Word: swallower
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Tobon knows what to do. For more than 10 years, the Colombian drug lords have been smuggling cocaine by hiring human "mules" to swallow as many as 100 condoms filled with the white powder. Many die en route or during the painful extraction process. And, over the decade, Tobon has received at least 400 calls for help from families of the dead. He tells the woman not to worry. Then he makes the phone calls...
Called "internal body carriers" by the Drug Enforcement Administration, mules can carry up to one kilo of cocaine or heroin in their intestines. Before ingesting the drugs, they fast for several days, then swallow cooking oil for lubrication. Next, the oblong packets are placed in their esophagus with pliers and shoved down their throat. If a condom rips or is corroded by stomach acid during a long flight delay, the drugs burn, slowly, through the internal organs. On arrival the mules are taken to a hotel room by gang members and given large doses of laxative. "The most I have...
...what has amplified the destructive power of modern fishing more than anything else is its gargantuan scale. Trawling for pollock in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska, for example, are computerized ships as large as football fields. Their nets--wide enough to swallow a dozen Boeing 747s--can gather up 130 tons of fish in a single sweep. Along with pollock and other groundfish, these nets indiscriminately draw in the creatures that swim or crawl alongside, including halibut, Pacific herring, Pacific salmon and king crab. In similar fashion, so-called longlines--which stretch for tens of miles...
...such cases, of course, the reader is honor bound to swallow hard and assume that every word has been made up. Invention gives Kate a pretty, childish mother, who falls in love (literally, as a result of repeated backward-flop trust exercises) with her therapist, a slightly sleazy charmer named Anton. What follows melds The Bobbsey Twins with On the Road. Mom drags the girls across the U.S. to meet her lover at Esalen, the California therapy spa, borrowing gas money from Kate, the sort of wise child who always has some. Then with Anton, his five children...
...Hong Kong plans for fireworks and champagne to celebrate its reunification with China next Monday, nearby Taiwan has been carrying out massive live-ammunition drills this week to make clear that it has no intention of allowing China to swallow it next. In response to Taiwan's saber-rattling, Beijing is threatening military drills in Fujian, the Chinese province nearest Taiwan, and maintains that Taiwan should view the Hong Kong handover as a blueprint for its own future. The rising tensions between Beijing and Taiwan have created a diplomatic difficulty for Hong Kong, which is stumped on where to seat...