generalspeaking

As The World Twists

***In Brussels, split-second timing and precise blueprints point to an insider-sponsored spectacular theft of diamonds valued at $50-million to be routinely sent from Antwerp to Zurich on a flight from the Belgian city's high-security diamond district, as a searing security-failure embarrassment.
 
The bold theft has seen one of Europe's biggest diamond heists take place in the world capital of diamond-cutting. Despite 2,000 surveillance cameras, police monitoring and numerous identity controls in protection of its $200-million daily trade of rough and polished gems, skilled thieves managed to handily breach security.

Twenty minutes prior to Swiss Flight X789's departure at 8:05 p.m. two black cars with blue police lights flashing forced their way through an airport fence onto the tarmac speeding straight toward the armoured car which had just completed its transfer of diamonds to the waiting Fokker. The 29 passengers aboard heard nothing, saw nothing.

With stopwatch precision thieves opened the plane's hold, plucked out the parcels containing the gems, loaded them into the cars, and sped off, without firing a shot.

***  In Texas something of a miraculous - at the very least an extremely rare birth situation - occurred when Tressa Montalvo gave birth to two sets of identical twins within a minute of each other. The 36-year-old woman claimed she and her husband Manuel had planned the pregnancy, but without the use of fertility drugs. Giving birth on Valentine's day to four babies; such a birth is consider to represent one in 70-million chances.

*** A former official in the Moscow government, Evgeny Kharitonoiv, has been arrested and charged with organizing a rather grotesque kidnapping over an $80-million debt. A kidnapping which ended the life of Rolls-Royce-driving Mikhail Pakhomov, 37, a councillor in the city of Lipetsk situated 350 kilometres south of Moscow. Evidently Mr. Pakhomov's beaten-to-a-pulp body was discovered at the bottom of a cement-filled barrel, in a horrible settling of a deal-gone-dreadfully-wrong.

***South Korea's outgoing president's parting warning shot to North Korea is that it has pushed itself into a dim dark corner with its recent nuclear test. South Korea has pressed for tighter UN sanctions on North Korea since Pyongyang conducted its third nuclear test last week. North Korea has defended that underground blast with its more powerful, much smaller device, as an act of deterrence against U.S. hostility. And has, by the by, warned South Korea that its own end is near.

***Tehran is preparing to once again ease the concerns of the international community with respect to its nuclear-weapons-producing plans. While denying its uranium enrichment program and its joint North-Korea/Iran research and production of ever more powerful, longer-range ballistic missiles have any kind of military component to them which might threaten their enemies with being on the receiving end of nuclear-tipped missiles as a sign of their fond regard, Ayatollah Khamenei has asserted that no world power can stop Iran from producing nuclear weapons should it choose to.

Labels: World News

posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, February 20, 2013