Laurence Westwood

Cyber fraud, human trafficking and weak states have fused into a criminal ecosystem that even China’s heavy hand struggles to dismantle Chinese actor Wang Xing with Thai police authorities In January of this year, eleven members of the mafia family Ming were executed in China. Their crimes included homicide, illegal detention, and the operating of cyber scam centres across the border in Myanmar. Five members of the family Bai were sentenced to death back in November, and there are more trials...

The assassination of Judge Giovanni Falcone more than three decades ago laid bare Italy’s long war with the Mafia and the cost of defying it. Capaci, Sicily, the site of the A29 bombing that killed him in 1992. Giovanni Falcone At precisely 5.56 pm on May 23, 1992, thirteen drums of TNT and Semtex placed in a culvert on the A29 – the autostrada leading from Palermo Airport to Palermo, Sicily – and near to the small town of Capaci were detonated. The explosion was so massive that it registered...

A young British correspondent sent to decode Mao’s China instead became one of the earliest symbols of hostage diplomacy. Anthony Grey was held hostage in Peking during Mao's 'Cultural Revolution.' Anthony Grey, who passed away last month aged 87, first learned what it meant to be a pawn of great-power politics long before the term ‘hostage diplomacy’ came into vogue. ‘In view of the illegal persecution and the fascist atrocities in Hong Kong against Chinese correspondents, the Chinese...