retiree Archives - usatoday24

An 80-year-old retiree won 2.7 million euros in the lottery and invested it in something unexpected: creating a drug trafficking network

February 11, 2026 by usatoday24

That a chemistry professor sick with cancer becomes one of the largest manufacturers of methamphetamine is something that gave us hours of entertainment with Breaking Bad. What we didn’t see coming is that a retiree from the United Kingdom could serve as inspiration for a sequel to the popular series. As detailed police sourcesan 80-year-old man won a small fortune in the lottery and, instead of investing it in Nvidia stock either in Hermès bags, He displayed an unexpected entrepreneurial spirit by setting up a fake pill factory that generated hundreds of millions of euros. The stroke of luck that changed everything. John Eric Spiby, from Wigan in Greater Manchester, won €2.77 million in the British Lotto in 2010. With that money he bought a rural property in Astley (west of Manchester) and started his new business venture there: manufacturing pills. The detail is that the pills he was manufacturing were etizolama thienodiazepine six to ten times more powerful than diazepam, and mixed it with other ingredients to make perfect imitations of legal anxiolytics. In Xataka Millions of Spaniards consume benzodiazepines to sleep at night. They don’t know it’s poisoned candy The Retiree’s Band. John’s son, John Colin Spiby, 37, was responsible for managing daily production in a rented container next to the house. A friend, Callum Dorian, was responsible for distributing the pills through encrypted chats on platforms such as EncroChat. For his part, Lee Ryan Drury, 45, helped with logistics. Each member of the band had an assigned role so that the entire production and distribution infrastructure functioned on an industrial scale. They sold the pills to 65 pence each (the equivalent of 75 cents) but the total estimated value reached 332 million euros on the black market. The raid that uncovered him. Spiby’s “pharmaceutical” scheme was uncovered in April 2022. Police stopped a vehicle at a hotel in Manchester and found 2.5 million fake pills valued at 77 million euros. The investigation took them to the Spiby farm, where they found hydraulic presses, automatic packaging machines, firearms, ammunition and enough equipment to produce million pills a month. The etizolam they manufactured reached a magnitude that, in the previous months, 58% of the opioid-related deaths in 2021 in Scotland, they were because of pills like those manufactured by Spiby. Dorian, the distribution manager, boasted in messages comparing Spiby’s business to drug trafficking empires, while the gang armed its distributors to protect the companies. key distribution routes. {“videoId”:”x8px49v”,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”ANTIBIOTICS are CEASING TO BE EFFECTIVE and the PROBLEM is SUPERBACTERIA”, “tag”:”Webedia-prod”, “duration”:”327″} The judge has just sentenced the band. The case came to Bolton court in November 2025. According to published The Timesduring the trial Spiby denied any knowledge of the organization that manufactured etizolam pills, claiming that he only rented his property to make some extra money. However, the chats, bank transfers and machinery pointed to him as the main financier, in addition to having found a Lotus and a Porsche that he had hidden in his garage next to the pill manufacturing machines, and the testimony of some neighbors who claimed to have seen him driving around in a Lamborghini, as he collected the BBC. The judge sentenced Spiby and his henchmen in January 2026. “Despite winning the lottery, he decided to continue a life dedicated to crime, far from what would have been normal years of retirement,” the court noted in its ruling. John Eric Spiby was sentenced to 16 years and one month in prison; his son at 9 years old. Drury, the logistics manager, was sentenced to 9 years in prison and Dorian, who already had a 12-year sentence pending, received more time. In total, 47 years in prison for the retiree’s gang. In Xataka | 13% of Spaniards have tried cocaine once in their lives. If we ask the dogs of Madrid the percentage will be higher Image | AMC, Unsplash (Candace Mathers) (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news An 80-year-old retiree won 2.7 million euros in the lottery and invested it in something unexpected: creating a drug trafficking network was originally published in Xataka by Ruben Andres .

Many times art is inexplicable, and a retiree from Malaga uses the most illogical tool to create it: Excel

June 29, 2025 by usatoday24

Explain what art is as complicated as sometimes get the weather forecast. Few things are more subjective and, while for many a banana is a simple fruit, for others it is a work that costs 6.2 million dollars. But within that subjectivity, reflecting reality in a painting is one of the most “accepted” ways to create art. What if that painting is done not with Photoshopbut in Microsoft Excel? That is precisely, with what Jesús Villanueva enjoys. No tutorials. “Normal,” you may think, since who would have occurred. Well let me tell you … it’s not so weird. We are going to see it throughout this pictorial trip with such a boring program (and useful) as Microsoft Excel. The program, which has almost 40 years behind himit was launched as a system of exclusive spreadsheets for Mac In 1985 and its bases have not changed: it is still a calculation program. However, each version became more powerful and versatile. In it Microsoft blog We found the story of Jesús Villanueva, 78, who entertains himself not playing ‘Skyrim‘, doing Streaming of ‘Leage of Legends‘ either Catching Pokémon: It entertains with Excel. He studied a construction eyeliner course and is what has been dedicated, but after retirement and pandemic of the COVID-19something changed Miguel Ángel del Excel. With free time (because you have to have it to create such works), Jesus began using Excel as canvas. “I never found a tutorial to explain how to do it. It has been trial after proof, drawing after drawing,” he says. He began recreating buildings in a format without perspective, but as he learned to master the tool, he went to more complex compositions. Image | Jesús Villanueva Image | Jesús Villanueva The most impressive thing is that it is not dedicated to borrowing external resources or hitting images, but to draw with colors directly in the grid, combining complex and simple shapes to give life to your idea. It is based on photographs, yes, but draw all forms manually in the application. Your secret? “Everything is a matter of patience, even in works that can take up to three months, such as the Siena cathedral.” Other religious buildings in its porpholio are the Mosque of Córdoba or the Cathedral of Florence, for which he had to draw the little characters large and then reduce their size to be able to embed them on the general image. The “Insert Forms” brush. That is the basic tool for Jesus. Choose a figure, calculate the proportions to case in a reference image and there begins to adapt, color and combine with others to give life to the object you want. When he has it, he unites it to the rest and the scene is formed. He also plays with vector strokes and the change of scale of elements. Image | Jesús Villanueva Japanese landscaping. In it Instagram of Jesus You can see his work, but he is not the only passionate of this particular brush. Tatsuo Horiuchi, an 84 -year -old Japanese man, also decided to unleash his particular vision of art when he retired. He says he took 10 years to create something that he felt that he could proudly teach people, but also that there were people who did not understand their hobby or that they laughed at it. “Why do you put so much effort on something that is not useful? Are you crazy?” “Well yes,” he replies in a video in which we can see part of his collection. Excel has a lot of life. Horiuchi gives a very important key. “I think, even if you don’t have talent for painting, you can paint something whenever you have Excel.” And this is interesting because there are people – as I – who are denied to paint even if he would like, and with a grid, it may be easier to start drawing. In any way, it is always curious to see that Excel is not just the tool in which Sustains the world economy and even formula 1 equipment: Excel too It can be a sport. And to gamify a tool as boring as it has all my respects. In Xataka | Thousands of people have been living from art for three years. Ireland pays them 1,300 euros per month to fulfill their dream

A retiree and his children have stolen millions of dollars to Ford in office material. Indeed, lights, caps and bumper

May 16, 2025 by usatoday24

Although in February this year Audi closed its Brussels plant After 75 years in operation, the road was not simple. In the middle of the workers’ protests, someone had an idea: take the keys of 200 cars, put them in a box and remove them from the factory. Clean, simple and with 200 kidnapped cars whose unit value was around 100,000 euros. As simple as keep a box under the jacket and go through the door. More complicated seems to steal the entire engine of a car. This is what was discovered A few months ago in India. For five years, up to 900 Kia combustion engines were stolen from their plants and has not been clear to what extent some worker of the company itself is involved. However, and although large, one can understand that engines from a factory have been steal if they manage to partially disassemble. But how can one take a car cap? And a bumper? This is what they wonder in Ford where a retiree and two children, company workers, have committed a “billionaire” robbery for more than two years. Hello, dad, I bring you a bumper The information, which comes from Detroit Free Pressa police note echoed in which it was confirmed that four people have been arrested for the theft of pieces of different Ford assembly chains that later sold on Ebay. Among those arrested is a former Ford employee but the identity of any of them has not been revealed so far. The pieces were stolen from three Ford plants, one in Deabane, another on a mounting plant in Michigan and one last in Flat Rock. In Motorpasion and The Drive They point out that three of these four men were family. One of them was a retired father and the other two were his children who had contact with a Ford employee. The extracted pieces were taken to stores where they accumulated for sale. A robbery that, according to the local police, is encrypted in “multimillionaire”. And it is that the four employees would have been subtracting and selling pieces for more than two years. The most curious thing is that it is not small or easy to hide pieces. Among the products found were car headlights but also Bumper and Capóslarge pieces therefore. An agent pointed to Fox That the stores where the pieces were stored were covered to the roof. The investigation is analyzing how these pieces could be taken out of the plant without attracting attention from other employees and will have to discover how they were eliminated from the inventory so as not to attract attention since all the pieces in a mounting plant usually have some type of code that identifies each piece. In addition, from the police they point out that they are still looking for new indications that take them to ships or warehouses where the suspects could save the pieces, taking into account the volume of them and the economic damage that it seems to have caused. Photo | Ford In Xataka | The “Sowing Method” alerted by the Civil Guard: this is the new scam popular in the great parking lots

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