From the Smithsonian: “Al Cantello’s unlikely journey into the secret world of spies began in late 1959, when he received a phone call from a mysterious individual asking him to meet at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. For reasons the Olympic javelin thrower couldn’t quite articulate later, he agreed to the clandestine conference. When Cantello arrived, he found a darkened room with so many shadows that he felt like he’d wandered onto the set of a B movie. Cantello said he didn’t know the man’s name and was uncertain which intelligence agency he represented—or, for that matter, if he was working for the U.S. or the Soviet Union. But it’s likely the man in the hotel was there on behalf of the CIA. The agency was watching the meet and was interested in recruiting Soviet athletes, particularly those of Ukrainian origin, who might defect.
Fugitive known as ‘El Diablo’ found working as a Mexican police officer 20 years later
From Fox News: “American detectives used social media to track a fugitive to Oaxaca, Mexico, 20 years after he allegedly shot a man dead outside an Ohio bar, and learned that he’d picked up an unexpected new job, becoming a police officer himself. Antonio “El Diablo” Riano, now 62, was charged with first-degree murder, arrested in Zapotitlan Palmas and handed over to U.S. Marshals in Mexico City on Thursday. Riano fled Ohio after allegedly shooting 25-year-old Benjamin Becarra on Dec. 19, 2004, outside the Roundhouse Bar in Hamilton, Ohio. Witnesses said Riano and Becarra got into an argument inside the bar – when the dispute moved outside, a security camera allegedly caught Riano fatally shooting the other man in the face. When Riano was arrested in Mexico he was found to be working as a police officer, and a photo snapped as he was taken into custody shows him wearing his police uniform.”
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From Substack: “The problem of unexploded ordnance (UXO) in Cambodia is a grave legacy of the Khmer Rouge period, with landmines and cluster munitions posing threats to the personal safety of people and communities, but also contaminating land that could otherwise be used for housing, agriculture and other infrastructure. After 25 years of demining, the dangers still persist, although incidences of death and injury have been falling over time. Apopo’s mine-sniffing rats are a pivotal part of addressing this issue. These African rats are much larger, about the size of a cat, and can live for up to eight years. What makes these rats ideal for mine detection is their extraordinary sense of smell, which they use to detect explosives.”
He passed himself off as an oil magnate and conned people out of billions
From the New Yorker: “When she left, she passed by the couple’s twin Mercedes-Benzes. She saw the men at a nineteen-twenties-themed club luncheon, wearing top hats and tailcoats. Turner seemed to especially relish dressing up and mingling with bigwigs. At one fund-raiser, he reportedly bought a table for ten thousand dollars, then raised his paddle at the auction and pledged a hundred thousand more.When the first heat of summer arrived, West Palm Beach emptied out. As soon as Maria returned, this past August, she called up Turner to arrange a drink. His number wasn’t working, which seemed odd. Then one of her friends told her to Google “Alan Todd May.” Maria was soon staring at a mugshot: May, the man in the photo, was slimmer, and his hair was darker, but he was clearly the person she knew as Jacob Turner. He had escaped from a federal prison almost five years earlier, she read, while serving a twenty-year sentence for an oil fraud that had netted him millions.”
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From Reuters: “A family of Russian sleeper agents flown to Moscow in the biggest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War were so deep under cover that their children found out they were Russians only after the flight took off, the Kremlin said on Friday.”Before that, they didn’t know that they were Russian and that they had anything to do with our country,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “And you probably saw that when the children came down the plane’s steps that they don’t speak Russian and that Putin greeted them in Spanish. He said ‘buenas noches’.” Among those released in the prisoner swap were the so-called illegal sleeper agents – the Dultsevs, a husband and wife who were convicted by a court in Slovenia of pretending to be Argentinians in order to spy, who were flown back to Russia with their two children.”
The little-known, informal and underground financial system known as Hawala
From False Positive: “Imagine that you are a textile merchant somewhere along the 6,000 kilometer stretch of the ancient Silk Road. The last thing you want to do, in such a dangerous environment, is carry cash on you. Hawala is an Arabic term roughly meaning to change or to transfer. It refers to a system in which networks of brokers (hawaladars) facilitate the movement of value from one geographic location to another. Nobody really knows when Hawala was first used. But there is evidence from the 6th century that Muhammed, the founder of Islam, was familiar with at least some version. Similar systems, with equally ancient roots, have existed in India (Hundi), Thailand (phoe kuan), and China, whose term Fei-Chien translates to flying money. And they have collectively come to be referred to as different varieties of “underground banking.”
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From the New York Times: “Before the media vans took over Main Street, before the environmental testers came to dig at the soil, before the doctor came to take blood, Katie Krautwurst, a high-school cheerleader from Le Roy, N.Y., woke up from a nap. Instantly, she knew something was wrong. Her chin was jutting forward uncontrollably and her face was contracting into spasms. She was still twitching a few weeks later when her best friend, Thera Sanchez, captain of one of the school’s cheerleading squads, awoke from a nap stuttering and then later started twitching, her arms flailing and head jerking. Two weeks after that, Lydia Parker, also a senior, erupted in tics and arm swings and hums. Then word got around that Chelsey Dumars, another cheerleader, who recently moved to town, was making the same strange noises, the same strange movements, leaving school early on the days she could make it to class at all.”
A psychiatrist who specializes in addiction says 12-step programs like AA don’t work
From NPR: “Since its founding in the 1930s, Alcoholics Anonymous has become part of the fabric of American society. AA and the many 12-step groups it inspired have become the country’s go-to solution for addiction in all of its forms. These recovery programs are mandated by drug courts, prescribed by doctors and widely praised by reformed addicts. Dr. Lance Dodes sees a big problem with that. The psychiatrist has spent more than 20 years studying and treating addiction. Dodes tells NPR’s Arun Rath that 12-step recovery simply doesn’t work, despite anecdotes about success. There is a large body of evidence now looking at the AA success rate, and the success rate of AA is between 5 and 10 percent. Not only, it’s harmful to the 90 percent who don’t do well. AA is never wrong (according to AA) so if you fail at Alcoholics Anonymous, then it’s you that’s failed.”
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From The Guardian: “Since those early days of the war, with the help of a motley group of intrepid friends, Marushchak has achieved something quite extraordinary. He has organised the evacuation of dozens of museums across Ukraine’s frontline – packing, recording, logging and counting each item and sending them to secret, secure locations away from the combat zone. Among the many tens of thousands of artefacts he has rescued are individual drawings and letters in artists’ archives, collections of ancient icons and antique furniture, precious textiles, and even 180 haunting, larger-than-life medieval sculptures known as babas, carved by the Turkic nomads of the steppe. “At times,” said Chuyeva, “he has been doing almost unbelievable things” – putting himself into extreme personal danger for the sake of often humble-seeming regional museum collections on Ukraine’s frontline.”
How Josephine Cochrane invented the dishwasher in 1885
From Neatorama: “Cochrane’s husband met his untimely demise leaving her and their two children to fend for themselves. Given that it was also in the 19th century, being a widow with two children to feed and raise, life wasn’t going to be rainbows and skittles. Despite not having a formal education in the sciences, Cochrane had been exposed to her civil engineer father and her grandfather, who had first patented the steamboat. And so, she looked for a problem that needed an urgent solution. Cochrane was fed up with chipped, nicked, or cracked dishes and utensils, and she wondered why nobody had ever thought of inventing a machine that could do all of that labor for her. With the help of the local mechanic George Butters, Cochrane was able to invent the first dishwasher and she filed her patent in December 1885 for the “Cochrane Dishwasher”. Then came the equally challenging part of the whole process: actually selling the machine.”
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From ESPN: “In the summer of 2018, inside a national arena that felt more like a small-college gym, the NBA commissioner shot free throws with the president of Rwanda. It was a meeting of disparate men with complementary motives. Adam Silver, a lawyer and NBA lifer who grew up in a wealthy New York suburb before presiding over one of the most progressive leagues in sports, was in Rwanda to build on a mission to extend the NBA’s reach to every corner of the world. Paul Kagame, a former rebel general credited with stopping one of the worst atrocities in modern history but who for years had been assailed as a dictator who smothers opposition through arrests, disappearances and killings, was looking to forge a partnership that would boost Rwanda’s economy and, critics say, distract the world from his human rights record.”
A physicist explains why he would rather fight a horse-sized duck than 100 duck-sized horses
From Wired: “First, this duck could obviously not fly. You can just imagine how big the wings would have to be for a 3,000 kg bird. It’s not going to happen. But the problems aren’t just with flying. What about the duck’s legs? A duck-sized duck has two approximately cylindrical legs. Looking at the duck image, I measure a leg radius of about 0.005 meters. What is the compression pressure in these legs for a normal duck? It would be weight of the duck divided by the total cross-sectional area. If we ramp this up to our horse-sized duck, what happens? The mass increases and so does the radius of the leg. The horse-sized duck is 6.85 times larger than a duck. The leg would also be 6.85 times larger. This would give a horse-duck compression pressure close to 100 times the pressure of a normal duck. I think this duck would just sit there quacking – but really loud quacks. I could just toss some rocks at it until I was declared the winner.”
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From the New York Times: “Challenged by his friend, the swimmer Duke Kahanamoku, Harry Prieste shinnied up a 15-foot flagpole at the end of the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium, and stole the official flag. The Irish linen flag came home with Prieste to Los Angeles, the fruit of his athletic prank and further evidence of his presence at the seventh Summer Olympiad, where he won the bronze medal in platform diving. For 77 years the flag was stored in a suitcase during Prieste’s years in swimming and diving shows, as a vaudeville comedian, a tumbler, a banjo player, a circus juggler and an Ice Follies performer. He did not regard the flag as valuable or worth returning until a reporter told him at a United States Olympic Committee banquet three years ago that the International Olympic Committee had been unable to find the missing Antwerp flag, the first one with the five rings. ”I can help you with that,” he said. ”It’s in my suitcase.”
She fell 14,000 feet without a parachute and somehow survived
From ESPN: “Each step that Emma Carey takes is a size six miracle. She has no feeling in her legs, no sense of when her feet land or they’re in the air. That means her legs give her brain zero feedback, so she has to think about where her legs are going but never feels where they are. There’s a little bit of a hitch in her gait, where her legs are just a tad mechanical going up and down. But it’s not even noticeable until she specifically says to watch for it. Most people would have no idea that she is paralyzed from the waist down, or that she survived the unthinkable: In June 2013, Carey went skydiving for the first time and fell 14,000 feet out of a helicopter into an empty cow pasture in Switzerland, with two tangled parachutes and her instructor passed out on her back.”
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From The Week: “Though the Allies considered some highly inventive schemes to beat Adolf Hitler, few are more bizarre than an alleged plot to make the Fuhrer lose interest in world domination by secretly drugging him with female sex hormones. Cardiff University professor Brian Ford says he uncovered the plan while reviewing recently declassified documents for his new book, Secret Weapons: Technology, Science, And The Race To Win World War II. British spies figured that if they could lace Hitler’s food with estrogen, over time he would become less cruel and aggressive, Ford says. The idea was to “feminize” Hitler, and make him behave more like his sister, Paula, a “mild-mannered secretary.” The Brits were encouraged by then-recent research into the effects of sex hormones. “There were agents who would be able to get it into his food.”
Scientists say sharks caught off the coast of Brazil have tested positive for cocaine
From Scientific American: “Sharks swimming off the cost of Brazil have something a little startling coursing through their systems: cocaine. The drug had never previously been found in wild sharks. But that doesn’t mean these fish are unique; scientists just hadn’t previously tested any shark for coke. The effort was a slam dunk, with the 13 sharks that were examined all testing positive for the drug in their muscles and liver, according to a new study. What this means for the sharks is an open question, say the study co-authors Enrico Mendes Saggioro and Rachel Ann Hauser-Davis. No one has ever studied the behavioral or physiological impacts of cocaine in sharks, Hauser-Davis says, but her ongoing research on environmental contamination in these apex predators suggests the notorious drug is only one of the animals’ worries.”
A Navy pilot captured by the North Vietnamese blinked a call for help in Morse code
From Futility Closet: “Captured by the North Vietnamese in 1965, Navy pilot Jeremiah Denton was forced to participate in a propaganda interview to be broadcast in the United States. Pretending to be blinded by the spotlights, he began blinking — seemingly random spasms and tics. He answered interrogators’ questions with a trace of defiance, knowing he would be beaten again and again, but hoping that America would detect his secret message in Morse code. He blinked the word “T-O-R-T-U-R-E” — alerting U.S. Naval Intelligence for the first time that American prisoners were being tortured. In his Investigator’s Guide to Steganography (2003), Gregory Kipper notes that captured soldiers would also sometimes use hand signals to transmit messages during photo ops; “often, these gestures were airbrushed out by the media.”
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Bill Gates has a McDonald’s gold card that gives him food anywhere in the world for life
From Yahoo: “Few perks in fast food are as elusive and sought-after as the McDonald’s Gold Card, which grants its holder free meals. However, the benefits of these cards can vary. While some are limited to local venues, others, like the one Bill Gates has, allow him to eat for free at any McDonald’s globally. Warren Buffett, another notable recipient of this privilege, discussed his own McDonald’s Gold Card during a 2007 CNBC interview, revealing the more localized nature of his card. During an interview with Becky Quck, Buffett showed what was in his wallet. “And, ah, here we have my McDonald’s card which lets me eat free at any McDonald’s in Omaha for the rest of my life. So that’s why the Buffett family has Christmas dinner at McDonald’s. It explains a lot of things,” he said.
The US government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences
From Slate: “It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat. Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season. Doctors were used to the symptoms of alcohol poisoning, but this outbreak was different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.”
Some scientists think this unusual star system is evidence of extraterrestrials
From Discover: “In 2016, word came out about the discovery of a downright strange astrophysical object, somewhere in the constellation Cygnus. Citizen scientists had been combing through the data from four years of NASA’s Kepler mission when they encountered the star, officially named KIC 8462852. And it was an oddball. It randomly dimmed, like a flickering lightbulb, and could stay that way for several days. It fluctuated intensely and erratically, sometimes dropping up to 22 percent in brightness. “Stars just don’t do that,” says Tabetha Boyajian, the astronomer who led the ensuing scientific investigation into the findings. KIC 8462852 – better known as Tabby’s Star, after Boyajian – continues to befuddle citizen scientists and astronomers alike. While researchers have thrown numerous theories at the wall, some of which have partially stuck, they’re still searching for one hypothesis that explains everything.”
A paraplegic man walks with the Olympic flame thanks to an exoskeleton
Kevin Piette, paraplegic since an accident, made history today by carrying the Olympic flame with his exoskeleton! 💪
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis’s Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s The Browser, Clive Thompson’s Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com
From the Guardian: “The Red Cross and the Vatican both helped thousands of Nazi war criminals and collaborators to escape after the second world war, according to previously unpublished documents. The Red Cross has previously acknowledged that its efforts to help refugees were used by Nazis because administrators were overwhelmed, but the research suggests the numbers were much higher than thought. Gerald Steinacher, a research fellow at Harvard University, was given access to thousands of internal documents, including Red Cross travel documents issued mistakenly to Nazis. They throw light on how and why mass murderers such as Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele and Klaus Barbie and thousands of others evaded capture by the allies. Steinacher says Britain and Canada alone inadvertently took in around 8,000 former Waffen-SS members in 1947, many on the basis of valid documents issued mistakenly.”
The world’s first refrigerated feast struck fear into many of those who were invited to it
From Atlas Obscura: “In October of 1911, some 400 guests sat down to one of the most pivotal meals of the 20th century. The setting was the Louis XVI room in Chicago’s Hotel Sherman, a luxurious meeting place for the elite that catered to swaggering politicians and mafiosi alike. There, under the cavernous, molded ceilings, the mayor of Chicago, the city’s health commissioner, and other bigwig bureaucrats steeled their nerves for the world’s first-ever “cold-storage banquet.” In his toast, the secretary of the National Poultry, Butter, and Egg Association praised guests’ bravery in trying a meal that relied on nascent technology: “What better example of courage could we have than their presence today, for it took considerable courage in the face of all that has been written in the newspapers to sit down to such a spread.” This was nearly two years before the first commercial refrigerators started appearing in American homes.”
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From Washington Post: “The ball blazed five feet over the goal’s crossbar. Even the team’s security guard couldn’t hide his frustration, kicking the dirt, wondering aloud why Capiatá’s fate had been put in Marset’s hands. Over the next two years, the reasons would become clear. Sebastián Marset, it turned out, was among the most important drug traffickers in South America, and one of the key figures behind a surge of cocaine arriving in Western Europe, according to Latin American, U.S. and European investigators. Instead of hiding from authorities, he had used his fortune to purchase and sponsor soccer teams across Latin America and in Europe. U.S. and South American investigators would learn that he was using those teams to help launder millions in drug proceeds.”
What we can learn about decision making from hunter-gatherer tribes like the Ju’hoansi
From Aeon: “For the vast majority of human history, people made group decisions through consensus. It is perhaps the most conspicuous feature of political life among recent hunter-gatherer societies, from the Ju/’hoansi to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia to the Indigenous societies of the early Americas. As an anthropologist, I have observed consensus-based decision-making myself among hunter-gatherers in the rainforests of Malaysia. Though the small-world life of hunter-gatherers may seem far removed from our global world, the problems of group life have remained fundamentally the same for hundreds of thousands of years. In the face of conflict and polarisation, ancient human groups needed processes that yielded good outcomes. What can we learn from a political form shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of trial and error?”
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From Wired: “The first picture Neil Armstrong ever snapped from the surface of the moon shows a jettisoned waste bag that may well contain poop. The Apollo crews left a total of 96 bags of waste, including urine and feces, across their six landing sites, which are still sitting there to this day: a celestial reminder that wherever humans go, we bring our shit with us. These bags, sometimes known as the “poo bags,” have been the subject of much interest and speculation since they were deposited on the moon more than 50 years ago. Human feces is packed with microbial life, which means that the moon hosted life on its surface for an unknown period of time after each landing. Learning how long those microbes survived in the extraterrestrial excrement would reveal insights into the mystery of life’s origins on Earth and its potential existence elsewhere.”
Forgotten Hollywood: The mysterious murder of an actress known as The Black Dahlia
From The Golden Globes: “On January 15, 1947, the mutilated body of a young woman was found in the Leimert Park area of Los Angeles in an empty lot, severed at the waist. According to the Los Angeles Times, she was face up, a few inches from the sidewalk, just north of the middle of the block. Her blue eyes were open, her hands were over her head with her elbows bent at right angles; her knees were straight and legs spread. She was missing her intestines and was slashed across the face from ear to ear. There were cuts and bruises on the body because whole sections of skin had been removed, and the body was drained of blood. A cement bag with blood was found nearby. An autopsy showed she died of a cerebral hemorrhage because of blows to the face. The woman was identified by the FBI as Elizabeth Short, an aspiring actress, whose prints were in the FBI files because she had been arrested for underage drinking in 1943.”
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From Now I Know: “After the Manhattan Project came to a close, nuclear weapons testing continued for decades. In 1957, the government detonated 29 bombs in the Nevada desert as part of Operation Plumbbob, hoping to develop better weapons. The researchers dug a 500 foot deep hole, dropped the bomb to the bottom, and blew it up, but the bomb yield was much greater than anticipated – 50,000 times greater. Fire shot hundreds of feet into the air from the mouth of the uncapped shaft. So a one ton iron lid was placed at the top of the shaft in hopes of keeping any flames underground. When the bomb went off, it shot the manhole cover skyward, at incredible speeds. How fast? Dr. Robert Brownlee estimated that the manhole cover was traveling at a speed of at least 125,000 miles per hour, making it easily the fastest-moving object in history.”
Severe autism can be permanently reversed, groundbreaking new study suggests
From The Telegraph: “Severe autism can be reversed and symptoms reduced to an indistinguishable level, scientists have discovered. Two non-identical twin girls in the US were found to have a level of autism at 20 months old that required very substantial support. A groundbreaking trial saw their parents and a team of medical experts create a bespoke two-year programme of interventions designed to help the children thrive and flourish as much as possible. Scientists say the programme was successful, with both girls undergoing dramatic improvements in the severity of their symptoms. The progress of one of the girls, described only as Twin P, was heralded as “a kind of miracle” by one of the paediatricians. “One of the twins’ symptoms were reversed to the point of being indistinguishable from children who had never had a history of autism symptoms,” said Dr Chris D’Adamo from the University of Maryland.
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From the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Born in 1874 in Albany, N.Y., Charles Fort started his career as a journalist and aspiring fiction writer until his uncle’s death in 1906 left him with enough money to pursue his paranormal research full time. By then he had already been collecting reports of various anomalies and strange occurrences, living in Manhattan and making regular pilgrimages to the New York Public Library to scour scientific journals and foreign newspapers. He gathered up accounts of frogs and fish raining from the heavens, mysterious disappearances, strange animal mutilations, unexplained flying objects, and anything else that seemed to lie outside the domain of accepted science. Encouraged by the novelist Theodore Dreiser, Fort tried first to string this news of the weird into two books he called X and Y: The first suggested that humans were being controlled telepathically by sinister beings on Mars, the second that there existed a secret malevolent civilization at the South Pole.”
Google Earth led a team of scientists to discover an untouched mountaintop rainforest
From The Verge: “In 2018, what is left to explore in the world? It seems unlikely, say, that humans might find an untouched forest to study, someplace that hasn’t been bulldozed and burnt and exploited within an inch of its life. But that’s exactly what happened this past spring, when a Welsh researcher, Dr. Julian Bayliss, led a 28-person team that included scientists specially selected for their different talents as well as logistics experts, rock climbers, and filmmakers to the top of a mountain in Mozambique. The story of the Mount Lico expedition began six years ago when Bayliss, a conservation scientist and butterfly expert, happened to spy a small forest atop a mountain using Google Earth. While locals were aware of Mount Lico, its tall, sheer walls meant that it was nearly impossible to access, which made it likely that the land on top was untouched by humans.”
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From The Guardian: “Millions of Britons were forced to drink subpar cups of tea last November due to the record-breaking low pressure caused by Storm Ciarán. The low pressure caused the boiling point of water to drop below the 100C temperature some experts recommend to extract the full flavour from tea leaves. The study by meteorologists at the University of Reading, published in the journal Weather, reported that the water was boiling at 98C on the morning of the storm. For water to boil, the atmospheric pressure must match the vapour pressure of the liquid. On that date, the barometer fell to 956.0 millibars, the lowest pressure recorded since a reading of 952.1 millibars in February 1989. Before that the previous reading as low was more than 200 years ago, when a measurement of 946 millibars was taken in December 1821.”
Battery X was a top-secret test involving female anti-aircraft crews during World War II
From JSTOR Daily: “During World War II, women were actively involved in Washington DC’s air defense system. Their work was hush-hush and the nation’s capital never came under attack, so their work has largely been forgotten. The Antiaircraft Artillery Volunteers worked as plotters for the Army’s Coast Artillery Antiaircraft Command. They provided real time 3-D visualizations of the region’s air traffic. More than three hundred women volunteered for this work at Bolling Field, located across the Potomac from DC. The second group were some of the “militarized civilians” of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps, which was formed in May 1942. They served in a test of mixed female/male anti-aircraft gun crews around Washington, the only known American test of mixed-sex military units during the war. The Pentagon didn’t declassify it until 1968.”
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News events often hit social media like a rock thrown into a beehive, but when it’s the attempted assassination of a presidential candidate, the effect is more like a grenade. The impact sends angry bees flying in all directions, spreading misinformation and mindless speculation as they go. Nothing is too outlandish or improbable to be shared—and not just by anonymous accounts on X, but, in some cases, members of Congress. In the moments after Trump was shot on Saturday—he sustained an injury to his ear, then was hustled offstage while pumping his fist at the crowd—the shooter was variously rumored to be a member of Antifa, a trans activist, and a Black Lives Matter operative. (Hedoesn’t appear to have been any of these things.) Different accounts described the shooting as both a “false flag” operation on the part of the Trump campaign in order to garner sympathy, and a carefully planned assassination plot on the part of the Biden administration and the “deep state.”
A typical comment came from one anonymous user who posted to X: “When did the Secret Service start allowing the President under duress to tell them ‘to wait’, then stand up to be seen by the crowd fist-pumping? Can you blame me for thinking this is fake?” Users claiming to be law enforcement officers also scoffed at the idea that the Secret Service would allow Trump to grandstand while his life was in danger. According to the New Statesman, more than fifty thousand X users liked a post claiming that the photo of Trump raising his fist under the Stars and Stripes flag was staged: “Great camera angle; great quality; no Secret Service agent in front of his head covering the wound; conveniently placed US flag.” Another post read: “This is price you pay when you take down the elite satanic paedophiles,” then suggested that the “order” for the assassination “likely came from the CIA” and accused Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Mike Pence of being involved. It was viewed almost five million times.
According to a report from NewsGuard, a service that tracks misinformation, the word “staged” appeared in posts on X more than three hundred thousand times on Saturday and Sunday—an increase of almost four thousand percent over the previous two-day period. There were also more than eighty thousand mentions of the phrase “inside job,” which represented an increase of more than three thousand percent compared with a similar period before the shooting. Social media bots and fake accounts helped amplify the false claims on a number of platforms, according to Cyabra, an Israeli tech firm which found that 45 percent of the accounts using hashtags like #stagedshooting were inauthentic.
Note: this post was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
