OMAR TORRES/AFP/Getty Images

The chaotic drug violence in Mexico continues unabated. With more than 6,000 killed in the past few years, today we can add yet another victim: the country's national police chief, killed by gunmen outside his home in Mexico City yesterday.

Edgar Eusebio Millán Gómez, the public face of Mexico's offensive against drug cartels, became the highest-ranking law enforcement official to be killed since the launch of the effort 17 months ago. The assassination could give new confidence to drug cartels blamed for 6,000 killings in the past 2 1/2 years, and embolden other anti-government groups in this violence-plagued nation.

"This could have a snowball effect, even leading to the risk of ungovernability," Luís Astorga, a Mexico City-based sociologist and drug expert, said in an interview. "It indicates terrible things, a level of weakness in our institutions -- they can't even protect themselves."

Just a few ordinary days in modern Mexico...

This weekend:

Gunmen killed 17 people over the weekend in the southern coastal state of Guerrero in a wild hunt for the head of the state cattlemen’s association, who has gone into hiding, the authorities said Monday.

On Saturday morning, several men dressed as commandos and carrying assault rifles opened fire on a cattlemen’s meeting at a hotel in Iguala, killing seven ranchers but missing the leader of the group, Rogaciano Alba Álvarez.

The next day, eight trucks full of armed men pulled up outside a house on Mr. Alba Álvarez’s ranch in Petatlán. The men asked for the owner of the ranch. His family and ranch hands denied knowing his whereabouts.

The gunmen then lined people up against a wall and opened fire, killing 10 people, including two young sons of Mr. Alba Álvarez, Alejandro and Rusbel, a witness told The Associated Press. Then they kidnapped a teen-age girl believed to be Mr. Alba Álvarez’s niece or daughter and fled, authorities said.

Last week:

TIJUANA – A confrontation between rival criminal gangs left 13 dead and nine injured early yesterday in gunbattles that started along a major thoroughfare and continued near a private clinic where police exchanged gunfire with injured suspects.

Saturday:

Police have recovered the remains of seven men who were killed and dumped along a road in northern Mexico.

Thanks to the likes of Napster, modern-day piracy is often associated more with ripped files than riptides. But according to this week's Tuesday Map, modern-day pirates still roam the high seas –- at least off the coast of Somalia.

This integrated satellite map, created by UNOSAT (the Operational Satellite Applications Program of the UN Institute for Training and Research) shows reported incidents of pirate attacks and hijackings off the coast of Somalia between January and November of 2007 (highlighted in red orbs) as well as incidents in 2005 and 2006 (not highlighted).

Somalia, ranked third in the 2007 Failed States Index, has been in a rough patch ever since the 1991 fall of President Said Barre. For more than two decades, it remained loosely governed and divided by warlords. Then, back in June 2006, a group of Muslim clerics, leaders, and businessmen called the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) took control of Mogadishu and installed an Islamic extremist leader, challenging the legitimacy of Somalia's U.N.-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG). Seven months later, the TFG, with the help of neighboring Ethiopia, retook the capital city and much of the South. The TFG's resurgence was also supported by American commandos, sent in to take out suspected al Qaeda terrorists.

Given this rocky track record, Somalia's coastal chaos would seem to reflect its internal instability. But according to UNOSAT's figures (see the chart included in the pdf map), piracy actually subsided during the UIC period, a time otherwise reported as bearing a striking resemblance to the Taliban regime.

Perhaps there's a fatwa against eye patches?

Fire up your popcorn poppers and invite over all your friends: On Wednesday night, PBS stations nationwide will air the new National Geographic documentary Illicit: The Dark Trade, based on the bestselling book by FP Editor in Chief Moisés Naím. You can check your local listings for times. (If you live in Washington, D.C., it's on WETA TV 26 at 8:00 p.m.)

The film explores the dark underbelly of globalization, from the counterfeiting of luxury goods to money laundering to human trafficking. Highlights include live footage of a raid on a counterfeit warehouse and a moving sequence illustrating how the contaminated cough syrup that killed dozens in Panama last year originated at an unlicensed Chinese chemical factory. It also features extensive interviews with Naím and our Carnegie Endowment colleague Minxin Pei.

Here's a preview:

FP subscribers can also check out Naím's 2003 cover story, "The Five Wars of Globalization," to see where it all began.

Guang Niu/Getty Images

Since July 2006, the Chinese People's Liberation Army has discovered "4,112 fake military vehicles and 6,373 stolen or bogus military number plates," Xinhua reports.

Why the counterfeiting? Because vehicles with military plates don't have to pay for tolls or parking, and they're far less likely to get pulled over for speeding.

I wonder, what kind of vehicles are we talking about here? Tanks? APCs? Some clever Chinese fraudsters have already fabricated a Ferrari, so why not?

bumad.un.kiev.ua

Bulgaria, the EU’s newest member state, is fast becoming one of Brussels' main headaches.

Back in January, corruption accusations grew so rampant around the country’s road construction projects that the EU froze all related funding until further investigation.  

Then, less than a week after EU officials visited Sofia to warn against corruption and organized crime, a prominent businessman was shot twice in the head in the stairwell of his apartment building. Less than 24 hours later, a former mafioso turned novelist was also shot and killed while leaving a downtown café. Their deaths only add to the 150 or so mafia-style killings in Bulgaria since the fall of communism –- none of which have seen convictions.

Now, Bulgaria’s parliament has reported that its country’s problems extend far beyond the new EU border.  Bulgaria’s National Security Agency has found that Bulgarian drug traffickers, who do a sizable business sitting on the fault line between Europe and Southwest Asia, have close links to Arab drug traders who, in turn, fund Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.

I’m all for the EU accession of Western Balkan states –- if nothing else because there is presently no other viable alternative for an economically and politically stable future in the region. But it's because of the lack of an alternative that accession standards have slipped as far as they have.  And if the EU can’t hold Bulgaria on its commitment to anti-corruption standards, how will it ever manage the likes of Bosnia and Serbia?

FILE: Mark Penn; Win McNamee/Getty Images

I must admit, I'm puzzled as to why it's supposed to be such a big deal that Hillary Clinton's chief strategist Mark Penn (right) met with Bogotá's ambassador to Washington about the controversial U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

The key point to remember about this and other FTAs in Latin America is that they're much more about politics than they are about economics. Ninety percent of U.S. imports from Colombia have already been entering the United States without any tariff, thanks to prior agreements. Peterson Institute analyst Jeffrey J. Schott estimated in 2006 that any welfare gains (GDP boost) from a U.S.-Colombia FTA would be positive, but "relatively small" -- roughly half a percentage point for the Colombians, and a negligible amount for the United States. If anything, the agreement is about lowering Colombia's tariff barriers to U.S. goods, solidifying trade relations, and lowering the risk that President Álvaro Uribe's successor will have a different economic philosophy. So, claims by U.S. labor activists that the FTA would be bad for U.S. manufacturers are little more than dishonest fearmongering.

That said, I'm not on board with U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab's hyperbole, either. Can it really be that the dangling FTA, not the drug war, is the root of Latin America's problems today?

Leaders in the hemisphere and Latin America have said that the single most destabilizing factor in Latin America today may be the U.S. Congress's failure to ratify the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. That is more destabilizing today than anything that Colombia's neighbor Venezuela is doing or threatening to do— and that is saying a lot.

FP Editor-in-Chief Moisès Naím explains:

At first sight, the scandals that brought down Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York, and Klaus Zumwinkel, the former president of Deutsche Post (the German corporate behemoth), didn't seem to have much in common. Spitzer fell two weeks ago for hiring prostitutes; Zumwinkel, two weeks before that, for tax evasion. Yet there's a thread that binds them together: money laundering. Both men were brought down by a new system for tracking money that was created in reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks—but that has since spread its net far beyond jihadists.

See also Naím's commentary on how Ugly Betty explains the Latin American economy.

SAEED KHAN/AFP/Getty Images

After years of championing the cause of former Iraqi employees of the Coalition Provisional Authority and pushing the United States to arrange their evacuation, The New Yorker's George Packer thinks he may have finally found the man for the job: recently arrested international arms dealer Viktor Bout.

Here's a modest proposal [...] why don't the American prosecutors eager to put Bout on trial cut a plea bargain in which he would use his worldwide cargo business to conduct an airlift like Britain's (and Denmark's last year), flying America's Iraqi friends in his fleet of Antonovs and Ilyushins across the world to Guam for processing and eventual resettlement. It would be a kind of community service on Bout’s part, atonement for his large role in worldwide atrocities over the past fifteen years and the beginning of his rehabilitation. It would also give the U.S. government a way to make up for using Bout as an arms trafficker to Iraq. It would save taxpayer dollars. And finally, after a year of delay and failure by American officials, we'd have a man eminently capable of getting the job done.

Packer's tongue is firmly in cheek here, but Bout is actually no stranger to humanitarian work. In Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun's 2006 FP story, "The Merchant of Death," the authors recount how Bout's planes have flown missions for the World Food Program, delivered supplies to tsunami-devastated Sri Lanka, and conveyed peacekeepers to Rwanda and Somalia. Ironically, these missions are what tipped authorities off to his illegal activities.

For more on the Bout arrest, check out our recent Seven Questions interview with Farah.

(Editor's note: Please see update at bottom.)

Do you have a Ph.D. from a well-regarded American university such as Harvard, Cornell, or Caltech? If so, don't go to Germany and put the title "Dr." on your business card, Web site, or résumé. It's illegal, and you could end up in prison for a year.

Under a 1930s law from Nazi times, only people with Ph.D.'s and medical degrees from German universities can use "Dr." as a title, though the law was amended in 2001 to include degrees from EU countries too. (There is a way for non-EU degree holders to apply for permission to use the titles, but apparently, it's not worth the trouble.)

Recently, seven Americans -- all researchers at institutes of Germany's prestigious Max Planck Society -- were investigated for title abuse. One was an astrophysicist with a Ph.D. from Caltech. Another, Ian Thomas Baldwin, has a Ph.D. from Cornell. His colleagues have been calling him "Prof. Dr. Baldwin" for a decade, but apparently, the law says he instead should be "Prof. Ian Thomas Baldwin, Ph.D., Cornell University." (It looks like his Web page is in compliance, thank goodness.)

Honorifics are taken quite seriously in Germany, reports the Washington Post. (If any of you who have lived in Germany know about this sensitivity, please feel free to leave a comment.) Fortunately, though, prosecutors have now recommended against filing charges, but the Americans could still face a civil fine.

Meanwhile, German officials recently suggested changing the law to allow the "Dr." title to be used by people with Ph.D.'s and medical degrees from U.S. universities, but only if the university is one of the approximately 200 accredited by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

It all raises the question: Do Germans with Ph.D.'s and medical degrees expect to be called "Dr." when living abroad?

UPDATE: According to a post on the Marginal Revolution blog, the law mentioned in this post may have just been changed.

Russia may have seen a terrific rise in crime since the breakup of the Soviet Union, but a women's prison in Siberia has been making the most of it. For almost 20 years now, prison UF-91/9 has held an annual beauty contest in which inmates compete for a tiara and the title of "Miss Spring."

Maria Yatskova, director of a documentary film about the prison and its pageants, describes the event:

The prison decided to invent its own rules with three categories - "Greek Goddesses", "Flower Gowns", and "Imaginary Uniforms", which lets inmates design their ideal prison uniforms of the future. Many women have never heard of the Greek myths or exotic flowers they portray onstage, but they learn from books provided by the staff… Several guards and unit chiefs judge the contestants on their appearance and creativity, crowning the winner with a tiara "Miss Spring" and two runners-up "Miss Charm" and "Miss Grace." News crews even broadcast the event on local TV."

In her film, aptly entited Miss Gulag, Yatskova tells the story of three inmate-contestants. Through their words, Yatskova explores the hardship and struggles of women from post-Soviet Russia's first generation, who were caught up in the side effects of Russia's market transition.

Miss Gulag premiered last year and has been appearing in festivals from Milan to Maine ever since. Check out the trailer here:

News this morning that "Merchant of Death" Viktor Bout, one of the world's top arms trafficker to guerillas and governments alike, has been arrested in Thailand. FP readers will be familiar with Bout from our profile of the notorious arms dealer, who made his fortune running guns and other illicit cargo for everyone from Qaddafi to the Pentagon.

Bout, who has openly been living the high life in Moscow for the past few years, is apprarently being held by Thai authorities on the basis of a U.S. DEA warrant accusing Bout of supplying guns to Colombia's FARC rebels. Given that attempts to capture Bout -- or at least disrupt his business -- have been hobbled by the lack of international enforcement mechanisms and toothless sanctions, it'll be interesting to see whether these charges stick and Bout's network is actually dismantled. Regardless, there are no doubt dozens of traffickers waiting in the wings to soak up Bout's clients. A formal announcement from the DEA is due today. Check back with us for rolling updates.

I'll bet you thought Nepal's glory days as a hippie destination were over:

PRAKASH MATHEMA/AFP/Getty Images

A Sadhu (Hindu holy man) smokes ganja (marijuana) in a chillum (traditional clay pipe) as a holy offering from lord Shiva, Hindu god of creation and destruction during celebrations of the Maha Shivaratri festival at the Pashupatinath temple area in Kathmandu, on March 4, 2008. Thousands of sages and holy men visit Nepal's biggest hindu temple Pashupatinath during the Maha Shivaratri festival each year.

The Public Policy Institute of California has just issued a surprising new report finding that immigrants to the Golden State are far less likely to commit serious crimes than those who are native-born. The study finds that even though foreign-born residents make up 35 percent of California's population, they make up only 17 percent of those incarcerated. Among men aged 18-40, the most likely to commit crimes, immigrants make up an even lower percentage. Native-born Americans in that age group who were born in the Untied States are 10 times more likely to be in county or state prison than immigrants. Hopefully, the study will put some xenophobia to rest.

Since 2002, more than $676 million worth of art has been stolen from European museums. Maybe it's just me, but this account of yesterday's art heist in Zurich makes it sound too easy:

Three thieves, wearing dark clothes and ski masks, walked into the Emile Bührle Foundation, a private collection housed a couple of miles outside of Zurich's city center on the shore of Lake Zurich, around 4:30 p.m. on Sunday.... While one held a pistol and ordered visitors and staff members to lie on the floor in the main room of the museum, the two other men removed the four paintings from the wall.... Their total worth is estimated at $163 million.... After the theft, the men fled in a white car, with the trunk open and the paintings visible."

These guys didn't crack a 16-digit pin code or jerry-rig a pully system using shoelaces and chewing gum, mind you. They walked into a museum in central Zurich, in broad daylight, took four paintings off the wall, put them in their trunk, and drove away. I've seen stick-ups at my local DC-area 7-Eleven that were more elaborate. Shouldn't it be a tad more difficult to steal several hundred-million dollars worth of Van Goghs and Monets than it is to jack a Twinkie from the Quickie Mart?

You may already have seen this incredible photo from a fire in Ludwigshafen, Germany, an industrial town across the Rhein from Mannheim:

AFP/Getty Images

The photo instantly told a heartwarming, if tragic, story: Fire-trapped Family Throws Baby to Safety.

Nine people died in Sunday's blaze, and a further 60 were injured. But incredibly, the 11-month-old baby survived without injury. In recent days, though, the story has taken a darker turn. Speculation is growing that the fire was not an accident, but racially motivated arson aimed at Turkish or Turkish-origin families living in the building. The accusations have been aired prominently in the Turkish press, and Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan is reportedly meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel today about it. There is some suggestive circumstantial evidence that arson was the motive:

The police confirmed Wednesday that the apartment building had already been daubed with neo-Nazi graffiti before the fire. The word "Hass" ("hate") was written twice on the wall next to the entrance to a Turkish cultural center on the ground floor of the building, with the last two letters written in the style of the Germanic runes of Hitler's SS organization.

Investigators have yet to issue their findings, however. For Germany, this is an extremely delicate topic. There are an estimated 2.5 million ethnic Turks in Germany, a relatively large minority in a nationalistic country of about 82.5 million. The good news? In the most recent state elections in Hesse, voters appeared to reject a xenophobic campaign waged by the incumbent, a Merkel ally. Tensions, of course, could easy flare up as a result of this incident. Stay tuned.

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime today released yet another report anticipating a bumper opium crop this year.

But I'm more interested in the report's finding that Afghanistan is also becoming the world's top center for marijuana cultivation. Eighteen percent of villages are planning to grow cannabis this year, a 5 percent jump over 2007.

The news reminded me of a story from awhile back about how Taliban fighters were using 10-foot-high marijuana forests for cover:

Bronwen Roberts/AFP/Getty Images

Guess there's going to be a lot more of that from now on. Perhaps it's time to try a different strategy?

Am I the only one who finds the FBI's newly redesigned Ten Most Wanted Fugitives page to be, well, a little cheesy? Check out the new logo:

I mean, it looks like something designed for a low-budget variety show, not for a list that includes the likes of Osama bin Laden.

The Guardian reports on a proposal by the FBI to setup an international database for "major criminals and terrorists":

The US-initiated programme, "Server in the Sky", would take cooperation between the police forces way beyond the current faxing of fingerprints across the Atlantic. Allies in the "war against terror" - the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand - have formed a working group, the International Information Consortium, to plan their strategy.

Here I was naively assuming that we already had a shared computer database for this type of thing. I mean, they really fax fingerprints nowadays?

Yet another black eye for the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation: 

Telephone companies cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time, according to a Justice Department audit released Thursday.