Tag Archives: plane

Aug20

Woman on Madrid plane had 1.7kg coke in breasts

Posted on by
Standard

WOMAN FOUND ON MADRID PLANE WITH COKE IN HER BREASTS

Woman on Madrid plane had 1.7kg coke in breasts

The woman’s breast implants were found to contain 1.7 kilos (3.74 pounds) of cocaine. Breast implant photo: Shutterstock

Woman on Madrid plane had 1.7kg coke in breasts

Published: 15 Aug 2014 13:55 GMT+02:00

Updated: 15 Aug 2014 13:55 GMT+02:00

A Venezuelan woman with 1.7 kilos of cocaine hidden in her breast implants was arrested at Madrid airport after arriving on a flight from Colombia, police said on Friday.
 “During a check of passengers from a plane from Bogota, the gestures and behaviour of a supposed tourist raised the suspicions of narcotics agents,” they said in a statement.

After a baggage search revealed nothing, female officers conducted a body search of the 43-year-old woman and discovered “certain irregularities and deformations in both breasts”.

At that moment, the suspect started to act nervously and “confessed that she was carrying implants with cocaine inside,” the statement said.

The woman was taken to a hospital where the implants were removed and found to contain 1.7 kilos (3.74 pounds) of the drug.

Although unusual, it is not the first time Spanish police have seen drug smugglers using breast implants to try to beat detection.

In December 2012, a Panamanian woman arriving in Barcelona from Bogota was found with 1.4 kilos of cocaine in her fake breasts. Her recent insertion wounds were still bleeding under bandages.

Other techniques have included drugs hidden under wigs, mixed into a cast put on a leg, and shaped and hardened into crockery.

Spain has a special police unit that checks “hot flights” from major drug-trafficking countries.

So far this year, in Madrid airport alone, the squad has seized around 500 kilos of cocaine and six kilos of heroin, and had made 189 arrests.

For more stories about Spain, join us on Facebook and Twitter

AFP (news@thelocal.es)

Sep13

TWO HIPPIES MET ON A PLANE

Posted on by
Standard
 
MAKING IT LAST

<nyt_headline version=”1.0″ type=” “>Two Hippies on a Long Flight Together

Linda and Bill Pearson spotted each other on a plane ride and have now been married nearly 40 years.

<nyt_byline>

By 
Published: June 7, 2013 122 Comments
  • FACEBOOK
  • TWITTER
  • GOOGLE+
  • SAVE
  • E-MAIL
  • SHARE
  • PRINT
  • REPRINTS
<nyt_text><nyt_correction_top>

Booming’s “Making It Last” column profiles baby boomer couples who have been together 25 years or more. Send us your story and photos through our submission form.

Readers’ Comments

Linda and Bill Pearson have been married 39 years. She is a psychiatric nurse practitioner, therapist and author of “The Discipline Miracle.” He is a geophysicist who does exploration work for oil companies. They live in a suburb of Denver and have four adult children. The following interview has been edited and condensed.

Q. You were graduate students at the University of Washington when you met.

Linda: He was walking down the aisle of a Continental flight carrying a pair of ski boots. I was making small talk with some guy sitting beside me. I made eye contact with Bill and I don’t know if he’ll remember, but he assumed I was with that guy and thought, “Oh, God, what a lucky guy.”

Bill: She was attractive but talking to someone, so I didn’t think much about it.

Linda: I knew the stewardesses; they gave me free liquor so that made me real friendly. I saw him at baggage claim with the ski boots and I’m like, “Oh do you ski?”

Bill: I asked for her phone number and for all I knew it could have been for the local police.

Linda: He called and we’ve talked every day since.

The attraction?

Linda: He was so handsome. He’s as bald as a billiard ball now, but then he had long blonde hair, 6 feet 3 inches tall, boots with big heels, corduroy bell bottoms — we were full-blown hippies.

Bill: She was pretty and athletic and tall and thin and outgoing.

Dating?

Linda: We both love sports. A typical date could be canoeing in the morning, tennis at noon, biking in the afternoon.

Bill: We ski, hike, scuba dive.

The proposal?

Linda: He’s real shy and quiet; I’m the talker — you’ve probably noticed that, right? We were sitting in the front seat of the car after a date, and I said, “We’re compatible, we probably should get married, yeah?”

Bill: I said, “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.”

The engagement?

Linda: We lived together seven or eight months but kept separate addresses so our parents wouldn’t know.

And the wedding?

Linda: Oh, that’s kind of a nothing story. We were as poor as church mice. We went to visit our parents in Houston and Pueblo. His mother wanted the big blah, blah, blah. I didn’t. She said you don’t even have an engagement photo, so she took one of us in her living room. She was kind of mad about it.

Bill: My older brother had a big church wedding. My mom liked to dress up and listen to church music. It wasn’t a high priority for us, spending for that. Living in Seattle, it rains a lot. If the tennis balls got wet, we couldn’t afford a new set, we’d put them on the radiator to dry.

Linda: We had a pot luck dinner at our apartment for 20 friends. No parents or siblings. Then we were married at the courthouse downtown. It’s a long story, but the judge’s secretary made a clerical error, which delayed everything and we wound up getting married at midnight, either Jan. 3-4 or Jan. 4-5. Ask Bill.

Bill: I believe the 5th. I could look it up if you need it for the story.

You don’t know your anniversary?

Bill: It’s kind of a tricky time of year. Kids’ birthdays, Christmas, New Year’s. One of our aunts called every year to wish us a happy anniversary, so that’s how we used to remember.

Linda: For the wedding, I wore polyester green bell bottoms. Bill probably had on orange corduroy pants. We drove downtown. There’s nobody on the street at midnight, plenty of parking. Three janitors with big brooms watched us get married.

Bill: Like Mary Poppins, all the cleaning people smiling.

Linda: One of our friends had a new camera, so he was the wedding photographer. It turned out he didn’t know how to use it and all the photos came out black. The judge said, “This is a very serious occasion” — a tinge of admonition in his voice.

Bill: He was probably thinking, “Oh boy, this hippie generation, no way it will last.”

The honeymoon?

Linda: Three weeks later we went with a group on a ski bus tour to Utah. We shared a motel room with another couple.

Bill: We took turns, told them, don’t come back for an hour.

You waited four years for your first child.

Bill: We wanted to be established in our jobs. We had our son. Linda, being a therapist, wanted to space them out so they wouldn’t be too competitive. We waited four years and had a girl. I thought we were part of Z.P.G., seemed to me like we were done.

Zero population growth? I haven’t heard that term in years.

Bill: She wanted another. We had another girl. I figured O.K., three, that’s not too much of a Z.P.G. transgression. She wanted to keep going.

Linda: Our family was so happy, I couldn’t have enough. That’s when the nightmare started — three, four, five miscarriages.

Must have been a terrible strain on the marriage.

Linda: A sadness in me, not a strain.

Bill: It was really stressful, took such a toll emotionally. My attitude was, “Why don’t we just enjoy what we have?”

Linda: The last one, I was in the I.C.U. I nearly bled to death. I’d been obsessed, it was an addiction, wanting to get pregnant. I didn’t stop when I should have. I went to a therapist for help. Bill was wonderful. He never said, “We have to stop.” His attitude was, if it’s important to you, it’s important to me.

Bill: I still loved her and wanted to be supportive in a way that she could be happy.

So you tried to adopt, but both times, the mothers had the baby and then decided to keep it.

Linda: Devastating. One just used us. She’d say, “If you buy me this new dress, I’ll be happier, it’ll be good for the baby.” We were through. And then I got a call from a woman I knew professionally. She says, “We have this baby, 6 months old, put up for adoption twice, but people brought him back, he’s so sick.” He had ileal atresia — his intestine wasn’t connected. Every 15 minutes he had bloody diarrhea. Screamed all the time. That was Nathanial. I described him to Bill. He said, “Oh my God, sounds like the little boy needs a home.”

Bill: I got to thinking, what kind of life will he have if we don’t.

Linda: He had all these operations. Finally when he was 3, he was having terrible pain and the surgeon cleared a blockage and that was it, the pain disappeared. He’s been perfect since.

Bill: The doctor said it was like pulling a potato out of the tail pipe of a Ferrari – watch him go.

Linda, you do marriage counseling. Typically, success rates are very low.

Linda: I ask two questions to each. if I get four yeses, I know I can save it. “Do you really, really, really want to make it work?” If he says, “I don’t know, sometimes I don’t think so,” that’s a no. The second: “Do you respect your spouse?” If I get even one no, the percentages are not good.

What about you two … what do you argue about?

Linda: He’s a real geophysicist. He doesn’t talk about things that bother him. He doesn’t get what people are feeling or circumstances like I do. It can be frustrating. “How can you not understand?”

Bill: I’ll be under stress at work and from Linda’s point of view, you discuss it. She wants to get real serious. My thing is I’ll take it under advisement and fix it.

Have you ever considered splitting up?

Linda: No, probably not. I mean no. In the heat of battle I might want to leave, but never thought that for longer than a flash of anger.

Bill: I may say, “Why do I bother?” But nothing really active. Neither of us think, “We have to set up a separate cash fund just in case.” We never got close to thinking about that. They say don’t go to bed angry. We don’t go to bed happy and resolved all the time, but in the morning, we’re past it.

Linda: When we fight about him not communicating, Bill will always say, “I’m sorry, I want to get better.”

Bill: The trip to our cabin is an hour-and-45-minute drive and we have good discussions then. If the talk dies down on my side, I look over and behind the sunglasses, she’s taking a little nap. Then I go over a bump, she wakes up and I’m in trouble for letting the conversation taper off.

What do you like about each other?

Bill: She’s so much more in tune with the kids. She’ll talk to each of them maybe three times a week for 15 to 20 minutes, then she’ll put me on and I last two minutes at most. I forget important stuff and she’ll say, “Talk to him about such and such.”

Linda: Bill’s love is obvious and deep for me and strong and forever, unwavering love, unwavering appreciation, unwavering lust for me — I’m not sure you should put that in.

Bill: Intimate relations are very important. We’re still very attracted but we work at it, go to the gym every day, eat healthy, look as good as we can. It’s a great time of life for us. You know the definition of freedom — the last kid goes to college and the dog dies.

Linda: Bill’s always very flattering to me. I genuinely think he thinks I’m one of the most beautiful women in the world. We can be watching Miss America and he’ll say, “but she’s not as pretty as you.” I think he has a gene missing, but I love it. It makes a woman feel wonderful.

Bill: We were at a 5K race for cancer last weekend and Miss Colorado was there. I told Linda don’t worry, you’re prettier.

Your 63-year-old wife is prettier than Miss Colorado?

Bill: Wow. I could get in trouble here. Miss Colorado was really cute — and so is my wife.