Vitol

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A carpet beater

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Vitol trades roughly 8 million barrels of oil per day — more than Saudi Arabia produces — and is owned entirely by its own employees, none of whom are household names. It operates from Rotterdam with near-total invisibility.

Foucault's 'History of Sexuality' — three volumes published before AIDS killed him — argued the Victorian era didn't repress sex; it invented an entirely new way to talk, confess, and be made by it.

Woven rattan, swung hard against hanging rugs in the yard every spring — the carpet beater was killed by one invention, the vacuum cleaner, within thirty years of its own peak production.

Colin Powell held up a vial of fake anthrax and pointed to blurred satellite photos at the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. He later called it 'a blot' — his single worst word.

In 1989, the FBI secretly recorded a Patriarca family induction in a Medford, Massachusetts house — candles lit, pistol on the table, saint's card burning in cupped hands — the first confirmed recording of the Mafia rite.

The common swift lives its entire adult life in the air — sleeping, mating, and moulting on the wing — touching ground only to nest. It may fly two million kilometres in a lifetime without once choosing to land.

A Mars-sized body called Theia struck the proto-Earth 4.5 billion years ago; the vaporized debris ring cooled into the Moon. Earth's closest companion is the corpse of a collision.

IC 814 was hijacked on Christmas Eve 1999 and held on a Kandahar tarmac for eight days; one passenger was stabbed to death. India freed three militants, one of whom later helped plan the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

Anwar al-Awlaki, born in New Mexico, was placed on a presidential kill list, denied due process in U.S. courts, and killed by CIA drone in Yemen in September 2011. His lawyers were told they needed a license to represent him.