Insider Finance - Business - Ukraine’s body collectors

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February 24, 2023

Hello, Insiders. This is Emily Cohn, Insider’s deputy editor in chief. Today marks one year since Russia invaded Ukraine. I want to quickly highlight some of our important and impactful work about this conflict.

We shared Katie Livingstone’s story of two volunteers who traveled to Ukraine to become war heroes, only for chaos to ensue. Photojournalist Alan Chin got access to the mobile command that's keeping Ukraine's trains running and filed a dispatch on board a packed train. Our documentary team has profiled a group of amateur fighters who started their own battalion and used satellite images to show the damage to historic landmarks in Ukraine.

Nicholas Carlson will be dedicating his notes next week to the true cost of this war — and what comes next. Stay tuned. But now, let’s get started.

— Emily Cohn

In today’s edition: Ukraine’s battlefield body collectors, the industry #MeToo forgot, and the expert sounding the alarm on Canadian “super pigs.” If this was forwarded to you, sign up here.

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THE BIG STORY

Ukraine’s body collectors

Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters

In the year since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last February, it’s often fallen on civilians to find and retrieve the bodies that pile up in mined forests and cratered fields.

Black Tulip is a humanitarian mission of Ukrainian civilians: They carry the dead from the battlefields, or exhume and retrieve bodies from shallow graves in newly liberated territories.

Oleksiy Yukov, 37, leads one of those groups. He estimates his team has retrieved at least 800 bodies since last February — just a fraction of the deaths recorded since the beginning of 2022.

"I see death exactly the way it is — not like the statistics that you see in the news,” Yukov said. “I see people and their encounter with death, in the very moment that it happened. I see the position in which the person died. I see under which circumstances the person died."

READ THE FULL STORY HERE

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Travelers say hotel resort fees have gotten out of control. Consumers are fed up — and they have the support of President Joe Biden, who has called on lawmakers to bar resort fees that can cost anywhere from $25 to $50 a night. Why fees have become a problem.
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A high-speed train ride

Taylor Rains/Insider

“I rode on one of Europe's fastest high-speed trains in first class — for $160.” Insider’s aviation reporter Taylor Rains traveled from Amsterdam to Paris on Thalys, a train that can reach speeds of 186 mph. And she says it easily beats flying. A look at her journey.

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This edition was curated by Emily Cohn and edited by Hallam Bullock, Lisa Ryan, Dave Smith, Nathan Rennolds, and Kevin Kaplan. Get in touch: insidertoday@insider.com.

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Insider Finance - Business - Ukraine’s body collectors

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