- Organized crime will always seek out the best way to make
a pile of money without actually having to do honest, hard work on its own. Sometimes,
that’s simply extorting money from those who earn it legitimately, other times
it means veering into the casino, petroleum or real estate industries, but in
New Zealand, it’s a sweeter endeavor - at least for thieves trying to
capitalize on the honey industry’s skyrocketing prices. Organized crime syndicates in the island
nation are trying to boost their profit margin by stealing and trading valuable
beehives and according to law enforcement, hive thefts have increased of late,
with at least 400 bee or honey thefts in the final 6 months of 2016. “There is
nothing to suggest at this stage that beehive-honey theft is directly linked
with a particular gang, but we do believe this offending is organized and
likely being carried out by groups,” Sgt. Alasdair MacMillan, Coordinator of
Community Policing for New Zealand Police said. Combine that reality with the
New Zealand Ministry of Primary Industry’s report that honey exports have
jumped 35 percent to $218 million since last June and you have a combustible
situation. When prices for native Manuka honey have tripled in value since
2012, unsavory characters are bound to start circling. Honey producers are now
having to spend increasing amounts of money on security for fear that some mob
goon squad is going to descend on their property looking to cut out the
middleman and funnel the profits directly into their boss’ coffers. Manuka
honey is prized for its antibacterial properties as well as taste and can go
for up to $50 a pound, with the hive
worth as much as $1,380. In this case, it may as well be literal liquid
gold………
- The two best jobs in America belong to a pair of
exceptionally tall and now, extremely stationary human beings residing in the
shadows of the iconic Hollywood sign. Meet Los Angeles Lakers veterans Luol
Deng and Timofey Mozgov, who signed contracts worth a combined $136 million
over four seasons to come to Los Angeles less than a year ago and will now be
glorified spectators for the final 15 games of the season. Of course, they’ve
been that for a while now and Mozgov has effectively been shut during the past
month, having played just one game since the All-Star break. Deng actually
started 49 of the 56 games in which he played, but averaged only 7.6 points and
5.3 rebounds a game for a team in last place in the Western Conference and
wouldn’t you know it, able to keep its first-round pick in this year’s draft if
that pick falls in the top three in the upcoming draft lottery. Sitting two
competent veterans who could help the team stumble into a few wins down the
stretch is a brilliant strategy for a team endeavoring to keep a prime draft
pick and better still, new team president Magic Johnson and general manager Rob
Pelinka can claim that they’re sitting the vets to give more playing time to
young players such as DeAngelo Russell and Brandon Ingram. Those guys need
experience and them gaining experience will conveniently lead to the team
struggling and losing more games, so if ownership has to shell out $24 million
a season to Mozgov and Deng to not play and contribute as much as the Hollywood
A-listers sitting in über-expensive seats in the front row at Staples Center,
then Jeannie Buss, Johnson, Pelinka and head coach Luke Walton will happily
trot out a losing lineup to protect that draft pick………
- What to do when your island home is snowbound and all but
shut down due to a massive winter storm blasting the East Coast? For one
do-gooder on Staten Island and a few of New York’s finest, the answer was to
track down a pair of wayward horses who tried to use the last big winter storm
of the season as cover to make their escape from captivity. In the snowy
afternoon haze on Staten Island earlier this week, the two horses escaped
captivity and were making a run for it when neighbor Robert Stasio looked out
the window and saw the brown-and-white animals, which appeared to be Shetland
ponies, galloping past his home on Retford Avenue. The Eltingville neighborhood
doesn’t often sees horses running down the street, so Stasio initially wondered
if he might be seeing things, perhaps hallucinating on account of being buried
under a mounting pile of snow and wishing he lived somewhere warmer and
sunnier. But once he realized that he wasn’t hallucinating, he got into his
truck and followed the horses in an effort to corral them before they caused an
accident or were forcibly stopped and frisked by the NYPD. It was a meaningful
mission for a guy who grew up handling horses with his uncle at Nellie Bly
Amusement Park in Brooklyn and Stasio was able to catch up with the horses two
blocks away on Richmond Avenue and tailed the animals in his truck as they
moved toward Hylan Boulevard, where police joined the pursuit and were able to
help Stasio finish the mission and get the horses to safety…….
- It’s almost as if Warner Bros. was doing some spring
cleaning, taking long-forgotten possessions off the shelf to dust and stumbled
across a movie franchise it had forgotten to squeeze every last ounce of life
out of in its quest to never, ever again make a truly original film. The
still-blood-left-in-that-turnip franchise the suits at Warner Bros. have
rediscovered is The Matrix, which cranked out three films in a five-year span
between last century and this one, banking a reported $3 billion worldwide
despite the movies getting progressively and markedly worse after a fantastic
first film, “The Matrix,” in 1999. Now, the studio is reportedly working hard
to move a new movie in the franchise, although details are sketchy at this
point. Keanu Reeves famously starred in the trilogy as Neo, a.k.a. Thomas
Anderson, a slacker computer hacker who’s suddenly pulled into an alternate
world where artificial intelligence and mankind have gone to war, with the
machines winning and turning humans into pod-grown entities used only for the
energy their bodies produce while their minds are kept occupied by a fictional,
computer generated world designed to simulate their pre-machine existence.
Reeves ended up saving humanity, but lost his lfie in the process, so having
him return would require a bit of creativity. The new movie could be a sequel,
prequel or reboot and one of the early leaders in the race for the leading role
is Michael B. Jordan, with no word on possible returns for Laurence Fishburne,
Carrie Ann Moss or Hugo Weaving. Joel Silver produced the first three Matrix
films, but he sold his interest in all his movies to the studio in 2012 for
around $30 million. He reportedly approached the studio about reviving the franchise,
but has a bad relationship with the Wachowski brothers, who created the Matrix
world yet won’t be involved with the new project. It’s a messy situation, but
if Warner Bros. can coax hundreds of millions more from this franchise, it doesn’t
care who’s a part of it……..
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