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From Vox
Why March Madness is all about Caitlin Clark -
Caitlin Clark and Iowa won the Big 10 Women’s Basketball Tournament earlier this month. | Photo by Adam Bettcher/Getty Images
The most exciting player in college basketball, explained.
For the uninitiated, college basketball may seem like a complicated sport. Nearly every second is packed with plays, screens, cuts, and defenses that can be hard to follow. Commentators spray you with names and phrases that you’re supposed to already know. (Izzo? Geno? The 1-3-1? Pac-12?) And let’s not even get started on advanced metrics, unless you can explain usage rate.
But if you’ve ever wanted to see basketball beautifully simplified — as clean as putting a ball through the hoop — all you need to do is watch Caitlin Clark, the 22-year-old superstar making headlines with the Iowa Hawkeyes.
In both the men’s and women’s college game, there has never been a more prolific scorer than Clark, no shooter as flashy. She’s the record-breaking scoring leader among all Division I college basketball players in NCAA history, smashing “Pistol Pete” Maravich’s more than 50-year-old record this season. Clark’s gaudy numbers and the manner in which she scores — pulling up from anywhere in the gym, no matter how distant from the basket — have brought mainstream attention to women’s college basketball, a sport historically eclipsed by its men’s counterpart.
Photo by Matthew Holst/Getty Images
The spot where Caitlin Clark broke the NCAA women’s scoring record at Carver-Hawkeye Arena
Her impact is being called the Caitlin Clark Effect. The Hawkeyes sold out their season tickets for their entire home schedule for the first time in school history, and Iowa’s road games have set attendance bests for opposing schools. Tickets for Iowa’s first two March Madness games, which begin on Saturday, sold out in 30 minutes. Earlier this month, her game against Ohio State — in which she broke Maravich’s aforementioned record — was watched by nearly 4 million TV viewers, the highest for a regular-season women’s basketball game (i.e., no championships involved) since 1999.
Clark is the exception among her exceptional peers, and it isn’t just because of her incredible long-range shot. It’s that she knows what makes basketball exciting. She sees the spotlight and the pressure, the wins and the heartbreaks as a privilege, and she has embraced being both a hero and a villain. That’s what allows her to be the most thrilling player in college basketball.
How Caitlin Clark changed women’s basketball
Over the past four years, Caitlin Clark has scored 3,771 points — the most for a player of any gender in Division I college basketball. That list includes male Hall of Famers like Maravich and Larry Bird as well as Brittney Griner, Maya Moore, Elena Delle Donne, and Chamique Holdsclaw, some of the best women’s players of all time.
Beginning her freshman season in 2020, Clark averaged 26.6 points per game and has upped that number each year to reach her current 31.9 as a senior. That stunning stat goes along with 8.9 assists per game and 7.3 rebounds. She’s currently shooting nearly 50 percent from the field, 38 percent from three, and 86 percent from the free throw line.
Those numbers are stellar, but basketball is a team sport, and Clark’s play elevates the Hawkeyes as a whole.
Clark is a scoring point guard. That means she touches the ball virtually every single time Iowa comes down the court on offense. Whether it’s shooting or setting up her teammates, getting points on the board is her responsibility. Opposing teams know this and go into each contest with the goal of shutting her down, playing Clark with lots of physicality and throwing double and even triple teams at her.
Yet all season, she’s been scoring at a high clip and doing so with efficiency. Her gravitational pull has also freed up her teammates: When opponents double-team Clark, it leaves at least one of her fellow Hawkeyes open, allowing them more space for cuts to the basket.
Clark’s offense has changed the Iowa program, bringing the team close to an NCAA championship.
Three years ago, during her freshman season, Clark and the Hawkeyes overachieved to make the NCAA Sweet 16 as a No. 5 seed, upsetting Kentucky before losing to UConn. Two years ago, Clark helped Iowa win the Big 10 tournament and clinch a No. 2 seed in the NCAA tournament.
Last year, she made program history and brought Iowa to the national championship game, beating the overall favorite South Carolina before losing in the final game to LSU. After a remarkable 2023–2024 season and another Big 10 tournament win, Iowa’s women’s team got a No. 1 seed for March Madness — just the third time in program history — and is ranked second overall.
Taking the Hawkeyes to the national championship last year and getting them poised for another deep tourney run is an especially remarkable achievement when you consider the composition of the Iowa squad.
— The Players’ Tribune (@PlayersTribune) April 1, 2023
Clark’s teammates weren’t highly ranked All-Americans in high school, the primary evaluation of how good an incoming college player is compared to her cohort. While ESPN ranked Clark herself fourth in the 2020 class, her next-best teammate, Hannah Stuelke, was ranked 45 coming out of high school and averaged 6.5 points per game in the 2022–2023 season. Clark is the only five-star recruit on Iowa’s roster.
By comparison, South Carolina, the top-ranked team heading into the tournament, is littered with highly rated players. Sophomore Raven Johnson was ranked second and named the Women’s Basketball Coach’s Association high school player of the year going into college. There’s also senior Kamilla Cardoso, who was ranked fifth on recruiting lists and was later named Freshman of the Year in her conference. There are many other stars, including Te-Hina Paopao, Bree Hall, and Milaysia Fulwiley.
To be clear, Clark isn’t a perfect player. Her defense is improving, but she and Iowa would much prefer to outscore their opponents than lock them down defensively. Iowa gives up around 72 points per game to its opponents, while teams like South Carolina, UConn, and Texas don’t let their rivals hit 60. Plus, coach Lisa Bluder’s failure to find Clark a blue-chip teammate or two throughout her college career is probably the reason why Iowa didn’t win the championship last year and still isn’t the favorite to win this year.
But Clark is special because her massive offensive talent makes her team better and allows Iowa to compete with more talented rosters. As Iowa has shown us this year and last, anything can happen with her on the floor.
Caitlin Clark isn’t afraid to be a star (or a villain)
Clark makes you feel like you’re watching magic. That’s why so many people, even some women’s basketball naysayers, are so interested.
Women’s basketball is often negatively compared to the men’s game. With the rim at the same height regardless of gender, men can make more athletic plays (dunks, putbacks, alley-oops) closer to the basket due to theirheight and strength. In the paint and on fast breaks, women’s basketball isn’t going to look as glitzy as the men’s. But physical advantages don’t have a bearing on shooting and court vision, and that’s where Clark excels.
Clark regularly pulls up from beyond the 3-point line, sometimes even a step or two over half court (the vaunted “logo” three), and sinks them. The farther she shoots from, the more spectacular the basket. Her shooting range has inspired the next generation of women’s basketball players, and helped her ink lucrative NIL (name, image, and likeness) deals with brands like Nike, Gatorade, and State Farm. Clark and Iowa, as the Wall Street Journal discussed, have been part of the most-watched women’s basketball games on six different networks.
Her countless fans also include Steph Curry, arguably the best men’s shooter of all time. “When you watch them play, she just adds the element of surprise that you can’t really game-plan for,” Curry told ESPN last March.
Caitlin Clark is ridiculous. Logo shot and another monster game.
In a sport where women are told they can’t do the things men do, Clark defies expectations. Not that many men’s college basketball stars shoot from where Clark does and with her confidence.
That belief in herself adds to the spectacle of her games. Like other greats before her, Clark is unafraid to be both the hometown hero and the visiting villain. She’s extremely fun to cheer on, especially if you’re an Iowa fan; she’s also extremely fun to root against and beat if you’re not.
Last year during the NCAA tournament, Clark employed John Cena’s “You can’t see me” gesture in a win over Louisville. Clark tallied a triple double — 41 points, 12 assists, 10 rebounds — and sank eight 3-pointers, suggesting that Louisville, in fact, did not see her. In her Final Four win against South Carolina, Clark waved off an opposing player, daring them to shoot. Said player didn’t shoot.
That clip went viral, with some fans calling the play disrespectful (positive and funny) and others calling it disrespectful (negative and unfunny). In the championship game, LSU returned the favor by sinking 64 percent of its 3s. Angel Reese, the LSU star who goes by the nickname “Bayou Barbie,” gave Clark some of her own medicine and taunted her as the game came to a close. Clark had nothing but compliments for Reese and LSU after the game.
Photo by Steven Branscombe/Getty Images
When Caitlin Clark walks into the building, she’s in range.
Clark and Iowa’s NCAA tournament bracket isn’t easy this year, as Kansas State — a team that beat them in the regular season — looms as a potential Sweet 16 matchup. Defending champion LSU and a resurgent UCLA team are also in Clark’s region.
Whether Clark finishes the season with a loss or a national championship, it’ll be her last one as a college player. She announced that she’ll move onto the WNBA despite having one year of eligibility left for college ball. Experts have already weighed in on how valuable she’ll be as a pro. If she continues on her current trajectory, barring injury, she’ll likely challenge for a WNBA championship and Olympic gold. Her professional career hasn’t even begun, and there’s still so much to be written.
Caitlin Clark’s next game: Iowa vs. Holy Cross at 3:00 pm on March 23, 2024
Baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani has been caught up in a gambling controversy. He won’t be the last. -
Getty Images
From baseball to March Madness, how gambling is ruining sports.
Eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of taking money from gamblers to purposefully lose the World Series. Though some maintained their innocence, all eight were eventually banned from baseball for life.
If that punishment was harsh, it was largely justified. No sport can be expected to thrive if fans have reasonable suspicions that the games aren’t on the level.
In the decades that followed, sports did all they could to distance themselves from gambling. To this day, every sports commissioner’s worst nightmare is waking up to hear that one of their top players has been involved in a gambling scandal.
Which is basically what happened to Major League Baseball (MLB) this week.
Oh no, Ohtani
Shortly after the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Diego Padres opened up the 2024 regular season with MLB’s first-ever game in South Korea this week, news broke that Japanese Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter Ippei Mizuhara had been fired after Ohtani’s representatives accused him of stealing millions of dollars to place illegal bets.
At this point, no one is accusing Ohtani of engaging in gambling on baseball, which is strictly forbidden by the sport.
But still, there’s some weirdness here, not least that Mizuhara reportedly gave an interview to ESPN claiming that Ohtani has transferred millions of dollars from his account to Mizuhara to cover the interpreter’s gambling debts, only for Ohtani’s representatives to later say that no, he had actually been the victim of theft.
But that’s the thing about gambling and sports. You don’t have to be sure that players are placing bets to wonder if everything is on the up and up. Just suspicion is enough to erode the integrity of the game.
Which, of course, is why sports put so much effort into putting walls between the games and the athletes and the bookies. At least, until recently.
The big game of sports gaming
As I write this, March Madness has just tipped off, which means, as we explained Monday, that we’re in the midst of the biggest mainstream betting event of the year. US bettors will put more than $2.72 billion on the men’s and women’s college basketball tournaments using legalized sportsbooks.
Putting aside the fact that $2.72 billion is roughly $2.72 billion more than the amateur men and women participating in these tournaments are directly paid for their work, it’s more than twice what the NCAA brought in from March Madness in 2021. Which just goes to prove that gambling has gone from a shadow sideshow in pro and college sports to, increasingly, the main attraction.
In 2023, as my former Vox colleague Emily Stewart has reported, Americans spent $120 billion on sports gambling, a 28 percent increase from the year before. The staggering growth in sports gambling has been enabled by the growing legalization of legal sports betting throughout the US, which really kicked off with a 2018 Supreme Court decision striking down a 1992 federal law that effectively banned the practice in most states.
Once the decision on whether or not to allow sports gambling was left up to individual states, most of those states said “Yes, please, give us more.” As a result, sports betting is legal in some form in three dozen states, and online sports betting is legal in two dozen states.
That second part is important. Sports gambling hasn’t just migrated away from the quasi-legal black market; it’s migrated to the object we keep closer on hand than anything else: our phones.
From DraftKings to FanDuel, the last few years have seen the rise of sports betting apps that take one known compulsive activity — gambling itself — and marry it with the best (or worst) in gamifying, addiction-generating social media.
Unsurprisingly, Americans spent a record 67.1 million minutes on sports gambling sites in October 2023, a 66 percent increase from the year before. (Disclosure: The sports network SB Nation, which is owned by Vox’s parent company, Vox Media, has a partnership with DraftKings.)
In response to these changes, sports could have kept the walls up.
They did not — you can now make bets on site at many stadiums and arenas, analysis of odds are a major part of pregame shows, and this week, the NBA even started allowing fans to place bets directly on its official League Pass app.
Sports is now gambling in the US, and gambling is sports.
A losing bet
There are a lot of drawbacks to the expansion of sports betting, not least that it means more people end up gambling.
While as many as 5 percent of American adults will experience some problem gambling in their lifetime, much of the existing research was done before the great legalization wave. The Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling, for instance, saw a 91 percent increase in calls to its addiction helpline in 2022 — the year that mobile gambling became legal in the state.
What’s even harder to see — though increasingly palpable — is the impact that the ubiquity of gambling is having on sports itself. You don’t have to go full Field of Dreams to lament the way that gambling essentially financializes sports and the athletes who play it, transforming what should be human drama into over-unders, prop bets, and teasers.
If you don’t believe me, listen to the players and the coaches. Indiana Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton recently complained that “to half the world, I’m just helping them make money on DraftKings … I’m just a prop.” Cleveland Cavaliers coach J.B. Bickerstaff has said that he received threats from gamblers last year. (The Cavaliers, it should be noted, have a sportsbook inside their arena.)
At this point, many experts believe that it’s a matter of when, not if, a major gambling scandal devastates a top US sport.
As March Madness demonstrates with its stirring upsets every year, one of the most powerful forces in sports is belief. But that belief can be shattered by something even more powerful: greed.
It’s not hard to understand why. The ongoing war in Ukraine has seen drones transform from a bespoke counterterrorism tool — one largely controlled by the US and its allies — into a ubiquitous feature of the modern battlefield.
Russian drones have rained down death on cities and destroyed energy infrastructure across Ukraine, inflicting serious pain on the civilian population. Ukrainian drones have made much of the Black Sea a no-go zone for Russia’s navy — despite the fact that Ukraine has virtually no navy of its own — and in recent days, drones have been able to reach deep into Russian territory.
On the front lines, surveillance drones are used as spotters for artillery, making such weapons far more effective and likely contributing to a stalemate, one where neither side is able to maneuver or take advantage of the element of surprise.
Not surprisingly, the Pentagon is looking to learn lessons from these battlefields, particularly as it eyes a potential future conflict with China. But while technological advances from the longbow to the atom bomb have changed the nature of warfare — just as war has driven technological innovation — what distinguishes the new age of drone warfare from previous military innovations is how it will play out. With drones, the military with the advantage isn’t necessarily the one with the most advanced or most powerful weapons, but the one that has these new weapons en masse and can quickly build and replace them.
These drones aren’t anywhere near as accurate or powerful as manned aircraft or high-end military drones like the US’s Reaper, which costs about $32 million — but they don’t need to be. If one is lost, it’s just not that big a deal. The result is that drones can be a kind of leveler for materially disadvantaged forces, whether they be the Houthi rebels disrupting the global trading system or Ukraine’s beleaguered defenders coping with shortfalls in artillery supplies.
All of that is bad news for the US military, which has long relied on sheer technological superiority. In response, the Pentagon is taking an “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach, launching an ambitious plan called Replicator to build thousands of cheap, replaceable — or “attritable,” in the Pentagon’s lexicon — drones, all in anticipation of a potential superpower conflict with China.
Advocates see the initiative not just as a new weapon but as a fundamental transformation of how America’s military equips itself for the wars of the future. Yet even the staunchest Replicator boosters concede that doing so will require a wholesale change in mindset for one of the US government’s most entrenched bureaucracies, one complicated by the fact that it’s all supposed to happen very, very fast.
The rise of Replicator
Last August, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced the launch of Replicator with the goal of fielding “attritable autonomous systems at scale of multiple thousands, in multiple domains, within the next 18-to-24 months.” Hicks was very clear on these weapons’ intended target: the world’s largest military by manpower.
“Replicator is meant to help us overcome the PRC’s biggest advantage, which is mass,” she said, referring to the People’s Republic of China. “More ships. More missiles. More people.” We don’t know exactly how these drones will operate, but it’s likely they could form coordinated swarms to counter China’s advantages in mass and proximity to a future battlefield.
The stakes could hardly be higher. “The purpose of Replicator is to deter a conflict with the PRC, and if forced to fight, to have the capabilities we need to do so,” Aditi Kumar, a deputy director at the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley-based Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), told Vox.
We are now nearly seven months into Hicks’s timeline and the public still doesn’t have a good idea of what these systems will look like or who will be building them. According to the Department of Defense, there are around half a billion dollars for Replicator in its fiscal year 2024 budget — though Congress being Congress, that budget has still not been passed, and the department has been funded through a series of stopgap funding bills — and another half billion in its just-released fiscal year 2025 budget.
That’s pretty modest within the Pentagon’s $850 billion budget request. Kumar told Vox that an initial list of systems has been approved and that the department has contracts “ready to execute” as soon as it receives procurement funding from Congress.
The name “Replicator” refers to the fact that the department hopes the procedures used to fast-track the program can be “replicated” across the department. But as a number of the initial articles greeting Hicks’s announcement pointed out, it’s also sure to remind any Star Trek: The Next Generation fan of the devices used by the Enterprise crew to conjure anything up to “tea, Earl Grey, hot” out of thin air.
This Replicator won’t be quite that fast, but Kumar said a lesson the DIU has gained from conversations with Ukrainian operators is that modern drone warfare not only requires large numbers of systems, but that those systems have to be adaptable to a rapidly changing environment. In Ukraine, for instance, the drone war often comes down to a race to adapt the machines to the other side’s electronic countermeasures and jamming systems.
“Basically every 90 days, the environment completely changes,” Kumar said, referring to lessons learned from the Ukrainian operators. “Whatever capabilities they are fielding, countermeasures developed for those and so they have to keep staying ahead of the curve.”
Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu via Getty Images
A Ukrainian soldier operates a drone during a training session in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on March 11, 2024.
The robots are coming
Fielding fleets of drones at this scale is also likely to speed up the military’s adoption of artificial intelligence. “The only way that thousands of drones work is if you have some measure of autonomy in the drones,” said Paul Scharre, a former Defense Department official now with the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). “Because they have thousands of systems of control, then you would need thousands of people operating them, and that’s a big personnel cost for the military.”
Scharre is among the scholars raising concerns about the risks that an autonomous weapon could inadvertently trigger an international crisis by taking some risky action that a human in the loop might have decided against. (Another worry is that the speed of future conflicts and the pace of AI innovation may create pressure to take humans out of the loop.) He told Vox that autonomous weapons systems are more difficult to test than other applications of AI, such as self-driving cars, because of the difficulty of simulating the conditions under which they will be used. “You won’t get feedback on how something works until the war happened,” he said.
Regardless, the age of AI aircraft is likely coming fast. The Air Force is also pursuing a separate program to develop so-called collaborative combat aircraft, or “robot wingman” drones: highly autonomous drones that will fly alongside crewed aircraft. Pentagon officials have described that program as “complementary” to Replicator.
Made in America
Building these drones on Hicks’s timeline sounds ambitious enough, but that’s just the beginning.
“Replicator is about fielding multiple thousands of autonomous systems by 2025, and that’s the metric we will be measured by in terms of success or failure,” said a senior Pentagon official authorized to speak with Vox on condition of anonymity. “But more important is the department’s culture change, in getting us to use our authority in a more creative way to accelerate delivery to the warfighter.”
Replicator takes aim at an outmoded Pentagon acquisitions and development process that has caused the average time for the development of US weapons systems, from research and development to deployment, to roughly quadruple since the 1970s.
And while the US has slowed down, potential adversaries have sped up. In 2018, Michael Griffin, then undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, estimated that it takes the US roughly 16 years to deliver a new idea to operational capacity, versus fewer than seven for China.
William Greenwalt, a former deputy undersecretary of defense for industrial policy now at the American Enterprise Institute, blames these delays on a culture of “systems analysis run amok” — the insistence on exhaustive testing and analysis for new systems. It’s “the greatest jobs program the Pentagon has ever developed,” he told Vox. “And as long as you don’t have a near peer competitor, you can have a jobs program.”
That’s no longer the case, given China’s rapidly rising capabilities and the country’s own investments in drones and autonomous systems. The senior Pentagon official acknowledged that the department had to find ways to get new systems from idea to operation, and that this would mean building “a culture where it’s okay to take acceptable risks, not irresponsible risks, but acceptable risks.”
Greenwalt predicted that the biggest technical challenge to Replicator will not be aerodynamics, range, or software, but manufacturing. Consider that it’s projected to take until 2025 for the US to ramp up production of 155-millimeter artillery ammunition — a system that hasn’t been altered that much since the early 20th century — to meet Ukraine’s battlefield needs. Replicator, a far more complex and completely new system, one that hasn’t even gone into production yet, is supposedly going to be built on a much faster timeline.
Adding to the headaches is the fact that the US commercial drone sector lags behind China’s, where Chinese companies like DJI dominate the market for the types of technologies that could be adapted for dual use. Ukraine’s forces have been celebrated for adapting these off-the-shelf systems for military purposes, and Kyiv now buys about 60 percent of the world’s supply of DJI’s popular Mavic quadcopter. But that’s obviously not an option for the US when China itself is the anticipated adversary.
Still, Greenwalt is cautiously excited about the level of ambition involved. “Can we basically adopt a manufacturing capability from scratch with new technology? That, I think, is the real revolutionary potential of Replicator.”
What Ukraine can’t teach us
As futuristic as Replicator may sound, there’s still a risk that the US is simply fighting the last war. Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the defense program at CNAS and author of a recent study of drone innovation in the war in Ukraine, questions the degree to which the lessons of that war — one where small, less capable, but easily replaceable drones have played a major role — would be applicable to combat in the Pacific with China.
“The geography and the distances involved in the Pacific theater are so much greater than in Ukraine, and the type of drones that the United States would employ need to have more range and endurance because they’re likely to be based at least several hundred miles away at the closest and probably much farther than that,” Pettyjohn told Vox. “So unless the United States is going to be pre-positioning drones on Taiwan, it’s going to need a different class of system.”
Pettyjohn worries that given the strict timelines established for Replicator, “the type of drones that it is going to end up producing are not going to be a lot of the ones that would be helpful.”
Pentagon officials declined to comment on the specific operational needs for Replicator but Kumar acknowledged that, “We are dealing with a very different environment, an amphibious environment. And that presents a different set of concepts of operations and targets [than Ukraine].”
Automatic weapons
The main advantage of drones, of course, is that they decrease the risks to human troops. “It does allow us to have fewer people in the line of fire by replicating what our soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and guardians do very well,” the Pentagon senior official said.
The shift to a great emphasis on autonomous systems comes at a time when the military is scaling back on its human manpower. In February, the Army announced it was cutting the size of its force by 24,000 — around 5 percent — mainly by not filling already empty posts. The move is part of a deliberate restructuring as the Army shifts away from its post-9/11 focus on counterterrorism, with deep cuts to special operations forces and more staff for drones, air defense, and cyber capabilities. It also comes as the Army has been consistently missing its recruiting goals.
A potential war with China is likely to involve greater numbers of troops in combat, and greater casualties, than the US has seen in decades. It’s possible that in the future, robots may be able to make up, to some extent, for human manpower in wars like these. We can only hope we won’t have to find out.
From The Hindu: Sports
Indian Premier League 2024 | Shreyas Iyer’s comeback in spotlight in Starc vs Cummins showdown - On paper, KKR with a star-studded batting and spin-heavy attack to complement Starc’s pace, will be overwhelming favourites.
Indian Premier League 2024 | Comeback-man Pant the highlight as Delhi Capitals take on Punjab Kings - Punjab Kings have rarely come together as a unit to go the distance, making Delhi Capitals the favourites for the day game
Pérez downplays speculation of his Red Bull teammate Verstappen leaving to join Mercedes in F1 - Pérez remains convinced the team is united.
Motor racing | Verstappen wants more focus on car, not Red Bull drama - Verstappen, who has won the last three world championships with Red Bull, said the internal strife had no impact on his performance or comfort within the team.
Badminton | Treesa-Gayatri win, Tanisha-Ashwini lose in Swiss Open - World no. 26 Treesa and Gayatri will face Australia’s Setyana Mapasa
From The Hindu: National News
ASAP Kerala invites applications for cybersecurity course - With no prior experience necessary to apply, the programme is accessible to beginners
Aviation regulator DGCA slaps ₹80 lakh fine on Air India for violations of norms related to flight duty time limitations - The DGCA said there were instances of exceeding duty periods, wrongly marked training records and overlapping duties.
Tiruchi Corporation expedites repairs at Periyar Nagar Collector Well - Of the 2,40,000 households in the city, 1,20,000 dependen on the Corporation’s water supply; the civic body recently introduced alternate day water supply
After withdrawing from Lok Sabha poll race, Congress national spokesperson Rohan Gupta now quits party - Rohan Gupta, who had been given a Lok Sabha ticket from the Ahmedabad East seat by the Congress, withdrew from the race last Monday citing his father’s ill health
Water storage in India’s key reservoirs is at 38% ahead of summer season - Reservoirs in the South have reported lower storage levels compared to last year, data shows
From BBC: Europe
Blackouts hit Ukraine after wave of Russia strikes - Ukraine says Russia trying to cause failure of country’s energy system after widespread attack.
Fleeing Ukraine’s embattled border villages - Ukrainians are leaving villages occupied by Russia amid a rise in cross-border attacks by both sides.
Bosnia and Herzegovina to begin talks to join EU - The bloc has given the green light to start membership talks with the country, eight years after it first applied.
Big missile attack targets Ukrainian capital - At least 17 people were injured as debris from more than 30 intercepted missiles fell on Kyiv, officials say.
Ukraine, Iceland, Georgia & Greece in finals - Ukraine will play Iceland in Wroclaw, Georgia will host Greece, and Poland will visit Wales in Tuesday’s three Euro 2024 play-off finals.
From Ars Technica
Never-before-seen data wiper may have been used by Russia against Ukraine - AcidRain, discovered in 2022, is tied to AcidPour. Both are attributed to Russia. - link
More than half of chickenpox diagnoses are wrong, study finds - Vaccination has dramatically reduced cases, making clinical diagnoses tricky. - link
SpaceX’s workhorse launch pad now has the accoutrements for astronauts - “This system will help us scale to bigger towers and spaceships.” - link
World’s first global AI resolution unanimously adopted by United Nations - Nonbinding agreement seeks to protect personal data and safeguard human rights. - link
Apple’s green message bubbles draw wrath of US attorney general - RCS and green bubbles in iPhone-to-Android texts play role in Apple/DOJ battle. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
Playful CEO -
A CEO of a multinational corporation was flying across the Pacific and decided he had to go to the bathroom. So he got up and started walking down the aisle, but just as he passed the plane door it malfunctioned, opened and he was sucked out.
Miraculously he survived landing in the water and saw a tropical island nearby. He swam to it, certain that he would soon be rescued. However, fifteen years passed and no one came to his rescue. Fortunately there was a spring on the island and he survived on coconuts and fish.
Finally one day, as he was drawing sand pictures at the beach, he sees a woman in a trim-fitting scuba outfit emerge from the ocean.
She is beautiful!
She says, “Are you Fred Jacobson?” He says, “Why yes I am.”
“Congratulations, I am from Rescue Inc., and we have been attempting to find you since you were lost. Now tell me, how long has it been since you’ve had a smoke?”
“Well, of course it’s been about 15 years.”
So she reaches down the front of her wet-suit on the left side and pulls out a package of Players cigarettes. “How in the world did you know that my favorite brand was Players?”
“We have researched all of your preferences very carefully Fred, we want to do a good job.”
So as Fred is taking a deep, satisfying drag on his cigarette, the rescuer says, “And how long has it been since you’ve had a drink?”
“Well, that’s fifteen years too.” And so she reaches down inside the wetsuit on the other side and pulls out a bottle of Jack Daniels.
“How did you know that Jack Daniels was my favorite drink?”
“Well, Fred, as I said we have looked into all of those things too, do you mind if I have a drink too?”
“No, of course not.” And they both put a couple away.
Then, as she starts to peel off the wet suit she says, “And tell me Fred, how long has it been since you’ve played around?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve got a set of golf clubs in there!”
Three men were talking about their teenage daughters: The first says “I was cleaning my daughter’s room the other day and found a packet of cigarettes. I didn’t even know she smoked”. -
The second says “That’s nothing. I was cleaning my daughter’s room the other day when I came across a full bottle of Vodka. I was really shocked as I didn’t even know she drank”. Then the third speaks up. “Both of you have got nothing to worry about. I was cleaning my daughter’s room the other day and I found a packet of condoms. I was really shocked. I didn’t even know she had a penis”.
A boy comes home for dinner looking exhausted and disheveled… -
His mother sees his state and asks him, “What on earth have you been up to all day?” The boy turns to his mother and proudly says, “Well Mom, I’ve been out fucking and fighting all day.” His mother is shocked by his words and angrily responds, “How dare you speak like that? You go to your room, this minute and no supper for you! Just wait till your father gets home and I tell him what you said!” The boy just skulks up to his room, head bowed in shame.
A little while later, the father comes home and calls out, “Hi honey I’m home!” Immediately, the mother approaches him and tells him, “Do you know what your son said to me? When I asked him how his day was, he told me he was out fucking and fighting all day.” Taken aback, the father replies, “He said what?” Again, the mother repeats, “He told me he was fucking and fighting all day, in those words”.
Furiously, the man throws down his bag and jacket and storms into the kitchen. He rifles through the cupboards, pulling out a large iron skillet. The wife looks at him frightened and asks, “Please dear, what do you plan on doing with that?”
The father turns to her and, with a smile says, “I’m going to fry him up a steak. The poor boy can’t be out fucking and fighting all day on an empty stomach now can he?”
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