Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• The Case for Negotiating with Russia - Samuel Charap is asking Ukraine and its allies to consider how much worse the war could get. - link

• How a Man in Prison Stole Millions from Billionaires - With smuggled cell phones and a handful of accomplices, Arthur Lee Cofield, Jr., took money from large bank accounts and bought houses, cars, clothes, and gold. - link

• The Trump Mug Shot’s Art-Historical Lineage - Assessing the forty-fifth President’s Georgia photo op in the context of Da Vinci, Warhol, and a rogues’ gallery of accused criminals. - link

• Trump’s 2020 Trial Is Set to Dominate the 2024 Primary Season - Jury selection could begin a day before Super Tuesday. - link

• “Braiding Sweetgrass,” and a Lesson in Extreme Heat - Parul Sehgal visits Robin Wall Kimmerer, who set out to bridge the gap between Western science and Indigenous teaching. Plus, Dhruv Khullar looks at extreme heat and the body. - link

From Vox

• Why Hurricane Idalia is so dangerous, explained in 7 maps -

  

  Several factors put Idalia on track to rival damage from previous deadly hurricanes.

  Hurricane Idalia made landfall in Florida on Wednesday morning as a dangerous category 3 storm with wind speeds of 125 miles per hour. Meteorologists are projecting severe impacts along Florida’s Gulf Coast: storm surges of up to 16 feet, several inches of rainfall, and possibly tornadoes. The National Hurricane Center is warning Idalia will bring “catastrophic impacts” and “destructive life-threatening winds.”

  The potential impacts from Idalia are certainly frightening, but they’re not all that surprising. This region of the world has all the ingredients for a powerful, dangerous, expensive, and destructive hurricane, from extremely warm ocean temperatures that fuel tropical storms to growing coastal populations that are vulnerable to storm surges. And unfortunately, some of these ingredients are becoming more potent as average temperatures rise.

  Here’s what could turn Idalia into one of the year’s most dangerous storms.

  Idalia churned over unusually warm ocean water on its path to Florida

  If there’s one thing a hurricane needs to grow, it’s warm ocean water. And this summer, the Gulf of Mexico and the broader Caribbean have been extremely and anomalously warm. In late July, a buoy off the coast of Florida registered 101.1 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about as warm as the water in a hot tub.

  As Hurricane Idalia moved north from Cuba toward Florida’s Big Bend region — where the Pan Handle meets the peninsula — it passed over water that’s still unusually hot. Check out the chart below, which shows sea-surface temperature anomalies, measured in Celsius. Darker red indicates regions that are warmer than average.

  Climate Change Institute/University of Maine

  Water in the path of the storm was roughly 1 to 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than average temperatures this time of year. That provided fuel for Idalia to go through what’s called rapid intensification, which is when a storm’s wind speeds increase by roughly 35 mph or more in less than 24 hours.

  The chart below shows, more simply, how hot the Atlantic is as of a few days ago. Waters around Tampa, just south of the storm’s center of impact, are currently in the high 80s, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

  Climate Change Institute/University of Maine

  One complicating factor: The world is in an El Niño year, a climate phenomenon that refers to the warm phase of the Pacific Ocean’s temperature cycle.

  On the one hand, El Niño tends to raise global temperatures. On the other, it usually increases wind shear in the North Atlantic, which can prevent hurricanes from forming. While these forces usually counteract each other to an extent, resulting in an average hurricane season, this year has been so hot that the scales have been nudged in favor of more storms. Earlier this month, forecasters updated their outlook to “an above-normal level of activity” for hurricanes.

  The hurricane is pushing a huge amount of water inland

  National Hurricane Center

  When a hurricane rams the coast, it usually pushes water inland, causing what’s known as storm surge. It’s often the deadliest part of tropical storms.

  That’s a major concern with Idalia. Even a few feet of storm surge can sweep away vehicles, yet current forecasts show parts of the Gulf Coast getting surge as high as 16 feet above ground level. This torrent of water can knock out critical infrastructure, inundate roads, spread disease, and cause injuries. And in low-lying areas like Florida’s Gulf Coast, that water can linger for days.

  Worsening the threat, the forecasted landfall of Idalia lines up with Tampa Bay’s highest tides of the month, meaning even more water could surge inland.

  The Florida Forgotten Coast and Big Bend are some of the most surge-prone areas in the world. The terrain is essentially flat inland a long way from the coast. The NHC’s storm surge maps for a category 4 hurricane show the potential for 6-9+ feet of surge 10 miles inland. #Idalia pic.twitter.com/eroXuswtfD

  — Clark Evans (@ClarkEvansWx) August 29, 2023

Idalia is striking an area still recovering from another storm

Hurricane Ian, which struck Florida last year, became the deadliest storm in the state since 1935, killing at least 149 people. It landed on Florida’s Gulf Coast at Category 4 strength and drove a storm surge as high as 18 feet; the surge alone was blamed for 41 deaths. The storm also dumped more than 25 inches of rain in some areas, only adding to the flooding.

Hurricane Ian was remarkably destructive too, damaging more than 52,000 structures. The storm’s price tag ultimately amounted to an estimated $109 billion, making it the costliest hurricane in Florida history.

NOAA

The damage displaced a number of residents who have still not returned home, and many Floridians are still waiting for insurance payouts. Some areas, meanwhile, are still clearing debris, while others are filled with buildings waiting to be demolished.

Now Idalia is threatening a similar region. Although the eye of the storm will make landfall north of where Ian struck, the zone of impact will at least partially overlap with Ian’s, compounding the impacts of the prior storm.

National Hurricane Center

Florida’s population is highest in its most vulnerable areas

More than three-quarters of people in Florida live along the coast. Coastal regions also have some of the fastest growth rates in the state. Between 2010 and 2020, the Tampa-St. Petersburg area grew by more than 365,000 people, according to the Florida Department of Transportation.

Wikimedia Commons

This means that as Idalia makes landfall, more people and property will be in the path of destruction.

Update, August 30, 7:50 am ET: This story was originally published on August 29 and has been updated with new information about Hurricane Idalia’s location and strength.

• America’s unique, enduring gun problem, explained -

  

  The factors that lead to tragedies like the UNC-Chapel Hill shooting are deeply ingrained in US politics, culture, and law.

  A grad student accused of shooting and killing a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on August 28 has been arrested and charged with first-degree murder and possessing a gun on an education property.

  The faculty member was the grad student’s adviser, Zijie Yan, an associate professor in the department of Applied Physical Sciences. It’s not yet clear what the shooter’s motivation may have been. Police are still searching for the weapon used in the attack and have not determined whether it was obtained legally.

  It’s one of dozens of school shootings this year alone, and comes just after another high-profile shooting in Jacksonville, Florida, where the shooter appeared to first try to target Edward Waters University, a historically Black university, before opening fire at Black victims in a Dollar General store instead.

  This kind of violence is unique to the US and should not be normalized.

  No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, 120 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 43,375 per year. According to the latest available analysis of data from 2015 to 2019, the US gun homicide rate was 26 times that of other high-income countries; its gun suicide rate was nearly 12 times higher. Mass shootings, defined as attacks in which at least four people are injured or killed excluding the shooter, have been on the rise since 2015, peaking at 686 incidents in 2021. There have been 476 mass shootings in the US in 2023 as of late August, and at the current pace, the US is set to eclipse the 2021 record this year.

  Despite that sheer carnage, however, the political debate over how to ensure that guns don’t fall into the hands of people who may hurt themselves and others — such as the UNC shooter — has long proved intractable. Last year, Congress reached a deal on limited gun reforms for the first time in nearly 30 years in the wake of a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas — the deadliest school shooting since 2012.

  But those narrow reforms clearly haven’t stopped America’s gun violence epidemic. The US’s expansive view of civilian gun ownership has been so ingrained in politics, in culture, and in the law since the nation’s founding that there’s no telling how many more people will die before federal lawmakers take further action. In that absence, many red states have loosened their gun laws over the last few years, rather than making it harder to obtain a gun.

  “America is unique in that guns have always been present, there is wide civilian ownership, and the government hasn’t claimed more of a monopoly on them,” said David Yamane, a professor at Wake Forest University who studies American gun culture.

  The US has a lot of guns, and more guns mean more gun deaths

  It’s hard to estimate the number of privately owned guns in America since there is no countrywide database where people register whether they own guns, there is a thriving black market for them in the absence of strong federal gun trafficking laws, and people can manufacture their own guns with DIY kits or 3D printers. The gun lobby has also vehemently opposed federal legislation to track gun sales and establish a national handgun registry.

  One estimate from the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss-based research project, found that there were approximately 390 million guns in circulation in the US in 2018, or about 120.5 firearms per 100 residents. That number has likely climbed in the years since, given that one in five households purchased a gun during the pandemic, though the 2018 estimate remains the most recent available. There has also been a significant increase in the number of guns manufactured and imported in the years since. But even without accounting for that increase, US gun ownership is still well above any other country: Yemen, which has the world’s second-highest level of gun ownership, has only 52.8 guns per 100 residents; in Iceland, it’s 31.7.

  Scott Olson/Getty Images

  American guns are concentrated in a tiny minority of households: just 3 percent own about half the nation’s guns, according to a 2016 Harvard and Northeastern University study. They’re called “super owners” who have an average of 17 guns each. Gallup, using a different methodology, found that 45 percent of Americans lived in a household with guns in 2022.

  Researchers have found a clear link between gun ownership in the US and gun violence, and some argue that it’s causal. One 2013 Boston University-led study, for instance, found that for each percentage point increase in gun ownership at the household level, the state firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9 percent. And states with weaker gun laws have higher rates of gun-related homicides and suicides, according to a study by the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.

  The link between gun deaths and gun ownership is much stronger than the link that gun rights advocates often seek to draw between violence and mental health issues. If it were possible to cure all schizophrenia, bipolar, and depressive disorders, violent crime in the US would fall by only 4 percent, according to a study from Duke University professor Jeffrey Swanson, who examines policies to reduce gun violence.

  There’s still a pervasive idea, pushed by gun manufacturers and gun rights organizations like the National Rifle Association, that further arming America is the answer to preventing gun violence — the “good guy with a gun” theory. But there have been relatively few instances in which police or armed bystanders have been able to successfully stop an active attack.

  According to a database maintained by Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University, there were 520 active attacks — defined as when one or more people are “actively killing or attempting to kill multiple unrelated people in a public space,” including but not limited to shootings — between 2000 and 2022. In many of those cases, police were unable to stop the attacker, either because the attack had already ended by the time they arrived or because the attacker surrendered or committed suicide. Only in 160 cases were police able to successfully intervene by shooting or otherwise subduing the attacker.

  

  Another 2021 study from Hamline University and Metropolitan State University found that the rate of deaths in 133 mass school shootings between 1980 and 2019 was 2.83 times greater in cases where there was an armed guard present. The researchers argue the results suggest the presence of an armed guard increased shooters’ aggression and that because many school shooters have been found to be suicidal, “an armed officer may be an incentive rather than a deterrent.”

  “The idea that the solution to mass shootings is that we need more guns in the hands of more people in more places so that we’ll be able to protect ourselves — there’s no evidence that that’s true,” Swanson said.

  The prevalence of the self-defense narrative is part of what sets apart the gun rights movement in the US from similar movements in places like Canada and Australia, according to Robert Spitzer, a professor at SUNY Cortland who studies the politics of gun control.

  Self-defense has become by far the most prominent reason for gun ownership in the US today, eclipsing hunting, recreation, or owning guns because they’re antiques, heirlooms, or work-related. That’s also reflected in ballooning handgun sales, since the primary purpose of those guns isn’t recreational, but self-defense.

  American gun culture “brings together the hunting-sporting tradition with the militia-frontier tradition, but in modern times the hunting element has been eclipsed by a heavily politicized notion that gun carrying is an expression of freedom, individuality, hostility to government, and personal self-protection,” Spitzer said.

  Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images

  That culture of gun ownership in the US has made it all the more difficult to explore serious policy solutions to gun violence after mass shootings. In high-income countries lacking that culture, mass shootings have historically galvanized public support behind gun control measures that would seem extreme by US standards.

  Canada banned military-style assault weapons two weeks after a 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia. In 2019, less than a month after the Christchurch massacre, New Zealand lawmakers passed a gun buyback scheme, as well as restrictions on AR-15s and other semiautomatic weapons, and they later established a firearms registry. The 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Australia spurred the government to buy back 650,000 firearms within a year, and murders and suicides plummeted as a result.

  By contrast, nearly a decade went by after the 2012 school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, before Congress passed a new gun control law. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the law passed in June 2022, was relatively limited: It incentivized states to pass red flag laws, enhanced background checks for gun buyers under 21, and closed the “boyfriend loophole,” which allowed some people with domestic violence convictions to purchase guns. But it did not ban any types of weapons, and certain studies suggest that even truly universal background checks may have limited effects on gun violence.

  At the same time, many states have sought to expand gun ownership in recent years. At least 27 states have now passed laws allowing residents to carry a handgun without a permit and allow school staff and teachers to carry guns on campus.

  

  “Other countries look at this problem and say, ‘People walking around in the community with handguns is just way too dangerous, so we’re going to broadly limit legal access to that and make exceptions on the margins for people who might have a good reason to have a gun,’” Swanson said. “Here we do just the opposite: We say that, because of the way that the Supreme Court interpreted the Second Amendment, everybody has the right to a gun for personal protection, and then we tried to make exceptions for really dangerous people, but we can’t figure out who they are.”

  While the majority of Americans support more gun control restrictions, including universal background checks, a vocal Republican minority unequivocally opposes such laws — and is willing to put pressure on GOP lawmakers to do the same. Alongside the NRA, and a well-funded gun lobby, this contingent of voters sees gun control as a deciding issue, and one that could warrant a primary challenge for a lawmaker who votes for it.

  The gun lobby has the advantage of enthusiasm. “​​Despite being outnumbered, Americans who oppose gun control are more likely to contact public officials about it and to base their votes on it,” Barnard College’s Matthew Lacombe explained in 2020. “As a result, many politicians believe that supporting gun regulation is more likely to lose them votes than to gain them votes.”

  Sarah Reingewirtz/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images

  The Supreme Court has made it impossible to cure America’s gun violence epidemic

  In 2008, the Supreme Court effectively wrote NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre’s “good guy with a gun” theory into the Constitution. The Court’s 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) was the first Supreme Court decision in American history to hold that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm. But it also went much further than that.

  Heller held that one of the primary purposes of the Second Amendment is to protect the right of individuals — good guys with a gun, in LaPierre’s framework — to use firearms to stop bad guys with guns. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in Heller, an “inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right.”

  As a matter of textual interpretation, this holding makes no sense. The Second Amendment provides that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

  We don’t need to guess why the Second Amendment protects a right to firearms because it is right there in the Constitution. The Second Amendment’s purpose is to preserve “a well-regulated Militia,” not to allow individuals to use their weapons for personal self-defense.

  For many years, the Supreme Court took the first 13 words of the Second Amendment seriously. As the Court said in United States v. Miller (1939), the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was to “render possible the effectiveness” of militias. And thus the amendment must be “interpreted and applied with that end in view.” Heller abandoned that approach.

  Heller also reached another important policy conclusion. Handguns, according to Scalia, are “overwhelmingly chosen” by gun owners who wish to carry a firearm for self-defense. For this reason, he wrote, handguns enjoy a kind of super-legal status. Lawmakers are not allowed to ban what Scalia described as “the most preferred firearm in the nation to ‘keep’ and use for protection of one’s home and family.”

  This declaration regarding handguns matters because this easily concealed weapon is responsible for far more deaths than any other weapon in the United States — and it isn’t close. In 2021, for example, a total of 14,616 people were murdered in the US, according to the FBI. Of these murder victims, at least 5,992 — just over 40 percent — were killed by handguns.

  Allison Dinner/AFP via Getty Images

  Last year, the Supreme Court made it even harder for federal and state lawmakers to combat gun violence. In its decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, it massively expands the scope of the Second Amendment, abandons more than a decade of case law governing which gun laws are permitted by the Constitution, and replaces this case law with a new legal framework that, as Justice Stephen Breyer writes in dissent, “imposes a task on the lower courts that judges cannot easily accomplish.”

  Bruen has since allowed handguns — which are responsible for the overwhelming majority of gun murders in the United States — to proliferate on many American streets. That’s because Bruen strikes the types of laws that limit who can legally carry handguns in public, holding that “the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.” Amid a flurry of activity in the courts over the last year, more than a dozen state and federal gun control laws have been invalidated in whole or in part as a result.

  Under this new legal regime, the future of firearm regulation looks grim for anyone who believes that the government should help protect us from gun violence.

  Update, August 29, 5:30 pm ET: This story was originally published on May 26, 2022, and has been updated multiple times, most recently with details from the August 28 shooting at UNC Chapel Hill.

• Did Israel’s national security minister just admit to apartheid policies? -

  

  With “Sorry, Mohammad,” Ben-Gvir goes viral.

  The State of Israel has occupied the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem since the 1967 war. The Palestinians living in those territories quite simply do not have the same rights as Israeli settlers there. For instance, it’s rare for the Israeli state to grant Palestinians building permits even as settlements expand.

  Israeli leaders rarely articulate in clear terms that separate legal systems rule over Israeli settlers and Palestinians in the same area. To do so would be to recognize the split realities, which Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights groups have documented as apartheid. But Israeli politicians have preferred to obscure this reality.

  That is, until an incendiary settler-politician serving in the extreme-right Israel government caused a stir in Israel last week when he described the situation almost exactly as human rights groups have — not accidentally, as a slip of the tongue, but very much on purpose.

  “My right, the right of my wife and my children to move around Judea and Samaria” — the biblical names for the West Bank — “is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs,” National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir told Israel’s version of Meet the Press. “My right to life comes before freedom of movement.”

  “Sorry, Mohammad, but that’s the reality,” Ben-Gvir paused to say, turning to a member of the TV panel, journalist Mohammad Magadli, who is a Palestinian citizen of Israel.

  It was a brash encapsulation of the policies underpinning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current far-right coalition, and even its softer and more PR-friendly predecessors.

  Ben-Gvir justified the intensive security regime at a time of a growing grassroots Palestinian movement willing to violently resist the Israeli state, and as settler violence against Palestinians has spiked.

  That clip quickly traveled around the internet. Ben-Gvir’s disparaging aside — “Sorry, Mohammad” — became a meme. One Israeli editor wrote that “Sorry, Mohammad,” would be a “fitting name for the Israeli national anthem.” The prominent Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem started posting violent videos and photos of the Israeli occupation captioned with the words “Sorry, Mohammad.” Some accounts began posting historical photos of racism and discrimination — from the Jim Crow years, apartheid-era South Africa and Nazi Germany — with those words. (Some posts appear to have been removed or deleted for violating social media terms of service.)

  Because Ben-Gvir’s tone may have seemed provocative, but what he stated on TV is actually just the policy of the State of Israel.

  The controversy over Ben-Gvir’s remarks, briefly explained

  Ben-Gvir’s statement caused a backlash. The US State Department spokesperson condemned his remarks. And two days later, Netanyahu’s office weighed in on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, to undo the damage.

  “Israel allows maximum freedom of movement in Judea and Samaria for both Israelis and Palestinians,” the statement said. “Unfortunately, Palestinian terrorists take advantage of this freedom of movement to murder Israeli women, children and families by ambushing them at certain points on different routes.”

  Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images

  “This is what Minister Ben-Gvir meant when he said ‘the right to life precedes freedom of movement’,” the prime minister’s office went on to explain.

  New grassroots Palestinian militant groups and individual acts of terrorism have increased this year. But it has also been an exceedingly deadly year for Palestinians in the West Bank. Under Netanyahu’s government, settlers have been emboldened, leading to more settler violence, the further annexation of Palestinian land, and settlement expansion. That encroachment has in turn fueled violent Palestinian resistance. This dynamic creates situations like one earlier this summer, when an Israeli military raid in Jenin killed 12 Palestinians, seemingly leading to a retaliatory Palestinian shooting of four Israelis near a settlement, which then led to more settler violence against Palestinians, all within three days.

  Netanyahu, then, was not so much condemning Ben-Gvir’s policy stance as his tone.

  Israeli attorney Daniel Seidemann pointed out that Netanyahu’s team posted on X on Friday evening after sunset, that is during the Jewish sabbath when Ben-Gvir and his colleagues from the Jewish Power Party would likely be offline. “He posted it only in English, not in Hebrew, so as not to anger his base,” Seidemann explained.

  And when Ben-Gvir got online after sunset on Saturday, he stood by his comments. “Not only do I not regret my words, I am saying them yet again,” he said, with an Israeli flag behind him and Netanyahu’s official portrait sitting on the bookshelf.

  Itamar Ben Gvir does not apologize for his Jewish Supremacist comments when he said that Jews rights are more important than Arabs’ rights. In fact he doubles down and repeats exactly what he said last night. Ben Gvir is a prize to BDS. pic.twitter.com/xEYTs6M4aB

  — Josh Drill (@drill_josh) August 25, 2023

Amichai Eliyahu, Israel’s minister of heritage and a member of Ben-Gvir’s party, added another example to the genre on Sunday.

“As soon as someone threatens my rights to live, I slightly reduce his civil rights,” he said in a TV segment.

“Limit just a tiny bit?” TV anchor Attila Somfalvi responded. “It’s called apartheid, I think, in the dictionary.”

What Ben-Gvir’s comments really reveal

Ben-Gvir is not only any ordinary provocateur shaped by the racist ideology of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. He is not just a lawyer who has represented Jewish terrorists who have killed Palestinians. He is a powerful minister in Israel’s far-right government.

Now he has laid plain what Palestinians endure every day. They lack rights so that settlers like Ben-Gvir can move freely through the occupied West Bank. Palestinians and Israeli settlers travel on separate roads in the territory; they are subject to different legal systems. “The elevation of Jewish rights to move (and most civil and human rights) over Palestinian freedom of movement (and other rights) is as old as the state itself,” Dahlia Scheindlin notes in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Netanyahu has advanced a controversial overhaul of the Israeli judiciary that, among other issues, would enable policies of further annexation of Palestinian land. The ethno-nationalist partners in the governing coalition support such bureaucratic measures. In particular, the government’s recent moves of “transferring many powers overseeing the West Bank from military to civilian leaders—in contravention of international law,” as Israeli lawyer Michael Sfard notes, openly advance “a policy of unilateral annexation.”

In 2017, Bezalel Smotrich, now Netanyahu’s finance minister, published a radical manifesto entitled “Israel’s Decisive Plan” that advocates the expulsion of Palestinians who seek an independent state. His self-described “pragmatic document” also detailed how to further advance the settlements and illegal outposts, what he calls “Victory Through Settlement.”

For Palestinians, none of these comments come as a surprise. This is the reality of the occupied territories. But it’s somehow clarifying for Ben-Gvir to say them aloud — and shows that Netanyahu’s most extreme coalition partners are operating from a place of comfort.

From The Hindu: Sports

• TNCA President’s XI goes down without a fight -

• A lot depends on nutrition and strength for athletes, says Dr. Aashish Contractor -

• U.S. Open | Alcaraz gets easy start to title defence, Medvedev advances - Seven-time Grand Slam winner Venus Williams lost 6-1 6-1 to Belgian qualifier Greet Minnen in her 100th U.S. Open match

• Bangladesh wicketkeeper-batter Litton Das ruled out of entire Asia Cup due to illness - Das could not recover from a viral fever, and he did not travel to Sri Lanka whom Bangladesh face in their opening match on Thursday; Anamul Haque Bijoy named as replacement

• Buttler welcomes ‘superstar’ Stokes back into England ODI fold - Stokes played a pivotal role in England’s 2019 World Cup triumph, scoring an unbeaten 84 in the final against New Zealand

From The Hindu: National News

• RJD MP Manoj Jha says DU cancelled his lecture planned for Sept 4 - Mr. Jha received an e-mail from Delhi University on August 30 informing that the lecture has been cancelled due to “unavoidable circumstances”

• Reprieve for actors Shane Nigam, Sreenath Bhasi - The two agree not to create problems at shooting locations

• Here are the big stories from Karnataka today - Welcome to the Karnataka Today newsletter, your guide from The Hindu on the major news stories to follow today. Curated by Nalme Nachiyar.

• Baseless allegations: Pralhad Joshi flays Rahul over his claim about China usurped India’s land - He said “whatever land that China has grabbed was during the tenure of Jawaharlal Nehru”.

• Former Karnataka chief minister H.D. Kumaraswamy hospitalised - The JD(S) leader arrived at Apollo Specialty Hospital in Jayanagar around 3:40 am on August 30, complaining of weakness and discomfort in limbs.

From BBC: Europe

• Russia’s kamikaze drones raining down on Ukraine’s east - The BBC’s Quentin Sommerville witnesses Russia’s increasingly sophisticated drone attacks.

• Ukraine war: Wave of drone strikes hits several Russian regions - Moscow says military planes were damaged in strikes on an airport and vows Ukraine will “not go unpunished”.

• Nagorno-Karabakh: ‘People are fainting queuing up for bread’ - Azerbaijan’s nine-month blockade of disputed territory Nagorno-Karabakh takes its toll on residents.

• Brexit: EU-derived equal pay protections to be brought back - Women will keep the right to the same pay as men doing similar jobs in what Labour says is a government U-turn.

• Prigozhin buried in private funeral - Wagner chief’s press service - The mercenary group boss, who led June’s aborted armed rebellion, was killed in a plane crash last week.

From Ars Technica

• Fairphone 5 sets a new standard with 8-10 years of Android support - The Fairphone 5 will keep on trucking until at least 2031. - link

• The 10 drugs up for Medicare price negotiation have seen steep price hikes - Much of the drugs’ costs are due to repeated price hikes over the years. - link

• After Musk’s mass layoffs, X says it’s expanding safety and election teams - X, née Twitter, greenlights wider range of political advertising. - link

• Google’s $30-per-month “Duet” AI will craft awkward emails, images for you - Google’s new kitchen-sink AI branding is everything to everyone in every Workspace app. - link

• iFixit tears down a McDonald’s ice cream machine, demands DMCA exemption for it - Public Knowledge and iFixit want the right to repair commercial kitchen gear. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• A guy goes into a store and tells the clerk, “I’d like some Polish sausage.” The clerk looks at him and says, “Are you Polish?” -

  The guy, clearly offended, says, ““Well, yes I am. But let me ask you something. If I had asked for Italian sausage would you ask me if I was Italian? Or if I had asked for German bratwurst, would you ask me if I was German? Or if I asked for a kosher hot dog would you ask me if I was Jewish? Or if I had asked for a taco would you ask if I was Mexican? Would ya, huh? Would ya?”

  The clerk says, “Well, no.”

  With deep self-righteous ndignation, the guy says, “Well, all right then, why did you ask me if I’m Polish just because I ask for Polish sausage?”

  The clerk replies, “Because this is Home Depot.”

  submitted by /u/YZXFILE
  [link] [comments]

• A man seeks cover in a cabin from the winter storm. -

  Very NSFW!

  Allright, so this is a story from Norway.

  It is a dark night in the winter. A small cabin is barely visible through the snow drift. A lone man, the cabin owner, sits in front of the fireplace. What little light there is comes from the fireplace and a few dim candles.

  Suddenly there is a knock on the door. In enters a man half frozen to death by the cold and the wind.

  In tradition with the local rules of the mountain, the guest is offered dry clothes and a hot meal.

  Hours pass, and bedtime is approaching. The cabin owner has to guard the fire, so the guest is offered his bed in the bedroom. With strict instructions not to bother his wife, who’s resting in a different bed in the same room.

  Next morning, the two are having breakfast. Suddenly, the cabin owner stares sternly at the guest. “You did bother my wife, didn’t you?” asks the cabin owner. The guest responds with “No! No! Absolutely not!”. For a brief moment the cabin owner settles down, before he again cries out “Yes! Yes! You did bother my wife!”. “Allright, Yes! Yes, I did” admits the guest. “But, how can you tell?” he asks the cabin owner. A few dead quiet seconds pass, then the cabin owner responds “Well, she’s been dead for 6 weeks, and you have larvae in your beard”.

  ---

  Note: In the mountainous parts of Norway, without road access or passable paths for horses, anyone who died during the winter was laid to rest in the crawl space beneath the cabin. When the snow thawed, the body was brought to the parish church, so it could be buried in consecrated ground. This story, or folk tale, is based on this practise.

  submitted by /u/SortaLostMeMarbles
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• A man is sitting at a bar at closing time, complaining to his friend. -

  How is it I always get in trouble with my wife for staying at the bar so late and you never get in trouble with your wife? When I come home from a night out, I do everything so quietly. I turn off my car and coast into the driveway. I sneak in the basement door. I take off my clothes in the basement and tiptoe into the bedroom. I get in bed very slowly and quietly. My wife always wakes up and yells at me and won’t talk to me the next day.

  His friend looks at him and says you’re doing it all wrong. Before I leave the bar, I always buy a shot and pour it on myself even if I haven’t been drinking. I screech into the driveway and come in through the front door, closing it loudly. I strip right next to the bed and climb in. Then I pat my wife on the butt and say, “How ‘bout it babe?” She always pretends she’s asleep.

  submitted by /u/Ancient-Bluejay2590
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• A man comes home late from the bar -

  He knows his wife don’t like it when he drinks, so he sneaks his way to the bathroom so he can piss. When he opens the bathroom door, the light automatically turns on. He finds it odd, since he didn’t buy any automated lights or something like that. He thinks that maybe his wife had installed the lights while he was in the bar, but it would be improbable for him to not see that she bought them. He thinks that maybe he entered the wrong house, but quickly looks outside the bathroom to see that this wasn’t the case. He thinks that maybe he was getting crazy, but thinking about this gave him goosebumps. In the end, he concludes that he is too drunk to think anything, so he piss and goes to sleep. He enters his room, lay in the bed with his wife, and tries to sleep, but the mistery of how his bathroom had an automatic light was too much for him, so he wakes up his wife to ask her. After explaining what happened, his wife, who had a sleepy and confused face at first, puts on a really angry face and start yelling at him: “YOU DRUNK BASTARD, DID YOU PISS IN THE FRIDGE AGAIN?”

  submitted by /u/Ferrarileite
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• The Turks invented sex -

  and then the Greeks improved it by removing the sheep and adding lubrication.

  The Romans perfected it by discovering that you could have it with women too, then the French ruined it by adding misogynistic condescension, and the British made it worse by adding shame; after that, the Americans made it terrible by making it a commodity.

  And finally the fucking furries ruin it by putting the sheep back in!

  submitted by /u/sygnathid
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