Sam Edwards

After two decades working in some of Mexico's toughest prisons, Warden Angeles Zavala thought she had seen it all. Then one morning in 2016 she arrived at work to find a local artist waiting for her. The man had recently completed a few workshops with inmates in another part of the prison and had a proposal. Speaking in rapid-fire bursts, the artist told Zavala he wanted to move into the maximum security prison and live there for six weeks to teach some of the country’s most dangerous inmates how to paint. Through art therapy, he would help them change their lives. And he wanted to start with the veteran narcos of Mexico’s violent drug war.

When horses across France started turning up dead and mutilated, amateur sleuths got to work on Facebook. A nationwide panic ensued.

Before dawn broke one January morning in Melilla, a Spanish town flanked by the Meditarranean Sea on one side and semi-arid hills on the other, veteran border cop Sergio Marquez heard the call come through the radio: “Fence activation, please verify.”

The crisis is now forcing West African countries along the Atlantic to fight one another over the fish that remain.

The Gürtel case began with one Madrid mogul. Over the next decade, it grew into the biggest corruption investigation in Spain’s recent history, sweeping up hundreds of corrupt politicians and businessmen – and shattering its political system.

Mexico's president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, swept to power in 2018 promising to speak for historically marginalised indigenous communities. His pet project, the 1500-km 'Mayan Train' has created division and tension within those very communitites.

BARCELONA/GIRONA, Spain (Reuters) - Twenty-four hours after Spain removed him from power, Catalonia’s leader had resolved to leave the country and take his independence campaign to the heart of the European Union, but first he needed to tie off an important loose end.