Recommended Links of the Week (No. 554): North Korea Robs Banks, Devil Pacts, and More

What can you find in this edition of Recommended Links? Some of the best headlines are: North Korea robs banks, pacts with the Devil, prehistoric cockroaches, and the guardian of your nightmares. Want more? Keep reading!

North Korea is robbing banks all over the world: "North Korea is one of the most hermetic countries in the world, where many details are not known with certainty. There are many doubts about how they finance themselves, since they have closed international markets, and tourism, although growing, is very limited and controlled to be a source of large income. Now, they have discovered that bank robbery is a great source of financing for the country."

Exploitation, how it was born and the best exploitation cinema films: "If something works, don't touch it: exploit it. Exploitation cinema lived its golden age between the 60s and 70s thanks to the gradual loss of strength of the Hays Code. Grindhouse sessions and the most insane films in double or triple bills took over movie theaters like those on 42nd Street in New York, popular cinemas for showing uninterrupted B-movie programs that were scheduled without rest. Let's talk about it."

These are the real pacts with the Devil documents: "Remember: the Prince of Darkness invented bureaucracy and wants everything in writing. You're going to have to sign a contract. Usually on human skin and with a crow's quill (that's his job) and with blood (that's your job). As at Strambotic we care about you, we show you a couple of 'real' pacts with Don Diablo that we have located so you don't get ripped off signing just anything."

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The constant of Nature that remains firm even near a black hole: "The fine-structure constant is one of those invariant numbers that appear in physicists' formulas, like the mass of the electron or the speed of light. And it determines the strength with which electrically charged particles interact with each other. No one knows why the constant has the value it has, which is approximately 1/137. But what they do know is that if that number were very different, atoms could not even form."

Cockroaches that lived among dinosaurs, preserved in amber: "Two new species of cockroach preserved in amber, which lived 99 million years ago, have been discovered in a cave in Myanmar by an international team of researchers. The two specimens received the names Crenocticola svadba and Mulleriblattina bowangi and have been placed in the family Nocticolidae."

Pyrrhus of Epirus: "From 297 BC, at age twenty-two, Pyrrhus of Epirus was able to begin his own military expansion campaign, switching sides in the Wars of the Diadochi after being supported by Ptolemy I of Egypt. Apart from military conquest, one of the mechanisms most used by Pyrrhus of Epirus to extend his power was marriage alliances."

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The guardian of your nightmares: "During the night, you wake up and feel a presence watching you. Even if you don't dare to look at it and your body doesn't respond, you know it's there. Then you feel a weight pressing on your chest. Every second seems endless. This phenomenon currently called sleep paralysis has been known for centuries, but it was not distinguished from nightmares. Both had culprits with many names, but with the same behavior." Here you have not one, but two galleries of illustrations of the "monster".

The terrible memoirs of a soldier in Hitler's war: "A strong detonation. One of ours is shattered and one of the arms is torn off at the shoulder joint. A whitish liquid like porridge comes out of the skull. He no longer screams, he only babbles and the whites of his eyes are visible. His hands begin to shake strangely, blood, urine and saliva escape from his body. He is one of the fallen and has a miserable, lonely, unfortunate death"

The year London forced smoking to avoid a pandemic that would wipe out part of the population: "And then tobacco arrived. A theory began to circulate in the city saying that smoking tobacco was a way to keep the air entering the lungs free of disease. This absolutely surreal situation led to such picturesque images where entire neighborhoods and districts spent the day smoking regardless of age. The children, of course, were also included, and those who refused were forced to do it."

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The farthest view between two points on Earth: "The idea is to take a photograph from a mountain peak to the farthest possible distance allowed by the curvature of the Earth. Usually, the ideal way to achieve a record is to try to find another distant mountain and thus achieve a greater distance. The current record: 443 kilometers. The distance is between Gaspard in the Alps and Fienstrelles in the Pyrenees."

Concrete City, the abandoned utopia of Pennsylvania: "After putting a hundred explosive cartridges into the first of the two dozen buildings condemned to be demolished, all they had achieved was making a few small scratches. The concrete they were made of was too strong to be torn down. However, that did not save the town from total destruction. This is the story of Concrete City and how it went from a planned city to ruin eaten by vegetation."

The oldest company in Europe is a restaurant: "The restaurant has not been open continuously since those early years of the 9th century, but has had to close several times. And I don't mean closing on Mondays for staff rest, as happens in many places. For example, the abbey where the restaurant is located was taken by Napoleonic troops at the beginning of the 19th century and they turned it into their headquarters in the area. The restaurant was stopped for a while. This creates a problem."