday gave Banco do Brasil 15 days to publicly acknowledge its role in slavery and the slave trade and present plans for some form of reparations.

The bank does not deny its ties to slavery but has argued that it should not be held responsible for the sins of a society. It says it did not commit any crimes and should not be liable for the actions of those who worked for or funded the bank

Brazilians, particularly elites descended from European settlers, have historically preferred to think of their country as free of racism. “A racial democracy,” they boasted, where people could marry independent of skin color and race was defined less rigidly than in the United States.

That story, historians say, has largely obscured the primacy of slavery in Brazil’s genesis — and its enduring impact. Brazil imported around 5 million enslaved Africans — far more than any other country — accounting for roughly 40 percent of the entire trade

Nearly twice as many enslaved people were brought through a single wharf in Rio de Janeiro than arrived in all of the United States. It was the last country in the Americas, in 1888, to abolish slavery.

“Bring together capital that has found itself displaced from illicit trade and converge it into a center where the productive forces of the country could be fed,” Irineu Evangelista de Sousa, who reopened the bank, wrote in his autobiography. “This was the idea that came into my head.”

Banco do Brasil, which in 2023 reported $380.3 billion in assets and $5.8 billion in profits, according to Forbes. Chartered in 1808 by Portuguese King Dom João, the bank drew its foundational capital from taxes the crown imposed on sea trade, much of which involved slavery. The wealthy Rio elite — many of whom trafficked in enslaved Africans — were invited by the crown to finance the bank.

When the trade was outlawed in 1831, the bank’s ties to slavery didn’t diminish, historians and government attorneys say — they intensified. The bank closed for two decades but reopened in 1853 for the purpose of accumulating ill-gotten wealth, prosecutors and historians allege, most of it from the international slave trade.

“Brazil has never had a problem romanticizing its memory of slavery,” said Luciana Brito, a historian at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia. “It likes to remember slavery as a means of producing a beautiful people, of one nation, as though it was a necessary evil.”

The openness with which he spoke of the scheme, historians say, betrays the extent to which the crime of slavery was normalized in elite Brazilian society.

Under pressure from the United Kingdom, Brazil begrudgingly signed on to an international campaign to abolish the international slave trade in 1831. But it did little to enforce it. More than 700,000 enslaved Africans were trafficked into the country until a more restrictive law was passed in 1850.

But that story, and so many others, was virtually unknown to Brazilians, said Thiago Campos, a historian at the Federal Fluminense University. So a group of historians began discussing earlier this year how to start a broader conversation.

Fourteen historians wrote a letter this autumn to government attorneys outlining what they knew of Banco do Brasil’s history and asking for a national debate on the matter. The attorneys with the Federal Public Ministry, who represent Brazilians in cases involving individual or social rights, took it even further: They called for reparations.

“Unfortunately, Brazil is very behind on this discussion,” he said. “I believe it will be likely that as we progress with this case, others will come forward, and we’ll have more discussion on this topic. It’s an important moment to put this on the national agenda.”

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.

At least three requests have been filed to the International Criminal Court demanding that Libyan and European officials, as well as traffickers, militiamen and others be investigated for crimes against humanity.

A U.N. inquiry published in October also found evidence that abuses committed in Libya may amount to crimes against humanity.

The EU report noted the “excessive use of physical force” by a Libyan patrol during the Sept. 15 interception of a wooden boat with about 20 migrants off the coast of Libya.

In 2018 she got on a smuggler’s boat bound for Europe but her group was caught by Libyan authorities and taken to the notorious Tajoura detention center where detainees were beaten and abused. She was only released after a friend paid a $700 ransom to the guards.

Questioned about the detention centers in Libya, Stano said the EU’s position is clear: “They are unacceptable. The current arbitrary detention system must end.”

The Libyan government last month named Mohammed Al-Khoja, a militia leader implicated in abuses against migrants, to head the Department for Combating Irregular Migration, which oversees the detention centers.

“The Europeans pretend to show the good face,” said a Cameroonian woman who arrived in Libya in 2016 with her child thinking she would find work. Instead, she was trafficked and forced into prostitution after being separated from her daughter. The AP does not identify victims of sexual violence.

The Libyan forces used tactics “never observed before and not in compliance with (EU) training ... as well as international regulation,”

“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?”

“They are laughed at, often called names and photographed against their will,” she said. “In addition, human trafficking, fraud and money laundering must be reduced, and thirdly, I want less inconvenience for residents and entrepreneurs. It must be quieter, cleaner and more livable there than now.”

Rep. Gaetz was welcomed to Trump Doral this week and has not sought to meet with President Trump himself,"

The interference by Trump's aides signals that Gaetz finds himself increasingly isolated as he weathers a potentially career-ending scandal just months after he offered to leave his plum job in Congress to join the 45th President's impeachment defense team.

Trump denied ever receiving a blanket pardon request from the 38-year-old congressman and noted Gaetz's denial of the allegations against him.

Trump spokesman Jason Miller wrote in a tweet on Sunday evening that Gaetz did not request a meeting "and therefore, it could never have been denied."Read More

Federal investigators are examining allegations that Gaetz had sex with an underage girl who was 17 at the time and with other women who were provided drugs and money in violation of sex trafficking and prostitution laws.

Gaetz has continued to deny all allegations against him and has not been charged with any crimes.

Trump omitted Gaetz as he name-checked many of his top Republican defenders -- from South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, according to two people familiar with his remarks.

Trump's failure to mention Gaetz was viewed as conspicuous to some in the crowd, given the congressman's outsized loyalty to the former President and the litany of other Republicans Trump called out during his speech.

Gaetz's appearance on Friday at a conference for pro-Trump women raised eyebrows inside the former President's orbit

Gaetz, who was announced as a "special guest" only days before the summit began, used his time on stage to denounce "wild conspiracy theories" about his personal life, and to reaffirm his plans to remain on Capitol Hill.

Gaetz has already faced calls from one Republican colleague, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, to resign his congressional seat and has received virtually no support from within Trump's orbit

Now, as President Biden, he is doubling down on that strategy once again and assigning his own vice president, Kamala Harris, the prickly challenge of carrying out his plan to commit $4 billion in a remarkably similar approach as she travels to the region Sunday.

But the numbers tell a different story. After years of the United States flooding Central America with aid, migration from the region soared in 2019 and is on the upswing once more.

Ms. Harris, who has little foreign policy experience and no history in the region, has already been criticized for not visiting the border.

The political risks are evident, including the obvious pitfalls of investing billions in a region where the president of Honduras has been linked to drug traffickers and accused of embezzling American aid money, the leader of El Salvador has been denounced for trampling democratic norms and the government of Guatemala has been criticized for persecuting officials fighting corruption.

“We’ve looked extensively at different programs that have been approached,” said Nancy McEldowney, a longtime diplomat who serves as Ms. Harris’s national security adviser.

Foreign aid is often a difficult, and at times flawed, tool for achieving American interests abroad, but it’s unclear whether there are any simple alternatives for the Biden administration.

From 2016 to 2020, 80 percent of the American-financed development projects in Central America were entrusted to American contractors, according to data provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“It’s an incredibly not-transparent situation,” said Eric Olson, an expert on foreign aid to Central America at the Seattle International Foundation. “It’s like this is a national secret.”

Even when aid money reached Guatemala in recent years, it often brought little change, according to interviews with dozens who worked with or received assistance from U.S.-financed projects in the country’s western highlands.

For decades, migration to the United States followed a pattern: Aside from some spikes in migration from Central America after civil wars or natural disasters, it was mostly single Mexicans who headed north in search of better jobs and pay.

Aid workers kept coming to deliver lots of seminars on topics in which the farmers were already well versed, they said, such as planting new varieties of coffee beans, and then left.

In the reams that have been written about the plight of the Rohingya, chronic and utter disenfranchisement is the most consistent thread. The origins of their bottom-tier status are colonial, but were codified in 1982 when the Burmese government passed a law that restricted their movement and access to education, and allowed for arbitrary confiscation of property.

With repatriation stalled, Bangladesh is now exploring relocation. The country has thus far been patient and welcoming, but its willingness to host such a large refugee population is wearing thin.

The atrocities continue to this day, deepening the humanitarian catastrophe in the province of Rakhine. (Myanmar has repeatedly denied carrying out any ethnic cleansing or genocide.)

Myanmar government signed a memorandum of understanding with two UN agencies as a first step toward the Rohingya’s repatriation, they were not consulted. So when 3,450 Rohingya families were offered voluntary return to Rakhine, not a single one took up the offer.

Wave after wave of extreme violence against them culminated in August 2017 with a crackdown that forcibly displaced nearly a million people. At least 9,000 members of their community died in just the first month of the onslaught

the storm surge during the monsoon often triggers landslides, and the mud, water, and sewage from makeshift toilets in the camps combine to form a deadly cocktail of infectious and waterborne diseases.

Staying here in the camps carries its own risks. Children have had no access to formal education, creating what UNICEF has called a “lost generation,” while human traffickers prey on young girls and boys.

Yet somehow, when faced with repatriation to Rakhine or relocation to Bhasan Char, the squalid camps appear the safest option.

For one thing, donor support is in doubt. Bangladesh, itself a poor nation, is struggling to cope with the economic and environmental impact of hosting so many refugees.

At the same time, the conditions in the camps are worsening. Bangladesh directed local telecom operators at the beginning of September to shut down networks in the camps

Last week, the government took the clampdown a step further, announcing that refugees were now expected to stop using Bangladeshi cellphone SIM cards or face potential fines and jail time. Rohingya families rely on internet connectivity to stay in touch with loved ones still in Rakhine

On September 7, a parliamentary committee on defense recommended that a barbed-wire fence be built around the camps, restricting the free movement that refugees are afforded under international law. The decision has essentially created an open-air prison.

This relative unwillingness to criticize either the Myanmar or Bangladesh government—seen by UN agencies as necessary to preserve relationships with the two countries so that they continue to allow them to carry out relief work—has rankled Rohingya leaders such as Ullah, who argue that the language of international politics and humanitarianism is instead being used to mask inaction.

official UN Security Council designation of genocide is critical to activating the 1948 Genocide Convention, allowing perpetrators to be punished and peacekeeping forces to be deployed.

China and Russia, veto-wielding members of the body, are likely to block any action against Myanmar

Two years ago, when foreigners rushed in with aid, the Rohingya expected their plight to improve. They thought they would get a seat at the negotiating tables where their fates are being sealed, so that the human rights enshrined in international law might be extended to them.Instead, Ullah and his fellow Rohingya here are reduced to holding out hope that their children will receive a better education, to at least offer the prospect that their community’s lot will improve in the future.

a modern-day Svengali.”

compared himself to Einstein and Gandhi while touting Nxivm as a “community guided by humanitarian principles that seek to empower people.”

he created a secret master-slave group for women within Nxivm called DOS, where stick-thin devotees were branded with his initials above their genitals, made to wear dog collars and submit to unwanted sex with Raniere and other members, the feds said.

who went by the title “The Vanguard” — preyed on the young as he committed what the FBI called “serious crimes against humanity.”

part of his bizarre plan to use her as some kind of “vessel” to supposedly achieve immortality — and took porno shots of her, according to testimony at his trial.

Many were then branded with a cauterizing pen in ceremonies videotaped by other members to prove their loyalty to the group, some women said.

“The world closed in on me,” she recalled. “Every degree of freedom I had was lost.”

In June 2019, the jury took under five hours to convict Raniere of all of the seven counts against him, including for sex-trafficking, racketeering, child pornography and forced labor. He faces 15 years to life on the charges.

The sentencing comes amid heightened interest in the case, with two recent docu-series — HBO’s “The Vow” and Starz’ “Seduced” — featuring survivors telling their stories.

Raniere, who did not testify at his trial, has also vowed to protest his innocence.