Transferring planes in Dubai? Better wipe your shoes.

by Aaron Hotfelder on

A British father of three named Keith Brown has been sentenced to four years in prison after being found guilty of possessing .003 grams of cannabis. The man, a council youth development officer, was going through Customs at the Dubai Airport, and apparently had the marijuana particle– smaller than a grain of sugar– stuck to his shoe.

Brown is a Rastafarian who was returning from a visit to his family in Ethiopia. He was imprisoned in September of 2007 but sentenced only this week. UAE officials say he will be deported after serving his four-year sentence.

Mr. Brown isn’t the only one to feel the wrath of Dubai’s draconian drug laws. Last month, charges against a German national were finally dropped after the man spent six weeks behind bars. His crime? Trying to pass through customs with .03 grams of hash in his bag. That’s about the size of a speck of dirt, and the man claimed he never knowingly possessed the hash.

The drugs, though invisible to the human eye, are detectable in customs using high-tech equipment, and customs officials are reportedly given a bonus for each arrest. Dubai’s drug laws were changed in 2006 so that the possession of even the most miniscule amount of a drug is considered possession.

Well, it’s at least nice to hear that Dubai doesn’t have any actual crime to worry about.

GADLING TAKE 5: Week of 4-11-2008

by Catherine Bodry on

This week can be summed up in one word: delayed. If you had somewhere important to be this week that required a domestic flight, you have my sympathies. Now, let’s focus on the fun stuff:

That’s five! Happy Friday.

Now you can buy drugs at the airport

by Catherine Bodry on

We know that airports are attempting to become destinations in themselves, implementing museum and shopping attractions. Now we can add one more “service” to the list: walk-in clinics with pharmacies.

Although it’s common to have pharmacies and clinics in foreign airports, the idea is just taking off in the US. Entrepreneurs believe that airport employees and travelers on layovers provide a big enough market to support such an industry. Airport employees often work odd hours that aren’t conducive to going to primary care providers, and travelers either have a lot of downtime or are looking to fill a last-minute prescription.

The company that operates walk-in clinics in Wal-mart, Solantic, will open at Orlando International Airport this year, joining several other health care providers opening in airports throughout the US (AirportMD is one new chain). Solantic offers menu-based pricing, so patients can choose a basic exam and prescription ($59), all the way on up to stitches and x-rays ($189).

What do you think? Do you see yourself visiting an airport clinic or filling a prescription there?

Possibly the world’s coolest conveyor belt

by Iva Skoch on

I am in Colorado this weekend. (Stay tuned for a ski dispatch.)

I have to say I was impressed by Colorado the minute I got off the plane. Check out the conveyor belt they have at Denver airport? Yes, they really put skiing first, don’t they. Instead of collecting your skis or golf bag at various stages of decomposition at the “over sized baggage claim,” you can just collect them right out of the spinning ski conveyor belt.

I have never seen a ski conveyor belt before. Thought I would share. Clearly, I am easily impressed.

TSA screening: Blogger gets through with knife, but loses toothpaste

by Jeffrey White on

Trying to figure out any real rhyme or reason to what is likely to draw the scrutiny of Transportation Security Administration workers is the travel equivalent of rolling dice in craps: You just don’t know for sure what’s going to come up.

The MacBook Air was the latest thing to befuddle the men and women in blue, as noted across the blogging universe last month. There was at least a plausible reason for that, since the laptop — gasp — has no drives and had only recently been unveiled. Still, simple confusion seems to happen every day, as when the TSA recently targeted a kid’s sterilized feeding tube. Screeners seem to have the liquids and gels down cold, but other things truly vex them: Portable speakers, for example.

A recent post over at the blog Thank Gilligan It’s Safe For Work tells us something many of us already know: The TSA is a joke. Still, the blogger’s tale is noteworthy: He recounts recently passing through TSA screening twice with a serrated Spyderco knife tucked safely in his jacket pocket. The TSA did confiscate his large tube of Colgate and both times gave quite a lot of attention to his JBL On Tour portable speaker system, running it through bomb detection.

What gives? Who knows.

Most of us know enough these days not to bring large tubes of toothpaste and shaving cream in our checked baggage, and certainly would think to remove the small knife that we carry on our key chains. But we’d assume speakers would be safe, right? Not for sure.

Still, it’s not just TSA folks who are inconsistent in what they catch and what they miss. While I’ve never tried to get a knife on board a plane in Europe (or anywhere else, for that matter), I always travel with a single carabiner on the handle of my bag (it’s handy for securing your bag to things in places where people like to grab and run, and I just never bother removing it). I recently had a security worker try to tell me I couldn’t bring it on board a plane. He removed it and showed me how it could be used as a weapon — not unlike a set of brass knuckles. Yet he missed the other thing in my bag I always travel with, a corkscrew, something that seems a slightly better candidate to be weaponized. He eventually let my carabiner pass.

I do figure though that my corkscrew’s days are numbered.