Weird news - Laxative helps in retrieving smuggled gold biscuits

Smuggling takes many shapes and sizes; and there will be smuggling when an item is priced differently in different countries, or there are duties or levies that cause these differences in prices and hence drive the process of smuggling. Smuggling can be done through the shipment of regular items (within these items - for example, gold is shaped into different items and then coated or painted to seem normal); these can be transported to land in beaches at night where there is lower chance of detection, can be carried across borders that are impossible to verify 100%.
And then you have human carriers who carry smuggled items through airports, and the most extreme case is that of people who swallow these items and hope that they remain undetected. This can prove very dangerous for those who are carrying drugs in packets - if these packets open during the time that they are in the body, the person can die. For others, such as in this case, if they are detected, there is really no option that to force them to expel these items from their bodies, which is done by giving them laxatives and the items then appearing when they do their poop (link to article):

Mushir Ahmed, who came from Kuala Lumpur by an Air Asia flight on Thursday night, was detained while he was waiting near the conveyor belt to collect his checked-in baggage after clearing immigration by an official of the air intelligence unit. “He appeared tense. We approached him and after interrogation that lasted for barely a couple of minutes, we were definite something was wrong,” a customs official said. Ahmed was taken inside the detention room and the metal detector corroborated that there was some metal inside his stomach. But he kept insisting there was a problem with the machine. “For the next three or four hours, we gave him a laxative and asked him to consume water at regular intervals. At dawn, he went to relieve himself and the gold biscuits emerged,” a customs official said.

It seems a bit yucky, but there is a lot of money involved and it happens often enough that there must be processes to deal with it.

Weird news - Man smuggling large number of turtles

Smuggles are known to try and smuggle anything of value across borders, with drugs being one of the most common and value enhancing smuggling activities, and the smuggling of people one of the most tragic smuggling cases (with numerous such activities resulting in the deaths of many of those being smuggled across). Rare and precious animal species also form a large part of such smuggling activities, such as in this case. One can only stop and wonder about how people are able to smuggle a large number of such animals with the expectation that they will be successful, with each smuggling trip making them more confident (till the time that they are caught). Imagine smuggling 41 turtles on your body (just the fact that the ones taped to your body would be squirming and moving would make it so squeamish and ticklish is enough to turn off most people when they think about this). (link to article)

In August 2014, Xu crossed the U.S.-Canada border into Detroit and was watched by U.S. agents as he picked up a package at a parcel center and appeared to transfer items before heading back to the border, according to a criminal complaint. When he passed back through the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, Xu was stopped by Canadian Border Services, which found and seized 41 live turtles taped to his legs and 10 hidden between his legs, the complaint said. The day of his arrest, Xu packed more than 1,000 turtles into suitcases that he sent with a runner he had hired to fly them to Shanghai from Detroit, prosecutors said.

Weird news: Boy attempted to be smuggled into Spain in a suitcase

Human smuggling is something that is famous in the United States, primarily due to the attempts of people from Mexico and from Central America to try to reach the United states, where they feel that they will get a better life. There is a whole organization that is in charge of such smuggling attempts, dealing with getting them across the border at points where there is no fence, or over a river, at times when border guards would not be there; and ensuring that there would be further supplies for them as they move inland away from the border. There are numerous cases where people do manage to get in, there are other cases where they are caught, and there are some tragic cases where people lose their lives in the process.
This is not only true of the US, but numerous other locations in the world where people attempt to better their status by reaching places that are promised to them as a much better place; in recent news, the attempts by people from North Africa to get into Italy through boats crossing the Mediterranean makes news, there are numerous cases where they are unable to get in, or are in the boat without food and water, or the boat has capsized and lives are lost. Spain is another place where people attempt to get in, such as this case where a woman tried to take a kid across the border with him curled up inside a suitcase, and the X-ray of the suitcase proved sensational (look at the image in the referred article):

The lawyer said in a phone interview that his client had then gone to Casablanca, Morocco, to find an alternative way to bring his son into Spain, by buying a visa there. Ouattara, the lawyer said, believed that his son would be brought into Ceuta by crossing the border with his Ivory Coast passport and the visa, for which he paid 5,000 euros. "Do you think any father would really allow his son to travel in a suitcase?" the lawyer asked. "He is just another victim of the mafias" that control Africa's human trafficking networks.

Weird news - 16 kg of cocaine mailed to UN headquarters, now stored there

One hears of all kind of measures that people use for smuggling drugs. There are small submarines that are used, people eat the drugs (put into small plastic vials) - some of which burst inside the person and can kill the courier, there are low flying planes that are used for the same, and numerous other such measures that are used for trying to smuggle drugs. After all, drug smuggling is extremely lucrative, to the extent that if some are caught, and others get through, the amount of money involved still makes the entire deal profitable.
But this method was interesting, trying to use the UN diplomatic route to try and get some cocaine through without inspection (link to article)

The UN is home to its fair share of diplomatic tussles and international scandals, but this was a very different kind of intrigue: more than 35 pounds of cocaine wound up in the mailroom of the United Nations headquarters in New York, authorities say, sent probably by someone who figured the drug would elude detection because of how it was packaged.
New York Police spokesman Paul Browne said the powder, discovered January 16, was in two white bags meant to look like diplomatic pouches, stamped with a bogus U.N. logo and sent from Mexico City through a DHL shipping center in Cincinnati. But a real U.N. diplomatic pouch is blue, has a lock and features the authentic seal of the organization. By international law, those pouches are not normally inspected or opened.

So, the UN finds itself in the position of holding 16 kn of cocaine, which would have an extremely high value if it was ever sold.