Anastasia Moloney

Abortion was a major flashpoint in 2023, dividing Americans and dominating political debate. Brace for more of the same in 2024, with key election battles and legal landmarks due to determine a woman's right to choose in the U.S. and well beyond.

In the year that Roe v Wade marked its 50th anniversary, pro-abortion Americans scored mixed results in 2023, months after the landmark decision was overturned and moral wrangling over abortion hit fever pitch.

From drug traffickers laundering money through dubious land purchases to miners illegally panning for gold, environmental crime is thriving in the Amazon and the question of what to do about it will be high on the agenda at the COP28 talks in Dubai.

For the first time, the global law enforcement community will gather at the U.N. climate conference, which starts on Thursday and runs until Dec. 12, to discuss how to combat the rise of illegal activities that threaten both people and planet.

Two years since the Mexican state of Veracruz legalised abortion, reproductive rights activist Metzeri Ávila still travels for hours into remote areas to deliver free abortion pills to women excluded by the public healthcare system.

Some women cannot afford to travel to a public hospital or do not know they are allowed to terminate their pregnancies, but others are being turned away by medical staff opposed to the procedure, Ávila said.

Along a dirt path in the heart of Guatemala's northern Maya Biosphere Reserve - a vast expanse of protected jungle and ancient ruins, ranchers on horseback herd cattle to grazing grasslands.

The cattle and cowboys should not be here.

After weeks of sleepless nights, Guatemalan farmer Lorenza Mendoza heard the words she had prayed for when a people smuggler called to say 'Your son is ok. He made it.'

About six months ago, Mendoza's 22-year-old son left his remote village in Guatemala's eastern Chiquimula province for the United States in search of a better life.

On a steep terraced slope in the mountains of eastern Guatemala, Gloria Díaz and a group of fellow farmers punch holes in the soil with wooden spades to plant bean seeds that they pray will yield a bumper harvest.

Sufficient production of beans, which most Guatemalan villagers eat daily, is no longer guaranteed in Chiquimula, a poor rural province in the drought-prone Dry Corridor - a belt of land stretching across Central America.

Weighing a crying 3-year-old girl on scales that dangle from the ceiling of a rural health clinic in eastern Guatemala, nurse Gamaliel Amador is not surprised by the reading - she hasn't gained weight.

The scales show 8 kg (17.6 lb), the same number recorded by Amador when the girl was first brought in two weeks ago - well below average for a child of her age and a sign of moderate malnutrition.

The momentous ruling by the US Supreme Court in June 2022 overturning half a century of abortion rights in the country will continue to reverberate in 2023 with more states set to usher in draconian bans.

The divisive battle over abortion rights will rage on at the local level as U.S. states seek to enshrine or curtail abortion rights in their constitutions and laws in 2023.

For decades, drug traffickers carried their cash in suitcases to dodge banking controls, and the police. Today, many are also using virtual cryptocurrency wallets installed on their cellphones.

When the U.S. Justice Department announced charges in April against four sons of jailed Mexican drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, the indictment said they had used "untraceable cryptocurrency" to launder the profits of their U.S. fentanyl smuggling operation.

For nearly 20 years, Antonio Ventura has been handing over $100 a month from the till of his small grocery store in El Salvador's capital to gangsters in extortion payments. It was the only way to avoid death threats at gunpoint, or worse.

Living in a poor San Salvador neighborhood split between areas controlled by the powerful armed street gang Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and its rival Barrio 18, Ventura and other residents were at the mercy of the gangsters.