Happy Monday, Lunch Club!

A Bosnian war veteran is finally talking about the wealthy foreigners who allegedly paid to shoot children from sniper nests above Sarajevo, three decades after the siege ended. In San Francisco, an investigation by The Standard exposes a man who moved through the city's most exclusive clubs while allegedly coercing his partner into sex work and collecting the proceeds. On a quieter note, a geologist makes the case that 700 million years of frozen planet may be the reason any of us exist at all. And ProPublica tells the story of a 9-year-old Colombian girl whose planned Disney World vacation turned into four months inside an immigration detention center in Texas.

Happy reading!

Brett

During the four-year siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s, wealthy foreigners allegedly paid up to £88,000 for the chance to shoot civilians from Bosnian Serb sniper positions in the hills above the city. Aleksandar Licanin, a former volunteer with a Bosnian Serb tank unit, told The Times he watched well-dressed visitors from Italy, Germany, Britain, and other countries take up positions alongside a 200-strong militia in the city's Jewish cemetery. Targets included children and pregnant women, who reportedly commanded higher fees. After a day of killing, the visitors would feast on roast pork and brandy until dawn. Italian magistrates have now opened an investigation, questioning an 80-year-old truck driver from northeast Italy who denied involvement, with three more suspects due for questioning. Licanin also claimed that Serbia's current president, Aleksandar Vucic, served as a translator for the foreign shooters, an allegation Vucic denies. Croatian journalist Domagoj Margetic says militia contacts told him shooters arrived from at least ten countries, and witnesses noted killings spiked on weekends.

Read here.

Mickey Gerold cultivated an image as a decorated veteran and successful real estate investor, moving through San Francisco's most exclusive private clubs and rubbing elbows with tech moguls and politicians. Behind that polished facade, according to his ex-girlfriend Emilia London, Gerold coerced her into having sex with men for money over nearly two years, collecting more than $100,000 in the process. London's allegations are backed by thousands of pages of records: calendar entries created from Gerold's accounts, a client-tracking spreadsheet, bank statements showing a dramatic spike in cash deposits during their relationship, and text messages coordinating the encounters. A family court judge in his divorce found Gerold lacked credibility about his finances. An Army investigation previously concluded he wore military honors he never earned. Five former partners described a cycle of charm followed by emotional and financial exploitation. SFPD's Special Victims Unit now lists Gerold as a suspect in an ongoing investigation involving 10 alleged victims. He denies all accusations and has threatened defamation suits against those who spoke out.

Read here.

Around 717 million years ago, ice swallowed the entire planet. Glaciers stretched from the poles to the equator and stayed there for roughly 57 million years. Geologist Graham Shields and his colleagues have spent decades studying rock formations on Scotland's remote Garvellach Islands, which preserve what may be the most complete record of this transition from tropical warmth to frozen wasteland. The evidence is remarkable: dropstones from drifting icebergs, frost-shattered ground, and enormous chunks of carbonate reef carried inside kilometers-thick ice sheets. The deep freeze likely resulted from the breakup of the supercontinent Rodinia, whose volcanic rock weathered rapidly and sucked carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But the real story is what happened to life. Rather than extinguishing biology, the extreme oscillations between glacial cold and hothouse warmth created evolutionary bottlenecks that may have pushed single-celled organisms toward cooperation and multicellularity. The Garvellachs are now being proposed as the official "golden spike" marking the start of the Cryogenian period, and a 2026 vote could make it official.

Read here.

Nine-year-old Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya from Colombia had her Halloween costume packed and her Disney World itinerary planned. Instead, when she arrived at Miami International Airport on October 2 with a valid tourist visa, immigration officers pulled her and her mother into separate rooms for hours of questioning. What followed was 42 hours in airport holding rooms, a plane ride, and a minivan trip to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas. By the time ProPublica reporter Mica Rosenberg met them, mother and daughter had been detained for nearly four months. Maria Antonia told Rosenberg she had fainted twice, ate mostly beans as a vegetarian with limited options, and had nothing meaningful to do all day. She overheard an officer say that if she had been a year older, they could have separated her from her mother. An immigration judge granted voluntary departure in January, but the family wasn't actually sent back to Colombia until February 6. The first thing Maria Antonia did upon returning was throw out her government-issued sweatsuit.

Read here.

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