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LSM: President \u010cakste’s daughter who feigned insanity in Siberia for her children’s sake. The story of Maiga \u0160\u012brone’s self-sacrifice<\/a><\/p>\n Pianist Maiga \u0160\u012brone, a daughter of Latvia’s first president J\u0101nis \u010cakste, was deported to Siberia with her two children in 1941. Realising that her children could only be sent home if she herself were declared legally incapacitated, she deliberately stayed in the psychoneurological hospital where she had ended up after admitting she was the president’s daughter \u2014 an admission that prompted Soviet doctors to diagnose her with schizophrenia. For eleven years she kept up the appearance of insanity so the children would not be brought back to Siberia. Her great-great-granddaughter Inga Baj\u0101re retells this story of self-sacrifice to LSM.lv, based on letters the family preserved.<\/p>\n Politico: Inside the whirlwind 24 hours that led the White House to slap export controls on Anthropic<\/a><\/p>\n Politico<\/em> reconstructs the chaotic 24 hours that led the US administration to impose export controls on Anthropic and force it to pull its just-released Fable model. After Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised concerns to the White House about bypassing the model’s guardrails, a series of tense phone calls followed between Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and senior officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.<\/p>\n Le Monde: ‘The AI war has begun’: France and Europe worried as US blocks Anthropic’s latest AI model<\/a><\/p>\n Washington’s unprecedented order forcing Anthropic to disable its latest models, Mythos and Fable 5, is seen in France and Europe as a demonstration of US power and control over the AI sector. Politicians across the spectrum \u2014 Attal, Bardella, M\u00e9lenchon \u2014 call for urgent European sovereignty and support for the French start-up Mistral AI; one of them dubs Anthropic America’s “Strait of Hormuz”.<\/p>\n The New York Times: The World’s Leading Deepfake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes<\/a><\/p>\n A portrait of Hany Farid \u2014 the world’s leading digital-forensics expert who, in the age of AI-generated video, can no longer trust what he sees with his own eyes. Handed a viral video that appears to show a missile striking a school in Iran, he works through it frame by frame to determine whether it is real \u2014 racing against the internet, which decides it is reality whether or not it is.<\/p>\n RFE\/RL: EU Set To Host Taliban For First Time Despite Outcry Over Human Rights Violations<\/a><\/p>\n The European Union is preparing to host a Taliban delegation in Brussels for the first time for “technical talks” \u2014 likely on 22 or 23 June \u2014 mainly about returning Afghans, including rejected asylum-seekers, from Europe to Afghanistan. Rights groups sharply criticise the move, especially after the revelation that nearly 3.8 million Afghan girls remain barred from education \u2014 one expert warns the EU is “normalising a regime of gender apartheid” in exchange for a short-term fix on migration.<\/p>\n ChinaTalk: Notes on Egypt<\/a><\/p>\n Travel notes on Egypt’s New Administrative Capital \u2014 a mega-city the Sisi regime is building in the middle of the desert an hour from Cairo, past endless posters of the president. The author contrasts the airbrushed official image with the heaps of rubble just out of frame, and concludes that nobody quite knows why the city exists at all.<\/p>\n