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 January 6th Criminal Case Against Donald Trump - It’s too early to say what investigators will find, but whether to prosecute the former President is becoming the defining issue of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s tenure. - link

• Is a Civil War Ahead? - A year after the attack on the Capitol, America is suspended between democracy and autocracy. - link

• The Russian Memory Project That Became an Enemy of the State - Two courts have ordered the shutdown of Memorial, a human-rights organization that documents the history of Soviet state terror. - link

• The Wild, Wonderful World of Estate Sales - The estate-sale industry is fragile and persistent in a way that doesn’t square with the story of the world as we have come to expect it. - link

• Biden, Back Into the Breach - A year after the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, the President delivered the speech that he never wanted to give. - link

From Vox

• The Supreme Court could hand down another major attack on Roe v. Wade any day now -

  

  Brnovich v. Isaacson could trigger a flood of decisions reinstating long-dead anti-abortion laws.

  By all outward signs, Roe v. Wade is on its deathbed. In December, the Supreme Court effectively insulated a Texas law that bans abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy from judicial review. Then, at oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a majority of the justices appeared eager to drastically roll back abortion rights — and perhaps even to overrule Roe explicitly. A decision in Dobbs is expected by late June.

  That leaves the right to an abortion in limbo. Technically, decisions like Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which weakened Roe somewhat but retained core protections for abortion, remain good law. And many state anti-abortion laws are currently blocked by court orders that rely on Roe and Casey.

  But those court orders are unlikely to survive the year and could very well all be lifted this summer, in the likely event that Dobbs overrules or guts Roe and Casey.

  Arizona’s Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich, however, apparently doesn’t have the patience to let this process play out. In early December, Brnovich asked the Court to immediately reinstate an enjoined state law restricting certain abortions. That law would prohibit abortion providers from performing an abortion if the provider knows that “the abortion is sought solely because of a genetic abnormality of the child” — although it does include an exception if the fetus has a condition that will prove fatal within three months of birth.

  The case is Brnovich v. Isaacson, and it remains pending before the justices.

  Though one conservative appeals court did uphold a similar Ohio law, most courts to consider laws banning abortions if the state disagrees with the reason for the abortion have been blocked by lower courts, and there is a very strong argument that these laws violate Casey. A Supreme Court decision reinstating the Arizona law, in other words, would be another loud signal from the justices that Casey is in its final days.

  Just as significantly, if Brnovich succeeds in his bid to reinstate Arizona’s law, he’s likely to open the floodgates to other Republican officials who wish to reinstate other anti-abortion laws.

  A decision reinstating the Arizona law would be an announcement that the Supreme Court is open to similar requests to lift existing court orders protecting the right to an abortion. And it would send a clear signal to anti- abortion judges in the lower courts that they are free to start lifting such court orders as well.

  According to the Guttmacher Institute, state lawmakers enacted 108 abortion restrictions in 2021 alone. Eight states still retain abortion bans from before 1973, when Roe was handed down, and several others have laws on the books that effectively ban all or most abortions. So, if the courts start allowing these sorts of laws to take effect, the impact on abortion rights could be swift and profound.

  Given that a decision in Dobbs is at most months away, the long-term impact of an anti-abortion ruling in Isaacson is likely to be minimal. Once Roe is overruled or gutted completely, the process of unwinding court orders blocking anti-abortion laws will happen anyway. But, at the very least, the Isaacson case could have a profound impact on anyone seeking an abortion in the first half of 2022.

  Arizona’s law is unconstitutional under Casey

  There are several very strong arguments that the Arizona law is unconstitutional under existing precedents.

  First of all, Casey held that “a State may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability,” where “viability” refers to the moment when a fetus is capable of living outside the womb.

  As the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit noted in an opinion striking down an Indiana law that is similar to Arizona’s, “Casey’s holding that a woman has the right to terminate her pregnancy prior to viability is categorical.” Casey says that the state may not prohibit “any woman” from terminating a pregnancy prior to viability. That includes people who wish to terminate their pregnancy for reasons that the state disapproves of.

  For what it’s worth, the Sixth Circuit, which is the only circuit to uphold an Arizona-style law, rejected the Seventh Circuit’s reasoning on the theory that these kinds of laws do not actually prohibit anyone from getting an abortion. Recall that Arizona’s law only prohibits providers from performing an abortion if they know that their patient is doing so for an impermissible reason. The Sixth Circuit claimed that this requirement that a doctor know their patient’s motive places such laws outside of Casey’s categorical rule because a patient could still obtain an abortion from a doctor who is ignorant of the patient’s motives.

  But even if a judge accepts such sophistry, Arizona’s law runs into a second problem. Casey doesn’t just prohibit pre-viability abortion bans, it also prohibits any abortion law that “has the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus.” It’s hard to imagine a legitimate purpose — that is, a purpose other than placing obstacles in front of people seeking abortions — to a law that permits abortions, but only if the doctor doesn’t know too much about their patient.

  The district court that struck down Arizona’s law also gave a third reason why it is unconstitutional. As the Supreme Court held in United States v. Davis (2019), excessively vague laws may be struck down if they fail to “give ordinary people fair warning about what the law demands of them.” And the district court pointed to several provisions of the Arizona law which, it concluded, do not clear this bar. For example, the law “does not offer workable guidance about which fetal conditions” qualify as a “genetic abnormality.”

  A decision reinstating the Arizona law would embolden opponents of abortion

  In any event, the fact that the Sixth Circuit disagrees with several of its fellow circuits about whether Arizona-style laws are constitutional is a good reason for the Supreme Court to hear the Isaacson case eventually. The justices often hear cases where two or more federal appeals courts have reached different answers to the same legal question, as the whole purpose of having a single Supreme Court at the apex of the judiciary is to ensure that federal law is uniform throughout the country.

  But Isaacson arrives at the Supreme Court on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other matters that are typically decided on a short timeframe and without full briefing or oral argument. Arizona’s attorney general, in other words, hopes to bypass the ordinary process for seeking review of a lower court decision — a process that typically takes months or longer — and obtain a Supreme Court decision reinstating Arizona’s law as soon as possible.

  If Brnovich can step outside the Court’s normal procedures to obtain such an order, other Republican officials will think they can do so as well. And many lower court judges will likely view such an order as a sign that they should start reinstating anti-abortion laws that were previously struck down.

  Thus, in practice, the Isaacson decision could wind up accelerating the demise of Roe, triggering a wave of decisions gutting abortion rights months before Dobbs is handed down.

  Indeed, there is a precedent, of sorts, for the Supreme Court gradually rolling out a major change in its understanding of the Constitution rather than implementing that change abruptly with one definitive decision.

  In the lead-up to Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Court’s landmark marriage equality decision, multiple lower courts handed down decisions holding that states could not deny marriage rights to same-sex couples. Rather than block these decisions while the Court pondered whether to make marriage equality the law in all 50 states, the Court allowed these lower court decisions to take effect. The upshot was that, by the time Obergefell was handed down, marriage equality had already come to much of the country due to these unblocked lower court orders.

  There are obvious differences between Obergefell and Dobbs — the former was an expansion of individual rights, while Dobbs is likely to end in a significant contraction of such rights — but the lead-up to Obergefell shows that the Court will sometimes implement a new constitutional rule on a piecemeal basis before implementing it nationwide. That process may already be underway as the Court drafts its Dobbs decision.

• The rehabilitation of Trump national security officials says a lot about Washington -

  

  How to make Beltway friends and influence policy.

  Matt Pottinger served four years on President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including 15 months as deputy adviser, and then resigned mid-insurrection. “The events of that day, January 6, were for me a red line. Decided that it was time to go, and I resigned that afternoon,” he said six months later. But he hasn’t said much about it since then.

  Maybe it’s because he’s been busy, as a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank affiliated with Stanford University. He’s also chair of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and a business consultant at the firm Ergo. Pottinger is most closely associated with Trump’s hardline China policy, an approach that Republicans and Democrats have come to broadly support.

  Many observers initially predicted that working for Trump would turn into a scarlet letter. But service in the Trump White House in the lead-up to the “Stop the Steal” violence hasn’t necessarily been an obstacle for rejoining Washington’s establishment.

  Top-level personnel, like adviser Stephen Miller and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, haven’t been rehabilitated, and former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller has stayed under the radar since he testified on the Capitol riot. But senior officials and staffers a few rungs below — and former Trump officials who questioned the election results — have done fine.

  This isn’t a phenomenon unique to the Trump administration. Whether it’s George W. Bush and his Iraq War or Barack Obama’s Afghanistan surge, foreign policy officials have time and time again been able to transcend their president and return to positions of power. That speaks to the unique mores of Washington, where subject matter expertise is the entry key to the elite club. Members of the foreign policy establishment protect their own — as long as they stay within the bounds of the mainstream policy ideas of the moment. This same principle protected many of the technocrats and appointees who supported the 2003 Iraq War. Their success in reestablishing themselves as trusted experts has paved the way for other acts that have been forgiven.

  Trump’s foreign policy was divergent from the Washington norm: He visited Saudi Arabia as his first overseas visit, valued personal diplomacy over longstanding protocol with dictators like Kim Jong Un, and wanted to ditch NATO entirely, among many other erratic moves. But Trump’s undemocratic actions at home were even more divergent.

  Critics have said that anyone who stood by Trump’s side — in any capacity — should have to answer for the former president’s anti- democratic behavior. Pottinger, for example, never publicly pushed election denialism. But critics say that’s insufficient for a national security staffer, when the US’s foreign policy is (at least purportedly) based on advancing democracy around the world.

  “You can have the most well-crafted China policy in the world, but if Donald Trump prevails in his efforts to dismantle US democracy, what is the point? What are we defending?” said Ben Rhodes, who served as Obama’s deputy national security adviser. “That runs so counter to everything that the American national security establishment is supposed to claim to represent, and it kind of makes a mockery of it.”

But that subject matter expertise — plus the patina afforded by resigning on January 6 — has helped Pottinger, a former journalist, expertly navigate the post-Trump landscape. He even emerged as the White House hero of the initial Covid-19 chaos in New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright’s chronicle of “The Plague Year.”

Pottinger declined an interview request from Vox, and his attorney Mary Boies responded on his behalf. “Matt led the way resigning promptly on January 6 and that action makes spoken denunciation unnecessary and certainly not disqualifying from public service. With Matt’s counsel, the U.S. reversed decades of failed policy toward China, and the new policy has continued under the Biden Administration,” Boies wrote. “This country needs the kind of sound policy that Matt helped craft, not aggressive rhetoric that only further divides the nation.”

Yet a lot of that aggressive rhetoric has come from the president whom he served. And the siege of the Capitol was a red line for Pottinger, but apparently not Trump’s previous questioning of the integrity of the election that gave rise to the attempt to overturn it, or any number of other incidents.

But look at what that red line bought Pottinger. The act of resigning set him apart from his boss, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, who stayed on through the handoff to President Joe Biden two weeks later. In that role early last January, O’Brien was mostly worried about antifa counterprotesters to the insurrectionists rather than the pro-Trump insurrection itself, according to the Washington Post. O’Brien hasn’t emerged with the same prestige. He’s been working as a mediator for a Los Angeles law firm, an atypical role for a former security chief. He recently started a consulting firm with other officials from the Trump White House since many of them had difficulty securing coveted jobs, according to Bloomberg.

Yet after a full term alongside Trump, things are going well for Pottinger. This summer, he was the only former Trump White House staffer on the schedule of the eminent Aspen Security Forum. He hopped off early from a panel to serve as an expert witness at the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. This year, Pottinger has appeared twice on CBS’s 60 Minutes to talk about the Wuhan lab leak theory of Covid-19’s origins, which he has advanced, and China’s aggressive economic policies. Neither time was he asked about Trump.

Experts get a pass

One reason that Matt Pottinger was welcomed back into the establishment is that, unlike some of Trump’s unconventional appointees, he had already been a part of the elite.

Pottinger has become the go-to expert on China’s economic and security outlook. He speaks fluent Mandarin, and as China correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, he broke news on companies and took risks to cover politically complex stories about the Communist Party. He changed careers to become a Marine in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then worked at one of the world’s largest hedge funds. Other Trump national security appointees with strong credentials before the administration — like onetime National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster or national security staffers Dina H. Powell McCormick and Nadia Schadlow — have landed similarly well.

Policy officials have often found ways to transcend party politics, even as they work for partisan leaders. In previous administrations, “there is a lot of respect on both parties for the other sides’ experts even when they vehemently disagree. Policy disagreements are normal and helpful,” said Elizabeth Saunders, a professor at Georgetown University who focuses on the presidency and foreign policy.

In some ways, this is a practical consideration. “Someone’s got to keep the lights on. Someone’s got to run China policy no matter how much you think the president’s good, bad, antidemocratic,” explains Saunders.

A concern raised by scholars of US foreign policy is the thin bench of potential staffers for a future Republican administration. If the Democrats were to lose in 2024, it will have been over a decade since a mainstream GOP candidate took the executive branch, and there are thousands of jobs that would need to be filled.

This pursuit of Republican foreign policy thinkers — to serve on public panels, testify to Congress, or author articles for prestigious journals like Foreign Affairs — has made it appealing to hear from people like Pottinger or McMaster, who do have recent high-level government experience.

But that deference extends mainly to policy staffers and experts who hew to Washington’s established worldview. It is worth emphasizing the Biden administration’s continuity with Trump in implementing many of the hawkish China policies of tariffs, sanctions, and strategic competition put forward by Pottinger. “There is a very narrow range of acceptable opinion, and if you’re within it you can weather a lot. Both Pottinger and O’Brien in many respects are inside the Beltway consensus on the big issues of the day,” said Michael Desch, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame.

It’s part of the unwritten rules of the elite club of Washington. “If you criticize NATO enlargement or Israel or some of the more foundational cornerstones of post-Cold War American foreign policy, you are more likely to be cast aside than if you worked for years for Donald Trump. And that’s just crazy,” Rhodes said.

Lack of accountability is self-perpetuating

There certainly are former Trump advisers who haven’t been welcomed back, like the short-lived National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and has encouraged challenges to the 2020 election’s integrity. Steve Bannon isn’t speaking at any centrist think tanks or universities anytime soon. But their cases are exceptions that prove the rule. “For me, the real story is the ability of inside-the-Beltway people to escape accountability for dumb things they did when in office, and I think it’s broader than just the Trump administration,” Desch said.

Many attribute the reentry of some Trump officials to Washington to a broader lack of reckoning for the enablers of the Iraq War. It’s well established at this point that President George W. Bush’s primary rationale for invading Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, was an outright lie. “The Bush administration had to work assiduously and I think at times dishonestly to make the case for war, and observing after the fact, I can’t point to anyone who was sanctioned for supporting the war,” said Christopher Preble of the Atlantic Council, a global affairs think tank in Washington.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who planned the war, and Secretary of State Colin Powell, who advocated for it at the United Nations, both maintained platforms before their deaths this year, as have their acolytes. Consider David Frum, the speechwriter who coined the “Axis of Evil” tagline that helped sell the war, who has rebranded himself as a popular columnist for the Atlantic.

And powerful Democrats (Joe Biden, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton) voted for the war. It’s not just that there were never trials or prosecutions for the Bush officials, or tough questions to their cheerleaders in academic, media, and think tank circles; support for the Iraq debacle has never really been an impediment to career advancement. Quite the opposite: None of the 33 scholars who signed onto an anti-Iraq War ad in the New York Times two decades ago have ascended to government roles, notes scholar Stephen Walt in The Hell of Good Intentions.

It’s rare that those who perpetuated foreign policy disasters are even asked about them; one of the few times a journalist did pose such a question produced a revealing sound bite.

Broadcast journalist Mehdi Hasan asked John Bolton, the senior Bush diplomat who went on to be Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, whether he regretted advocating for the Iraq War, especially in light of the hundreds of thousands of civilians who died. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bolton said, and called the war a “brilliant military victory by the United States and other coalition forces.”

The persistent failures of US foreign policy since the Cold War, and the lack of accountability for those failures, helped give rise to Trump, argues Walt. He writes that “perhaps the greatest barrier to genuine accountability is the self-interest of the foreign policy establishment itself. Its members are reluctant to judge one another harshly and are ready to forgive mistakes lest they be judged themselves.”

Other experts have a more generous interpretation of how Washington slouched toward Baghdad. Kori Schake, a former Bush official now at the American Enterprise Institute, told me that policymakers are implementing decisions based on imperfect information and short timelines. “If you are going to have in government people who have never made an inaccurate judgment on foreign and defense policy, you are going to have almost no one who meets this standard,” she said.

There may be other analogues for the current moment. Few of the Ronald Reagan officials associated with the Iran-Contra arms scandal were rehabilitated. Robert McNamara, the former defense secretary during seven of the most devastating years of the Vietnam War, repudiated his views and still was never really welcomed back into the establishment. “At the end of the day, it comes down to questions of integrity,” Schake said. “Do you judge that these are people of good faith trying to do the right thing? Or do you think they’re a danger and need to be cordoned off from potential future roles?”

As Pottinger said last summer, “I’m proud of a lot of things that the administration did, and I think I’ll look back on those years as ones that I’m proud of.”

• How to use rapid tests in the omicron era -

  

  Rapid tests work with omicron, but there are caveats.

Should we be swabbing our noses or our throats for at-home tests? Do rapid tests even detect omicron at all? Are PCR tests the only results we can trust right now?

Guidance about how to approach testing in the omicron era seems to be evolving by the day. ​​A recent real-world study that followed 30 subjects likely exposed to omicron found that PCR saliva tests can catch Covid-19 cases three days before rapid antigen tests, which use nasal swabs. These findings, which have not been peer reviewed, seem to confirm after the Food and Drug Administration’s announcement in late December that, while they do detect omicron, rapid antigen tests may now have “reduced sensitivity.” But that doesn’t mean rapid tests don’t play a key role in our pandemic response going forward.

This is all confusing to a public that’s been pulled in several directions over the course of the pandemic when it comes to guidance and testing. Long delays for PCR test results, a shortage of at-home rapid tests, and the wait for more definitive science about the omicron variant have all made it more difficult to figure out when and how to to get tested. Nevertheless, public health experts say that, as more become available, rapid tests will be an increasingly vital tool for diagnosing Covid-19 and reducing its spread.

So you might be wondering: What’s the point if rapid tests aren’t as accurate as PCR tests? Well, rapid antigen tests, which look for a specific protein on the Covid-19 virus, remain extremely effective at confirming positive cases. Put simply, if you test positive on a rapid test, you almost certainly have Covid-19. If you test negative, in some cases, you might still test positive on a PCR test, which is much more sensitive because it tests for genetic evidence of the virus. Rapid tests may not pick up positive cases in people who have been vaccinated or who have recently recovered from Covid-19, since they may produce less virus, one expert told Recode.

Rapid tests can also reveal a positive case faster than the labs that process PCR tests, since they can take several days to share results with patients, especially during big waves of infection. Perhaps more importantly, rapid tests can indicate whether someone is contagious enough to spread the virus to others, which is what many people are most worried about.

“Given that a rapid antigen test is often the most feasible or available option for many, we don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good,” Joshua Michaud, the associate director for global health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told Recode. He explained that every Covid-19 case that’s caught by someone who could take a rapid antigen test but not a PCR test is a win for public health.

Taking rapid tests more frequently also makes them more effective. Most at-home rapid test kits are designed to be conducted over the course of two days, which is why kits typically include two tests. Because each test is a snapshot of the moment it’s taken, multiple tests help reduce the chance of receiving a false negative.

Of course, all of this is assuming that you can get your hands on a rapid test. In the weeks since omicron started to spread, rapid tests have been incredibly hard to find in some parts of the country. These tests are out of stock because neither test manufacturers nor the Biden administration anticipated record levels of Covid-19 cases, which have boosted the demand for rapid tests. To confront the shortage, the White House now plans to buy and distribute 500 million free rapid tests in the coming weeks. When that happens, these tests could help catch more positive cases and lower the number of people infected with Covid-19.

How accurate are rapid tests when it comes to omicron?

The accuracy of a rapid test depends on how often you’re testing yourself and whether you want to identify a Covid-19 infection or measure your contagiousness. But if you test positive on a rapid test, you should trust the result, assume you’re infectious, and isolate for at least five days. If you test positive again after five days, the CDC recommends isolating for five more.

Rapid tests, however, are not perfect. Research indicates that antigen tests are less accurate than PCR tests — this has been the case since the beginning of the pandemic. PCR tests are processed in a lab, where sophisticated equipment can identify and amplify even the tiniest genetic evidence of the virus that causes Covid-19. These tests are so precise that patients can actually test positive for weeks after they’ve recovered and are no longer contagious. The results of rapid tests, meanwhile, can vary based on how much virus is in a patient’s nose at the time the sample is taken and how far along they are in their infection.

Scientists explain the difference between rapid tests and PCR tests in two ways: specificity, which reflects a test’s false-positive rate, and sensitivity, which reflects a test’s false-negative rate. Both PCR and rapid tests have high specificity, which means that their positive results are very trustworthy. But while PCR tests tend to have near- perfect sensitivity, rapid antigen tests tend to have a sensitivity around 80 to 90 percent. This means that rapid tests tend to produce more false negatives than PCR tests do.

Omicron makes testing even trickier. The sensitivity of rapid tests may be even lower for omicron cases, according to early research from the FDA and other scientists. Another problem is that omicron may propagate more in the throat than the lungs, which means it could take longer for Covid-19 to show up in nasal samples, even if someone is symptomatic. It’s possible that vaccinated people and people who have recently recovered from Covid-19 are noticing more false positives on rapid tends because they tend to produce less virus overall.

“At-home tests are mostly effective when the person has high viral loads, a time when the person is more likely to transmit the virus,” Pablo Penaloza-MacMaster, a viral immunologist at Northwestern’s medical school, told Recode, “Most at-home tests are still able to detect infection by omicron because they target a part of the virus that doesn’t mutate that much.”

Separate studies from both the UK’s Health Security Agency and researchers in Australia found that antigen tests are as sensitive to the omicron variant as they were to earlier strains of Covid-19. Again, the FDA does still recommend rapid tests to diagnose positive cases, and test manufacturers say they’re confident in their products’ ability to detect omicron. While early research indicates saliva tests might detect Covid-19 more quickly, right now most of the PCR tests and all of the available rapid at-home tests that have emergency use authorizations from the FDA use nasal samples.

How to use rapid tests in less-than-ideal circumstances

Which brings us back to the question of whether you should be sticking nasal swabs in your throat. There is evidence that saliva samples may be a quicker indicator of Covid-19 cases, but that doesn’t mean you should stop following the directions that come with your test kit. The FDA says that people should not use rapid antigen tests to swab their own mouths. Some experts say you might consider doing so anyway, and point out that other countries, including the UK, have approved rapid antigen tests that use throat swabs and released very careful directions about how to do so.

“​​I personally do swab my throat and my nose to get the best sensitivity when I use over-the-counter tests at home,” Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard, said at a Thursday press conference. “There are risks associated with that, but the biology does tell us that they might be getting better sensitivity earlier.”

But the concern with rapid test kits right now is not that people are swabbing their noses, but how often they’re swabbing their noses. A single test could miss a Covid-19 case and produce a false negative, but taking two tests over a 24 to 36 hour period reduces this risk. The more rapid tests you take, the more you reduce your chances of a false negative, and the more times you test negative over multiple days, the more confident you can be that you’re not spreading Covid-19.

Still, the biggest problem right now is that rapid tests are pricey and hard to find. Pharmacies have limited the number of test kits people can buy, and many are completely sold out. A single test can also cost more than $10, which means that testing yourself regularly gets expensive quickly. Opportunists have even hoarded tests and engaged in price gouging, which has exacerbated the shortage.

If you don’t have enough tests to test yourself regularly, it’s best to test yourself right before seeing vulnerable people, says Mara Aspinall, a professor who leads Arizona State’s testing diagnostic commons and a board member for the test manufacturer Orasure, told Recode. “I’m heading to a vulnerable person [or] I’m going into a health care setting, and therefore need to test right beforehand.”

For now, the best test kit is the test you can get (Wired has a handy list of the brands currently available). If you’re planning to go somewhere and don’t want to spread the virus, you should take one rapid test the day before traveling, and then a second test immediately before you go. If you only have one rapid test, take it right before you see people.

Testing yourself should become easier as more rapid tests become available. In addition to the 500 million free rapid tests that the White House will distribute beginning later this month, people with private insurance will also be able to get their rapid test purchases reimbursed starting next week. You should also check with your local health department, as they might be distributing free tests.

Even though the rapid test situation is still less than ideal, there are other strategies we can use to protect both ourselves and other people from Covid-19, like getting vaccinated, getting boosted, and wearing a mask. And if you do happen to find some rapid tests, go ahead and grab them. They might just come in handy, especially if you use them correctly.

From The Hindu: Sports

• ‘Bowled’ that was not to be: Tendulkar-Warne have fun discussion on Stokes’ lucky survival - Stokes did not offer a shot to a delivery from Cameron Green but the ball brushed the stump and yet didn’t dislodge the bail

• Australia Border Force cancels Czech player Renata Voracova’s visa - Voracova had played in Melbourne earlier this week but has been asked to leave Australia after being detained by Border Force officials

• Fourth Ashes Test | Jonny Bairstow century highlights ‘Pink’ day 3 - At stumps, Bairstow was 103 not out and Jack Leach was on four, with England trailing Australia by 158 runs.

• COVID-19 third wave affects BCCI headquarters - Fifteen MCA staffers and at least three BCCI staff members have contracted COVID-19.

• Slow over-rate will lead to a fielder less outside 30 yard circle: ICC changes T20I playing conditions - The first men’s match to be played under the new playing conditions will be the one-off tie between the West Indies and Ireland at the Sabina Park in Jamaica on January 16

From The Hindu: National News

• Special team formed to nab accused in Mudumalai elephant burning case - The incident happened in the buffer zone of the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve almost a year ago.

• MUDA reclaims over 50 acres of encroached land in Mysuru in six months - The eviction of encroachments took place at Devanoor 3rd stage close to Narayana Multispecialty Hospital

• Anbumani hails SC verdict on 27% OBC reservation - Terms it a milestone in the history of social justice

• Farm loan waived in Namakkal and Salem districts - The Chief Minister has agreed to treat it as a special case: Periyasamy

• Palaniswami criticises Stalin for not ordering the closure of Tasmac outlets - Panneerselvam questions the logic behind the government’s deadline for distribution of Pongal gift hampers

From BBC: Europe

• Kazakhstan unrest: Troops ordered to fire without warning - The president orders the crackdown on protests, saying “20,000 bandits” had attacked the main city.

• In pictures: Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas - Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas from Moscow to Cairo.

• Lithuania: The European state that dared to defy China then wobbled - It stood up to China over Taiwan, but this week Lithuania’s president said it made a mistake.

• Italy Covid: Bullet forces immunologist to get protection - Prof Antonella Viola is given police protection after threats are made against her and her family.

• Passengers from Italy escape quarantine in India - They were among 125 passengers who tested positive for Covid after arriving on a flight from Milan.

From Ars Technica

• Rocket Report: SpaceX raises more cash, Buy your own New Glenn - “SpaceX … is currently drafting responses for the over 18,000 public comments.” - link

• Study: 1960 ramjet design for interstellar travel—a sci-fi staple—is unfeasible - “It is very unlikely that even Kardashev civilizations of type II might build magnetic ramjets.” - link

• Lawsuit: Facebook recommendations helped extremists meet and plan murder - Facebook sued by sister of federal security officer shot to death at protest. - link

• GameStop stock takes off as plans for NFT marketplace come into focus - Two of 2021’s weirdest trends come together to start 2022. - link

• Omicron is not mild and is crushing health care systems worldwide, WHO warns - “Just like previous variants, omicron is hospitalizing people, and it is killing people.” - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• My father once asked me if I knew the difference between heaven and hell… -

  “In heaven” he said, “the Italians make the food and the British run the government”

  He then paused and said, “In hell, the British make the food and the Italians run the government”

  submitted by /u/scrum_lord_69
  [link] [comments]

• So there I am, alone with my girlfriend. She leans closer and whispers in my ear. . . -

  “Tell me something you’ve never told anyone at all.”

  After a pause, I whisper back “I think the Owl People are already among us.”

  “Who?”

  “Holy shit!”

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

• There was a German, an Italian and an Irishman on death row. -

  The warden gave them a choice of three ways to die:

  1. To be shot
  2. To be hung
  3. To be injected with the AIDS virus for a slow death.

  So the German said, “Shoot me right in the head.”. Boom, he was dead instantly.

  Then the Italian said, “Just hang me.” (Snap, he was dead.)

  Then the Irishman said, “Give me some of that AIDS stuff.” They gave him the shot, and the Irishman fell down laughing. The guards looked at each other and wondered what was wrong with this guy.

  Then the Irishman said, “Give me another one of those shots,” so the guards did. Now he was laughing so hard, tears rolled from his eyes and he doubled over.

  Finally the warden said, “What is wrong with you?” The Irishman replied, “You guys are so stupid….. I’m wearing a condom!”

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

• An old man walks up to the counter of a pawn shop holding an old, weathered guitar -

  “I’d like your expert opinion on this guitar, how much do you think it’s worth?” asks the old man.

  The pawn broker looks it up and down. “Well, I can tell right now that there’s a little warping in the neck, the lacquer is faded and there’s scratches and dents all over it. It’s an old, well-played guitar but I don’t think it’s worth any more than twenty bucks.”

  The old man reaches his hand out and says, “Okay, if that’s what you think it’s worth.. you have a deal!”

  “Great!” replies the pawn broker, shaking his hand.

  “Here’s twenty bucks,” says the old man. “I’ll buy it right now!”

  The broker stops, and suddenly looks confused. “Wait…. buy?” he asks.

  “Yes!” smiles the old man as he flips the guitar over, “This one has a sticker price of $150, but now that I have your honest opinion I think twenty bucks is a great deal!”

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

• Dave and Jim were a couple of drinking buddies who worked as aircraft mechanics in Melbourne, Australia. One day the airport was fogged in and they were stuck in the hangar with nothing to do. Dave said, ‘Man, I wish we had something to drink!’ -

  Jim says, ‘Me too. Y’know, I’ve heard you can drink jet fuel and get a buzz. You wanna try it?’ So they pour themselves a couple of glasses of high octane booze and get completely smashed. The next morning Dave wakes up and is surprised at how good he feels. In fact he feels GREAT! NO hangover! NO bad side effects. Nothing! Then the phone rings. It’s Jim. Jim says, ‘Hey, how do you feel this morning?’ Dave says, ‘I feel great, how about you?’ Jim says, ‘I feel great, too. You don’t have a hangover?’ Dave says, ‘No that jet fuel is great stuff no hangover, nothing. We ought to do this more often..’ ‘Yeah, well there’s just one thing.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘Have you farted yet?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, DON’T - cause I’m in New Zealand’

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