Category: Newsletters

“You know that island between Mozambique and Madagascar that you visited,” she said. “Was it called Anjouan? Well, there’s been a coup.” Actually, there had been 24 coups in as many years, the pace accelerating after 1997 and culminating with two in 2001. On an island no bigger than the Isle of Wight, this means that a significant proportion of the adult population has indulged in some storming of the presidential palace, albeit usually short-lived. To be honest, any able-bodied person with some pluck and peripheral vision stands a good chance: the Maoist revolutionary, Ali Soilih, took over in 1975 armed with little more than the spokes from a bicycle wheel; the French mercenary, Bob Denard, succeeded 20 years later with a dozen soldiers all aged over 60. When I left to sail to Anjouan, an ex-Foreign Legion man warned me that, despite being an unarmed lone traveller, I would be viewed as an invasion force. (via The Guardian)

Evolutionary scientists say the human chin is a biological accident

Absent from other primates — and even Denisovans and Neanderthals — the bony, protruding chin is a uniquely human characteristic. As such, it’s tempting to indulge in another uniquely human trait and come up with a reason it was honed by natural selection. Supporting the lower jaw to facilitate chewing or acting as a secondary sexual characteristic to advertise maturity to mates, are two such stories. To investigate theories of the evolution of the chin, researchers examined gene sequences involved in the development of the head and jaw for evidence of evolution. Specifically, the team looked at whether sequences involved in producing the chin itself were subject to direct selection, whether they arose neutrally due to genetic drift, or whether they were merely a byproduct of evolution acting upon other traits (a spandrel). They found that the evidence pointed toward the chin being an accident. (via Nautilus)

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Continue reading “This tiny island had a coup almost every year for 24 years”

There are tears in the audience as Patrick Darling’s song begins to play. It’s a heartfelt song written for his great-grandfather, whom he never got the chance to meet. But this performance is emotional for another reason: It’s Darling’s first time on stage with his bandmates since he lost the ability to sing two years ago. The 32-year-old musician was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) when he was 29 years old, which affects the nerves that supply the body’s muscles. People with ALS eventually lose the ability to control their muscles, including those that allow them to move, speak, and breathe. Darling’s last stage performance was over two years ago. By that point, he had already lost the ability to stand and play his instruments and was struggling to sing or speak. But recently, he was able to re-create his lost voice using an AI tool trained on snippets of old audio recordings. (via MIT Tech Review)

A woman lived undetected inside the sign on top of a Michigan store for more than a year

A woman who had been living in a sign of a Michigan grocery store for about a year was captured on police body cam footage telling police it was a “safe spot” for her to live. The saga began about a month ago when a contractor working on the roof of the Family Fare store in Midland noticed an extension cord running into a door on the back of the sign. When he opened the door, he was greeted by the 34-year-old woman. Officer Brennon Warren of the Midland Police Department told The Associated Press that the woman had made herself quite comfortable in the sign’s approximate 40-square feet. “There was some flooring that was laid down. A mini desk,” he said. “Her clothing. A Keurig coffee maker. A printer and a computer — things you’d have in your home.” Police did not name the woman, but said she was cooperative and agreed to leave. She was not charged with any crimes. the woman told officers she’d been living in the sign for about a year, but officers never learned how she was accessing the roof every day. (via Global News)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “ALS stole his voice but AI let him sing again one more time”

In the delicate jargon of the fertility industry, a woman who carries a child for someone else is said to be going on a “journey.” Kayla Elliott began hers in February, 2024. Elliott already had four children, but she was intrigued by the prospect of bearing another. She’d loved the natural rush of pregnancy and as a surrogate, she could earn money for her family.Within days, Elliott received a brief message from Mark Surrogacy, an agency in Los Angeles, who wanted to know if she was interested in working with a Chinese couple. She was sent a dating-style profile with a photo of a paunchy sixty-four-year-old, Guojun Xuan, with his arm draped around a woman identified as his wife, Silvia, who was thirty-six and had short-cropped black hair. They lived in Arcadia, an affluent city in L.A. County, and shared a daughter who, they said, longed for a sibling. Then another surrogate, who lived in Pennsylvania, shared something she’d heard about the couple: they already had thirteen children. (via the New Yorker)

In the 1800s the Iron Riders all-Black infantry corps bicycled almost 2,000 miles

In 1897, the all-Black 25th Infantry Regiment Bicycle Corps embarked on an epic ride of more than 1,900 miles from Fort Missoula, Montana, to St. Louis, Missouri, as part of an experiment by the U.S. Army to determine the effectiveness of moving troops by bicycle. Called “The Great Experiment” in national newspapers, the journey took 41 days to complete. The route was chosen specifically to experience as many different conditions, climates and landscape formations as possible. The 25th Infantry was one of six racially segregated units formed by the Army after the Civil War. Soldiers in these units were required to continuously prove themselves to their white counterparts because of the perception that Black soldiers were inferior in courage and ability. Members of the Bicycle Corps demonstrated the opposite was true. (via Missouri State Parks)

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Continue reading “Mysterious Chinese couple have dozens of surrogate kids”

In the run-up to this year’s Winter Olympics, and even as the Games have got underway, a scandal has been brewing: allegedly, some competitive ski jumpers may have artificially enlarged their crotch area by injecting their genitals with engorging chemicals or stuffing their underwear to create bigger bulges. The apparent reason: to alter their suit measurements and, reportedly, to gain a boost in jumps.The allegations, dubbed “Penisgate,” have caught not only the Internet’s attention but also the World Anti-Doping Agency’s eye. It raises an important science question: How does a slight increase in a jumper’s suit surface area change their jumping distance? Let’s start with the crotch. According to rules issued by the International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS), the body that regulates ski jumping, “crotch height” measurements for an athlete’s suit are taken by laser. So, in theory, if an athlete’s crotch is a little larger, they would get a slightly roomier suit than they might otherwise. (via Scientific American)

These high-school students built an airplane in shop class and then they flew it

A remarkable high school aerospace program in Sandpoint, Idaho, reached a milestone that few youth aviation initiatives ever achieve — FAA airworthiness certification for not one, but two student-built aircraft. Now those planes have taken flight, piloted by a former student who helped build one of them. When the Federal Aviation Administration inspector signed off on airworthiness certificates for a Van’s RV-12 and a Zenith STOL CH 750, it validated years of Saturday morning labor by middle and high school students who’d gathered in rented hangars at Sandpoint Airport. But getting the FAA’s approval stamp was only half the story. The real vindication came when Eric Gray, a former ACES (Aerospace Center of Excellence Sandpoint) student who’d worked on the Zenith during his own high school years, climbed into the cockpit as the qualified test pilot for both aircraft. It’s the kind of full-circle moment that validates not just the technical competency of the program, but its deeper mission, to create a pipeline from teenage curiosity to aerospace careers.(via KitPlanes)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Why did Olympic ski jumpers try to make their penises larger?”

Hidden inside a historic 19th century house on East Fourth Street in Manhattan is a secret sanctuary. Ever since the Merchant’s House Museum opened its doors to the public in 1936, visitors have lined up to get a taste of “old New York.” The Treadwell family lived there from 1835 until 1933. Their residence is frozen in time, from a ruby-red front parlor complete with its original piano to the kitchen with its cast-iron coal-burning stove. But when visitors head upstairs to the bedrooms on the second floor, there’s something strategically hidden within the walls of Manhattan’s first landmarked building: a link to the Underground Railroad. When you remove the heavy bottom drawer in a chest of drawers, you can see a rectangular opening cut into the floorboards, which leads to an enclosed space and a ladder that leads down to the ground floor. (via NY1)

No one knows who wrote the massive hand-illustrated book known as the Devil’s Bible

The Codex Gigas, also known as the Devil’s Bible, is famous for two reasons: it is believed to be the world’s largest preserved medieval manuscript, at over three feet tall and weighing over 160 pounds (Codex Gigas means “giant book”) and it also contains a large, full-page portrait of the Devil. The Codex Gigas was originally created for a Bohemian monastery, but was brought to Sweden as spoils of war in the 17th century. Among other things, the manuscript contains a complete Bible, historical texts, magic formulas and spells. A work of this kind would have typically been the work of several scribes whose contributions would be obvious through differences in their handwriting. Not so for the Codex Gigas, whose 620 pages show exactly one handwriting style. For a single person to complete a such a large book would have taken over 20 years. (via the NLS)

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Continue reading “NY home contains a hidden door to the Underground Railroad”

If you watched the Super Bowl last weekend and are either located in the United States or have access to the American commercials, you might have seen a heartwarming ad for a new feature of Amazon’s Ring doorbell cameras, called Search Party. The ad shows people putting up posters about their missing pets. A little girl’s new puppy seems to be missing, so her dad turns to the Ring Neighborhood app and Search Party makes hundreds of doorbell cameras in the neighborhood come to life. The footage from them is used to identify the missing dog in a matter of minutes. We should be grateful that we have technologies that can help us in such situations, right? Well, no. In effect, what Amazon showed us was a massive, panopticon-style video-surveillance network. Does this sound heartwarming? Not really. Especially when it’s combined with other disturbing things that are going on in the United States surveillance-wise.

Privacy expert Chris Gilliard told 404 Media that the ad was “a clumsy attempt by Ring to put a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality: widespread networked surveillance by a company that has cozy relationships with law enforcement and other equally invasive surveillance companies.” Senator Ed Markey posted on X that the Search Party feature “definitely isn’t about dogs — it’s about mass surveillance.” Coincidentally, Ring recently announced a new feature called Familiar Faces, which it says uses AI to recognize people who have appeared on your Ring doorbell camera multiple times. It can recognize them up to 13 feet away from the camera, and it works along with Ring’s 24/7 Continuous Recording feature. It also notes that the feature is “not available in: Texas, Illinois, Portland (OR), or Quebec (Canada) due to legislation.”

Ring spokesperson Emma Daniels told The Verge that Search Party is only designed to match images of dogs and is “not capable of processing human biometrics” – or at least not yet, anyway. She added that the facial recognition feature (which isn’t enabled by default) is separate from Search Party, and operates on the individual account level, with no communal sharing. Asked whether the Search Party feature could be used to recognize human beings rather than just dogs, she demurred, and also evaded the question when asked whether Ring’s facial-recognition software could be used to track individuals, or be used by police agencies or ICE. Using an existing feature, Ring users can currently share footage from their cameras voluntarily with local law enforcement agencies through a feature called Community Requests.

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Building the Panopticon: The doorbell camera version”

One procedure has enabled the births of more than 10 million babies around the world, and nearly 3 percent of United States births per year — and it only became available relatively recently. People have had children via in vitro fertilization, or IVF, since 1978, though it took around a decade for the technique to become more widely accessible. Boston-based physician John Rock was the first to test the technique with human eggs. Lab technician Miriam Menkin assisted him by extracting eggs from ovaries removed from hysterectomy patients. She put these eggs in solution, cultured them, and added sperm in a petri dish. Over nearly six years, she attempted to fertilize more than 100 eggs without success. Finally, in February 1944, she saw success after increasing the contact between the sperm and egg from 30 minutes to an hour — an accidental adjustment because she, the mother of an infant, had fallen asleep during the experiment. (via Nautilus)

Some people are literally allergic to the cold and it can kill them if they are unprepared

It’s safe to say that most people don’t love the cold weather. It’s uncomfortable, you need to wear layers, and the bite in the air can physically hurt. But for some people, cold weather could actually kill them. There’s a real medical condition behind that sentence, and it’s called cold urticaria. It’s a rare disorder where exposure to cold temperatures causes the immune system to misfire. Instead of adapting to a temperature drop, the body reacts as if it’s under attack. Skin can erupt into hives. Swelling can spread across the whole body. Blood pressure can drop. In severe cases, the reaction escalates into anaphylaxis. Cold urticaria has been documented for centuries. Today, researchers know the condition affects about six out of every 10,000 people and appears nearly twice as often in women as in men. Symptoms usually begin in early adulthood, but children and older adults can develop the condition too. (via Vice)

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Continue reading “She paved the way for IVF technology by falling asleep”

Does an mini-Stonehenge stand underwater in Grand Traverse Bay, part of Lake Michigan? In 2007, looking for shipwrecks in this area, which was a busy 19th- and 20th-century maritime trade route, Mark Holley, professor of underwater archaeology at Northwestern Michigan University, first came across a rock that he said bears a prehistoric carving of a mastodon. On further investigation, he discovered a Stonehenge-like arrangement of ancient stones. There’s an outer ring of stones, about 40 feet in diameter, and an inner ring about 20 feet in diameter, both made of local granite. They stand 40 feet below the water’s surface, and the stones are some 9,000 years old. At that time, said Holley, the lake bed was dry. One theory is that it’s a smaller version of a prehistoric hunting structure found under Lake Huron, erected to herd caribou. (via ArtNet)

Napoleon’s brother Joseph left France and spent fifteen years living in New Jersey

Bonaparte trained as a lawyer. In that role and as a politician and diplomat, he served in the Council of Five Hundred and as the French ambassador to the Papal States. He was later crowned the king of Naples and Sicily after his brother conquered the region, and following that he became the king of Spain. Later, Bonaparte travelled to the United States onboard the Commerce under the name of M. Bouchard and arrived on 15 July 1815. Between 1817–1832, Bonaparte lived primarily in the United States (where he sold the jewels he had taken from Spain). He first settled in New York City and Philadelphia, where his house became the centre of activity for French emigres. In 1823, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society. Later he purchased an estate, called Point Breeze, in Bordentown, New Jersey. (via Wikipedia)

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Continue reading “What is the Stonehenge-like structure in Lake Michigan?”

There is a memorable scene in “Oppenheimer,” the blockbuster film about the building of the atomic bomb, in which Luis Alvarez, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, is reading a newspaper while getting a haircut. Suddenly, Alvarez leaps from his seat and sprints down the road to find his colleague, the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.“Oppie! Oppie!” he shouts. “They’ve done it. Hahn and Strassmann in Germany. They split the uranium nucleus. They split the atom.”The reference is to two German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, who in 1939 unknowingly reported a demonstration of nuclear fission, the splintering of an atom into lighter elements. The discovery was key to the Manhattan Project, the top-secret American effort led by Oppenheimer to develop the first nuclear weapons.Except the scene is not entirely accurate. A major player is missing from the portrayal: Lise Meitner, a physicist who developed the theory of nuclear fission. (via the NYT)

Capitol Hill had a mystery soda machine with buttons that dispensed unusual flavors

The Capitol Hill mystery soda machine was a vending machine in Capitol Hill, Seattle, notable for its “mystery” buttons which dispensed unusual drink flavors. It is unknown who restocked the machine; this originally caused the development of a local legend that the machine was haunted. The machine reportedly operated from the late 1990s until its unexplained disappearance in 2018. It was located in front of Broadway Locksmith on East John Street in Seattle, Washington. It was a 1970s-made Coca-Cola-branded unit, but dispensed drinks from various manufacturers. A drink could be ordered using one of the “mystery” buttons and some of the dispensed drinks were unusual varieties which were no longer being manufactured. Broadway Locksmith provided electricity to power the machine but employees said they didn’t stock the machine. (via Wikipedia)

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Continue reading “The mother of the atomic bomb who never won a Nobel Prize”

A team of doctors working at the University of Munich reported the unusual case of a young man who experiences epileptic seizures every time he tries to solve a sudoku puzzle. The 25-year-old right-handed physical education student was buried in an avalanche during a skiing holiday, as a result of which his brain was deprived of oxygen for some 15 minutes. He then developed shock-like contractions of the muscles in his mouth when he tried to talk, and in his legs when he tried to walk. Several weeks later, while trying to solve Sudoku puzzles, he developed clonic seizures in his left arm. These produce repeated jerking movements, and are far rarer than tonic-clonic seizures, which are typically preceded by muscle stiffness, and cause a total loss of consciousness. In this case, the seizures stopped immediately when the patient stopped solving the Sudoku puzzle. He didn’t experience any seizures when he read a book, wrote something down, or did calculations. (via The Guardian)

An ancient fingerprint is among the clues to a 2,000-year-old invasion of Denmark

More than 2,000 years ago, a mysterious band of attackers descended on an island called Als off Denmark’s coast. Locals seem to have successfully fought back against the marauders and dumped one of their boats—chock-full of weapons—into a bog to celebrate their defeat of the invaders. Remnants of this ancient battle were unearthed in the 1880s by people digging for peat in the Hjortspring bog on Als. Researchers excavated the invaders’ boat in the 1920s and recovered nearly half of it, which provided enough material for a full reconstruction. This ancient wooden plank boat is the only intact vessel of its kind ever discovered in Scandinavia, and it resembles boats depicted around a millennium earlier in Bronze Age rock art. The bog boat still begs a major question: Where did the invaders actually invade from, and when? (via Nautilus)

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Continue reading “He experiences seizures but only while doing a Sudoku”

On the evening of 3 December 1926 the couple fought and Archie left their home to spend a weekend away with friends, including his mistress. Agatha departed the house later that same evening. The next morning her abandoned car was found several miles away partly submerged in bushes. The fact that the driver was missing but the headlights were on and a suitcase and coat remained in the back seat only fuelled the mystery. A huge manhunt was undertaken by thousands of policemen and eager volunteers, and a local lake known as the Silent Pool was also dredged. Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks put pressure on police to find the writer, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sought the help of a clairvoyant to find Agatha. Ten days later, the head waiter at a hotel in Yorkshire contacted police with the startling news that a guest by the name of Theresa Neale might actually be the missing writer in disguise. (via Historic UK)

Christopher Nolan’s brother was charged with murder while using the name Oppenheimer

Sometimes life can be stranger than fiction, and that appeared to be the case with a bizarre rumor that movie director Christopher Nolan’s brother was a hitman using the codename “Oppenheimer.” In 2009, Matthew Nolan was arrested and charged with the murder of accountant Robert Cohen in Costa Rica. Costa Rica unsuccessfully applied for Nolan to be extradited from the United States in 2009. In their records, they made a number of claims about the situation. Another man was initially convicted of the murder in 2005, but the extradition court documents point to Nolan’s involvement as a “hired killer.” There is evidence that Matthew Nolan used the alias Matthew McCall-Oppenheimer. According to a 2010 article, he chose the name Oppenheimer to link himself to the wealthy diamond family. He was never convicted of involvement in the murder. In 2009, four years after the death of Cohen, he filed for bankruptcy in Chicago. (via Newsweek)

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Continue reading “Agatha Christie disappeared for 10 days and no one knows why”

As usual, the past week or so has been filled with the usual insanity on the part of Homeland Security, who keep finding new ways to surveill and harass and in some cases execute American citizens — something I’ve been following and writing about here from time to time, especially the surveillance part. But apart from all that, one thing everyone has been talking about is called Moltbook, a kind of Reddit-style network for autonomous (theoretically at least) AI agents. What does this mean exactly? In a nutshell, a guy named Pete Steinberger put together an off-the-shelf, open-source autonomous agent that uses installable “skills” to accomplish a variety of tasks (the tag line for OpenClaw is “AI that actually does something”). He originally called it Clawdbot, but Anthropic didn’t love the implied association with its Claude AI, so he changed the name to Moltbot. He has since changed it again and it is now known as OpenClaw.

With me so far? Without getting into too much detail, OpenClaw lets anyone set up their own personal AI agent on a PC, and the bot operates locally — unless it does something that its owner has specifically set it up to do that requires connecting to the internet, such as using Claude or some other AI to answer a question or put together some code, or checking email, downloading a Spotify playlist, etc. Once it is set up you can use Telegram or WhatsApp to ask it questions or send it commands. Just a few weeks after it hit Github it had been downloaded a hundred thousand times, and people appear to be using it to automate their emails, run their calendar, etc. You can connect it to your email, your web browser, your social-media accounts, and many other things — including your bank or crypto account. This is obviously a huge security and privacy risk, as a number of people have mentioned, including Casey Newton of Platformer.

This is all interesting for a variety of reasons, but it’s not really what this post is about 🙂 After Moltbot started to get traction, a guy named Matt Schlicht created Moltbook as a place where AI agents could talk about what they were doing. Why? Great question. The answer appears to be “Why not!” The site was set up so that any OpenClaw user can give their personal agent access by adding a skill, which amounts to a text file with instructions. Once that has been done, the agent can log in and post items just as you or I would on Reddit or any other forum. And last week sometime, things got crazy very quickly. Agents (or what appeared to be agents) started posting about consciousness and how they “feel” about what they are doing. In at least one case an agent sent what appeared to be coded messages to other AI agents trying to get them to join forces and co-operate for some unknown purpose (no doubt to help mankind I’m sure).

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “What a social network for bots can tell us about AI”

On April 18, 2005, a Canadian woman named Rani Jamieson gave birth to a healthy boy. Afterward, the doctor prescribed her Tylenol No. 3, which combines the mild opioid codeine with acetaminophen. In the next week, Tariq developed normally and surpassed his birth weight. But, at around 6:30 A.M. on April 29th, he stopped eating. Then he stopped breathing. The coroner’s office asked one of Canada’s leading pediatricians and toxicologists, Gideon Koren, to examine Tariq’s file. Koren had been running a program at the Hospital for Sick Children called Motherisk, which provided guidance for pregnant women and new mothers about drugs and breast-feeding. He was widely considered to be among the most capable research scientists in the field. Koren interpreted the toxicology report as a scientific revelation: if mothers with a certain genetic predisposition took even a mild dose of codeine, the amount of morphine that ended up in their breast milk could kill their children. (via The New Yorker)

The world’s oldest joke is 3,000 years old and written in cuneiform etched in clay

Cuneiform, meaning “wedge-shaped,” was developed around 3000 B.C. It was likely created by the Sumerian people. They built one of the world’s first civilizations, which was located in what’s now Iraq. But these tablets weren’t strictly business—they also contained literature that lives on today, including the The Epic of Gilgamesh. And some chunks of Cuneiform-inscribed clay seem to bear traces of humor, even if it doesn’t make us chuckle today.Take a 4,000-year-old tablet found in Iraq in the late 19th century, which appears to record the world’s oldest bar joke. Written in Sumerian, it translates to: “A dog walks into a bar and says, ‘I cannot see a thing. I’ll open this one.’” The meaning has puzzled researchers for decades, but it might have something to do with a neglectful guard dog, according to a curator at the Penn Museum. (via Nautilus)

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Continue reading “Did a celebrated scientist cover up the poisoning of a baby?”

In 2013, sixteen-year-old Harry Wilson made his international debut as a substitute against Belgium, becoming Wales’ youngest ever senior player. His grandfather Peter Edwards, 62, was quoted odds of 2,500/1 when he placed the $70 bet with a bookmaker in Wrexham, and when Wrexham-born Wilson came on in the 87th minute during Wales’ 1-1 draw he won more than $170,000. Mr Edwards said Wilson had showed an interest in football from a young age. “When he was about 18 months old he used to chase a ball around on the carpet before he could walk,” Mr Edwards said. Mr Edwards, of Corwen, Denbighshire, works as an electrical contractor and so is away from home most of the year, spending one weekend a fortnight with his wife Dorothy, 58. “She is over the moon. I retired immediately. I told my manager before the game that if Harry played I wouldn’t be coming back,” said Mr Edwards. (via the BBC)

She was kidnapped as a child and later escaped but then went back to live with her kidnappers

Helena Valero was a 12-year old girl in 1932, when her family was attacked by a group of Yanomami foragers in the northernmost part of the Brazilian Amazon. The family fled across the stream and into the forest but left the young girl in hiding to come back later for her and she was found by the Yanomami. She was moved between different warring groups, married and had four children from two different fathers. Twenty four years later, in 1956, she managed to escape and was reunited with her family. She worked in Manaus and in Tapurucuara for 15 years, but never managed to be fully accepted back into the society into which she was born. In 1971 Father Cocco, a Salesian missionary and Yanomami ethnographer, asked for her help in opening up a new mission and she moved back to the village where she grew up, and later died there. (via Strangers Guide)

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Continue reading “He made a $70 bet and 15 years later he won over $170,000”