Kickstart: This is the way: Seattle police bust a shop selling stolen Star Wars Lego sets

A shop owner is headed to court for dealing in stolen merchandise — 171 Lego toy sets that had been swiped from another retailer in Seattle.

In July, Seattle police launched Operation MandalOrganized Retail Theft, a name based on the fact that a shoplifter had repeatedly stolen Lego sets, frequently making off with ones from the Star Wars spinoff TV series The Mandalorian.

Seattle police said in a news release that the store's loss prevention official said the thief had taken more than $10,000 worth of merchandise.

Another employee noticed that a store near Pike Place advertised it was selling many of the same items that had been stolen. When store officials checked out the store, many of the items still had RFID tags on them. They alerted police.

"While the detective was at the store, the prolific shoplifter arrived and sold multiple items to the shop's owner," the Seattle Police Department said in its release. "Through additional undercover work, police determined the owner was knowingly trafficking stolen goods, and ... officers served a warrant at the store."

The 67-year-old store owner was arrested for trafficking in stolen property. The search continues for the shoplifter.

There's been a lot of talk about China's reasons for limiting the import of plastic scrap for recycling. The biggest issue is that China doesn't want to be stuck with hard-to-recycle trash from other countries.

A new podcast, though, points to something else that came in with all those recycling shipments: Western rock music via cassette tapes that had been tossed in the trash.

Mixtape: Dakou is a six-part series from WNYC's RadioLab podcast team about how music fans in China discovered that "cut out" cassette tapes — unsold albums otherwise sold at a discount — went into scrap shipments headed to China for recycling. That's where they were discovered at a recycling center, rescued and recirculated to a willing audience in a country where most Western music was prohibited.

There were, the podcast reports, anywhere between 45 million and 150 million cassettes per year shipped to China.

Full disclosure, Rebecca Kanthor, our Shanghai-based correspondent, is one of the reporters who worked on the Mixtape: Dakou project.

One episode is available now on all major streaming platforms.

As if the computer chip shortage wasn't enough for the auto industry to deal with, automakers are on watch after a cyberattack on a German supplier forced the company to shut down.

Production is at a standstill at plants operated by Eberspaecher, a supplier of heat and ventilation products, our sister paper Automotive News writes.

Automakers said they are carefully monitoring the situation and do not believe the attack on Eberspaecher's IT systems spread to other companies, but it is a reminder that many companies need to improve their cybersecurity.

Consulting firm Black Kite issued a report earlier this year noting that half of automakers are "highly susceptible to a ransomware attack" and more than 17 percent of suppliers are "likely to incur a ransomware attack."