users online counter
Interesting
Suspects in sticky situation after police make arrests in Quebec maple syrup heist INGRID PERITZ AND TU THANH HA Montreal and Toronto — The Globe and Mail It was a culinary whodunit involving a daring heist, a golden bounty, and now, some allegedly sticky-fingered suspects. Police in Quebec announced the arrest of three men in the theft of 6 million lbs. of maple syrup from a provincial warehouse, a haul estimated at $18-million and enough to smother a Himalayan mountain of waffles and pancakes. The arrests mark a badly-needed break in a case that circled the globe and pulled in law-enforcement agents operating in two countries and three provinces, all deployed in the retrieval of one of Canada’s most cherished resources. The theft was discovered in August at a depôt rented by the Quebec Federation of Maple Syrup Producers, in what police believe was an inside job. Some 10,000 barrels of stockpiled syrup, part of the federation’s carefully guarded “International Strategic Reserve,” had gone missing. The Fort Knox-style controls reflect the fact that Quebec dominates the world market in maple syrup and carefully controls the commodity’s price and supply. “One of the suspects clearly had access to the warehouse,” said Lt. Guy Lapointe of the Sûreté du Québec. He said the looted liquid was then transferred within the warehouse in St.-Louis-de-Blandford to waiting trucks. “Because they were doing it inside, they couldn’t be seen from outside, and it was easier for them to steal the syrup.” Some of the syrup found its way to buyers outside Quebec, some of whom may not have been aware it was stolen, Lt. Lapointe said. The objective for the perpetrators, however, was straightforward. “The whole point was to make some money.” Two of the three suspects were led into a Quebec courthouse in handcuffs under a heavy snowfall in Trois-Rivières on Tuesday. Richard Vallières, 34, and Avik Caron, 39, face charges of theft, conspiracy, fraud and trafficking in stolen goods. The operation was vast. Investigators interrogated nearly 300 people and executed search warrants in New Brunswick, Ontario and the United States. They seized vehicles they suspect are linked to the theft, along with equipment such as electronic scales, industrial lifts, and kettles used in syrup production. In addition to province police, the effort involved the RCMP, Canada Border Services Agency, as well as U.S custom and immigration agents, whose investigation is centered in Vermont, according to a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. Police say the theft from the squat brick warehouse off a highway in St. Louis-de-Blandford, southwest of Quebec City, took place sometime between August last year and July this year. Provincial police went as far as posting online the photos of five people from Quebec under the title “Wanted,” who are the object of arrest warrants in the case. One warrant targets a woman from Bécancour, Que. on charges of fabricating a forged waybill to dupe U.S. and Canadian border agents. Police say two thirds of the missing syrup has been located, some of it in the northern U.S. But while some barrels of retrieved syrup is under provincial police guard, some remains outside the province. “Police know where it is, now we’re trying to recover it,” said Simon Trépanier, interim director of the Quebec maple syrup federation. “But we have to identify its ownership, because nothing resembles a barrel of maple syrup like another barrel of maple syrup.” The stakes in the syrup caper are high: Quebec produces about 80 percent of the world’s syrup, and the missing loot represented about 12 per cent of the federation’s inventory. While the theft is not expected to affect supplies in Canada, one industry insider said the appearance of black-market syrup may have been responsible for a decrease in the price being sought by buyers in some European markets. Part of the haul might is alleged to have been sold to a New Brunswick maple export business, where police executed a search warrant in September and hauled away enough barrels to fill six truckloads. Étienne St-Pierre, owner of S.K. Export Inc. in Kedgwick, N.B., said he had purchased the syrup from a regular supplier, Richard Vallières, but didn’t know it had a suspicious origin. “You bring me syrup, it’s syrup. There’s no serial number on it,” Mr. St-Pierre said. Sarto Landry, a lawyer for the Richard Vallières who had sold syrup in New Brunswick, declined to comment. In a past interview, before the arrests, Mr. Landry had said his client purchased the product at regular prices and had no inkling it could have been stolen. He said the police had been visiting producers and asking them to submit to lie detectors. Mr. St-Pierre has said in the past that he and his suppliers have been unfairly targeted by Quebec authorities for transacting outside of the Quebec federation of maple producers. In Quebec, the production and sale of maple syrup, like other farm products, is regulated by a marketing board, the Régie des marchés agricoles et alimentaires du Québec, which sets prices and quotas for bulk sales. “It’s like a legal cartel,” said Benoît Girouard, president of L’Union Paysanne, a farmers’ group opposed to the marketing board. Sales of small bottles of syrup on the premises is not restricted but for any larger amounts, farmers have to declare their harvest and remit it to the federation, which warehouses the product and resells it, Mr. Girouard said. This has led to inflated prices and a syrup black market, he said, noting that small and medium-sized producers are being squeezed out by the system’s quota restrictions. Disputes involving maple producers are among the most common complaints in tribunal decisions by the Régie. Rulings describe how producers getting fined for failing to declare their production fully and how officials have sent inspectors to sugar bushes to check whether the number of maple tap holes matched the reported sap output. “There’s a total loss of control of your harvest,” Mr. Girouard said. “We’re not talking about regulating. It’s policing and it’s nonsense.”

Suspects in sticky situation after police make arrests in Quebec maple syrup heist

INGRID PERITZ AND TU THANH HA

Montreal and Toronto — The Globe and Mail

It was a culinary whodunit involving a daring heist, a golden bounty, and now, some allegedly sticky-fingered suspects.

Police in Quebec announced the arrest of three men in the theft of 6 million lbs. of maple syrup from a provincial warehouse, a haul estimated at $18-million and enough to smother a Himalayan mountain of waffles and pancakes.

The arrests mark a badly-needed break in a case that circled the globe and pulled in law-enforcement agents operating in two countries and three provinces, all deployed in the retrieval of one of Canada’s most cherished resources.

The theft was discovered in August at a depôt rented by the Quebec Federation of Maple Syrup Producers, in what police believe was an inside job. Some 10,000 barrels of stockpiled syrup, part of the federation’s carefully guarded “International Strategic Reserve,” had gone missing. The Fort Knox-style controls reflect the fact that Quebec dominates the world market in maple syrup and carefully controls the commodity’s price and supply.

“One of the suspects clearly had access to the warehouse,” said Lt. Guy Lapointe of the Sûreté du Québec. He said the looted liquid was then transferred within the warehouse in St.-Louis-de-Blandford to waiting trucks. “Because they were doing it inside, they couldn’t be seen from outside, and it was easier for them to steal the syrup.”

Some of the syrup found its way to buyers outside Quebec, some of whom may not have been aware it was stolen, Lt. Lapointe said. The objective for the perpetrators, however, was straightforward. “The whole point was to make some money.”

Two of the three suspects were led into a Quebec courthouse in handcuffs under a heavy snowfall in Trois-Rivières on Tuesday. Richard Vallières, 34, and Avik Caron, 39, face charges of theft, conspiracy, fraud and trafficking in stolen goods.

The operation was vast. Investigators interrogated nearly 300 people and executed search warrants in New Brunswick, Ontario and the United States. They seized vehicles they suspect are linked to the theft, along with equipment such as electronic scales, industrial lifts, and kettles used in syrup production. In addition to province police, the effort involved the RCMP, Canada Border Services Agency, as well as U.S custom and immigration agents, whose investigation is centered in Vermont, according to a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.

Police say the theft from the squat brick warehouse off a highway in St. Louis-de-Blandford, southwest of Quebec City, took place sometime between August last year and July this year. Provincial police went as far as posting online the photos of five people from Quebec under the title “Wanted,” who are the object of arrest warrants in the case. One warrant targets a woman from Bécancour, Que. on charges of fabricating a forged waybill to dupe U.S. and Canadian border agents.

Police say two thirds of the missing syrup has been located, some of it in the northern U.S. But while some barrels of retrieved syrup is under provincial police guard, some remains outside the province.

“Police know where it is, now we’re trying to recover it,” said Simon Trépanier, interim director of the Quebec maple syrup federation. “But we have to identify its ownership, because nothing resembles a barrel of maple syrup like another barrel of maple syrup.”

The stakes in the syrup caper are high: Quebec produces about 80 percent of the world’s syrup, and the missing loot represented about 12 per cent of the federation’s inventory. While the theft is not expected to affect supplies in Canada, one industry insider said the appearance of black-market syrup may have been responsible for a decrease in the price being sought by buyers in some European markets.

Part of the haul might is alleged to have been sold to a New Brunswick maple export business, where police executed a search warrant in September and hauled away enough barrels to fill six truckloads.

Étienne St-Pierre, owner of S.K. Export Inc. in Kedgwick, N.B., said he had purchased the syrup from a regular supplier, Richard Vallières, but didn’t know it had a suspicious origin.

“You bring me syrup, it’s syrup. There’s no serial number on it,” Mr. St-Pierre said.

Sarto Landry, a lawyer for the Richard Vallières who had sold syrup in New Brunswick, declined to comment.

In a past interview, before the arrests, Mr. Landry had said his client purchased the product at regular prices and had no inkling it could have been stolen.

He said the police had been visiting producers and asking them to submit to lie detectors.

Mr. St-Pierre has said in the past that he and his suppliers have been unfairly targeted by Quebec authorities for transacting outside of the Quebec federation of maple producers.

In Quebec, the production and sale of maple syrup, like other farm products, is regulated by a marketing board, the Régie des marchés agricoles et alimentaires du Québec, which sets prices and quotas for bulk sales.

“It’s like a legal cartel,” said Benoît Girouard, president of L’Union Paysanne, a farmers’ group opposed to the marketing board.

Sales of small bottles of syrup on the premises is not restricted but for any larger amounts, farmers have to declare their harvest and remit it to the federation, which warehouses the product and resells it, Mr. Girouard said.

This has led to inflated prices and a syrup black market, he said, noting that small and medium-sized producers are being squeezed out by the system’s quota restrictions.

Disputes involving maple producers are among the most common complaints in tribunal decisions by the Régie.

Rulings describe how producers getting fined for failing to declare their production fully and how officials have sent inspectors to sugar bushes to check whether the number of maple tap holes matched the reported sap output.

“There’s a total loss of control of your harvest,” Mr. Girouard said. “We’re not talking about regulating. It’s policing and it’s nonsense.”

Posted 5 months ago
Tagged: Quebec, maple syrup, heist, INGRID PERITZ, TU THANH HA, The Globe and Mail, pancakes, waffles, St.-Louis-de-Blandford, Trois-Rivières, theft, fraud, trafficking, New Brunswick, Ontario, RCMP, Bécancour, Canada, Kedgwick, N.B., .
Source: The Globe and Mail
Solving Historical Riddles: Hunting for a Mass Killer in Medieval Graveyards. By Nicholas Wade

Beneath the Royal Mint Court, diagonally across the street from the Tower of London, lie 1,800 mute witnesses to the foresight of the city fathers in the year 1348. Recognizing that the Black Death then scourging Europe would inevitably reach London, the authorities prepared a special cemetery in East Smithfield, outside the city walls, to receive the bodies of the stricken.

By autumn, the plague arrived. Within two years, a third or so of London’s citizens had died, a proportion similar to that elsewhere in Europe. The East Smithfield cemetery held 2,400 of the victims, whose bodies were stacked five deep.

The agent of the Black Death is assumed to be Yersinia pestis, the microbe that causes bubonic plague today. But the epidemiology was strikingly different from that of modern outbreaks. Modern plague is carried by fleas and spreads no faster than the rats that carry them can travel. The Black Death seems to have spread directly from one person to another.

Victims sometimes emitted a deathly stench, which is not true of plague victims today. And the Black Death felled at least 30 percent of those it inflicted, whereas a modern plague in India that struck Bombay in 1904, before the advent of antibiotics, killed only 3 percent of its victims.

These differences, as well as the fear that the Black Death might re-emerge, have prompted several attempts to retrieve DNA from Black Death cemeteries. The latest of these attempts is reported Tuesday in of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team led by Hendrik N. Poinar of McMaster University in Ontario and Johannes Krause of the University of Tübingen in Germany.

They looked for surviving fragments of DNA in bones and teeth that archaeologists had excavated from the East Smithfield site in the 1980s. The DNA matched that of the modern-day microbe, confirming, as have several other studies, that Yersinia pestis was indeed the agent of the Black Death. Sharon DeWitte, a member of Dr. Poinar’s team, was one of several skeptics who had doubted the microbe’s role. “I’m very happy to find out I was wrong,” said Dr. DeWitte, a paleodemographer at the University of South Carolina. “In science, if you’re open to alternative possibilities, you can change your mind.”

Dr. Poinar’s team also looked for the microbe’s DNA in another medieval London cemetery, that of St. Nicholas Shambles, which was closed before the Black Death struck. They found no sign of it there, indicating that Yersinia pestis was not already present in the English population before the Black Death, so it must have arrived from elsewhere.

If Yersinia pestis was indeed the cause of the Black Death, why were the microbe’s effects so different in medieval times? Its DNA sequence may hold the answer. Dr. Poinar’s team has managed to reconstruct a part of the microbe’s genetic endowment. Yersinia pestis has a single chromosome, containing the bulk of its genes, and three small circles of DNA known as plasmids.

The team has determined the full DNA sequence of the plasmid known as pPCP1 from the East Smithfield cemetery. But, disappointingly, it turns out to be identical to the modern-day plasmid, so it explains none of the differences in the microbe’s effects.

“It was probably a naïve approach to assume we’d get the smoking gun on first attempt,” Dr. Poinar said.

Mark Achtman, an expert on plague who works at University College Cork in Ireland, said that the new study was “technologically interesting” but that a great deal more of the microbe’s DNA needed to be sequenced to obtain scientifically important results.

This is indeed Dr. Poinar’s plan. The challenge in reconstructing the microbe’s DNA from the East Smithfield cemetery is that it is highly fragmented. The Yersinia pestis chromosome is 4,653,728 units of DNA in length, but the bits of DNA from the cemetery are no more than 50 to 60 units long.

Determining the order of the chemical units in such fragments has become possible only in the last few years with the development of new DNA sequencing machines that work with short fragments.

Another technical challenge is to separate the plague DNA from that of the human and other microbial DNA in the ancient bones. One technique that Dr. Poinar’s team has used is to tether plasmid DNA from the modern plague microbe to plastic beads. DNA is quick to bind to strands of DNA of the complementary sequence, as in the DNA double helix. So the beads act as fishing rods to pull out the DNA of interest.

“It’s probably exceptionally important to find out what made this bug so deadly in the past,” Dr. Poinar said.

A version of this article appeared in print on August 30, 2011, on page D4 of the New York edition with the headline: Hunting for a Mass Killer in Medieval Graveyards.
Posted 1 year ago
Tagged: Black Death, DNA, DNA sequencing, DeWitte, Dr. Poinar, Europe, Germany, Graveyard, Hendrik N. Poinar, Historical Riddles, Ireland, Johannes Krause, London, Mark Achtman, Mass Killer, McMaster University, Medieval, Nicholas Wade, Ontario, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sharon DeWitte, Solving Historical Riddles, University College Cork, University of South Carolina, University of Tübingen, Yersinia pestis, antibiotics, archaeologist, archaeology, bubonic plague, .
Source: The New York Times
free counters