The Grim Journey of the Accused Brooklyn Subway Shooter - Frank James, the man charged with carrying out the Sunset Park attack, appears to have inhabited a world of conspiracy theories, grievance, and mental illness. - link
The Siege of Chernihiv - For more than a month, the Russian military pummelled residents with bombing raids and missile fire, turning a locked-in Ukrainian city into an urban death trap. - link
The Case for an Immediate Energy Embargo on Russia - An aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky argues that halting the purchase of oil and gas is the surest way to stop Vladimir Putin’s military machine. - link
The French Far Right Comes on Little Cat Feet - After years of seeing Marine Le Pen as a dangerous extreme, many voters now see her as a politician like any other. - link
“The Northman,” Reviewed: Just a Bunch of Research and Gore - Robert Eggers’s berserker epic collapses under the weight of its own aspirations toward authenticity. - link
From Vox
How to think about masking on planes, trains, and buses right now -
Denis Novikov/Getty Images
Even if there’s no official mandate, there are things you can do to make traveling and commuting a little safer.
Since the beginning of President Biden’s term in January 2021, a federal mask mandate for public transportation has been in place, affecting everything from local bus routes to transcontinental flights. On Monday, the federal mask mandate for public transportation was struck down by Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle. While the Justice Department has appealed this ruling by Mizelle — who, at the time of her appointment by Donald Trump in 2020, was declared “not qualified” by the American Bar Association — it hasn’t sought or received a stay, meaning the mask mandate will not be in effect while the decision is appealed.
The CDC still recommends people wear masks on public transportation, but ultimately it’s now up to airlines, transit authorities, and ride-hailing companies to decide whether to require masking — and it’s up to individuals to figure out, in the absence of those requirements, what they should do to protect themselves and others.
“I would certainly still wear masks on public transit,” said Katelyn Jetelina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and the author of the Your Local Epidemiologist newsletter. “Not just for individual-level risks, but also to help those that are much higher risk, and for those vulnerable pockets in the community.”
Here’s why you should continue to mask on transit — even in the absence of a mandate — along with some expert tips for protecting yourself and others when you’re commuting or traveling.
The science still supports masking on transportation
It’s important to know that Health Freedom Defense Fund v. Biden, the case that led to the ruling striking down the travel mask mandate, was strictly about whether or not the federal government had the authorityto implement the mandate; it was not about whether masking on transit is currently legitimate or useful from a public health standpoint.
But the idea that the CDC doesn’t have this authority is also bogus. As my colleague Ian Millhiser wrote on Tuesday, Mizelle’s opinion in this case “is so poorly reasoned that it is difficult not to suspect that it was written in bad faith.” He continues: “The most likely reading of her opinion is that she simply disagreed with the Biden administration’s masking policy, and concocted a justification for striking it down.”
The fact that the mandate was struck down is not a sign thatmasking on transit or planes lacks scientific merit. The evidence shows that masks work and are an important Covid-19 mitigation measure when indoors in public.
“We know that Covid-19 is airborne and spreads via an aerosol that builds up in enclosed spaces,” said Matthew Cortland, a senior fellow working on disability and health care at the think tank Data for Progress. “The less Covid-19 that’s in the air around us, the safer we are. Masks reduce the amount of that infectious aerosol. The science is very clear.”
While it’s true that cases have dropped dramatically across the US since the winter omicron surge, the numbers are starting to go back up. According to the New York Times, “Cases have increased in a majority of states and territories during the past two weeks, but the inclines are sharpest in the Northeast and Midwest. In Washington, DC, Michigan, and New Hampshire, cases have more than doubled since the start of the month.” This may also be an undercount, given the widespread use of at-home antigen tests whose results are not officially recorded.
Hospitalizations thankfully remain relatively low at present, but there are still plenty of good reasons to want to avoid infection, and to actively avoid passing the virus to others. “Every one of the 462 deaths caused by Covid-19 is a tragedy,” Cortland said, referring to the deaths on April 19, the day of our interview. “But preventing tragic deaths is not the only reason to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Even in people who are fully up to date on their vaccinations, Covid-19 can still cause long-term, serious health complications. Yes, long Covid, but Covid-19 also raises the risk of diabetes, abnormal heart rhythms, heart muscle inflammation, blood clots, strokes, myocardial infarction, and heart failure.”
Beyond this, the more the virus spreads, the more likely we are to get new variants, which have the ability to prolong this pandemic even more.
If you want to protect yourself, one-way masking definitely helps
One-way masking, or wearing a mask to protect yourself from the people around you who are unmasked,is fairly effective. “One-way masking helps a lot,” Jetelina said. “This is especially true when you have a well-filtered, well-fit mask like an N95, KN95, or KN94. They do a really great job at protecting the wearer. I feel very confident when I’m wearing one.”
Cortland also emphasized the importance of wearing high-quality and well-fitting masks indoors, and suggested that people who are relying on one-way masking to stay safe should perform a seal check (a few tutorials here, here, and here) to ensure their mask is as protective as it can possibly be. “To be clear, it is not a replacement for a professional seal check,” Cortland said. “It is better than nothing, which is what the CDC and the rest of the federal government is offering.”
But keep in mind that one-way masking is not a panacea, especially when community transmission is high. Emergency medicine physician Jeremy Faust recently did statistical modeling to determine when a KN95 or N95 would be enough to protect a severely immunocompromised person if they were the only person wearing one. Faust determined that once a community surpasses a weekly average of 50 cases per 100,000 people, one-way masking becomes unlikely to be enough to ensure very strong protection. While a lot of factors are at play here, including an individual’s risk status, vaccine status, and mask fit, it’s helpful to know that one-way masking can only take us so far. The more people who wear masks in public spaces, the better.
Your mask also protects everyone who can’t opt out of using transit
Even if you feel okay about your personal risk, wearing a mask in public is key to protecting others, including unvaccinated kids and the immunocompromised. People who are worried about getting Covid-19 cannot, and should not have to, stay home if they aren’t comfortable entering mask-optional public spaces. High-risk people (just like lower-risk people!) need to be able to access essential public spaces — hospitals, pharmacies, grocery stores, and, yes, public transportation — to meet their basic needs and earn a living.
“We use the subway to get to the grocery store, the bus to get to the pharmacy, ride-shares to get to work,” they continued. “To exclude tens and tens of millions of Americans from public transit — by making these conveyances unsafe — is not good for public health, it is not good for our economy, it is not good for our country.”
Jetelina said that she’s particularly concerned with people not wearing masks on trains and buses, which have terrible ventilation systems compared to planes. “My biggest fear with this is that there are going to be health equity concerns linked with this, and communities are going to be disproportionately impacted,” she said. “And with that, they will have even more mortality and morbidity, so it becomes this very dangerous revolving door.”
If you’re traveling by plane, ventilation alone won’t keep you (or others) safe
“Filtration and ventilation are incredibly useful on airplanes,” Jetelina said. “And they’re very powerful, especially if we compare it to other spaces. But they’re not perfect.”
Jetelina said one problem is that a plane’s ventilation and filtration systems aren’t actually on for the entirety of a trip — for example, they often aren’t running when the plane is sitting at the gate. This, coupled with the fact that airports are often crowded and don’t have the same highly effective ventilation system that a plane does, could mean significant time spent without these layers of protection. At minimum, you should wear a high-quality, well-fitting mask when you’re taking transit to the airport, in the airport, boarding the plane, taxiing on the runway, and disembarking the plane.
Another problem on the plane itself is that the ventilation and filtration systems are highly effective for removing Covid-19 aerosols from the air, but less so for the larger and heavier droplets that can also transmit the virus. That means if you’re sitting near an unmasked Covid- positive stranger who coughs or sneezes, their droplets could reach you before ever getting picked up by the ventilation and filtration system. “While [ventilation] is a really great layer of protection, the masks help pick up the slack,” Jetelina said.
“What we’re seeing in the science is that this proximity matters — a two-row diameter around you is where droplets could reach you from,” Jetelina said. “That’s quite a few people around you if you’re in the center of a plane.”
Finally, more masking on planes will help prevent community transmission when folks reach their destinations. Even if the number of individuals who are infected on the flight is low, each can then go on to infect a much bigger number of people. “Transmission on planes can really impact propagation within the community, and even across the nation,” Jetelina said. “And so, again, thinking about your individual level of protection is important, but also, the community-level protection that you have when you wear a mask on a plane.”
Jetelina said she doesn’t think people need to necessarily cancel flights now that masks are no longer required. “I think that if you wear a really nice N95 and if you’re boosted — or now it’s the second booster, so you’ve had four shots,” she explained, “there’s never no risk, but the risk is smaller with the layers of protection.”
Remember that you don’t need a mask mandate to wear a mask
When I recently interviewed biostatistician Lucy D’Agostino McGowan for an article about Covid-19 safety, she offered a helpful analogy she credited to her colleague Justin Lessler: When it comes to car safety, there are certain measures the government implements, like requiring that we all drive on the right side of the road and setting speed limits.
“They’re a minimum necessary requirement in order to keep our society functioning and allow people to get around in automobiles,” D’Agostino McGowan said. “And then there’s things you can layer on top of it, that will help your individual risk — both in terms of keeping you safe and keeping the people around you safe.” That might look like buying a car with a high safety rating, making sure your tires and brakes are in good shape, and cutting down on distractions like having a pet in your lap. It would be helpful for everyone if people thought of Covid-19 measures in a similar way and treated masks like something worth doing even if no one is forcing you to.
“What I’m afraid of is that when mandates are lost, the normalization is also lost,” Jetelina said. “And so I hope that people feel confident in wearing masks, even if there isn’t a mandate there. Because it is truly best for their health with these rising cases.”
Why is it Macron and Le Pen, again? -
A worker puts up posters for French presidential candidates, including incumbent centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron, left, and far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, right, on a wall in Bordeaux, France, on March 28. Macron and Le Pen will face each other in a runoff election on April 24. | Philippe Lopez/AFP via Getty Images
French presidential runoff elections — pitting the center against the far right — take place on April 24.
French president Emmanuel Macron will face off against the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the country’s April 24 presidential runoff.
It is a rematch of sorts of the 2017 election. But the dynamics that gave voters a reprise of the Macron-Le Pen matchup reveal deeper shifts in French politics: a collapse of traditional parties, a mainstreaming of right-wing discourse, and a disunity among the left. All bring a degree of uncertainty to the election this Sunday, even if Macron is now favored to win.
Maybe nothing exemplifies this more than the implosion of France’s mainstream center-right and center-left parties in the first round of the elections on April 10. The candidates for the traditionally center-right Republicans finished behind two far- right candidates — Le Pen, of the National Rally, and the more extreme Éric Zemmour and his Reconquête party. The traditionally center-left Socialist candidate was demolished by the left-wing populist, Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise. In both cases, it was not all that close.
“We are absolutely seeing the collapse of the former mainstream right and former mainstream left in France in a really, really striking way,” said Sarah Wiliarty, an associate professor of government, specializing in Western European politics, at Wesleyan University.
Macron himself may be the biggest reason for the struggles of the mainstream parties, having captured the political center. He is pro-environment, pro-LGBTQ rights, and pro-European project. But, on the economy, he is much more the pro-business, lower-taxes type. “He stole from the moderates from the left and on the right,” said Rainbow Murray, an expert on French politics at Queen Mary University of London. “And the moderates, of course, are where the average voter is.”
This year, Le Pen built off her position in the 2017 runoffs by trying to frame herself as more mainstream. Some experts said the far-right’s ascendance has pulled the entire political discourse rightward in France. Rim-Sarah Alouane, a researcher in comparative law at Toulouse 1 Capitole University in France,said the “normalization” of the far-right has allowed more mainstream parties to absorb versions of their talking points — on issues like immigration and integration into French society.
But, since 2017, Le Pen has put even more effort into softening the edges of her extremist rhetoric and elevating a populist message that still captures a lot of the right. If you’re a voter who finds a message like Le Pen’s appealing, “do you,” as Wiliarty put it, “go for a watered-down version from the Republicans? Or do you go for the real deal?”
A lot will depend on the voters whose candidates didn’t make it through the first round, specifically those who supported Mélenchon, who came in third. The question is who they will support in the runoff — if they support anyone at all.
Macron’s agenda has proven to be more right-of-center, which leaves some leftist voters with two less-than-satisfactory choices. Macron has tried to broaden his appeal on the left as April 24 gets closer. But this election may be less about a vote for Macron than about a vote against Le Pen.
Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images
French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, center, and supporters react after seeing preliminary results during the first round of voting in the French presidential election in Paris on April 10.
Sunday’s contest may turn on how many voters make that choice — and whether it will be enough to give Macron a real mandate to govern.
“If he’s just the man who could barely beat Le Pen, then that’s going to make it much harder for him to push things through,” Murray said. “So he needs to win. But he needs to win credibly.”
The headliners are the same as 2017, but the showdown isn’t
In the first round of France’s presidential elections, on April 10, Macron won just shy of 28 percent of the vote. Le Pen came in second, with a tiny bit more than 23 percent. Mélenchon, the left-wing candidate, fell just short of a spot in the runoff, with 22 percent. Everybody else delivered single-digit results.
The results are maybe not that unexpected. While experts said it’s pretty remarkable that France’s mainstream left and right parties have practically disappeared on the national level (it’s a little more nuanced in local politics), political parties are traditionally a bit weaker in France, and party affiliation and organization is less deeply rooted than in other parts of Europe (which have also seen political fragmentation, if not to the same degree.)
It is a sign that the parties may be mutable, and that the pull comes more from the candidates and their politics. But Le Pen and Macron are not running as exactly the same politicians they were in 2017.
This “un-demonization” strategy is a lot more cosmetic than anything else. “The heart, the soul of the far-right is still rotten to the core,” Alouane said. “It’s still the same party, but with a different face. It’s plastic surgery.”
If political plastic surgery was the strategy, Le Pen looked even more mainstream compared to the more radical right-wing party that arose alongside of her, which did push the kind of racist, overly anti-immigrant rhetoric that Le Pen had tried to edit. Zemmour, the candidate to her right, also got a lot of media attention — which may have helped Le Pen escape some scrutiny. “She was both clever and got lucky,” Wiliarty said. (Zemmour received about 7 percent of the vote in the first round, and has endorsed Le Pen for the runoff.)
Macron also isn’t the same candidate as in 2017. Then, Macron was the “wunderkind,” a political outsider-ish who managed to be a sort of anti-establishment establishmentarian, promising a pragmatic and anti-populist presidency. He was pro-EU, and pro-Western values in the wake of Brexit and Trump, and he was framed as an antidote to both.
Now, he’s got a term in office for voters to scrutinize. “It’s easier for the other candidates to attack him. He’s in a weaker position now than he was in 2017,” said Francesca Vassallo, an associate professor of political science at the University of Southern Maine, who studies French and European politics.
Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
French President and candidate for re-election Emmanuel Macron addresses supporters after the first round of France’s presidential election, in Paris on April 10.
France’s post-Covid-19 economic recovery has been strong, and Macron has delivered on promises to attract business and tech. But Macron’s policies of tax cuts and welfare and pension reform have contrasted sharply with the national mood, where French voters are worried about price increases. As experts said, his policy manifesto looks a lot like what you’d expect from a center-right Republican. “His ideological shift in both economic and social terms has been towards the right,” Murray said.
Macron has the middle. But is that enough?
Macron, in 2017, trounced Le Pen, winning about two-thirds of the vote. He appealed to the middle — on the right and the left. But he also was the new guy, who promised an untested vision. Even for many left-wing voters who may not have loved all of his policies, he was a clear alternative to Le Pen’s extremism.
The wild card is whether that will hold true in 2022. The fear is that left-wing voters, especially those who opted for Mélenchon, will be disillusioned. “Macron or Le Pen, we’re screwed in any case. For my first election, I’d hoped for better,” an 18-year-old student and Mélenchon voter told France24.
There was an assumption, likely made by Macron himself, that he could take the left for granted, “and they will support him because they have nowhere else to go,” Murray said.
“Which is an assumption that’s now being challenged because he’s now facing abstention from the left rather than supporting him against Le Pen,” she added.
The question is whether Macron’s late-game pivot will be enough. Macron and Le Pen squared off in a debate Wednesday night, their only meeting before the vote. Macron dug into Le Pen’s ties to Vladimir Putin, a particularly salient issue amid the Ukraine war. Le Pen tried to frame Macron as out of touch. In 2017, Macron’s debate performance was decisive in his victory. This time around, Macron was also seen as having the edge; in at least one snap poll, 59 percent of people said Macron was the most convincing in the debate.
In the end, Macron may have done enough to secure a second term. Macron remains ahead in the polls, and many voters do understand the threat of Le Pen. Alouane said, in broad terms, especially for France’s most vulnerable, it is a “vote that stinks versus vote that kills.”
Christophe Ena/AP
Demonstrators hold banners reading “For Social Justice” and “United Against the Far Right” during a protest against far-right politics in Paris, on April 16, ahead of the runoff vote on April 24.
But maybe, as the United States can attest, voting against one person isn’t really the same as voting for a person. Macron may eke out a win, but that is unlikely to vanquish Le Pen and the far-right, and it may mean Macron begins his second term as a far weaker president.
And that may not just be based on Sunday’s results. As experts pointed out, France’s future will also be decided in the elections for France’s National Assembly later this spring. Experts said that if Macron wins the election Sunday, his party is likely to win control of the Assembly, but likely not with the majorities he had in 2017.
But, experts added, if Le Pen wins on Sunday, it may be the type of shock that fully rattles the electorate. “It is very likely that will be a strong backlash against her and her party,” Vassallo said. “And so people would vote for other parties and not for hers. This means she will be a president without having a political majority in the National Assembly. That is not fun.”
If that happens, it would restrain Le Pen’s domestic agenda, and make her a fairly weak president. But president nonetheless.
Russian Doll and accepting the things you can’t change -
Nadia returns with an oddly myopic conviction that she can fix her current life by changing the past. | Courtesy of Netflix
Natasha Lyonne’s Nadia travels back in time in a futile attempt to undo intergenerational trauma.
In the first season of Russian Doll, death is an inescapable hazard of New York City life. Nadia Vulvokov (Natasha Lyonne) is stuck in a death-driven time loop, perishing in all sorts of bizarre, gruesome, and cursed accidents. Each round, she resurrects to the night of her 36th birthday party as Henry Nilsson’s jaunty “Gotta Get Up” blares in the background. Death, it seems, is her only path forward. It is the existential engine that propels Nadia and Alan Zaveri (Charlie Barnett), her partner in purgatory, toward their indeterminate futures.
Instead of death, the second season, set four years after the first, derives its momentum from Nadia’s matrilineal past. Nadia stumbles through a mysterious time wormhole on the southbound 6 train and confronts the pains, traumas, and misgivings of her schizophrenic mother Nora (Chloë Sevigny) and grandmother Vera (Ilona McCrea), a widowed Holocaust survivor. This time, Nadia and Alan are under much less existential pressure than before. They can return to reality — linear time — by train. Their access to the MTA-operated past doesn’t seem to be a glitch in the system to resolve, but a version of fated events to observe and learn from.
Russian Doll is a show about trauma — how it manifests, festers, and embeds in its characters’ lives — and the possibility of healing these deep-seated wounds. Last season, Nadia and Alan had to reckon with the pain that predated their Groundhog Day loop, which was set off by their failure to help one another on that fateful night. They emerged from the trappings of death with another chance at life. The second season probes further into the murky source of their lingering struggles by way of Nadia’s (and to a much lesser extent, Alan’s) maternal relations. It is an ambitious but ultimately lacking attempt at illustrating how trauma is inherited from one generation to the next, at the expense of the protagonists’ development and season one friendship. There is no strong emotional thread binding Alan and Nadia together, and despite their parallel time travel journeys, the pair’s interactions feel forced and disjointed.
Nadia is hunched and hardy as ever, and her newfound time-traveling abilities allow her to inhabit the bodies of Nora and Vera at various points in their lives. This ignites an obsession with her family’s history. She begins to entertain the archetypal delusion of most time travelers — that the past can be changed to create a better future. Nadia believes she can improve Nora’s and Vera’s fates by remedying the wrongs inflicted upon them by the world and by one another. As a result, her unborn self will inherit the material and emotional benefits of these changes: a sane mother, a happier childhood, and a college trust fund worth 150 Krugerrands.
Meanwhile, Alan finds himself in Berlin Wall-era Germany in the shoes of his maternal grandmother, an exchange student from Ghana. Alan tries to dissuade Nadia from her mission, urging her to take on a passive time-traveling role. (It’s worth noting that Alan’s arc this season is horribly underdeveloped.) His advice goes unheeded; Nadia insists that she has to “close the fucking deranged loop and bounce,” as the two did in the first season to escape perpetual death. Her efforts to rewrite the past, however, prove to be futile.
While inhabiting Nora’s body, Nadia learns that her mother stole the Krugerrands from her grandmother Vera to buy a car. Nadia, as Nora, manages to get the money back, only to lose it all on the subway. Nadia then ventures further back in time to help Vera find her family’s belongings, which were seized during the Nazi occupation of Hungary. Once Vera discovers these long-lost goods, she pawns them off for the Krugerrands that Nora later steals and eventually loses. The “fucking deranged loop,” Nadia realizes, is already closed. Despite her resistance, she is operating within its constraints to fulfill a predetermined destiny.
Her matrilineal past and pain are unchangeable. Ruth (Elizabeth Ashley), a psychotherapist and Nadia’s stand-in maternal figure, delivers some of the most poignant lines of the season, foreshadowing the truth that Nadia struggles to accept. “Nothing can absolve us but ourselves,” Ruth says, with the ease of a wizened philosopher. Later, she adds: “Trauma is a topographical map written on the child and it takes a lifetime to read.”
This is where the second season disappoints. The protagonists do not traverse across new territory on their topological maps, even while embarking on a roundabout journey to their pasts. Nadia’s persistent familial conflicts are rehashed without fully exploring the nuances of Nora’s and Vera’s traumas beyond Nadia’s solipsistic considerations. We learn little about the origins of Nora’s mental health problems, Vera’s struggles as a widowed immigrant, and how their mother-daughter relationship grew so contentious.
At its lowest points, Russian Doll falls into the basic trappings of the trauma plot. “The trauma plot,” writes New Yorker critic Parul Sehgal, “does not direct our curiosity toward the future but back into the past.” Characters are “created in order to be dispatched into the past, to truffle for trauma,” which has been “synonymous with backstory.” Trauma as a plot device threatens to ascribe a character’s actions and decisions to a series of preexisting symptoms, born from an unchangeable yet ever-looming past. The first season put a funny, thrilling, profound, and existential twist on the nature of trauma. The second season was redeemed by its final episodes from falling head-first into this hackneyed trope.
The space-time continuum begins to fray in the penultimate episode, and Nadia learns it’s risky dwelling in the past for too long. She starts to miss out on real life. The present does not pause for Alan and Nadia as they journey further down their respective time loops. On her 40th birthday, Nadia tries to bring her newborn self to the present where she can parent her (“Tabula rasa!” she declaims), trapping her and Alan in a time-warped dimension where the past, present, and future intersect. There is no climactic return to linear time, no jovial celebration for escaping the loop.
Instead, Nadia’s catharsis comes in the form of grief. She learns that she wasn’t at the hospital to witness Ruth’s death, which occurred on Nadia’s 40th birthday. Nadia interacted with various past versions of Ruth during her time-bending blip, but ultimately missed out on Ruth’s final moments in the present. Nadia’s time arc barrels past the death of her loved one (“Grief doesn’t move you in a straight line,” says one of her friends) into the future. She emerges from the 6 train on the day of Ruth’s wake, a month after her death.
What then, I wondered, was the point of all that time traveling? The show offers an unclear explanation. Maybe it was a means for Nadia to approach her family’s psychological burdens with greater empathy, acceptance, and forgiveness. Or maybe the futile, fatalist nature of Nadia’s time-traveling endeavor was its grand takeaway.
Her journey back in time was all just a “Coney Island.” It’s a phrase that one of her mother’s old boyfriends deploys to describe “the thing that would’ve made everything better if only it had happened, or didn’t happen.” It’s a fantasy, he explains. An “if only” that leads people to dwell on the possibility of a better life. Russian Doll ends on this staid note of hope. Nadia’s present is a state of resigned grief, and she is no longer plagued by the Coney Islands of her trauma-laden past. The show leaves behind many unanswered questions, but the past, for now, is behind us.
From The Hindu: Sports
IPL 2022: RCB vs SRH | Umran, Karthik in focus as upbeat Hyderabad squares up against Bangalore - A win for Sunrisers will elevate them to the top-4 while a victory for RCB will help them grab the top spot.
IPL 2022: KKR vs GT | Struggling Kolkata faces stern Gujarat test - The onus would be on Kolkata's bowlers to seize the momentum and stop the Titans' three-match winning run.
Watch | How far can a paper plane fly? -
It's very good that he is still hungry: Jadeja on Dhoni's latest Houdini act - “It's very good that he is still hungry (for runs and wins),” the new CSK skipper said after Dhoni's 13-ball 28 propelled the team to an epic win over their arch-rivals
Bayern vs Dortmund preview: 10th straight Bundesliga title on the cards -
From The Hindu: National News
New vessel joins Coast Guard in Kochi - Auxiliary barge will provide logistics support for ships
New Director for I&PR -
Coordination committee for 44th International Chess Olympiad set up -
Taxi cab operators in crisis despite rise in travel demand - Mounting operational expenses due to frequent rise in fuel prices make matters worse for them
Farmers seek abolition of GST on farm-related machinery - In interaction with Minister, they also seek crop insurance for sugarcane
From BBC: Europe
Mariupol steelworks: ‘We have wounded and dead inside the bunkers’ - One of the last defenders in Mariupol tells the BBC conditions are dire but they won’t surrender.
Ukraine war: Russia ‘plans to seize southern Ukraine’ - A senior general says the aim is to open a route into a separatist region of Moldova, Transnistria.
Mariupol: Driving into the ‘apocalypse’ to save mum and dad - How a young Ukrainian woman travelled into the besieged city of Mariupol to save her parents.
Ukrainians injured or killed by unexploded ammunition - Across Ukraine’s Kyiv region, efforts have begun to clear the countless pieces of unexploded ammunition left behind after fierce fighting.
Madeleine McCann: Christian Brueckner declared formal suspect - Madeleine McCann has been missing for nearly 15 years after she disappeared, aged three, in Portugal.
From Ars Technica
CDC raises alarm of mysterious hepatitis cases in kids; 2 states report cases - An adenovirus is still the leading suspect, but experts are keeping an open mind. - link
Rocket Report: Falcon 9 says Aloha to Hawaii, Blue Origin to abandon ship? - “New Glenn’s first stage will come home to the Jacklyn after every flight.” - link
Combo COVID booster is the way to go this fall, Moderna data suggests - A bivalent vaccine produced stronger, broader protection, early data suggests. - link
ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law - No judges on 29-seat appeals court even asked for a vote on industry petition. - link
Critical bug could have let hackers commandeer millions of Android devices - Flaw could be exploited with malicious audio file. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
My nerdy friend just got a PhD on the history of palindromes. -
A man’s walking home late at night when he sees a woman in the shadows. -
A man’s walking home late at night when he sees a woman in the shadows.
“Twenty bucks,” she says.
He’s never been with a hooker before, but he decides what the hell. They’re going at it for a minute when all of a sudden a light flashes on them… it’s a police officer.
“What’s going on here, people?” asks the officer.
“I’m making love to my wife,” the man answers indignantly.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” says the cop, “I didn’t know.”
“Well,” said the man, “neither did I until you shined that light in her face.”
A man wakes up after a heavy night of drinking to his wife happily cooking breakfast. -
Confused, he approaches his daughter for an explanation of last night when he arrived home. “You kicked in the door when you couldn’t get your key in the lock, fell through the table and broke it, and pissed your pants.” “Jesus! So then why the hell is she in such a good mood?” “When she tried to take your pants off to wash them, you slapped her hand away and said, ‘Get your hands off me! I’m married!’”
for I have sinned. I have been with a loose girl."
The priest asks, “Is that you, little Joey Pagano?”
“Yes, Father, it is.”
“And who was the girl you were with?”
“I can’t tell you, Father. I don’t want to ruin her reputation.”
“Well, Joey, I’m sure to find out her name sooner or later so you may as well tell me now. Was it Tina Minetti?”
“I cannot say.”
“Was it Teresa Mazzarelli?”
“I’ll never tell.”
“Was it Nina Capelli?”
“I’m sorry, but I cannot name her.”
“Was it Cathy Piriano?”
“My lips are sealed.”
“Was it Rosa DiAngelo, then?”
“Please, Father! I cannot tell you.”
The priest sighs in frustration. “You’re very tight lipped, and I admire that. But you’ve sinned and have to atone. You cannot be an altar boy now for 4 months. Now you go and behave yourself.”
Joey walks back to his pew, and his friend Franco slides over and whispers, “What’d you get?”
……falls of a cliff and they all die. They arrive at the gates of heaven and meet St. Peter. St. Peter says to them “Sisters, welcome to Heaven. In a moment I will let you all though the pearly gates, but before I may do that, I must ask each of you a single question. Please form a single-file line.” And they do so.
St. Peter turns to the first Nun in the line and asks her “Sister, have you ever touched a penis?” The Sister Responds “Well… there was this one time… that I kinda sorta… touched one with the tip of my pinky finger…” St. Peter says “Alright Sister, now dip the tip of your pinky finger in the Holy Water, and you may be admitted.” and she did so.
St. Peter now turns to the second nun and says “Sister, have you ever touched a penis?” “Well…. There was this one time… that I held one for a moment…” “Alright Sister, now just wash your hands in the Holy Water, and you may be admitted” and she does so.
Now at this, there is a noise, a jostling in the line. It seems that one nun is trying to cut in front of another! St. Peter sees this and asks the Nun “Sister Susan, what is this? There is no rush!”
Sister Susan responds “Well if I’m going to have to gargle this stuff, I’d rather do it before Sister Mary sticks her ass in it!”
/cdn.vox-
cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23404092/GettyImages_1239898129.jpg)
Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images
/cdn.vox-
cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23404109/GettyImages_1239902773.jpg)
Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
/cdn.vox-
cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23404122/AP22106576514184.jpg)
Christophe Ena/AP