In an effort to discourage the practice, the Japanese Fisheries Agency will raise the fine on the poaching of baby Japanese eels from 100,000 yen (US$925) to 30 million yen ($8.4 million) by 2023, potentially cutting off a major source of funding for organized crime groups, The Japan Times reported on Thursday.

Swedish police said that a violent Nigerian sex and drug trafficking gang, which allegedly often uses black magic - voodoo - to coerce people into crime, has started spreading throughout the country, the SVT Nyheter reported last week.

Two brothers that ran a Monaco-based oil and gas consultancy have pleaded guilty in a US court of conspiring to bribe government officials in nine countries in order to win contracts.  

Widespread corruption slows down development in Central American countries and causes them to lose as much as US$13 billion a year, the Anti-Corruption Digest announced on Thursday. 

After a failed arrest in early October, Mexican authorities released on Wednesday a video showing the moment soldiers handed over the son of drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman to members of the Sinaloa cartel to avoid bloodshed in the city of Culiacan.

Bulgarians were gathered on the streets of Sofia to protest a vote by the country’s Supreme Judicial Council on Thursday long before its outcome was officially announced: that Ivan Geshev had been elected, 20-4, to be the country’s new prosecutor general.

A West African woman claims to have escaped from the Kuwaiti captors she was sold to four years ago and who had kept her locked for months in a Cleveland apartment, according to News 5 Cleveland.

Masked gunmen killed at least 18 and injured hundreds of Iraqis when they opened fire at anti-government protesters in the Shiite holy city of Karbala on Tuesday, the Associated Press reported.

Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri resigned on Tuesday, “in response to demands” made by anti-corruption protesters, saying he had “reached a dead end,” Euronews reported.

The Cypriot government said on Tuesday it will hire three firms to carry out due diligence checks on individuals applying for the country’s citizen-by-investment program, and comb through past naturalizations to make sure they comply with the latest eligibility requirements, Cyprus Mail reported.