In 2007, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) wiretap of the notorious Medellín cartel picked up a conversation in Arabic. With further investigation, the DEA discovered that the Iran-backed terrorist group Hizballah was arranging shipments of cocaine from Colombia to the Middle East. This operation turned out to be only a small part of a sprawling network of criminal enterprises in South America, writes Emanuele Ottolenghi:

During the past four weeks, there has been a rash of violent attacks in Jerusalem and the West Bank. These are not a response to any Israeli actions, nor are they spontaneous outbursts. Rather, as Itamar Marcus and Maurice Hirsch explain, the violence is the result of deliberate incitement by the Palestinian Authority (PA), which began when its president, Mahmoud Abbas, realized he was unlikely to win the upcoming national elections. The violence, write Marcus and Hirsch, was originally a way to win votes, and is now a way to maintain popularity after Abbas’s decision to postpone the elections in definitely: