This Week in The World

In 1925, a smooth-talking Czech con artist read that the Eiffel Tower was in disrepair and saw an opportunity. Victor Lustig posed as a government official, invited six scrap metal dealers to a secret meeting, and successfully sold France's most iconic monument—not once, but twice. This is the story of the most brazen con in Parisian history.

For decades, France and England turned lighthouse construction into a full-blown arms race of luminosity. From the cliffs of Brittany to the rocks of Cornwall, rival engineers invented revolutionary lens systems and built impossible towers, each trying to out-shine the other—literally—while saving thousands of sailors in the process.

Imagine going to sleep French and waking up American, or being Danish one day and Swedish the next—all without leaving your home. We're counting down seven remarkable islands whose residents became citizens of entirely different countries due to treaties, sales, and diplomatic deals, often discovering their new nationality by accident.

Long before Dubai's extravagance or Jay Leno's garage, an Indian prince owned a different car for every day of the year—including custom Rolls-Royces and a fleet that employed 300 people just to maintain it. This is the story of how Maharaja Bhupinder Singh became the world's most obsessive car collector in an era when most people had never even seen an automobile, and what happened to his legendary collection after his death.

Both claim therapeutic powers, both shimmer in unexpected shades of pink, and both have been mined since ancient empires rose and fell. But the Himalayan salt phenomenon and the Dead Sea's mineral extraction industry took wildly different paths to global fame. We're diving into the surprising parallels between these two salty extremes on opposite sides of Asia.

From libraries where you check out books in one country and return them in another, to restaurants where your appetizer is served in a different nation than your dessert—these border towns redefine what it means to be international. We're counting down five places where geopolitical quirks create the most fascinating lived experiences.

Thirty-seven years after the world's worst nuclear disaster, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has become an unexpected conservation success story. We explore how radiation, human absence, and resilient wolf packs have transformed this toxic wasteland into a thriving ecosystem that challenges everything we thought we knew about nature's ability to reclaim devastated landscapes.