In ‘Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away,’ former Wall Street Journal reporter Ann Hagedorn provides a captivating account George Koval, who was born in Iowa and died a Soviet hero.

Malcolm Nance, the onetime National Security Agency cryptographer and current Brookings Scholar, once observed, “nothing in the world happens by coincidence.”

But when it came to George Koval, the Soviet sleeper spy carefully embedded into the Manhattan Project who, with his all-American background and scientific training, revealed key American nuclear secrets to his Moscow patrons, the U.S. national security establishment seemed all too willing to overlook as mere coincidences the unlikely concatenation of events leading to Koval’s betrayal.

REPORTER: "Should members of congress and their spouses be banned from trading individual stocks while serving in congress?"

PELOSI: "No…We are a free market economy. They should be able to participate in that." pic.twitter.com/2SNqSCwFEU

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) December 15, 2021

Turns out that within a few days of that, Pelosi and her husband Paul bought millions in call options for Google, Salesforce, Roblox, and Disney stocks.

The Pelosi family’s trades this month include Google and Salesforce call options worth between $500,000 and $1 million each, as well as Roblox call options valued at between $100,000 and $250,000. The duo also bought up between $250,000 and $500,000 in calls for chipmaker Micron Technology and between $100,000 and $250,000 of Disney call options in disclosures that were earlier reported by Congresstrading.com.

Paul Pelosi runs Financial Leasing Services, a real estate and venture capital investment and consulting firm. In recent years he’s made big-money bets on companies his wife is supposed to regulate, including Amazon, Apple, and Google.

That’s right, it’s been a banner year for speaking truth to power, preventing democracy from dying in darkness, and sexual healing.

The corporate media continues to hit home run after home run, elevating the discourse, and making sure we all know that no matter what our lying eyes tell us, we’re getting a happy ending.

As such, it’s difficult to drill down to the most heroic of the heroes 2021 has delivered, but as I’m also something of a hero, I did the work. In doing so, I distilled the heroic number of heroes down to five, though I also encourage you to do the work. We’re all in this together. //

Chris Cuomo: Bravery in Covering for Your Brother, Whose Deviant Proclivities You Share

Jake Tapper: Bravery in Being More Partisan Than the Elected Democrats You Interview

Chris Wallace: Bravery in Admitting You’re Not So Objective After All

1965 Jaguar E-Type in How to Steal a Million, Movie, 1966 IMDB

This time, a US freight forwarding company is swinging into action and using three Boeing 747s to fly potatoes into Japan amid a critical shortage of french fries in Japanese McDonald’s outlets. //

Normally, McDonald’s brings its potatoes in via ship from Vancouver. But flood damage and the impact of coronavirus on global supply networks have caused delays there.

“The fries shortage is primarily due to the supply side of McDonald’s global supply chain,” Hiroshi Ohashi, an economics professor from the University of Tokyo, told NBC. “They procure potatoes from the US, where port shipping has been a bottleneck.”

Step in Ryan Petersen, Chief Executive Officer at Flexport, a US-based freight forwarder company. On Wednesday, he confirmed via Twitter the company had contracted to fly three planeloads of potatoes to Japan to alleviate the french fries shortage.

When news of the potato shortage broke in Japan, there was a scramble to get the last serves lest a person be forced to live without french fries for a week or two. This only caused a further shortage. //

How many potatoes can a 747 freighter fly? One person online did the maths. A Boeing 747 freighter can fly about 112,760 kilograms of freight. A large serve of McDonald’s french fries weighs about 154 grams. That’s about 2.2 million large serves of french fries per plane.

This seems like a lot, but one person pointed out there are 2,975 McDonald’s outlets in Japan. McDonald’s 34,000 worldwide stores go through just over four million kilograms of potatoes per day. On a pro-rata basis, Japanese McDonald’s customers eat 375,000 kilograms of french fries a day. On these numbers, Ryan Petersen might have to back up for some further flying.

CNN announced Tuesday that it would pull the plug on its long-running Airport Network, causing jubilation among many of the network's critics on social media.

Network President Jeff Zucker announced the CNN Airport Network will officially end on March 31, citing a "deep decline in airport traffic because of COVID-19, coupled with all the new ways that people are consuming content on their personal devices." //

CNN Airport does not use the exact same feed as the standard CNN, as additional sports and weather segments are added while some graphic video is removed. CNN Airport also goes out of its way not to air any coverage of plane crashes or other disasters that could spook passengers.

As part of the deal, CNN paid airports to leave the network on, and many travel hubs even have agreements in which CNN pays for their TVs and infrastructure. The Philadelphia Inquirer previously reported that airports also receive "up to six minutes each hour to promote the airport or local attractions" as part of the deal. //

For years, the agreements had blurred the lines between news and advertising as the network blurred the lines between news and political activism.

The RedLine information-stealing malware targets popular web browsers such as Chrome, Edge, and Opera, demonstrating why storing your passwords in browsers is a bad idea.

This malware is a commodity information-stealer that can be purchased for roughly $200 on cyber-crime forums and be deployed without requiring much knowledge or effort. //

While browser password stores are encrypted, such as those used by Chromium-based browsers, information-stealing malware can programatically decrypt the store as long as they are logged in as the same user. As RedLine runs as the user who was infected, it will be able to extract the passwords from their browser profile.

The Kyoto University in Japan has lost about 77TB of research data due to an error in the backup system of its Hewlett-Packard supercomputer.

The incident occurred between December 14 and 16, 2021, and resulted in 34 million files from 14 research groups being wiped from the system and the backup file. //

At the moment, the backup process has been stopped. To prevent data loss from happening again, the university has scraped the backup system and plans to apply improvements and re-introduce it in January 2022.

The plan is to also keep incremental backups - which cover files that have been changed since the last backup happened - in addition to full backup mirrors.