The Bulgarian government must do more to combat organized crime and corruption, while Romania has made some progress, says the European Union. The assessment and recommendations from the EU’s executive branch are part of an annual progress report released today .

Macedonians pay an average of €470 per year for public services, the highest in the region, according to a regional survey sponsored by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Seven inmates were killed and 59 escaped on Friday from a Centro de Ejecución de Sanciones (CEDES) prison during a riot in Nuevo Laredo, a city of 640,000 on the US-Mexico border.

Mexico’s President yesterday approved changes to his government’s Constitution targeting human traffickers and streamlining the way authorities handle them.

Romanian organized crime prosecutors arrested 90 members of a cybercrime group and charged them for online fraud on Thursday. The group’s activities over the past two years targeted more than one thousand victims, many of them in the United States, and earned the gang more than $20 million.

On Wednesday Italian authorities arrested 40 people as a part of an investigation into an international drug trafficking ring run by the 'Ndrangheta Mafia. The drug trafficking operation included six countries worldwide and spread across Europe, the United States and Latin America.

Over three dozen operatives in a global drug smuggling syndicate were arrested on Wednesday, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) announced.  Members of the smuggling network led by ethnic Albanians are charged with trafficking cocaine, marijuana, Ecstasy (MDMA) and prescription drugs into the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

The Croatian government has been demonstrating its commitment to fighting corruption culminating this week in the arrest of a high ranking military official and the extradition of the former Prime Minister. Both are accused of corruption.

In a span of 24 hours fighting between rival organized crime gangs led to the deaths of more than 40 forty people, whose bodies were found across Mexico on Saturday. In Monterrey on Friday 20 people were killed and five injured when a gang member opened fire in a bar, according to the associated press.

In order to stem the flow of illegal guns to Mexican drug cartels, stricter regulations monitoring frequent gun purchasers will be imposed in American border states, the U.S. Justice Department announced on Monday.  The decision comes as efforts to destabilize arms smuggling networks have come under fire and gun-related violence escalates in Mexico.