It was the year of the brutal murder of a Saudi journalist, the eruption of Kilauea in Hawaii and the election of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in the US. This summer we look back at the big stories of the year around the world and closer to home.
Operation Ark: Inside NZ's $50m designer drug ring

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Within minutes of meeting, the pair were planning how to smuggle "juice" from Thailand to New Zealand in the mail.
The friends became business partners. And business was good until, a few months later, they were charged with selling a prescription medicine without a licence.
They went back to their day jobs; Vincent, an IT consultant, Chase a male stripper.
But it wasn't long until the young entrepreneurs decided to push the boundaries of law and science.
Their research led them to import BZP and TFMPP from overseas and, by a complete fluke, mix the powders together.
The combination of dopamine (a stimulant) and serotonin (a sense of euphoria) was a perfect high for those wanting to party into the wee hours of the morning.
It was like Ecstasy, but entirely above board.
Chase and Vincent, by accident, had become pioneers in the "legal high" industry.
And it made them rich. Until one day, reacting to public outrage, the government banned BZP.
What happened next is a saga that can only be told now, 10 years on, after myriad suppression orders fell away like dominoes in the High Court this week.
This is a story about science experiments and a cast of colourful characters playing a risky game of cat-and-mouse with New Zealand's drug laws.
A story of "protection" money, clandestine meetings and bugged Skype conversations.
Of boxes of cash stacked in the lounge of a pensioner's home in the North Shore, later laundered through companies in Hong Kong and Thailand.
Money made from "designer drug" pills. Millions and millions of pills.
A saga that started with a police investigation and ended in prison.
"This was the largest Class-C drug importation and dealing operation that has come before the New Zealand courts," said Justice Peter Woodhouse, "and the largest by a very long way."
Stripping and science
Chris Chase was born Christopher Alan Roger D'Aguiar in November 1973. The eldest son of immigrants from Barbados. He grew up on Auckland's North Shore.
He left Glenfield College when he was 16 to set up a lunch bar at the local gym where he was training.
An injury stopped D'Aguiar from playing basketball, so he turned his attention to bodybuilding.

"I became kind of obsessed with it, I guess you could say," D'Aguiar said later.
The business deal was simple, there was no lease or contract. The gym wasn't using the space and a lunch bar added value for customers.
The teenage D'Aguiar bought the equipment, organised signage, made deals with food suppliers and prepared healthy meals with his mother.
Before long, he went back to school. The lunch bar was hard work and D'Aguiar realised he wanted a profession.
An average student before quitting school, D'Aguiar returned to achieve an A bursary.
Physical discipline gave him the academic discipline to achieve the grades he needed to qualify for university.
"Bodybuilding essentially teaches you how to set and achieve goals in a very definable and visible way. Your goal is to lift 50 kilos six times, you either achieve that goal or you fail," D'Aguiar would later say.
"It gave me sort of a system I could use in any part of my life."
D'Aguiar enrolled at the University of Auckland in 1994, starting a Bachelor of Science degree but dropped out later in the year.
Science made way for stripping.
"Ladies would have a lingerie type party and if they purchased enough during the course of the party, their prize would be me, essentially."
At the age of 23, after a few years working for agencies, D'Aguiar and a few strippers banded together.
They formed "Men o Men" and D'Aguiar was in charge of bookings.
"They might want a cop, a policeman for instance and everybody had a policeman outfit. A fireman would be common, my signature one was Zorro."
D'Aguiar was still bodybuilding, representing New Zealand in international competitions and winning a national championship.
And then stripping gave way to science, of sorts.

He met Lee Vincent at Sinners, a bar on Auckland's infamous party strip Karangahape Rd, and they went into business together.
They formed VC Sports Science Ltd in 2001 after a "business opportunity", as D'Aguiar described it, presented itself one night in town.
And D'Aguiar changed his name to Chase.
"A friend of ours had this white powder with him," Chase said. "What piqued my interest is he said it was legal, which back then was a very novel concept.
"A drug that got you high, was a stimulant, and it was legal. So I saw a business opportunity there.
"We took it that night, we loved it, we went out and had a good time."
Chase and Lee Vincent contacted the US website that had supplied the white powder to their friend.
It was benzylpiperazine, or BZP. The stimulant was completely unregulated in New Zealand.
For an even better high, Vincent's research found BZP was mixed overseas with trifluoromethylphenylpiperazine, or TFMPP.
The pills gave users a euphoric high similar to MDMA, better known as Ecstasy, but were completely legal.
They began selling by "word of mouth" to friends and associates; "open-minded" people, as Chase descri