Authorities in the Philippines have launched an investigation against nearly 30 immigration officers for their alleged role in the trafficking of dozens of women to Syria where the victims were underpaid and abused.

The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) orchestrated for decades the theft of millions of rubles of oil from trucks and pipelines in the country’s top oil producing region claims a new investigation by Radio Free Europe. 

Malaysian customs officials said on Tuesday that they have seized captagon pills worth US$1.2 billion that were hidden in trolley tires, making it the biggest drug haul ever recorded in the country.

A Bucharest court issued a warrant on Wednesday for the arrest of Florian Tudor, the alleged chief of the so-called Riviera Maya Gang which stole more than a billion dollars by skimming credit cards belonging mainly to tourists visiting Mexico and withdrawing money from their accounts.

Combined with the ongoing normalisation of regional instability and violence, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought on new opportunities for criminal expansion in the Levant, where illicit activity could become a “permanent and pervasive fixture,” experts say.

German lawmaker and member of the ruling Christian Democratic Union, Karin Strenz, died on Saturday while traveling privately from Cuba to Germany. Strenz was implicated in the Azerbaijani Laundromat, a EU-wide lobbying and money laundering scheme revealed by OCCRP in 2017.

During his traditional public Angelus prayer address on Sunday, Pope Francis spoke out against organized crime and its use of the COVID-19 pandemic to enrich itself.

A new wave of violence has spread across Mexico as the country approaches legislative elections in June, with criminal gangs murdering, extorting and threatening candidates as a way to strengthen their political influence.

A global media watchdog urged Pakistani authorities to investigate last week's murder of a local journalist in the southern Sindh province and arrest the killers.

Mexico’s president has proposed a bill that would make graft cases involving public servants and human rights violations public. The move is supposed to make corruption investigations more transparent but experts said they will believe it when they see it.