From now on, anyone who commits online abuses such as sending pornographic images without the consent of the receiver, death threats, fake news intended to harm, or electric images that intensely flash to a person suffering from epilepsy, will land in prison, the U.K. government stated on Wednesday.

Brazilian authorities closed on Tuesday an illegal copper mine that operated with 26 workers in slave-like conditions. Two Brazilians and a Chinese were identified as the ones running the mine, which had up to 14 illegal extraction points. Police presumes the extracted ore was taken to China.

Fifteen people, including four deemed “high-value targets,” were apprehended in a Europol-coordinated operation aimed at dismantling a network orchestrating sham marriages to aid illicit immigration into the European Union, Europol said Wednesday in a statement.

In a busy first half of the week, Hong Kong Customs rescued hundreds of animals across multiple endangered species, while also seizing contraband parts from animal traffickers that included tiger teeth, pangolin meat, and shark skins.

The Colombian National Police reported the arrest of a Brazilian woman who attempted to board a flight to Sao Paulo carrying 130 poisonous frogs in her suitcase.

The Council of the European Union, the EU essential decision maker, has proposed improvements to draft legislation that would ban all products manufactured through forced labor within the European Union (EU), asking for the prohibition to also apply to products bought online and for the strengthening of control mechanisms that would expose such products.

Transparency International warned on Tuesday that the world is sinking deeper into corruption, with a decline in the effectiveness of justice systems, as indicated by its 2023 Corruption Perception Index ranking countries based on their perceived levels of public sector corruption.

A Pakistani anti-graft court on Wednesday send the former Prime Minister Imran Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi to prison for 14 years in a case related to the unlawful sale of state gifts. His supporters question the harsh sentence that comes days before elections.

Human rights organizations have accused U.S. petrochemical plants in Texas and Louisiana of polluting the environment so severely that the toxic substances they release have caused respiratory diseases and cancer among people living nearby.

Authorities in the United States charged Monday three individuals tied to a US$1.89 billion cryptocurrency fraud scheme, in which two of them allegedly defrauded investors through fake crypto mining operations; the third defendant pleaded guilty the same day.