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A week after she was arrested over a tantrum on a tarmac in New York, former Korean Air executive Cho Hyun-ah faces charges of breaking aviation safety laws and then interfering with the inquiry into the incident.

Cho was indicted on those charges today, placing her under the threat of possibly spending years in prison. She was arrested on Dec. 30 along with two others — an airline executive and an official at the Transport Ministry — who are accused of working to undermine the investigation.

On Dec. 5, Cho forced a plane that had left its departure gate at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport to return to its gate so it could leave behind the senior steward.

Cho had insisted on the step after becoming enraged over being served macadamia nuts in a bag instead of on a plate while she was seated in first class.

Before the outburst, Cho, who has also been called by the first name Heather, had served as Korean Air's head of in-flight services. She is the daughter of airline chairman Cho Yang-ho.

The episode quickly became notorious (we called it a "nut rumpus" last month), putting new scrutiny on the privileged lives of South Korea's wealthy, and corporations' ties to government.

From the Korea Herald:

"The prosecution said it would launch an additional investigation into the Transport Ministry over suspicions that public servants had received special favors from Korean Air. Some ranking officials were accused of having their seats upgraded regularly for free."

This week, Cho's attorney told a judge that "Cho was in an excited state and may not have been aware of the fact that the plane had started to move," the Chosun Ilbo reports.

In other recent developments in the case, prosecutors said that Cho's younger sister, Cho Hyun-min, who's also a Korean Air executive, sent her embattled big sister a text message "promising to 'take revenge' on her behalf," the Ilbo says. The younger Cho apologized for that note after officials introduced the phone's contents as part of the evidence against Cho.

The AP tells us more about the charges Cho faces:

"She could face up to 15 years in prison if found guilty of all four charges she faces, according to Attorney Park Jin Nyoung, spokesman for the Korean Bar Association. Prosecutors accused her of forcing a flight to change its normal route, which Park said was the most serious charge with a maximum prison sentence of 10 years. The three other charges she faces are the use of violence against flight crew, hindering a government probe and forcing the flight's purser off the plane."

nut rage

Like many devoted fans, I jumped on the release of newly reconfigured, high-definition versions of HBO's classic cop series The Wire, binge-watching much of the show's five seasons on the HBO GO streaming service over the holidays.

And what I discovered — along with the sharper visuals — was the immediacy of the show's themes. Every episode felt as if it had been written last week, despite the fact that it debuted more than a dozen years ago and finished its run in 2008. Nowhere is that prescience on better display than the ways The Wire talks about race, culture and class.

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David Simon, creator of the HBO series The Wire, on the set in 2002. GAIL BURTON/ASSOCIATED PRESS hide caption

itoggle caption GAIL BURTON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

David Simon, creator of the HBO series The Wire, on the set in 2002.

GAIL BURTON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Series creator David Simon's potent stew of on-point television offered a knowing take on the decay eating at Baltimore, and by extension, many American cities. The show highlighted the overly aggressive policing of poor black communities, the way drug-dealing became the only viable business in too many neighborhoods, the stigmatization of the poverty-stricken and the ways that middle-class black people often fell short in attempts to help African-Americans stuck in the underclass.

In fact, I'd argue The Wire has a greater resonance today than when it was originally broadcast, because so many of its messages about urban failure, policing and race have become a depressing reality.

Here are some examples of scenes that speak to issues we're grappling with now.

These Lives Matter

The scene that opens the very first episode of The Wire feels like a mission statement. A teen, nicknamed Snot Boogie, lies dead in the street. The show's protagonist, Baltimore police Detective Jimmy McNulty, gets another street kid who witnessed the shooting, to explain that the victim was killed for trying to steal money from the pot at a dice game.

First, Simon shows viewers they are entering a world where the rules are different, the language is different and the danger is obvious. But he's also focusing on a situation that many Americans pay little attention to: a young black man with a criminal past getting killed in a senseless shooting. We hear some of Snot Boogie's personal story, and we feel a pang of pity when McNulty expresses sympathy over the insulting nickname (even if he is probably exaggerating that feeling to get the witness to talk to him). Most importantly, we learn that Simon is going to make viewers care about people who many of us have preferred to ignore.

That idea is central to real-life efforts by protesters in Ferguson, who looked beyond Michael Brown's past and fought to make their fellow citizens care about him and the other young men who lose their lives in overlooked neighborhoods. Part of the message is that, even if someone is guilty of a crime, they deserve to be treated like a human being by police and society in general.

The Thin Blue Line, Beyond Black And White

Another scene from the first season features a black police official, Lt. Cedric Daniels, berating a knucklehead officer who, in a fit of temper, struck an unarmed kid. While Daniels is reprimanding the young white officer, he's also coaching him to spin his story to avoid official sanction.

Real-life protests over the grand jury decision in Eric Garner's death show concerns about this very issue — questioning whether law enforcement is capable of policing itself, and whether the justice system can be truly impartial when a police officer stands accused of assaulting or killing a black man.

The show also lays bare how and why it's so tough to fix failing police policies. Consider a scene from The Wire's third season. An experienced police major, Howard "Bunny" Colvin, decides to herd drug dealers into "free zones," areas in his district where police essentially won't enforce drug laws. The short-lived experiment reduces crime in all the other areas he policed and allows the drug trade to progress without its usual violence.

Before it all comes crashing down, Colvin explains to a young sergeant how drug enforcement tactics have disconnected police from the communities they are supposed to be protecting.

"This drug thing, it ain't police work," he says, remembering how old-school cops walked a beat, got to know their communities and learned tips from local residents that helped solve crimes. "You call something a war, and pretty soon, everybody going to be acting like warriors ... and when you're at war, you need a [expletive] enemy. And pretty soon, damn near everybody on every corner is your [expletive] enemy. And the neighborhood you're supposed to be policing, that's just occupied territory."

Real-life activists today fear those are the attitudes fueling stop-and-frisk policies where thousands of innocent young people of color are searched and sometimes detained. Look at the "you're with us or you're against us" stance many New York police have demonstrated in dealing with Mayor Bill de Blasio, and you see more evidence of the war attitude at work.

Neighborhoods Collapse, Crime Thrives

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Actors Jermaine Crawford, Maestro Harrell, Tristan Wilds and Julito McCullum portrayed Baltimore students in the fourth season of HBO's The Wire. Paul Schiraldi/HBO hide caption

itoggle caption Paul Schiraldi/HBO

Actors Jermaine Crawford, Maestro Harrell, Tristan Wilds and Julito McCullum portrayed Baltimore students in the fourth season of HBO's The Wire.

Paul Schiraldi/HBO

I didn't speak to Simon for this piece, but I did interview him several times during the show's run. He told me back in 2003 that the show often detailed how people land in the drug economy when traditional options fail them — whether it's the black kids in crumbling schools and struggling families in the fourth season, or the white kids trying to land a shrinking number of jobs on the city's docks in the second season.

"Whenever the economy shrugs and throws off people it doesn't need, the underground economy finds a place for them," Simon said. "You start seeing the intersection between the drug culture and the lack of meaningful work."

At a time when both incarceration rates and income inequality are reaching staggering levels, that seems to be yet another prediction Simon and The Wire nailed many years ago. Throughout the series, young people are taunted by career criminals, police and each other about the futility of pursuing education and legitimate work.

Simon has said often that The Wire is, in part, about the failure of institutions and the mediocrity of bureaucracy, even in the drug trade. But it's also about how those failures work along fissures of race and class.

As books like The New Jim Crow and documentaries like The House I Live In argue that the war on drugs has become a war on the poor and the non-white, the case for The Wire's view of an America hobbled by the desire for order at any cost — especially if that cost mostly falls on poor black and brown people — seems seriously prescient.

eric deggans

Baltimore

The Wire

David Simon

HBO

I'm aware of the responsibility, let's put it that way. I wouldn't go there if I didn't think I could do it and do it well. I do feel like that's what a writer does is he goes into other people's heads. Growing up [in D.C.], around here, in a city that was, when I was a kid, 75 percent black, you pick up the voices. And my dad had a diner and I was always out on the street, working with people, playing sports, things like that, and listening all the time. ... I sort of picked that up. I'm still very interested in that. A lot of what I do now, when I say I'm "researching" — it's really just being out there in the world and listening to people and trying to respect them when I get to the point where I'm putting it down on the page.

On racism in America

In general, you take the race thing and people seem to be surprised that there's still racism. It was supposed to end when Obama got elected, right? "Post-racial America." So I'll say in general that what I think, unfortunately, is that this problem will be solved when people of my generation and older die off, basically. Because you see it very rarely now in kids — and kids, juveniles, people in their 20s, they just don't care about it. Even people of my generation who have these bad feelings, they know enough, they've been smart enough not to pass it on to their kids, and so that is what's going to happen. I think things are going to get better in probably 20, 30 years, when people my age and older are gone.

On his experience adopting two kids from Brazil, which inspired the story "When You're Hungry"

Everybody thinks that adopting kids is some kind of noble calling, but I wanted to demystify it, take the mystery out of it and also show the humor of it. Because there are some sort of ridiculous things that happen when you adopt kids, and one of them is when you go to the lawyer's office — or whoever you're dealing with – [and] they throw a bunch of pictures on the table, of babies, and they'll say ... "Choose a baby."

I would say to my wife, "Well, OK, that's all well and good, but when I choose this baby, what happens to all the other ones? I'm rejecting them, it's a pretty big decision." Then we were in a meeting at some point and the attorney says to us, "What kind of baby do you want?" And I said, "What do you mean 'what kind'? Like, what color?" And he's like, "Well, yeah." I was sort of dumbfounded by that. ...

“ I saw the police pull into the parking lot and I was all jacked up on adrenaline and I just got in my car and I took off. I had to drive down the sidewalk to do it and a high-speed chase ensued, let's put it that way.

- George Pelecanos

It's relatively easy to adopt kids if you're not trying to get kids that look exactly like you. Because you hear how hard it is. But actually it happened very quickly for us.

On writing for The Wire

Laura Lippman, who was [series creator] David Simon's girlfriend at the time and she's a great writer out of Baltimore ... she gave David one of my books. It was a book called The Sweet Forever, which was one of my deep, urban, dark books that were set back in a time in Washington when things were pretty crummy.

I think she said to him, "Read this guy. He's doing in Washington what you're sort of doing in Baltimore." So David read it and I met him — I saw him at a funeral, actually, of a mutual friend ... and he says, "Ride back with me to the wake." So we're riding back and he says kind of casually, "I just sold a series to HBO about drug dealers and police." He downplayed it. He didn't tell me about his ambition or really what the show was going to be about. But I knew his work from Homicide and especially The Corner, which he co-wrote the book with Ed Burns. ... He offered me an episode for that first season. I accepted David's offer and I wrote the episode, which was the penultimate episode of season one.

On the last time he was arrested when he was 28 years old

I had been to a wedding in the daytime, which is always a bad idea, especially for my group of guys. So I got in a little accident, a little fender-bender in a parking lot and it escalated — more than one guy and me. There was shoving and stuff like that. Somebody called the police and one of those guys blocked my car from behind so I couldn't leave. I saw the police pull into the parking lot and I was all jacked up on adrenaline and I just got in my car and I took off. I had to drive down the sidewalk to do it and a high-speed chase ensued, let's put it that way. I lost them because it was in my neighborhood where I grew up and I knew all the alleys and side streets, but it was very dangerous what happened because I was blowing red lights and cars were spinning. ...

Anyway, the next day they called me at my apartment said "Would you like to come in or would you like us to come arrest you?" Because they had my license plate numbers. So I went by my parents' house ... I told them, "Mom and Dad, I'm about to go turn myself in," this and that. Anyway, I got charged with a bunch of stuff, including driving on the sidewalk, which is my favorite charge of that checkered night.

I ended up having to do go to this class at night for six weeks and I was looking around at the people in the classroom and I saw a bunch of guys who, to me, they were losers, you know what I mean? And then I came to the realization that I was one of them. So I sort of grew up and that's what happens. I got married shortly thereafter; two or three years later I wrote my first novel, started a family. People do change. I believe in that.

Read an excerpt of The Martini Shot

Here's the background: A group calling itself Pegida — Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West — has protested since October against Germany's asylum and immigration policies, which it views as lax. Germany takes in more refugees and asylum-seekers than other European Union countries.

Pegida's views aren't in the political fringe. One German journalist told the BBC that many of its supporters felt "hard done-by" by the media and politicians. And a recent poll in Stern magazine showed 1 in 8 Germans would join an anti-Islam march.

Pegida says it is not racist or xenophobic, says it opposes extremism and calls for the preservation of the country's Judeo-Christian culture. One demonstration organized by the group in Dresden before Christmas drew 17,500 people; another one on Monday in the same city attracted 18,000 people.

But attempts to replicate that turnout elsewhere have been met with counterprotests.

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People protest against Pegida in Hamburg, Germany, on Monday. Bodo Marks /EPA /LANDOV hide caption

itoggle caption Bodo Marks /EPA /LANDOV

People protest against Pegida in Hamburg, Germany, on Monday.

Bodo Marks /EPA /LANDOV

Counterdemonstrations that drew thousands of people were held in Berlin, Cologne, Dresden and Stuttgart. Efforts by Pegida supporters to march in Berlin on Monday were thwarted by counterdemonstrators who blocked their way. About 80 German politicians, celebrities and athletes signed a petition — headlined No to Pegida — in the Bild newspaper. They include former Chancellors Helmut Schmidt and Gerhard Schroeder, as well as Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Family Minister Manuela Schwesig.

And in her New Year's Day speech, Chancellor Angela Merkel called on her fellow Germans to be wary of groups such as Pegida.

"Do not follow people who organize these, for their hearts are cold and often full of prejudice, and even hate," Merkel said.

In some of most striking images of the counterprotests, Germany turned off the lights at its most famous landmarks, including Berlin's Brandenburg Gate and Cologne Cathedral.

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The lights at Cologne Cathedral are switched off Monday to make a statement against Pegida. Maja Hitij/EPA /LANDOV hide caption

itoggle caption Maja Hitij/EPA /LANDOV

The lights at Cologne Cathedral are switched off Monday to make a statement against Pegida.

Maja Hitij/EPA /LANDOV

"We don't think of it as a protest, but we would like to make the many conservative Christians [who support Pegida] think about what they are doing," Norbert Feldhoff, the dean of the cathedral, told the BBC.

Kathrin Oertel, one of Pegida's main organizers, told a rally in Dresden that there was "political repression" once again in Germany.

"Or how would you see it when we are insulted or called racists or Nazis openly by all the political mainstream parties and media for our justified criticism of Germany's asylum-seeker policies and the non-existent immigration policy?" she asked, according to the BBC.

Pegida

Germany