Mexico

• A jury in New York found Genaro García Luna - Mexico's former top security official - guilty of accepting millions of dollars in bribes from the Sinaloa cartel when he was in charge of prosecuting the very same cartels.
• Pres. AMLO's government embraced the news of García Luna's conviction as further evidence of corruption in the rival Calderón government that preceded AMLO's. An AMLO spokesman tweeted: "Justice has arrived for the former squire of Felipe Calderón."

• BYD - China's leading electric vehicle (EV) maker, and thus the world's top seller of EVs - just launched three of its models in Germany, and is reportedly considering opening an assembly plant in Germany.
• Unlike most Western EV makers, BYD uses cheaper, cobalt-free batteries that make some performance sacrifices compared to alternatives with cobalt. It will be interesting to see how BYD cars sell in Germany.

• Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin bluntly accused Russia's general staff and defense ministry of "high treason" for refusing Wagner both ammunition and air transport in Ukraine. Analysts are reading Prigozhin's increasingly vocal criticism of the Russian military command as a sign that he's growing apart from his one-time benefactor, Pres. Putin.
• The defense ministry denied holding back ammunition: "All requests for ammunition for assault units are met as soon as possible."
• New (and poorly vetted) reports suggest Belarus's pro-West foreign minister committed suicide in November after returning from meetings with Russian officials discouraged by the course his country was taking. His death was initially reported as a heart attack.

• Three Senegalese UN peacekeepers were killed - and five more injured - when their convoy ran over a roadside bomb in central Mali. Mali is the UN's deadliest peacekeeping mission: at least 168 peacekeepers have died there since the mission began in 2013.