NYT: The Cloud Has Sound: The Unrelenting and Unseen Cost of A.I. Data Centers
The “heartbeat” of the AI economy is a low-frequency vibration produced by the giant cooling fans and diesel generators of data centers. The US already has more than 3,000 of them; some residents living nearby, whose health and homes are being wrecked by the relentless hum, filed lawsuits last month in three cities specifically over the noise.
LSM: Eight days in June: how the occupation unfolded in 1940
A multi-part LSM/LTV history feature on the eight June days of 1940 — from the night-time attack on the Masļenki border post and the Soviet ultimatum to the Red Army tanks in Rīga on June 17 and the installation of the puppet Kirhenšteins government. A reminder of how selectively the censored press of the day reported the occupation.
Culture writer Evelīna Stiene rounds up where to celebrate the summer solstice across Latvia — in Rīga, Kurzeme, Vidzeme, Zemgale and Latgale — from dawn rituals and herb markets to greeting the sunrise and late-night open-air dances.
Axios: American pride has fallen off a cliff
Ahead of the US’s 250th birthday, an identity crisis has gripped the country, a survey finds: Americans are less proud of their nation, more religiously divided and increasingly doubtful that the “American Dream” still works. The author warns that democracy can survive policy fights but not the loss of a shared civic faith.
Le Monde: Why AI systems, which rely on the internet, poorly reflect the diversity of human knowledge
A Le Monde investigation into why the internet is a poor mirror of human knowledge: the programs that crawl and harvest web content cover only 40–80% of the publicly accessible web (less than 10% of the whole web), only 343 of the world’s roughly 7,000 languages are found online, and knowledge passed on orally and through practice never makes it in at all. So AI models inherit the web’s biases and cannot claim to be comprehensive.
Le Monde: Musk’s AI, Grok, was used in strikes in Iran, reveals Pentagon
The US Department of Defense revealed in a court filing that Elon Musk’s AI Grok (the “Grok Gov Model”) is already being used in the military targeting program Project Maven — originally powered by Anthropic’s Claude, until the government ended its contract with Anthropic in February after the company refused to let its tools be used for fully automated strikes and the mass surveillance of Americans.
Financial Times: Huawei’s big comeback tests limits of US chip controls
Seven years after US sanctions many saw as a death sentence, Huawei is staging a comeback: the head of its chip unit, He Tingbo, unveiled in Shanghai a logic-stacking technology that boosts performance without the latest ASML tools, while the company builds large AI clusters by linking many weaker chips together. It challenges the assumption that export controls leave China’s semiconductor industry stuck at 7 nanometres.
Radio Prague International: Czech Radio chief: funding reform is aimed at weakening public broadcasters
The heads of Czech Radio and Czech Television are criticising the government’s plan to replace the licence fee with direct funding from the state budget, warning it threatens public media independence. Czech Radio director general René Zavoral says the reform would cut the broadcaster’s budget by about CZK 411 million and questions whether it complies with the European Media Freedom Act.
NYT: The Sweet Tongue: How Ecuador’s Andes Created a Language of Its Own
In Ecuador’s Andean highlands, everyday Spanish has fused so seamlessly with the Indigenous Kichwa tongue that a distinctive dialect has emerged — one that bends grammar and lends speech a melody, often unnoticed by the speakers themselves. The journalist spent years collecting phrases overheard in cafes and offices that even many Ecuadoreans don’t fully understand.
NYT: A Deadly Outbreak of Plague, Nearly 5,000 Years Before the Black Death
In Siberian graves, scientists have found the oldest known traces of plague — Yersinia pestis DNA in the skeletons of hunter-gatherers who lived 5,500 years ago, nearly 5,000 years before the Black Death. It overturns the previous view that the bacterium was originally mild and only later turned deadly, alongside the rise of farming and cities.
Al Jazeera: Satellite images show 10 places where water is disappearing globally
On the UN World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought (June 17), Al Jazeera uses satellite imagery to show ten shrinking lakes, rivers and reservoirs around the world — from Argentina’s Paraná River and Bolivia’s Lake Poopó to Iran’s Lake Urmia and the US’s Lake Mead. The world loses about 324 trillion litres of freshwater a year.
At the demand of participants in Russia’s war against Ukraine, authorities in Vorkuta have dismantled a 2010 memorial to victims of political repression in the Yur-Shor cemetery — it bore 33 names and the coat of arms of Ukraine. Memorial calls Yur-Shor one of the main remembrance sites of the Vorkuta camp complex; the move is part of Russia’s ongoing erasure of the memory of Stalinist victims.
NYT: Japan Raids Ice Cream Giants in Cartel Investigation
Japan’s Fair Trade Commission has raided the offices of six leading ice-cream makers on suspicion of running a cartel: the companies allegedly colluded to raise prices beyond the rise in raw-material costs, harming consumers. Ice-cream sales in Japan are climbing as summer approaches.
This is a daily link digest — links to the articles I read the previous day.
Tip: a paywalled article can often be read by searching for its URL on archive.ph; an article in another language can be translated with hugo.lv.