From the Archives

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, NY – Bailey Whitfield "Whit" Diffie first heard about the applications of computational work-based cryptographic methods from Alan Tritter at IBM's Thomas J. Watson laboratory, when he met with him and other members of the company's cryptography research team over a weekend in 1974. Diffie was nearing the end of his sojourn across the United States, which semi-official crypto biographer Steven Levy paints as the romantic adventure of an eccentric genius, whose "libertarian ethic" drove him to scour the country in search of the best way to achieve cryptographic privacy.

MAMARONECK, NEW YORK – Carlo Gambino approached 12-year old Walter Shaw, Jr. after his father had been grilled that day by Senator John McClellan about his role in the mob's multiple gambling rackets. "You remember one thing about these politicians, these judges, these big corporations", the top boss of New York's five crime families told the impressionable boy. "They have a license to steal," he continued, "but we don’t need one. You remember that. Your dad’s not the bad guy, kid. They are the bad guys".

WASHINGTON, DC ­– On August 3, Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and John Boozman (R-AR) submitted the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act to the upper house of Congress calling for a mandatory framework to govern digital assets under the jurisdiction of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), an independent agency of the US government tasked with regulating financial derivatives markets and commodities trading.

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA – On January 3, 2009, the pseudonymous author of the Bitcoin whitepaper, Satoshi Nakamoto, 'mined' the cryptocurrency's first fifty tokens. The computational milestone was dubbed the "genesis block" and followed by the first Bitcoin transaction about a week later, when ten of the digital coins were sent to American software developer Harold "Hal" Finney, thus proving the network's functionality and establishing the main pillar of foundational Bitcoin lore

LONDON, ENGLAND – Boasting three quarters of a century of "investing for development", British International Investment recently unveiled its new name along with a five-year plan to pour billions of pounds into technology, climate and "inclusive finance" projects

NARSAQ, GREENLAND – Mariane Paviasen had greeted dozens of geologists, researchers and maybe even a few mining executives when they touched down on the Bell helicopters used by Air Greenland to ferry visitors to this remote part of the world. But in 2014, Paviasen traded in her practiced welcome pitch for a less agreeable disposition, after she decided to oppose a rare earth mining concession granted to an Australian company called Greenland Minerals, Ltd. (GGG), just five miles from her home in Narsaq.

SCOTTSBORO, ALABAMA - On June 6, employees of Starbucks store 66182 in Jackson County, Alabama, joined a nationwide movement of baristas calling for better hours, wages and benefits, that has grown to include almost 300 Starbucks locations

NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT – Yale Law School describes its Information Society Project (ISP) as "a community of interdisciplinary scholars who explore issues at the intersection of law, technology, and society

TURIN, ITALY – Scientists are divided over the viability of head/whole body transplants, and have been since Dr. Robert J. White chopped a monkey's head off and grafted it onto the body of another in 1970.

FORT MEADE, MD - Bobby Ray Inman waged World War three against the United States, and won. The budding spy master's legend began during a wargaming exercise at the Naval War College