Mexico’s crackdown on drug cartels has triggered a spike in violence in Vancouver, where seven shootings took place in 48 hours this week, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police superintendent said on Thursday.
With the Mexican government in hot pursuit, the drug cartels are “too busy fighting each other” to deal with their supply lines to Canada, causing a shortage of cocaine in Vancouver, Pat Fogarty told CBC public television.
He said the price of cocaine has “skyrocketed to 50,000 dollars a kilo where it was normally six months ago around 25,000 to 30,000 per kilo,” sending local drug gangs scrambling to control the dwindling stocks of the drug.
“And so what you have is basically gangsters that do nothing else but make their money through the cocaine trade ... that are now under a great deal of stress and so ripoffs occur. A variety of things can occur at any given day in order to survive,” Fogarty said.
The city, host of the 2010 Winter Olympics, has seen several murders and shootings in the past few weeks that police attribute to gang warfare. The most notorious incident occurred last week, when hitmen fatally shot a young mother driving while her four-year-old son screamed in the back seat.
The surge in violence has led Minister of Public Safety Peter Van Loan to dub Vancouver as Canada’s gang capital.
There are an estimated 900 organized criminal groups operating in Canada, accounting for 20 percent of homicides in the country, according to the Justice Department, which said the number of nationwide slayings is on the rise.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
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