Argentine President Javier Milei suffered a sweeping setback on Sunday in a Buenos Aires provincial election widely viewed as a political test for his libertarian party and a barometer for how it will perform in crucial congressional midterms next month.

Milei’s recently formed La Libertad Avanza party captured just 34% of the vote in Argentina’s biggest province, losing by a landslide to the left-leaning Peronist opposition, which secured 47% with the majority of ballots counted late Sunday.

With Milei struggling to stabilize a sputtering economy and his close associates embroiled by a graft scandal ahead of congressional midterm elections in late October, the results were being closely scrutinized for their potential to rattle investors and roil jittery global markets.

Analysts expected La Libertad Avanza to lose by a few points to the Peronists, but his allies feared that a worse-than-expected outcome in Buenos Aires province — which makes up nearly 40% of the country’s population — would galvanize his rivals at a delicate time.

Milei needs to expand his party’s tiny minority in the opposition-dominated Congress in midterms next month to fulfill his radical libertarian reforms and make good on his promise to turn the nine-time defaulter into a country capable of servicing its debts.

The Peronists are now the largest bloc in Argentina’s fragmented congress, and have used their numbers to pass social spending measures that are testing Milei’s efforts to balance Argentina’s budget.

Poland has detained Aysoltan Niyazova, a member of Russian anti-Putin protest group Pussy Riot, after she entered the country from Lithuania. The authorities say they were required to do so as she is the subject of an Interpol red notice issued by Turkmenistan, and are now considering her extradition.

Niyazova, who is a Russian-Turkmen dual national, was taken into custody and placed in a detention centre on Saturday morning, according to Lucy Shtein, a fellow Pussy Riot member, who shared a video on social media of the incident.

Shtein noted that Niyazova was also detained in Croatia in 2022 under the same Interpol notice, before being released a week later. “They’ve been putting this person through this for years just because she’s the daughter of a Turkmen opposition figure,” she added.

Gazeta Wyborcza, a leading Polish newspaper, reports that Niyazova had come to Poland to collect a dog from a shelter. It says she has a Schengen area residence permit issued by Lithuania, from where she had entered Poland by car.

In normal times, there are no checks on Poland’s border with Lithuania. But the Polish government reintroduced them earlier this year as part of efforts to clamp down on illegal migration.

On Sunday, a Polish border guard spokeswoman confirmed to broadcaster TVN that Niyazova had been taken into custody.

“This woman’s details were entered in the Interpol database as someone who needed to be detained,” she explained. “She was detained and, in accordance with procedures, handed over to the police. They are now taking action.”

A spokesman for police in the city of Białystok, meanwhile, said that Niyazova’s case would be taken up by prosecutors. The local prosecutor’s office later told Gazeta Wyborcza that they were gathering evidence, interviewing the detainee, and expected to make a decision on extradition on Monday.

Pussy Riot told Mediazona, an independent Russian media outlet founded by two of the group’s members, that Niyazova is facing “no legal charges” in Turkmenistan and that “her only ‘crime’ is openly opposing one of the most closed dictatorships in the world”.

“We demand her immediate release and call on Polish and European authorities not to extradite her to a regime known for torture, arbitrary detentions and persecution of dissidents,” wrote the group, which rose to international prominence in 2012 after staging a performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

When Niyazova was previously detained in Croatia in 2022, Amnesty International was among the human rights groups that appealed for her not to be extradited to Turkmenistan, saying it would “put her at great risk of suffering serious abuse, including torture and other ill-treatment”.

Amnesty noted that “Interpol warrants have been notoriously abused by a number of authoritarian regimes”, including Turkmenistan’s, which issued its red notice against Niyazova  in 2002, accusing her of embezzling funds belonging to the country’s central bank.

In 2011, Switzerland refused to extradite Niyazova to Turkmenistan but instead sent her to Russia, where she was sentenced to six years in prison for the same alleged embezzlement, reported the Moscow Times.

Police in Poland have shut down a methamphetamine laboratory and arrested two Mexican men linked to the Sinaloa cartel, one of the largest criminal organisations in the world.

Footage shared by the Polish police’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBŚP) shows armed counter-terrorism officers in a helicopter swooping in to raid the drug lab, which was located in Świecie county near the city of Bydgoszcz in northern Poland.

They detained three men: one a Polish national and the other two Mexicans who, according to investigators’ findings, “supervised the production of the drug and are linked to one of the largest cartels in North America”, announced the CBŚP.

Later, a police source told state broadcaster TVP that the cartel in question was Sinaloa, which is based in Mexico and is involved in drug trafficking across North America, Europe and Asia.

“They were ‘cooks’ responsible for overseeing the production of high-quality meth,” said the anonymous source. “Mexican cartels are increasingly sending such people to Europe. We will now determine who exactly was running the laboratory.”

The three men detained have been presented with a variety of charges, including participation in an organised criminal group and large-scale manufacture of drugs.

Over 300 litres of methamphetamine and phenylacetone were seized, as well as three tonnes of other chemicals used in the production process. Police estimate that the products could have made 330kg of the finished drug with a black-market value of over 6 million zloty (€1.4 million)

In 2022, a joint report by EU agency Europol and the US Drug Enforcement Agency revealed growing collaboration between Mexican cartels and EU-based criminal networks. It noted that the Mexican groups provided methamphetamine “cooks” to their European partners.

In May this year, French and Belgian police announced that they had dismantled a criminal organisation “with strong ties to the Mexican Sinaloa cartel” that had been involved in meth production and distribution. Last year, Spain arrested 14 people with suspected links to the Sinaloa cartel.