Welcome to the Jewelry District, a podcast by J.C.K. brought to you by the Gapier's Institute of Diamonds.

Today, Rob Bates and Victoria Gamalski talk about Russian diamond sanctions,

news from Tucson, and a blogger's mysterious Instagram suspension.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the jewelry district. This is Victoria Gamelski, editor-in-chief of JCP.K,

jk online.com, calling in from Los Angeles, and I'm with.

Rob Bates, news director of J-C-K and J-CKOnline.com, calling in from New York City.

How's things?

Things are good.

When listeners are listening to this, when this episode is out, I was supposed to be in Columbia. We're recording this on a Thursday, and I was due to leave on Friday the 23rd to fly to Bogota to meet the British jeweler Pippa Small. And then we were due to carry on to a community in northwest province of Choco, which is towards the Dary and Gap, if anybody knows where that is.

It's a really treacherous, quite dangerous part of Panama that connects Panama to Colombia.

And it's, I think, jungle, no roads. And there's quite a bit of, I believe, narco traffic and all kinds of other unsavory business that goes on there.

And unfortunately, those security threats have

revved up. And I had to cancel my trip, actually, because we couldn't go to the gold region,

which is a shame because it was really, you know, this really inspiring story of where Pippa

sources some of her gold and what she's trying to do by working with this community of artisans and a different

part of Columbia who used the gold from the Choco province. And it was going to be a great story because

gold is one of the biggest topics in our world and how it's sourced and how we can make sure

it's sourced responsibly and what it means when you're talking about recycle gold and what it

means when you're talking about mine gold and all the complexity of that conversation I was really hoping to illuminate.

So I do hope there's a point later in the year when we can return, but I just wanted to kind of close the loop on that since I had mentioned earlier this year that I would be going.

And I think now I've learned my lesson.

I should just sit tight on these things until they actually happen.

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