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

• Why Did the Police Shoot Matthew Zadok Williams? - Outside Atlanta, a mother and five sisters look for answers. - link

• What’s Next for the Campaign to Break Up Big Tech? - A judge recently dismissed two antitrust cases against Facebook. But what appeared to be a setback for the effort may actually provide a road map for how it can succeed. - link

• What We Need to Learn from the Tragedy in Surfside - It is possible that South Florida, where climate change is a particularly acute problem, is nearing a point at which even the best-constructed buildings are under threat. - link

• Biden’s Invisible Ideology - The President has deployed an exasperating but effective strategy to counter Trumpism. - link

• Richard Branson’s Plan to Beat Jeff Bezos to Outer Space - The two billionaires have been duelling for years to make commercial space flights a reality. Now, on Sunday, Branson is going himself. - link

From Vox

• Seashells changed the world. Now they’re teaching us about the future of the oceans. -

  

  In The Sound of the Sea, environmental journalist Cynthia Barnett explores the history and science of shells.

  This story is part of Down to Earth, a Vox reporting initiative on the science, politics, and economics of the biodiversity crisis.

  Many years ago, the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum in Florida surveyed its visitors to find out how much they knew about seashells. Ninety percent of them, as the survey revealed, didn’t know that shells were made by live animals.

  “I was just absolutely floored when I heard the statistic,” said Cynthia Barnett, an author and environmental reporter who teaches journalism at the University of Florida. “Most people thought they were some sort of rock or stone, and I was really disturbed by that. It just got me thinking how separated we are from the natural world.”

  Barnett didn’t let that thought go. It became an obsession — and eventually, a book. Published earlier this month, her new book, The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans, is a story about seashells and the creatures that make them.

  Seashells aren’t just interesting because of the fascinating and bizarre animals that create them, Barnett writes. They’ve also shaped human societies and laid the groundwork for one of the world’s most recognizable oil companies, Royal Dutch Shell. And whether you know it or not, seashells are all around us — in construction materials, in the ground below our feet, even in our toothpaste.

Courtesy of W. W. Norton

Shells also reveal a frightening future that climate change is swiftly ushering in. “The sea and its life are taking a far greater blow than those of us on land,” she writes. Oceans are absorbing far more heat than land and they’re becoming more acidic, as they suck up much of the carbon dioxide we emit into the air. That’s taking a toll on many mollusks, she writes, as is over-harvesting.

I recently spoke with Barnett about these threats, and her own place in the sweeping story of seashells. She used to spend summers harvesting wild scallops in Florida, and ate seafood on the road while reporting the book, she said.

But as she’s learned about the true price of harvesting, she’s changed her habits, and she’s optimistic that others are doing the same. “I think our ethics of gathering seafood, of cooking seafood, has changed, and that could give us a lot of hope,” she told me. “We do change over time.”

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The animals inside seashells

Benji Jones

Where do seashells actually come from?

Cynthia Barnett

Seashells are made by the wondrous creatures that live inside of them — the marine mollusks. There are about 50,000 of them known. Mollusks are the second-largest group of animals behind the arthropods — which include the insects — and they are scooting and flipping and scooching all over the world from the deepest parts of the ocean to the highest mountain peaks.

Benji Jones

When I think about seashells, I think of oysters in a restaurant or perhaps the beautiful conch shell. How varied are seashells?

Cynthia Barnett

There are the gastropods, which are animals that make a single coiled shell. Then there are the bivalves, which are those double-shelled animals like clams and scallops. And then, of course, there are the cephalopods like the unshelled octopus or the squid, which had a shell long ago but evolved out of it. They traded in their shells for speed.

Marine mollusks evolved shells to protect themselves. As fishes and crabs evolved stronger teeth and stronger claws for pinching, seashells became stronger and stronger and more varied and more elaborate over tens of millions and even hundreds of millions of years. It’s an evolutionary arms race.

The really cool thing is that so many other things we love about seashells also evolved as protection. Sometimes when you pick them up, they’ll slam shut their little trap doors. The terebrids, or auger shells, have these really narrow apertures — the part of the shell you hold up to your ear — so predators can’t pry into them. The cowries evolved these really smooth, glossy humps, which scientists think makes it hard for a crab to hold on to them.

BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Benji Jones

How do they make these shells in the first place?

Cynthia Barnett

That is the process of biomineralization. The primary element in seashells is calcium carbonate. And the animals take that from the sea around them and build their shells slowly as they grow. So they’re basically secreting the shell at the edges, and they do that over most of their lives. Although kind of like humans, they grow faster at different times of their lives.

“We walk on a world of shells”

Benji Jones

Until reading this book, I didn’t realize that seashells are essentially all around us — in our building materials and in the design of buildings.

Cynthia Barnett

When I set out to write this book, I started thinking about all the places that seashells are found. They’re underfoot, making up limestone aquifers where we’re getting our drinking water. We walk on the bodies of all the marine life that has ever lived. A lot of the built environment is also made of seashells including the Empire State Building and the Washington Cathedral — these are great buildings cut from limestone.

Benji Jones

Limestone is the result of ancient shells basically being compressed over millennia.

Cynthia Barnett

Yes, that’s exactly right, and it’s a really hardy building material. Beyond that, of course, seashells are models for a lot of classic architectural design. Gaudi’s vaulted rooftops in Catalonia, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York, Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House in Australia. Utzon credited the fierce-looking cockscomb oyster for that waterfront beauty.

Benji Jones

I just love this idea that the shells are the homes for mollusks, but also, in some cases, they house us. Is it also true that shells are in toothpaste, or am I making that up?

Cynthia Barnett

You are not making that up. Shells are in toothpaste for the calcium carbonate. The same thing that helps make them tough is a good material for keeping our teeth clean. The ancient Greeks ground oysters and used it on their teeth to keep their teeth white and clean.

The world’s first currency

Benji Jones

As you write, a small seashell called the cowrie was used as a form of currency for a long time. When and where was that?

Cynthia Barnett

These little shells were harvested en masse in the Maldives for a thousand years, and they were used as money around the world. The money cowrie is a reef-dwelling algae-eater in the genus Cypraea, which actually shares its Greek root word with cryptocurrency — crypto, meaning hidden or secret. I was really fascinated by the money cowrie when I found out that it had been used as a major currency of the slave trade. In West Africa, they actually purchased an estimated third of the enslaved Africans forced to the Americas.

Benji Jones

And why the cowrie? Is there something particular that makes the shell so special?

Cynthia Barnett

For one, they’re very uniform in size, so they were easy to count. They also packed up really well into ship ballast. And they were something you could put into a pocket or a purse and easily use like coins. They are really small and could fit on the tip of your pointer finger.

Benji Jones

Do we have a sense of when they became money? Was there a formal process that made that happen?

Cynthia Barnett

It was informal at first. There’s a wonderful global historian named Bin Yang who has written an entire history of the money cowrie as currency, and he found that Maldivian cowries were spending like coins in India as early as the fourth century. Then they moved west to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, they spread to mainland Southeast Asia, and then they took off.

The oil company Shell has its origins in actual shells

Benji Jones

You tell another story about the value of shells — more specifically, the ones that laid the groundwork for Royal Dutch Shell, the oil company.

Cynthia Barnett

Shell’s history dates to a Jewish curio shop owner in the East End of London. His name was Marcus Samuel, and in the 1830s, he was importing tropical seashells. The big thing that made him wealthy were these little gift boxes bejeweled with seashells. He thought of the idea of selling them as tourist items at beaches all around the United Kingdom. They were really, really popular.

One of his sons, Marcus Samuel Jr., is the one who ended up founding Shell Oil. At that time, oil was transported in cases and it sort of sloshed around. It could catch fire. It could burn ships. What Marcus Samuel Jr. did was help design the first safe oil tanker to be able to take a large amount of oil through the Suez Canal.

Benji Jones

Is the company’s logo a scallop?

Cynthia Barnett

Yeah. The first logo they had was like a homely little mussel — just really boring. The scallop is perhaps the most brilliant-ever marketing symbol. It’s been a beloved shape for most of humanity. That bright yellow scallop shell has become so iconic for Shell Oil that the company doesn’t need to use its name when it uses that logo.

What’s poignant about this, and another reason for doing this book, is the revelation that seashells are beginning to be impacted by acidifying and warming seas. A company that started out with a founder who loved seashells so much is now trading in a fossil fuel, whose emissions are harming the oceans and creating acidifying seas that are, in turn, harming seashells and the animals that make them.

Fossil fuels are harming shell-building mollusks

Benji Jones

The increase in CO2 emissions is not only warming the oceans but increasing the level of acidity inside of them. How does that work?

Cynthia Barnett

The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and in the oceans is a limiting factor for the mollusks in taking in calcium carbonate to build their shells. The carbon dioxide we’ve sent into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels has turned seawater about 30 percent more acidic than it was at the start of the industrial era. That chemical change in the ocean has begun to limit the carbonate that mollusks use to make their shells. Acidic waters can also bore into some shells, pitting them or eroding them.

Mollusks are also threatened by warming. Some parts of the ocean have already become too warm for the shell-making animals. But the other beautiful thing about marine mollusks is that these are incredible survivors, and they did make it through five mass extinctions.

“Shell madness”

Benji Jones

Shells, we now know, can represent wealth. But for many people, they are collector’s items. As you write in the book, there were these periods when shell collecting was a wildly popular hobby — there was “shell madness.” What does that look like?

Cynthia Barnett

There are two really fascinating periods of crazed shell collection. One begins in the 16th and 17th centuries in the Netherlands, when these exploratory ships began to take off for the Indo-Pacific and bring back these amazing, beautiful seashells — all kinds of chambered Nautiluses, Conchs, and things that you just don’t see on the beaches of the North Sea.

These seashells became extremely valuable to the Dutch. Rembrandt himself got caught up in the shell madness. You had dilettantes in Holland paying more for a single seashell than they would pay for a famous Dutch master painting. That lasted for a couple of hundred years, and it sort of collapsed in the wake of the French Revolution.

Braunger/ullstein bild via Getty Images

Another shell madness happens in the United States, post-World War II. Part of that was spurred by the number of American soldiers who served in the Pacific, in places like Palau, Guam, and Hawaii that have incredible seashells. They brought home tropical shells as souvenirs or keepsakes, and that helped spark a great excitement for seashells that lasted for a couple of decades in the United States.

Florida was a hotspot for that madness. People would make a pilgrimage to Sanibel Island and collect as many shells as they could. It was really a mecca because, at that time, people collected live shells and they would just fill their car trunks with seashells to bring home.

Benji Jones

I’m sure that smelled good.

Cynthia Barnett

There was a joke here in Florida that the best seashells to be found were just south of the Georgia line because that’s when the station wagons would begin to stink and they would have to stop and unload all the shells on the side of the road.

If you stayed in a beachfront motel on Sanibel Island there would be a boiling station where everybody brought the live animals to just boil them and retrieve the shells. It was a big part of shell collecting culture. That has really changed. People who would have thought nothing of taking a whole trunk full of life, say, in the 1950s or 60s, would never do that today. It’s one of those stories that gives you some hope that people can change.

Benji Jones

I’m curious, and this is more of a philosophical question, but why did — or still do — seashells have such a grip on us?

Cynthia Barnett

I think we are fundamentally drawn to beauty. This is something that really makes us human and binds us. There’s something really mesmerizing about looking at the top of, say, a lightning whelk or certain kinds of conchs, that just have this wonderful, mesmerizing spiral. It’s something that was true 100,000 years ago, and it’s true today.

Benji Jones

Are you a collector?

Cynthia Barnett

I am not a collector, and I know that because I followed real shell collectors around for about six years while I was working on this book. The hardcore shell collectors are known as conchologists. They’re really knowledgeable about shells and the animals that make them. Another way I know I’m not a collector is that I have a favorite shell. When I would interview conchologists, I soon found out that none of them have a favorite shell. That’s like asking them, “Who’s your favorite kid?” They just won’t answer the question.

Benji Jones

I’ve got to know, what’s your favorite shell?

Cynthia Barnett

My favorite shell is the lightning whelk. It’s this gorgeous spiraled gastropod that was also really loved by the indigenous Floridians called the Calusa. They actually built these great cities of shell in southwest Florida — all of these incredible shell structures and mounds that were later flattened for road fill and to spread on agricultural fields.

The lightning whelk has an unusual feature. It opens to the left, and usually, shells open to the right. If you hold a typical shell in front of you, the aperture — or the part that you hold to your ear — will be on your right, if the shell is pointing up. But in a lightning whelk, it’s on the left. It’s just a beautiful shell.

• Biden’s plan to make stuff cheaper -

  

The president’s big antitrust push could impact how much you pay for plane tickets and prescription drugs.

President Biden issued a sweeping executive order on Friday, making the case to Americans that companies from multiple industries have become too big and too powerful, and federal intervention is needed to bring competition back to the marketplace in order to drive prices down.

The Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy represents a slight shift for the Biden administration, which has lately focused its antitrust attention on Big Tech. Last month, Biden appointed tech antitrust expert Lina Khan to be the chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which, along with the Department of Justice, is responsible for enforcing antitrust laws. The order addresses several issues with major tech companies and alleged anti-competitive behavior, calling for more scrutiny of mergers and acquisitions that certain tech companies might pursue in order to remove competitors from the marketplace. The new executive order also asks the FTC to establish rules over the collection of user data, which many Big Tech companies rely on for revenue and which Congress has consistently failed to pass laws to regulate.

But it can be hard to make the case that antitrust enforcement for Facebook and Google will do anything for consumers’ wallets because those services are largely free — you essentially pay for them with your data, which the companies use to do things like sell ads. And Amazon’s dominance over just about everything has come, partially, through its ability to make its prices lower than smaller businesses. People like to pay less for things, and lower prices have historically been interpreted as beneficial to the consumer. That’s basically what antitrust laws are for: to protect consumers.

So now Biden is rolling out a comprehensive executive order that, among other things, makes the case for how antitrust measures will save Americans money by promoting competition and driving down prices for everything from airline fees to hearing aids.

“The heart of American capitalism is a simple idea: open and fair competition,” Biden said shortly before he signed the order. “That means that if your companies want to win your business, they have to go out and they have to up their game; better prices and services; new ideas and products.”

He added: “But what we’ve seen over the past few decades is less competition and more concentration that holds our economy back. We see it in big agriculture, in big tech, in big pharma. The list goes on. Rather than competing for consumers, they are consuming their competitors.”

Here’s how the order, if fully implemented, can make things cheaper for you.

Airline fees

Biden’s executive order directs the Department of Transportation (DOT) to issue rules requiring airlines to refund fees when services aren’t provided or aren’t provided adequately. For example, if you pay a baggage fee and your bags are delayed, that fee would be refunded. Or if a plane’s wifi or in-flight entertainment system doesn’t work, the airline would issue some sort of refund on the ticket price.

The order also directs the DOT to issue rules that airlines must clearly disclose all baggage, change, and cancellation fees to their customers.

Internet bills

Americans have long been forced to pay whatever the few internet service providers charge for those services, typically because they don’t have much of a choice: Most people have one or two high-speed internet options available to them, which gives their carriers little motivation to charge them less. And the prices those providers charge can vary and are often padded with hidden fees.

The order will ask the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to stop internet service providers from making deals with landlords that restrict tenants to only one option for an internet carrier. This will, in theory, promote competition and lower prices.

The Biden administration will also push the FCC to revive its “Broadband Nutrition Label” plan. This would compel providers to explain all the different plans available to customers, all the fees associated with them, all the services customers are getting, and all the details of their final bill. These Broadband Nutrition Labels were proposed back in 2016, only to be dropped by the Trump administration’s FCC.

Finally, Biden is imploring the FCC to restore net neutrality. Net neutrality, which was established by the Obama-era FCC and repealed by the Trump FCC, would prohibit carriers from charging more to access certain sites or services. It does this by classifying internet service as a “Title II” common carrier, which would subject it to regulations along the lines of a public utility.

The order is ultimately trying to promote competition and transparency, and end fees designed to lock customers in.

Prescription drugs

Biden’s new order directs the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to work with states and tribal authorities to import drugs from Canada, where the same drugs are typically much cheaper than in the United States. This would, ideally, force drug manufacturers to bring down the prices they charge in the US, or at least give Americans the option to pay less for imported drugs.

The order also directs the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to support generic drugs that will give Americans cheaper options to brand-name equivalents, and come up with a plan to combat price gouging within 45 days.

Finally, it asks the FTC to ban “pay for delay,” which is when drug companies pay off competitors to delay offering cheaper generic versions of their drugs once their exclusive patent ends.

Hearing aids

Biden is ordering HHS to issue rules that allow hearing aids to be sold over the counter, rather than forcing consumers to have an expensive (and probably unnecessary) consultation with a medical professional first — one that few health insurers will even cover.

Repairs, from tractors to mobile phones

The order asks the FTC to expand “right to repair” rules. Farmers and iPhone owners alike have complained that their device and equipment manufacturers have made it impossible or excessively difficult for anyone but those manufacturers to do repairs — which allows the manufacturers to set their own repair prices with no competition to drive those prices down.

Products from basically any store that isn’t Amazon

In what could be one of the more sweeping parts of the order, the Biden administration asks the FTC to make rules that prevent “internet marketplaces” from using their dominant position to gain an advantage over the small businesses that have to sell their wares through them. For example, Amazon can see which of another company’s products are selling well, make its own versions of those products, and then display them more prominently. This could apply to Apple as well, as its many developers have complained that its App Store is a monopoly and that Apple will see what its users want (music streaming services, for example), make its own version, and push it onto Apple device owners.

• Critical race theory hysteria overshadows the importance of teaching kids about racism -

  

  I teach high school. My students are mature and smart enough to handle these kinds of topics.

  It was a normal day in one of my 11th grade US history courses. During class, a kid, I’ll call him Billy, asked, “Why is it such a big deal that the police killed someone? Why is there so much fuss about this one? He should have just listened to the police.”

  While this conversation could have happened this year, it occurred in the spring of 2015, amid the media uproar surrounding Freddie Gray, a young black man who died while in Baltimore police custody. But Billy didn’t understand why this was happening, and now I — a high school teacher — was tasked with explaining this national moment to my young student. So I took a deep breath and launched into a brief historical context about the history of police brutality, Black resistance to it, and how all of this goes back to America’s Reconstruction era.

  These conversations take place often in my class. Young people want to understand the world around them, and it’s my job to do my absolute best to help them make sense of things, even if it’s just by providing them with knowledge of past events that created the inequalities they witness on a regular basis. Whether it’s police killing unarmed Black people, anti-Asian violence during the Covid-19 pandemic, or viral videos of people making racist 911 calls, students want to know. I pride myself on helping kids to make connections between these kinds of events and our nation’s history.

  This is one reason why I get so frustrated at all the bad takes circulating among politicians, social media, and the news related to critical race theory and the teaching of America’s racial history in K-12 classrooms. The reality is that kids are talking about race, systems of oppression, and our country’s ugly past anyway — from media coverage to last summer’s protests to even this very controversy itself, my students are absorbing these conversations and want to know more. I’m just one teacher, and there’s no way to generalize what’s happening everywhere. But I believe that my students are smart and mature enough to handle the truth.

  Most of the people discussing critical race theory aren’t really discussing the theory itself, which is something taught in some law schools, but not — as far as I know — in most or any K-12 schools. Instead, what these critics seem to be talking about is a brain dump of unrelated buzzwords related to hot button topics in society, such as racism, privilege, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Never mind that most haven’t been in a K-12 history classroom since they were enrolled.

  I’ve taught in both majority-Black and majority-white classrooms. One trait that’s the same in both is that parents send their kids to school with the hope that their kids will be prepared for a better life in the future. Certain state legislators and pundits are exploiting that desire and have manufactured a crisis surrounding CRT precisely because most people do not know what it is. The goal is to scare parents, who will then scare teachers away from discussing an accurate representation of past events in the US. But the truth is, we should be having these conversations about racism and the unvarnished truth about our nation’s past with our students. A well-meaning parent should want their children to understand CRT, American exceptionalism, as well as other frameworks they can use to understand American society.

  Teaching the kids the unsavory realities of US history will not teach them to hate this country. As a Black woman, and a great-great-great-great granddaughter of at least one enslaved person, I grew up with a clear understanding that our country’s past wasn’t all good, for all people, all the time. It’s actually because of this that I’ve made it my life’s work to help young people understand history so that they can create a better future. I might have given up on most people my age and older, but the brilliance I see in my classrooms still gives me hope.

  I also believe that we do not help kids by lying to them. Telling them the truth about how our country was built makes kids appreciate me more. It’s one thing to discuss the New Deal as a solution for the Great Depression. It’s another to show them the New Deal housing maps, tell them how the housing assistance excluded many Black people, and how those issues connect to current economic and racial maps in many US cities.

  There’s also value in teaching kids to evaluate information from multiple perspectives — it makes them better at every aspect of life. We absolutely should talk about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, but we should also talk about Ona Judge, Sally Hemings, and others they enslaved. We should read the Indian Removal Act, but we should also examine documents written from the perspective about indigenous people who were removed. It’s in learning all of these details that students get a much richer picture of this country when we share the flaws, as well as the successes.

  Some may be uncomfortable because discussing issues related to race will lead to questions for which the answers may not be so apparent. Students have asked me if white resistance to Brown v. Board led to the founding of their school. They’ve also asked if redlining is why there are so many more Black people in south Dallas than north, where we live and attend school. They also ask questions about issues like patriarchy, capitalism, and oppression that I’m definitely not qualified to answer in a 30-second soundbite. When I first started teaching, I was terrified to tell kids I didn’t know the answer. I thought I would look like a failure. Now, I welcome questions, and help kids learn strategies to find answers.

  Some say that talking about racism will teach kids to feel bad for being white. Yes, it is hard to learn that one’s success is tied very often to socioeconomic status and zip code instead of only hard work and intellect, and some students will no doubt feel bad that they live in a society that awards and withholds privilege based on a status over which most have no control. But that’s a good thing. My grandma said that when you learn better, you do better. I want kids to learn about these systems and work to change them.

  Earlier this year, on January 6, I was teaching a virtual class when the insurrection at the Capitol began. Thankfully, it was an elective course on racial issues in society. The students, and myself, were grateful for the safe space to process our questions and reactions to this event unfolding in real time. This is not unusual for us. My students have asked why pandemic conditions varied so greatly from state to state — to which I tell them that that’s the 10th Amendment in action. They are shocked to learn that the elections of 1800 or 1824 had more drama than 2016 or

2000. Ironically, while few K-12 teachers could define critical race theory before 2021, many will probably teach about it next school year. For me, that will likely look like me planning a class discussion of the controversy during my introductory unit for US history, and deeper analysis in my racial issues and African American history classes. As a teacher, it’s such a gift when news headlines make it so much easier to make history relevant for my 11th graders.

      Jania Hoover, EdD, is a high school social studies teacher and department chair in Texas with 16 years of teaching experience in both public and private schools. She has designed curriculum for and currently teaches courses on US history, African American history, Native American history, and racial issues in American society.

From The Hindu: Sports

• India-Sri Lanka series to now start from July 18, says BCCI secretary Jay Shah - The series, which was originally scheduled to start with the three ODIs on July 13, had to be rescheduled due to COVID outbreak.

• Mahmudullah takes sudden decision to retire from Test cricket - Bangladesh all-rounder Mahmudullah has made a sudden decision to stop playing Test cricket, a day after recording a career-best 150 in the ongoing one

• Long wait in immigration, not enough volunteers: IOA chief highlights concerns on arrival in Tokyo - Batra was informed of the inconveniences the athletes from other countries are facing.

• Copa America final | Rio opens 10% of Maracana Stadium - Guests will be required to wear masks in the stadium and keep a distance of two meters among each other. No food and drinks will be allowed

• Olympics 2020 | A good draw but it’s not going to be easy: Sindhu - Have to give 100%: Sai Praneeth

From The Hindu: National News

• Doctors in Punjab to go on three-day strike from Monday - We will run parallel OPDs in the lawns of the hospitals to serve patients, they say

• Deficit rainfall leaves farmers worried in Malnad - Against a normal of 539 mm, the region, consisting of four districts, received only 327 mm between June 1 and July 9

• ‘HDK and Sumalatha should avoid tussle for sake of district’s development’ - Refusing to comment on the ongoing war of words between JD(S) leader and former Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy and Sumalatha Ambareesh, MP, over ille

• Former Himachal Pradesh CM Virbhadra Singh cremated with full state honours - Thousands of his well-wishers gathered at the crematorium to bid adieu to the leader.

• Centre earned ₹4.91 crore revenue as fuel prices hiked 69 times this year: Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury - The Congress leader also urged the Trinamool government in West Bengal to follow the footsteps of the Chhattisgarh administration and do away with VAT to reduce fuel prices

From BBC: Europe

• Biden vows US action over Russian cyber-attacks - Asked if Moscow would face consequences for the series of hacks, Mr Biden replied: “Yes.”

• Skydivers killed in Swedish plane crash - Eight skydivers and a pilot die in a plane crash close to the runway at Orebro airport.

• EU votes for action over Hungary’s anti-LGBT law - The new legislation bans the depiction or promotion of homosexuality and gender change among under-18s.

• Spanish ministers clash over campaign to eat less meat - A minister faces pushback from fellow coalition members after urging carnivores to cut down.

• German carmakers fined over emissions ‘cartel’ - VW and BMW fined €875m by the European Commission for colluding to restrict emissions cleaning tech.

From Ars Technica

• Quest for “green” cement draws big name investors to $300B industry - Start-ups and venture capitalists are joining concrete makers against a hard problem. - link

• Feds indict “The Bull” for allegedly selling insider stock info on the dark web - Data allegedly sold individually or through weekly or monthly subscriptions. - link

• Cheat-maker brags of computer-vision auto-aim that works on “any game” - Capture cards, input hardware, and machine learning get around system-level lockdowns. - link

• Rupert Murdoch’s answer to Google News is dead after only 18 months - The shuttered news aggregator offered stories mainly from right-leaning sources. - link

• NYC ePrix: It’s time for Formula E’s annual visit to America - We check in with one of our favorite series ahead of this weekend’s races. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• It’s a shame nothing is built in the USA anymore… -

  I just bought a TV & it said “Built in Antenna”. I don’t even know where that is.

  submitted by /u/Dullahen
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• A woman places an ad in the local newspaper. “Looking for a man with three qualifications: won’t beat me up, won’t run away from me, and would be IMMENSELY good in bed”. -

  Two days later her doorbell rings. “Hi, I’m Tim. I have no arms so I won’t beat you, and no legs so I won’t run away.” “What makes you think you are great in bed?” the woman retorts.

  Tim replies, “I rang the doorbell, didn’t I?”

  submitted by /u/littleboy_xxxx
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• What is the difference between BTS and Logan Paul? -

  BTS is a boy band from Asia; Logan Paul is a boy banned from Asia.

  submitted by /u/CamilaCazzy
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• Vaginas are like the weather -

  When it’s wet, it’s time to go inside

  submitted by /u/somethingcoming_197
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• An 88-Year Old Woman was interviewed by the local News after getting married for the fourth time… -

  The interviewer asked her questions about her life, about what it felt like to be marrying again at 80, and then about her new husband’s occupation.

  “He’s a funeral director,” she answered.

  “Interesting,” the newsman thought. He then asked her if she wouldn’t mind telling him a little about her first three husbands and what they did for a living.

  She told him she’d first married a banker when she was in her early 20s, then a circus ringmaster in her 40s, later on a preacher in her 60s, and now in her 80s, a funeral director.

  The interviewer looked at her, quite astonished, and asked why she had married four men with such diverse careers.

  She smiled and explained, “I married one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, and four to go.”

  submitted by /u/themanimal
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