She stole $54 million from her town and no one noticed
From Kathy Gilsinan at Politico: "It was the spring of 2012 and nearly three weeks had passed since police had marched Rita Crundwell, the town’s well-liked comptroller, out the door of that very same building in handcuffs. In that time, the magnitude of her betrayal had grown clearer, and more dumbfounding: At first the feds believed she’d “misappropriated” $30 million from the coffers of this small town of about 16,000, but now the figure was close to $54 million. The place previously best-known as Ronald Reagan’s childhood home, site of the Petunia Festival and the Catfish Capital of Illinois, was now also the home of the largest municipal fraud in United States history."
A guide to sabotaging meetings written by the precursor to the CIA
From Authentic Communications: "A document that was declassified by the CIA contains instructions on how to disrupt meetings, designed to guide sympathetic citizens of Axis countries in how to help the war effort. It was written by the OSS, the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, who created it during the run up to the Second World War. It includes advice such as: "Make “speeches. Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences." Other recommendations include: "Slow it down: advocate caution, avoid haste" and "Where possible refer all matters to committees (never fewer than five)."
The brilliant inventor who made two of history’s biggest mistakes
From Steven Johnson for the NYT: "While The Times praised him as “one of the nation’s outstanding chemists” in its obituary, today Thomas Midgley Jr. is best known for the terrible consequences of that chemistry, thanks to the stretch of his career from 1922 to 1928, during which he managed to invent leaded gasoline and also develop the first commercial use of the chlorofluorocarbons that would create a hole in the ozone layer. Each of these innovations offered a brilliant solution to an urgent technological problem of the era, but each turned out to have deadly secondary effects. There may be no other single person in history who did as much damage to human health and the planet."
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