Another Putin foe poisoned?

RUSSIA: Against his doctor’s wishes, opposition leader Alexei Navalny was discharged from a Moscow hospital and returned to prison, where he is serving a 30-day sentence. Russian authorities have imprisoned him repeatedly for protesting the Putin regime. Navalny’s doctor and lawyer said they believed he’d been poisoned—standard treatment for Kremlin foes. Opposition supporters turned out for protests on Saturday, anyway, and authorities arrested 1,300 demonstrators.

NIGERIA: Terrorism experts are warning to treat with caution a video released by a Boko Haram splinter group suggesting 16-year-old Leah Sharibu has been killed. No independent confirmation has surfaced of the death of the Christian teen, who was taken from her school in 2018 and held because she would not renounce her faith.

Nigerians remain hopeful and the government said negotiations for Sharibu’s release are ongoing, noted Akinola Ojo, senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa. “In light of the available evidence, it’s quite difficult to ascertain the real situation,” said Ojo, noting no formal statement has been made by terror groups and, “Leah’s case is a high-profile one.”

ISIS: The collapse of the Islamic State caliphate is making life hard on terrorists using the internet. “The jihadist message is finding it increasing difficult to reach its intended audience,” in part due to monitoring by YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, plus other limitations, reports insurgency expert Manuel Torres Soriano.

IRAQ: It’s taken only a few months on the ground as head of the UN’s special probe into Islamic State atrocities for Karim Khan to call for a war crimes tribunal similar to trials for Nazis. As his team works to analyze up to 12,000 bodies from more than 200 mass graves, Khan said, “Iraq and humanity requires its Nuremberg moment.”

MALI: President Donald Trump issued an executive order targeting jihadists in Mali, just after Britain announced it was sending more than 250 additional troops there to augment a UN peacekeeping force. In June, militants massacred an entire Christian village, and U.S. Army Special Forces have been on the ground since at least 2015.

BRAZIL: A prison riot in Sao Paulo has left 52 people dead, 16 of them decapitated.

INDIA: With parts of India facing a yearlong drought, local officials have dispatched a water train to Chennai, the manufacturing hub of 10 million people where supplies are running out.

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