Volcanoes are erupting in The Philippines, but on-fire Australia received some welcome rain. The Iran war cries have been called off and The Donald’s military powers are about to be hamstrung by the Senate. Meanwhile, his impeachment trial is starting, and we’re all on Twitter for a front-row seat.
What Could Go Right? Operation Thunder
The largest rescue ever of illegal wildlife trafficking just occurred under our noses.
Emma Varvaloucas
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Operation Thunder
Seahorses hidden in snack boxes. Turtles stuffed into luggage. A polar bear carcass, tiger cubs, and thousands of rare, blue-tongued lizards. All of this and more has been found at various points in the history of Operation Thunder, a global crackdown of the illegal wildlife trade. Run by Interpol and the World Customs Organization (WCO), it is now in its eighth year.
Operation Thunder’s latest haul, announced this month, included the rescue of nearly 20,000 live animals, all of them endangered or protected species, as well as thousands of tonnes of animal products and timber. The animals will all be repatriated to their country of origin or rehabilitated in conservation centers.
When possible, their DNA will also be collected to support prosecutions, as in the case of the oryx—a type of antelope—pictured below, which were seized in Iraq. Operation Thunder also resulted in the arrests of 365 people and the identification of six transnational criminal networks.
Operation Thunder is just a small dent in the black market for illegal wildlife products, which is worth over 20 billion USD per year and linked to other forms of organized crime, like money laundering and arms trafficking. As the illegal wildlife trade has grown, however, so too has a coordinated approach to fight it.
The first edition of the program, Operation Thunderbird, was conducted in 2017 across 49 countries and saved over 8,000 animals. Operation Thunderstorm followed in 2018 and Operation Thunderball in 2019.
At the time, it was unclear if the operations would remain a short series. “It is not something that we aim at doing only for once and for the sake of having a nice press release,” Henri Fournel, then the coordinator for environmental security at Interpol, told National Geographic in 2019. “This is, for us, the foundation of a new era where customs and police will work hand-in-hand against wildlife and timber traffickers.”
Since then, Operation Thunder has become an annual event that now encompasses 138 countries. The number of seizures, as well as the number of recovered animals, has roughly doubled since its start. (One note: while Operation Thunder is funded by a number of partners, the United States Agency for International Development is one. Since the agency was gutted, it’s unknown if the same levels of funding will continue into 2025.)
Interpol agents gather intelligence before the monthlong operation and share it with local police, customs officials, and border control. They then descend on airports, borders, checkpoints, and postal hubs, using trained dogs and x-ray scanners to search for contraband. They even check scrap yards, taxidermy shops, garages, and pet fairs.
The full list of seizures from Operation Thunder 2024 is here. Among the live animals were 12,427 birds, 5,877 turtles, 1,731 other reptiles, 33 primates, 18 big cats, and 12 pangolins, the scale-covered mammals that protect themselves by curling into a ball. The list also includes a tonne of sea cucumbers smuggled into the US from Nicaragua.
Operation Thunder 2024 was the largest rescue ever of illegal wildlife trafficking, and it just occurred under our noses.
P.S. The chance of the asteroid we wrote about last week hitting Earth has risen to over three percent. If you want to be involved in the science behind planetary defense, one of our amazing readers wrote in about Asteroids@home, an open source project to identify asteroids that are too far away or small to be included in existing sky surveys. Anybody can participate by downloading a computer program and letting it run in the background!
By the Numbers
1.4M: The square kilometers of the Arctic Ocean mapped for the first time this month, part of a project to map the floor of every ocean by 2030.
<15M: The number of mink and fox pelts produced globally in 2023, down from 66 million in 2019. Bans on fur farming and public awareness of animal mistreatment have curbed the fur farming industry drastically.
2018: The year global sales of combustion engine cars peaked. (Other datasets point to 2017.)
Quick Hits
🥘 How about some space paella? Citizen inventors have been busy whipping up new methods for cooking in space, making long-term, deep space missions more viable.
🌍 A competing theory about how likely it was for intelligent life to develop on Earth is emerging. Instead of the “hard steps” theory, which asserts that the development of intelligent life was highly improbable and rare, the new thesis states that it is the predictable result of certain global conditions—implying that this would be the case for other Earth-like planets as well.
🇬🇳 In January, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared sleeping sickness eliminated in Guinea, which had the most cases in West Africa in the early 2000s. How did they do it?
⚖️ In Illinois, guns must be surrendered to law enforcement in cases where an order of protection has been served, per a new gun safety measure signed into law by Governor JB Pritzker last week. The legislation is named after a domestic abuse victim who was shot and killed by her husband.
🧑⚖️ A 2020 law passed in Argentina mandated environmental training for all public officials—the first law of its kind in the world. While the program’s implementation has been challenged by a climate-skeptic president, it has still continued. In the judiciary branch, thousands of personnel, including judges, have already gone through the training.
🤯 The first hybrid quantum supercomputer—a quantum computer integrated into one of the world’s fastest supercomputers—has just gone live in Japan, crunching numbers for physics and chemistry research.
🤯 While in North America, political orientation and trust in scientists are interrelated, that is not the case in the rest of the world. Trust in scientists remains high worldwide, and the majority of one survey’s 72,000 participants say that they want scientists to play an active role in society and policymaking.
📉 The World Health Organization has published its first-ever report on drowning prevention. The global drowning death rate has dropped by 38 percent since 2000.
💡 Editor’s pick: Two points of view—from the right and the left—on the limits of President Trump’s blitz of executive orders ($).
TPN Member Originals
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- The White House demonstrates USAID’s efficiency | CGD | Charles Kenny
- Out of chaos and corruption, a revelation and a reckoning | Lucid | Ruth Ben-Ghiat
- It’s a constitutional contest, not a crisis | The Edgy Optimist | Zachary Karabell
- What’s most frightening about Trump’s Gaza ravings | NYT ($) | Thomas L. Friedman
- Germany’s Friedrich Merz and a bold political gamble | GZERO | Ian Bremmer
- What Hegseth and Trump don’t understand about DEI and the military | WaPo ($) | Theodore R. Johnson
- The paradox of Trump’s first weeks | Slow Boring | Matthew Yglesias
Reasons to calm down about China | NonZero | Robert Wright- Trump is no populist | NYT ($) | David Brooks
- How to realize your own love supreme | The Atlantic ($) | Arthur C. Brooks
- How the woke right replaced the woke left | The Atlantic ($) | Thomas Chatterton Williams
- From ‘defund the police’ to ‘defund air traffic control’ | Breaking the News | James Fallows
- Ukraine: Fog of peace | Diane Francis | Diane Francis
- Syria’s not-so-new reality | The International Correspondent | Faisal Saeed Al Mutar