Guatemala has requested FBI assistance in tracking down members of the Barrio 18 gang who escaped from prison last month. Of the 20 fugitives, only four have been recaptured. The gang originated in 1960s Los Angeles among Salvadoran immigrants and spread through Central America following mass deportations. After the breakout, Guatemala officially labeled Barrio 18 a terrorist organization, following a similar move by the U.S. Three senior security officials, including the interior minister, resigned amid reports that the escapes occurred over several days before authorities noticed. The FBI’s Joint Task Force Vulcan, formed to combat MS-13, a rival gang with similar origins, will lead the collaboration. Salvadoran officials estimate that MS-13 and Barrio 18 have been responsible for roughly 200,000 deaths across the region over the past 30 years.
True Spies
Rise And Kill First
How do you report on secrets the state would rather erase?
Investigative journalist Ronen Bergman set out to write the untold history of Israel’s targeted assassinations. He spent years persuading Mossad veterans and commanders to talk, all while navigating censors, hacked emails, and attempts to shut him down. The payoff was a trove of on-the-record testimonies and documents that reshaped his understanding of what he thought he knew.
One source revealed a bombshell: in the early 1980s, Defense Minister Ariel Sharon allegedly ordered the Air Force to bring down a civilian airliner over the ocean to kill PLO leader Yasser Arafat. According to Bergman’s reporting, senior Air Force officers quietly blocked the mission, jamming communications and refusing to stain the service with a war crime. It was a glimpse into the hard choices inside Israel’s intelligence world, where collection and covert action often collide.
Join Ronen Bergman in this week’s podcast selection, 'Rise And Kill First', to go inside the Mossad’s playbook and uncover the scoop that almost never saw daylight!
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What happened to one of Europe’s lost royal jewels?
The Florentine Diamond, a 137-carat yellow gemstone once owned by the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg dynasty, has resurfaced in a Canadian bank vault after vanishing for over a century. Descendants revealed that Empress Zita secretly safeguarded the jewel, entrusting its location to her two sons and requiring the secret to remain sealed for 100 years after Emperor Charles I’s death in 1922.
The diamond’s story stretches across European history. First recorded with the Medici family of Florence in the 1600s, it later passed to the Habsburgs and became part of the imperial collection in Vienna. When the empire collapsed in 1918, Charles fled with his family, and the gem was presumed lost or stolen. During World War II, the exiled royals escaped Nazi persecution and relocated to Canada, where they quietly stored the diamond along with other family treasures.
The Habsburg descendants now plan to keep the gem in Canada, in recognition of the country’s role as a refuge during their exile, and intend to display it publicly for the first time in more than 100 years.
UC San Diego scientists have developed a method to mass-produce xanthommatin, the pigment that enables octopuses to blend into their surroundings and gives monarch butterflies their vibrant orange wings. The discovery could have far-reaching uses in defense, design, and even skincare.
Researchers previously struggled to harvest enough of the pigment from animals or replicate it in the lab. But the team at UC San Diego has successfully engineered bacteria to create up to 1,000 times more xanthommatin than ever before. The microbes were modified to produce one molecule of pigment for every molecule of formic acid, a compound they require for survival. As the bacteria multiplied and consumed more formic acid, they also produced more pigment, naturally scaling the process. The same technique could be used to produce other valuable compounds, opening the door to cleaner, more efficient biomanufacturing that does not rely on fossil fuels.
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A new study published in Science Advances has shown that artificial intelligence can translate brain activity into written text and even predict which video a person is watching. The technique, developed by computational neuroscientist Tomoyasu Horikawa, combines deep-learning language models with brain imaging to decode human perception in real time.
Researchers analyzed captions from over 2,000 short videos using a large language model trained to comprehend word order and meaning. They then collected fMRI scans from six participants as they watched the same videos and trained a separate model to match brain activity with specific captions. By focusing on semantics rather than keywords, the system successfully identified which clips participants were viewing and generated text descriptions of their content.
While scientists have previously used brain data to infer words or images, decoding responses to dynamic, real-world videos is far more complex. The team hopes the approach could eventually help people with speech or language impairments communicate by turning thought patterns into words.
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