The New York Times: X-Ray Specs for the World’s Oldest, Sealed Letters
A team of historians, scientists and engineers has built a portable X-ray scanner that can read 4,000-year-old letters without breaking open the clay envelopes they were sealed in. More than half a million cuneiform artefacts have been found across the Middle East, but many went unstudied precisely because they were tightly wrapped in clay; the new scans are shedding light on both trading practices and the role of women in ancient Anatolian society.
The New York Times: Europe Created Heat-Wave Protections. Now Comes the ‘Crash Test.’
After the 2003 heat wave killed 70,000 people across Europe, countries built early-warning systems, opened cooling shelters and better prepared hospitals — but this week’s heat, in places 14°C above normal, is the “crash test” for those measures. Western Europe is still vulnerable: air-conditioning is rare, the number of older residents has grown 40% in two decades, and half of France’s 52 official heat waves since 1947 have come in the past 16 years.
Axios: AI lab musical chairs hits Google the hardest
The reshuffling of AI-lab talent has hit Google hardest: within a week, two prominent researchers left DeepMind — Noam Shazeer, a co-author of the transformer paper “Attention Is All You Need”, who is joining OpenAI, and Nobel laureate John Jumper, who is moving to Anthropic. The talent war has intensified as much of the industry believes artificial general intelligence is near, and companies place extraordinary value on the handful of people who know how to direct that research.
Axios: People Inc. CEO accuses Google of abusing its market power
Neil Vogel, CEO of People Inc., one of America’s largest publishers, accuses Google of abusing its market power by using the same web crawler for search and for AI — so publishers can’t block AI scraping without also losing the search traffic they depend on. Vogel argues that the scale and quality of their content is the publishers’ real protection: the moment they started blocking the crawlers, “the phone started ringing”.
Financial Times: How Europe’s refineries helped save your summer holiday
After the US and Israeli strikes on Iran in late February cut off Middle East export routes — which normally supply a quarter of Europe’s peak-season jet fuel — European refineries reconfigured for maximum jet-fuel output. BP’s Castellón plant in Spain lifted its production by about 30%, and in March the region’s total hit a record 1.3 million barrels a day, halving the need for imports; the dire predictions of running out never came to pass.
LRT: Lithuania’s Ruginienė government: ten moments that defined 272 days in office
After just under ten months in power, the Social Democrat government of Lithuanian PM Inga Ruginienė resigns on Tuesday; LRT looks back at ten defining moments: a record defence budget (5.38% of GDP), a defence minister sacked after 28 days, a culture minister gone within a week, the Belarus cigarette-smuggling balloon crisis and border closure, the restoration of relations with China, and an ethics ruling that bars Ruginienė from serving as PM again for a set period.
Yle: Finnish military allows long hair and earrings for men
From July, the Finnish Defence Forces will let men wear long hair under the same rules already applied to women: hair may not be worn loose, and the neck and ears must stay visible. It is part of a push for gender equality, though unusual hairstyles, brightly dyed hair and facial hair (without a justified reason) will still be banned.
Axios: Tech stocks slump as AI bubble fears loom
Tech stocks fell sharply on Tuesday as AI-bubble fears weighed on the market: the Nasdaq dropped 2.5%. Memory-chip and data-storage makers were hit hardest — after South Korea’s KOSPI fell 10%, Micron lost more than 10% and Sandisk more than 12%. It’s too early to say whether this is a serious shakeout or just a temporary rebalancing.
Paris’s top-floor homes — former maids’ rooms and converted attics under zinc roofs — become nearly unbearable in heat waves: 42°C indoors, with the temperature not dropping below 36°C at night. The zinc itself isn’t to blame (it reflects the sun well); the culprits are the low, poorly ventilated, uninsulated roofs with skylights that turn the flats below into a terrarium-like heat trap.
According to Verstka, over three months Russians have been searching the internet ten times as often for instructions on “how to siphon petrol”: in March there were about 4,000 such queries a week on Yandex, last week nearly 44,000. The cause is a fuel crisis in Russia’s regions triggered by Ukrainian drone strikes on refineries and oil depots — sales are being capped at filling stations, and drivers are looking for ways around the limits, such as filling the tank, siphoning the fuel into cans and refilling.
Nina Ostanina, head of the Russian State Duma’s committee on family protection, has claimed that a domestic-violence law would scare men away from marriage, because they would fear that “sometimes impulsive women” could treat any touch at home as an assault. She says criminal punishment for physical violence already exists, and predicts that if the law passes, “ten in ten” families will divorce. Such a law has been sought in Russia for more than a decade — yet in 2017 domestic violence was, on the contrary, decriminalised.