Murky...

If the intentional events of the past year were scripted as a Bond film, the critics would decide that 007 had stretched credibility too far.

An ex-Russian spy poisoned in a quiet English cathedral town; a US government outflanked by North Korea on nuclear weapons; a Saudi critic murdered by Saudi officials in an Istanbul consulate.

But one recent story goes even further into international thriller territory. It's a chilling tale that has received a fraction of the coverage granted to any of these other big 2018 stories: the disappearance of Meng Hongwei.

Meng was the president of the International Criminal Police Organization, known as Interpol, the planet's cross-border law enforcement cooperation body. In late September, he quietly disappeared in China. There hasn't been much of a public fuss. As the age of liberal values ebbs away, have global norms on human rights been so weakened that even international policemen are no longer safe from state-sponsored kidnap?

Whatever the messy nature of internal Chinese politics, it remains astonishing that the president of the world's law-keeping organization disappear in a manner completely in breach of any concept of natural law. [By Kate Maltby]