What happened
Ukraine yesterday hit a major oil refinery in Moscow, along with a warehouse and residential buildings, in what Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin called Kyiv’s “largest ever” drone attack on the Russian capital. Sobyanin said “a few drones” got through, out of 1,600 targeting the Moscow region, including 450 aimed at the city, and the attack was ”clearly planned with the aim of disrupting“ yesterday’s final day of voting in Russia’s first parliamentary elections since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Kyiv said it was targeting Moscow’s Gazpromneft-Moscow Oil Refinery (pictured above, burning) to deprive Russia of war funding. 

Who said what
Ukraine has been using its drones to “make the Russian public feel the war’s consequences and pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin into negotiating a peace settlement,” The Associated Press said. Kyiv’s refinery attacks have caused months of “widespread fuel shortages” in Russia, The New York Times said. Even before yesterday’s strikes, “not many fuel stations had any gas to sell.”

What next?
With almost all electoral competition quashed, “Putin’s ruling United Russia party is expected to retain its dominance in the parliament and present the win as proof of public support for the war,” Politico said. With 58% of votes counted last night, Putin’s party had 58%, Russia’s Central Election Commission said.

What happened
The Trump administration on Saturday barred reporters from CNN, Politico and MS NOW from the White House, following through on President Donald Trump’s post a day earlier warning he was “banning” the three outlets “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” The White House Correspondents’ Association and other media organizations condemned the decision, and the networks threatened legal action.

Who said what
Trump’s public and private “frustrations” with the media coverage of his presidency “reached a fever pitch” when “one of his closest aides, Natalie Harp, showed him clips of anchors on the cable network MS NOW criticizing his administration,” The Wall Street Journal said. His decision to ban the three news organizations hours later “caught many White House officials by surprise,” and “one senior administration official reacted with exasperation,” arguing that the move “would do little to achieve the president’s goal of improving press coverage.”

What next?
Trump is clearly “not interested in playing by traditional First Amendment rules and norms,” Penn State University media law expert Amy Kristin Sanders told The Associated Press. It’s “not an exaggeration to say his hostile actions toward news organizations and individual reporters have a chilling effect on freedom of expression around the world.”

Researchers have found evidence that ancient humans chewed on betel nuts, a stimulant still widely used today. Analyzing the teeth of early human foragers from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi revealed “dental pathology” most likely attributed to the “habitual sucking of whole betel nuts,” said a study published in the journal Science Advances. 

Written accounts of betel nut chewing go back about 2,000 years, and previous archaeological evidence goes back about 3,500 years. The new findings extend potential betel nut use by tens of thousands of years.

The skeletal remains had “deep, rounded grooves in some of their teeth,” the study’s authors said at The Conversation. These grooves were “unlike any previously documented form of prehistoric dental wear” and “pointed to an unusual activity, performed repeatedly over a long period.” Researchers compared the wear to the “rounded notches worn into the teeth of habitual smokers who regularly clenched the abrasive stems of clay tobacco pipes” during the colonial period.

The similarity led the researchers to the betel nut, whose “rounded seeds” match the “size and shape of the grooves,” said the authors. While not well known in the U.S., the nut is “one of the world’s most popular intoxicants,” especially in Southeast Asia, said Popular Science. 

Chewing the drug produces a euphoric effect because of a psychoactive ingredient called arecoline. Prehistoric humans likely used the nuts as painkillers, said The New York Times, but in chewing on them, they “wore their teeth down to the pulp,” which “would have been excruciating.”