Hackers in Ukraine and Frog Juice in the Andes: The Week in Global-Affairs Writing

The Ukrainian Hacker Who Became the FBI’s Best Weapon—and Worst Nightmare
Kevin Poulsen | WIRED
“One Thursday in January 2001, Maksym Igor Popov, a 20-year-old Ukrainian man, walked nervously through the doors of the United States embassy in London. While Popov could have been mistaken for an exchange student applying for a visa, in truth he was a hacker, part of an Eastern European gang that had been raiding U.S. companies and carrying out extortion and fraud. A wave of such attacks was portending a new kind of cold war, between the U.S. and organized criminals in the former Soviet bloc, and Popov, baby-faced and pudgy, with glasses and a crew cut, was about to become the conflict’s first defector.”

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For World’s Newest Scrabble Stars, SHORT Tops SHORTER
Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson | The Wall Street Journal
“Nigeria is beating the West at its own word game, using a strategy that sounds like Scrabble sacrilege.”

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The First 50 Lashes: A Saudi Activist’s Wife Endures Her Husband’s Brutal Sentence
Ensaf Haidar | The Guardian
“The man himself could not be made out in the video. But I saw clearly that he was striking Raif with all his might. Raif’s head was bowed. In very quick succession he took the blows all over the back of his body: He was lashed from shoulders to calves, while the men around him clapped and uttered pious phrases. It was too much for me. It’s indescribable, watching something like that being done to the person you love. I felt the pain they were inflicting on Raif as if it was my own.”

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Hold the Fort
Katherine Laidlaw | The Walrus
“For so many young couples, Fort McMurray held the promise of steady work in a booming industry, and a chance to have an impact on a city still in its blueprint stages. Sure, Aleaha [Frigon] had heard about the problems with drugs and excess, of rental prices skyrocketing, and the health ramifications of living so close to the oil sands. But she was excited. They were moving toward the future she’d always imagined. The Frigons were exactly the kind of family the oil companies were hoping would populate Fort McMurray at the time, who could turn it from a booming oil town to a city that would stand on its own—built on hope, expectation, incentive.”

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What Can the U.S. Learn From Radicalization in the French-Speaking World?
Benjamin Wallace-Wells | The New Yorker
“Americans ... may find a kind of national relief in [Will] McCants and [Chris] Meserole’s hypothesis. Compared to ‘the fashion police of Paris,’ we are comfortable with religious diversity and religious expression, and perhaps this is a source of insulation against ISIS recruitment here. But the real pressure is not on the strength of religious freedom but on the possibility of hyphenated identity—on whether a person feels able to be both Muslim and French, or both Muslim and American.”

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For This Green Smoothie, the First Ingredient Is Frog
Evan Gershkovich | The New York Times
“If you Google the words 'green smoothie,’ you will be inundated with recipes for the perfect healthy shake. You might have to look a little farther for the elixir popular in Peru and Bolivia, which relies not on leafy greens, but on the endangered Titicaca water frog.”