Ir.lv: From one microphone to Europe: LNSO’s 100-year story
The Latvian National Symphony Orchestra is marking its centenary. Its predecessor, the Riga Radiophone Orchestra, began daily broadcasts on September 5, 1926 with just 14 musicians, exactly as many as its single microphone could pick up. The piece also traces the station’s own origins: parliament allocated 140,000 lats for it in 1924, and its first official broadcast, on November 1, 1925, was a live relay of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly from the National Opera.
PBS NewsHour: Inside Afghanistan’s secret schools where women defy the Taliban to educate girls
Nearly five years after the Taliban banned education for girls over 12, Afghan women keep teaching the next generation in secret. A PBS correspondent visited an underground school in a Kabul basement where hundreds of teenagers study, and in Herat spoke with women who took to the streets in June against even harsher dress rules and were met with gunfire from Taliban forces. A clandestine online school now illegally educates 12,000 girls nationwide.
Le Monde: Belgian brewers battle government’s new alcohol-prevention slogan
Belgium’s Brewers Federation is fighting the government’s plan to replace the warning “excessive alcohol consumption is harmful to health” with the blunter “alcohol is harmful to health,” arguing it unfairly stigmatizes the whole industry. The move has backers even within the ruling coalition, but the health minister points out alcohol kills nearly 10,000 people in Belgium every year, and an addiction specialist dismisses the brewers’ argument as one that denies alcohol’s addictive nature and blames the people it harms.
Meduza: Russia and the West are both chasing Pavel Durov. Why does he bother everyone so much?
Meduza examines why Telegram founder Pavel Durov is being pursued by both Russia and the West at once. On the surface the accusations look alike, everywhere the platform is accused of not doing enough against terrorism, fraud and other illegal content, but Russia’s case has repeatedly shifted its reasoning over a decade and is really a fight for control of Telegram, while the French and Australian proceedings turn on a narrower, more legal question of where a digital platform’s accountability ends.
Wired: OpenAI Cut Off a Billion-Dollar Customer to Avoid Elon Musk
OpenAI has ended its partnership with the coding tool Cursor after Elon Musk’s SpaceX bought it for $60 billion, a call that could cost OpenAI over a billion dollars in annual revenue. The company says it can no longer trust Musk’s companies to honor its terms of service. Cursor’s CEO shot back that OpenAI’s models make up only 5 percent of Cursor’s user traffic, but an OpenAI executive countered that usage share isn’t a proxy for revenue or value.