El Salvador officially adopted bitcoin as a legal tender Tuesday, and marked its dual-currency status by buying 400 bitcoins worth more than $20million. The Central American country made history Monday when it bought its first 200 bitcoins, becoming the first known nation to do so. The U.S. dollar had been the country’s official currency for the past two decades.

The self-described “coolest president in the world” is developing a new form of authoritarianism that may soon attract imitators.

Eric Grill is sitting on the patio of a house with multicoloured walls, screeches of nearby tropical birds covering his voice as he expounds on the future of bitcoin in El Salvador. Grill, an American man with blue eyes and short dark hair, is only mildly miffed. “It’s like a jungle here,” he says. “There's been a little bit of an adjustment but I have this place for a month, I'm here for the long haul.”

Millions of Americans received stimulus checks in the past year, but Salvadoreans will be soon be receiving one paid in Bitcoin. The Central American country will give U.S. $30 worth of Bitcoin to each adult citizen that downloads and registers on the country’s new cryptocurrency app, Chivo, President Nayib Bukele said during a televised speech Thursday.

Hours after becoming the first nation to authorise bitcoin as a legal tender, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele instructed a state-owned geothermal electric company to plan to use geothermal energy from the country’s volcanoes for mining for the cryptocurrency.

Evelyn Hernández, who has been acquitted of killing her baby, hopes her case will set a precedent.

The teenager told police all about his gang, MS-13. In return, he was slated for deportation and marked for death.

A woman convicted of aggravated murder in El Salvador after suffering a stillbirth has been freed from prison, the second such release in the space of a month. Maira Verónica Figueroa Marroquín, 34, had her sentence commuted by the ministry of justice and was released on Tuesday after serving almost 15 years of a 30-year sentence.

MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, has long been known as one of the deadliest street gangs in the world, but under the Trump administration the fight against this criminal network of mostly Salvadoran young men, many of whom are immigrants, has ramped up dramatically.

Sessions is meeting with the president of El Salvador and high-ranking law enforcement officials, as well as with an FBI anti-gang task force, to talk about combating the powerful gang MS-13.

His only crime: Having the same name as a gangster accused of murder.

Police in El Salvador are investigating a "cowardly and inhumane" attack at the National Zoological Park that killed a hippopotamus named Gustavito. The 15-year-old hippo suffered "multiple blows on different parts of the body" from "blunt and sharp objects" in Wednesday's attack, the Ministry of Culture said in a statement.

El Salvador, one of the world’s deadliest countries, has recorded a rare day without a single homicide. National Civil Police commissioner Howard Cotto said on Thursday that no murders were reported the previous day in the gang-plagued little Central American nation. The last time the country went a full day without any killings was 22 January 2015, according to records kept by the Associated Press. It also happened once in 2013 and on two days the year before that.

San Salvador’s upstart mayor, Nayib Bukele, has promised a new way forward for a city besieged by decades of violence. His biggest obstacle, however, may not be the city’s gangs, but the city’s idea of itself. By Juan Carlos.

A molasses spill in a river in El Salvador from a sugarcane processing plant has triggered an alert by authorities worried about the effect on fish and people along the waterway. The civil protection service issued the alert after 3.4 million liters (900,000 gallons) of sludgy, brown, hot molasses was released into La Magdalena river near the town of Chalchuapa, 55 kilometers (35 miles) west of the capital San Salvador.

The government of El Salvador has deployed a new heavily armed unit to fight criminal gangs in rural areas. The 1000-strong special force is equipped with helicopters, armoured cars and assault weapons. Officials say it will target gang leaders who left the cities because of a government crackdown. There are an estimated 70,000 gang members in El Salvador. The country has one of the highest murder rates in the world largely due to their turf wars.

The story of how a group of trans women vanished in the midst of El Salvador’s civil war has been passed down from generation to generation, creating a legend that gave them a place in the history of a country that often seems to wish they would disappear. By J. Lester Feder and Nicola Chávez Courtright.