Tag Archives: real story

High Price: Jailed For Climbing a Skyscraper

George King disguises himself as businessmen, runners, and passed-out drunks — all to gather intel on some of the world’s most secure and iconic buildings so that he can illegally free-climb them without any safety equipment what-so-ever.

When he was just 19, after months of preparation, he climbed London’s famous Shard. The stunt landed him in prison – but since then his obsession has grown stronger.

We spoke to George and his childhood friend Caspar to hear how he planned his most famous climb, how his adrenaline-fueled hobby was born, and how it became more extreme over the years.

Australia’s Poo Divers

Next time you’re having a shit day at work, spare a thought for Australia’s professional poo divers. They’re tasked with making sure the country’s sewerage processing plants are running well. They suit up and dive down into toxic ponds of excrement to clear obstructions and manage the huge machines that keep things regular.

In the nation’s poop they’ve found teeth, undies, and a lot of corn. The job is hard, they’re submerged in thick sludge, working in the pitch dark, with nothing to guide them other than their instincts. But what sounds like hell to us, they find strangely peaceful. And the smell? To them, it just “smells like money.”

The Rise of Deadly Tiger Attacks

Residents of the protected Leuser National Park in Aceh struggle to keep Sumatran tigers away from their livestock and homes. Once a rarity, these kinds of attacks are now on the rise in North Sumatra. Between 2019 and 2020, Sumatran tigers killed at least 20 cattle in this region alone.

The attacks are also an economic strain on the region’s farmers, costing around $10,000 in lost cattle. But there’s another, more concerning outcome of the rise in attacks—an environment of fear amongst those who call the forest borderlands their home.

Raising Boys Away From Women: Gender Segregation in India

In some North Indian towns and villages, it’s an age-old tradition for unmarried boys to live in a room outside of the home called the “baithak”, separated particularly from the women of the family. The boys, aged between 6 and 20 years old, enter their own houses only for meals and hang out in these “baithaks” during the day.

We travel Rajasthan and Haryana in India, to see why some villages follow this system of separating families on the basis of sex and understand the rarely documented “Baithak” System.

The Bros of Fracking

We head to North Dakota fracking territory to meet the new generation of young and wealthy directional drillers who are taking part in the politically loaded and controversial method of obtaining oil.

Escaping the FLDS Polygamy Cult

The FLDS broke away from mainstream Mormonism in order to continue the practice of polygamy. They established the community of Short Creek along the Utah/Arizona border to follow their beliefs in isolation. In 2011, their prophet Warren Jeffs was sentenced to life in prison (plus 20 years) for sexual abuse of two of his child brides, ages 12 and 15.

The Freemasons and the Mafia

From a local accountant who tipped off a mob boss, to a national politician accused of being a Mafia fixer – in Italy, the lines between Masonry and Mafia are blurred.

We look at different parts of the criminal economy, separating fact from myth and find out how deep the links between Freemasons and Mafia run.

The Truth About Crystal Meth

Around 500,000 people in California are addicted to methamphetamine. Out of a population of almost 40 million, that’s one in every 200 people. But this goes way beyond the US: Meth is raging across Mexico, the Philippines and South-East Asia too.

Meth is also one of the most misunderstood and unfairly stigmatized of all the illegal drugs. Here we pick apart crystal meth fact from fiction and discover how the War on Drugs has created a world on speed.

We examine the social implications of prohibition worldwide. Any attempt to shut down the trade in drugs such as heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine or weed invariably sets off a chain of events that just makes things worse, leaving a trail of death, illness, violence, slavery, addiction, crime and inequality across the globe.
Everyone loses – except, in a weird kind of way, the drugs themselves.

How America Got Hooked on Opioids

Any attempt to shut down the trade in drugs such as heroin,
cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine or weed invariably sets off a chain of events that just makes things worse, leaving a trail of death, illness, violence, slavery, addiction, crime and inequality across the globe. Everyone loses – except, in a weird kind of way, the drugs themselves.

Around 58,000 Americans were killed in the Vietnam War. But in 2017 alone, 70,237 Americans died of drug overdoses; the War on Drugs is like a Vietnam War every year.

This is the story of the North America Opioid Crisis – how an oversupply of the prescription drug oxycodone collided with fifty years of drug prohibition to create an epidemic every bit as serious as COVID-19.
This terrifying crisis reaches every corner of American life, far beyond the clichés of the ‘inner-city drug user’.

How Mephedrone Conquered Eastern Europe

This is how Mephedrone (4-MMC) has spread across Eastern Europe and become the most popular drug for everyone from ravers to intravenous users.

M-Cat is king of Russia and a number of former Soviet states, such as Georgia. It is cheap, available and increasingly potent which explains why it’s turned into most people’s favourite amphetamine.

We explore how this trend started in Russia and expanded into a number of bordering countries and how it’s morphed from just a party drug into something far more dangerous.

The 12-Year-Olds Drug Dealers

For the past decade, the UK has been horrified by the phenomenon of County Lines – big city criminal groups using kids as young as 12 to take over the drug supply of smaller towns and villages.

It’s taken years for the police to even begin to understand that many of these children are groomed and exploited, rather than just arresting them as dealers. We show how county lines are a direct product of the War on Drugs itself.

We examine the social implications of prohibition worldwide. Any attempt to shut down the trade in drugs such as heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine or weed invariably sets off a chain of events that just makes things worse, leaving a trail of death, illness, violence, slavery, addiction, crime and inequality across the globe. Everyone loses – except, in a weird kind of way, the drugs themselves.

The Opioid Crisis Sweeping Africa

As the world has been transfixed by the opioid crisis in North America, another crisis, just as serious, has been unfolding almost unreported across Africa.

The addictive prescription painkiller Tramadol has exploded in popularity, used by everyone from workers trying to cope with long hours and grueling labor, to university students looking to have a good time. It’s even the drug of choice for members of Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram, fueling their violence.

Now, governments are threatening to crack down, using the same War on Drugs methods of repression that have failed everywhere else. And meanwhile, as counterfeit pills flood the continent, new research is questioning whether people are even taking real Tramadol at all.