Ecuador descended further into violence after President Daniel Noboaintroduced a state of emergency following the disappearance of two imprisoned leaders of the country’s most prominent gangs, prison riots and explosions in several cities.

Targeted killings and professional hitmen are in high demand in South Africa, according to a Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) report, which examines how violence has festered as a monetizable commodity over the past two decades.

Two alleged members of the Mac Baller Brims gang - a violent crime group from New York City’s Bronx borough - have been charged on Friday with the murder of a 27-year-old man during a robbery committed in Manhattan last October.

The rivalry between the Škaljari and the Kavač clans, which originated on opposite sides of a single mountain on Montenegro’s Adriatic coast, has upended the criminal underworld in the region. Crime groups have aligned themselves with one or the other, and some politicians and police have picked sides too.

A rising number of organized crime groups are turning their attention to Europe’s lucrative drug trafficking market, Europol said on Wednesday. By now, one-third of the 5,000 gangs operating in the European Union is involved in the production, trafficking, distributing and selling of drugs.