The head of Mexico's organized crime unit stepped down on Thursday, just weeks after announcing that members of his team had been charged with having links to the nation's most powerful drug cartel, Reuters reported.

A spokesman said that Jose Cuitlahuac Salinas resigned for "personal reasons," and that the resignation would take immediate effect.  Salinas will be replaced by Rodrigo Archundia Barrientos, an expert on kidnappings at the organized crime unit.

On October 17, Salinas said the Mexican government had charged seven officials, including three members of his unit, with passing information to the Sinaloa cartel, dubbed by the United States Intelligence Community the “most powerful drug-trafficking organization in the world.”

Salinas himself was not being investigated, the spokesman at the attorney general's office said.

Mexico's powerful drug cartels are suspected of spending millions of dollars a year to corrupt officials, but charges are not common and convictions are extremely rare, Reuters reported. Earlier this month, Mexico charged 14 federal police officers with the attempted murder of two CIA operatives in early October. The daylight attack was suspected to have been ordered by a drug cartel.

President Felipe Calderon leaves office at the end of the month, and though putting a stop to gang violence and drug activity was a cornerstone of his campaign, gang-related violence increased by more than 700 percent during his six-year presidency. More than 60,000 people have been killed.

A rocky six-year truce between Brazilian police and gang members is now over in Sao Paulo, AP reports.  And a surge in violence has descended upon the city’s slum neighborhoods. In the past two weeks alone, the metro area has seen more than 10 killings per day.

Seven people were killed in a single night last week in the Vila Brasilandia shantytown, including a police officer. Days later, gunmen shot up a bar, killing a 13-year-old boy and three adults.

Sao Paulo, which is to host the World Cup opening match in 2014, has seen nearly 150 homicides over the past two weeks and 94 police executed this year, according to Brazil’s department of Public Safety.

Regional security experts say that a powerful prison-based gang, the First Capital Command, is behind the violence. The gang likely feels that the government has violated an informal agreement, long denied by officials, to slow the prison transfers of gang leaders and limit crackdowns on its operations in Sao Paulo's outskirts in exchange for an end to gang violence.

The First Capital Command is allegedly based in Sao Paulo state prisons, and was allegedly behind several waves of attacks on police, government buildings, banks and public buses in 2006. Those assaults and counterattacks by police in the slums killed more than 200 people.

With the latest violence, shops and schools in some Sao Paulo districts closed early this past week as rumors of gang-imposed curfews spread, AP reports.

And though Brazil has responded by setting up multiple task forces and strategies to curb the swell of violence, there is still an abiding “climate of insecurity” throughout the country.

Somalian President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said Thursday that he would allow charcoal exports from the country to resume despite evidence that the trade is financing the region's Al-Qaeda allied terrorist group Al-Shabaab.

A professor at Georgetown University who also runs a data analytics company says that “big data” can be a major player in the war on crime. In the same way that Google and Target utilize personal web surfing and social media information to customize advertisements, so can law enforcement and intelligence groups analyze criminal behavior to deter illicit activities.

The first step is to take a social science approach, says Professor Gary Shiffman, in which traits are assigned to members of criminal organizations. In his graduate program, Shiffman’s students compiled a list of traits associated with the “success” of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra over 150 years. Those traits included: high cost of defection, effective use of violence, support among local populations and operations in areas of weak government power.

Shiffman writes that these traits apply equally to “politically motivated insurgents and transnational terrorist organizations.”

What’s then necessary is for law enforcement, military and intelligence communities to have access to high-end analytics – the same type that Google deploys – to isolate potential criminals.

More than two million people travel across international borders every day, according to Shiffman’s data, and tracking down perpetrators represents “an historic challenge.”

However, he says, “humans behave in patterns much more predictable than we want to hear, and with the right amount of prior information…we can forecast an individual’s preferences and constraints.”

Shiffman also notes that the importance of local communities is often overlooked. But criminal organizations almost always require support from people outside the core group.

“Focusing not only on the behavior of the criminal, but on the…local populations will provide keys to undermining organized violence,” Shiffman says.

Amid the recent onslaught of organized biker violence in Australia, an interesting (and thankfully bloodless) news story broke yesterday. Local media reported that students from the Gold Coast’s top private school, including the mayor’s daughter, partied at the headquarters of a notorious outlaw motorcycle gang this weekend.

The 17 and 18-year-old girls, students at St. Hilda’s School, were bussed to a mystery location after their school formal at the area’s convention center. Evidently, the after party location was kept secret to deter potential gatecrashers. The girls all claimed they had no idea they were entering a criminal stronghold.

Those claims, despite the fact that NMC (“Nomads Motorcycle Club”) was displayed prominently above the entrance.

A spokeswoman for the mayor confirmed, “The students had no prior knowledge of the location…as teenage girls, I doubt they realized even after they arrived.”

St. Hilda’s certainly wasn’t involved. The elite prep school, with annual fees of $16,000 for upper school students (not including boarding fees), declined to comment on the controversy, other than to note that it was not responsible.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that this is third time a private top-tier school has had students attend parties at outlaw motorcycle clubhouses.

In 2007, students from Emmanuel College held a formal after-party at the Rebels clubhouse, and in 2006, the Bandidos Mermaid Beach clubhouse was the venue for a similar event for students from The Southport School.

The Nomads Motorcycle Club is one of several violent outlaw gangs involved in an escalating turf war in Australia. After a shooting at a shopping mall in April which injured one innocent bystander, and a spate of drive-by attacks throughout the summer, officials have sought to crack down. Police are primarily using building violations to arrest members from the Nomads, Bandidos and Hells Angels chapters.  

A Russian gas magnate is under investigation in Latvia for fraud, according to a report in Business News Europe.

Reverta, the private bank hired by Latvia to manage the country's delinquent borrowers, told BNE that the Khudainatov brothers – Eduard, the deputy CEO of the Russian oil company Rosneft, and his brother Zhan – have defaulted on loans totaling $78 million, despite having sold a subsidiary for $400 million in early 2012. 

To avoid repaying their loan, the brothers obscured their financial holdings by liquidating the companies they used to borrow money from Latvia, and transferring those companies' assets and licenses to a new company that would not be on the hook for that outstanding balance, BNE reports. Then they sold the new company for $403 million and were able to pocket the entire profit.

Reverta filed a complaint of gross fraud against Zhan Khudainatov, who is listed as a director of the liquidated companies, in April 2012. In Russia, the charge carries a minimum sentence of five years, according to BNE.

Zhan Khudainatov became CEO of Severneft in 2004 when his brother Eduard, through yet another company he owned, took out a $40 million loan from the government to purchase Severneft.  Severneft, which was one of the companies liquidated, possessed a lucrative drilling license, BNE reports. Eduard was a public official at the time serving as CEO of a subsidiary of Russian state-owned gas giant Gazprom.

Olga Grigorieva, formerly a senior medical official in the Moscow Prison Service, received death threats against her mother and son several weeks before her testimony in Moscow court on the circumstances of Sergei Magnitsky's death.

Magnitsky was the lawyer for Hermitage Capital who was arrested and killed in Russian police custody after he exposed the $230 million theft implicating government officials. For four months prior to his death in 2009, he was held at Butyrka detention center where the prescribed treatment for pancreatitis and gallstones were withheld from him.

Last Thursday, Ms. Grigorieva testified that Mikhail Tremasov, a former top medical official at Butyrka, phoned her two days after she received a court summons and told her that she should fear for her son and mother.  He also said that Dmitry Kratov, former deputy head of Butyrka and the only defendant in the case, might be killed.  He warned Grigorieva "not to talk."

Despite repeated requests from Magnitsky’s family to open an investigation into officials of the Russian Interior Ministry, Prosecutor’s Office and judges, the Russian authorities have only pursued a suit against Kratov, alleging “negligence” in medical care at Butyrka.

The lawyer for Magnitsky’s mother asked for details about the threat on Kratov’s life during Grigorieva’s testimony. When the judge forbid the question on the grounds of irrelevance, the lawyer objected, saying the court was obstructing justice.

Croatian authorities arrested more than 26 employees and the entire management of the pharmaceutical company Farmal Monday on suspicion of paying doctors to prescribe the company's drugs, according to local media reports

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has canceled an arms deal with Russia worth $4.2 billion based on suspicions of corruption, CNN and others reported. Al-Maliki’s advisors say that Baghdad still wants to salvage an agreement.

The contract was for attack helicopters and mobile air-defense systems. 

Some media outlets have speculated that Iraq struck the weapons deal in the first place to reduce its dependency on the United States.  In October, the Longley Intelligence Group reported that the U.S. remains Iraq’s largest arms supplier with $6 billion in contracts already agreed to and deals worth over $10 billion under discussion.

If – as initially reported – the arms deal was canceled due to corruption, “it is a good sign for Iraq’s fledgling democratic government,” wrote the Longley Group.

But Middle Eastern analysts suspect that Al-Maliki’s corruption “suspicions” are a smokescreen.

“If Washington is playing rough with him and threatening to cut off military aide due to Iraq’s foreign policy in Syria, then flirting with Moscow is his way of getting the U.S. to play ball,” Ramzy Mardini, a fellow at the Beirut-based Iraq institute for Strategic Studies, told CNN.

“Conversely, he could be simply pressuring the Russians to put forth a better deal.” Mardini said.

Though Russian firms are “widely believed” to engage in corrupt practices to win foreign contracts, wrote the Longley Group, al-Maliki’s suspension of the contract appears to be more about political calculation.

At a special conference Thursday, Hilary Clinton expressed the United States’ commitment to curtailing wildlife trafficking, an illegal trade with annual revenues between $7-10 billion, according to estimates.

OCCRP ran a story about a record seizure of illegal ivory in Hong Kong last month. That’s just one example in what the Word Wildlife Fund calls an “escalating poaching crisis around the world, pushing populations of endangered species like tigers, elephants and rhinos to the brink of extinction.”

Kenyan and Indonesian ambassadors also attended Thursday’s conference, called “Wildlife Trafficking and Conservation: A Call to Action” held at the U.S. Department of State. Both ambassadors spoke on the critical situations their countries face from the violence of wildlife trafficking.

Secretary Clinton's speech outlined a specific, four-part strategy for addressing the global problem:

1. Develop a global consensus on wildlife protection.
2. Spearhead a global outreach program, set to launch on December 4 (Wildlife Conservation Day).
3. Establish a global system of regional wildlife enforcement networks.
4. With the aid of the intelligence community, produce an assessment of large-scale wildlife trafficking's impact on security interests.

Clinton pledged $100,000 on top of the $24 million that USAID has already committed to the effort over the past five years.

USAID Deputy Administrator Donald Steinberg made remarks as well. He announced that his agency is developing a Technology Challenge on Wildlife Trafficking, engaging the best and brightest scientists and entrepreneurs with the task of finding technological solutions for wildlife trafficking challenges.