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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.”

(Editor’s note: If you like this newsletter, please share it with someone else. And if you really like it, perhaps you could subscribe, or contribute something via my Patreon. Thanks for being a reader!)

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.”

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

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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Continue reading “The amazing mine-sniffing rats of Cambodia”

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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Continue reading “They found out their parents were Russian double agents”

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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Continue reading “When dozens of teenagers suffered mysterious seizures”

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.”

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 “They defy death to help save works of art in war-torn Ukraine”