Longform’s Picks of the Week

Every weekend, Longform highlights its favorite international articles of the week. For daily picks of new and classic nonfiction, check out Longform or follow @longform on Twitter. Have an iPad? Download Longform’s new app and read all of the latest in-depth stories from dozens of magazines, including Foreign Policy.

“Boom: Inside a British Bank-Bombing Spree” by Nick Summers, Bloomberg.

No American ATM has ever been robbed with explosive gas. The same was true in Britain — until 2013. Now there have been more than 90. Inside the birth of a bomb spree.

“Bank security experts think the first ATM gas attack may have been in Italy in 2001. Early statistics are shaky, but by 2005 there were almost 200 across the continent, according to EAST, or the European ATM Security Team. (Their figures include physical explosives, but gas dominates.) In 2013 there was a 31 percent increase from the year before, to 696 attacks in eight countries. Gas bomb gangs have struck in Australia (2008), Brazil (2010), and Chile (2014), but they’re primarily a European phenomenon. The Dutch term for the method is plofkraak, which translates roughly to thud burglary.

It’s a low-tech, low-investment, more immediate alternative to modern thievery involving card skimmers, PIN–capturing cameras, and malware. ATM fraud is declining steeply in Europe, EAST says, down 42 percent in the first half of 2014 compared with the same period in 2013, while physical attacks—explosions, plus crowbar jobs, ‘ram raids,’ etc.—are up 3 percent.”

“Bad Dream: the Casinos, the Mob, and the Missing Millions” by Greg McArthur, the Globe and Mail.

Deal-making smarts had taken Michael DeGroote from hardscrabble immigrant roots in Ontario farm country to the stature accorded a billionaire and benefactor par excellence. His new venture, hatched in his late 70s, was to invest in Dream Corporation, whose partners were bent on founding a new Las Vegas in the Dominican Republic.

“A little more than a month after the Vegas Flamingo opened, Mr. DeGroote and the trio turned their attention to the Dominican Republic, setting their sights on full-service casinos. Despite suffering from a chronic pain condition that he likens to ‘living in hell,’ Mr. DeGroote braved the Dominican Republic’s notoriously dangerous and unmaintained roads in January, 2011, with Antonio Carbone to scout possible acquisitions.

Shortly after, the Carbones and Mr. Pajak formed the Dream Corporation and went on a shopping spree. They bought all kinds of casinos: beachside gambling houses that feature a few card games and a handful of slots, as well as full-sized casinos outfitted with all manner of wagering. All this was financed with Mr. DeGroote’s money, which he sent to the trio in installments, in exchange for interest payments and a share of the profits.”

“The Cobweb” by Jill Lepore, the New Yorker.

Can the Internet be archived?

“On July 17th, at 3:22 P.M. G.M.T., the Wayback Machine saved a screenshot of Strelkov’s VKontakte post about downing a plane. Two hours and twenty-two minutes later, Arthur Bright, the Europe editor of the Christian Science Monitor, tweeted a picture of the screenshot, along with the message ‘Grab of Donetsk militant Strelkov’s claim of downing what appears to have been MH17.’ By then, Strelkov’s VKontakte page had already been edited: the claim about shooting down a plane was deleted. The only real evidence of the original claim lies in the Wayback Machine.

The average life of a Web page is about a hundred days. Strelkov’s ‘We just downed a plane’ post lasted barely two hours. It might seem, and it often feels, as though stuff on the Web lasts forever, for better and frequently for worse: the embarrassing photograph, the regretted blog (more usually regrettable not in the way the slaughter of civilians is regrettable but in the way that bad hair is regrettable). No one believes any longer, if anyone ever did, that ‘if it’s on the Web it must be true,’ but a lot of people do believe that if it’s on the Web it will stay on the Web. Chances are, though, that it actually won’t. In 2006, David Cameron gave a speech in which he said that Google was democratizing the world, because ‘making more information available to more people’ was providing ‘the power for anyone to hold to account those who in the past might have had a monopoly of power.’ Seven years later, Britain’s Conservative Party scrubbed from its Web site ten years’ worth of Tory speeches, including that one. Last year, BuzzFeed deleted more than four thousand of its staff writers’ early posts, apparently because, as time passed, they looked stupider and stupider. Social media, public records, junk: in the end, everything goes.”

“Can the Siberian Tiger Make a Comeback?” by Matthew Shaer, Smithsonian Magazine.

In Russia’s Far East, an orphaned female tiger is the test case in an experimental effort to save one of the most endangered animals on earth.

“In the not-so-distant past, tigers roamed the shorelines of Bali, the jungles of Indonesia and the lowlands of China. But deforestation, poaching and the ever-widening footprint of man have all taken their toll, and today it is estimated that 93 percent of the ranges once occupied by tigers have been eradicated. There are few wild tigers remaining in China and none in Bali, nor in Korea, where medieval portraits showed a sinuous creature with a noble bearing and a nakedly hungry, open-mouthed leer — an indication of the mixture of dread and admiration humans have long felt for the beast. At the turn of the 20th century, it was estimated that there were 100,000 tigers roaming the wild. Now, according to the World Wildlife Fund, the number is probably much closer to 3,200.

In a way, the area comprised of Primorsky and neighboring Khabarovsk Province can be said to be the tiger’s last fully wild range. As opposed to India, where tiger preserves are hemmed in on all sides by the thrum of civilization, the Far East is empty and conspicuously frontier-like — a bastion of hunters, loggers, fishermen and miners. Just two million people live in Primorsky Province, on a landmass of nearly 64,000 square miles (about the size of Wisconsin), and much of the population is centered in and around Vladivostok — literally ‘the ruler of the east’ — a grim port city that serves as the eastern terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the home base of WCS Russia.”