LUNCH BREAK READS

Friday, May 22, 2026

Happy Friday!

It is a holiday weekend in the U.S., so we will be off on Monday. LBR will return on Tuesday next week!

I will leave you with four interesting stories, and if you scroll to the bottom, we have the week’s top stories.

Brett

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01 • ~21 Minute Read

The Guardian

Sean Williams

‘The devil’s child’: the rise and fall of the only female yakuza

Mako Nishimura joined Japan's Inagawa-kai-adjacent underworld in 1986 after defending a pregnant friend with a baseball bat. She ran sex workers, sold meth, sliced off her own fingertip to apologize for her gang's drug use, and remains the only confirmed woman to complete sakazuki, the ritual binding a yakuza to her boss until death. The gangs she joined controlled casinos, stocks, and politicians. Then the bubble burst, anti-yakuza laws gutted their finances, and foreign syndicates moved in. Now 59, broke, and tattooed past her hands, Nishimura helps ex-yakuza leave the life and is slowly rebuilding contact with her mother and sons.

Read the Story →

02 • ~24 Minute Read

404 Media

Samantha Cole

How Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart

A 14-year-old boy at Radnor High School in Pennsylvania paid $250 for an Apple App Store subscription to Movely, then used it to generate sexual deepfakes of five female classmates and shared them. School administrators initially called the abuse "rumors," offered the girls the option to leave class early, and sent parents an email stating no crime had occurred. Six days later, police charged the boy with summary harassment. Parents pushed back at board meetings for months. Governor Josh Shapiro's office got involved. The case exposes how schools, police, and Title IX enforcement are buckling under nudify apps targeting children.

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03 • ~15 Minute Read

CNN	Emma Tucker

A stillbirth and Facebook post expressing her grief landed her in prison for over 2 years. Experts say it’s part of a pattern

Patience Rousseau had a stillbirth in rural Nevada in 2018, buried the remains in her yard, and wrote a Facebook post grieving the baby she named Abel. A sheriff's deputy who knew Rousseau's babysitter saw the post, obtained a search warrant, and arrested her under a 1911 statute criminalizing women who take substances intending to terminate a pregnancy. Rousseau spent over two years in prison after her overworked public defender advised a guilty plea. Judge Charles McGee vacated the conviction in 2021, calling it "a total miscarriage of justice." The deputy who arrested her kept Abel's ashes on a shelf in her Texas home.

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04 • ~10 Minute Read

High Country News

Sofie Hecht

The dark legacy of the atomic age is still playing out in New Mexico

For 80 years, families living within 150 miles of the 1945 Trinity test site in New Mexico have buried relatives killed by cancer the federal government refused to acknowledge. Tularosa locals say they don't ask whether they will get cancer, only when. In July 2025, after a 20-year campaign by the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, Congress finally added New Mexico to the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act through Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Nearly 10,000 people have applied; 1,218 claims have been approved, totaling $121.8 million. Co-founder Tina Cordova calls it a victory but says the fight continues.

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A 14-year-old paid $250 to make deepfake porn of his classmates

LUNCH BREAK READS

Friday, May 22, 2026

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