At the end of October 2026, a difficult and delicate humanitarian mission quietly succeeded: hundreds of civilians were evacuated from Russian-occupied Oleshky, a city in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine, and brought back to territory controlled by the Ukrainian government. These were ordinary people—families, elderly men and women, mothers with children—who had endured months of occupation, shelling, and shortages. When the opportunity came to leave, they made the brave decision to abandon their homes and everything familiar. The rescue route was anything but simple. Evacuees were first transported by buses through occupied territories to the Russian city of Anapa,…

In Lusaka, Zambia, Joan Chirwa has spent years watching information move through society like water through a sieve—sometimes clear, sometimes muddied, and often carrying things that should never have been poured in. As the founder of the Zambia Free Press Initiative, she has become one of the country’s most thoughtful voices on the quiet crisis of misinformation and disinformation spreading across digital platforms. Her warning is simple, but it carries the weight of someone who has seen the consequences: before you believe something, before you share it, before you let it shape your emotions or your decisions, you need to…