EL SALVADOR: Waging War on Gangs
El Salvador is on pace to eclipse Honduras as the country with the highest homicide rate in the world—as of September 2015, around 5,000 murders have occurred this year. The staggering death toll has been attributed to the breakdown of a truce between powerful rival gangs and the government, which, having previously backed the pact, has now opted to take on the gangs. The government has even started charging gang members with the crime of belonging to a terrorist organization. VICE News correspondent Danny Gold heads to El Salvador, where he spends time with police officers, gang members from all factions, and the Salvadorans caught in the middle of what many are now calling a war.
Coming this month to VICE News.
JAPAN: Food Hacking
Munchies’ new series Food Hacking re-imagines the ways that people around the world cook and eat. Host Simon Klose, a documentary filmmaker from Sweden, explores the new technologies that are permeating and transforming Japan’s culinary scene. Neither a chef nor a hacker, Simon is curious about subversive cuisine at the intersection of ecology and technology. In the latest episode, he heads to Tokyo to visit Kentaro Fukuchi, an associate professor of mathematical science who wants to fuse cutting-edge technology with the Japanese tradition of consuming raw meat. Using an industrial laser, Fukuchi is able to fry the fat in strips of bacon while keeping the rest of the meat raw. By hacking a laser cutter to cook, the professor says, he is actually hacking Japanese culture.
Watch this episode of Food Hacking now on Munchies.
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ANGOLA: Hanging On
Even more than a decade after the end of its brutal 27-year-long civil war, Angola remains one of the most difficult countries in the world to visit. We travel there with Americans Alex Honnold, winner of the Piolet d’Or, climbing and mountaineering’s highest honor, and Stacy Bare, National Geographic’s Adventurer of the Year, to document their trip as they chart new climbing routes in the country’s under-explored interior. In addition to climbing, the team helps to lay the groundwork for a grassroots solarenergy network in the area of the provincial capital of Waku- Kungo. They also visit a munitions-demolition site to better understand the challenge Angola faces in clearing the countless land mines the conflict scattered throughout the countryside.
Coming soon to VICE Sports.
DENMARK: Fur Trade
Twenty years after PETA launched its influential “Naked” campaign featuring five models declaring, “I’d rather go naked than wear fur,” the controversial fur industry is booming once more. From the runway to an emerging generation of shoppers in China, fur has returned to the heart of fashion—and at full pelt. In this i-D investigation, we join host Rose Bretécher, a writer and the great granddaughter of a furrier, as she visits the garment factories of China and the fur farms of Denmark. Bretécher sits in on a Greenlandic seal hunt and begins to discover where she stands on the debate. The industry may be worth an estimated $40 billion, but can the taboo ever truly lose traction?
Watch the documentary, Fur Trade, later this month on i-D.
CLEVELAND: Cleveland Strangler
Over the course of two years in the early 2000s, 11 women were raped, strangled, and murdered in Cleveland. The victims were poor black women struggling with addiction on the east side of town. Their murderer, Anthony Sowell, stashed their bodies in his decrepit house unnoticed, despite the numerous rape allegations against him, the missing-persons reports, and the smell of rotting flesh that permeated the neighborhood. Sowell was finally arrested in 2009 and now sits on death row. In the first documentary of our new crime series, Red Right Hand, VICE flies to Cleveland to try to understand the systemic failures and police negligence that led to this horrific chapter in the city’s criminal history.
Watch this episode of Red Right Hand now on VICE.
