Happy Monday Everyone! Today’s newsletter: 996 words…3.75 mins
🗞 Today’s Edition: Louvre’s Royal Jewel Heist, Gaza’s Ceasefire Cracks…& Resumes, Spain Bans Black Cat Adoptions, Mamdani’s Imam Firestorm, NJ UFO Mystery Solved… & much more!
🚨 Watch For:
NYC Mayoral Debate Round 2: Wednesday, Oct. 22nd
President Trump to attend the ASEAN summit: Oct 26th-28th
📜THE HIGHLIGHT
One killer insight to stash in your back pocket
🇫🇷 The Louvre’s Royal Jewel Heist — Paris’ Newest True-Crime Thriller
It took seven minutes for four masked thieves to humiliate France. On Sunday morning, dressed as construction workers, the crew rolled up to the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon, sliced through a window overlooking the Seine, and lifted 8 pieces of 19th-century royal jewels straight out of their display cases — all while tourists were in the building.
Among the loot:
Napoleon’s emerald-and-diamond necklace for Empress Marie Louise
A diamond diadem belonging to Empress Eugénie
Queen Marie-Amélie’s 631-diamond sapphire necklace.
They left behind the Regent Diamond (€60M) — too famous to fence.
The getaway: Two Yamaha TMax bikes, military precision, and a trail of pure Parisian chaos. Sixty investigators are now chasing ghosts, while Macron called it an “attack on French heritage.”
The jewels are said to have “inestimable” and “incalculable” heritage and historic value. The monetary estimate, although undisclosed, is likely to be in the hundreds of millions.
💡Insider take: Experts say they’ve got 48 hours before the jewels are dismantled or stones re-cut. Translation: the crown jewels of France might soon be untraceable sparkle dust.
🔍 Bottom line: Oceans Eleven, but make it Napoleonic. Paris just got its own art-crime blockbuster — and the Louvre’s reputation took the real hit.
♟️THE CHESSBOARD
Geopolitics Decoded In 3 Moves
Top-left: Hamas terrorists approaching the Yellow line; Bottom-left: IDF bombs Hamas targets; Right: IDF places yellow blocks along the line of control.
💥Gaza Ceasefire Cracks — The Yellow Line Blurs
The U.S.-brokered Gaza ceasefire almost imploded Sunday after Hamas fighters crossed the “Yellow Line”, killing two IDF soldiers near Rafah.
Israel hit back fast — a rapid series of airstrikes hit Hamas field commanders, tunnel sites and weapons depots, leaving 26 dead, before Washington pressed both sides to stand down.
Trump insisted the truce was “still in place,” while envoys Witkoff and Kushner rushed to Tel Aviv to salvage it — with VP JD Vance en route.
Israel’s now begun marking the “Yellow line” with yellow concrete blocks to establish clear boundaries and ensure tactical clarity along lines of control.
💡 Why it matters: This was a stress test of Hamas’s internal discipline and Washington’s leverage. The ceasefire’s holding by duct tape.
🇺🇸 🇦🇺 Trump & Albanese — Mates, Minerals, and Missiles
President Trump and Australian PM Anthony Albanese met at the White House today, sealing a Critical Minerals Partnership to curb U.S. reliance on China.
The pact prioritizes Aussie lithium, cobalt, and nickel for U.S. defense and EV supply chains.
Talks tackled AUKUS (trilateral security pact with the UK), with Trump backing the $239B submarine project, but hinting at renegotiating timelines.
Australia also pledged $2B to speed U.S. shipyard upgrades.
🦘 Bottom line: Washington’s locking in its Pacific allies — and Canberra’s cashing in on America’s China anxiety.
🐈⬛Spain Bans Black Cat Adoptions for Halloween
The Catalonian town of Terrassa has temporarily banned black cat adoptions from Oct. 6 to Nov. 10 to stop potential Halloween “rituals” or prop use.
Officials say adoption requests for black cats spike every October, often for aesthetic or superstitious reasons.
⚡Terrassa houses about 100 cats (12 black) and insists the move is precautionary, not punitive — a bid to protect pets from trend-driven cruelty and spooky-season impulsiveness.
🗽THE EMPIRE FILES
Political Drama From DC To NYC
📸 Mamdani’s Imam Photo Sparks NYC Firestorm
NYC mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani is under fire after posting a photo with Imam Siraj Wahhaj — once named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Wahhaj also describes homosexuality as a “disease of society”
His son and other family members were arrested in 2018 for involvement in a failed terrorist plot.
His son also kidnapped a disabled child for a religious ritual which led to the child’s death.
The backlash was instant: victims’ families and rivals like Andrew Cuomo accused Mamdani of “glorifying extremism.” Zohran hit back, calling the outrage “Islamophobia, plain and simple.”
⚡Bottom line: At this point, his socialism and communist tendencies seem like child’s play compared to his close ties with radicals.
👽 Jersey’s “UFO” Was Just… a Secret Test Flight
The wild “UFO” lights over New Jersey last November? Not aliens — just a classified manned eVTOL test by a private defense contractor working under a U.S. government contract .
The stealthy 20-foot aircraft, seen hovering over Picatinny Arsenal, sparked mass hysteria before the company quietly confirmed it at an Army summit.
🛸Bottom line: America’s next-gen war tech looks a little too sci-fi for civilian airspace.
🤖 CODES & POWER
Tech Wars, Crypto Chaos, and AI’s Black Mirror Moments
🍕X’s Handle Marketplace
X is launching a marketplace for inactive handles, letting Premium users buy usernames — from $2.5K to over $1M for “rare” ones like @Pizza or @Tom
Premium+ and Business users get first dibs on “priority” names like @GabrielJones for free (if approved).
It’s part of Musk’s push to turn vanity into revenue as ad sales keep sputtering.
💡Why it matters: This will be a test to see if X can build a sustainable business model beyond advertising, making user identity a core revenue stream.
🔌 AWS Outage Grounds U.S. Flights
Amazon Web Services’ hiccup on Monday hit Delta, United, and other airline sites, leaving travelers unable to check in or see reservations.
Outage struck early morning in the US-EAST-1 region, with Amazon reporting partial recovery by 5:30 a.m. ET.
AWS blamed "increased error rates" in its US-EAST-1 region (tech-speak for "oops").
💡Why it matters: The entire economy is now hostage to the stability of a few cloud providers, making their resilience a matter of national security.
📺 FUN FACTS & TRIVIA
Scotland’s National Animal
The national animal of Scotland is the unicorn. It was first used on the Royal Coat of Arms in the 12th century. It symbolized purity, power, and a refusal to be conquered.