The Self-Fulfilling Prophecies of Clarence Thomas - For decades, Thomas has had a deeply pessimistic view of the country, rooted in his reading of the Fourteenth Amendment. After the Supreme Court’s recent opinions, his dystopia is becoming our reality. - link
How Shinzo Abe Sought to Rewrite Japanese History - Japan’s longest-serving Prime Minister wanted a more assertive place for his country on the international stage—at the expense of atonement and historical accountability. - link
Prenups Aren’t Just for Rich People Anymore - Younger Americans, especially, have found their own use for prenuptial agreements: protecting their spouses from the worst impulses of the American debt-collection system. - link
The Kids Who Lost Parents to COVID - On two teens bound by grief, and the estimated two hundred thousand American children like them. - link
The Last Abortion Clinic in North Dakota Gets Ready to Leave - The Red River Women’s Clinic has thirty days to close on one side of the border with Minnesota, before reopening on the other. - link
From Vox
Tacky is back! -
The homepage of Very Famous Magazine. | Very Famous Magazine
Meet the internet aesthetic romanticizing “the glamor of getting by.”
“Money talks, wealth whispers” is a common, if a bit classist, phrase whose central idea has been observed as long as there have been social critics to point it out. We are currently emerging from a roughly decade-long aesthetic trend that reveres this kind of upscale subtlety: Nordic minimalism, sensible direct-to-consumer basics, dressed-down business casual, streetwear so nondescript it is almost violent, no-makeup makeup, bare-bones live-work spaces so indistinguishable from one another that you might be doing anything, anywhere in the world, and not know it. In the logic of 2010s corporate design geared toward (mostly) white, (mostly) hetero, (definitely at least) middle-class people, simple is good. Simple is clean. Simple whispers that it is better than you without having to say it.
It was at the apex of this culture awash in muted millennial pink that I discovered a blog called Very Famous Magazine, which exemplified its polar opposite. The website — purposefully not optimized for mobile viewing — is a shade of cyan so bright it hurts your eyeballs, with bright purple headlines and decorative stock gifs of roses and glitter from the pre-social media internet. But to dismiss these aesthetic choices as merely nostalgia for the GeoCities era or Y2K “trashion” would be to miss the point. Under the section “Who Is Very Famous?” it describes itself thusly:
A hotel lobby.
7/11 candy.
Watching Showgirls alone at midnight.
The condensation from your frappuccino.
The jet streams in your heart-shaped jacuzzi.
A strip mall in the late afternoon.
At the intersection of luxury and overdraft protection.
The smell of motel air conditioning and sprinklers on St. Augustine grass.
For terrible lifestyles.
The reason I came across Very Famous Magazine also sort of fits in with the Very Famous aesthetic of glamor minus elegance: The founder is my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, Kelsey Lawrence, who’s a freelance writer based in Texas and New York. (It’s not weird! We’re friends!) Kelsey launched Very Famous in 2018, while staring out the window overlooking her parents’ apartment complex pool, becoming increasingly disillusioned with women’s media and its refusal to publish anything truly off-kilter, as well as its stylistic loyalty to mainstream standards of “good taste.”
It’s difficult to categorize the precise ethos of Very Famous, and internet culture has enough catchy little nicknames for niche aesthetics — “I get a little tired of hearing ‘something-hyphen-core,’” Kelsey tells me — but I like her definition: “It’s sort of about the glamor of getting by each day, and finding those little moments of glitter, whether it’s a sparkly top from TJ Maxx or walking by a nail salon with roses in the window.”
I’m reminded of a phrase I read in the similarly weird, although more male-coded, newsletter Blackbird Spyplane, which coined the term “Un-grammable Hang Zone” to describe places that feel welcoming, lived-in, and unpretentious but whose pleasant auras are impossible to capture on Instagram. Like the widely reported return to “casual” posting or the end of the “influencer aesthetic,” it should be noted that all of these phenomena are still performances, none more or less “authentic” than the other. To embrace tackiness, camp, or anything deemed declassé on the grounds of individual enjoyment is also to partake in a long lineage of writers and artists who have done the very same thing, often invoking scholarly works of media theory as a sort of paradoxical means of justifying it.
It may not be new, but stereotypically “bad taste” is having a moment. A recent piece in Time magazine lists the evidence: Selling Sunset, hyperpop, Pete Davidson, micro-miniskirts, cocaine decor, revisionist retellings of maligned ’90s women like Pamela Anderson, Britney Spears, and Monica Lewinsky. Writer Judy Berman posits that the renewed interest is possibly due to, like many things, Americans’ growing sense of doom. “Nothing kills numbness like a sensory onslaught of color, sound, hedonism, melodrama, and sleaze,” she writes.
There is something that feels very of-the-moment about the pursuit of lowbrow pleasure, particularly to women who have never seen themselves in the quiet, willowy millennials who go to barre classes, drink smoothies, and journal (a trope that, unfortunately, continues to be repackaged and sold on TikTok). In an essay on the relation between tackiness and fatness, writer Margaret Eby notes that “Tacky is a way of saying, ‘That is too much.’ It’s a way to say, ‘Hush.’ You’re too loud, too bright, too attention-seeking. You take up too much space. You’re too costume-y. You’re too dramatic. Your excesses are not welcome here.”
Rax King, the author of a collection of essays called Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer, covers the topic as it relates to sexual promiscuity, adding in her book, “To my mind, every tacky loudmouth of a girl is behaving strategically. For a girl, a scream is a potent reclamation of space that cannot be claimed any other way. Everybody wants to sidle up to a pretty young girl all the time unless she’s screaming.”
The first time I visited Very Famous, I immediately thought of the Dollz. The Dollz, for those outside my precise age and gender demographic, were little Bratz-like digital avatars you could dress up in thigh-high boots, schoolgirl skirts, and cut-out crop tops, essentially all the clothes I could hardly fathom wearing myself as a then-12-year-old, but liked to imagine I might someday. Needless to say, the Dollz were tacky as hell, and I loved them: They were everything that was antithetical to the culture I grew up in, which valued functional, sensible design that withstood the outdoors; athleticism; and granola self-reliance. Nobody wore Juicy Couture at my mid-aughts high school, so as the resident “prep” who preferred polo shirts and wore too much makeup, if anyone embodied tackiness, it was me.
When we talk about tackiness, what we’re often talking about is an excess of something deemed too feminine, too indulgent. But there seems to be a growing chorus suggesting that perhaps indulgence (at least the way normal people experience it, and not, like, billionaires) is not the human condition’s most shameful sin. The world doesn’t care that you’re wearing a scent from Bath & Body Works or that you ate a Lean Cuisine for dinner just because you like the taste. Our own individual choices, be they stylistic or financial or even political, seem to matter less than they ever have; most trends move too fast to be even a little bit meaningful anymore. Just because something’s tacky today doesn’t mean it will be tomorrow. Why even bother paying attention?
This column was first published in The Goods newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one, plus get newsletter exclusives.
The inside story at Meta as it moves beyond Facebook -
Land of the Giants explores the social media juggernaut in a moment of transformation.
The new season of Vox Media Podcast Network’s award-winning narrative podcast Land of the Giants debuts today, July 13. This time, Recode senior correspondent Shirin Ghaffary teams up with her co-host, The Verge’s deputy editor Alex Heath, to tell the story of Meta, formerly known as Facebook, at a pivotal moment — both for the tech giant and for the billions of people who use its products.
Under the leadership of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the same man who co-founded Facebook from his college dorm room in 2004, Meta is trying to transition away from its complicated legacy as a social media company to a futuristic metaverse vision that aims to reshape the future of the internet. This transition is happening while criticism from users, regulators, and even its own former employees is at an all-time high. They are worried the company and its products — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and others — are harming society, from how global democracy functions to the mental health of teenagers. They think Meta is too big and too powerful and perhaps needs to be broken up. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg’s business is under pressure like never before. Both Facebook and Instagram are quickly losing ground to TikTok, forcing Meta to rethink its approach to social media entirely.
The new season of Land of the Giants will bring you original reporting on Meta’s current challenges and the future it’s building; the show will also explore critical moments from its origin as a scrappy startup to its current status as a tech behemoth. Ghaffary and Heath will take you inside the company by talking to current and former executives, including Meta’s top policy executive Nick Clegg and head of WhatsApp Will Cathcart, as well as preeminent critics and leaders outside the company like whistleblower Frances Haugen and Zynga founder Mark Pincus.
The first episode of Land of the Giants: The Facebook/Meta Disruption comes out on July 13, and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to the trailer below.
Reproductive rights have never been secure. Ask Black women. -
Women demonstrate against New York state abortion laws in Manhattan on March 28, 1970. | Graphic House/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
If you’re wondering how we got here, look to Black women’s long fight for reproductive justice.
To understand how the United States of America became a country without the constitutional right to abortion, look to the history of Black women’s long fight for reproductive autonomy.
The reproductive coercion of Black women is a thread running through American history, one that predated and presaged the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Dobbs that overturned Roe v. Wade. Enslaved Black women were forced into pregnancy to help build America’s budding economy. Pregnant Black moms are criminalized or excluded from abortion on the basis of poverty.The state takes away Black children from Black mothers at a disproportionate rate.
For Roberts, reproductive rights and the fight for abortion access shouldn’t just be about the existence of a choice, but about the right to live in a society that allows for the freedom to make it. “Just having a legal choice that you don’t have the means to effectuate is not true freedom,” Roberts told me.
I reached out to Roberts to talk about the key moments throughout history, like the passage of the Hyde Amendment — barring federal funds from paying for abortions — that suggested abortion rights were never fully secure. We talk about why adoption is not and has never been a solution to inequality, why Black women have historically used abortion as resistance, and why American history is a better source of analogies than The Handmaid’s Tale. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Fabiola Cineas
As someone who has studied the historic fight for reproductive justice, particularly through what Black women have experienced, what was your reaction when you saw the leaked draft opinion in May and then when the Supreme Court officially overturned Roe in June?
Dorothy Roberts
I can’t tell you how many panels I’ve been on over the last couple of decades where the issue was what to do in the post-Roe world. So there was a lot of preparation for it, but I was still shaken by it. I happened to be with my daughter and her two best friends — they’re all in their 30s — and my thought was, “My goodness, they have fewer rights to autonomy over their bodies than I did at their age.” When I was their age, I thought that I had good control over my body.
At the same time, though, there’s a reproductive justice movement that’s so much stronger than it was when I was their age. We are in a contradictory time because with the fight for justice, it seems like we’re going backward while at the same time building movements that are so much further than we were when we were growing up.
Fabiola Cineas
You had more autonomy over your body in the pastthan your daughters do now. But was there something you observed back then that suggested that reproductive rights were not actually secure?
Apu Gomes/AFP via Getty Images
A child holds a sign during a demonstration in Los Angeles, on June 26, two days after the US Supreme Court released a decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
Dorothy Roberts
I could see that even though we were legally protected from government laws that barred abortion, there was no legal right to demand government support for abortions due to the Hyde Amendment. So we had the legal right to an abortion, but it excluded funding for women who were poor. This was all happening while there was a bipartisan effort to end the federal entitlement to welfare. Plus, in the late 1980s, I watched the prosecutions of Black women for being pregnant and using drugs.
Those two aspects of reproductive regulation, which disproportionately affected Black women, made me think the fight wasn’t over.
The advocacy around abortion was focused mostly on the framework of being able to make a choice, without taking into account these structural impediments to having reproductive freedom.
It also didn’t take into full account the devaluation of Black women’s childbearing and the punitive policies surrounding it. I was an advocate for abortion rights, but I was more concerned about the failure to advocate with the same force for the human rights of impoverished people, or Black people and other people of color in the United States. Once I started thinking about the Hyde Amendment and the prosecutions of Black women who were pregnant and using drugs, I began to see a whole host of reproductive violations that weren’t at the forefront of the mainstream reproductive rights movement. That really changed the narrative about progress toward reproductive freedom in America.
I can see today how those infringements of human rights are coming together to create the moment we’re in now, where pregnancy is criminalized and where we are going to see the arrests and incarceration of people who manage their pregnancies, have miscarriages, or have stillbirths. They’re all going to be punished under one agenda of controlling women’s autonomy over their bodies and participation in society, and also punishing anyone who’s capable of being pregnant.
Fabiola Cineas
I’d like to back up then. It sounds like there’s almost a straight line from the 17th century to now that has long told us that these rights were never fully secure. And it sounds like it is specifically bound up in a struggle that Black women have faced for reproductive freedom. Can you walk me through some key historical moments that you think speak directly to the Supreme Court’s decision and the ensuing trigger bans?
Dorothy Roberts
I’d first go back to the institution of slavery to look at the connection between reproduction and bondage. The experiences of the enslaved Black woman and the exploitation of Black women’s labor were foundational to the state regulation of reproduction in America.
It still is staggering to me when I think about the very first laws in the colonies that were so directed at regulating Black women’s sexuality and reproduction, and how that reverberates today.
Black women, during the slavery era, resisted control of their bodies, including by having abortions. Abortion has been a means of resistance for Black women in the same way that exploiting Black women’s reproductive labor has been a form of racial and gender oppression from the very founding of this nation.
That was an aspect of the history of reproductive policy and rights in the United States that I didn’t think was getting enough attention. I don’t think you can understand where we are today without taking into account the historic regulation of Black women’s childbearing, which has its roots in enslavement.
Fabiola Cineas
And what would you highlight next?
Dorothy Roberts
After the Civil War, white supremacists who wanted to take back control of the South, enforce white domination, and effectively re-enslave Black people used the apprenticeship system to violently capture and take control of Black children again by exploiting their labor against the will of their parents. In many of the narratives about this, Black mothers describe how they fought to get their children back. To me, that system is the root of our current child welfare system, or what I call a family policing system, that also disproportionately tears apart Black families and is especially punitive to Black mothers.
Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
Georgia state Rep. Erica Thomas speaks during a protest against recently passed bills banning abortion, at the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta, on May 21, 2019.
I would also highlight the activism of Black women, demanding welfare rights and government funding for their childbearing decisions and for the care of their children. Because Black women were successful at being included in welfare programs, the state reacted by making those programs more punitive and vilifying, eventually leading up to the abolition of the federal entitlement to welfare. This was fueled by the myth of the Black welfare queen. So there’s that.
Fabiola Cineas
What else stands out to you?
Dorothy Roberts
The way in which prosecutors and policymakers turned drug use during pregnancy from a health care issue into a crime, with the prosecutions of Black women who are pregnant and smoked crack cocaine in the 1980s. I see that as the beginning of this latest chapter of the right-wing criminalization of pregnancy.
This is the chapter in which they criminalize pregnant people who don’t produce a healthy baby, whether it’s by abortion or by alleged behaviors during pregnancy that are seen to risk a fetus. That strategy begins with the prosecutions of Black women and also the taking of their newborns. And that is a prelude to what is happening today.
Fabiola Cineas
And how have things shifted to what we are seeing today?
Dorothy Roberts
One way in which the conditions now are different from when Roe was decided [in 1973] is that we have medication abortion and it’s easier for people to self-manage their abortions. But on the other hand, we have this buildup of criminalizing pregnancy with fetal protection laws, prosecutors prosecuting and getting convictions of women who have stillbirths. We see the arrest of women who had self-managed abortions prior to the Dobbs decision. That foreshadows a future where women and girls and people who are capable of pregnancy are going to be arrested and incarcerated for pregnancy outcomes. So again, criminalizing pregnancy whether you want to have a child or you want to terminate the pregnancy — those prosecutions are a pivotal point in the story of how we got to where we are today, and how Black women were both targeted and fought back again.
During a period in the 1990s, Black feminists got together and developed the framework of reproductive justice. That’s certainly another key moment — though, of course, we can also go back to enslaved women who started this work, andthe Combahee River Collective of the 1970s that wrote about interlocking systems of oppression and how Black women’s position in society is oppositional to white male rule.
So the crafting of reproductive justice analysis is built on that history that recognizes the human right to not have a child but also to have a child, and to parent a child in a nurturing and supportive and just and humane society. That looks beyond the question of whether there is a legal choice to look at the societal conditions that allow people to actually exercise true reproductive freedom and autonomy.
Fabiola Cineas
You’ve said that forced pregnancy and family separation — taking children away from their parents through the child welfare system — are connected and that understanding this connection is key to understanding the struggle for reproductive justice. How are they connected?
Dorothy Roberts
One way that we can see theyare connected forms of state violence is that the right is arguing that adoption is the solution to both of them. And, unfortunately, some liberal people are also arguing for adoption as a solution to the struggles of families who are feeling the brunt of an inequitable society. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re seeing adoption thrown around as the solution to what really is state violence and state oppression.
Fabiola Cineas
Yeah, I’ve been seeing what looks like mostly white or foreign couples or white women holding up signs that say, “We will adopt your baby.” Yet when asked if they actually will, the answer seems to be, “No.” What is this about?
Dorothy Roberts
Compelling pregnancy and taking people’s children away from them are both ways of upholding a system of white male elite rule where you divert attention away from structural inequities that need to be demolished and replaced and point to private mechanisms, which is what adoption is.
Owen Franken/Corbis via Getty Images
A man wears a sign stating “Adoption not abortion” and “Abortion is murder” in Boston, Massachusetts in 1976.
In the case of family separation, we have a family policing system that instead of helping families, blames family caregivers — especially Black family caregivers — and relies on taking children away. To me, that is a neoliberal form of privatizing issues. Instead of a society that supports families’ needs, it turns to private citizens taking children and claiming them for their own. That is exactly the same response of a regime that now wants to force people to carry pregnancies to term. They turn to this private response of adoption in place of facing the fact that one of the main reasons that people have abortions is because they don’t have the means at that time to take care of children.
For state legislators and the Supreme Court justices to pretend that adoption is going to take care of it is just blatant mendacity.
Every aspect of that is just false — there’s not going to be enough people to adopt all of the children whose needs cannot be met because of poverty in this nation, because of the structural racism, because of discrimination against women. Children will either grow up in families that don’t have the means to meet all of their needs on their own, or they’re going to go into a dangerous and harmful foster system.
It’s all about blaming people who are unable to meet children’s needs. It’s about denying them freedom to make decisions for themselves and then punishing them for whatever outcomes befall their children. Under this regime, they include the fetuses where there isn’t a healthy baby.
Yes, this is also related to the false accusation that abortion is a form of genocide that Black mothers are complicit in. Abortion hasn’t been used historically as a form of controlling Black reproduction. Sterilization has. There’s a big difference between forcible sterilization and upholding the human rights to control your body and not be compelled to be pregnant. Those are two radically different things. One is about compulsion and unfreedom. The other is about freedom and resisting compulsion. Those aren’t the same thing.
Clarence Thomas is just wrong. And so are others like him who say that abortion is a tool of Black genocide and that Black women are participating in the destruction of the Black community when they have abortions. And they refer to the eugenics era as a historical reference. That’s just false.
Barbara Rodriguez/AP
A billboard picturing President Barack Obama declares “Every 21 minutes, our next possible leader is aborted” in a vacant lot in Chicago, in April 2011. A Texas anti-abortion group was responsible for the billboard campaign.
The historical reference is compelled sterilization of Black women, which is akin to compelled pregnancy. They’ve got the references all screwed up when they make that argument. The billboards that went up [10 years ago] to shame Black women for abortion that said, “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb” — that message supports sterilizing Black women, as well as compelling pregnancies. It’s a message about reproductive control. It’s a false message that isn’t about any kind of liberation for Black people.
Fabiola Cineas
And is this another reason why some people claim that abortion still feels like a “white woman” issue?
Dorothy Roberts
I’ve heard that, too, believe me. At the time when the Webster decision was being considered and we thought that Roe might be overturned, I was speaking about it at a church and a Black man came up to me and said, “That’s a white woman’s issue. Why are you talking about it?” And there is a history of some Black nationalists chiding Black women for any kind of family planning, contraceptives, or abortion. It’s just ridiculous to say it’s a white woman’s issue when Black women are more likely to seek and have abortions.
Black women have been advocating for reproductive freedom for just as long as white women have been. We have included the right to abortion in our fight, but it’s just that we haven’t focused on it since we recognize that sterilization, abuse, and being prosecuted for having babies, and Black maternal mortality, and so many other issues involving our reproductive lives are equally as important.
There’s a long history of Black women advocating for abortion rights. Loretta Ross has been advocating for abortion rights for decades. Shirley Chisholm, in her autobiography and advocacy, championed abortion rights and spoke out against Black men who said that it was a white woman’s issue. Black women use abortion as a form of resistance against slavery.
It’s wrong to say that it’s a white woman’s issue. And it’s also wrong to say that it is a form of Black genocide. Those are false in terms of politics, history, in terms of what Black women have been advocating for for centuries. They’re anti-freedom. They’re anti-freedom, and they are inconsistent with the history of Black rebellion and abolition activism.
Fabiola Cineas
I also want to get your thoughts on The Handmaid’s Tale references and memes and the people who declared, “Welcome to The Handmaid’s Tale!” when the Supreme Court’s decision came down. This is the reference that seems to be the most widespread whenever women’s rights are on the line.
But lately some people have been pushing back, arguing that the meme erases the realities that marginalized groups of women have faced for centuries in America — America has already been a Gilead for Black women, for example. Why do you think The Handmaid’s Tale meme is still prevalent?
Dorothy Roberts
Mainstream US society has never taken full account of Black women’s lives and autonomy and imagination and vision. So the response to any current trend is often to look to white people as the victims and as the visionaries. But as I’ve been saying, Black women have been at the forefront of movements to both contest oppression and also reimagine a society that is more just and humane and caring and equal. I think that’s just one reason why we would get The Handmaid’s Tale before we get the very real history of Black women’s reproductive labor being exploited or Black women being compelled to be pregnant for the profit of white enslavers. It’s not an imagined story. It’s an actual history that continues to shape policy today.
Erin Clark/Boston Globe via Getty Images
Members of the Boston Red Cloaks, dressed as characters from The Handmaid’s Tale, advocate for reproductive freedom on the steps of the Massachusetts State House in Boston on May 7.
There’s a big difference between saying this fictional dystopia is a metaphor for our reality and saying, let’s look at the real history of the reproductive violence against Black women and how it actually has shaped policy in the United States since the time of slavery until today.
It’s also prevalent because white people don’t have to grapple with the reality of how we got to the overturning of Roe. It is a result of the dehumanization of Black people, and it is a white backlash against every advance for liberation that Black people have made. It is a result of policies that have put Black women at the center.
It’s mind-boggling but so important to recognize that we can name all these moments of history where there’ve been these regressions in freedom, where stereotypes about Black women and policies geared at controlling Black women’s sexuality and childbearing have been at the center over and over again. One of the reasons for ignoring this is that it’s a way to skirt radical social change. It’s a way of pretending that America is built on principles of equality and liberty when you ignore the deep roots of inhumanity and slavery and coercion and punishment that are still critical to understanding where we are today.
Fabiola Cineas
As someone who’s examined and been a part of this fight for a long time, what gives you hope right now?
Dorothy Roberts
What gives me hope today that we can continue with a reproductive justice framework is fighting back against these assaults on our freedoms while building a radically different society that doesn’t rely on carceral approaches to meeting human needs. This means it doesn’t police people or force people into compelled pregnancy. It doesn’t take people’s children away from them as a way of meeting children’s needs. I see all of these carceral, punitive, inhumane approaches as part of a white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist approach to meeting human needs. They’re all interconnected.
I find hope in the fact that we have a reproductive justice movement that has been active and flourishing. I’m also finding a lot of hope in the very quick action by abortion funds that are taking immediate steps to help people who need abortions.
From The Hindu: Sports
Supernatural, Philosophy, Miracle, Shamrock, Splendido and Fortunatus shine -
Singapore Open badminton | Mithun, Ashmita register stunning victories; Sindhu, Prannoy too win - Saina Nehwal avenges her India Open loss to compatriot Malvika Bansod
ICC ODI rankings: Bumrah back to No.1 - The Indian Pacer grabs the top spot in the ICC ODI rankings after losing it in 2020
A promising start to the first edition of Andhra Premier League T-20 cricket championship - The Andhra Premier League T-20 championship gives young cricketers an opportunity to rub shoulders and learn from big names in the field
India overtake Pakistan in latest ICC ODI rankings after big win over England - India were placed fourth with 105 points but the 10-wicket win on Tuesday propelled them to 108 rating points, leaving Pakistan behind at 106 in the latest chart
From The Hindu: National News
Death of Assam scrap pickers rocks Assembly - Speaker rejects adjournment motion on the incident
Health Ministry forwards RTI plea on stipend to National Medical Commission - NMC asked to provide information directly to K.V. Babu
Andhra Pradesh: Mild tremors at Marripudi in Nellore district - There is no loss of life or property in the area
HC directs Vivo to give Rs 950 crore bank guarantee to ED to operate frozen bank accounts - The high court also asked the company to maintain a balance of Rs 251 crore in the bank accounts, which was there at the time of freezing of the accounts, and the amount shall not be used till further orders.
Waste management at Hootagalli CMC receives a boost - Slew of machinery inducted for scientific disposal of waste
From BBC: Europe
Uefa Liverpool final: String of errors in French handling, says report - A French Senate inquiry finds Liverpool fans were unfairly blamed for the failings at the stadium.
Ukraine grain: Kyiv optimistic on Russia deal to reopen Black Sea - Tough talks are needed to reopen safe cargo routes for the grain that Russia has trapped in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s rock warrior Slava Vakarchuk: ‘We need to be angry’ - Slava Vakarchuk is the lead singer of Okean Elzy, Ukraine’s most popular rock band.
Europe swelters as heatwave spreads - Forest fires and droughts hit Spain and Portugal as authorities warn of exceptionally hot weather.
Tory leadership: What candidates think about Northern Ireland Protocol - What do the would-be prime ministers want to do with the Northern Irish part of the Brexit deal?
From Ars Technica
Ongoing phishing campaign can hack you even when you’re protected with MFA - Campaign that steals email has targeted at least 10,000 organizations since September. - link
All the best Amazon Prime Day 2022 deals we can find [Updated] - We’ve sorted through Amazon’s annual garage sale to find the stuff that’s worth your time. - link
YouTube begins rolling out picture-in-picture on iPhones and iPads - iOS offered this capability for a while, but YouTube was slow to implement it. - link
This is why the pistol shrimp is immune to its own powerful shock waves - Anterior opening in orbital hoods helps redirect kinetic energy from the blasts. - link
Twitter sues Elon Musk, says he can’t “trash the company… and walk away” - Lawsuit: Musk’s contractual breaches “cast a pall over Twitter and its business.” - link
From Jokes Subreddit
Three inmates on the way to prison… -
Three inmates were on the way to prison. They were each allowed to take one item with them to help them occupy their time while incarcerated.
On the bus, one turned to another and said, “So, what did you bring?”
The first convict pulled out a box of paints and stated that he intended to paint anything he could. He wanted to become the “Grandma Moses of Jail.”
Then he asked the second, “What did you bring?”
The second convict pulled out a deck of cards and grinned and said, “I brought cards. I can play poker, solitaire, gin, and any number of games.”
The third convict was sitting quietly aside, grinning to himself. The other two took notice and asked, “Why are you so smug? What did you bring?”
The guy pulled out a box of tampons and smiled. He said, “I brought these.”
The other two were puzzled and asked, “What can you do with those?”
He grinned and pointed to the box and said, “Well according to the box, I can go horseback riding, swimming, roller-skating….”
The boy’s sign reads “1 cup for 25¢, 3 cups for $1
A construction worker stops by and asks to buy one cup of lemonade. “25 cents”, says the kid.
The construction worker then buys another one, and another one, paying 25 cents each.
As the construction worker walks away, he turns around with a smile, and says: “Hey kid, you realize I just bought three cups for 75¢… Maybe lemonade stands aren’t your thing.”
“I guess you’re right” says the kid good-naturedly as he sets up the next 3 cups.
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Apu Gomes/AFP via Getty Images
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Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
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Barbara Rodriguez/AP
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