Two public swimming pools in southeast France have been closed amid controversy over a burkini ban protest as temperatures continue to soar across the country.

A group of women wearing burkinis and activists from the Alliance Citoyenne rights group went to the Grenoble pools to protest a municipal ban on the Muslim swimwear on Sunday.

The women demanded that they be allowed to swim while wearing the garments, arguing that the rule requiring men to wear swim briefs and women to wear bikinis or swimsuits is discriminatory, and calling for the regulations to be changed to accomodate burkini wearers.

At least two people have died and over half a dozen are injured in Eastern Siberia following a crash landing of an Antonov An-24 twin turboprop airplane operated by Angara airlines.

The tragedy in Nizhneangarsk occurred after the plane skidded off the runway while attempting to make an emergency landing. Videos from the scene recorded by witnesses showed large plumes of smoke ascending into the air.

At least two crew members died in the crash, according to preliminary information, while at least seven other people were hospitalized. Another 43 people were rescued from the plane, which was headed to Ulan Ude.

Keith Raniere, the former leader of purported self-help organization NXIVM "borrowed heavily" from the teachings of Scientology, copied a number of its internal methodologies, and, in some instances, plagiarized word-for-word its unique terminology for his own exalted classes.

The parallels between both organizations are many - from employing similar indoctrination and deception tactics, to going after members-turned-critics, to even using the same legal defense. Multiple interviews conducted by The Epoch Times - including one with a former Scientology member who also had taken NXVIM classes - confirmed many of them.

The similarities surfaced after The Epoch Times previously reported about the parallels between the NXIVM case and a new lawsuit launched last week against the Church of Scientology International (CSI) and its leader, David Miscavige. Both cases detail allegations of abuses from human trafficking to child abuse. Some say the new suit is unlikely to amount to anything, citing Scientology's vast financial resources and history of settling out of court.

Raniere was found guilty on all counts by a federal jury on June 19.

An Alabama woman who suffered a miscarriage after being shot last year has been indicted for manslaughter in the loss of the fetus.

Marshae Jones was five months pregnant in December 2018 when, during a fight, Ebony Jemison shot her in the stomach - but a Jefferson County grand jury said the former mom-to-be was responsible because she started the brawl, AL.com reported.

"Let's not lose sight that the unborn baby is the victim here,'' said Pleasant Grove Police Lt. Danny Reid.

Initially, police charged Jemison, 23, with manslaughter but the charges were dismissed when a grand jury didn't indict her.

The Global Commission on Drug Policy, a group comprising 14 former heads of state from countries including Mexico, Portugal and New Zealand, has issued a blockbuster finding about the global system of illegal drug classification: It should be scrapped entirely and replaced with a new system that's rooted in science.

According to the report (included in full below), the "deep-lying imbalance" between criminalizing narcotics and permitting their medicinal use had led to "collateral damage" including forcing patients in low- and middle-income countries to undergo surgery without anaesthetic, or even to die in unnecessary pain due to a lack of access to opioids or other pain medications.

Additionally, the system had bred other social ills, from the spread of infectious diseases, to overcrowding in prisons around the world (with the US being one notable culprit).

A gunman opened fire near a mosque in the French city of Brest, leaving two people injured. He was later found dead. There is no information whether the shooter targeted the mosque specifically.

Brest Prosecutor Jean-Philippe Recappe said the gunman opened fire as people were leaving the mosque in the city's Pontanezen neigborhood.

According to local media, one of those shot was the controversial Imam Rachid Abou Houdeyfa. Having once been a proponent of ultra-conservative Islam, he became a so-called 'Republic-compatible' leader in 2016, helping the French government to train Muslims to "comply with the rules of secularism and living together with the French."

A Bosnian man wanted in connection with the 2015 Paris attacks has been arrested in Germany, federal police and prosecutors in the eastern city of Dresden said in a joint statement on June 27.

The November 2015 attacks by Islamic extremists killed 130 people, including 90 at the Bataclan theater.

The 39-year-old suspect, whom German authorities did not identify, was wanted on a European arrest warrant by Belgium, where many of the Paris attackers came from.

"There is a European arrest warrant issued by the Belgian authorities against the accused on suspicion of abetting a terrorist organization linked to the terror attacks, including on the Bataclan concert hall, on November 13, 2015 in Paris," the statement said, without giving further details.

The man, who was put before a German judge last week on the basis of the European arrest warrant, was ordered held in custody pending possible extradition by a court in the eastern town of Merseburg.

While in Accra, Ghana, in 2001, I befriended a young woman at a nightclub. I was flabbergasted that Fola (a pseudonym) was taking a keen interest in me. When we left the club and strolled along the beach, I noticed a few men were following us. I could tell she was a bit frightened, and when I asked her about it, she began to cry. When she propositioned me a few minutes later, I knew something was wrong. I gave her an extra cellphone that I had, and my number, telling her she could always call to talk. The next afternoon she told me her story: She and all of the women in the club that night had been prostituted, controlled by a Nigerian syndicate that trafficked women, guns, and narcotics.

Fola and the other women at that club aren't alone. Forced labor, forced marriage, and forced sex work are rife around the world, often right under our noses in unrecognized forms. Yet when I ask the anthropology students in my classes when slavery ended, most say something like "with the 13th Amendment" or "at the end of the Civil War." Only a handful realize that modern slavery is everywhere.

Researchers estimate there are at least 40 million people enslaved today. This is by no means a problem isolated to the developing world. In the 1990s, my friend and activist Alice Jay was kidnapped at the age of 11 in Western Michigan by the Mexican Mafia. She was trafficked for more than 15 years throughout the United States and is now a heroic survivor running her own nongovernmental organization called Sister Survivors in Detroit.

I am a cultural anthropologist who studies and lives in both the United States and the West African country of Togo. Even I have been strikingly naïve about this situation. Growing up near Flint, Michigan, I saw massage parlors, strip clubs, and cheap motels everywhere. In hindsight, I now wonder if these places were populated by people who were trafficked, perhaps even some children, coerced into exploitation. In Togo, many of the things I first considered to be a normal part of life-the children married before the age of 15, the hundreds of children working daily on fishing boats, and the dozens of poor girls who head to market each day for a 12-hour stint of haggling-I now consider to be manifestations of slavery.

Video hosting platform Vimeo - whose CEO contributed to the 2016 Clinton campaign - has completely banned Project Veritas over a viral video of a surreptitiously recorded Google employee admitting that the search giant is training its algorithms to to avoid the "next Trump situation," raising questions of 2020 election meddling.

Traces of cocaine have reportedly been found in multiple locations throughout the Houses of Parliament.

Swabs which turned blue when they come into contact with cocaine were used in a number of areas across the Parliamentary Estate, mainly toilets outside various offices and bars, which are accessible to Parliamentary passholders, including journalists, guests of MPs, and visitors attending Parliamentary events.

The news comes in the final throes of the Tory leadership race, which saw Michael Gove admit he had snorted cocaine in the past, Rory Stewart say he had once smoked opium in Iran, and Jeremy Hunt confess he'd consumed a cannabis lassi while in India. We also got the baffling revelation that Boris Johnson like to make models of buses out of wine boxes for fun. Different strokes, I guess.