Man arrested With $153,000 - Dogs Sniff Out Drug-Coated Cash at Nashville Airport

           

Arrested with $153,000: A man who chartered a plane with cash was arrested on money laundering charges after an airport police dog smelled narcotics on $153,000 in his suitcase.
A K-9 unit detected the drug odor on the bundles of money in Guckian's bag, the document said.

Conor Guckian, 33, was arrested in Nashville on Monday after airport police were alerted to a "suspicious individual" using the large sum of cash to charter the plane to California, according to the affidavit.

The officer then waited for Guckian to arrive to board the plane, where Guckian told officers he was transporting the large sum in order to buy gold in California, according to the affidavit.
He consented to a second search and the second dog detected the narcotic odor on the cash, which was divided into 32 bundles secured with rubber bands, according to the affidavit.
"The manner in which the US currency was wrapped is consistent with that of drug proceeds," the affidavit says.

Guckian told police he came to Nashville to see a friend, but later said he was only there because the flights were cheaper, police said.

He also told police he structured his bank accounts to show balances under $10,000 to avoid government detection and said he was previously arrested in New York for possession for resale of cocaine.

He told police he came to Nashville to see a friend, but later said he was only there because the flights were cheaper, police said.

Guckian also told police he structured his bank accounts to show balances under $10,000 to avoid government detection and said he was previously arrested in New York for possession for resale of cocaine.
He remained in jail Tuesday in lieu of $10,000 bond.

               
 

George and Mrs. H.W. Bush Witness at Maine Same-Sex Wedding

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KENNEBUNK, Maine (AP) — Former President George H.W. Bush was an official witness at the same-sex wedding of two longtime friends, his spokesman said.

Bush and his wife, Barbara Bush, attended the ceremony joining Bonnie Clement and Helen Thorgalsen as private citizens and friends on Saturday, said spokesman Jim McGrath.

Thorgalsen posted a photo on her Facebook page showing Bush signing the marriage license as a witness. She captioned the photo: "Getting our marriage license witnessed!"

In the photo, Bush is seated in a wheelchair, a stack of papers on his lap and his left hand poised with a pen. One bright red sock and one bright blue one peek out below the cuffs of his blue slacks.

The 41st president has deep ties to the area and owns a compound in Kennebunkport, a small coastal town. Thorgalsen and Clement own a general store in neighboring Kennebunk. They were honeymooning overseas and didn't immediately respond to an email seeking comment Wednesday.

View gallery."

In this Sept. 21, 2013 photo, Erling Thorgalsen, at left, makes a toast in honor of his sister, Hele …

Gay marriage became legal in Maine in December.

Bush was in the White House when gay marriage wasn't as big a political issue as it is today. One of his sons, former President George W. Bush, opposed same-sex marriage and in 2004 announced his support for a proposed constitutional amendment to outlaw it. But his wife, Laura Bush, and their daughter Barbara Bush support gay marriage, as does his former vice president, Dick Cheney, whose daughter Mary Cheney is openly gay.

A spokesman for George W. Bush on Wednesday declined to comment on his current feelings about same-sex marriage or his thoughts about his father's role in a same-sex wedding.

In July, George W. Bush made headlines when he said he wouldn't comment on the issue, saying he "shouldn't be taking a speck out of someone else's eye when I have a log in my own." He later explained that he just wasn't going to answer the question because he was out of politics.

His brother Jeb Bush, a former governor of Florida and a potential presidential candidate, has said same-sex marriage is an issue best left to the states to decide. In a speech in June, he told the Faith & Freedom Coalition the nation needs to be supportive of non-traditional families.

Amazon Star Exec Killed in Bike Accident

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Google Finance - Former Amazon CFO Joy Covey dropped out of high school, used her 173 IQ to get to Harvard Business School, helped Jeff Bezos take Amazon public--and then proved that you can lead a full and very rich life beyond business.

Joy Covey, who was Amazon.com's CFO in its startup days and guided the company through its IPO, died Wednesday in a bicycle accident in California. Covey, 50, was reportedly struck while cycling on Skyline Boulevard in the mountains of San Mateo County. She leaves an eight-year-old son, Tyler.

One of the breakout women in tech during the first Internet boom, Covey ranked No. 28 on Fortune's Most Powerful Women in Business list in 1999. I interviewed her, as well as her boss, Jeff Bezos, at Amazon (AMZN) headquarters in Seattle, and captured her extraordinary life in that year's MPW cover story: 

Among the newcomers, Joy Covey has led the most unfettered life. Actually, her life has been a lot like her company, Amazon.com: unconventional, expansive, high risk, with a pitch that goes something like this: "It may not seem logical, but trust me. I know where I'm going. And it's far." Covey is the younger of two daughters of a Northern California doctor and nurse. They were frugal, self-reliant parents. "They had a complete and utter disregard for social expectations," says Covey, 36. She did too. Bored with school during her freshman year at San Mateo High, she dropped out.

Did her parents come down hard on her? "No," says Covey. "They knew it wouldn't do any good. I thought, They won't beat me or throw me out. If I don't obey, what can they do? I decided, there's no more following the rules." Actually, she did follow some rules: She returned to school for one more year. Then she used her 173 IQ to pass California's high school-equivalency exam. At 19, she graduated from California State University at Fresno and took the CPA exam (scoring second best in the country that year). After working at the accounting firm Arthur Young for a while, she headed to Harvard to collect an MBA and a law degree.

Three years ago, following an interlude in Silicon Valley, Covey arrived in Seattle, pumped at the prospect of being a pioneer. Amazon.com was then an unproven e-commerce curiosity. "I thought, Wouldn't it be great to build one of those new business models like Microsoft or Intel or Dell?" She helped break retailing out of its box and did the same with her job as CFO. Covey has been an unusually influential finance chief, working with Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos to recruit senior management and steer the company into businesses far beyond books. Says Bezos: "I can budget only four days a year to talk to investors, so Joy has been Amazon.com's primary contact with Wall Street. In the Internet space, that's really unusual. She's doing what a CEO would normally do."

Covey is a sports fanatic who goes rock-climbing and wakeboarding (for the uninitiated, that's snow-boarding behind a boat). But even at work, she is altogether unbound. During a dinner last year at a Seattle restaurant to celebrate Amazon's big junk-bond offering (the first by an Internet company), she joined her boss on the floor for a round of leg wrestling. "She won," Bezos says. Recently, when Covey said she wanted a new position as chief strategist, Bezos says the decision was easy. "Joy is really good at figuring out what's going to be important six months from now, which, in Internet companies, is very hard to do."

I also featured Covey in a 1999 story about Fortune MPW and their mothers--and this, about Joy's mom, gives you a sense of where Joy got her remarkable will:

During World War II, Joan Covey, who is Dutch by heritage, lived in Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies). When the Japanese invaded, she was sent to a prison camp for two years. She watched her own mother starve to death there. The hardship fostered an intense self-reliance, which daughter Joy has as well.

Covey tired of frenetic Internet life and left Amazon voluntarily in 2000, She spent her time raising her son, Tyler, and showing that high-powered corporate women can indeed lead a rich life beyond a business career: She got her pilot's license, threw herself back into extreme sports--Alpine rock climbing, Utah skiing, kiteboarding--and deployed her Amazon wealth into environmental and other causes. She served as Treasurer of the Natural Resources Defense Council and on Harvard's Advisory Board. "I'm not retired," she told me after quitting corporate life. "I intend to have two or three more careers."

The world has lost an amazing person in Joy Covey. We will miss her greatly.

Paris Jackson - Judge orders inquiry in wellbeing

By ANTHONY McCARTNEY | Associated Press – 8 minutes ago

LOS ANGELES (AP) — An investigation into Paris Jackson's wellbeing has been ordered by a judge overseeing the guardianship of Michael Jackson's three children, court records show.

Superior Court Judge Mitchell Beckloff ordered an investigator to look into Paris Jackson's health, education and welfare and recommend whether any changes are necessary on Thursday, one day after she was taken by ambulance from her family's home and hospitalized.

Authorities have said they were dispatched to the home on a report of a possible overdose, but have not released any additional details.

An attorney for her grandmother has said the 15-year-old is physically fine and receiving appropriate medical treatment.

Beckloff issued a similar inquiry into the wellbeing of Michael Jackson's three children, Prince, Paris and Blanket, last year after an incident in which Katherine Jackson was out of communication with them for several days. The Jackson family matriarch had been taken by some of her children to a resort in Arizona, prompting an agreement that led to another guardian being temporarily instated.

Tito Jackson's son, TJ, was appointed co-guardian over the children.

The earlier report to Beckloff was not made public, although he has stated that he believed Katherine Jackson was doing a good job of raising her son's children.

"There have been communications between the court and counsel and we're completely supportive of the court's actions," Katherine Jackson's attorney, Perry Sanders Jr., said Friday.

He declined to offer any update on Paris Jackson's condition Friday, saying his earlier statement remained accurate.

Beckloff's order requires an investigator to prepare a report that only he will be allowed to review. He did not include instructions on how the review should occur or when the report was due. Last year, Beckloff required an investigator to interview each of the children separately.

An email message sent to TJ Jackson's attorney, Charles Shultz, was not immediately returned.

The filing was first reported Friday by celebrity website TMZ.

___

Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP

Paris Jackson's Alleged Suicide Attempt: Teen Felt "Bullied" at School

A source exclusively tells E! News that Michael Jackson's 15-year-old daughter reportedly revealed recently that's she's been the target of bullies at school, and that the teenager has been feeling "like an outsider" as she struggled to fit in.

"She has been complaining recently about feeling bullied at school," the insider says. "She does not have very many true friends there, and she doesn't feel like she really fits in there."

Paris Jackson, the teenage daughter of the late Michael Jackson, is “physically fine and is getting appropriate medical attention” after an unspecified emergency at her Calabasas, Calif., home.

The trauma of losing a father was recalled Wednesday after Paris Jackson was rushed to a hospital after cutting one of her wrists, sources close to the family told CNN.

Paris called a suicide counseling hot line, which led to a counselor calling 911 to the Jackson home in Calabasas, California, the sources said. Other Jackson sources stopped short of calling the incident a suicide attempt, although one suggested it might be "a cry for help."

"Being a sensitive 15-year-old is difficult no matter who you are," attorney Perry Sanders said. "It is especially difficult when you lose the person closest to you."

While either behind a mask as a small child or in the public eye as a teen, the aspiring actress has endured many ups and downs in her relatively few years.

Since their father's death, Prince, Paris and Blanket's lives have become more public.

Gold Medalist Dies After America's Cup Racing Boat Capsizes

May 10, 2013 (SAN FRANCISCO) -- Training on the San Francisco Bay turned deadly for an America's Cup racing team from Sweden. The Artemis Racing catamaran capsized near Alcatraz Thursday afternoon, killing one team member.

A familiar set of questions is being asked after a 72-foot catamaran belonging to Artemis Racing capsized in the San Francisco Bay, trapping a British sailor underwater for ten minutes on Thursday afternoon. The sailor, British Olympic gold medalist Andrew "Bart" Simpson, was pulled out from under the wrecked boat and taken to the nearby St. Francis Yacht Club, where he was pronounced dead. He was 36 years old.


And so everybody's wondering: Is the San Francisco Bay too dangerous for America's Cup training? Is the race itself too dangerous? It was just six months ago that Larry Ellison's 72-foot America's Cup boat capsized in the San Francisco Bay after zipping underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. And this was after Ellison was allowed to dictate the size limitations for boats competing in the race, opening the door for these giant catamarans. "Has Ellison's plan to turn the world's most famous yacht race into a high-tech white-knuckle NASCAR of the sea gone too far for speed?" the San Jose Mercury News wondered at the time.

The new class of America's Cup contenders is simply a consequence of the race's hypercompetitive tradition. To keep the race exciting, they say, the sailors have to keep pushing the limits. The sailors prepare for the worst, many of them wearing helmets on board and carrying mini oxygen canisters in their pockets in case they get trapped under water. "If you can only race to the top of first gear, it's boring," Team Oracle USA leader Jimmy Spithill said in November. "You need to be pushed."

It must be a team philosophy. Oracle's chief engineer Dirk Kramers echoed the sentiment, "If nobody takes risks there will be no progress."

Actor William Roache British Soap Charged with Rape

LONDON (Reuters) - William Roache, the world's longest serving soap actor according to Guinness World Records, was charged on Wednesday with two counts of rape against an underage girl, British prosecutors said.

Roache, 81, who plays Ken Barlow in the popular soap opera "Coronation Street", is the latest high-profile figure to be accused of sex crimes in Britain since the death of BBC television presenter Jimmy Savile in 2011.

Savile was one of the BBC's biggest stars in the 1970s and 1980s, but after his death police discovered he had allegedly committed sex crimes on an unprecedented scale, triggering an investigation that has netted several other celebrities.

"We have concluded that there is sufficient evidence and it is in the public interest for Mr Roache to be charged with two offences of rape relating to a girl, aged 15, in 1967," said prosecutor Nazir Afzal in a statement.

Roache is expected to appear at Preston Magistrates' Court, in northern England, on May 14. Neither he nor his representatives have made any comment since his arrest earlier on Wednesday.

Roache's arrest was not directly related to Savile investigations.

Other high-profile figures arrested in connection with sexual crimes since the Savile probe began include celebrity publicist Max Clifford, glam-rock singer Gary Glitter and comedian Freddie Starr, all of whom deny any wrongdoing.

(Reporting by Mohammed Abbas; Editing by Michael Roddy)