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

• False Choices and Familiar Stories in a California Homeless Encampment - How do you tell the story of the biggest crisis on the West Coast when every typical journalistic avenue seems to have run its course? - link

• Roe vs. Trump in the Michigan Midterms - Candidates are betting on abortion outrage and MAGA enthusiasm. Why did one Republican field organizer tell canvassers to think twice about mentioning the former President? - link

• Another City Is Drowning, and We Can’t Look Away - In Bangkok and around the world, live updates about hurricanes and floods are turning us into climate voyeurs. - link

• The Ongoing Electoral Efforts to Up the Anti-Democratic Ante - Republican-led legislatures and right-wing activists alike are making things more difficult for election officials. - link

• Trump’s Threats of Violence Are Too Dangerous to Disregard - As the various investigations around the former President close in on him, his campaign to discredit and intimidate his accusers will only intensify. - link

From Vox

• The Instagram capital of the world is a terrible place to be -

  

  Just because you can (sort of) afford to go somewhere doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it.

  This time last week I was wandering the stony streets of Positano, a small village on Italy’s Amalfi Coast. Positano rests almost vertically on the steep cliffside, with peachy pastel houses stacked on top of one another against zigzagging streets where local vendors sell sips of limoncello and colorful ceramics. At the bottom there is a pebbly beach where, if it’s warm enough (which it usually is), you can swim in the clear, turquoise waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Positano is blessed with a mild Mediterranean climate and a proximity to luxury and wealth; it is home to one of the most famous and majestic hotels in the world and provided the backdrop for Diane Lane’s whirlwind romance in Under the Tuscan Sun. Twenty years later, the town has become synonymous with the grandest of influencer travelscapes, clogging Instagram with photos of beautiful people on boats, staring back in wonder at the skyline behind them.

  It is also the most unpleasant place I have ever been. This has little to do with the town itself, which has been home to resorts and villas for the European elite since the Roman Empire but contains only small traces of its ancient past; as our tour guide explained, “there is no history here, it is just for relaxing and for pictures.” Fewer than 4,000 people live in Positano, and tourists outnumber them three-to-one.

  Nor is it really the fault of the crowds, though like seemingly everywhere else in Italy, they are rampant and inescapable and at times contribute to a sense of claustrophobic doom so great that the only way out is divorcing yourself from your body and disassociating until you finally reach open air. Rather, what’s most disturbing about being in Positano is the knowledge that you have been suckered, and the realization that just because you have the means to go somewhere does that mean that you are owed anything more than the experiential equivalent of flying Basic Economy. To be in Positano as a middle-class person — someone who can afford to travel and take time off work but not, say, afford to buy real estate in the city where they live — is to feel like an idiot for believing it could have been any better, or that being there is actually a benefit to the lives of the people who live there.

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  A post shared by Le Sirenuse (@lesirenuse)

The fact that there are so many more people traveling internationally now than ever before in history is not necessarily a bad thing; luxuries that were once only afforded to the ultra-rich have been democratized by low-cost airlines and cheap deals on sites like Airbnb, Booking.com, and Expedia. For many people, the summer of 2022 was their first time traveling internationally since the pre-Covid era, and despite the continued risks of traveling at all and the confusing and contradictory regulations about masking and vaccines, planning an international trip is now a nearly seamless experience: online travel agencies serve their users only the highest rated itineraries, thereby guaranteeing a publicly vettable experience. And if you could go to the best possible cities, eat at the best possible restaurants, and take the best possible pictures, why wouldn’t you?

Our cultural obsession with having “the best” of everything is a topic I’m endlessly fascinated by, but traveling is different from, say, spending hours on Wirecutter or prowling Amazon reviews to find the best cat litter. Everyone who can afford to buy the best cat litter is likely going to end up with the same formula; the same can’t be said for restaurants or hotels, which have limits on the number of people who can be there. The problem of travel at this particular moment is not too many people traveling in general, it is too many people wanting to experience the exact same thing because they all went to the same websites and read the same reviews. It’s created the idea that if you do not go to this specific bar or stay in this exact neighborhood, all the money and time you spent on being here has been wasted, and you have settled for something that is not as perfect as it could have been.

Yet so often the opposite is true: that if you ignore a large portion of what the internet recommends, you’re significantly less likely to end up having the Positano problem. True luxury, as any rich person knows, is the ability to separate oneself from the masses, to avoid being next to or even seen by regular people. In the age of algorithms, the only way to replicate any semblance of luxury is to take the keystrokes less traveled. A vacation is not, or at least shouldn’t be, a to-do list, something to be optimized with meticulously timed reservations months in advance, though increasingly this is what travel is: Unless you’ve secured a reserved time slot, the must-see museums of Florence and “you have to eat here” pasta spots in Rome are inaccessible for those unwilling to spend hours in line or so cramped that being there is no longer enjoyable. And just as in other popular travel destinations flooded by wealthy tourists who benefit from the undercurrent of underpaid locals providing them a once-in-a-lifetime experience, it is soured by the fact that those who actually live there can’t afford the luxuries they’re peddling.

Not only did I feel somewhat ridiculous for being in Italy at all considering the number of other people on my Instagram feed who had the exact same thought this summer, I felt ridiculous that I had not known how competitive the whole thing had become, that no matter how many recommendations you receive from friends or strangers on the internet, the same ones will have been given to thousands of other people who are just as unhappy to see you there as you are them.

Travel right now feels to me like walking into a Chanel store and looking at all the beautiful clothes, perhaps grazing them with your shoulder, but never being able to put them on, all the while being watched with disdain by the people whose job it is to weed out the non-ultra-wealthy. I have never actually been in a Chanel store because I know better than to shop somewhere I cannot afford, but I have yet to learn this lesson when it comes to travel. Everything about the way the industry works now — booking websites, credit cards, Chase points, Instagram — makes us believe that actually, we can afford to visit a place like Positano, and that it will look just as glorious as the photos taken from the most expensive resorts. Being adjacent to luxury, though, is not the same thing as experiencing it. In fact, it can make us feel bereft of something we never had in the first place, but somehow felt like we deserved.

This column was first published in The Goods newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one, plus get newsletter exclusives.

• The White House’s AI Bill of Rights is great — if it’s enforced -

  

  Now can we get some laws, please?

  It’s a big week for Americans who’ve been sounding the alarm about artificial intelligence.

  On Tuesday morning, the White House released what it calls a “blueprint” for an AI Bill of Rights that outlines how the public should be protected from algorithmic systems and the harms they can produce — whether it’s a recruiting algorithm that favors men’s resumes over women’s or a mortgage algorithm that discriminates against Latino and African American borrowers.

  The bill of rights lays out five protections the public deserves. They boil down to this: AI should be safe and effective. It shouldn’t discriminate. It shouldn’t violate data privacy. We should know when AI is being used. And we should be able to opt out and talk to a human when we encounter a problem.

  It’s pretty basic stuff, right?

  In fact, in 2019, I published a very similar AI bill of rights here at Vox. It was a crowdsourced effort: I asked 10 experts at the forefront of investigating AI harms to name the protections the public deserves. They came up with the same fundamental ideas.

  Now those ideas have the imprimatur of the White House, and experts are excited about that, if somewhat underwhelmed.

  “I pointed out these issues and proposed the key tenets for an algorithmic bill of rights in my 2019 book A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence,” Kartik Hosanagar, a University of Pennsylvania technology professor, told me. “It’s good to finally see an AI Bill of Rights come out nearly four years later.”

  It’s important to realize that the AI Bill of Rights is not binding legislation. It’s a set of recommendations that government agencies and technology companies may voluntarily comply with — or not. That’s because it’s created by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, a White House body that advises the president but can’t advance actual laws.

  And the enforcement of laws — whether they’re new laws or laws that are already on the books — is what we really need to make AI safe and fair for all citizens.

  “I think there’s going to be a carrot-and-stick situation,” Meredith Broussard, a data journalism professor at NYU and author of Artificial Unintelligence, told me. “There’s going to be a request for voluntary compliance. And then we’re going to see that that doesn’t work — and so there’s going to be a need for enforcement.”

  The AI Bill of Rights is mostly a tool to educate America

  The best way to understand the White House’s document might be as an educational tool.

  Over the past few years, AI has been developing at such a fast clip that it’s outpaced most policymakers’ ability to understand, never mind regulate, the field. The White House’s Bill of Rights blueprint clarifies many of the biggest problems and does a good job of explaining what it could look like to guard against those problems, with concrete examples.

  The Algorithmic Justice League, a nonprofit that brings together experts and activists to hold the AI industry to account, noted that the document can improve technological literacy within government agencies.

  This blueprint provides necessary principles & shares potential actions. It is a tool for educating the agencies responsible for protecting & advancing our civil rights and civil liberties. Next, we need lawmakers to develop government policy that puts this blueprint into law.
  8/

  — Algorithmic Justice League (@AJLUnited) October 4, 2022

Julia Stoyanovich, director of the NYU Center for Responsible AI, told me she was thrilled to see the bill of rights highlight two important points: AI systems should work as advertised, but many don’t. And when they don’t, we should feel free to just stop using them.

“I was very happy to see that the Bill discusses effectiveness of AI systems prominently,” she said. “Many systems that are in broad use today simply do not work, in any meaningful sense of that term. They produce arbitrary results and are not subjected to rigorous testing, and yet they are used in critical domains such as hiring and employment.”

The bill of rights also reminds us that there’s always “the possibility of not deploying the system or removing a system from use.” This almost seems too obvious to need saying, yet the tech industry has proven it needs reminders that some AI just shouldn’t exist.

“We need to develop a culture of rigorously specifying the criteria against which we evaluate AI systems, testing systems before they are deployed, and re-testing them throughout their use to ensure that these criteria are still met. And removing them from use if the systems do not work,” Stoyanovich said.

When will the laws actually protect us?

The American public, looking across the pond at Europe, could be forgiven for a bit of wistful sighing this week.

While the US has just now released a basic list of protections, the EU released something similar way back in 2019, and it’s already moving on to legal mechanisms for enforcing those protections. The EU’s AI Act, together with a newly unveiled bill called the AI Liability Directive, will give Europeans the right to sue companies for damages if they’ve been harmed by an automated system. This is the sort of legislation that could actually change the industry’s incentive structure.

“The EU is absolutely ahead of the US in terms of creating AI regulatory policy,” Broussard said. She hopes the US will catch up, but noted that we don’t necessarily need much in the way of brand new laws. “We already have laws on the books for things like financial discrimination. Now we have automated mortgage approval systems that discriminate against applicants of color. So we need to enforce the laws that are on the books already.”

In the US, there is some new legislation in the offing, such as the Algorithmic Accountability Act of 2022, which would require transparency and accountability for automated systems. But Broussard cautioned that it’s not realistic to think there’ll be a single law that can regulate AI across all the domains in which it’s used, from education to lending to health care. “I’ve given up on the idea that there’s going to be one law that’s going to fix everything,” she said. “It’s just so complicated that I’m willing to take incremental progress.”

Cathy O’Neil, the author of Weapons of Math Destruction, echoed that sentiment. The principles in the AI Bill of Rights, she said, “are good principles and probably they are as specific as one can get.” The question of how the principles will get applied and enforced in particular sectors is the next urgent thing to tackle.

“When it comes to knowing how this will play out for a specific decision-making process with specific anti-discrimination laws, that’s another thing entirely! And very exciting to think through!” O’Neil said. “But this list of principles, if followed, is a good start.”

• Philadelphia elected a progressive prosecutor twice. The state government wants to fire him anyway. -

  

  Republicans are leading an impeachment investigation into Larry Krasner before the midterms.

  Weeks before the midterms, a political drama is unfolding in Pennsylvania: A state committee to investigate crime in Philadelphia could ultimately impeach the city’s twice-elected district attorney Larry Krasner, who ran on a platform of reducing mass incarceration and the criminalization of poverty.

  Republicans say their investigation is about seeking solutions for rising crime, but for the past five years, they’ve been eager to connect their anti-Krasner rhetoric to the broader Democratic Party — a narrative that has fueled backlash against progressive prosecutors in other cities and painted Democrats as anti-police. Pennsylvania’s investigation started just weeks after San Francisco voters recalled their progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin.

  Krasner’s allies see the probe as a cynical stunt by a Republican-controlled legislature that both underfunds Philadelphia and blocks its leaders from passing tougher gun laws. They also view it as a dangerously anti-democratic effort to overturn the will of Philadelphia voters — akin to the effort to overturn the city’s votes for Biden in the 2020 election.

  The committee, dubbed the Select Committee on Restoring Law and Order, was voted into existence by nearly all House Republican lawmakers in June. It’s already embroiled in one legal battle with Krasner, who has objected in court to their sweeping request for documents. To impeach Krasner, the committee might have to demonstrate evidence of misbehavior or corruption — not just ideological disagreement — and that could end up being the subject of yet another court fight.

  The backdrop to all of this is the midterm elections. In Pennsylvania, there’s a tightly contested US Senate race where the Republican candidate, Mehmet Oz, has made crime the focus of multiple attack ads. The governor’s race also has implications for 2024 and beyond: The current Republican nominee, Doug Mastriano, led the effort to overturn Pennsylvania’s votes for Biden two years ago.

  Mastriano, who is now trying to defend himself against accusations of being anti-democratic, has become one of the few high-profile GOP officials to defend Krasner against impeachment, calling the inquiry “political grandstanding.” And dozens of Democrats, including Democratic lieutenant governor candidate Austin Davis, voted with Republicans in September to hold Krasner in contempt for refusing to comply with a subpoena. (Krasner argued in state court that the committee’s subpoena was illegitimate and illegal.)

  Some other Pennsylvania Democrats are seeking to distance themselves from the controversy. Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman, who has been running ads about “funding the police,” has not weighed in, and gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro’s campaign also declined to comment.

  The committee pledged to produce a report with its findings and recommendations by “the fall” — coinciding with the 2022 midterms.

  Matt Rourke/AP

  A pioneering progressive prosecutor confronts rising crime in Philadelphia

  Krasner, who was first elected in 2017, was one of the first people to run as a self-described “progressive prosecutor” — part of a growing national movement of candidates who emphasize that the discretionary decisions made by a city’s chief attorney can have a profound effect on mass incarceration.

  Since taking office, Krasner has stopped seeking cash bail for some low-level offenses, a move to reduce jail time that some defendants have to serve simply because they’re low-income. His team also stopped prosecuting marijuana cases and most prostitution cases against sex workers, and heavily deprioritized retail theft — something that’s been on the rise in the city over the past two years. His office touts statistics on his website that Krasner has imposed over 29,000 fewer years of incarceration compared to the previous district attorney.

  Amid rising crime rates and increasing concern about crime, a growing backlash, led primarily though not exclusively by Republicans, has depicted reformers like Krasner and Boudin as threats to public safety. Researchers have not found a link between progressive prosecutors and local crime rates, and in fact found that declining to prosecute a misdemeanor can significantly reduce the likelihood of future crime.

  If more DAs like Boudin and Krasner are booted out of office, reformers fear other prosecutors may lose interest in bucking old “tough on crime” playbooks.

  While some of Philadelphia’s crime uptick began prior to Krasner taking office, the situation has gotten worse since the pandemic. Philadelphia’s murder rate went up 58 percent between 2019 and 2021. There were a record 499 homicide victims in 2020, followed by another record-breaking 562 homicides in 2021. The number of murders this year — 409 as of October 3 — is slightly less than this time last year, but still the second-highest the city has seen by this date in 15 years.

  Gun violence has also been increasing statewide and nationally since the pandemic started, including in suburban and rural areas. One analysis from the Council on Criminal Justice, a research and policy group, found a 30 percent increase in homicides across 34 US cities in 2020 compared to 2019, and another independent crime analysis found murder up 37 percent across 57 localities.

  Jane Roh, a spokesperson for Krasner, noted that of the five largest cities in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia’s increase was similar to Pittsburgh (where homicides were up 53 percent) and smaller than Reading (117 percent) and Allentown (71 percent). Compared to the other 12 Pennsylvania counties of at least 300,000 residents, Philadelphia’s increase ranked sixth.

  Still, the level of violence is hard to hand-wave away with comparative statistics, and because Philadelphia is so large, percentage increases can obscure what are many, many more deaths. Just last week, five high schoolers in Philadelphia were shot, one fatally, after an afternoon football scrimmage, and other crime, like carjackings, has spiked.

  Matt Slocum/AP

  Critics of the district attorney allege that his policies have contributed to the rise in crime by sending a message that laws in the city won’t be enforced. They point to declines in conviction rates for illegal gun possession: Between 2015 and 2020, the share of illegal gun possession cases resulting in conviction fell from 65 percent to 42 percent, a decline driven primarily by cases being dismissed by judges and withdrawn by the district attorney. The district attorney said that some offenders went through diversion programs instead of facing jail time and that police brought forward weak cases that were too difficult to win in court.

  Krasner’s supporters stress that the lagging performance of police should get more attention. From January 1, 2017, through September 18, 2022, Philadelphia police made arrests in less than 40 percent of homicide incidents in the city and just 18 percent of nonfatal shootings. The district attorney cannot charge those who have not been arrested.

  Krasner has argued more energy should be focused on improving the low clearance rate for shooting cases rather than on trying to remove illegal guns from the streets. (In February, the Philadelphia Police Department launched a new division focused on investigating nonfatal shootings.) Roh, Krasner’s spokesperson, also noted that the DA supports a host of enhanced gun safety regulations, measures opposed by Republicans on the state level.

  Even amid the rise in crime, Krasner easily won his reelection in 2021, earning more than twice as many votes as his Republican challenger, Chuck Peruto — who campaigned on getting tougher on crime. While Krasner faced a heated primary, beating a prosecutor backed by the city’s police union, he barely campaigned in the general election against Peruto and declined to debate him. Democrats outnumber Republicans in Philadelphia seven to one, and the city hasn’t had a Republican DA in over three decades.

  Krasner has been a target of attacks for Pennsylvania Republicans for the last half-decade, but the impeachment inquiry is a new escalation. The investigation began in June after three House lawmakers who live in districts far from Philadelphia circulated a memo seeking their colleagues’ support for impeaching Krasner for “dereliction of duty.”

  About two weeks later, 110 Republicans and four Democrats in the Pennsylvania House voted against 86 Democrats to establish the committee, which has subpoena power. In July, Pennsylvania’s Republican House speaker appointed five members to the committee, including two Philadelphia Democrats who had voted against the inquiry; one, Danilo Burgos, told the Philadelphia Inquirer he only agreed because he was told they’d be investigating crime statewide. But Republican lawmakers voted against an amendment supported by Democrats that would have expanded the committee’s scope to study statewide violence.

  Michael Straub, a spokesperson for Pennsylvania’s House speaker, defended the narrow focus. “I mean, Philadelphia is such a crucial place in the state,” he told Vox. “So much of what makes Philadelphia relevant to the rest of the country and rest of the world is its population and culture, so making sure Philadelphia is safe and vibrant and attracting people is important to everyone regardless of political party.”

  Matt Rourke/AP

  Republicans are now trying to claim this is not necessarily about impeachment

  Despite the unambiguous origins of the committee, Republicans are now claiming that their work should not be assumed to be about impeachment. The committee “has a wide-ranging scope and is much broader than a mere impeachment inquiry,” said Jason Gottesman, House Republican caucus spokesperson, when Vox asked about the anti-democratic implications of the probe.

  Unlike other states, Pennsylvania voters cannot recall elected officials, and there have been only two successful impeachments in state history — a state supreme court justice in 1994 and a district judge in 1881. The state constitution says “the Governor and all other civil officers shall be liable to impeachment for any misbehavior in office,” although Krasner’s office argues this language applies only to elected state officials, not local politicians.

  Some reports have suggested the “any misbehavior in office” language is vague enough to include general discontent with how an official approaches their job. Bruce Ledewitz, a Duquesne University law professor who teaches a course on the Pennsylvania Constitution, told Vox that the select committee would need to find actual evidence of corruption or misbehavior to impeach Krasner. Simply disagreeing with his policies would not be enough.

  “The idea that the constitutional language is so broad that it could mean anything, I don’t think that’s the case,” Ledewitz said, pointing to the statutory removal provisions, and contrasted them with the looser standards of impeachment at the federal level. If the Pennsylvania legislature does move to impeach Krasner, Ledewitz said they’ll need to prepare for it to be challenged in court, like it was in Pennsylvania in 1994.

  In August, the select committee issued its first subpoena of Krasner, requesting documents related to his policies including on bail and plea bargains. They also asked for documents on prosecuting police officers, and the “complete case file” of Ryan Pownall, a former Philadelphia police officer who faces third-degree murder charges for killing a Black man in 2017. Pownall is set to go on trial in November.

  Krasner allies say the select committee’s interest in these case files reveals they are more interested in shielding police from accountability than protecting victims of crime. Vox asked the Republican chair of the select committee, Rep. John Lawrence, why these documents were being prioritized in the investigation. Gottesman, answering on Lawrence’s behalf, pointed to three press releases from Lawrence that did not directly address the question.

  Matt Rourke/AP

  In a letter sent to the committee in August, Krasner’s lawyers asked the committee to withdraw their requests and end the investigation, and later petitioned a state court for relief. They argued in legal filings that the probe is illegitimate because it serves no proper legislative purpose and Krasner has committed no impeachable offense. They also said that impeaching Krasner would violate the constitutional rights of the Philadelphia voters who elected him, that documents for the pending Pownall trial are privileged, and that it would be illegal to disclose grand jury materials.

  The select committee — which asked for the “complete case file” of a pending murder trial, including documents “related or referring to the investigative grand jury proceedings” — denies it sought any privileged materials. The committee’s interim report issued September 13 noted that the district attorney’s office could withhold privileged materials if it provided a list of them.

  Krasner’s lawyer, Michael Satin, told Vox that they would not produce such a log when the request was “patently improper” and an abuse of power by the legislature. “Courts, not legislative bodies, are best equipped to resolve disputes involving a subpoena, especially one that involves an inquiry into a pending criminal case,” said Satin. The select committee has asked Krasner at least twice in writing to withdraw their court petition.

  But state lawmakers — including Democrats opposed generally to the impeachment inquiry — were not happy that Krasner resisted the legislature’s subpoena and voted 162-32 to hold him in contempt. Republicans like Rep. Lawrence claimed Krasner “willfully neglected” the subpoena, though Krasner’s team pushed back, saying they followed the law by registering their objection with the judiciary, in addition to writing their objections to the committee.

  Rep. Jared Solomon, a Democratic state rep from Northeast Philadelphia, told the Philadelphia Inquirer he saw Krasner’s resistance as “exactly the same” as Steve Bannon, who was convicted of contempt for failing to comply with congressional subpoenas into the January 6 investigation.

  About a week after the contempt vote, Krasner’s team began providing some records to the select committee — primarily those that were already available online on their website. If Krasner’s team had provided those documents to the committee initially and only objected to the files related to the pending murder trial, it’s unlikely as many Democrats would have held the district attorney in contempt, but Krasner’s team didn’t want to grant legitimacy to what they saw as a sham investigation.

  “This impeachment investigation is absolutely just a witch hunt. I’m on the judiciary committee and I have voted at every instance to not proceed with this, but I’m a lawyer and so is District Attorney Krasner, and legal subpoenas are legal subpoenas,” said Rep. Emily Kinkead (D-Pittsburgh), who voted to hold Krasner in contempt. “While I understand everything the legislature does is inherently political, we have the right to issue subpoenas and if he believed there were privileged items that were requested, he should have created a privileged log, to say, ‘These documents exist but you’re not entitled to see them,’ but he didn’t even do that.”

  Matt Rourke/AP

  Impeachment looks less likely in the Senate than in the House

  In order to impeach, a majority of members in the Republican-controlled House would need to vote in favor, and then two-thirds of the state Senate would need to, too. That means 34 senators would need to vote in favor of impeachment, and there are 28 Republicans currently in the chamber.

  Despite dozens of Democrats voting to hold Krasner in contempt, it still might be hard to get six on board for impeachment, especially when the specter of Republicans trying to throw out Philly votes two years ago still looms so large.

  “Bad things happen in Philadelphia,” Trump proclaimed in the fall of 2020, in an attempt to gin up distrust about election integrity in Pennsylvania’s biggest city. Following the 2020 election, Trump put on blast a Republican election commissioner from Philadelphia who found no evidence of voter fraud, insisting “he refuses to look at a mountain of corruption & dishonesty.”

  Krasner performed especially well in his reelection campaign in areas with high levels of gun violence, giving the district attorney confidence to say his progressive policies were backed by a mandate from the people most affected.

  Progressive allies of Krasner have been organizing over the past few weeks to send a message to Democratic state officials that voting to impeach Krasner would be aligning themselves with Republican election deniers.

  “We’re not just going to roll over and pretend that there’s not an attack on Philadelphia, on Black and brown people,” said Tonya Bah, a Philadelphia activist who leads Free the Ballot. “For Democrats to side with Republican leadership to harm someone that we elected, it is very disheartening, and quite frankly, we have to draw a line in the sand.”

  On September 23, the Working Families Party, a union-backed group that helps elect progressive candidates locally and nationally, announced it would be rescinding five midterm endorsements of Democratic state reps who had voted to hold Krasner in contempt.

  Vox contacted the five Democrats who lost their WFP endorsements. Two elected officials from Pittsburgh — Reps. Jessica Benham and Emily Kinkead — said they didn’t even know they had received the WFP endorsement but were not planning to vote for impeachment.

  “I voted to hold the DA in contempt because legislative bodies have jurisdiction to issue and enforce their own subpoenas,” Benham said. “That the DA responded in part to the subpoena after the contempt vote, which carried no actual penalty, demonstrates that he could have responded in part prior to that vote, but chose not to for reasons unclear. Nevertheless, I will be voting against impeachment if that charge comes before the House, as I respect the will of the voters.”

  Rep. Danielle Friel Otten of Chester County also said she views her subpoena vote as very different from any vote to remove someone from office. “For me, the vote to find DA Krasner in contempt of the House was about equal application of the law,” she told Vox. “This was a procedural vote about responding to a lawfully issued subpoena. Larry Krasner was duly elected by the voters of Philadelphia, and impeachment requires a high bar. To this point, I’ve seen no evidence of any impeachable offense.”

  Vanessa Clifford, the mid-Atlantic political director for the Working Families Party, told Vox both Benham and Kinkead had submitted candidate questionnaires applying for WFP’s endorsement, and were both personally notified that their state committee had endorsed their reelection campaigns.

  Rep. Rick Krajewski, a Democratic state House lawmaker representing West Philadelphia who voted against holding Krasner in contempt and was disappointed by the nine Philadelphia state reps who did, said Krasner is an easier “punching bag target” than, say, local judges, because there’s only one of him. Pinning the city’s problems on the district attorney is also easier for state Republicans to do than investing in Philadelphia communities, schools, workers, and parks and recreation.

  There’s no doubt that Philadelphia has real issues with people feeling safe, Krajewski added. “But as a result, we’re seeing a return to ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric, to overpolicing, and in my opinion, that is the wrong response to this moment,” he said. “We’ve seen that during the Reagan era, the Nixon era, an investment in crackdown does not work. I think for myself and other Democrats who support Larry, we’re having real conversations with our community about what this could mean for our democracy and how we can stand united.”

From The Hindu: Sports

• Supriya strikes twice for Odisha Naval Tata Academy -

• Golf set to make a quiet debut at the National Games on Thursday -

• Khushi knocks out second seed -

• Anastasia, Amore, Speed Air, Royal Monarch, Chaitanya and Carnoustie excel -

• Time, Phenom and Son Of A Gun catch the eye -

From The Hindu: National News

• Third elephant death in 10 days in Malnad region due to electrocution raises concern -

• Temples in Wayanad witness heavy rush on Vidyarambham day -

• 14 rescued as search operations resume to trace mountaineers in avalanche-hit Uttarakhand peak - Out of the 14 rescued so far 10 are trainees and four instructors.

• HC sets aside conviction, 10 years rigorous imprisonment imposed by a Mahila Court in a rape case - It says the prosecution case is unreliable due to delay in lodging FIR and contradictions in evidence adduced by the complainant

• Media in Kerala not highlighting national issues, says Rajesh -

From BBC: Europe

• Ukraine war: Liberated town shows human cost of Russia’s defeat - The BBC’s Orla Guerin finds desolate scenes in Lyman, a town Ukraine recaptured from Russia.

• Ukraine makes breakthrough in south against Russia - Ukraine makes fresh gains in occupied territory annexed by Russia, straining Russian supply lines.

• Dutch town Bodegraven-Reeuwijk loses Twitter paedophilia rumour case - A conspiracy theory falsely claimed that Bodegraven near The Hague was once home to a satanic ring.

• Qatar World Cup 2022: Paris joins boycott of fan zones over human rights - It is the latest French city to announce the move over human rights in Qatar.

• Close Macron aide Alexis Kohler investigated over conflict of interest - The French president’s chief of staff is under investigation over his links with a shipping firm.

From Ars Technica

• Intel A770, A750 review: We are this close to recommending these GPUs - New GPU series, ranging from $289 to $349, is less “amazing” and more “interesting.” - link

• 2022 Nobel Physics Prize goes to seminal tests of spooky action at a distance - Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger pioneered quantum information science. - link

• Musk makes U-turn before trial, tells Twitter he’ll complete merger [Updated] - Musk wants to avoid trial, told Twitter he’ll complete deal at original price. - link

• Begone, polygons: 1993’s Virtua Fighter gets smoothed out by AI - Sega’s famously boxy 1993 arcade game gets a fan-powered Stable Diffusion refresh. - link

• VideoLAN threatens to sue India gov’t as ISPs keep blocking VLC website - ISPs apparently blocking VLC website due to gov’t order, but it’s not clear why. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• When you are born you actually have 4 kidneys. -

  But as you get older, two of them turn into adult knees

  submitted by /u/Ok-Progress-2925
  [link] [comments]

• At a university there was a dean who cared about others and showed exemplary behavior. One day an angel appeared at a faculty conference. -

  The angel said as a reward for his good deeds that God would give him his choice of eternal riches, eternal wisdom, or eternal beauty.

  The dean chose eternal wisdom without hesitation.

  “Good,” said the angel, disappearing into a cloud of smoke.

  Everyone present turned their gazes to the dean, who was illuminated by a faint halo.

  A colleague whispered, “Tell me something.”

  The dean, who had gained eternal wisdom, sighed and said, “I should have chosen eternal riches.”

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

• Your momma is so slow… -

  It took her 9 months to make a joke.

  submitted by /u/Alternative-Durian11
  [link] [comments]

• Two cowboys are out riding the range and talking about their favorite sex positions -

  The first cowboy says the “rodeo” position is his favorite.

  The second cowboy says he’s never heard of it before and asks how to do it.

  The first cowboy responds, “Well, you mount your lady from behind then reach down and grab her tits. Then you whisper ‘these feel almost as good as your sister’s.’ Then you yell yeehaw and try to hold on for 8 seconds!”

  Edit: fixed

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

• Sex is like snow; -

  you never know how many inches you’re going to get or how long it will last.

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