Banana Beach is one of three holiday home schemes excluded from an initiative to stop a decade-long dispute over the legality of many developments in

Banana Beach is one of three holiday home schemes excluded from an initiative to stop a decade-long dispute over the legality of many developments in Marbella. This spring the town’s new mayor, Angeles Muñoz – who has vowed to end years of actual or alleged corruption involving former Marbella council chiefs and developers – announced that 18,000 “illegal” homes in the area would be given retrospective building licences, making them legal. But she said three schemes, including Banana Beach, would not be retrospectively licensed and would have to be demolished, probably next year.Yet spanishpropertyworld.com, the website quoted above, still advertises...

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fake 50 and 100 euro notes started popping up all over Europe

fake 50 and 100 euro notes started popping up all over Europe. Occasional arrests shed little light on who could be the masterminds behind the counterfeiting. After a few months, several European national police forces decided to pool all their information and send their case files to a heavily secured building in The Hague. There, a list of 250 suspects and 950,000 suspicious phone numbers was compiled."Making sense out of such a huge pile of information is our core business," said Tom Driessen, a deputy director for Europol, the European Police Office, based in the Netherlands. His organisation is a hub for information that can be useful for countries collected by the EU’s 27 national police forces. Europol is meant to be the EU’s answer to international organised crime.A gang off the streetsA...

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Barbate got nicknames such as 'lawless city' and 'city of crime'

grass trade is "like a party, and everyone in Barbate is enjoying it", said Antonio. Although he denied any part in the flourishing drug trade in the southern Spanish fishing town, he was willing to tell how much money can be made in trafficking hashish. "Everybody here knows that anyway," he said, sitting down in his office at the municipal sports complex where he does odd jobs at the weekend.Antonio, who is referred to by anyone who knows him as 'El Feo' (the Ugly), sported a trimmed mullet and fake Armani sunglasses as he explained what happens when a smuggling boat from nearby Morocco lands in Barbate. "Several people are needed to safeguard...

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