A woman has been jailed after attempting to smuggle £160,000 worth of crack cocaine disguised as coffee beans into Manchester Airport. Maxine Spence, 45, was sentenced to six and half years in prison after attempting to bring the stash of drugs into the country. Spence, of Wheeler Street, Birmingham, was arrested after arriving on a flight from Montego Bay, Jamaica, in April last year. During a search of her luggage six hessian bags of coffee beans were found by Border Force officers. The bags were opened and mixed in with the coffee beans were thousands of rocks of crack cocaine, each weighing less than a gram. Forensic testing on the rocks showed that they were between 64 and 74 per cent pure, and if sold in the UK would have had a potential likely street value in excess of £160,000. In interviews with NCA investigators, Spence initially denied knowing the drugs were in the coffee and claimed she had bought the bags from a market in Jamaica. PROFESSIONAL: Minshull Street Crown Court heard rocks of crack had been sealed using sophisticated processes But following a three day trial at Manchester’s Minshull Street Crown Court, she was found guilty of importing a class A drug and sentenced to six and a half years in prison. Rob Miles, head of the NCA’s Border Investigation Team at Manchester Airport, said: “ This was a professional attempt to smuggle class A drugs into the UK. The rocks of crack had been sealed into the bags of coffee using sophisticated industrial processes. “ Spence claimed not to know the drugs were in there but she knew exactly what she was doing and the evidence we put before the court demonstrated this, resulting in her being found guilty by a jury. “ We continue to work with Border Force to prevent illegal drugs coming in to the UK through Manchester and other ports and airports, and tackle the organised crime networks responsible.” Phil Shields.
Short first review on Withington, Advantages: Reasonably priced for what it is, Very central location on the main Wilmslow Road with buses every few minutes to and from central Manchester, Not too bad staff (don't like being called 'pal' all the time but could be worse!) Pool table is reasonably kept but costs £1 a go, Negatives: Did not. More Helpful? 2 Thank robbo1000 Problem with this review? Report.
Shrink-wrapped food in grocery stores is what lots of people think about when they shop for dinner. Whether it’s individually butchered cuts of meat, bushels of fruit or ground spices, sometimes the foods we eat the most are those we know the least about. Even going to farmers markets in Costa Rica doesn’t tell the whole story. Many of the foods and spices bought in markets are still mostly finished products, sometimes far removed from how they look hanging from a tree or coming out of the ground. Here are six tropical foods and spices that grow in Costa Rica that you definitely know but probably have never seen au naturel. 1. Cacao Cacao pods on the tree. Lindsay Fendt/ The Tico Times Be it a chocolate candy bar or a tin of cocoa, few things travel farther from from their natural state than a cacao pod. The yellow or rusty-colored pods hanging off low trees in clumps look more like alien eggs sacks than the raw ingredient for many people’s favorite sugar fix. Farmers crack open the pods to get at the white, flesh-covered seeds inside. After a fermentation process, the beans are dried and lightly roasted. The roasted beans are broken up and the hauls separated from the nibs. At this point the nibs can be eaten as is, as a complex, slightly bitter snack. But before it becomes a chocolate bar, the nibs are crushed into a paste called chocolate liquor and conched with sugar to produce a mix of cocoa butter and cocoa solids that chocolatiers eventually place into molds. Costa Rica used to be a major producer of cacao but a blight wiped out much of the industry in the 1970s. Today a nascent gourmet cacao industry is starting to get off the ground again, hoping to make cacao as synonymous with Costa Rica as coffee. 2. Cashews Raw cashew fruit with seed. ( Via Wikimedia Commons user Ricardo) Prepare to have your mind blown, dear reader: Cashews aren’t actually nuts, they’re.
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