It's not a coincidence that two global multinational investment banks and financial services companies, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, agrees that the nascent metaverse market could be worth $8 trillion in the future. In its latest Technology Vision 2022 report, titled Meet me in the metaverse, multinational information technology services company, Accenture surveyed more than 4,600 business and technology leaders across 23 industries in 35 countries. Like an arms race, futuristic big tech companies Microsoft, Facebook (FB now Meta), and Apple Inc, Google (now Alphabet) amongst others, are scrambling to sweep up the metaverse. Facebook (now Meta) describes the metaverse as "a set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren't in the same physical space as you". CEO Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is working on egocentric data, which involves seeing worlds from a first-person perspective.

Mexico's increasingly militarized crackdown of powerful drug cartels has left nearly 39,000 unidentified bodies languishing in the country's morgues – a grotesque symbol of the ever-burgeoning war on drugs and rampant violence. Investigative NGO Quinto Elemento Labs, in a recent report, found that an alarming number of people have been simply buried in common graves without proper postmortems, while others were left in funeral homes. The so-called war of drugs has claimed the lives of nearly 300,000 people over the last 14 years, while another 73,000 have gone missing. All the while, these cartels have yet to be designated formal terrorist organizations despite boasting well-documented arsenals of sophisticated weaponry to rival most fear-inducing militias on battlefields abroad. Just last month, reports surfaced that Mexico's Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) now possess bomb-toting drones – which The Drive's Warzone depicts as "small quadcopter-type drones carrying small explosive devices to attack its enemies."