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From Wired: “The flood of text messages started arriving early this year. They carried a similar thrust: The United States Postal Service is trying to deliver a parcel but needs more details, including your credit card number. Like thousands of others, security researcher Grant Smith got a USPS package message. A couple of days earlier, he says, his wife called him and said she’d inadvertently entered her credit card details. Smith began a mission: Hunt down the scammers. Over the course of a few weeks, Smith tracked down the Chinese-language group behind the mass-smishing campaign, hacked into their systems, collected evidence of their activities, and started a months-long process of gathering victim data and handing it to USPS investigators and a US bank.”

This athlete’s favorite part of the Olympics was the free health care

From The 19th: Ariana Ramsey, a member of the history-making U.S. women’s rugby team, is going viral on TikTok, not for her skills on the pitch, but her newfound obsession with free health care in the Olympic Village. For nearly a week, Ramsey has been documenting her experience taking advantage of the free health services available to athletes. The Olympic and Paralympic Village accommodates about 22,250 athletes who have access to a medical clinic at all times. According to Sports Illustrated, the Olympic Village has offered health care to athletes since the 1932 Los Angeles Games. She first got a pap smear, then booked dental and optometry appointments. She has since deemed herself a universal health care advocate, saying free health care in America will be her “new fight for action.”

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He wanted a cheap warehouse but wound up buying most of Pine Bluff, Arkansas

From Max Read: “Fenley’s story begins in 2019. After separating from his wife, with whom he has three kids, Fenley had moved in with his father, a sculptor, and uncle in Los Angeles. Two weeks after his arrival, his uncle received an eviction notice, and Fenley and his father began to look for somewhere new. So Fenley hopped on the commercial real-estate listing site Loopnet and searched for properties over 65,000 square feet and sorted by price. At the top of the list was the former home of the steel company Varco Pruden – a 17-acre property in Pine Bluff that had been vacant and decaying for 15 years. The property was listed at $375,000; Fenley initially assumed the price was a typo.”

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Continue reading “They tricked his wife so he hacked their scam operation”

From Atlas Obscura: “As atmospheric and chemical scientists, we study the air quality and ecological effects of wildfire smoke and other pollutants. In a study that started quite by accident when smoke overwhelmed our research site in Colorado, we were able to watch in real time how the leaves of living pine trees responded. Plants have pores on the surface of their leaves called stomata. These pores are much like our mouths, except that while we inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, plants inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. On the first morning of heavy smoke, we did our usual test to measure leaf-level photosynthesis of Ponderosa pines. We were surprised to discover that the tree’s pores were completely closed and photosynthesis was nearly zero. We also measured the leaves’ emissions of their usual volatile organic compounds and found very low readings.”

WWII pilots who refused missions were designated LMF for Lack of Moral Fiber

From Inside Story: ““Lack of Moral Fibre,” or LMF, was the punitive designation promoted by the RAF leadership throughout the war to stigmatise aircrew who refused to fly on operations, avoided operations or did a boomerang — flew home early from a sortie without a persuasive excuse. By early 1940, senior officers had become concerned that medical staff were excusing too many men from flying duties. A memorandum issued by the air ministry to all commands in April sought to limit the definition of mental incapacity by promoting the alternative, if unspoken, diagnosis of cowardice. The service records of those classified as LMF cases would be stamped with a large red “W” for “waverer.” All would be stripped of their flying badges, sometimes publicly in front of their peers. Officers would lose their commissions and be refused ground jobs.”

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Continue reading “Trees hold their breath to avoid wildfire smoke”

From Damn Interesting: “In 1922, a bank teller named Grace Fryer became concerned when her teeth began to loosen and fall out for no discernible reason. Her troubles were compounded when her jaw became swollen and inflamed, so she sought the assistance of a doctor in diagnosing the inexplicable symptoms. Using a primitive X-ray machine, the physician discovered serious bone decay, the likes of which he had never seen. Her jawbone was honeycombed with small holes, in a random pattern reminiscent of moth-eaten fabric. As a series of doctors attempted to solve Grace’s mysterious ailment, similar cases began to appear throughout New Jersey. One dentist took notice of the unusually high number of deteriorated jawbones among local women, and it took very little investigation to discover a common thread; all of the women had been employed by the same watch-painting factory.”

London Museum’s new pigeon and “poo splat” logo causes dissent in the UK

From the BBC: “The new logo for the Museum of London featuring a porcelain pigeon and a glittery poo splat is dividing opinion. The director of the museum, Sharon Ament, said the pigeon and splat represented the “grit and glitter” of the capital. However, museums newsletter author Maxwell Blowfield said pigeons were “one of the least unique things about London”. The museum, which has been renamed as the London Museum, has a new premises due to open in Smithfield and a revamp is taking place at its Docklands site. Ms Ament said: “The pigeon and splat speak to a historic place full of dualities; a place where the grit and the glitter have existed side by side for millennia; an impartial and humble observer of London life.” Mr Blowfield, author of the popular Maxwell Museums’ newsletter, wrote: “No-one ever thinks, feels or speaks about pigeons. They’re one of the least unique things about London.”

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Continue reading “The story of Undark and the Radium Girls”

From LitHub: “At the 1912 games in Stockholm, gold, silver and bronze medals were handed out in five arts categories: Architecture, Literature, Music, Painting, and Sculpture. All submitted art works had to be original and sports-themed, and, like their more athletic counterparts, the artists participating in the new “Pentathlon of the Muses” were supposed to be amateurs. The 1912 Olympic Arts Competition was little more than a sideshow, with only a few dozen submissions and a handful of awards given out (the very first Literature gold medal was awarded for the poem “Ode to Sport,” submitted by none other than Pierre de Coubertin himself under a pair of pseudonyms) but as the years rolled on, de Coubertin’s celebration of the arts grew in popularity.”

Hurricane Debby sweeps cocaine worth $1 million onto Florida beach

From the New York Times: “Tropical Storm Debby’s strong winds and heavy rain have downed trees, submerged streets and drenched neighborhoods across Florida this week. The storm also heaved an unexpected type of debris onto one beach: blocks of cocaine worth about $1 million. Debby, which made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane with sustained winds of at least 74 miles per hour, blew 25 packages of cocaine onto a beach on the Florida Keys, according to Samuel Briggs II, the acting chief patrol agent for the U.S. Border Patrol in Miami. The drugs were discovered by a “good Samaritan,” who alerted the authorities, Briggs said. The cocaine blocks, which weighed about 70 pounds total, appeared to be wrapped in plastic and marked with a red and black symbol. Their street value, he added, was over $1 million.”

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Continue reading “They used to give Olympic medals for literature”

From NBC News: “A Russian chess player is under investigation after allegedly being caught on camera spraying her opponent’s board with what authorities said was a substance containing mercury as part of an attempted poisoning ahead of a match last week. Amina Abakarova faces a possible lifetime ban and potential criminal proceedings, Russian authorities said, after the incident during a tournament in the Caucasus republic of Dagestan. The Russian Chess Federation issued a statement Wednesday on what it said was “an attempt to poison a participant in the championship of the Republic of Dagestan in Makhachkala,” referring to Dagestan’s capital. It said Abakarova has been temporarily suspended from all competitions under the authority of the national federation, pending the conclusion of a criminal investigation. A 34-second surveillance video purports to show Abakarova walking around what looks like a room with chessboards set up for a tournament and appearing to rub something on one of the boards, before walking away.”

The Voynich Manuscript has baffled scientists for 500 years

From The Atlantic: “In the library catalog, the book—a parchment codex the size of a hardcover novel—had a simple, colorless title: “Cipher Manuscript.” But newspapers tended to call it the “Voynich Manuscript,” after the rare-books dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who acquired it from a Jesuit collection in Italy around 1912. An heir sold the manuscript to another dealer, who donated it to Yale in 1969. Its 234 pages contained some 38,000 words, but not one of them was readable. The book’s unnamed author had written it, likely with a quill pen, in symbols never before seen. Did they represent a natural language, such as Latin? A constructed language, like Esperanto? A secret code? Gibberish? Scholars had no real idea. And there were otherworldly illustrations: groups of naked women who held stars on strings, like balloons, or stood in green pools fed by trickling ducts and by pipes that looked like fallopian tubes. Many of the women, arms outstretched, seemed less to be bathing than working, almost like plumbers.”

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The strange saga of Kowloon Walled City, once the most densely-populated place on earth

From Atlas Obscura: “The most densely populated city on Earth had only one postman. His round was confined to an area barely a hundredth of a square mile in size. Yet within that space was a staggering number of addresses: 350 buildings, almost all between 10 and 14 stories high, occupied by 8,500 premises, 10,700 households, and more than 33,000 residents. The city’s many tall, narrow tower blocks were packed tight against each other—so tight as to make the whole place seem like one massive structure: part architecture, part organism. There was little uniformity of shape, height, or building material. Cast-iron balconies lurched against brick annexes and concrete walls. Wiring and cables covered every surface: running vertically from ground level up to forests of rooftop television aerials, or stretching horizontally like innumerable rolls of dark twine that seemed almost to bind the buildings together. Entering the city meant leaving daylight behind. There were hundreds of alleyways, most just a few feet wide.”

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Continue reading “Russian chess player accused of trying to poison opponent”

From Atlas Obscura: “They come when a boat is quiet, the posse of adolescent orca whales looking to rumble. Finding the propeller still, they crash into it like semi trucks, each animal a monochromatic, five-ton torpedo on a mission of destruction. Although killer whales are often observed interacting with boats, sea life, and ocean detritus there’s no clear explanation why gangs of young males suddenly began ramming boats around Portugal, Spain, and France this summer. Since July, they’ve sunk or damaged at least three. Researchers believe the behavior may be a temporary cultural fad—the cetacean equivalent of the ice bucket challenge or rickrolling—and it’s not the first killer whale trend to go viral. Orcas, like other whale and dolphin species, have culture, behaviors that are socially shared and learned within a population. Some are transmitted from older generations to younger ones. Others are shared “horizontally,” between members of the same age group.”

A rare neurological disorder makes people think they are seeing monsters

From the New Yorker: “After he recovered, Werbeloff was eager to be around people again, and he spent a night clubbing. In the shifting red light, he looked at a friend’s face and realized that the right side looked odd. It seemed to stretch outward, like Silly Putty being pulled, and a dark, rough patch was visible around the friend’s right eye. Werbeloff blinked and looked away, and his friend’s features briefly returned to normal. Then the distortions appeared again. In the weeks that followed, Werbeloff started to notice similar unsettling changes in everyone he looked at. “If they were smiling with their teeth very visible, then, on the right-hand side, the canine tooth would elongate,” he told me. Even his own face in the mirror looked malformed on the right. He had long known that his ability to recognize faces was so poor that it bordered on prosopagnosia—face blindness—but now he wondered whether he suffered from something else.”

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Son of Russian spies feels relief after becoming a Canadian citizen

From the BBC: “The son of Russian spies has spoken of his relief after a court decided to let him keep his Canadian citizenship. Alexander Vavilov had his citizenship revoked after his parents, who worked for Russia’s foreign intelligence service, were arrested in 2010. He was born in Canada, and until their arrest he believed his parents were Canadian too. Mr Vavilov was born Alexander Foley in Toronto on 3 June 1994 to Tracey Lee Ann Foley and Donald Howard Heathfield – or so he thought. Their real names were Elena Vavilova and Andrey Bezrukov and they had moved to Canada using false identities, in order to establish a “deep cover” that would allow them to travel the world and spy for Russia’s KGB. In Canada, they seemed like a normal, happy young family. Mr Vavilov’s older brother Timothy was born just four years before, also in Toronto. At one point, his parents started up their own diaper delivery service.”

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Continue reading “How young killer whales learn to become hooligans”

From Book of Joe: “A  study by Susan Diem and others of how CPR is portrayed on TV found that it was successful in 75% of the cases and that 67% of the TV patients went home. In reality, a 2010 study of more than 95,000 cases of CPR found that only 8% of patients survived for more than one month. Of these, only about 3% could lead a mostly normal life. Of the 92% of the 95,000 patients who did not survive more than a month, most did not survive the initial episode of CPR. Of those who did, even if CPR was successful in restoring spontaneous heartbeat and cardiac function sufficient to maintain perfusion and blood pressure for up to 30 days, that time was spent in ICUs hooked up to all manner of monitors, intubated, on a ventilator, and for the most part with little or no spontaneous brain activity and function.”

M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie Trap is based on a real sting operation

From GQ: “The loose inspiration for Trap is Operation Flagship, a plan hatched by the U.S. Marshals Service’s Fugitive Investigative Strike Team in 1985. They needed to catch a bunch of fugitives in Washington, DC. In order to keep both costs and risks down, they planned an elaborate sting operation to lure in wanted men: F.I.S.T. sent letters to the last known addresses of over 5,000 fugitives, telling them that they had won two free tickets to an upcoming Washington Redskins game against the Cincinnati Bengals, plus an opportunity to win additional tickets to the Super Bowl. They targeted a big upcoming Washington Redskins home game against the Cincinnati Bengals on December 15, 1985. Then, they invented a new TV network, Flagship International Sports Television, that would be giving out free tickets to celebrate their supposed launch.”

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Did the world’s oldest message in a bottle just wash up on a beach in Ocean City?

From The Inquirer: “Amy Smyth Murphy was taking an early morning stroll on the beach in Ocean City the other week when she spied a distinctive looking bottle by the water’s edge. Intrigued, she picked up the corked green vessel and saw paper inside. She decided to take her find back to her mom’s beach house so she and her relatives could explore it together. With the aid of a corkscrew, her niece Avery Smyth’s nimble fingers, and nephew Jack Smyth’s assistance, they were able to coax the message out of the bottle. Given the other clues so far — the likely age of the bottle, the Klemms — Smyth Murphy said she feels pretty sure the 76 refers to 1876.”

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Continue reading “CPR only works about three percent of the time”

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.”

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

Continue reading “Some Olympic athletes were recruited by the CIA in 1960”