HBO's The Wire Goes Against Stereotype Sergeant Joe Friday would probably flip in his fictional grave at the sight of HBO's new cop show, which just concluded its first season last month. The Wire looks at the war on drugs as it is waged in the inner cities of Baltimore by an inter-agency team of federal agents and local police officers. The cop genre has come a long way from the strait-laced corn served up on Dragnet, the mother of all TV police dramas, but The Wire may be pioneering a sub-genre of its own. Created by David Simon, a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, and co-written by ex-police officer Ed Burns, The Wire challenges some of the core assumptions that underlie the typical cop show. [continues 1022 words]
Sergeant Joe Friday would probably flip in his fictional grave at the sight of HBO's new cop show, which just concluded its first season last month. The Wire looks at the war on drugs as it is waged in the inner cities of Baltimore by an inter-agency team of federal agents and local police officers. The cop genre has come a long way from the strait-laced corn served up on Dragnet, the mother of all TV police dramas, but The Wire may pioneering a sub-genre of its own. Created by David Simon, a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, and co-written by ex-police officer Ed Burns, The Wire challenges some of the core assumptions that underlie the typical cop show. [continues 1339 words]
TENS of thousands of dolphins are being slaughtered by Latin American gangs using the fishing industry as cover for smuggling cocaine into the United States and on to other countries, including Britain. US anti-narcotics officers acknowledge that crime syndicates in Colombia and Mexico have bought up tuna fleets and canneries in South and Central America. The boats are used to transport the cocaine - known as "white tuna" - and the fishing companies provide a means of laundering the profits. Ben White, the international co-ordinator of the Washington-based Animal Welfare Institute, said that the gangs used fishing methods most countries had banned because of the disastrous effect they have on dolphins and porpoises. [continues 496 words]
Mexico's most vicious drug trafficking gang, the Tijuana cartel, is being forced to regroup after army commandos captured its mastermind, Benjamin Arellano Felix, without firing a single shot. The Mexican soldiers, who swooped early on Saturday, also discovered that the gang's sadistic co-leader, Arellano Felix's brother Ramon, was already dead. The raid is considered the biggest victory in the international war on drugs since the death of the Colombian cocaine lord, Pablo Escobar. The commandos stormed the hideout in Puebla, an hour's drive south-east of Mexico City, after disarming two guards. [continues 542 words]
At first it seemed like just another incident on the increasingly violent streets of Mexico. Three men, brandishing guns and driving a battered Volkswagen through the Mexican port city of Mazatlán, a Pacific coast beach resort popular with Americans, failed to stop at a routine police checkpoint. A chase and shoot-out in front of a hotel left two of the three dead. Four weeks later, police have learned that the incident struck the single biggest blow against the world narcotics trade since the death of Pablo Escobar. One of the dead men turned out to be none other than Ramon Arellano-Felix - the world's most powerful drugs baron and a leading fugitive on the FBI's most wanted list. [continues 499 words]
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