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Human trafficking is one of the world's fastest-growing criminal enterprises, according to the United Nations. Precise figures are hard to come by, given the inherent challenges of collecting data on illegal activity. But according to estimates from the International Labour Organization (ILO), trafficking is a $150 billion industry affecting 20.9 million people worldwide, nearly a quarter of whom are marketed for sex. The ILO estimates that 5.5 million children are victims of the trafficking industry, and many are sexually exploited. Efforts to eliminate sex trafficking have enjoyed prominent backing in the US for about 20 years, ever since strange bedfellows rallied behind the cause of defeating modern-day slavery. Simultaneously, Operation Underground Railroad (OUR) is making a public splash by amplifying the drama of its tactics and the ways people can support the group's cause without ever busting into a brothel. A documentary movie, called The Abolitionists, has been screened privately in select US theaters, and a proposed television series about OUR is currently being filmed. Adapted from the source document.

While Arctic sea ice continues to melt, down in the Antarctic, ice is actually accumulating -- and at record levels. Capping off an anomalously high three-year trend, September 2014 saw 7.76 million square miles covered in ice; that's more than 500,000 square miles above the average documented between 1981 and 2010. Glaciologist Ted Scambos and his colleagues are trying to figure out what, exactly, is happening. A senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, a part of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Scambos has been tramping around the Antarctic since the 1990s. Scambos's next big trip likely will be to a ridge on the East Antarctic Plateau, thought to be the coldest place on Earth. Foreign Policy recently caught up with Scambos to learn what is required to live and work at the bottom of the world. Adapted from the source document.