PBS News: Lured by Russia, African soldiers end up on deadly front lines of Ukraine war
A PBS News segment on men from African countries whom Russia lures into its war against Ukraine with promises of jobs, hefty bonuses and citizenship. Ukrainian authorities estimate that Russia has recruited 27,000 foreign nationals from 130 countries since 2022. African soldiers are humiliated and beaten by their commanders and sent into assaults as cannon fodder; most survive less than two months at the front, and there is no way to break the contract and go home.
RFE/RL: Ukraine Is Winning Its War On Russian Oil Refineries. On The Front Line, It’s A Bloody Slugfest.
RFE/RL writes that Ukraine’s drone strikes on oil refineries have forced nearly all Russian regions to restrict fuel sales, but on the front line in the Donetsk region Ukraine is struggling to hold Kostyantynivka — one of the “fortress” cities guarding the way to Kramatorsk and Slovyansk. Russian soldiers sneak into the city in small groups and dig into ruined buildings; analysts estimate it could fall within a month. The Kremlin claims the city has already been taken; Zelensky replies that this is just another lie and offers, in that case, to meet Putin there for peace talks.
Wired: Scientists Have Identified a New Fossil Species of Axolotl in Mexico
Wired reports that researchers at Mexico’s National Autonomous University have described a new extinct axolotl species — Ambystoma quetzalcoatli, the first fossil salamander formally described in Mexico. The remains found in the state of Hidalgo show that axolotls lived in the lakes of what is now Mexico as far back as the Pliocene, several million years ago, and that even then, like modern axolotls, they retained larval features throughout their lives.
The New York Times: ‘Who Should I Vote for?’ Voters Turn to A.I. Before Casting Their Ballots
The New York Times writes that this year’s US midterms may well be the first elections in which a meaningful number of voters ask artificial intelligence for advice before casting their ballots: people photograph their ballot and ask Claude or ChatGPT to help pick candidates for dozens of local offices. One hour of research replaces many, but experts warn that the answers can contain errors, tend to mirror the asker’s own views, and favour candidates with a bigger online footprint — campaigns are already publishing material in formats that AI tools prefer to cite.
The New York Times: Nearly a Million Investors Lost a Total of $3.8 Billion on Trump Crypto Coin
The New York Times, citing data from the crypto analytics firm Nansen, reports that nearly a million buyers of Trump’s $TRUMP coin — about two out of every three — have lost a combined $3.81 billion; the coin is down 97 percent from its peak. Trump himself made $636 million from the coin last year, collecting a fee on every trade regardless of the price. Traders who bought early and sold before the crash also profited.
The New York Times: The Bureaucratic Hell of Getting a Job in 2026
In a New York Times opinion column, Jessica Grose compares looking for a job in the US to a bureaucratic purgatory: companies are hardly firing anyone, but hardly hiring either, and the number of people out of work for more than six months is the highest since the pandemic. Job seekers send hundreds of applications, prepare for dozens of hours and go through multiple interview rounds, yet still end up without a job; roughly 90 percent of companies use artificial intelligence at some point in hiring, so applications have to be tailored to algorithms whose evaluation logic is a black box.
Financial Times: Yankee pyramids: how to build a presidential library
A Financial Times essay for the US 250th anniversary on presidential libraries — a peculiarly American institution: since Franklin D. Roosevelt, every president gets an archive building with a museum after leaving office. The author describes how these libraries are turning from archives into monuments: Obama’s center in Chicago no longer holds the president’s papers at all, while Trump’s planned building in Miami is a roughly 50-storey skyscraper with golden statues that he himself says will most likely be a hotel. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has declared unconstitutional the law under which presidential records belong to the state, not to the president himself.
LSM: A tragedy on a European scale — the Holocaust. What it was like in Latvia and Ukraine
In an LSM history piece, Oleh Kudrin, a Ukrainian journalist living in Latvia, marks the remembrance day for the victims of the genocide of the Jewish people by recalling how the Holocaust unfolded in Latvia and Ukraine. In Latvia, the Nazis and their local collaborators murdered 70,000 local Jews and another 16,000–20,000 brought in from elsewhere; in Ukraine, more than 1.4 million Jews. The two lands are directly linked by the executioner Friedrich Jeckeln, who organized both the Babyn Yar and the Rumbula massacres and was hanged in Riga in 1946; the article also honours the Righteous Among the Nations — the rescuers of Jews, including Žanis Lipke of Riga.
Meduza publishes British photographer Keith Macgregor’s photos from the “City of Lights” exhibition at a Hong Kong gallery — night streets in neon glow from the 1980s to the 2000s. Hong Kong’s neon streetscape once inspired the cyberpunk genre and Blade Runner, but since the 1980s the number of neon signs has fallen from a hundred thousand to about four hundred: LEDs are pushing neon out, many signs have been dismantled as dangerous or illegal, and only a handful of craftsmen who know how to make them remain.
Wired: Where NASA Posts Its Best Space Photos, and How to Find Them
Wired rounds up the places to look for NASA’s photos and videos: the comprehensive NASA Image and Video Library, the better-organized NASA Images with its Image of the Day, the Johnson Space Center’s Flickr account with more than 63,000 photos sorted into albums, and the agency’s social media accounts. Because NASA’s work is paid for by the US government, most of its imagery is free to use and share.
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