I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
Dubbed the “Child Assassin” by Swedish media, the unnamed minor was reportedly paid 250,000 Swedish crowns ($27,000) to travel to the city of Malmö and kill a certain person, but ended up shooting a 21-year-old man who was hanging out with some friends. It is unclear who ordered
On 25 April 1982, two teenage boys in the small town of Borden, Saskatchewan, Canada began playing the relatively new fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Today, 43 years later and more than 2,000 km away, Robert Wardhaugh's D&D campaign is still going strong. The
Hi everyone — Mathew Ingram here. This is a special Christmas edition of When The Going Gets Weird, and it is the last newsletter of the year. Hope you and your loved ones have a great holiday (if you celebrate a winter festival of some kind) and we'll see
A distant webcam captured the moments the couple’s hiking trip started to unravel.The pair, a boyfriend and girlfriend, were nearing the summit of Grossglockner, the tallest mountain in the Austrian Alps, when their lights appeared on its dark peak. Around midnight, the man said, his girlfriend was struck
One lucky couple has beaten extraordinary odds to win £1m on the National Lottery — for the second time. Richard Davies, 49, and Faye Stevenson-Davies, 43, first scooped a seven-figure jackpot playing the EuroMillions Millionaire Maker in June 2018. And now they have done it again by matching five main numbers
On The Abyss, a rat used to demonstrate the film’s oxygenated water technology drowned during filming. Faced with the prospect of a dead rat — and losing the production’s “No Animals Were Harmed” certification — Cameron performed CPR on the rodent. The rat sprang back to life, and Cameron adopted
In 1863, Angelo Mariani marketed a patent medicine called Vin Tonique Mariani à la Coca de Perou. Based on Bordeaux wine infused with three varietals of coca leaves in the bottle, le Vin Tonique Mariani was immediately applauded as a an ideal stomach stimulant, an analgesic on the air passages
Researchers have recorded, for the first time, images of moths drinking a moose’s tears. The intriguing interaction between the nocturnal insects and majestic mammals went down deep in the woods of Vermont, captured by trail cameras set in the state’s Green Mountain National Forest as part of a
The mission demanded the utmost secrecy. A team of American climbers, handpicked by the C.I.A. for their mountaineering skills — and their willingness to keep their mouths shut — were fighting their way up one of the highest mountains in the Himalayas. Step by step, they trudged up the razor-toothed
Clisson et Eugénie, also known in English as Clisson and Eugénie, is a romantic novella, written by Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon wrote Clisson et Eugénie in 1795, and it is widely acknowledged as being a fictionalised account of the doomed romance of a soldier and his lover, which paralleled Bonaparte'
It is a drizzly October afternoon and I am sitting in a rural Lancashire pub drinking pints of Moretti with London’s leading snail farmer and a convicted member of the Naples mafia. We’re discussing the best way to stop a mollusc orgy. The farmer, a 79-year-old former shoe
It began with a rumour. Years after the war ended, stories started circulating about a Polish doctor who had supposedly saved thousands of Jews from the gas chambers by inventing a false epidemic. Newspapers repeated it. A documentary crew went looking for it. A myth formed around the idea that