The surprising triumph of "Africa's Kim Jong Un" | Russia has taken thousands of Ukrainian kids. Some don't want to go home | The "crazy professors" making drones for Ukraine | Inside the Race to Crush Paris' Bedbug Crisis

View online | Unsubscribe (one-click).
For inquiries/unsubscribe issues, Contact Us

The surprising triumph of “Africa’s Kim Jong Un” - The Economist

In 1967, at the height of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, a group of young Eritrean students posed for a photo on the outskirts of Nanjing. The Eritreans, whose tiny country had been annexed by Ethiopia five years previously, were training to be guerrilla fighters in order to win it back. Looking at the photo, it’s not hard to guess which student would eventually emerge as a leader. Standing at the back, Issaias Afwerki towers over his comrades and their Chinese tutors, who loyally clutch copies of the Little Red Book. Arms crossed, he looks straight at the camera with a quizzical expression.

Since that photo was snapped, China has become a superpower. Nanjing is now overrun by shopping malls, and bold skyscrapers have replaced the modest homes discernible in the photo’s background.

In contrast, Eritrea seems stuck in a time-warp. Not only is it one of the world’s poorest countries, it is also a giant prison, from which legions of despairing youngsters try to flee every year. Pundits dismiss it as the “North Korea of Africa”.

Continued here

Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.

Russia has taken thousands of Ukrainian kids. Some don’t want to go home - The Economist

Kostya Ten (pictured above) was 13 years old when Russian troops entered his village of Kosatske on the banks of the Dnieper in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine. He was a tearaway kid from a complicated family. His mother died when he was tiny; his father, who was ethnically Korean, used to grow watermelons but was bedridden following a stroke. He had five older sisters and was treated as the baby of the family. At the age of 11, Kostya began running around with a gang of older boys who stole scrap metal. At first, he served as a lookout. Then they told him to nick some metal from his own home, promising to split the proceeds with him. Instead, they kept the money for themselves.

For two weeks after the full-scale invasion, Kostya and his family slept in the basement of their house. Then the Russian soldiers arrived and set up checkpoints. All the shops were looted and helicopters whirred overhead – they were “so cool”, said Kostya. He got talking to the occupying soldiers, many of whom were Ukrainians from Donetsk and Luhansk, eastern regions of Ukraine where Russia backed a secessionist takeover in 2014.

“Are you afraid?” a few of the friendlier soldiers asked Kostya. They were not much more than teenagers themselves. Kostya was hesitant. “Don’t be afraid,” they said and told him they had been forced into the army. They bought biscuits for the local kids and sometimes they let them hold their guns. “One showed me how to load it,” said Kostya. “The gun was really heavy, I almost fell over.”

Continued here

Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium

The “crazy professors” making drones for Ukraine - The Economist

The day before Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” was a good one for Alexei and Kostya, tech entrepreneurs in their 30s from the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine. An investor had agreed to fund their startup: the friends were developing a device to make electric-car charging-points more efficient. Alexei was an electronics engineer at Kherson State University. Kostya was the manager of the local Apple Store. (They didn’t want to give their surnames.)

Within days, Kherson fell to the Russians and the men’s plans were in tatters. The Apple Store was looted and closed; university classes were suspended. The men joined the resistance – Alexei made explosives in his apartment while Kostya drove his red Tesla round the city pretending to be a taxi but actually delivering ammonia to bombmakers. When Kherson was liberated in November, they started a new business: making drones for the Ukrainian army.

In June I met Alexei and Kostya in Kherson at the house of a friend of theirs – they wanted to keep the location of their workshop secret. Before they told me about their project, the men recounted their misadventures under occupation. It wasn’t long, they said, before the FSB, Russian intelligence, cottoned on to their resistance activities. Alexei, who has tufty strawberry-blond hair, sits bolt upright and talks in efficient, short sentences, showed me the Russian TV news report of his arrest in summer 2022. He smiled shyly at the newscaster’s description of “a terrorist planning mass murder”.

Continued here

Inside the Race to Crush Paris’ Bedbug Crisis - WIRED

A cute little beagle with big smiley eyes â¦ how could you not fall in love with Watson? But the residents of my Parisian building were terrified when they saw him enter. Watson is not like any other dog. He's trained to detect the tiny insects that have been all over the front pages of French newspapers for the past few weeks: bedbugs.

This fall, fear has become paranoia. Pictures of bedbugs in cinemas, metros, and trains have saturated social media. "I've been getting so many calls from worried people lately," says Watson's owner, Charlotte Ducomte, founder of the company WatsonDetect. For years now, she and Watson have been going through the city and its suburbs to detect bedbugs in private apartments and company offices. These past few weeks, she's been inundated with calls from people who "wanted to have their apartment checked â¦ just in case." There is "ia bedbug panic in Paris" right now, she says.

Bedbug numbers in France have surged in 2023. There's been a 65 percent increase in pest control visits for the insects across the country this year compared to last, says France's Union Chamber of Insect Control.

Continued here

You are receiving this mailer as a TradeBriefs subscriber.
We fight fake/biased news through human curation & independent editorials.
Your support of ads like these makes it possible. Alternatively, get TradeBriefs Premium (ad-free) for only $2/month
If you still wish to unsubscribe, you can unsubscribe from all our emails here
Our address is 309 Town Center 1, Andheri Kurla Road, Andheri East, Mumbai 400059 - 93544947