History Untold

In the week after the sex-criminal financier Jeffrey Epstein died, Anya (not her real name) opened the door of her New York apartment. Outside was Epstein's brother, Mark, telling her she had to leave, she says. Anya had lived for years in one of several flats on East 66th Street in Manhattan used by Jeffrey Epstein to house women he abused. In one moment, she lost her home but escaped a nightmare. (Mark Epstein denies he was aware of his brother's wrongdoing.) "I'm still struggling to reconcile with the fact that I was abused for years," Anya says. "You were not chained to a door or something, right? You were not locked up in a basement. The chains were less obvious, but they were there." Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting charges for sex-trafficking children, used to say that his operation was "like a cult, and he was the cult leader", Anya says. She has given the BBC a rare account of life as one of Epstein's "assi...

Coastal communities in Colombia and Ecuador, where most of the boats are thought to have begun their journeys, are counting the losses not just in relatives who never returned, but in how the attacks have upended the lives of those who make their living from the ocean and now fear it. More than 200 people have now been killed in a bombing campaign by the US military against people it has accused of smuggling drugs in the waters off South America, after a string of deadly attacks over the past week. The military said Saturday that three men had been killed in the eastern Pacific during a strike ordered by Gen. Francis Donovan, the head of the Southern Command, against a boat that was “engaged in narco-trafficking operations.” Their deaths bring the total killed to at least 202, in more than 60 strikes. The strikes have been shrouded in secrecy. Few bodies of those killed have been recovered, and scant physical evidence exists of debris or the drugs the Trump administration c...