This week, President Donald Trump pardoned a man federal prosecutors described as the architect of a “narco-state” who moved 400 tons of cocaine to United States shores. In September, the US military began killing people on Caribbean vessels based on unproven suspicions they were doing the same thing on a far smaller scale. The strikes have drawn allegations of war crimes; the contradiction has drawn bipartisan scrutiny. In an explainer for JURIST, Ingrid Burke Friedman examines the White House legal justifications for the air-strikes, and the response from international law experts. She also dissects the politics behind the divergent approaches to the pardoned Honduran ex-president Juan Orlando Hernández and the incumbent Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro—who faces trafficking charges in the US, and a destabilization campaign.

Wandering Amu Darya River Opens Afghanistan Border Conflict

by Joe Dyke, IRIN

MAZAR-I-SHARIF — Uzbekistan has a perhaps unusual ally in its territorial claims over neighboring Afghanistan: the mighty and ever-wandering Amu Darya river. And no one knows it better than the children of Arigh Ayagh School, just inside Afghanistan.

Built in 2007 about 3 kilometers from the Amu Darya—which runs along the border between the two Central Asian giants—the school was financed through the National Solidarity Programme, a development scheme largely funded by the World Bank.

Yet all that remains of that investment is a solitary wall, dangling tentatively over a precipice. Sitting in its shadow, two teens stare blankly across the vast river that is rapidly swallowing their homeland.

Every year for the past decade the Amu Darya has encroached up to 500 metres further into Afghanistan, taking with it large swathes of territory and leaving hundreds of families homeless. And as the official border between the countries is defined as the middle of the river, Uzbekistan has laid claim to hundreds of kilometres of Afghan territory.