Monthly Archives: May 2026

Luigi’ing like Googling? Gloom/Doom Feeding Political Assassinations

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Months before his arrest for allegedly attempting to murder the chief executive of OpenAI, Daniel Moreno-Gama suggested “Luigi’ing some tech CEOs” in an internet chat. Moreno-Gama traveled from the Houston area to San Francisco, threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s mansion and then attacked OpenAI’s headquarters’ entrance, planning to burn the building down. The incident spotlights a brewing anticorporate fervor in some internet subcultures, amplified by the national attention on Luigi Mangione, the accused UnitedHealthcare CEO killer.***

Except from Zusha Elinson, Altman Attack Suspect Called for ‘Luigi-ing Tech CEOs’ in Online Messages, WSJ, Apr. 15, 2026

*** Supporters on social media platforms like TikTok, X, and Instagram, and attendees at events have cheered Luigi Mangione as folk hero, seeing his actions as a stand for the underdog and against corporate power .

Several bombs falling from the sky onto a rural area with fires and thick black smoke

When Bombs Fall Like Rain: A View of the 21st Century

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On April 8, 2026, Israel struck Lebanon, hitting 100 sites in 90 seconds in one of Israel’s deadliest bombing campaigns in Lebanon in the past two years…The April 8 Israeli bombings hit in the middle of the afternoon and left more than 350 people dead, including more than 130 women and children, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Israel said it killed 250 militants and released the identities of a handful, saying they were unit commanders and intelligence officers…Lebanese civil defense said strikes hit half a dozen sites in the heart of Beirut—upscale neighborhoods and tourist areas outside of Hezbollah’s traditional Shia Muslim strongholds in the southern suburbs. Residents screamed and ran from the explosions as plumes of smoke rose one after the other into the sunny Mediterranean sky. 

Ragheda Sharara, who was chased out of her home in Beirut’s southern suburbs at the beginning of March by the fighting, was staying at the Manara Riva Suites hotel by the sea when the bombs hit. The 34-year-old was sitting in the lobby when she felt the airstrikes and saw falling glass and smoke. Worried the building would fall, she ran outside and saw rescuers with a naked elderly woman who had been bathing and whose legs were severed in the blast. 

Israel says its targets weren’t top officials but rather midlevel battlefield commanders who it said were responsible for directing strikes at Israel and Israeli forces. The goal was to create a psychological shock by hitting them simultaneously without warning, an aerial version of the pager attack that decimated the Hezbollah’s ranks two years ago, people familiar with the operation said. Israel named the operation “Eternal Darkness.”

Excerpt from Omar Abdel-Baqui, ‘Bombs Fell Like Rain’: The Israeli Attack That Hit 100 Lebanese Targets in 90 Seconds, WSJ, Apr. 17, 2026

For the Poor by the Poor: the Ethics of Cocaine Trade

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The First Capital Command, known by its Portuguese initials PCC, started out as a disgruntled band of inmates fighting for soap and toilet paper in the 1990s.  It now has some 40,000 members behind bars and on the streets with a vast network of affiliates—making it the largest criminal group in the Americas by some estimates, operating in nearly 30 countries on every continent…With the scale of Italian organized criminal groups and the efficiency of a multinational corporation, the PCC has helped drive record cocaine seizures in Europe and sparked violent turf wars in the heart of major ports in Belgium and the Netherlands. 

 Unlike the narco-tycoons of Mexico, the heavily armed Colombian cocaine militias or the flashy drug lords of Rio de Janeiro’s Red Command gang, PCC members keep a low, businesslike profile, seeking fortune not fame—and shying away from the kinds of gratuitous violence that attract police and TV news crews. New recruits sign up to a strict internal code of conduct, their swearing-in ceremonies sometimes conducted by videoconference.

By adopting religious personas—pretending to be ministers—PCC figures have gone into far-flung regions of Brazil to gain the trust of locals and recruit new members, while securing routes to neighboring cocaine-producing countries…In 2023, prosecutors in Brazil’s northern state of Rio Grande do Norte investigated a PCC cell accused of setting up at least seven churches to launder drug money—a practice now so common that authorities have a name for it: narco-Pentecostalism. Drug profits are also laundered through gas stations, fintechs, real-estate funds, sex motels, car dealerships and construction firms…Few crimes are outside the PCC’s reach. Members today are involved in everything from illegal gold mining and cargo theft to cybercrimes and the trafficking of exotic birds…

When the PCC was born in August 1993 inside the grimy walls of the Taubaté high-security prison in São Paulo state, its founders weren’t seeking world domination. They demanded better sanitation and beds, among other basics. Brazil’s prisons were slum-like infernos—some of the world’s most overcrowded and violent, plagued by tuberculosis and lice—and rights groups said guards routinely beat inmates. Resentment was simmering at Taubaté after 111 inmates had months earlier been killed when police crushed a rebellion at another prison not far away…Alarmed by the growing jailhouse fraternity, authorities tightened prison controls and transferred inmates to other states. This only accelerated the PCC’s national expansion and hardened its resolve. “Peace, justice and freedom” became the PCC’s rallying call, as it cast itself as a parallel power to a state whose abuses—from prison officials to politicians—help the gang draw recruits….The PCC offers recruits a future in a system “made for the poor by the poor,” said Bruno Manso, a foremost authority on the gang and co-author of “The War: The Rise of the PCC and the World of Crime in Brazil.” Manso said the PCC provides what recruits feel they can’t get elsewhere: escape from “the utter misery of urban life.”

Excerpt from Samantha Pearson, How a Brazilian Prison Gang Became a Global Cocaine Power,WSJ, Apr. 23, 2026