The New York Times: Climate Change Fueling Europe’s Ferocious Heat Wave, Scientists Find
A rapid scientific analysis concludes that this June’s scorching heat in Western Europe would not have been possible without human-caused climate change. Even in today’s climate, a heat wave this widespread and intense is still rare for June — with a less than 1% chance of appearing in any given year — but 50 years ago, when the planet was noticeably cooler, it would have been “virtually impossible”. How often such waves recur in the future depends on how much countries cut their greenhouse-gas emissions.
The New York Times: How a Niche Technology Became a Choke Point for A.I.
The New York Times reports on how a once-obscure corner of the semiconductor industry — advanced chip packaging, which bundles dozens of components into a palm-size module — has become one of the key choke points in the contest for AI leadership. As the traditional approach of cramming ever more transistors onto a single chip yields diminishing gains, Nvidia and other makers increasingly rely on packaging — but it is done almost entirely by Taiwan’s TSMC, the same company that also makes the most advanced chips. That has left the US more dependent on Taiwan than ever; a plan for a packaging research centre in Arizona, backed with $1.1bn by the Biden administration, was effectively halted by the Trump administration last year.
Politico: Pope moves to clarify when wars are justified. Trump probably won’t like the answer.
On Friday, Pope Leo XIV is gathering the world’s cardinals behind closed doors to revisit the Church’s teaching on when war is justified. He calls the traditional “just war” theory, whose roots go back to St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, outdated in an age of drones, cyber-warfare and nuclear weapons, and appears to want to narrow it so that war is justified only in the strictest cases of self-defence. The stance has already clashed with the Trump administration — US Vice President JD Vance had urged the pope to be “careful” about his theology.
Wired: Europe Is Fed Up and Wants Its Own AI
Wired describes how a desire for Europe’s own — “sovereign” — AI industry is gathering strength, so as not to depend solely on American models. Although previous attempts to replicate the Silicon Valley ecosystem have not succeeded and European startups get only a tiny share of US investment, this time the push came from Washington: when the Trump administration tried to place Anthropic’s powerful “Claude Fable” model under export controls and deny foreigners access to it, many took it as a warning that relying on US companies is no longer safe.
Al Jazeera: Who will control Africa’s AI infrastructure, and at what cost?
As foreign tech companies invest in data centres, cloud services and AI systems across Africa, an increasingly pressing question is how much control African countries will actually have over the infrastructure these technologies rely on. A continent home to roughly 18% of the world’s population holds less than 1% of global data-centre capacity, and projects such as the planned $1bn Microsoft–G42 data centre in Kenya raise concerns about their enormous energy and water use. Al Jazeera notes that whether the partner is American, European or Chinese, what matters is what countries actually gain from such deals.
Wired: How People in China Keep Outsmarting Anthropic’s Geolocation Restrictions
Wired reports on how people in China get around Anthropic’s geographic restrictions to access Claude — a model many Chinese programmers consider the best, since domestic models still trail by six to nine months on coding. Although Anthropic bans accounts it suspects belong to users in China, a large black market has emerged: accounts are sold on Taobao and Telegram, while so-called “transfer stations” — intermediary servers outside China — resell access to the Claude API. After the company introduced ID verification, the market shifted toward forged identities.
ABC: Concerns China’s new ethnic unity law could put Australian citizens at risk
From 1 July, a new “ethnic unity” law takes effect in China, aimed at forging a shared national identity among the country’s 55 ethnic minorities (including Tibetans and Uyghurs), entrenching the Chinese language and criminalising “separatism” and “religious extremism”. Concern centres on a clause providing that people outside China, too, can be held accountable for “undermining ethnic unity” or “inciting separatism”. The Australian government has raised concerns directly with China and at the UN Human Rights Council, while the European Parliament has called for the law to be repealed.
NPR: Ex-NOAA employees re-create a climate data site shut down by Trump
Former employees of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have built a new climate-data site, Climate.us, to fill the gap left after the Trump administration shut down the government-run Climate.gov last year (its creators were laid off amid DOGE budget cuts). The team, led by former program director Rebecca Lindsey, crowdsourced about $280,000 and recruited some 80 scientists to fact-check the published content. The site restores the old “climate dashboard” and a 15-year archive of articles, and promises to stay non-partisan — “just the facts”.
Meduza: Бастрыкин сожалеет, что в России нельзя сажать в тюрьму с 12 лет
Alexander Bastrykin, head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, told the St Petersburg legal forum that he regrets it is not possible in Russia to bring people to criminal liability from the age of 12. According to him, today’s teenagers mature much faster and already commit crimes at 12–13 yet go unpunished. Bastrykin also noted that in 2025 students attacked schools six times in Russia, and that since the start of 2026 eight such cases have already been recorded.
Meduza: Рядом с офисом «Иннопрактики» в Москве (ее возглавляет дочь Путина) поставили систему ПВО
In Moscow, an S-400 air-defence system has been installed not far from the main office of the Innopraktika foundation — headed by Vladimir Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova. According to Radio Svoboda, citing satellite imagery, the installation is most likely part of a new air-defence ring around central Moscow being rolled out as Ukrainian drone strikes on the city increase. At least 27 such installations are deployed around Putin’s own residence at Valdai.
SBS: The night sky is fading. What happens when we lose the stars?
Light pollution across Australia is increasingly blotting out the stars, and that is not merely a loss of scenery: it is a cultural and ecological shift that disrupts ecosystems and threatens Indigenous knowledge that has relied on the night sky for thousands of years. The article’s subject, a member of an Australian First Nations community, describes the “Emu in the Sky” constellation — seen not in stars but in the dark patches of the Milky Way — whose position signals when emu eggs may be collected. A NASA-funded study finds that the amount of artificial light at night rose worldwide by about 16% between 2014 and 2022.
Financial Times: SpaceX bonds sell off days after AI and rocket group’s $25bn debt deal
The Financial Times reports that SpaceX’s bonds fell sharply in price on Friday — just days after the company borrowed $25bn — as investors began to doubt the long-term prospects of Elon Musk’s rocket and AI company. The bonds’ yield has moved close to levels typical of “junk” borrowers, even though the rating agencies have assigned the company an investment-grade rating. In 2025 SpaceX posted losses of $4.9bn; one expert calls the borrowing so soon after the record-breaking IPO a sign that the market is entering “bubble territory”.