These are two heists stories I've been keeping an eye on:
—— A gang of thieves in London avoided motion-sensor technology to break into a warehouse storing rare, centuries-year-old books and made off with $300 million worth of texts back in 2017. Antiquarian book experts speculated over who would do such a thing. The books, after all, would be nearly impossible to fence.
Well, three years later, authorities discovered a cache of books in Romania. The very same books stolen from the London warehouse. The gang of Romanian thieves was just sentenced to prison terms.
—— Then there's the so-called Green Vault escapade in Dresden, Germany last year. Thieves made off with a billion dollars (yes, billion) worth of jewelry. How is that even possible? Security guards are under investigation, but the crime remains very much unsolved.
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I've begun following Emily Atkin's newsletter, HEATED, about climate change. She's pointed out that most of the world's pollution really comes from a handful of companies, probably a dozen or so. Places like Shell, and Exxon.
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We don't pay enough attention to Africa. Just to give one example, Erik Prince's company Frontier Services Group (the successor to Blackwater) fought an insurgency in northern Mozambique until late last year. The insurgents are affiliated with ISIS. Prince's company left, and the Wagner Company (Russia's mercenaries) have moved in. The Frontier Services Group has also been involved in Libya (as has the Wagner Company). Seth Hettena, one of the U.S.'s best unsung investigative reporters, just published a great piece about Prince in Rolling Stone, “Erik Prince’s Private Wars.”