Drug traffickers groom children as young as 10 at "school of assassins" in Ecuador
CBSN
When Luis Sarmiento and his grandson went out early to buy bread one morning in March, they came across a shocking scene: A macabre message left by Ecuador's drug traffickers in the form of two headless bodies.
"I covered my grandson's eyes, went upstairs, and I don't know anything else," recalled Sarmiento, a 78-year-old former laborer who has lived in the Duran municipality -- near Guayaquil, Ecuador's largest city -- for 16 years.
Drug traffickers have long targeted this hilly area to groom young recruits at their "school of assassins," a retired police chief told AFP under condition of anonymity.
Dubai, United Arab Emirates — Heavy rains lashed the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday, flooding portions of major highways, leaving vehicles abandoned on roadways across Dubai and grinding traffic at the city-state's huge international airport briefly to a complete halt. Meanwhile, the death toll from separate heavy flooding in neighboring Oman rose to 18, with others still missing as the sultanate prepared for the storm.
Paris — Five years have passed since Notre Dame cathedral in Paris was engulfed in flames. The iconic spire and timber roof were destroyed in the blaze. People around the world were shocked at the scale of the fire and the damage it caused, but work to restore the iconic landmark to its former glory continues.
Lawmakers in Poland have voted in favor of measures to ease the country's near-total ban on abortion, setting the stage for a potential clash over women's rights with the country's conservative president. With their vote on Friday, parliamentarians endorsed several proposals to relax the abortion restrictions, including one from newly elected Prime Minister Donald Tusk's party to decriminalize abortions up to 12 weeks into a pregnancy.