That's because the dumb-shits are using geoip to determine language rather than the browser's language acceptance policy sent in its headers to the server when requesting the URL.
Defective *command and control* thinking
Code:
https://messaging-notifications.api.nytimes.com/svc/message/v1/list/global.json?_=1500829171846
GET /svc/message/v1/list/global.json?_=1500829171846 HTTP/1.1
Host: messaging-notifications.api.nytimes.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:54.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/54.0
Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Referer: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/23/us/politics/trump-russia-sanctions.html
Origin: https://www.nytimes.com
DNT: 1
Connection: keep-alive