import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup


def __get_hrefs(URL):
    """
    Extracts the paths to articles from the topic site

    :param URL:
    The url to extract hrefs from
    :return:
    A list of hrefs
    """
    page = requests.get(URL)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(page.content, "html.parser")
    results = soup.find_all("a", class_="c-thumbnail c-thumbnail--gutter")
    href_list = []
    for element in results:
        href_list.append(element['href'])

    return href_list