#Slava Cocaine

[gotohellfuckingyankees]

[blackpilledkremlintsarina5294]

[antiamericafinland]

[maryversusthemovies]

New York’s hottest club is Liquid Sky. This club has everything: heroin, David Bowie impersonators, aliens, necrophelia, shrimp, cocaine, a Fairlight CMI synthesizer, Germans, murder, and anorgasmia.

Starring Anne Carlisle, Paula E. Sheppard, Susan Doukas, and Otto von Wernherr. Written by Slava Tsukerman, Nina V. Kerova, and Anne Carlisle. Directed by Slava Tsukerman.

Episode 130 - Liquid Sky

https://sites.libsyn.com/398906/episode-130-liquid-sky-1982

[bobguz]

Zelensky brings "Slava cocaine" attitude to the United States. Russia re...

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic: 02 Mar 2020 (Disasters vs dystopias, meet me in Kelowna, Cool Mules, astrosovkitsch, drug policy)

Today's links

My new podcast, "Disasters Don't Have to End in Dystopia": Tired: Look for the helpers. Wired: Be the helper.

The next frontier for school censorware is spying on kids all the time: It's how we'll stop ISIS, apparently.

I'm coming to Kelowna on March 5: It's my first-ever trip to the BC interior and more than half the (free) tickets are gone. RSVP now!

Cool Mules, an investigative series on a Vice editor's cocaine-smuggling ring: From the people who brought you the stunning "Thunder Bay."

Soviet Space Graphics: Cosmic Visions from the USSR.

Apple, Nike and Dell's supply chain includes enslaved Uyghurs: Xinjiang Phase II.

Drugs Without the Hot Air: The best book I've ever read on drugs and drug policy, in an expanded new edition.

This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

My new podcast, "Disasters Don't Have to End in Dystopia" (permalink)

I just posted a new podcast! "Disasters Don't Have to End in Dystopia" is an essay I wrote for Wired about the ways that the stories we tell ourselves make the difference between rising to meet a crisis and devolving into catastrophe.

The podcast is here:

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/01/disasters-dont-have-to-end-in-dystopias/

The Wired essay is here:

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/cory-doctorow-walkaway/

Though I wrote it in 2017, it really applies today. Our beliefs about whether we can trust our neighbors to have our back in times of crisis informs whether we behave in a way that shows THEY can trust US in times of crisis.

And since every crisis is (eventually) overcome by people pitching in to get things fixed, the belief that our fellow humans are untrustworthy means that crises are more likely to turn into disasters – and the stories we write can instil or dispel that belief.

I know that there's some controversy about Mr Rogers' famous "Look for the helpers" speech – that it's advice for children, not adults.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/look-for-the-helpers-mr-rogers-is-bad-for-adults/574210/

But the adult version is "BE the helper." That is, prepared to run towards the emergency, not to cower in a luxury bunker while better people than you get the machine started again.

The next frontier for school censorware is spying on kids all the time (permalink)

We spend a lot of time bemoaning the lack of privacy-consciousness among kids, and then we spy on them at school with censorware and punish them for taking any action that might protect their privacy from us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGjNe1YhMA

Meanwhile, censorware companies – whose primary customers have always been oppressive regimes seeking to control political oppositions – have morphed into full-on student surveillance companies, and their sales pitch is a terrifying slurry of war-on-terror/active shooter FUD.

When companies like Gaggle and Securely pitch school-boards on their products, they claim that they can detect incipient in-school ISIS attacks and the like, and use that as justification to spy on kids in-school and out-of-school online activities. These companies are mini-NSAs-for-hire, tracking social media usage and every keystroke and click on school networks and devices, storing it (insecurely) for years, if not decades.

https://www.thegazette.com/subject/opinion/staff-columnist/iowa-city-schools-student-social-media-monitoring-surveillance-gaggle-securly-20200302

They make bizarre claims ("the average 7th grader has 6 Instagram accounts" – which would make 7th graders 25% of the entire IG user-base). And they find terrified parents to endorse spying ("If it's going to protect my child, I don't care how you get the info, just get it"). People who sell security need to sell fear. If we want our kids to care about their privacy, we can't make them "safe" by spying on them all the time and banning any steps they take to make us stop.

I'm coming to Kelowna on March 5 (permalink)

I'm coming to the BC interior for the first time ever, talking about my book Radicalized at the Kelowna library as part of Canada Reads. I'm being hosted by the CBC's Sarah Penton from 6-8PM! It's free to attend but it's ticketed, and the majority of tickets are already gone — if you want to come, now's the time to RSVP.

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cbc-radio-presents-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-96154415445

(and if you can't make it, it's OK! The CBC will broadcast the audio and I'll put it my podcast, too)

Cool Mules, an investigative series on a Vice editor's cocaine-smuggling ring (permalink)

Back in 2015, Slava Pastuk was an editor at Vice, and he abused his position there to pressure young, desperate would-be journalists into smuggling suitcases full of millions of dollars' worth of cocaine into Australia.

https://nationalpost.com/news/former-vice-editor-gets-nine-year-sentence-for-recruiting-young-drug-mules-for-massive-cocaine-smuggling-ring

Five of them went to prison, but Slava Pastuk did not (at first). When Pastuk's role in the affair became public and he was indicted and tried, he refused to talk to the press at all, making the whole thing something of a non-story cipher (despite its spectacular details).

Incredibly, though, Canadaland got Slava to talk. At length. And they got the other side of the story, too, both from Slava's victims and those who risked career suicide by turning him down. The result is a new, six-part investigative series called Cool Mules, hosted by Kasia Mychajlowycz, whose work I discovered through the spectacular On The Media.

https://www.canadalandshow.com/shows/cool-mules/

It's modeled on Canadaland's last, spectacular miniseries, Thunder Bay, easily the best investigative series I ever listened to.

https://www.canadalandshow.com/shows/thunder-bay/

This morning's Canadaland features an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the making of the series between Mychajlowycz and Jesse Brown, and it has me licking my chops for the series itself.

https://www.canadalandshow.com/podcast/315-the-cocaine-smuggling-ring-at-vice/

Soviet Space Graphics (permalink)

When my grandmother was 12, she was inducted into the Leningrad civil defense corps during the 900 day siege of Leningrad (I wrote a science fiction novella about this called "After the Siege").

http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/after-the-siege.html

The story is also available as a five-part audiobook reading by Mary Robinette Kowal:

http://scalzi.com/atseige/afterthesiege1.mp3 http://scalzi.com/atseige/afterthesiege2.mp3 http://scalzi.com/atseige/afterthesiege3.mp3 http://scalzi.com/atseige/afterthesiege4.mp3 http://scalzi.com/atseige/afterthesiege5.mp3

Eventually (years later) my grandmother was evacuated with the women and children across the winter ice and ended up in Siberia, where she met my grandfather, got pregnant, fled to Azerbaijan and birthed my father. They made their way to Canada over six years, through a series of refugee adventures and crises that could each be a novella of its own (the part where she married my grandfather's one-armed partisan fighter brother, for example, and got caught in a pogrom).

My grandmother completely lost contact with her family in Leningrad, for years. More than a decade. My father vividly recounts how he, as a little boy, heard his mother in Toronto answer the phone and say, "Mama, mama" and begin to cry for the family she thought was dead.

Over the years that followed, my grandmother and grandfather traveled to the USSR several times to see her family, and my Leningrad family came often to visit us in Toronto. Whenever they came, the brought Soviet space-program memoribilia.

There was SO MUCH of this stuff (in the early 90s, Russian sf fans used to pay their way to US conventions by shlepping suitcases full of astrosovkitsch to sell at the event), and it was gorgeous and magical. Some of the best art of the Soviet era was produced to celebrate the space program, and my most cherished toys and knickkacks growing up featured Sputnik, Gagarin, and Valentina Tereshkova. Today, much of that stuff is in our home, thanks in part to Ukrainian Ebay sellers who've taken over the astrosovkitsch market from Russian sf fans.

I'm awfully excited, therefore, by the news that Phaidon is bringing out "Soviet Space Graphics: Cosmic Visions from the USSR." It's a lavishly illustrated volume, produced in collaboration with the Moscow Design Museum.

https://www.phaidon.com/store/design/soviet-space-graphics-9781838660536/

If you're ever in St Petersburg and you want to see some amazing historical examples of Soviet space and tech materials, visit the Popov Museum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.S._Popov_Central_Museum_of_Communications

Incidentally, my grandmother's baby brother Bora, who stayed behind in Leningrad, grew up to be curator of the Popov. I last saw Uncle Bora in 2005, shortly before his death, and he gave us a curator's behind-the-scenes tour of the museum. You can see my photos from the visit here:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=37996580417%40N01&sort=date-taken-desc&text=popov&view_all=1

Apple, Nike and Dell's supply chain includes enslaved Uyghurs (permalink)

Phase II of China's Xinjiang concentration camps for ethno-religious minorities (mostly Uyghurs but also other Muslim minorities) is creating slave-labor factories that serve major US brands.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51697800

Nike, Apple and Dell's supply chains are all implicated.

As a reminder, the Xinjiang concentration camps used torture, punitive rape, brainwashing, forced medical experimentation and other tactics to "retrain" a disfavored minority.

"Between 2017 and 2019, the ASPI think tank estimates that more than 80,000 Uighurs were transferred out of the far western Xinjiang autonomous region to work in factories across China. It said some were sent directly from detention camps."

The revelations come from a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute:

https://www.aspi.org.au/report/uyghurs-sale

The workers enslaved in these factories spend their off-hours in brainwashing sessions, living "in segregated dormitories, with Mandarin lessons and 'ideological training', subjected to constant surveillance and banned from observing religious practices."

Drugs Without the Hot Air (permalink)

I first read "Drugs Without the Hot Air," David Nutt's astoundingly good book about drug policy back in 2012; in the eight years since, hardly a month has gone by without my thinking about it. Now, there's a new, updated edition, extensively revised, and it's an absolute must-read.

Nutt came to fame when he served as the UK "Drugs Czar" under the Labour Government in the late 2000s; especially when Home Secretary Jacqui Smith fired him for his refusal to lie and say that marijuana was more harmful than alcohol, despite the extensive evidence to the contrary (Smith also threatened Nutt for publishing a paper in Nature that compared the neurological harms of recreational horseback riding to harms from recreational MDMA use, a paper that concluded that if horses came in pill form we might call them "Equasy").

Since then, Nutt — an eminent psychopharmacologist researcher and practioner — has continued to campaign, research, and write about evidence-based drugs policy that takes as its central mission to reduce harm and preserve therapeutic benefits from drugs.

Like the first edition of Drugs Without the Hot Air, the new edition serves three missions:

First, to describe how a wide variety of drugs — benzos, cocaine, opoiods, cannabis, etc, but also alcohol, caffeine and nicotine — work in the body, in clear, nontechnical language that anyone can follow.

Next, to describe the harms and benefits of drugs, considered both on individual and societal levels — and also to describe what the best medical evidence tells us about maximizing those benefits and minimizing those harms.

Finally, to recount how governments — mainly in the UK but also in the USA and elsewhere — have responded to the evidence on drug mechanisms, harms and benefits.

Inevitably, part 3 becomes an indictment, as Nutt describes in eye-watering, frustrating, brutal detail how harmful, incoherent, self-serving and cowardly government responses to drugs have been, and how many lives they have ruined — through criminalizing harmless conduct, through treating medical problems as criminal ones, and through badly thought-through policies that caused relatively benign substances to be replaced with far more harmful ones (for example, Nutt traces the lethal rise in fentanyl partly to the successful global interdiction of opium poppies).

One important difference between the new edition and the original is visible progress on this last. In the years since Nutt was fired for refusing to lie about science, he has founded Drugscience, a research and advocacy nonprofit that has scored significant policy wins and made real therapeutic breakthroughs through hard work and rigour.

I don't think you could ask for a more sensible, clear-eyed, and useful book about drugs, from the ones your doctor prescribes to the ones your bartender serves you to the ones you can go to jail for possessing. Nutt is not just a great and principled campaigner, nor merely a talented and dedicated scientist — he's also a superb communicator.

Drugs Without the Hot Air is part of an outstanding series of technical books — mostly about climate change — that have greatly influenced my thinking. The publisher, UIT Cambridge, has several more that I recommend.

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Media professors' SCOTUS brief on why P2P should be legal https://web.archive.org/web/20050910210056/http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/mediagrokster.pdf

#15yrsago Study: Used hard-drives full of juicy blackmail material https://web.archive.org/web/20051223054039/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1487674,00.html

#15yrsago Revolved: Beatles mashup album https://web.archive.org/web/20050221212052/http://www.hearingdouble.co.uk/ccc/

#15yrsago 1121 phrases you can't put on personalized jerseys at nfl.com https://web.archive.org/web/20050304035349/https://www.outsports.com/nfl/2005/0301nflshopnaughtywords.htm

#10yrsago Brits: tell the LibDem Peers not to bring web-censorship to Britain! https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2010/lib-dems-seek-web-blocking

#10yrsago If chess were redesigned by MMORPG developers https://akma.disseminary.org/2010/03/if-chess-were-invented-by-mmog-developers/

#5yrsago America's growing gangs of armed, arrest-making, untrained rent-a-cops https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/private-police-carry-guns-and-make-arrests-and-their-ranks-are-swelling/2015/02/28/29f6e02e-8f79-11e4-a900-9960214d4cd7_story.html

#5yrsago Bruce Schneier's Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World https://boingboing.net/2015/03/02/bruce-schneiers-data-and-gol.html

#1yrago Man-Eaters: Handmaid's Tale meets Cat People in a comic where girls turn into man-eating were-panthers when they get their periods https://boingboing.net/2019/03/02/lycanthropes-v-patriarchy.html

#1yrago Massive study finds strong correlation between "early affluence" and "faster cognitive drop" in old age https://www.pnas.org/content/116/12/5478

#1yrago Comcast assigned every mobile customer the same unchangeable PIN to protect against SIM hijack attacks: 0000 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/a-comcast-security-flub-helped-attackers-steal-mobile-phone-numbers/

#1yrago Improbably, a Black activist is now the owner and leader of the "National Socialist Movement," which he is turning into an anti-racist group https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2019/03/01/how-black-man-outsmarted-neo-nazi-group-became-their-new-leader/?utm_term=.e5eb80c543cb

#1yrago Study that claimed majority of Copyright Directive opposition came from the US assumed all English-language tweets came from Washington, DC https://webschauder.de/wer-zwitschert-zum-eu-urheberrecht/

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org), Dark Roasted Blend (https://www.darkroastedblend.com/) and Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/).

Hugo nominators! My story "Unauthorized Bread" is eligible in the Novella category and you can read it free on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Upcoming appearances:

Canada Reads Kelowna: March 5, 6PM, Kelowna Library, 1380 Ellis Street, with CBC's Sarah Penton https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cbc-radio-presents-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-96154415445

Currently writing: I just finished a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel now, though the timing is going to depend on another pending commission (I've been solicited by an NGO) to write a short story set in the world's prehistory.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Disasters Don't Have to End in Dystopias: https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/01/disasters-dont-have-to-end-in-dystopias/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a very special, s00per s33kr1t intro.

[floatingeye]

LIQUID SKY (1982)

Dir: Slava Tsukerman

80′s GLAM BLONDIE GOES BOATING

Here's another one for my list of great 80s cult movies, one I will remember as fondly as Repo Man, Blue Velvet and Videodrome. The vision is maybe less accomplished but as vibrant as those films, basically what we get at first glance is something between Daisies (the Czech film) and a Yugoslav film I recently discovered called W.R. - Mysteries of the Organism, with many of the same preoccupations— youth, feminism, freedom of expression, attitudes to sex, contrasted with repressive mores in men and sex. The obvious metaphor used here is aliens (as in a flying saucer lands in New york) for the emerging glam punk scene with its androgynous Bowie sex-image and post-Factory and Warhol scene with its drugs and ersatz madness as style. AIDS had officially entered the lexicon the year before, this is reflected in the film as the men evaporating when they achieve an orgasm with our 'alien' heroine. The whole worldview behind this is what you can expect from the 80s. Rejection, solipsism, a general detachment from anything that does not please a sense of escape and fulfillment now, a numbed attitude I normally find vacant. Usually mistaken as Zen, it seems to attach itself to American youth every decade or so since the mods. And yet the dignified assertion of individuality in the face of small-mindedness and abuse shows a still sparkling soul—the girl casually invites to her place a stranger from the club because he promised cocaine, and seems surprised and mildly disgusted that he lied and basically expected sex. Three women are finding out the men in their lives are not worth it, the junkie boyfriend is more interested in his own pleasures, the German in his science of 'observing'. The young model, who exists with more freedom outside the norm, unconsciously removes them from the story. In the end, this synthetic avatar of freedom and unconventionality is consumed and magically disappears in the night as the two women watch. In its nested layering of created situations where a woman explores by allowing fragmented selves to be explored, this is situated close to two of my favorite movies of all time, another Eastern European film called Loves of A Blonde, and Celine and Julie. It's an 80s take on dreamy flight. It's all here so lovely and heartfelt about the overall world, with its heady cocktail of now innocent strangeness and still evocative flicker in the eye. The New York penthouse at night, with its open balcony to gleaming skyscrapers is one of the most vital spaces in any film I know. The cool, composed rejection of fixed roles and images, tuning out minus the constructed cosmology of world-renewal of a decade earlier. The painted faces of models casually desperate to be captured against the gleaming skyscraper-void, stating nothing beyond the flickering moment of things coming to be. The parting shot with our heroine lost in her dervish spin in the dark, a dreamy incarnation that couldn't last.

4/5

[khodorkovskaya]

13.09.18

today started with me sobbing to lana’s new song. i love her so much wtf! oh btw her song “yes to heaven” makes me cry every. single. time. i discovered it in like march-april and it STILL makes me cry like what the actual fuck.

yesterday was v nice. i finished my french lesson at 14.30 and nik called me and said that he’s chilling with dasha in the nearby park. so i was like alright ill come for like an hour and then go work on my documentary. so i went. then andrei showed up. then it turned out that laurent and azadeh were nearby so they came. then we realised that misha is in the same park with laure so they joined us. then we called niko who was also close by. and then we called slava too. it was getting cold so i suggested we go to my place and it was so nice. we ate kebabs and drank my uncle’s berry samogon. and thennn we went to usine cos there was a techno concert going on. i regretted this so much this morning cos i had class at 8 and felt like shit lol! plus the prof was sooo energetic im pretty sure he does cocaine like ew!

[gotohellfuckingyankees]

[longform]

How a bunch of Canadian hipsters wound up smuggling cocaine (and getting caught).

Kate Knibbs | The Ringer | Dec 2019

[antiamericafinland]

[alanonmeetingsnearme]

Leroy Slava: From drug addiction to professional property investment

In spite of all the bad stories and news that we encounter every day about drug addiction, it still feels good that there are inspiring stories that come out of it. There are still those who took the courage to change and live a better life, even lead as an example to others that as long you want something with all your heart, there will always be a way to it.

Just like with what happened with Leroy Slava who was once a drug addict but is now professional property investor. He is a professional property investor who has pulled himself up by his bootstraps from drug addiction to become a key player in the property market. Slava started doing drugs while in Grade 10 and this abuse escalated when he completed schooling, leading him to drop out from Wits Tech (now University of Johannesburg).

Click the link for more information.

Addicted to ecstasy, acid, cocaine and cat, he has turned his life around against all odds. Slava recalls that he went to rehab, but that didn’t work for him. “From Wits Tech, I went to Damelin and dropp edout again. For a few years, it got worse with drug addiction – it was only when I was 25 when I realised that it was actually becoming a big problem,” he says.

He recalls that his turn-around began when he went to church prayed and sought a purpose for his life. With his passion for property, Slava has been successfully investing in the South African market for a number of years.

His property journey started at the age of 26, when he sold a property he inherited and purchased a townhouse.

“The guy that sold me the townhouse bought it on auction. He purchased a distressed house, refurbished it and sold it to me at a profit,” he says.

The post Leroy Slava: From drug addiction to professional property investment appeared first on Addiction Treatment.

from Addiction Treatment http://alanonmeetingsnear.me/2018/10/10/leroy-slava-drug-addiction-professional-property-investment/

[medicalmarijuana-news]

Did A Vice Editor Recruit Interns as Drug Mules?

According to Canada’s National Post, a former editor with Vice Media used his position at the high-octane media outlet to recruit young journalists and artists into a “transnational cocaine-smuggling ring.”

Current and former Vice employees alleged to the Post that 26-year-old Yaroslav Pastukhov, a.k.a. Slava Pastuk, personally tried to recruit them as drug couriers during his time as music editor for Noisey, offering a fee of $10,000 to smuggle cocaine hidden in the lining of suitcases. They all said they declined the offer.

Pastukhov’s one-time roommate, an up-and-coming DJ and electronic music artist named Jordan Gardner, was arrested along with four others on Dec. 22, 2015 in Sydney, Australia when cocaine valued at approximately 5 million US dollars was discovered in luggage belonging to the group. Gardner’s lawyer, friends and family all claim that he says Pastukhov badgered him into making the trip, and that when he and some of his travel companions tried to back out of the deal in Las Vegas, they were threatened with a gun. Gardner is currently in an Australian prison awaiting sentencing for what the Australian Federal Police describe as the work of a “transnational crime syndicate.”

In an interview with the Post, Gardner’s lawyer, Eidan Havas, claimed Pastukhov is part of a massive scheme headed by a Mexican drug cartel. “They’re finding young Canadians, or young individuals who for all intents and purposes don’t have any criminal histories and are productive members of their community, and manipulating them into making the wrong choice,” he added. “They got [Gardner] to a situation where they pulled a gun to his head, they knew where his family lived. The family received death threats. They put him in a position where he couldn’t return.”

According a friend of Gardner’s, the night before he left Toronto for Las Vegas he told her he had cold feet about the trip, but didn’t feel safe backing out because he had been warned that “something could happen to” his loved ones if he didn’t go through with it. Gardner arrived in Las Vegas in December 2015, where, Havas told the Post, he picked up the suitcases to take to Australia. Hamas said, “[Gardner was] told certain things about the packaging and how it’s tamper-proof and this and that. So then Jordan gets the bags and the first thing, he tells me, is you can literally smell the glue from the bag”—meaning the alterations to the luggage to conceal the cocaine were obvious.

Hamas continued: “And [Gardner’s] just like, ‘You guys are a bunch of liars, this isn’t what I was told. I don’t want to do this any more.’ At that stage, one of the men pulled out a gun, held it to his head and said words to the effect of, ‘If you don’t do this, we’re gonna get your girlfriend and your parents, we know where they live.’”

On Dec. 22, Gardner and the four others he was traveling with landed in Sydney. A search of their luggage by border control revealed 37 kilograms of cocaine in 81 tightly sealed packages hidden in the lining of eight checked bags, according to police.

Gardner and Nathanial Carty, a 22-year-old New York-based model, were immediately charged with importing a commercial quantity of cocaine. That afternoon, their traveling companions—Canadians Porscha Wade, 20, Robert Wang, 24, and Kutiba Senusi, 23—were also charged. All but Wade pleaded guilty. Her trial is set for September 2017.

When news of the arrests reached Toronto, several young Vice journalists say they realized they had been targeted for recruitment as possible couriers. Each told the Post the approach came from Pastukhov. Many of them asked that their names not be published because of “a fear of repercussions from friends and former colleagues and a negative impact on their career.”

The allegations in the National Post article have not been proven in court, and no criminal charges have been pressed against Pastukhov. However, Vice Canada ended its relationship with him last year after concerns were raised with management about some of his actions. Jordan Pearson, who currently writes for Vice’s tech site Motherboard, and Matt Braga, a former Vice Canada editor, both told the Canadian newspaper that they had heard staff members discussing Pastukhov’s alleged drug-running and recruitment efforts. When contacted for comment by the Post, Pastukhov repeatedly declined to address the allegations.

Gardner and his co-accused await sentencing in Australia, set for this week. The maximum penalty for smuggling a commercial quantity of cocaine into Australia is life imprisonment.

Havas said Gardner wants to help others avoid the same fate: “I don’t fucking bullshit: these guys do not deserve what’s about to happen to them. He wants other people to know that he made a mistake and do not make the same mistake he made.

“He’s thrown away a large portion of his life. He’s been in jail while his album has been released, by Èbony. All these opportunities have gone to waste,” said Havas, adding: “Go buy the rap album.”

For the full story, go to the National Post.

from Medical Marijuana News http://ift.tt/2kLEa5q via https://www.potbox.com/

[gotohellfuckingyankees]

This woman, Responsible for the destabilization and destruction of Ukraine, has been given a "Job" at the "National Endowment for Democracy" "Regime change R us" has a new star employee.

[antiamericafinland]

Ukraine is the world’s largest money laundering operation. Hundreds of billions of dollars and euros have been laundered there.