Geopaix

A decade ago, a funny money mystery fell into the hands of scientists and students at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima.The university had been acquiring 19th- and 20th-century Peruvian coins from local dealers, and graduate students in the chemistry department were analyzing the pieces for their thesis work. But one coin, a 10-cent piece known as a dinero, stood out.The dinero was marked “1899.” The problem was that official records indicated no coins of that denomination were minted in Peru that year — according to the people who made the money, the coin never existed.Most international coin catalogs don’t list 1899 dineros, said Luis Ortega, a chemist at the university. And in the rare cases that they do, there is often only a note of “counterfeit” with no further detai...

When Ghada Abu Samra leaves the room in Rafah where she, her mother and brother have been living between their searches for food and clean water, she sees more Gazans packing in to the already overcrowded southern city.“Every day the numbers grow in a massive way,” said Ms. Abu Samra, a 24-year-old web development student who has been in Rafah for weeks. “There is no place for anyone except to sit in the streets and build a tent.”As almost all of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been driven from their homes by Israel’s nearly three months of airstrikes and evacuation orders, Rafah, once a city of 300,000 people, has become the main refuge for those displaced. More than 1 million people are squeezed into the city, in a tiny corner of the enclave on the Egyptian border, the United Nations s...