Daily Digest, Nov. 9 –

Members of three Somali gangs in Minneapolis were accused of operating a prostitution ring in a federal indictment released Monday.  Twenty nine people – primarily from the Twin Cities – are included in the document, which outlines a history of fraud, burglary and human trafficking that’s been going on for a decade. At least 25 of the people had been arrested by ICE, local police departments, the FBI and U.S. Secret Service on Monday, the Star Tribune reported. The ring reached across three states and sold girls as young as 12. Gangs tied to the trafficking ring include the Somali Outlaws, the Lady Outlaws and Somali Mafia.

After three years of investigations, federal prosecutor John Durham cleared CIA officers who destroyed videotapes recording brutal interrogations of two Al Queda detainees, according to the New York Times.  The documentation, comprised of 92 videos, was destroyed after an order from the CIA’s top clandestine officer Jose Rodriguez, who said the exposure of the tapes would be “devastating” to the agency, according to the Associated Press. The tapes showed the waterboarding of two Al Queda members, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri.  

An ash plume that erupted from Mt. Merapi in Indonesia has killed 153 people in the past two weeks. Barack and Michele Obama, currently on their eastern tour, stopped in Indonesia on Tuesday.  The White House billed the President’s trip to the country, which has the largest Muslim-majority in the world, as outreach to the Muslim world, the Washington Post reported. While the President will still speak at an event at the University of Indonesia , his time in the country will be cut short a couple hours due to ash cloud. Obama’s next stop will be Seoul for the G-20 conference.