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Dozens of political prisoners have been freed from Belarusian prisons as part of a deal between authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko and US President Donald Trump. Fifty-two prisoners have been released, including trade union leaders, journalists and activists, but more than 1,000 political prisoners remain in jail. In exchange, the US has said it will relieve some sanctions on Belarusian airline Belavia, allowing it to buy parts for its airlines. The prisoner release came on the eve of joint military exercises involving Belarus and close ally Russia, and after what neighbouring Poland called an unprecedented Russian drone incursion into its airspace. Poland is closing its borders with Belarus because of the Zapad-2025 drills, which last until Tuesday.

It's a perennial debate: whether American tech companies are contributing to government control of the internet in China. But long before Apple ceded control of local user data to the state or Microsoft was found to have partnered with a Chinese military-run university on artificial-intelligence research, there was Yahoo. Back in the early 2000s, Yahoo was operating a popular search engine and email service in China, and it was one of the first tech companies to be found sharing user information with the Chinese government, leading to the imprisonment of a number of Chinese citizens. The ensuing attention and subsequent lawsuit against Yahoo from the families of two political prisoners landed a big blow against the company. All this probably seems like a lifetime ago, but my colleague Eileen Guo has found that the consequences of Yahoo's actions are still very much felt today.

Cyber-activists opposed to the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, say they have penetrated the state-run railway's computer system and threatened to paralyse trains moving Russian troops and artillery to the country for a potential attack on Ukraine. Their goals include freeing political prisoners, removing Russian soldiers from Belarus, and preventing Belarusians from "dying for this meaningless war", a person involved in the attack told the Guardian. A member of the "Cyberpartisans" said the hacktivist group had so far encrypted or destroyed internal databases that the Belarusian railways use to control traffic, customs and stations, an action that could cause delays to commercial and non-commercial trains and "indirectly affect Russia troops movement". They had so far avoided taking more drastic steps to paralyse trains by downing the signalling and emergency control systems, but said they "might do that in the future if we're confident innocent people won't get injured as a result". The group has demanded that Belarus cease serving as a staging ground for a buildup of Russian troops and military weaponry, some of it just miles from the Ukrainian border.

In this editorial, we take a look at a post-pandemic dystopia where AI and robotics engulf the flow of labour, talent and the economy. These are our forecasts of an economy optimised by artificial intelligence and ripened by robotics. Robots' infiltration of the workforce doesn't occur at a steady, gradual pace. Instead, automation happens in bursts, concentrated especially in bad times such as the current Covid 19-induced economic paralysis, when humans become relatively more expensive as firms' revenues rapidly decline. At these moments, employers shed less-skilled workers and replace them with technology and higher-skilled workers, which increases labor productivity as a recession tapers off.