Over the past five weeks, Turkey’s role in facilitating the trafficking of illicit Islamic State crude has been exposed for the world to see. Ankara’s move to shoot down a Russian Su-24 near the Syrian border prompted a media blitz from Moscow, which has variously accused the Erdogan government of being complicit in a business that nets Bakr al-Baghdadi between $500 million and $1 billion per year in revenue.
A 19-year-old was fatally shot in the early hours of Saturday morning when a Chicago police officer discharged his weapon at the scene of a disturbance in West Garfield Park on Chicago’s West Side. abc7 reports: The shooting happened at about 4:30 a.m. Saturday near West Erie Street and North Kilpatrick Avenue, officials said. One of the victims was 19-year-old Quintonio LeGrier, who she said was in college studying engineering, but had a mental illness, said his mother, Janet Cooksey.
An Israeli couple have been arrested for trying to sell their three month old daughter to pay gambling debts. The couple from Jerusalem were detained after trying to sell the baby for 100,000 shekels ($26,000) The father “advertised” the child as healthy, but a physical exam showed that she was suffering from severe neglect. RT reports: “Meet your new daddy,” the father, 30, told his daughter giving her to an undercover police officer just a moment before he was arrested, Israeli media reported. His wife, 27, was also detained upon suspicion of helping and abetting her husband.
Amid ISIS' spread, with NATO troops pulling out, and local law enforcement agencies ill-equipped and underfunded, Afghanistan has once again become the frontline in the so-called "War On Drugs." As Al-Jazeera reports, Afghanistan's poppy fields, which feed the habits of drug addicts worldwide, are thriving, with cultivation of the crop hitting record highs last year.
Record breaking landslides could be taking place right now that are not being registered. One of the largest landslides in over 30 years went unnoticed in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness. Motherboard reports: One such event occurred last October, when 200 million metric tons of rock—the equivalent to the weight of 1,104,972 blue whales—slid off the side of a remote mountain in Southeast Alaska, sending debris flying and launching a tsunami large enough to be measured by a tidal gauge nearly 100 miles away.