Mexico could be on the verge of being a failed state. That's the view of some observers, including a former US drugs tsar General Barry McCaffrey - who cite the increasingly violent battle between powerful drug cartels and the government which has deployed the army to fight them.
Last year alone, 6,000 people were killed in violence linked to the drugs gangs and the killing shows no sign of abating.
The country is beginning to resemble Colombia in the recent past, not a comparison the Mexican government would like but one many analysts and journalists are starting to make.
This week, The World Tonight's Robin Lustig is in Mexico to look in depth at the threat facing the country. You can follow his trip on Robin's World Tonight blog and hear his reports on Thursday and Friday on the programme.
Mexico is one the world's biggest countries with a population of 110 million and the 13th largest economy. It's also strategically located on the southern border of the United States. So what happens there is significant for the rest of the world.
Yet apart from occasional reports when there is a particularly large number of deaths in the "war on drugs" and when the country was the first to be badly hit by swine flu, the country gets relatively little coverage in the British media.
Listeners to The World Tonight and readers of my entries on this blog will know that one of the things we try to do on the programme is to cover significant global issues that are often not given much daily news coverage elsewhere.
It's for this reason we have followed the worsening situation in Somalia relatively closely as well as the unresolved conflicts in the western Balkans.
In Mexico, we'll be looking in depth at the underlying economic crisis which makes it more difficult to deal with the drugs cartels.
The violence was already deterring business; but the recession in the US has caused a big drop in the money sent home to support their families by Mexicans north of the border; and the swine flu outbreak which may have killed up to 60 people has dealt a heavy blow to the country's large tourist industry.
We'll also ask whether the militarisation of the "war on drugs", the use of the army to deal with a law and order problem in a country with an authoritarian past, is an effective policy or risks making the violence worse.
Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.
It was late on Thursday evening London time that we first started getting reports from Los Angeles that Michael Jackson had been taken to hospital. First they were rumours, then more credible reports and finally we received confirmation that he had died.
By any lights, Michael Jackson was a huge figure internationally, and BBC News went into gear to report a big breaking news story.
We've had a number of complaints about our coverage, the main charge being that we simply did too much: that his death didn't justify the prominence and scale of our reporting through Friday and into the weekend.
The story was certainly very prominent, with extensive reporting on our domestic and global news channels and it was the lead story on our television and radio bulletins and on the web. But this wasn't to the exclusion of other important stories domestically and internationally. Friday was also the third day of our special coverage on television and our website from Pakistan and Afghanistan.
It is clear that Michael Jackson meant different things to different generations, both among our audiences and among our own staff. There are some who had followed him as a boy star, but there's also a large number of younger people who never saw him perform at his height but are only too aware of the controversy about his personal life and his increasingly eccentric appearance and behaviour. There was also the expectation around his comeback concerts in London. Looking at media output around the world, it was clear that his death was provoking international shock and big audience consumption.
Some stories divide audiences, and clearly there are those who aren't interested in Michael Jackson. But we have to try to serve a whole range of readers, listeners and viewers - and undoubtedly a great many of you were extremely interested.
The audiences to our main television bulletins were a little higher than average for a Friday evening and the statistics for our online content broke records: more than 8.2m global unique users, the second highest since Obama's election. The BBC News mobile site had its biggest-ever figures on Friday.
This was also a story which for which many users of the site wanted to access our video, particularly the live stream of the BBC News channel. Within the first hour, there were just under a million hits globally on the live streams of the News Channel and BBC World TV. Overall, a quarter of site users on Friday accessed audio or video (26%, compared to the daily average of 15%). There were over two million users of AV on the site on Friday, higher than the site's previous record (for Obama's election in November 2008).
We will continue to report new developments, and we'll do so in a proportionate manner where we think they are of relevance and interest to our audiences: we're anticipating covering further information about the circumstances of his death; his business and estate - and his funeral.
Throughout our coverage, we have been careful to sift fact from rumour and to assess Jackson's career as a musician and his impact as a creative singer and dancer, while not ignoring the more disturbing side to his life. This was a big news story - about the death of a big cultural icon - all around the world.
Mary Hockaday is head of BBC newsroom.
At the Radio 4 Blog, controller Mark Damazer writes about recent programmes responding to current events, namely Iran (The Report and Uncovering Iran) and MPs' expenses (Moats, Mortgages and Mayhem).
You can read more and comment at the Radio 4 Blog.
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