Wired: How Hunter Biden Won the Internet
Wired spent months talking to Hunter Biden — the son of a former US president — about his return to public life. For three years he stayed silent and painted in a Malibu garage, but in May, after nearly a decade away, he began posting on X again and gained more than 800,000 followers within a month, speaking openly about his addiction and recovery.
Wired: Bernie Sanders Saw This Coming
Wired interviews Senator Bernie Sanders, who has warned for decades that concentrated wealth threatens democracy and now wants firm regulation of the artificial-intelligence industry. Together with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez he is pushing to halt data-centre construction until safeguards are in place, and he proposes a fund that would tax the largest AI companies and pay part of the proceeds directly to citizens. Congress’s inaction on the issue, Sanders argues, is kept in place by the industry’s billionaire money, which threatens any politician at election time.
The New York Times: Norway’s ‘Viking Row’ Is a Fan Phenomenon at the World Cup
The New York Times reports on a ritual by Norway’s football fans that has become a phenomenon of this World Cup: shoulder to shoulder, supporters heave back and forth as if rowing a Viking longship, chanting “Ro!” (row!). They row in stadiums in Boston and New York, and back home too — in schools, nursing homes and even parliament, where the prime minister joined in. Norway is having its most successful World Cup in almost thirty years.
Yle: End of the line — Finland says goodbye to fixed-line phone network
Yle reports that Finland is saying goodbye to its fixed-line telephone network: the last call was made on Tuesday, 30 June, and the operator Elisa is shutting down its copper-line network for both private customers and businesses. Finland has had landline phones since the 1880s, with home use peaking in the early 1990s, but their numbers began to fall thereafter because of mobile phones — above all Finland’s own Nokia.
Meduza: Putin claims Russia has a satellite constellation that is ‘in no way inferior’ to Starlink
Meduza examines Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia already has its own satellite constellation “in no way inferior” to Starlink. The trigger: in June the military complained that Ukraine uses Starlink to guide heavy cargo drones. Putin probably meant the low-orbit “Rassvet” constellation, built by a company tied to MegaFon and Alisher Usmanov’s group; but only the first craft are in orbit so far, with commercial service promised no earlier than 2027 — so it is far too early to speak of real competition for Elon Musk.
SBS: Could this be Australia’s warmest winter ever?
SBS (republishing The Conversation) explains that Australia is having an unusually warm winter — Sydney and Melbourne have had their warmest start to winter on record. It is part of a global trend driven by climate warming, which also brought record heat to Europe in June. Meteorologists warn that this El Niño year points to a hot, dry summer with a heightened risk of bushfires.
Le Monde reports on a violent campaign against foreigners in South Africa. The “March and March” movement, which blames undocumented migrants for the country’s unemployment and crime, demanded they leave the country by 30 June; in the atmosphere of hatred at least four people have already died, including a Malawian lynched by a mob. Thousands — mostly Malawians — are now leaving, with 12,000 deported from Durban alone. One teacher says: “I have resisted xenophobic pressure in the past, but now there is no other way — we have to leave.”
TechCrunch: The DeepMind trio who built a poker AI are now making money for quant hedge funds
TechCrunch reports on three former DeepMind researchers who once built an AI that beat the best poker players and now apply the same technology to stock trading. Their Prague-based company, EquiLibre Technologies, is valued at $500 million after fresh funding; in partnership with the quant fund Tower Research Capital, its algorithms trade billions daily on the S&P 500 and Nasdaq and, the company says, have not closed a single month at a loss. The method is the same one that worked in poker: the program learns by being rewarded for good decisions, and in the markets the result is easy to measure — how much money it made.
TechCrunch: The father of the internet is finally retiring
TechCrunch reports that next week, after more than twenty years, Vint Cerf — one of the founding figures of the internet — is leaving Google. In the 1970s, together with Robert Kahn, he developed the TCP/IP protocols that let different computer networks talk to each other, often called the very foundation of the internet. Cerf, 83, predicts that the spread of AI agents — programs that act autonomously — will force companies to agree on common standards, because natural language is too imprecise for those agents to communicate with each other.
ABC: Ernst and Young staff sacked after Anthony Albanese’s private banking information allegedly breached
ABC reports that two employees have been sacked from the consulting firm Ernst & Young after they allegedly accessed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s personal banking information while working at Australia’s Commonwealth Bank. In May the federal police charged the two Sydney men with unauthorised access to data; the younger one additionally faces a charge of distributing personal information in a harassing or menacing manner. It is the latest scandal surrounding Australia’s “Big Four” consulting firms.
Financial Times: The young Chinese choosing life in ‘ghost cities’
The Financial Times writes about young Chinese people settling into half-empty tower blocks — the so-called “ghost cities” left over from China’s vast but collapsed property boom. In smaller cities such as Huizhou the rent is tiny — a few hundred euros a month for a flat that once cost a million yuan — and remote work lets them live more freely and calmly. The backdrop is a deep crisis: the fall in house prices has wiped out around €14 trillion in wealth, births have dropped to their lowest level since 1949, and some of the empty buildings may have to be demolished.
The New York Times: A Mountain Town Is the Birthplace of Mexican Soccer. But Which One?
The New York Times tells how the cradle of Mexican football is a mountainous region northeast of Mexico City, where in the 19th century English miners from Cornwall introduced the game. But which exact place was first is disputed: both the small town of Mineral del Monte, with its surviving Cornish heritage and its own tradition of meat pasties, and the nearby city of Pachuca claim to be the birthplace of Mexican football. The article appears as Mexicans celebrate their national team’s success at the World Cup.