• 🇬🇧󠁿 🇸🇪 🇿🇦 🇮🇪 🇬🇭 🇩🇪 🇪🇺
    European & African
    Drug Discussion

    Welcome Guest!
    Posting Rules Bluelight Rules
  • EADD Moderators: Shambles

This is the neeewwwwws!

Status
Not open for further replies.
Drug-smuggling pensioners jailed

Three pensioners involved in a £5m cannabis smuggling operation have been jailed.

They were part of a gang which imported cannabis from Holland hidden in frozen chicken imports.

Wattie Soutter, 68, of Rotherhithe, south-east London, described as the drug deal's broker, was sentenced to nine-and-a half years in jail.

Derek Mercer and Andrew Rowe, both 70, received eight and seven year sentences respectively.

Mercer, of South Norwood, south-east London, and Rowe, of Bethnal Green, east London, were found guilty last month by a Southwark Crown Court jury of knowingly being concerned in the smuggling of cannabis into the UK.

Soutter had pleaded guilty to the charge.

The court heard mobile phone evidence clearly showed Soutter acted as a broker between the Dutch connection and the wholesale cannabis distribution operation in Britain.

Two others, both distributors, admitted the smuggling charge.

Patrick Maloney, 54, of Turquand Street, Southwark, south-east London, was sentenced to seven years, while Russ O'Cuneff, 51, of Glengarnock Avenue, Poplar, east London, was jailed for six years.

In sentencing, Judge Martin Beddoe said he "frankly failed" to see why he should take the ages of the pensioners into account.

"It can fairly be said the older someone gets the less excuse they have for getting involved in crime, particularly when it was planned and organised," he said.

"When you got involved in this you knew full well what the consequences would be if caught - a lengthy spell of imprisonment in your twilight years.

"I suspect that at the age you are there is a bit of a devil-may-care attitude towards offending."

The jury had been told the gang placed the drugs in a bonded meat warehouse in Bury St Edmonds, Suffolk, before delivering pallets to a haulage and storage company in Grays, Essex.

Andrew Marshall, prosecuting, said evidence of 12 previous smuggling runs had been discovered by investigators.

Police found 1.4 tonnes of cannabis in Mercer's warehouse and 60kg of the drug in Rowe's Volvo estate car.
Click to expand...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8285922.stm
 
Bank Charges back at last soon maybe

RBS cut its overdraft fees early this month. Photograph: Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images

The long-running court battle over bank charges could reach an early conclusion after the prime minister, Gordon Brown, told bank chiefs today to negotiate a solution and resolve the dispute "without further delay".

More than 1m reclaim requests over excessive bank fees and charges have been on hold since July 2007, following the start of a test case brought by the Office of Fair Trading against seven banks and one building society. The case has gone through the high court and the court of appeal and is currently in front of the newly created supreme court.

But in his first intervention in the case, Gordon Brown said : "I believe that a negotiated solution could be in everyone's best interests, and so we have called on the banks and the regulators to explore a quicker way to resolve this without further delay."

The prime minister's statement was made in a letter to consumer campaigner Martin Lewis of moneysavingexpert.com, and comes just weeks after a climbdown by taxpayer-controlled Royal Bank of Scotland.

RBS unilaterally slashed its overdraft fees early this month, cutting the cost of a bounced cheque or direct debit from £38 to £5 per item. It said the maximum amount customers would pay in unpaid item fees would fall from £114 a day to £50 a month. Other high street banks will now be under pressure to match RBS's cuts.

The prime minister's intervention comes at a late stage in the legal battle. A ruling from the supreme court is expected within weeks. But if there is no negotiated settlement before then, and the ruling goes against the banks, customers will still be many months away from receiving refunds. It could pave the way for a further hearing to decide whether the charges are fair and, if not, what fair charges would be.

The final bill for the banks could run into billions of pounds. Before the moratorium on refunds was imposed at the start of the case, banks and building societies had already repaid nearly £1bn to claimants. More than 6m bank charge reclaim letters have been downloaded from sites such as moneysavingexpert.com.

Banks have been charging consumers up to £39 for a bounced cheque, standing order or direct debit, although critics say the actual cost could be as little as £2. It is estimated they could be forced to refund at least another £1bn, and lose future revenue of around £2.5bn a year.

Any negotiated agreement on fees and charges is likely to be close to the £12 maximum default charge that the OFT imposed on credit card firms three years ago.

Martin Lewis said: "This is a major signal that bank charges have been pushed up the government agenda. Yet the worry is banks will mount a further legal challenge to the OFT's ruling, traipsing through the courts again, and this is where the PM comes in. By pushing for a negotiated settlement we could get a quick solution. This type of settlement will mean reclaimers won't need to go to court or the ombudsman. They will simply be able to write to their provider and request a payback."

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
Click to expand...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/sep/23/pm-intervenes-over-bank-charges
 
Dealing With Drugs

Not exactly news cos it's more of a response to the recent New Scientist article on legalising drugs but thought this was a bit of a different take on the legalisation issue.

Of the many reasons you discussed for legalising drugs, the most compelling is that by doing so we could improve public safety (12 September, p 30).

I am a 34-year police veteran who fought on the front lines of the "war on drugs". I saw that prohibition doesn't reduce drug abuse but does hand huge profits to murderous gangs and cartels who will do anything to control the illicit market.

If we legalised and regulated drug production and sales, it would wipe out the perverse profit incentives we've inadvertently created and the killing would stop, as it did when we took control of the liquor trade away from Al Capone's gangster cronies at the end of alcohol prohibition.
From Sean O'Malley

The proposals on drug legalisation in Clare Wilson's article do not go far enough. Drug legalisation, as described in the story, would never work or find enough votes to make it into law.

There are two problems. First, most existing drugs are simply too dangerous. Legalising crystal meth would be crazy. Secondly, the inertia involved with the existing system is too large to permit straightforward legalisation.

There is, however, another way. Why not allow the drug companies to design, test and certify recreational drugs. The government could set the safety standards for new recreational drugs, which probably already exist on the back shelves of drug industry research facilities. In fact, some existing pharmaceuticals, like Prozac and Ritalin, are close to being recreational drugs.

Drugs from a government-controlled process could push existing illegal drugs out of business: would you rather have crystal meth cooked in the kitchen of a trailer home or a professionally designed and produced drug? If one of the new drugs causes too much trouble it can be banned. Legalisation need not be an all-or-nothing process.
New York, US

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition

linky
Click to expand...
 
http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showthread.php?t=465004


'Herbal high' warning after teenagers are violently ill



BAD REACTION: Two women were violently ill after taking legal high Hyper X

ADVERTISEMENT

Published Date: 01 October 2009
By RACHAEL BRUCE and JACKIE TURLEY
LEGAL doesn't mean safe, a drugs charity has warned following reports of bad reactions to 'legal highs'.
Two 19-year-old Douglas women became violently ill, including vomiting and shaking, after taking Hyper X, known as herbal ecstasy, last weekend.

They had no sleep for 30 hours afterwards and had to take time off work.

It was the first time the they had tried the substance.

The father of one of the women – who want to remain anonymous – warned others not to try Hyper X and wants to see such substances banned.

And Shelly Stanley, director of the Drug Advice Service and Helpline, said that misinformation circulating on internet chatrooms and among friends about legal and herbal highs was causing confusion.
Click to expand...
 
Hmmm, that's strange. I thought it would now be impossible to buy from a headshop these days due to the recent scheduling. But the 30hrs without sleep rings true to Pips.
 
Some scary shit right here yo... :
EU funding 'Orwellian' artificial intelligence plan to monitor public for "abnormal behaviour"

The European Union is spending millions of pounds developing "Orwellian" technologies designed to scour the internet and CCTV images for "abnormal behaviour".


By Ian Johnston
Published: 9:08PM BST 19 Sep 2009

A five-year research programme, called Project Indect, aims to develop computer programmes which act as "agents" to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and even individual computers.

Its main objectives include the "automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence".

Project Indect, which received nearly £10 million in funding from the European Union, involves the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and computer scientists at York University, in addition to colleagues in nine other European countries.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of human rights group Liberty, described the introduction of such mass surveillance techniques as a "sinister step" for any country, adding that it was "positively chilling" on a European scale.

The Indect research, which began this year, comes as the EU is pressing ahead with an expansion of its role in fighting crime, terrorism and managing migration, increasing its budget in these areas by 13.5% to nearly £900 million.

The European Commission is calling for a "common culture" of law enforcement to be developed across the EU and for a third of police officers – more than 50,000 in the UK alone – to be given training in European affairs within the next five years.

According to the Open Europe think tank, the increased emphasis on co-operation and sharing intelligence means that European police forces are likely to gain access to sensitive information held by UK police, including the British DNA database. It also expects the number of UK citizens extradited under the controversial European Arrest Warrant to triple.

Stephen Booth, an Open Europe analyst who has helped compile a dossier on the European justice agenda, said these developments and projects such as Indect sounded "Orwellian" and raised serious questions about individual liberty.

"This is all pretty scary stuff in my book. These projects would involve a huge invasion of privacy and citizens need to ask themselves whether the EU should be spending their taxes on them," he said.

"The EU lacks sufficient checks and balances and there is no evidence that anyone has ever asked 'is this actually in the best interests of our citizens?'"

Miss Chakrabarti said: "Profiling whole populations instead of monitoring individual suspects is a sinister step in any society.

"It's dangerous enough at national level, but on a Europe-wide scale the idea becomes positively chilling."

According to the official website for Project Indect, which began this year, its main objectives include "to develop a platform for the registration and exchange of operational data, acquisition of multimedia content, intelligent processing of all information and automatic detection of threats and recognition of abnormal behaviour or violence".

It talks of the "construction of agents assigned to continuous and automatic monitoring of public resources such as: web sites, discussion forums, usenet groups, file servers, p2p [peer-to-peer] networks as well as individual computer systems, building an internet-based intelligence gathering system, both active and passive".

York University's computer science department website details how its task is to develop "computational linguistic techniques for information gathering and learning from the web".

"Our focus is on novel techniques for word sense induction, entity resolution, relationship mining, social network analysis [and] sentiment analysis," it says.

A separate EU-funded research project, called Adabts – the Automatic Detection of Abnormal Behaviour and Threats in crowded Spaces – has received nearly £3 million. Its is based in Sweden but partners include the UK Home Office and BAE Systems.

It is seeking to develop models of "suspicious behaviour" so these can be automatically detected using CCTV and other surveillance methods. The system would analyse the pitch of people's voices, the way their bodies move and track individuals within crowds.

Project coordinator Dr Jorgen Ahlberg, of the Swedish Defence Research Agency, said this would simply help CCTV operators notice when trouble was starting.

"People usually don't start to fight from one second to another," he said. "They start by arguing and pushing each other. It's not that 'oh you are pushing each other, you should be arrested', it's to alert an operator that something is going on.

"If it's a shopping mall, you could send a security guard into the vicinity and things [a fight] maybe wouldn't happen."

Open Europe believes intelligence gathered by Indect and other such systems could be used by a little-known body, the EU Joint Situation Centre (SitCen), which it claims is "effectively the beginning of an EU secret service". Critics have said it could develop into "Europe's CIA".

The dossier says: "The EU's Joint Situation Centre (SitCen) was originally established in order to monitor and assess worldwide events and situations on a 24-hour basis with a focus on potential crisis regions, terrorism and WMD-proliferation.

"However, since 2005, SitCen has been used to share counter-terrorism information.

"An increased role for SitCen should be of concern since the body is shrouded in so much secrecy.

"The expansion of what is effectively the beginning of an EU 'secret service' raises fundamental questions of political oversight in the member states."

Superintendent Gerry Murray, of the PSNI, said the force's main role would be to test whether the system, which he said could be operated on a countrywide or European level, was a worthwhile tool for the police.

"A lot of it is very academic and very science-driven [at the moment]. Our budgets are shrinking, our human resources are shrinking and we are looking for IT technology that will help us five years down the line in reducing crime and combating criminal gangs," he said.

"Within this Project Indect there is an ethical board which will be looked at: is it permissible within the legislation of the country who may use it, who oversees it and is it human rights compliant."
Click to expand...

a - s c a r y - w a s t e - o f - m o n e y :\
 
Everton FC youngster released on bail following drugs charge

Everton striker Jose Baxter has been released on bail following his arrest on a drugs charge, it was confirmed on Tuesday morning.

Baxter, 17, was one of three men arrested in Kirkby on Monday on suspicion of possession of cannabis with intent to supply and on suspicion of possessing counterfeit money.

The striker is the youngest player to represent Everton following his introduction, aged 16 years and 191 days, as a substitute in a Premier League game against Blackburn Rovers in August 2008.

"Three men have been arrested in Kirkby on suspicion of possession of cannabis with intent to supply and possession of counterfeit money," said a spokesman for Merseyside Police. "All three men have been released on police bail pending further inquiries."

Baxter is a product of the club's youth academy having joined Everton aged just six and has made two substitute appearances in the Europa League this season.

He has represented England at youth level and was an unused substitute in the FA Cup final defeat to Chelsea last season.

soon as i read this i thought cocaine. but no cannabis8)
 
8o BEWARE: RADIOACTIVE PAEDOS 8o

The Sun said:
Radioactive 'paedo' on the run

By ANTHONY FRANCE

Published: 27 Feb 2009
A CHILD porn suspect on the run after failing to attend his trial is massively RADIOACTIVE, doctors say.

College principal Thomas Leopold, 42, was given huge doses of radiation for a thyroid condition - and could harm anyone he touches.

He fled to Ireland on an overnight ferry this month, a court heard.

Judge John Price, who issued a warrant for his arrest yesterday, said: "Please warn officers that when he is arrested he might be radioactive. This is not a joke."

Leopold, head of a tutorial college in Harrow, Middlesex, is accused of downloading a library of indecent images of children in 2006.

Jeannie Mackie, defending, said Leopold had a thyroid condition for which he has had radiotherapy. She said: "He is in chronic poor health. His doctor confirmed he is dangerous, in terms of radioactivity, for six weeks after treatment.

"He travelled to Ireland on his own in his car. He wasn't in contact with others. When he showed his radiation card, he was permitted to stay in the car on the boat."

Prosecutor Nick Mather told London's Southwark Crown Court that Leopold skipped bail four days before the case was due to open.

He said he had not been seen since his car boarded a ferry in Fishguard, South Wales, bound for Rosslare.

Judge Price added: "He is doing everything to make it as difficult as he can."

Leopold, of Hammersmith, West London, denies five counts of making indecent images of children and one of owning 87 such images.
Click to expand...

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article2276130.ece
 
ets5s8.jpg
 
^^
Lol. :D

WE'RE VERY CROSS CROSS DRESSERS!

By Richard Smith 7/10/2009

Two drunk thugs think it would be fun to attack 'drag queens' as they totter along a street. Only trouble is their victims were CAGE FIGHTERS on their way to a stag do. Uh Oh!

As drunken stunts go, this is not the cleverest...

Two boozed-up yobs who picked on a pair of drag queens got a shock when the men turned out to be cagefighters out on a fancy dress stag night.

Retribution was swift and painful, and within three seconds Dean Gardener, 19, and 22-year-old Jason Fender were left sprawled across the pavement in agony. Trouble flared when the thugs started taunting the men as they walked through a city centre in women's clothes and heels.

Bare-chested Gardener walked up to one, who was wearing black hot pants and a pink wig, and hit him in the face.

But the victim's friend, dressed in a short dress, stockings and suspenders, leapt into action and floored Gardener and Fender with a string of lightning fast punches and kicks.

One of the cagefighters then bent over the pair and picked up his handbag before calmly walking away.

Cctv footage of the brawl in Swansea was shown to city magistrates after the two yobs had admitted using abusive words and behaviour.

Mark Davies, defending, told the court: "You know it cannot have been a good night when you get into a fight with two cross-dressing men.

"They were extremely drunk. Fender had at least 10 pints of cider."

The pair were also filmed attacking revellers outside a night club before they got their comeuppance.

Both were given given a four-month community order, electronically tagged and put on a 7pm to 7am curfew.

Linky

This made me laugh this morning. :D Serves the cunts right.
 
Drugs baron guilty over £1m plot

A drugs baron has been found guilty of conspiring to import £1m of cannabis into Jersey by boat from Amsterdam.

Jurors at Jersey Royal Court convicted Merseyside gangster Curtis Warren of conspiring to import a controlled drug.

During the two-week trial the court had heard that Mr Warren, 46, of Liverpool, wanted to flood the Jersey drugs market with cannabis.

Jurors also found five other men, accused of working with Mr Warren, guilty of the same charge.

John Welsh, 43, also from Liverpool, James O'Brien, 45, of Glasgow, Jason Woodward, 22, of Dartford, Kent, Paul Hunt, 27, and Oliver Lucas, 23, had denied a charge of conspiring to import drugs.

During the trial the court heard how the gang planned to buy 180kg of cannabis in Amsterdam and bring it into an isolated cove in Jersey by boat.

Mr Warren was once Interpol's most wanted drugs trafficker and, even after a decade in a Dutch jail, police still consider him to be one of Britain's most wealthy and influential criminals, the court heard.
Click to expand...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/jersey/8292383.stm

---

What's with all the weed importation lately, I thought it was most likely to be grown in the UK.
 
Two drunk thugs think it would be fun to attack 'drag queens' as they totter along a street. Only trouble is their victims were CAGE FIGHTERS on their way to a stag do. Uh Oh!
Click to expand...

=D YES!!! I always wondered what would happen if someone started on a cage fighter not knowing who they were, nevermind two who were off on a stag do, dresses in women's clothing ^_^
Now I know. They're kick yer arse!
Fuckin good on them ;)

New ring detected around Saturn
By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News

_46507490_ringdiagram.jpg

Saturn (Nasa)
The outer E-ring on Saturn extends about 240,000km into space

A colossal new ring has been identified around Saturn.

The dusty hoop extends some 13 million km (8 million miles) from the planet, about 50 times further out into space than its more familiar rings.

Scientists tell the journal Nature that the tenuous ring is probably made up of debris kicked off Saturn's moon Phoebe by small impacts.

They think this dust then migrates towards the planet where it is picked up by another Saturnian moon, Iapetus.

_46501700_iapetus.jpg

Iapetus (Nasa)
The particles smack Iapetus like bugs on a windshield
Dr Anne Verbiscer, University of Virginia

The discovery would appear to resolve a longstanding mystery in planetary science: why the walnut-shaped Iapetus has a two-tone complexion, with one side of the moon significantly darker than the other.

"It has essentially a head-on collision. The particles smack Iapetus like bugs on a windshield," said Anne Verbiscer from the University of Virginia, US.

Observations of the material coating the dark face of Iapetus indicate it has a similar composition to the surface material on Phoebe.

The scale of the new ring feature is astonishing. Nothing like it has been seen elsewhere in the Solar System.

The more easily visible outlier in Saturn's famous bands of ice and dust is its E-ring, which encompasses the orbit of the moon Enceladus. This circles the planet at a distance of just 240,000km.

The newly identified torus is not only much broader and further out, it is also tilted at an angle of 27 degrees to the plane on which the more traditional rings sit.

_46501701_phoebe.jpg

Phoebe (Nasa)
Impacts on the moon Phoebe are probably supplying the ring

Tour of Saturn and its moons and rings

This in itself strongly links the ring's origin to Phoebe, which also takes a highly inclined path around Saturn.

Scientists suspected the ring might be present and had the perfect tool in the Spitzer space telescope to confirm it.

The US space agency observatory is well suited to picking up the infrared signal expected from cold grains of dust about 10 microns (millionths of a metre) in size.

The ring would probably have a range of particle sizes - some bigger than this, and some smaller - and modelling indicates the pressure of sunlight would push the smallest of these grains towards the orbit of Iapetus, which is circling Saturn at a distance of 3.5 million km.

"The particles are very, very tiny, so the ring is very, very tenuous; and actually if you were standing in the ring itself, you wouldn't even know it," Dr Verbiscer told BBC News.

"In a cubic km of space, there are all of 10-20 particles."

Indeed, so feeble is the ring that scientists have calculated that if all the material were gathered up it would fill a crater on Phoebe no more than a kilometre across.

The moon is heavily pockmarked. It is clear that throughout its history, Phoebe has been hit many, many times by objects.

Some will also have been orbiting Saturn; others will have come from deep space.
Click to expand...
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top