{"id":286152,"date":"2026-06-02T08:49:06","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T13:49:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=286152"},"modified":"2026-06-02T08:49:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T13:49:11","slug":"he-ran-an-11m-fraud-scheme-from-prison-and-just-escaped","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2026\/06\/02\/he-ran-an-11m-fraud-scheme-from-prison-and-just-escaped\/","title":{"rendered":"He ran an $11M fraud scheme from prison and just escaped"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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A Georgia man convicted of leading an $11 million fraud scheme while in custody through contraband phones is now on the run after officials say he escaped from a federal prison camp. The United States Marshals Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other law enforcement agencies are searching for 34-year-old Arthur Cofield. According to authorities with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Cofield was discovered missing from the minimum-security camp next to the Federal Corrections Institution in Jessup on Tuesday afternoon. At the time of his escape, Cofield was serving a sentence of over 11 years for identity theft and conspiracy to commit mail fraud, wire fraud, and bank fraud. Federal prosecutors announced new charges against Cofield in a December 2020 press release. At the time, the Atlanta man was serving a prison sentence for armed robbery in Butts County and faced an attempted murder charge in Fulton County. (via CBS<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Soviet moon rover was silent for 40 years and then started sending signals again<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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For nearly 40 years, Lunokhod 1 was neither destroyed nor forgotten in the usual sense. The Soviet rover had simply become impossible to locate with enough precision to remain scientifically useful. In 2010, that changed when researchers identified its exact position and recovered a laser signal that brought it back into active lunar research. The rover itself never resumed operation. What returned was its reflector, still capable of sending light back to Earth after decades of silence. <\/strong>Lunokhod 1 reached the Moon aboard the Soviet Luna 17 mission on November 17, 1970, becoming the first remote-controlled rover to operate on another world. Designed for a shorter lifespan, it remained active through <\/strong>11 lunar day-night cycles before communications ceased in 1971. (via Daily Galaxy<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: 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\u00a0see other issues\u00a0and sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Two green-skinned children suddenly appeared in a 12th-century English village<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The girl said she came from a place called Saint Martin’s Land, where the sun never rose, and everything sat in permanent twilight. She and a younger boy had been herding cattle, heard a sound like the bells of a great church echoing across the fields, and then found themselves standing by a wolf pit in Suffolk, England. Their skin was green. The children spoke a language nobody recognized and refused everything offered to them until somebody brought out raw broad beans, which they ate hungrily and lived on for months. Two medieval writers recorded the story. William of Newburgh, a canon in Yorkshire, and Ralph of Coggeshall, an abbot in Essex, who drew on Sir Richard de Calne, who took the children into his manor house. The boy was the younger and sicklier of the two, and he died soon after the pair were baptized. The girl grew stronger, gradually ate ordinary food, and lost her green color as she did. (via Boing Boing<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either <\/em>through my Patreon<\/em><\/a> or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called <\/em>The Torment Nexus<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Researchers think Amelia Earhart’s plane could be in a lagoon near a remote Pacific island<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Nearly nine decades after Amelia Earhart vanished over the Pacific Ocean, Purdue University\u201a which helped fund her historic attempt to fly around the world\u201a is planning to lead a new effort to find her lost plane and potentially solve aviation’s greatest mystery. The target is Nikumaroro, a remote Pacific island that is tied to a long-running theory that Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan did not crash straight into the sea on July 2, 1937, but reached the reef and died there after being stranded. The original plan called for a field team from the Purdue Research Foundation and the Archaeological Legacy Institute to head to Nikumaroro in November 2025 to examine the Taraia Object, a long-debated anomaly in the island’s lagoon. Organizers believe it could be part of the Lockheed Electra 10E once piloted by Earhart. (via Popular Mechanics<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the French Revolution the country designed its own calendar where weeks had ten days<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The French Republican calendar, also commonly called the French Revolutionary calendar, was a calendar created and implemented during the French Revolution and used by the French government for about 12 years from late 1793 to 1805, and for 18 days by the Paris Commune in 1871, meant to replace the Gregorian calendar. The calendar consisted of twelve 30-day months, each divided into three 10-day cycles similar to weeks, plus five or six intercalary days at the end to fill out the balance of a solar year. It was designed in part to remove all religious and royalist influences from the calendar, and it was part of a larger attempt at dechristianisation and decimalisation in France. It was used in government records in France and other areas under French rule, including  Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of the  Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland,  Malta, and Italy. (via Wikipedia<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you need to reach the back of the cathedral so you use the incense trebuchet<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Acknowledgements<\/strong><\/em>: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as <\/em>The Morning News<\/em><\/a> from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s <\/em>Curious About Everything<\/em><\/a>, Dan Lewis’s <\/em>Now I Know<\/em><\/a>, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s <\/em>The Browser<\/em><\/a>, Clive Thompson’s <\/em>Linkfest<\/em><\/a> and <\/em>Why Is This Interesting<\/em><\/a> by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy<\/em>. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com<\/em><\/p>\n

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A Georgia man convicted of leading an $11 million fraud scheme while in custody through contraband phones is now on the run after officials say he escaped from a federal prison camp. The United States Marshals Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other law enforcement agencies are searching for 34-year-old Arthur Cofield. According to … <\/p>\n

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