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jlf23tumble · 5 years ago

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Recap, “Do me a favour?”

Hey, HEY, it's @builtoutoflove's birthday tomorrow (today, depending on where you live, well, Monday, no matter what), and long, LONG ago, she very sweetly asked me to recap her favorite interview, so as a birthday treat, I WILL, and I’m gonna do it right now because Monday is shaping up to be an intense work day for me, so why not spoil her a little early? I could sit here and try to describe this interview’s official particulars, but we all know it as "Do me a favour?", and as I type this, I am GALAXY-BRAINING because that's also the name of an iconic Arctic Monkeys song (Do Me a Favour; do yourSELF a favor and listen to it), and jesus take the wheel, I'm vibrating in the twin keys of Halex Sturner (copyright Melissa) and my ever-growing list of AM songs that Louis needs to cover. It came out in '07, and I like to think various Alex Turner phrases just randomly pop up in Louis's vocab, even though he was allegedly inhaling pure Oasis at this point, at least 10+ years after their heyday.

ANYWAY, back to the main event, which evidently happened in Japan as part of the never-ending promo the D did for This Is Us. I looked for more footage because this one screams back-to-back-to-back-to-back, but all I could find was this five-minute gem, which maybe takes place in a giant department store, according to Louis (??). Look at Niall and his fake glasses:

Right out of the gate, we're in for spicy Louis (interviewer: “Do you remember [whatever this outlet is]?” Louis: “HOW...COULD WE...FORGET”), glasses!Niall (an intellectual), Zayn channeling me and how I would politely engage and disengage through ALL of their promo, Liam and his coat helicoptered straight in from the GQ shoot, and band swot Harry (flirty? high? competitive? engaged in a deep game of public edging? he’s QUIRKY is what he is). We also get the first (??) appearance of this guy!

After a quick clapback (forward???) to the "Ganbarimasu!" shout/fist raise, we get more of the host being low-key obsessed with testing each of them on whether they remember her/them (Harry ‘professional niceboy’ Styles: "Yes, of course!" x2; Louis: "A bond for life!"), and I wonder anew just why it was that Lou T spent so much time pulling the sides of Harry's hair forward so intensely.

Harry decides he's going to actually make physical contact, which makes the host's LIFE:

...and prompts Louis to intone, "You two, the chemistry in the room, Jesus, I'm sweaty." Something gets edited and nothing gets translated, but suddenly at Louis's prompting to see if anyone has anything to add, Zayn reminds us all that Louis was quite good at putting the tent up (Louis: "I'm just good at life"...okay? Also, you were NOT good at putting tents up, you liar). But then Zayn remembers that it's LIAM who's good at putting tents up, and Harry confirms that Liam's the quickest at tent assembly (Louis: "He's the most INTENSE guy I know"...YES, WE GET IT, and poor Niall can't even hold the candle he's trying to light on the edge of Louis’s wit). There's a bunch of talk about how Liam was in scouts and got a badge, and it feels like some kind of public edging because there are a lot of looks zooming around, but far be it from me to sexualize any of them, EVER, amirite?? Related: Louis is infuriatingly hot in this entire segment, christ:

Another question isn't translated, but it must be about embarrassing moments because Liam's volunteering his idiocy related to geography and not knowing the distance between Australia and Japan (Louis: "Yeah, that was pretty embarrassing”; Harry: “Yeah”), but then Liam says true, but he still professes to this day that it's one of the closest places TO Australia, and oh, Liam.

The next question is about all the cameras during the movie’s filming, I think? Louis: "WeLl, DoN't FiLm mY pRiVaTe PaRtS," the editing/muttering is hard to parse, but he also mentions the clock, which makes the host laff as Niall and his glasses give us the rundown on this little show they started out on called the X Factor, perhaps you’ve heard of it? ("We're used to having cameras around all the time, so we just sort of enjoyed it, having all the cameras around"...sigh)

There's more cross-talk, none of it translated, but Harry says, "Drats!" and slaps his leg as Louis says "Oh, bollocks," but whatever it was doesn't get them out of the obligatory quick language lesson, so Louis and Harry twin flame it all over this piece as they actually try to get it right (Liam: "Oh my Tennessee! Tennis match!!"...no reaction; Louis, a beat later: "Oh my tennis match", laughter all around; band swot Harry earns 10 points for Gryffindor by counting surprisingly well albeit unprompted in Japanese).

The host says they can use it tonight, and Harry does a weird garble thing, but then Liam kicks into the standard promo spiel, prompting MULTIPLE gestures of "getta load of this guy" from Louis, here's just one:

I wish I knew what the HELL prompted this, but basically, Louis's making all kinds of smirks, using his thumbs to gesture at Liam as he explains their "sound," and then Harry just decides to go for it:

Liam says "blah blah blah, that's my ear there," which pulls Louis's focus, as intended, and that iceman, "Do me a favour?" that is over in a hot second, like, it's literally a blip.

There's a lot more untranslated talk, with Liam saying he'll do his best, he's got a group of rowdy lads, then Harry mouths something at him, but we can't hear it because the host is busily thanking each of them, Louis is thanking her in Japanese, and then...he just leaves. Harry stands up, too, looks off camera (you can hear Louis laugh), and...scene.

#happy birthday andi!!!!#hope you love it #recap #do me a favour....and stop flattering yourself #perhaps fuck off would be too kind #GOD THIS SONG #one direction #this one's a freebie #LMAO

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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The 'fool' that fentanyl made into a millionaire

https://apnews.com/ce51cf7c958643629bce76764f71058d

This is a fascinating read 📖 looking at who stoked and helped create the Fentanyl Crisis that has taken so many lives. 😱 😭 😭 😭

The 'Fool ' That Fentanyl Made Into A Millionaire

By CLAIRE GALOFARO and LINDSAY WHITEHURST | Published September 14, 2019 10:20 AM ET | AP | Posted September 14, 2019 10:40 AM ET |

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — The photo that flashed onto the courtroom screen showed a young man dead on his bedroom floor, bare feet poking from the cuffs of his rolled up jeans. Lurking on a trash can at the edge of the picture was what prosecutors said delivered this death: an ordinary, U.S. Postal Service envelope.

It had arrived with 10 round, blue pills inside, the markings of pharmaceutical-grade oxycodone stamped onto the surface. The young man took out two, crushed and snorted them. But the pills were poison, prosecutors said: counterfeits containing fatal grains of fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid that has written a deadly new chapter in the American opioid epidemic.

The envelope was postmarked from the suburbs of Salt Lake City.

That's where a clean-cut, 29-year-old college dropout and Eagle Scout named Aaron Shamo made himself a millionaire by building a fentanyl trafficking empire with not much more than his computer and the help of a few friends.

___

This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

___

For three weeks this summer, those suburban millennials climbed onto the witness stand at his federal trial and offered an unprecedented window into how fentanyl bought and sold online has transformed the global drug trade. There was no testimony of underground tunnels or gangland murders or anything that a wall at the southern border might stop. Shamo called himself a "white-collar drug dealer," drew in co-workers from his time at eBay and peppered his messages to them with smiley-face emojis. His attorney called him a fool; his primary defense was that he isn't smart enough to be a kingpin.

How he and his friends managed to flood the country with a half-million fake oxycodone pills reveals the ease with which fentanyl now moves around the world, threatening to expand the epidemic beyond America's borders. It is so potent, so easy to transport, experts say, large-scale traffickers no longer require sophisticated networks to send it to any corner of the globe. All they need is a mailbox, internet access and people with an appetite for opioids. And consumption rates are rising from Asia to Europe to Latin America as pharmaceutical companies promote painkillers abroad.

The case against Shamo detailed how white powder up to 100 times stronger than morphine was bought online from a laboratory in China and arrived in Utah via international mail; it was shaped into perfect-looking replicas of oxycodone tablets in the press that thumped in Shamo's basement and resold on the internet's black markets. Then it was routed back into the postal system in thousands of packages addressed to homes across this country awash with prescription painkiller addiction.

When Shamo took the stand to try to spare himself a lifetime in prison, he began with a nervous chuckle. He careened from one topic to the next in a monologue prosecutors would later describe as masterful manipulation to convince the jury he thought his drug-dealing was helping people. Customers wrote thank you notes because their doctors refused to prescribe more painkillers, he said. It felt like "a win-win situation" — he got rich and his customers got drugs.

One of them was a struggling 21-year-old named Ruslan Klyuev who died in his bedroom in Daly City, California, the envelope from Utah at his feet. Shamo was charged in connection to that overdose alone, but when investigators scoured the list of customers they said they counted dozens more dead.

___

The question before this jury is being debated all across America: Two decades into the opioid epidemic, is there such a thing as justice for 400,000 lost lives?

The largest civil litigation in history is testing how the pharmaceutical industry should be held accountable for inundating the country with billions of addictive pain pills. Purdue Pharma, seen by many as the primary villain for deceptively pushing the blockbuster drug OxyContin, reached a tentative $12 billion settlement this week with about half the states and roughly 2,000 local governments. Attorneys general who didn't sign on say the figure is far too low. A trial of other pharmaceutical companies is scheduled for next month, in which communities will contend that their mass marketing of prescription painkillers sparked an epidemic.

This crisis began in the 1990s and has since has spiraled into waves, each worse than the one before: Prescription opioids spread addiction, then a crackdown on prescribing paved the road to heroin, which led to fentanyl — a synthetic opioid made entirely in a laboratory. Traffickers added it to heroin to boost its potency and profitability. That transition happened slowly at first, then with extraordinary ferocity.

By 2017, deaths from synthetic opioids had increased more than 800 percent, to 28,466, dragging the United States' overall life expectancy down for a third consecutive year for the first time in a century. Fentanyl deaths have been reported abroad, in Canada, Sweden, Estonia, the United Kingdom. Countries with surging prescription opioid addiction, like Australia, fear they are on the brink.

"Fentanyl will be the bubonic plague," said Mike Vigil, former chief of international operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration, warning that any country with a burgeoning prescription opioid problem could soon find itself following American footsteps. "It's just a matter of time."

No one can say exactly how or why fentanyl, first synthesized in 1959 as a powerful painkiller, entered the modern illicit drug market, said Bryce Pardo, a researcher at the Rand Corporation. In 2013, people began overdosing on heroin laced with fentanyl in New England and Ohio, and it spread from there. Shabbir Safdar, the Partnership for Safe Medicines' executive director, said the first known death from a fentanyl-laced pill was in San Francisco in October 2015.

It was a frightening development: The DEA estimates 3.4 million Americans misuse prescription painkillers, compared to 475,000 heroin users — meaning the pool potentially exposed is 10 times bigger.

There are two sources of supply. Mexican cartels and packages shipped direct from China, where it is produced in a huge and under-regulated chemical sector. A Senate investigation last year found massive quantities of fentanyl pouring in from China through the Postal Service. The report largely blamed dated technology that left customs inspectors sifting through packages manually looking for "the proverbial needle in a haystack." The Postal Service wrote in a statement to The Associated Press that it is working hard with its international counterparts to close those loopholes, and is improving its technology to intercept fentanyl shipments.

By the time a seized package heading from China to Utah led investigators to Shamo, he had already turned fentanyl into at least 458,946 potentially poisonous pills, the government said. There are many more like him, officials say, upstart traffickers pressing pure Chinese-made fentanyl into pills in their basements and kitchens with unsophisticated equipment. In a single batch, one pill might have no fentanyl and another enough to kill a person instantly. One agent at Shamo's trial compared it to making chocolate-chip cookies, only if too many chips ended up in a "cookie," whoever ate it dropped dead.

For traffickers, the profit margins are irresistible: The DEA estimates a kilogram of fentanyl synthesized for a few thousand dollars could make a dealer more than $1 million.

"Any moron can basically become a major drug kingpin by dealing in fentanyl," said Vigil. "You can have somebody with an IQ minus 100 who becomes an overnight multimillionaire."

___

Aaron Shamo dreamed of entrepreneurial riches. He idolized Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and studied self-improvement books like "Think and Grow Rich."

He and a longtime friend, Drew Crandall, worked at eBay after failed stints in college. But Crandall was fired and Shamo decided it was "unfair" that he still had to work, so he quit. They wanted easy money.

Shamo grew up in Phoenix with three older sisters. As a teenager, he started smoking pot and refusing to attend services with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His parents sent him to boarding school in Utah, where he earned his Eagle Scout badge. He later met Crandall through their shared love of longboarding and they moved in together. Crandall was awkward and shy; Shamo was charismatic, and prided himself on helping his friend talk to girls.

The pair concocted a plan to sell their Adderall, prescribed for attention deficit disorder, on the dark web — a wild, unregulated layer of the internet reached through a special browser. There are underground marketplaces there that mimic Amazon or eBay, where guns and drugs and pirated software are traded. Money is exchanged anonymously through cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.

They learned what they needed on the web, searching with queries like "how to ship drugs." It was so easy. They expanded, ordering drugs in bulk, breaking them down and selling at a mark-up, all while barely having to leave the house.

They used the postal system like a drug mule, peddling the club drug MDMA, magic mushrooms, date rape drugs — they once bought a kilogram of cocaine from Peru. They recruited friends, offering them $100 to have parcels mailed to their homes, no questions asked.

But the profit margins were slim and their ambitions were greater: They bought a pill press, ordered the sedative alprazolam online from India and watched YouTube videos to figure out how to turn it into fake Xanax, an anti-anxiety medication. Crandall, math minded, created the recipe. They mixed it up by shaking it in mason jars.

Then Crandall fell in love.

His new girlfriend grew suspicious when he would sneak away to package drugs. When she confronted him at a party, he tearfully confessed. She forgave him, if he promised to leave the business. They bought one-way tickets to New Zealand.

Then a local drug dealer made a suggestion to Shamo that would change the course of his life: There was a fortune to be made in producing fake oxycodone.

Shamo enlisted his gym buddy, Jonathan Luke Paz, to help him. Shamo ordered fentanyl online from China, set up the pill press in the basement and bought dyes and stamps to match popular pharmaceuticals. Then they handed them over to the local dealer, who tested them on his own customers. The first batches were weak or speckled in color, he told them, or didn't react like real oxycodone when users heated it on tinfoil to smoke it.

But they were getting better.

"Close to being money in the bank," the dealer messaged Shamo. "You did it, bro."

On the first day of 2016, Shamo he wrote out his goals for the upcoming year: He would be rich. All the girls would want him.

"I will overachieve," he wrote. "I will overcome."

He went online with his products a month later. Some were specified as fentanyl, but some weren't, purporting instead to contain 30 milligrams of oxycodone. Shamo named this new store Pharma-Master.

___

As winter turned to summer, sales skyrocketed. Pharma-Master started selling thousands of pills a week, charging around $10 each.

On June 6, a relatively small order came in: 10 pills, to be shipped to an apartment house in Daly City, a working-class suburb of San Francisco.

Like every order, it was sent in an encrypted email to two former eBay co-workers in charge of distribution. Alexandrya Tonge and Katherine Bustin counted out the pills in their suburban condo, packaged the shipments and dropped them in the mail.

The envelope arrived at the doorstep at 3 p.m. on June 11.

Under different circumstances, Shamo might have been friends with the 21-year-old man who lived there. Ruslan Klyuev, a Russian immigrant, was also an aspiring tech entrepreneur interested in the dark web. He had a baby face: rosy cheeks and curly hair. Klyuev loved to cook and would make extravagant meals for the house.

But his relationship ended, his web design business sputtered and he became estranged from his family, said Barry, a roommate who spoke on the condition that his last name not be published. His emotions toggled between sorrow and elation, and he struggled with substance abuse.

After drinking vodka, Klyuev crushed two of the pills with a battery and snorted the powder with a rolled-up sticky note, according to testimony. He started drifting in and out of sleep. He couldn't stand up.

He was found dead the next day, with fentanyl, alcohol and a substance associated with cocaine in his system.

His was the only death with which Shamo would be charged. His defense attorney, Greg Skordas, argued that neither his death nor any others can be definitely linked with Shamo's operation.

But in documents, prosecutors connected Shamo to a veritable slaughter:

A 24-year-old man in Seattle overdosed three weeks after he bought pills from Pharma-Master in March 2016.

Later that spring, 40 pills were shipped to a 21-year-old in Washington, D.C. He died in his dorm room 11 days later.

In Utah, a 29-year-old software analyst named Devin Meldrum had been searching since he was a teenager for a cure for cluster headaches that felt like knives stabbing his skull, said his father, Rod.

Doctors had prescribed opioids but limited the dosage, so he bought a backup supply from Pharma-Master. On Aug. 13, 2016, he ran out of pills days before his refill. As he got ready for bed, he texted his fiance and took a pill from his reserve for the first time, his father said.

He was dead before she arrived to say goodnight, blue on his bathroom floor.

His father isn't sure Shamo even now understands the magnitude of what happened: "Does he even comprehend how many families have had their hearts torn out?"

___

Online, Pharma-Master was getting rave reviews.

"These will make u a millionaire in under a year, guarantee," wrote one shopper who called himself "Trustworthy Money."

He was a dealer in Portland named Jared Gillespie. He bought 80,000 pills from Pharma-Master, according to documents filed against Gillespie in Oregon. He knew he was buying fentanyl pills, the Oregon prosecutors alleged, but the people buying from him had no way to know that. They are unknown and uncounted.

Shamo offered steep discounts for bulk buyers. Tonge, one of his distributors, testified that she began to question Shamo's claim that he was helping patients who couldn't get medication: Why would one person need 5,000 pills?

Her vacuum cleaner would become a critical piece of evidence. Its dust bin was filled with pills. The operation had grown so frantic, pumping out tens of thousands of tablets a month, that when they spilled onto the floor, they weren't worth saving.

Tonge and her partner complained that the orders were coming too quickly, so Shamo hired a "runner" named Sean Gygi to pick up the packages and drop them in the mail, dozens of them a day.

Drug manufacturing became routine: Shamo once wrote himself a to-do list, and included a reminder to "make blues," the street name for oxycodone, along with getting a haircut, washing his sheets, cleaning the kitchen. And Shamo planned to expand. He bought another press so big agents would later need a tow truck to drag it out of his garage.

The money was pouring in, and out.

Shamo hired a personal assistant; she did his shopping, had his car detailed. He stuffed a duffel bag with $429,000 cash and asked his parents to hold it. He bragged to friends about VIP bottle service at clubs and gambling in Las Vegas. He shopped for real estate in Puerto Rico; took photos sipping champagne on a cruise ship; bought designer jeans, an 88-inch television, a boat and BMW.

Crandall and his girlfriend posted photos on Instagram of trips to Laos, Thailand, Singapore, kayaking and partying. But he was running out of money and agreed to become a remote customer service representative. The list of people accepting packages from China ballooned to more than a dozen. Everyone was making easy money and getting text messages from Shamo dotted with "lol" and "awesome!"

Shamo penned another note: "I am Shamo. I am awesome. My friends love me. I created an empire."

But even as he cheered himself on, there were signs of danger.

One customer reported an overdose death. Shamo scanned obituaries, then declared it was a faked, Crandall said. Then a message said pills were making people sick.

Crandall forwarded it to Shamo with a dismissive question: Should he tell them to "suck it up?" Or send more pills to pacify them?

___

They didn't know it, but a suspicious customs agent at the Los Angeles International Airport had flagged a box from Shanghai, China, pulled it off the belt and looked inside. The agent found 98.7 grams of fentanyl powder — enough to make almost 100,000 pills. The box was destined for Utah.

Agents looked for more packages making their way from China to Utah, and eventually one arrived, said an agent with Homeland Security Investigations who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect ongoing investigations. On Nov. 8, 2016, postal inspectors seized a box en route from a port city in China known to law enforcement as a fentanyl-trafficking hub. It was addressed to Sean Gygi, Shamo's "runner," so agents arrived at his house with a search warrant.

Gygi said he thought the hundreds of envelopes he'd put in the mail contained the party drugs he sometimes took himself. Told it was fentanyl, the agent recalled, Gygi drooped.

He agreed to wear a wire while he picked up the packages, like he did every day. But instead of dropping them in the mail, he delivered them to police.

This single day's shipment contained 34,828 fentanyl pills destined for homes in 26 states.

Four days later, on Nov. 22, 2016, agents stood on Shamo's stoop, shouted through a bullhorn, then broke the door down with a battering ram. They were dressed in neon-orange hazmat suits with clear bowls around their faces that made them look like astronauts.

Shamo came up the stairs in a T-shirt and shorts, a mask and gloves in his pocket. A pill press downstairs was running, in a room with powder caked on the walls and the furniture.

Others were raiding the stash at Bustin and Tonge's condo. Veteran vice officers would say they had never seen so many pills, even in international operations. In total, they packed up over 74,000 fentanyl pills awaiting distribution.

In Shamo's sock drawer, agents found stack after stack of cash. There was more money in a safe in the closet. Agents totaled up more than $1.2 million, not including the money he had tied up in Bitcoin or bags he'd stashed with his family. Investigators eventually caught up with Paz, who Shamo paid around a dollar per pill, and he surrendered $800,000 more.

Crandall was in Laos, still traveling with his girlfriend, when he heard the news. He stored his drug-related data on a flash drive, threw it down a storm drain and sent an email to the dark web marketplace: "This account has been compromised." After a few months, he figured he was in the clear. He and his girlfriend planned their wedding and invited guests to meet them in Hawaii for the big day: May 12, 2017. They bought rings, and a dress.

Agents were waiting when they stepped onto American soil in Honolulu.

___

When Crandall sat on the witness stand, he was slump-shouldered and shackled, clumsily trying to maneuver his handcuffs to pull a tissue out of the box to wipe his eyes. In the two years since his arrest, he has been imprisoned in a county jail and watched his fellow inmates suffer the brutal fallout of an opioid epidemic. They stole from their parents, cycled in and out of jail and shivered, sweated, sobbed through withdrawal.

He'd helped feed this, he realized. For money.

He and Shamo's other ex-partners and packagers pleaded guilty, agreed to testify against their friend and hoped for mercy.

The story they told convinced the jury to convict Shamo of 12 counts, including continuing criminal enterprise, the so-called "kingpin charge" that is typically reserved for drug lords like El Chapo and carries a mandatory life sentence. The jury deadlocked, though on the 13th count: the death of Klyuev.

The bust was one of the largest operations in the country in 2016. But the fentanyl trade has only grown more sophisticated since. By comparison, Shamo now looks "small-time," said Safdar, with the Partnership for Safe Medicines. The most notorious Mexican drug cartels have transitioned to fentanyl, even as homegrown upstarts like Shamo's proliferate.

Seizure data in the United Nation's World Drug Report shows trafficking quickly expanding worldwide. In 2013, four countries reported fentanyl seizures. By 2016: 12 countries. In 2017, 16 countries reported seizing fentanyl.

And there is no reason to believe it will not spread further. In Africa and the Middle East, the synthetic opioid tramadol is widely abused, much of it illicitly manufactured in Asia. If that market transitions to fentanyl it would be catastrophic, said Scott Stewart, a former agent with the State Department. In Australia, prescription opioid consumption has quadrupled. Marianne Jauncey, medical director of a Sydney harm-reduction center, can't think of any reason fentanyl won't soon arrive — all they can do is prepare for the day that it does.

As Shamo was convicted, a single dark web marketplace still had 32,000 listings for drugs, thousands of them claiming to be oxycodone. There was no way to tell whether they originated in a pharmacy or somebody's basement.

One vendor even borrowed a version of Shamo's name. Pharmamaster peddles oxys online, sold in bulk at a discount. It has, it boasts, an "unlimited" supply.

"Pharma-grade A++," the listings promise. "24-hour shipping!"

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foxspirit1928 · 6 years ago

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Miss Fisher Reading List (38)

Continuing the theme of my previous reading list post about Zane Grey, this one is about Buffalo Bill, who was an American scout, bison hunter, and showman (1846 – 1917). He founded Buffalo Bill’s Wild West performing company in 1887 and toured in the U.S. and later in Great Britain and Europe. (See Wikipedia for details) Although he had never set foot in Australia, his fame evidently spread across the ocean as Jack had been saving a badge for him since he was 10 years old.

In S1 and S2, Jack was known as Shakespeare Man who recited the Bard’s words by heart with his dulcet tones. The revelation of his love for Zane Grey and Buffalo Bill in S3 added a different dimension to him that I found endearing. It’s not surprising that he was into cowboys as a kid, but he apparently retained the sense of adventure after growing up, and that’s why the precarious Miss Fisher intrigued him from the beginning. In S3E6 Game, Set and Murder, I have this mental image of him heading home after getting the Special Constable paperwork ready and fishing out the badge hidden in a little tin box that was filled with various mementos like old coins and stamps. I could picture that familiar and irresistible smirk on his face as he was thinking of pinning the badge on his newly anointed Special Constable Phryne Fisher.

Back to my reading list. I chose “Buffalo Bill Cody: An Autobiography” as it got pretty decent customer reviewers on Amazon (4.4 out of 5 stars). The description on Amazon mentioned “The adventure story writer Emilio Salgari met Buffalo Bill in Italy, saw his show, and later featured him as a hero in some of his novels.” I was curious about these novels and did some research on the writer. According to Wikipedia, Salgari (1929 – 1989) was considered the father of Italian adventure fiction and Italian pop culture, and the “grandfather” of the Spaghetti Western that emerged in the mid-1960s. The young Clint Eastwood stared in three of his films.

As for his novels, I didn’t find any that was specifically tied to Buffalo Bill, but they all sounded quite fanciful. I randomly selected “Sandokan: The Tigers of Mompracem” (English translation by Nico Lorenzutti, 2007) about a band of rebel Malaysian pirates in 1849 fighting for the defense of tiny native kingdom against the colonial powers of the Dutch and British empires. Several critics used the work “swashbuckling” (engaging in daring and romantic adventures with ostentatious bravado or flamboyance). I am totally in!

(Posted 03-Nov-2018)

#miss fisher reading list #game set and murder #foxypedia #miss fisher #missfisher #mfmm

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phoenixfire-thewizardgoddess · 7 years ago

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1-100

…are you joking

no one on this earth wants to know that much about me

you asked for it:

1: when you have cereal, do you have more milk than cereal or more cereal than milk?

The intention is always more cereal than milk, and yet… it always ends up being the opposite.

2: do you like the feeling of cold air on your cheeks on a wintery day?

…as an Australian, NO

3: what random objects do you use to bookmark your books?

Heh, what DON’t I use?

Receipts, assignments, old documents, letters, other books, string, anything i can lean it against and hold it open with, etc.

even the odd obliging cat’s paw for a few minutes

4: how do you take your coffee/tea?

~I drink neither, I am boring like that~

5: are you self-conscious of your smile?

Yeah, I’m aware of how fucking ridiculous I look when I smile, and my non-perfect teeth.

6: do you keep plants?

not currently, but I used to have sunflowers and such

7: do you name your plants?

not usually, which is odd bc i name literally everything else

8: what artistic medium do you use to express your feelings?

~writing~

words are easy

have tried painting and drawing but i’m just so shithouse at it

9: do you like singing/humming to yourself?

Y~E~S

all the time

10: do you sleep on your back, side, or stomach?

All, depends on the day really.

11: what’s an inner joke you have with your friends?

Well, a few years back for some reason some irl friends and I would randomly start singing the Narwhals Narwhals song, or reply ‘the dirt is gone!’ after anyone said ‘Bam!’

but recently? online? uhhhhhhh… well, i send shitty mouse-drawn-in-Paint pics to the ever-patient camiluna27 and she finds polite things to say about them… which is our little joke

12: what’s your favorite planet?

Like my favourite Sailor Scout, it’s Jupiter.

13: what’s something that made you smile today?

Our foster puppy is coming today

14: if you were to live with your best friend in an old flat in a big city, what would it look like?

it wouldn’t matter what it looked like, we’d make it work even if our only furniture was a minifridge and a beanbag… sharing the chores, watching stupid shit at night, complaining or joking with each other, etc.

15: go google a weird space fact and tell us what it is!

It takes 230 million years for our solar system to make a single orbit around the Milky Way.

16: what’s your favorite pasta dish?

Tuna Mornay (? never been sure how it’s spelled tbh)

17: what color do you really want to dye your hair?

BLUE

18: tell us about something dumb/funny you did that has since gone down in history between you and your friends and is always brought up.

my brain is blanking, and yet last night i know i was recalling something really stupid…

19: do you keep a journal? what do you write/draw/ in it?

Nah, i just shitpost my angst or delight onto this site…

20: what’s your favourite eye color?

I have no preference for eye colour.

21: talk about your favorite bag, the one that’s been to hell and back with you and that you love to pieces.

Oh, I got this shoulder bag thing from The Harry Potter Experience when it came to Australia… it’s half-covered in an ever-changing bunch of badges (keep losing and finding them/getting new ones). it’s been left in the sun, saturated, pelted with hail as i ran for cover, etc.

22: are you a morning person?

I never used to be… but since the antidepressants, i’m finding mornings way easier.

23: what’s your favourite thing to do on lazy days where you have 0 obligations?

mess about on the computer, usually

video games or writing something, or chatting with people i can no longer see physically/it would be super expensive to meet irl

24: is there someone out there you would trust with every single one of your secrets?

yeah, a few

25: what’s the weirdest place you’ve ever broken into?

???? who in the hell is breaking into enough places to have a top ten list?

26: what are the shoes you’ve had for forever and wear with every single outfit?

Heh, I just have a handful of cheap-ass shoes I got from Big W a few years ago and I get cheap insert things to keep them alive. I randomly put on any pair i can find, whether they match the outfit or not… what other choice do you have with big lady feet and soft skin?

27: what’s your favorite bubblegum flavor?

Fruity

28: sunrise or sunset?

Sunset.

Sunrise means I’ve been awake too long and have Fucked Up ™

29: what’s something really cute that one of your friends does and is totally endearing?

not to bring her up consistently, but camiluna27 literally drew fanart of one of my fanfics (the first ever??? holy shit) and I was so goddamn flattered I almost couldn’t believe it… someone liked my trash and DREW SOMETHING?

such talent. much love. so excite. wow.

30: think of it: have you ever been truly scared?

Pfft, yeah, probably.

31: what is your opinion of socks? do you like wearing weird socks? do you sleep with socks? do you confine yourself to white sock hell? really, just talk about socks.

Socks are good.

I am making a sock right now, in viking fashion, it looks ridiculous.

Sleep? In winter, sometimes.

MISMATCHED SOCKS WERE A GODDAMN FASHION STATEMENT AT SCHOOL HELL YEAH

32: tell us a story of something that happened to you after 3AM when you were with friends.

Well there were two funny things.

the first one was this massive sleepover party, and the minute the lights went off with all these adolescents sardined on the floor (teens but like, everyone was just chilling nothing nsfw happening), the marshmallow war began

it’s 3am and people are being PELTED with the goddamn things in the dark it was chaos.

the other time, i’d gone to a party thing, put up a tent to stay over like the others and this other girl at the party i’d just befriended (along with her highly anxious friend i managed to calm down) was not sure how to get home and i’m like… stay in my tent i have space it’s chill

we’re sleeping in jeans bc that seemed like a good idea at the time (it was NOT)

everyone’s STARVING. like, no real FOOD was at this party (New Years party?) we had chips and softdrink and that was it… and i dunno if you know this, but no amount of like, chicken-flavoured chips will fill up the aching hollow in your stomach for Real Food

so we’re talking bc we’re awake, relative strangers who are starving together in a tent they’re intending to share the night in, and we get on to SUPERNATURAL

i loved the show still it wasn’t the disaster it became, yet… and she admits that the S1 episode with the Wendigo freaked her out… and i’m like, hah, yeah, glad we’re not in a tent with woods around, huh? bc i am an asshole… that was pretty much where we were

and around the same time, the free-roaming chickens on the property are slowly moving past and making satanic noises, freaking her out more so i changed the topic to calm things down… but then, later on (waaaaaaaaay too early in the morning bc some of us had to pee early and it was Effort™ ) i get back to the tent to find a Chicken. In. The Tent.

looking at me like *I* was being the asshole here for intruding on her rest.

the other chick-a-dee is sleeping and im thinking ‘well fuck she’ll freak if the chicken’s randomly there when she wakes… and i try to subtly get the chicken out, and if you know chickens… you can understand how i failed

it was hilarious, and disastrous.

33: what’s your fave pastry?

don’t know, really

34: tell us about the stuffed animal you kept as a kid. what is it called? what does it look like? do you still keep it?

Oh! I still have them.

There’s two, one called (creatively) Teddy, who wore a yellow onesie the Parental Unit made for him. My fondest memory of him was this time in kindy where we took our teddies in bc it was ‘Teddy Bear Picnic Day’, and during naptime, the teachers took the teddies and hid them around the playground…

We had to find them when we woke up.

Teddy had one foot in the top of the fence and looked like he was trying to leave/escape… i told the Parental Unit this story a thousand times over the years, the poor bugger.

The other one was made for me, after Parental Unit had a dream i’d be a girl. Her name is Heidi (you know, after the song? ‘Heidi, Heidi, Heidi ho, the elephant walks oh so slow’), she’s a pink elephant in a tutu and lovely and she and ted are hella safe for now.

35: do you like stationary and pretty pens and so on? do you use them often?

I do like them, and when i get a special pen i use it for EVERYTHING, then flounder to find a basic pen when it runs dry

36: which band’s sound would fit your mood right now?

I don’t know, i’m not really feeling anything.

What’s that song that’s just 3 minutes of silence?

37: do you like keeping your room messy or clean?

>.> Messy

When it’s clean, it’s Clean ™

But when it’s messy… >.>

38: tell us about your pet peeves!

*unfurls list*

people who stand in the way and block entire corridors to chat with someone and there’s a public bench RIGHT THERE

capitalism

i can’t remember any others right now but i know there’s LOTS…

39: what colour do you wear the most?

Most of my outfits have black in them. We can pretend it’s slimming.

40: think of a piece of jewellery you own: what’s it’s story? does it have any meaning to you?

I have a dragon ring, my estranged godmother bought it for me from this massive local market we once went to, back in like 2007/2008?

I love it so much for some reason (not so much th godmother tbh, she’s a pain) and it’s mass-produced, but i love it… wear it almost everywhere

41: what’s the last book you remember really, really loving?

Out of the Black Land by Kerry Greenwood

42: do you have a favourite coffee shop? describe it!

~nope~

43: who was the last person you gazed at the stars with?

Well, I looked up at them on the way inside the other night and pointed them out to the Parental Unit. They’re pretty stunning here, without city lights to obscure them.

44: when was the last time you remember feeling completely serene and at peace with everything?

??????????????????? that’s a thing?

45: do you trust your instincts a lot?

Perpetually, always.

46: tell us the worst pun you can think of.

I can’t, you’ll punish me.

47: what food do you think should be banned from the universe?

that mayonnaise-peas pizza thing i just saw, WHY

48: what was your biggest fear as a kid? is it the same today?

I feared the wild animals in the dark when i was locked outside, and also feared Huntsman Spiders.

Today? the spiders and anything in the dark can square the fuck up, and fight my fear of disappointing everyone/failing

49: do you like buying CDs and records? what was the last one you bought?

used to, but the CD player in the car broke… so now i just use the ipod/itunes

50: what’s an odd thing you collect?

…monster high dolls, hardy boys books, comic books

51: think of a person. what song do you associate with them?

uhhhhhhhhhhhhh mind blank

52: what are your favourite memes of the year so far?

Cask of Amontillado and Joe Biden memes have been awesome

53: have you ever watched the rocky horror picture show? heathers? beetlejuice? pulp fiction? what do you think of them?

Rocky Horror? Good, interesting.

heathers? pulp fiction? no

beetlejuice? seemed a lot more exciting when i was little

54: who’s the last person you saw with a true look of sadness on their face?

our puppy

she’s learned the exact sad face to make when she wants someone to go outside and play ball

55: what’s the most dramatic thing you’ve ever done to prove a point?

can’t think of anything overtly, honestly

unless you count ‘yeah i can use a swivel chair instead of a ladder’ and the inevitable falling through a bookcase

56: what are some things you find endearing in people?

Honesty, Humour, Excitement and Communication/Connection, Creativity

When they energise, not drain

57: go listen to bohemian rhapsody. how did it make you feel? did you dramatically reenact the lyrics?

it has always been interesting, and it makes you feel dramatic…

i can neither confirm nor deny…

58: who’s the wine mom and who’s the vodka aunt in your group of friends? why?

no idea

59: what’s your favourite myth?

define myth

like ‘mermaids are a thing’, or ‘that time a god did _____’ or like, ‘swimming right after eating can give you stomach cramps’?

60: do you like poetry? what are some of your faves?

used to

61: what’s the stupidest gift you’ve ever given? the stupidest one you’ve ever received?

uhhhhhhhh literally any fanfic i give as a gift, is stupid

i got two little plastic dicks as a joke gift from someone as a secret santa thing (another time i got a $2 piece of trash bag thing the size of my hand that broke the second i touched it, and i was rather upset)

62: do you drink juice in the morning? which kind?

no, but my fave juice is apple blackcurrant or tropical

63: are you fussy about your books and music? do you keep them meticulously organized or kinda leave them be?

well, depends, i try to keep the series together and stuff, but mostly it’s ‘if it fits, it sits’ in the bookshelf

64: what colour is the sky where you are right now?

obscenely blue, like, you’d think it was computer generated blue

65: is there anyone you haven’t seen in a long time who you’d love to hang out with?

Yeah

66: what would your ideal flower crown look like?

…something with blue flowers, but let’s be real, the chance to wear a flower crown would be amazing even if they were all corpse flowers

67: how do gloomy days where the sky is dark and the world is misty make you feel?

they are otherworldy and beautiful, they have a different energy to sunny days

68: what’s winter like where you live?

Cold. Stubbornly wearing shorts and tank tops claiming you’re not cold. putting four layers on the bed bc what. the. FUCK.

69: what are your favourite board games?

Cluedo, Monopoly

70: have you ever used a ouija board?

Nah, that seems like a terrible idea. I refuse to be That White Girl™ who invites demons in…

71: what’s your favourite kind of tea?

Mortali-tea

Nah, none, i don’t drink tea or coffee, i am BORING.

I am the Beige of people, beverage-wise.

72: are you a person who needs to note everything down or else you’ll forget it?

Sometimes. Esp. recently, I find noting it down helps, but usually I remember more than i assume i will.

73: what are some of your worst habits?

Lazy/procrastinate, eats stupid shit I SHOULD NOT BC I AM FAT AS FUCK, overthinks, boring.

74: describe a good friend of yours without using their name or gendered pronouns.

amazingly talented, fun, incredibly aesthetically pleasing, open, understanding, brilliant and a pleasure to interact with.

75: tell us about your pets!

Okay, so we have four cats and a doggo.

The two oldest cats are sisters, aged 11; very loving but also tiny murder machines so they’re inside mostly.

Two youngest half-siblings, aged 7; one is the perpetual kitten who loves affection, the other is a slinky boi who comes to you if he wants love, and not before (adores my sibling tho, their bond is strong).

Doggo is the baby, she’s 3 i think? Always energetic.

+ a foster puppy we just got today, just now, and she’s fuckin’ adorable but like, a massive ball of energy.

76: is there anything you should be doing right now but aren’t?

cleaning

77: pink or yellow lemonade?

PINK hell yeah

78: are you in the minion hateclub or fanclub?

HATE

i will fight ALL of them to the DEATH

79: what’s one of the cutest things someone has ever done for you?

Listened to me complaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaain

Also drew me art for no reason i mean, c’mon that’s so cute

80: what colour are your bedroom walls? did you choose that color? if so, why?

Light blue, yep. loved it, and also it went with the underwater theme the family did

81: describe one of your friend’s eyes using the most abstract imagery you can think of.

Amazing as orbs go.

82: are/were you good in school?

generally, shit at chemistry though (but then, if an entire class fails an exam, you don’t ask the students whose fault it is)

83: what’s some of your favorite album art?

uhhhh not sure

84: are you planning on getting tattoos? which ones?

maybe dunno

85: do you read comics? what are your faves?

my dude, so many.

Batman, Nightwing, Wonder Woman, Teen Titans, The Titans, ElfQuest, Avengers, New Avengers, Saga, Hawkeye, uhhhhhhhhh, like, i have HEAPS...

86: do you like concept albums? which ones?

i have no idea what that is

87: what are some movies you think everyone should watch at least once in their lives?

St Trinians, love that movie...

AVATAR

88: are there any artistic movements you particularly enjoy?

...good question, i have no idea what you’re asking

89: are you close to your parents?

The Parental Unit literally knows every facet of my being bc i can discuss anything with them. Even if we clash on ideologies or whatevs.

The Other One’s a violent stalker, so no, not that one.

90: talk about your one of you favourite cities.

I have been to like, Brisbane and Sydney... not a huge pool of cities to compare from. Uh, I like that there are so many comic book shops in brisbane tbh...

91: where do you plan on travelling this year?

Probs Brisbane.

92: are you a person who drowns their pasta in cheese or a person who barely sprinkles a pinch?

Depends on the type of pasta, really.

93: what’s the hairstyle you wear the most?

Plaits. Keeps it out of the way.

94: who was the last person you know to have a birthday?

Sibling. I went all out with their gifts and am barely making it to monday... but it was worth it.

95: what are your plans for this weekend?

>get foster puppy

>chill/be boring bc you are the human equivalent of the colour beige

96: do you install your computer updates really quickly or do you procrastinate on them a lot?

Procrastinate, mostly. ‘Restart required’ lol nope, you can wait...

97: myer briggs type, zodiac sign, and hogwarts house?

ENTP, Gemini, Gryffindor

98: when’s the last time you went hiking? did you enjoy it?

oh god no. Grade 9 they had this youth action program... sent us orienteering in the bush... up a mountain, down a moutain, through the fucking lantana six times because the boys in the class have the map and can’t fucking read it right but ‘girls can’t read maps so why would we give it to you’...

it was a goddamn disaster, but we survived. hated it, so much

99: list some songs that resonate to your soul whenever you hear them.

Sia’s ‘The Greatest’, ‘Move Your Body’ and ‘Unstoppable’

‘This is Gospel’, ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’, ‘Don’t Threaten Me With A Good Time’, and ‘Golden Days’ by Panic! at the Disco

‘Never Coming Back to Earth’ by Steve Aoki & Fall Out Boy

Most of the songs by Lindsey Stirling

‘Heroes’ by Generdyn

‘I Hope You Die In A Fire’

‘Wait For It’ and ‘History Has Its Eyes On You’ from HAMILTON

‘Assassin, Murder, Monster’ and ‘Chase the Morning’ from REPO! the Genetic Opera

‘The Beauty Underneath’ from Love Never Dies

100: if you were presented with two buttons, one that allows you to go 5 years into the past, the other 5 years into the future, which one would you press? why?

I’d slam both at once and launch myself into a temporal paradox so i simultaneously never existed and also always existed therefore becoming a GOD...

#Anonymous

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biofunmy · 5 years ago

Text

How a clean-cut Eagle Scout became a fentanyl drug lord

The photo that flashed onto the courtroom screen showed a young man dead on his bedroom floor, bare feet poking from the cuffs of his rolled up jeans. Lurking on a trash can at the edge of the picture was what prosecutors said delivered this death: an ordinary, U.S. Postal Service envelope.

The envelope was postmarked from the suburbs of Salt Lake City.

That’s where a clean-cut, 29-year-old college dropout and Eagle Scout named Aaron Shamo made himself a millionaire by building a fentanyl trafficking empire with not much more than his computer and the help of a few friends.

———

This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

———

For three weeks this summer, those suburban millennials climbed onto the witness stand at his federal trial and offered an unprecedented window into how fentanyl bought and sold online has transformed the global drug trade. There was no testimony of underground tunnels or gangland murders or anything that a wall at the southern border might stop. Shamo called himself a “white-collar drug dealer,” drew in co-workers from his time at eBay and peppered his messages to them with smiley-face emojis. His attorney called him a fool; his primary defense was that he isn’t smart enough to be a kingpin.

How he and his friends managed to flood the country with a half-million fake oxycodone pills reveals the ease with which fentanyl now moves around the world, threatening to expand the epidemic beyond America’s borders. It is so potent, so easy to transport, experts say, large-scale traffickers no longer require sophisticated networks to send it to any corner of the globe. All they need is a mailbox, internet access and people with an appetite for opioids. And consumption rates are rising from Asia to Europe to Latin America as pharmaceutical companies promote painkillers abroad.

The case against Shamo detailed how white powder up to 100 times stronger than morphine was bought online from a laboratory in China and arrived in Utah via international mail; it was shaped into perfect-looking replicas of oxycodone tablets in the press that thumped in Shamo’s basement and resold on the internet’s black markets. Then it was routed back into the postal system in thousands of packages addressed to homes across this country awash with prescription painkiller addiction.

When Shamo took the stand to try to spare himself a lifetime in prison, he began with a nervous chuckle. He careened from one topic to the next in a monologue prosecutors would later describe as masterful manipulation to convince the jury he thought his drug-dealing was helping people. Customers wrote thank you notes because their doctors refused to prescribe more painkillers, he said. It felt like “a win-win situation” — he got rich and his customers got drugs.

———

The question before this jury is being debated all across America: Two decades into the opioid epidemic, is there such a thing as justice for 400,000 lost lives?

The largest civil litigation in history is testing how the pharmaceutical industry should be held accountable for inundating the country with billions of addictive pain pills. Purdue Pharma, seen by many as the primary villain for deceptively pushing the blockbuster drug OxyContin, reached a tentative $12 billion settlement this week with about half the states and roughly 2,000 local governments. Attorneys general who didn’t sign on say the figure is far too low. A trial of other pharmaceutical companies is scheduled for next month, in which communities will contend that their mass marketing of prescription painkillers sparked an epidemic.

This crisis began in the 1990s and has since spiraled into waves, each worse than the one before: Prescription opioids spread addiction, then a crackdown on prescribing paved the road to heroin, which led to fentanyl — a synthetic opioid made entirely in a laboratory. Traffickers added it to heroin to boost its potency and profitability. That transition happened slowly at first, then with extraordinary ferocity.

By 2017, deaths from synthetic opioids had increased more than 800 percent, to 28,466, dragging the United States’ overall life expectancy down for a third consecutive year for the first time in a century. Fentanyl deaths have been reported abroad, in Canada, Sweden, Estonia, the United Kingdom. Countries with surging prescription opioid addiction, like Australia, fear they are on the brink.

“Fentanyl will be the bubonic plague,” said Mike Vigil, former chief of international operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration, warning that any country with a burgeoning prescription opioid problem could soon find itself following American footsteps. “It’s just a matter of time.”

No one can say exactly how or why fentanyl, first synthesized in 1959 as a powerful painkiller, entered the modern illicit drug market, said Bryce Pardo, a researcher at the Rand Corporation. In 2013, people began overdosing on heroin laced with fentanyl in New England and Ohio, and it spread from there. Shabbir Safdar, the Partnership for Safe Medicines’ executive director, said the first known death from a fentanyl-laced pill was in San Francisco in October 2015.

There are two sources of supply. Mexican cartels and packages shipped direct from China, where it is produced in a huge and under-regulated chemical sector. A Senate investigation last year found massive quantities of fentanyl pouring in from China through the Postal Service. The report largely blamed dated technology that left customs inspectors sifting through packages manually looking for “the proverbial needle in a haystack.” The Postal Service wrote in a statement to The Associated Press that it is working hard with its international counterparts to close those loopholes, and is improving its technology to intercept fentanyl shipments.

By the time a seized package heading from China to Utah led investigators to Shamo, he had already turned fentanyl into at least 458,946 potentially poisonous pills, the government said. There are many more like him, officials say, upstart traffickers pressing pure Chinese-made fentanyl into pills in their basements and kitchens with unsophisticated equipment. In a single batch, one pill might have no fentanyl and another enough to kill a person instantly. One agent at Shamo’s trial compared it to making chocolate-chip cookies, only if too many chips ended up in a “cookie,” whoever ate it dropped dead.

For traffickers, the profit margins are irresistible: The DEA estimates a kilogram of fentanyl synthesized for a few thousand dollars could make a dealer more than $1 million.

“Any moron can basically become a major drug kingpin by dealing in fentanyl,” said Vigil. “You can have somebody with an IQ minus 100 who becomes an overnight multimillionaire.”

———

Aaron Shamo dreamed of entrepreneurial riches. He idolized Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and studied self-improvement books like “Think and Grow Rich.”

He and a longtime friend, Drew Crandall, worked at eBay after failed stints in college. But Crandall was fired and Shamo decided it was “unfair” that he still had to work, so he quit. They wanted easy money.

They learned what they needed on the web, searching with queries like “how to ship drugs.” It was so easy. They expanded, ordering drugs in bulk, breaking them down and selling at a mark-up, all while barely having to leave the house.

Then Crandall fell in love.

Then a local drug dealer made a suggestion to Shamo that would change the course of his life: There was a fortune to be made in producing fake oxycodone.

Shamo enlisted his gym buddy, Jonathan Luke Paz, to help him. Shamo ordered fentanyl online from China, set up the pill press in the basement and bought dyes and stamps to match popular pharmaceuticals. Then they handed them over to the local dealer, who tested them on his own customers. The first batches were weak or speckled in color, he told them, or didn’t react like real oxycodone when users heated it on tinfoil to smoke it.

But they were getting better.

“Close to being money in the bank,” the dealer messaged Shamo. “You did it, bro.”

On the first day of 2016, Shamo wrote out his goals for the upcoming year: He would be rich. All the girls would want him.

“I will overachieve,” he wrote. “I will overcome.”

He went online with his products a month later. Some were specified as fentanyl, but some weren’t, purporting instead to contain 30 milligrams of oxycodone. Shamo named this new store Pharma-Master.

———

As winter turned to summer, sales skyrocketed. Pharma-Master started selling thousands of pills a week, charging around $10 each.

On June 6, a relatively small order came in: 10 pills, to be shipped to an apartment house in Daly City, a working-class suburb of San Francisco.

The envelope arrived at the doorstep at 3 p.m. on June 11.

He was found dead the next day, with fentanyl, alcohol and a substance associated with cocaine in his system.

His was the only death with which Shamo would be charged. His defense attorney, Greg Skordas, argued that neither his death nor any others can be definitely linked with Shamo’s operation.

But in documents, prosecutors connected Shamo to a veritable slaughter:

A 24-year-old man in Seattle overdosed three weeks after he bought pills from Pharma-Master in March 2016.

Later that spring, 40 pills were shipped to a 21-year-old in Washington, D.C. He died in his dorm room 11 days later.

In Utah, a 29-year-old software analyst named Devin Meldrum had been searching since he was a teenager for a cure for cluster headaches that felt like knives stabbing his skull, said his father, Rod.

He was dead before she arrived to say goodnight, blue on his bathroom floor.

His father isn’t sure Shamo even now understands the magnitude of what happened: “Does he even comprehend how many families have had their hearts torn out?”

———

Online, Pharma-Master was getting rave reviews.

“These will make u a millionaire in under a year, guarantee,” wrote one shopper who called himself “Trustworthy Money.”

Shamo offered steep discounts for bulk buyers. Tonge, one of his distributors, testified that she began to question Shamo’s claim that he was helping patients who couldn’t get medication: Why would one person need 5,000 pills?

Tonge and her partner complained that the orders were coming too quickly, so Shamo hired a “runner” named Sean Gygi to pick up the packages and drop them in the mail, dozens of them a day.

Drug manufacturing became routine: Shamo once wrote himself a to-do list, and included a reminder to “make blues,” the street name for oxycodone, along with getting a haircut, washing his sheets, cleaning the kitchen. And Shamo planned to expand. He bought another press so big agents would later need a tow truck to drag it out of his garage.

The money was pouring in, and out.

Shamo penned another note: “I am Shamo. I am awesome. My friends love me. I created an empire.”

But even as he cheered himself on, there were signs of danger.

One customer reported an overdose death. Shamo scanned obituaries, then declared it was a fake, Crandall said. Then a message said pills were making people sick.

Crandall forwarded it to Shamo with a dismissive question: Should he tell them to “suck it up?” Or send more pills to pacify them?

———

They didn’t know it, but a suspicious customs agent at the Los Angeles International Airport had flagged a box from Shanghai, China, pulled it off the belt and looked inside. The agent found 98.7 grams of fentanyl powder — enough to make almost 100,000 pills. The box was destined for Utah.

Agents looked for more packages making their way from China to Utah, and eventually one arrived, said an agent with Homeland Security Investigations who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect ongoing investigations. On Nov. 8, 2016, postal inspectors seized a box en route from a port city in China known to law enforcement as a fentanyl-trafficking hub. It was addressed to Gygi, Shamo’s “runner,” so agents arrived at his house with a search warrant.

Gygi said he thought the hundreds of envelopes he’d put in the mail contained the party drugs he sometimes took himself. Told it was fentanyl, the agent recalled, Gygi drooped.

He agreed to wear a wire while he picked up the packages, like he did every day. But instead of dropping them in the mail, he delivered them to police.

This single day’s shipment contained 34,828 fentanyl pills destined for homes in 26 states.

Four days later, on Nov. 22, 2016, agents stood on Shamo’s stoop, shouted through a bullhorn, then broke the door down with a battering ram. They were dressed in neon-orange hazmat suits with clear bowls around their faces that made them look like astronauts.

Shamo came up the stairs in a T-shirt and shorts, a mask and gloves in his pocket. A pill press downstairs was running, in a room with powder caked on the walls and the furniture.

Others were raiding the stash at Bustin and Tonge’s condo. Veteran vice officers would say they had never seen so many pills, even in international operations. In total, they packed up over 74,000 fentanyl pills awaiting distribution.

In Shamo’s sock drawer, agents found stack after stack of cash. There was more money in a safe in the closet. Agents totaled up more than $1.2 million, not including the money he had tied up in Bitcoin or bags he’d stashed with his family. Investigators eventually caught up with Paz, whom Shamo paid around a dollar per pill, and he surrendered $800,000 more.

Crandall was in Laos, still traveling with his girlfriend, when he heard the news. He stored his drug-related data on a flash drive, threw it down a storm drain and sent an email to the dark web marketplace: “This account has been compromised.” After a few months, he figured he was in the clear. He and his girlfriend planned their wedding and invited guests to meet them in Hawaii for the big day: May 12, 2017. They bought rings, and a dress.

Agents were waiting when they stepped onto American soil in Honolulu.

———

He’d helped feed this, he realized. For money.

He and Shamo’s other ex-partners and packagers pleaded guilty, agreed to testify against their friend and hoped for mercy.

The story they told convinced the jury to convict Shamo of 12 counts, including continuing criminal enterprise, the so-called “kingpin charge” that is typically reserved for drug lords like El Chapo and carries a mandatory life sentence. The jury deadlocked, though, on the 13th count: the death of Klyuev.

The bust was one of the largest operations in the country in 2016. But the fentanyl trade has only grown more sophisticated since. By comparison, Shamo now looks “small-time,” said Safdar, with the Partnership for Safe Medicines. The most notorious Mexican drug cartels have transitioned to fentanyl, even as homegrown upstarts like Shamo’s proliferate.

Seizure data in the United Nations World Drug Report shows trafficking quickly expanding worldwide. In 2013, four countries reported fentanyl seizures. By 2016: 12 countries. In 2017, 16 countries reported seizing fentanyl.

There is no reason to believe it will not spread further. In Africa and the Middle East, the synthetic opioid tramadol is widely abused, much of it illicitly manufactured in Asia. If that market transitions to fentanyl it would be catastrophic, said Scott Stewart, a former agent with the State Department. In Australia, prescription opioid consumption has quadrupled. Marianne Jauncey, medical director of a Sydney harm-reduction center, can’t think of any reason fentanyl won’t soon arrive — all they can do is prepare for the day that it does.

One vendor even borrowed a version of Shamo’s name. Pharmamaster peddles oxys online, sold in bulk at a discount. It has, it boasts, an “unlimited” supply.

“Pharma-grade A++,” the listings promise. “24-hour shipping!”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Sahred From Source link Health

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ltdedngallery-blog · 6 years ago

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THE BIG INTERVIEW … DAN BALDWIN

(Originally published Nov 2014)

BRITISH ARTIST DAN BALDWIN RECENTLY RETURNED FROM HIS STUNNING SOLO SHOW ‘END OF INNOCENCE’ IN NEW YORK CITY…AFTER 101 DIFFERENT INTERVIEWS ABOUT THE SHOW & THE NEW WORK, WE CAUGHT UP WITH HIM TO TALK ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE…

LTD/EDN… Hey Dan, you are so often described, perhaps incorrectly, as an urban artist. It doesn’t get anymore urban than NYC, so how the hell was New York? Could you ever live there?

DAN…We had that very conversation out there, could we live here? We thought Yes and No .

If we had a massive loft in the Meatpacking District… Yes!

Although the TV Shows, disclaimers and adverts… that was driving us to a No! One commercial actually announced ‘If your erection lasts for more than four hours, seek medical advice’ and they invent words like ‘ruggedise’ and ‘dramadies’!

So as long as that loft apartment has no TV, you’ll be fine! Did you get to see any more of the City on this trip, or was it just work, work work? Any favourite spots?

Some good friends flew in from Brighton, and we visited all the usual places… Central Park, Liberty Island, Trump Tower, Dakota Building, Times Square, The MoMA, Soho, Cast Iron District, Ground Zero.

The Meatpacking District was the area we liked the most – round by Chelsea market and the historic High Line. I took photos I’m going to use in my new paintings which I’ve never done before – really interesting architecture, great buildings etc.

As for that Urban Artist tag, I guess I’m not easily labelled.

My paintings can be figurative, abstract, landscape, or non-perspective and they move forwards fast – I make sculpture and paint pots, I didn’t grow up in an inner city – but I’m not from the countryside either. My work may have urban appeal, and that may link back to my passion towards skateboarding and it’s art and music. I grew up in a very exciting time with music, that has inspired me.

When I started in 1990 (or 1996 if you exclude college) there was no Urban tags, until 2006, I guess art movements or chapters need to be boxed into a category.

Like they did with Pop Art – many of the Pop artists weren’t, like Ed Rusche, who was a young exciting painter making eye catching art at the same time as Rauschenberg – who actually wasn’t POP either, but was dating Jasper Johns, who was quite POP. I guess we all just love to categorise.

Brit’s taking and breaking the US has been a UK obsession in music and art for generations. With your management team PMM at your side are you part of a new British invasion?

Hopefully – who knows – what I loved was the response to my art from such a diverse mix of people – and selling art direct to people walking in from Texas, Canada, Australia, Germany and NYC, that doesn’t happen in my experience as much in London.

Can you tell us a little more about how it works with you and PMM Art Projects?

PMM will oversee all aspects of putting a show on for me – Pat, Roger, Richard will agree dates that work best, Roger will scout out venues across the city, Pat will then agree, then employ PR to maximise on Press, Roger will spread the word ‘like a scud missile’, Richard will deal in sales and clients, the hanging of the show, and email enquiries, Chippy will deal in decal, graphic design , show preview, lists, poster and sign, Marta will help deal in all admin, and take care of logistics; like cars, flights, hotel, crates, shipping etc - Pat had 700 posters distributed across NYC, and arranged a dinner for special clients and collectors the night before the opening. We all do our bit, I focus on making the art, then photographing it all, packing ready for crates and shippers, and I am there to hang it with Richard and a specialist hanger.

Pat and Roger also oversee any specific projects I may be asked to do, other than a show, like the deal with my recent Paolo Nutini project – If I’m approached by a company for example, I will run it past PMM.

It’s like I have a backbone of support and it all will come together on a show.

Do you pay attention to the American art scene? Feel different to London/UK? Any current artists out there you like? We heard that Shepard Fairey is a collector…

Not really – I rarely get time for other UK shows. I am aware of a lot of artists and try to keep my eyes open, but I’m 6 days a week absorbed in my own work so it’s not so easy.

I went to MoMA NYC just to see if there was a Basquiat, but sadly it was in storage. I was thrilled to see my favourite Rauschenberg again ‘Canyon’, I hadn’t seen that since I was about 19. It’s a mixed media collage on canvas with a eagle stuck to the bottom on wood, with paint and cardboard and as a young artist it made me realise you can do anything in art. I also still get a buzz from seeing Warhol like the huge black red Disaster piece/car crash .

I remember going out to a show in London after my LA show and it was so pretentious compared to LA, which is very much dress down laid back in its vibe. NYC was cool, good people.

Shep isn’t a collector of mine as such, but he has a lot of art – he came to my LA show and requested to meet me, which was great as I saw him there and was like Fuck, its OBEY ! . . Weirdly I had bought myself an Obey print when I first went full time in 2006.

We had a good chat about music mainly and my art and the next day he invited us to his downtown Hollywood studio, which was amazing – he was incredibly generous and gave me 12 prints, and two books, so I pasted some onto a canvas and made a Baldwin on top of some Obeys and one was a Martha Cooper, so it’s a one off Baldwin on some Shepard Fairey Martha cooper prints! I then sent it back to him. (pictured above left).

That meeting was a highlight of our LA trip and years later I had no idea it would link up to PMM via Logan Hicks.

You have a number of other celebrity collectors. If you could collect something from a celebrity what would it be?

I think something from the classic car collection of Jay Leno would be a nice one … I don’t know.

I do want a 50s American car, a 58 Plymouth Fury, after my top 3 favourite movie Christine, or some original Westwood punk gear.

I collected badges as a kid… Now i collect stuff for my art – something from Elvis’s Gracelands, perhaps or a bit of James Dean’s wardrobe, or his conga drums. One of Andy Warhol’s striped t-shirts would be cool or a Basquiat scrap of paper or something from his studio – similarly something from Bacon’s studio. A drum kit from Adam Ant was on my childhood wish list… They gave one away on ”Jim’ll Fix it’.

We covet inanimate objects – is it nostalgia? or sentimentalism? There, I invented a word! Or maybe not. I have a cabinet full of objects we collect. Old children’s dice, a dead Bee, a cats whisker, it’s memory and object – I like nostalgia.

Your Cyclone piece was recently used by Paolo Nutini on his album sleeve artwork – if you could design any album for any band through history what would it be?

Album art used to be so important, I never forget the power Frankie Goes to Hollywood had with their first album, and the symbolism they used, the heart, the bullet, the crucifix, the sperm. It made a big impact on me, as did Adam Ant, but that was more his look and that great logo.

So did Santa bring you anything exciting this year? What was on your list to Santa? Did any goodies cross over with your son’s list?

We escaped the misery of Dads Army, Quality Street, the Two Ronnies repeat from 1978 and you know, all the rest of it and celebrated Rome.

Is finding out that Santa doesn’t exist the real ‘End of Innocence’?

He doesn’t?

Ha, so enough of Christmas, it’s a New Year…What’s up next?

Thursday (Jan 8th 2015) sees the opening of a new print show alongside Peter Blake at the GX Gallery (www.gxgallery.com/exhibition/fame-promise) I have made 5 new works on paper for it.

I also have a lot of loose ends since NYC, some commissions to do, two charity events coming up, and making new art. I am itching to continue my SUBVERT series and make more bronzes.

There will be a lot going on over the next 12 months, we are also planning to move and relocate the studio. Plus I’m already planning my new show! In my head anyway!

Lastly, talking of your head, one question about the Show…. We noticed a splendid hat, move over Pharrell…Where did you get that hat, where did you get that hat?

Ha, I’m not brave enough for ‘Child of the Jago’, yet, but you know, all in time .. but in NYC it was essential.

I like the look of some of these www.nickfouquet.com

In the 90’s, or earlier, when England was full of casuals and mullets, if I said then imagine if all the young casuals started to dress like it was the 1940’s – braces, hats, cloth caps, brogue boots, beards you would have laughed – but now it’s true!

Everything comes round in circles. Look at Duchamp, putting an urinal in a gallery in 1917, how ahead of his time was he? Anyway you know the old saying ‘if you want to get ahead, get a hat ‘…1934 that slogan was created.

Thank you Dan for your time, we look forward to new work in 2016.

#art #artists on tumblr #danbaldwin #new york #maddox gallery

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healthnotion · 6 years ago

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A Peek at The Strenuous Life: August 2018

Last year we launched The Strenuous Life: an online/offline platform that’s like a scouting program for grown men. Each month, members receive The Strenuous Life Bugle, a newsletter that highlights what’s been going on at TSL. We thought AoM readers might enjoy a peek at it every now and then. If you’re interested in becoming a member yourself, sign up for updates here; the next enrollment (and the final enrollment of 2018) opens in September.

The 50-Mile Challenge Hall of Fame Page

I’ve created a page on which I’ve listed those TSL members who have completed one of the most strenuous of challenges — the 50-mile march/hike — along with the time they did it in. A hearty huzzah! to these intrepid and hardy souls. Teddy would be proud of you.

Congratulations to Those Who Did 52/52 Agons!

The original cohort of TSL Classes — Classes 000-004 — recently passed the year mark of their journey on The Strenuous Life. Out of these 738 individuals, an elite 20 completed a tremendous achievement: they did every single weekly Agon for 52 weeks. To have done this despite sick days, holidays, vacations, job stress, relationship and financial variations, general life changes, and the simple mood fluctuations that all happen over the course of a year is truly an impressive achievement. These men not only did hard things, but did the hardest thing of all — they did hard things consistently! My hat’s off to them:

Dustin B., Class 001

Mike P., Class 001

Mark M., Class 001

Louis V., Class 001

Merlin H., Class 001

Steve J., Class 001

Andrew M., Class 001

Jason C., Class 001

Steven C., Class 001

Nate H., Class 002

Christian T., Class 002

Joshua S., Class 002

Michael D., Class 002

Bill D., Class 003

Jack G., Class 003

Adam H., Class 003

Erik W., Class 004

Justin H., Class 004

Tanner S., Class 004

Brian N., Class 004

Badge Work

How’s your badge work been going? I love going through the forums and seeing how many guys have done something for the first time while working on a badge requirement — first time going camping and making a fire, first time roasting a chicken, first time changing their car’s oil . . . that’s what The Strenuous Life is all about — going outside your comfort zone and expanding your horizons!

For the Microadventure Badge, @tobi hiked a little outside his hometown in Germany and set up a bivvy to sleep the night in a nice hidden spot in a field, while @nhadley hiked to the top of 10,457�� Lassen Peak in Lassen Volcanic National Park with his family. @rahorst81 finished the Jumpstart Journaling Challenge for the Journaling Badge, and @neil7t took in a classical concert at the Musikverein concert hall in Vienna for the Music Badge.

@mattdesroches1 tracked the cycles of the moon and @desertchristian took a shot of Venus for the Astronomer Badge. For the Handyman Badge, @rspollock organized his garage by throwing away junk and putting up more racks and shelves. For the Hacker Badge, @gledel built his first Arduino project and has a goal to make a thermometer for his girlfriend’s pottery kiln that sends a notification to her phone when the oven reaches certain temperatures.

For the Mountain Ranger Badge, @s-c-hughes climbed the the Zugspitze, the tallest mountain in Germany, and @davidadav climbed Mailbox Peak (twice) and Alta Mountain in WA. @whisper mastered the required knots (and took notes on them) for the Knotsmanship Badge, and @rspollock copied the poem “If” for the Penmanship Badge.

@monrovia-damon hosted a Fourth of July party, and @justinhartling87 held a dinner and game night for the Host Badge. @rayperts rucked an hour a week with a 40-lb weight for 4 consecutive weeks for the Rucking Badge. @amendez_831 went camping for the first time in his life and also made his first fire! He worked on several requirements for the Firemanship Badge, including making a teepee and upside-down fire, and starting a fire with flint and steel. I like his review of his first camping trip: “Wow what an experience. I never thought in a million years that camping would be so fun. It was a great combination of working at your craft of becoming a well-rounded man as well as bonding with your loved ones. We only camped one night and I felt closer to my love then I have in a while. An amazing experience!”

For the Backyard Farmer Badge, @rscore harvested his first eggs from a chicken coop he built and populated with chicks several months ago, @mswilkes started his first garden and grew squash, bell peppers, jalapeños, tomatoes, and cabbage, and @franz grew 3 kinds of herbs and moved them right from field to plate.

@blairbrown changed the oil on his car for the first time (and thought it felt pretty manly to do), @armstrong read five biographies for the Biography Badge (looks like someone is a big fan of McCullough), and @wanderingmonkey took a tour of the Arizona State House for the Citizenship Badge.

@ringo learned how to take a bearing with his compass for the Scout Badge, @tridder practiced his squat form, and @disfocus took a dip, in the buff, at a beach near Bicheno (on the east coast of Tasmania), in water that was about 50 degrees Fahrenheit, for the Rough Rider Badge. For the Orator Badge, @clarkp dropped in to his local Toastmasters chapter as a walk-in guest to check it out, and ended up giving an impromptu speech on “A Person Who Had Great Success.” He discussed Theodore Roosevelt’s contribution to the development of America, and when everyone voted on the best impromptu speech, he won! Bully!

@franz knocked off a requirement for the Craftsman Badge by making a frame (his first time making one) for his badge mat. He made it out of mesquite and gave it a coat of clear shellac to bring out the leather-brown color in the grain. He used cross lap joints to assemble the frame and added a quarter-inch birchwood backing board to attach the mat to. He also used a Forstner bit to drill out a spot for his TSL Challenge Coin on the top. Very nice indeed!

Geographic Group Meet-Ups

Here’s a look at some of the meet-ups that happened on July’s Strenuous Saturday (the third Saturday of every month), and otherwise; it’s awesome seeing the international meet-ups and men living strenuously around the world!

Sydney, Australia Meet-Up

@msligo, @rival-dawn, and @lachlan went for a hike in the Blue Mountains, and then afterwards enjoyed a drink and meal at a small town pub nearby.

Feuchtwangen, Germany Meet-Up

German members @s-c-hughes, @tobi, and @alessandro had intended to do some traditional cross-cutting work on a few logs that are going to be used for a small building, but when rain interfered with their plan, they made the most out of it by doing indoor activities such as lock picking and firewood splitting. During periods with less rain, they fit in some heavy lifting to get a massive stone into place for the building project, lifted sandbags, and got a fire started with flint and steel. They even enjoyed a barbecue in the rain. Stephen and Tobi finished the day with a microadventure by sleeping outside on straw under a tarpaulin cover.

Louisiana Meet-Up

Members in Louisiana met up for a hike/ruck at Chicot State Park. They each carried 20 pounds in their packs, as preparation for the Pearl Harbor GoRuck they plan on doing in December. Afterwards, the men went out for some delicious Mexican food.

New Jersey Meet-Up

Jersey members @jonathan-a, @kgreen, @billdean104, and @joshg138 met up for a ruck/hike at Hacklebarney State Park, and also tried to start a fire with a magnesium fire starter while they were there.

Vermont Meet-Up

VT members @dberry and @paquette-jim hiked up the Halfway House Trail to the Chin on the top of Mt. Mansfield and back down the Sunset Ridge Trail for a total of approximately 8.5 miles and over 2,600’ of elevation. They discussed their first year in The Strenuous Life, badges completed, favorite Agons, as well as improving their future potential meet-ups.

Idaho Multi-Day Camp Out

Idaho TSL members spent the weekend camping together, beginning on Friday night and finishing on Sunday morning. The men hiked, swam, and trained with tomahawks and knives. Steak was pan-fried, eggs and bacon were cooked, homemade mead was drunken, and great conversations were had.

Calgary, Canada Weekly Ruck

@calgarytrav inaugurated a weekly rucking meet-up for TSL members in Calgary. For this initial outing, the men went to Fish Creek Park for a 6.7km ruck, which they spent catching up and spotting some deer. I appreciate Travis’ leadership in getting this going!

Class Call-Outs

Class 018 finalized their logo:

Class 019 is so strenuous, they decided to design two badges for themselves: one for the Class as a whole, and one for those who completed the Challenge:

If you don’t already, follow The Strenuous Life (@strenuous.life) on Instagram; you may see your badge work or meet-ups featured there!

Keep living strenuously, everyone!

“There is need to do all the ordinary, commonplace duties as they arise, or we will be in no shape to meet the crisis that calls for heroism when that crisis arises.” –Theodore Roosevelt

The post A Peek at The Strenuous Life: August 2018 appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

A Peek at The Strenuous Life: August 2018 published first on https://mensproblem.tumblr.com

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gpllife · 6 years ago

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robertmcangusgroup · 8 years ago

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The Daily Tulip

Thursday 2nd February 2017

Good Morning Gentle Reader… This world we live in is a strange place, with many oddities as I discover when writing the news each day.. Like the Snake that slithers into Oregon woman's pierced ear lobe or the cat in Pennsylvania who is back on solid ground after being stuck at the top of a neighborhood tree for three days. or if that's not odd enough the British driving instructor who is in danger of losing his license after a viral video showed him climbing out of the driver's seat of a moving car... They are all odd, but the one that caught my attention was the man that Trumped everyone, by winning an election with less vote than his opponent .. Like I said it's a strange world we live in...

HOW YOO KWAN DRIVE LIKE THAT…Chinese Tourists Are Hitting America’s Roads in RVs. As car ownership and international travel soar among China’s rising upper class, America’s West Coast has become a vacation destination for visitors eager to hit the pavement. While there can be some cultural bumps in the road, tour agencies are starting to cater to Chinese RVers, who want to pack a ton of sights into a typical 12-day excursion and who love the camaraderie that forms with fellow campers. Their homeland is starting to take notice, as China aims to build 2,000 campgrounds by 2020.

WHAT EVER FLOATS YOUR BOAT…. A former member of the Russian Parliament wants to buy three uninhabited South Pacific islands and re-establish his country’s monarchy in a $350 million project he’s calling “alternative Russia.” Are you Russian? Tired of the cold winters? Authoritarian antics of President Vladimir Putin got you down? Well Anton Bakov, a Russian businessman and ex-member of parliament, has your back. Because Bakov has plans to restore the Russian monarchy…on some desert islands…in the South Pacific. Bakov wants to buy three uninhabited islands from the small Pacific nation of Kiribati to establish what he calls an “alternative Russia.” The details on how he plans to do that are sketchy. But during a visit to Kiribati on Jan. 27, he said he planned to invest $350 million into the islands to create a resort, support the local economy and, of course, to restore the Romanov Empire to its former glory days. “This is the desire of…a great number of Russian patriots who are not happy with Putin’s regime,” Bakov’s wife told Radio New Zealand. (Though it’s unclear how many Russians who don’t like Putin also want to reinstall a tsar).

YOU CAN TAKE THAT TO THE BANK…Deutsche Bank Agrees to $630 Million in Settlements. Shares in Deutsche Bank rose slightly as the lender announced it’ll pay $425 million in fines to regulators in New York and $204 million to the U.K., ending two probes into suspicious mirror trades that the bank allowed despite anti-money laundering laws. Billions were transferred from Russia to accounts in Latvia, Estonia and Cyprus, ringing alarm bells for potential financial crimes. The bank, which has agreed to improve its financial security measures, is still being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department.

WHERE’S THAT DIVERSITY MERIT BADGE ? Boy Scouts to Accept Transgender Kids After a century of only accepting boys whose birth certificates list them as male, the Boy Scouts of America say transgender boys are now welcome. The organization was forced to consider the question late last year, when a New Jersey troop expelled a member for being transgender. Activists say they’re heartened by the Scouts’ quick turnaround — openly gay people weren’t welcome in the 2.3 million-member organization until 2013 — and the boy who was expelled has been invited to return to his Cub Scout troop.

DID HE ATTEMPT TO CURRY FAVOUR WITH THE BANKS?? India's controversial withdrawal of high value banknotes late last year has had an "adverse impact" on the economy, the government has admitted. The country's Economic Survey, released on the eve of the national budget, said the measures had slowed growth. The dramatic move to scrap 500 ($7.60) and 1,000 rupee notes was intended to crack down on corruption and so-called black money or illegal cash holdings. The report forecast that India's economy would grow 6.5% in the year to March 2017, down from 7.6% the previous financial year. But it also stressed that the estimate was based "mainly" on data from before the note withdrawal kicked in - causing some to suspect growth may be lower still. India's Finance minister Arun Jaitley who will deliver the Union budget in Delhi on Wednesday, said he expected the economy to "revert to normal" from March onwards after supplies of cash in the economy were replenished. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the so-called "demonetisation" policy on November 8 last year. Within hours the two notes were no longer accepted as legal tender - taking the equivalent of about 86% of India's cash supplies out of circulation and sparking scenes of chaos outside banks and cash machines. Low-income Indians, traders and ordinary savers who rely on the cash economy were badly hit, with hordes thronging banks to deposit expired money and withdraw lower denominations.

AND FINALLY.. YOU CAN RUN, BUT YOU CAN’T HIDE… The Rise of Dominatrix Fox Hunts. Women are taking to the woods to chase and capture men who will submit for the weekend, in invitation-only “hunts” from Australia to Scotland. At one Florida-based “slave retreat,” the men pay to be pelted with paintballs while wearing only a collar and shoes. The price tag: a mere $2,200. Begun in 1996 in a remote part of the Czech Republic, the events now include a virtual component on Second Life, but they’re still a small niche in the larger BDSM world.

Well Gentle Reader I hope you enjoyed our look at the news from around the world this Thursday morning…

Our Tulips today are a little "Artsy" for a change, I thought it was as good as a rest.......

A Sincere Thank You for your company and Thank You for your likes and comments I love them and always try to reply, so please keep them coming, it's always good fun, As is my custom, I will go and get myself another mug of "Colombian" Coffee and wish you a safe Thursday 2nd February 2017 from my home on the southern coast of Spain, where the blue waters of the Alboran Sea washes the coast of Africa and Europe and the smell of the night blooming jasmine and Honeysuckle fills the air…and a crazy old guy and his dog Bella go out for a walk at 4:00am…on the streets of Estepona…

All good stuff....But remember it’s a dangerous world we live in ….. Be safe out there…

Robert McAngus

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