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
It is easy to miss California’s biggest environmental disaster. Driving north on Highway 111, you wouldn’t expect to find an inland sea. If it’s summer, the thermometer in your car could read 115 degrees. But amid the shimmering heat, there are signs of water. All around you,
The infamous Black Death — a pandemic that killed as many as one third to one half of Europeans within just a few years — may have been aided in its devastation by an unknown volcanic eruption. That’s the hypothesis presented in research published December 4 in Communications Earth & Environment,
Santa Claus was nursing a beer at an uptown dive bar. The neighborhood was gentrifying, and management seemed eager to accommodate—there was scented soap in the bathroom and twenty-two-dollar lobster rolls. But the place couldn’t outrun the regulars. They drank tumblers of Irish whiskey filled to the brim,
In 1838, 29-year-old Illinois state representative Abraham Lincoln went on a pseudo blind date set up by a friend. The date wasn’t entirely blind — Lincoln had seen the sister some years before, and said she seemed to be “intelligent and agreeable.” But things quickly went from great to uncomfortable
A fusion energy start-up claims to have solved the millennia-old challenge of how to turn other metals into gold. Chrysopoeia, commonly known as alchemy, has been pursued by civilisations as far back as ancient Egypt. Now San Francisco-based Marathon Fusion, a start-up focused on using nuclear fusion to generate power,
In the late 1990s, when most people just about had an email address and the smartphone with even one G, never mind five of them, was just a twinkle in a mad inventor’s eye, the internet was still regarded by many as the preserve of the nerd. Most of
The Pacific Northwest is known for five things: lumber, aircraft, tech, coffee, and crime. What might account for the abrupt rise and equally abrupt fall, between the nineteen-sixties and the turn of the century, of the “golden age” of serial killing? And why were so many of these brutes cradled
In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia. Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay. He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a
Two men from North Texas have been charged over violent plans that included an armed coup on the Haitian island of Gonave, according to the Justice Department. Gavin Weisenburg, 21 years old of Allen, and Tanner Thomas, 20 years old of Argyle, along with other co-conspirators planned to murder all
If you share a recipe for or photo of fried rice in China on November 25th, you may get a visit from the authorities. To understand why, you have to go back 75 years. North Korea, backed by the Soviet Union and China, launched a surprise invasion into South Korea,
After the 1913 death of Horace Vose, the traditional provider of the White House Thanksgiving turkey, numerous farmers sent animals to the president for Thanksgiving dinner. In 1926, a Mississippi supporter sent a racoon. Coolidge, who had never eaten raccoon and had no appetite to try it, kept the racoon
If you were one of the millions of children who grew up reading Goodnight Moon before bed, chances are its iconic green bedroom is permanently seared into your memory. Now, for the next four months, you have the opportunity to sleep in the Goodnight Moon room IRL. The Goodnight Moon
Brinlee Luster brushed off the exhaustion and stomach cramps as stress. She was finishing college, planning a wedding, and racing toward graduation. At first, the changes were easy to dismiss. A cold that wouldn't clear up. An unsettled, uncomfortable feeling in her gut that could be anxiety. Feeling
Olga Tsvyk got a job doing eyelash extensions, a skill she had picked up back home in Ukraine. In March 2016, a 40-something recent Russian immigrant named Viktoria Nasyrova walked into her salon. Nasyrova told Tsvyk that she was a masseuse and that she lived with her boyfriend in Brooklyn.