Geographic

Chilean authorities uncovered organized criminal networks that investigators say stole, processed, and shipped copper on a vast scale to Peru and China, exposing a trade worth an estimated 817 billion pesos, or about $917 million, between 2020 and 2025.

A Mexican national pleaded guilty to participating in a two-year, multimillion-dollar black-market peso exchange conspiracy that laundered drug trafficking proceeds through Texas to Mexico, the U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday. 

Trade misinvoicing is occurring at “massive scale” across Asian supply chains, with discrepancies in reported invoice values reaching a record $1.7 trillion in 2022 across developing Asia.

Ten years after the Panama Papers exposed the offshore financial system exploited by tax cheats and criminals around the world, prosecutions and transparency reforms tied to the landmark investigation are still unfolding.

Rwanda has threatened to withdraw its troops from northern Mozambique, where they have spent the past five years containing Islamic State-linked militants, after the U.S. imposed sanctions on Kigali over its alleged support for the M23 insurgency in neighboring Congo.

Malta is mounting an unusually public fight against a European Union push to centralize crypto supervision, arguing the move would strip the island-nation of oversight over major digital-asset firms it helped attract and regulate.

House Republicans have opened an investigation into alleged hospice fraud in California, citing a CBS News investigation that found widespread warning signs among hospice operators in Los Angeles County and raising concerns about potentially tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer losses.

The United States has lifted sanctions on three Belarusian fertilizer companies and the country’s state investment bank in exchange for Belarus freeing 250 political prisoners, a move made as the war in Iran continues to drive fertilizer prices higher.

Serious and organized crime became more diverse and more harmful in 2025, with drugs, organized immigration crime, and illicit finance all worsening, according to a new report by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA). 

West Africa has become a major and expanding logistics, warehousing, and redistribution hub in the global cocaine trade, with the market in the region larger than ever and increasingly damaging to public health, governance, and security.