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How Biden Came to Own Trump’s Policy at the Border - Haitian asylum seekers were deported under Title 42, a despised Trump-era practice that the current Administration can’t seem to let go of. - link
The Facebook Whistle-Blower’s Testimony and the Tech Giant’s Very Bad Week - The company has weathered bad P.R. in the past. Will a Senate subcommittee hearing prove a bigger challenge? - link
The Short Story at the Center of the “Bad Art Friend” Saga - A Times Magazine feature has prompted feverish discourse about the ethics of artistic appropriation. Is the art in question any good? - link
What Responsibility Do Courts Bear for the Crisis at Rikers Island? - In the wake of a dozen deaths in New York City jails this year, prosecutors and judges are being asked to reckon with the consequences of setting bail. - link
From Vox
A better way to legalize marijuana -
Marijuana activists hold a 51-foot inflatable joint at the US Capitol on October 8, 2019, during a rally calling on Congress to pass cannabis reform legislation. | Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images
States are generally following the same model for marijuana legalization. They don’t have to.
As marijuana legalization has grown into a political triumph, a standard model has emerged for how it should be done: “Regulate marijuana like alcohol” is the slogan that has dominated legalization campaigns since Colorado became one of the first two states to legalize pot.
This is commercialized legalization. For-profit companies grow, cultivate, and sell marijuana. Some companies are expanding across state and national lines and doing more advertising. Soon enough, the market for marijuana will look a lot like the market for alcohol, with large companies spreading brands to make big profits while smaller, boutique operations take off here and there.
Some experts and advocates don’t love this model. There are genuine concerns that the current commercial model of legalization will lead to “Big Marijuana”: a large industry that, similar to the tobacco, alcohol, and opioid industries, has a powerful financial incentive to market and sell its product to as many people as possible, no matter the consequences for consumers or the public more broadly.
But marijuana legalization — and alcohol regulation, for that matter — doesn’t have to look like this. As other states move to legalize cannabis, it’s possible to follow an alternative model that might be able to achieve the same goal with fewer downsides.
Alcohol regulations aren’t working well for alcohol
An obvious question is: If the standard commercial model works for alcohol, why can’t it work for a newly legal drug like cannabis, too?
A different model could help. Previous research, for example, found that states that maintained a government-operated monopoly for alcohol kept prices higher, reduced access to youth, and cut overall levels of use — all benefits to public health.
Marijuana is nowhere as dangerous as alcohol. You can quite literally drink yourself to death; the same doesn’t apply to marijuana. So it’s almost certain that legalizing marijuana the same way won’t lead to all the same bad outcomes.
Still, there are some risks. A thorough review of the research, by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, found that marijuana poses a variety of possible downsides, which can include a higher risk of respiratory problems (if smoked), an increased risk of developing schizophrenia and other psychoses, an increased likelihood of car crashes, a general decrease in social achievement, and, potentially, some harm to fetuses in the womb.
There’s also the real risk of addiction and overuse. As Stanford’s Keith Humphreys put it to the Atlantic, “In large national surveys, about one in 10 people who smoke [marijuana] say they have a lot of problems. They say things like, ‘I have trouble quitting. I think a lot about quitting and I can’t do it. I smoked more than I intended to. I neglect responsibilities.’ … People will say, ‘Oh, that’s just you fuddy-duddy doctors.’ Actually, no. It’s millions of people who use the drug who say that it causes problems.”
None of that is to make the argument for prohibition, which produces its own problems: millions of arrests, deep racial disparities, and the lifelong harm of a permanent criminal record.
But if the model for alcohol hasn’t worked well with alcohol, why immediately replicate it with marijuana? Maybe the government or nonprofits can handle supply chains instead of for-profit corporations. Maybe people can grow, gift, and sell pot to each other, but mass commercial production is illegal. Maybe taxes can be way higher for marijuana than they have been for alcohol to deter excessive use. (And if some of these ideas succeed, they could be applied to the alcohol market, too.)
Marijuana has relatively few risks, so getting this wrong might not be the end of the world. But if it can make legalization go more smoothly, why not explore other options?
What alternative marijuana legalization models could look like
In 2015, a group of drug policy experts put together a guide to marijuana legalization, and the final report (published by the RAND Corporation) detailed a dozen alternatives to current marijuana prohibition.
The 12 alternatives range from tougher prohibition measures (labeled “extreme”) to total legalization without any real regulation (also “extreme”). Among the ideas:
Communal own-grow and distribution: Under this model, there would be no formal marijuana shops and businesses. Instead, people would be allowed to grow, distribute, and use their own marijuana on a less formal basis. This would inherently limit the ability of big businesses to take off. (This is similar to how marijuana legalization currently works in Washington, DC, although with some notable loopholes.)
Government operates the supply chain: Much as some state and local governments do with alcohol, this model would put the government in charge of distributing marijuana — Uncle Sam would be a weed dealer. This might sound ridiculous, but the idea is that with less incentive to simply sell as much marijuana as possible, the government would have to weigh public health, safety, and other potential problems along with incentives for profit.
Nonprofit organizations: Instead of allowing for-profit companies to oversee the industry, this legalization model would let only nonprofits into the industry. This would, the thinking goes, limit the profit incentives to market and sell as much marijuana as possible regardless of the negative consequences.
There are seven other options in between the two extremes of legalization with no regulation and total prohibition, including standard commercial legalization, reduced criminal penalties, and a Dutch-style system for retail (where local outlets, typically coffee-shop-like establishments, can sell small amounts of marijuana but no one else can).
Within these models, there are also plenty of questions that different places should consider: Does a legalization framework address at least some of the damage done by the war on drugs? Does it provide economic opportunities to those who need it most? What is the primary goal or benefit of legalization, and how do you maximize that while minimizing the unintended consequences or downsides?
More than propping up any one idea, the argument of the RAND report is that there really are a bunch of alternatives.
And as the country pushes forward toward legalization — with major political figures like former Attorney General Eric Holder arguing the US is on a “glide path” to reform — it’s worth taking these alternatives seriously.
Lebanon’s electricity was down for a day, but the crisis was years in the making -
A tangle of raised power lines runs along a street in a suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, on June 23, 2021. | Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images
A power outage is just the latest political nightmare for Lebanon.
Though limited power was restored Sunday after about 24 hours of outages, the collapse of the state-run electrical grid on Saturday is just the most extreme manifestation of a chronic fuel shortage that has plagued Lebanon for the last year and a half.
Lebanese citizens have struggled with the state’s electric company, Electricité du Liban, for years, and its shortcomings mean that private generators are common, at least for those who can afford them. Even in an ordinary week, it’s common for people to have as little as one or two hours of daily electricity from the state grid.
Lebanon’s electricity grid shut down entirely after the country’s two main power stations ran out of fuel.
The city is pitch black except for the lights of a handful of buildings and car headlights.
But the crisis came to a head Saturday when the nation’s two largest power stations ran out of enough diesel fuel to provide even a few hours of electricity in a country already confronted with multiple crises.
The Deir Ammar and Zahrani power stations shut down in quick succession over the weekend after fuel ran out, leaving Lebanon’s population of more than 6.8 million people without public power. The blackout comes just over a week after the government allowed a contract with a Turkish company supplying power via two barges off the coast of Beirut to lapse, cutting off that energy supply.
Though common, private generators proved insufficient during the outage — as Beirut-based journalist Bel Trew pointed out on Twitter Saturday, not only are such generators incredibly expensive to run and equally subject to Lebanon’s fuel shortages, but they do little to keep essential services like hospitals running.
Lebanon now has zero state power meaning the entire country is running on private generators. They are prohibitively expensive: my last month’s bill was 3.75 million lira which is $2500 on official rate& about $250 on black market. How is the airport running?What about hospitals? https://t.co/eFzcVhxH1I
According to Washington Post reporters Nader Durgham and Liz Sly, even before the weekend’s outage, chronic fuel shortages meant that hospitals have been “forced to suspend operations or halt vital procedures,” among a slew of other issues.
“It is drastic, and it has been drastic for a while,” Lebanese Energy Minister Walid Fayyad told the Post. “With a few hours a day people can go about their basic needs for a couple of hours, and of course it is better than nothing, but the situation is dire and we need more than a few hours a day.”
But Lebanese citizens put the situation in starker terms.
“We have forgotten what electricity means,” Abdul-Hadi al-Sibai, a Beirut taxi driver, told the New York Times.
A 6 million-liter fuel donation from the Lebanese armed forces brought power back on Sunday, ahead of the schedule originally predicted by Lebanon’s central government. However, it’s not a permanent solution — according to Reuters, the new supply of fuel will only be enough to keep the lights on for three days. A shipment from Iraq is set to boost the fuel supply later this month, according to Al Jazeera, and the energy ministry announced Sunday that it had received a $100 million fuel credit from the central bank of Lebanon, so that the country can again pay to import fuel.
Lebanon has dealt with energy problems for decades; hours-long outages have long been a part of everyday life. But the country’s current economic crisis, combined with political corruption, has turned what was once a serious, but for many, manageable inconvenience into a far more acute crisis.
“There is no fuel and limited generation, so the variation in frequency is ruining the grid,” Marc Ayoub, an energy researcher at the American University of Beirut, explained to Al Jazeera.
Lebanon’s power outage is just one of multiple crises
The shutdown comes as Lebanon is experiencing shocking hyperinflation; the Lebanese lira, which is pegged to the dollar, has dropped 90 percent in value since fall 2019 and is currently trading about 18,900 lira per dollar on the black market. Prior to Lebanon’s 2019 economic implosion, the exchange rate was 1,500 lira per dollar.
That astronomical inflation makes ordinary goods like medicine hard to come by, much less enough fuel to power an entire country.
Critically, the compounding crises have serious political implications, both internally and outside of Lebanon. Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shia militant group — which is part of Lebanon’s government, although the US has designated it a terror group — brought in gasoline fuel by the truckload from Iran via Syria, according to a New York Times report last month, apparently flouting US sanctions.
Currently, according to the Washington Post, those US sanctions are also a major obstacle to a plan for Lebanon to import gas from Egypt via Syria, which could improve the long-term outlook for Lebanon’s power grid. That could soon change, as US ambassador to Lebanon Dorothy Shea confirmed in August that the Biden administration is seeking “real, sustainable solutions for Lebanon’s fuel and energy needs.”
For the time being, however, the Lebanese government has been conspicuously absent in responding to the interconnected crises facing the country, despite the fact that Lebanon formed a new government last month. That absence has only served to highlight Hezbollah’s ability to deliver basic goods where the central government fails, potentially giving the group a larger foothold in the country.
Lebanon’s new government is also its first functional administration since a major explosion rocked its capital, Beirut, last year, according to the BBC. In the aftermath of that crisis, the existing government resigned, creating a stalemate that took 13 months to resolve.
Lebanon’s political system has enabled chaos for years
In June, the World Bank identified the collapse of Lebanon’s financial system as “in the top 10, possibly top three, most severe crises episodes globally since the mid-nineteenth century,” adding that there’s no sense of how the nation will recover from such a catastrophe.
Despite that severe diagnosis, global actors like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have thus far largely declined to step in due to a lack of faith in Lebanon’s government and its disinclination to deal with any of the several interconnected and deeply rooted crises facing the country.
Specifically, Lebanon’s 2019 financial collapse sprang from decades of bad economic policy: Ultra-wealthy, deeply entrenched public servants have long benefited from a peculiar political system and enriched themselves further by helping themselves to public funds. From 2018 to 2020, the country’s GDP fell from $55 billion to $33 billion — a precipitous drop typically associated with the outbreak of conflict, according to a recent World Bank report.
Calls for the resignation of the whole government, with the rallying cry, “All of them means all of them,” erupted in October 2019, after attempts to raise money by taxing the use of WhatsApp, the messaging service widely used both within Lebanon and to communicate with the rest of the world, including a large Lebanese diaspora.
That resignation did eventually occur — but not until August 2020, after a massive explosion in Beirut, caused by more than 2,700 tons of improperly stored ammonium nitrate, killed hundreds, injured thousands, and left hundreds of thousands homeless. The explosion also destroyed Lebanon’s major grain silo, leaving the country with less than a month of reserves at the time. It also destroyed Beirut’s port area, which handled about 70 percent of the food imports in a country that imports about 85 percent of its food.
Despite the popular outrage that drove Lebanon’s previous government to resign, there are signs that the new administration, led by Najib Mikati, a billionaire and Lebanon’s wealthiest man, will be more of the same. Mikati, who is now prime minister, has held the position twice before — meaning he comes from the exact system that plunged the country into its current upheaval.
That government, as Faysal Itani, adjunct professor of Middle East politics and security at Georgetown University, wrote for Vox last year, is deeply entrenched, making it difficult to change, despite its many and obvious problems. As Itani explains:
Lebanon’s political system is the product of a decades-old power-sharing arrangement among leaders of Lebanon’s 18 religious sects, the most important being the Sunni and Shia Muslims and Maronite Christians. This system, known as confessionalism, parceled out political power according to sectarian quotas, with each sect usually led by one or several members of prominent political families.
Despite the lack of public services and the blatant corruption of those in power, Lebanese politicians have generally proved adept at playing up sectarian disputes and doing just enough to keep their constituents satisfied.
However, the depth of Lebanon’s current crises, exemplified by the outright collapse of the state power grid Saturday, means that the status quo of previous Lebanese governments might not be good enough going forward. Already, Mikati, the new prime minister, has pledged to end the fuel crisis and restart talks with the IMF to shore up the economy, a potential lifeline for Lebanon — if he keeps his promise.
The thorny truth about socially responsible investing -
Environmental, social, and governance investing has become more popular — but misleading claims abound. | Getty Images/iStockphoto
Think you’re investing ethically? You might be surprised.
It’s easier than ever to invest ethically — or, at least, to be told by marketers you are. Whether you’re actually doing it is harder to figure out.
Investors have become eager to put their money toward good in recent years. In 2020, assets under management using sustainable investing strategies in the United States reached $17.1 trillion, according to a report from the Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investing. That’s one of every three dollars under professional management in the country. Investments that consider environmental, social, and governance factors— or ESG — are gaining more public attention, too. There are over 800 registered investment companies with ESG assets.
It’s good that the general public, including investors, is trying to pay attention to where money flows. What isn’t so good: Plenty of people think they’re investing in ways that match their values when in reality, they aren’t. It’s really easy to slap the ESG label onto an investment product, likely increase fees on it a little bit, and call it a day. Plenty of big investors claim they’re managing their money in an environmentally friendly, socially responsible way — and assume nobody’s peeking behind the curtain.
“What you get is an industry that knows if they put ‘ESG’ or ‘green’ on something, they can make a lot more money out of it,” said Tariq Fancy, the former chief investment officer for sustainable investing at BlackRock, who has since spoken out on the pitfalls of socially minded and ESG investing. “And you have a public that says, ‘If it says ESG on it, I should probably buy this.’”
“I compare it to the ’70s, when everybody was labeling their food as organic and the government was like, ‘Hey, there’s a definition to that word,’” said Nell Minow, vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors, a consulting firm that focuses on corporate governance. Currently, there’s no solid definition for ESG.
This isn’t to say that investing ethically is impossible — though there are some experts, including Fancy, who would argue that it is largely the case. Either way, it’s a much thornier issue to navigate than meets the eye. Plenty of people would be surprised to learn the fossil fuel-free fund they’ve got their 401(k) in isn’t so fossil fuel- free, or that the company providing them the fund — such as BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard — may happily vote for bloated CEO pay packages and against disclosures on items such as diversity and climate.
It’s also up for debate whether avoiding certain investments and divesting actually works. When investors sell off shares of a company whose practices or business models they object to, they are giving up their seat at the table and to other investors who don’t care. Divestment campaigns, like the one Harvard announced to no longer hold direct investments in fossil fuels, are good at drawing attention to causes and creating negative PR. But in the short term, they don’t accomplish much in terms of harming companies, and in the long term, there’s debate about their financial effectiveness as well.
“The problem with the financial markets is they’re so big that you can’t possibly affect them by deciding not to own something that’s objectionable,” Fancy said. “In five milliseconds, someone who doesn’t give a shit will go buy it.”
There are steps one can take to make sure their money is aligned with their values (more on that below), but ultimately, there’s only so much individual investors can do. Regulators need to define ESG so that the people creating such funds have something to comply with, and investment professionals need to be encouraged to contemplate broader issues when advising their clients (if that’s what their clients want).
At a higher level, there’s always a question of how much good can be accomplished through investing — a corporation or industry won’t change its practices just because some people on Wall Street say so.
There’s a lot of “woke-washing” going on in socially minded investing
Most people constantly have a thousand things they’re trying to pay attention to, and what’s in their 401(k), IRA, or Betterment account isn’t generally at the top of the list.
But plenty of regular investors want to make sure they’re not harming the planet with their investments, and they think that in the long term, responsible investments will be more lucrative. They’re inclined to trust that the label on the product they’re putting their money into is accurate, and if it says ESG on it, they want to believe it.
The companies making these products are well aware of that inclination. They also know that they may be able to charge higher fees on ESG products because investors are willing to swallow them if they think it’s for the greater good, even if what’s in the product isn’t much different from what’s in any run-of-the-mill (and lower-cost) fund.
“There’s a lot of green-washing, of woke-washing, a lot of washing within this category of ESG,” said Marilyn Waite, a program officer in environment at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a nonprofit charity, and the author of Sustainability at Work.
It doesn’t mean it’s impossible to do better; it just means it’s harder than it seems.
“Most people are invested and have no idea what they’re invested in, because most people invest in mutual funds — which are these baskets of stocks — and they only tell you on the prospectus what are the top 10 holdings,” said Andy Behar, CEO of As You Sow, a nonprofit that promotes environmental and social corporate responsibility. “You may hold companies that are profiting from burning down the rainforests, profiting from private prisons, profiting from climate destruction, and you have no idea. It’s very, very difficult to figure it out.”
As You Sow has created multiple tools for people to learn what’s in their investments and try to decipher whether it aligns with their goals and values. People can type in a ticker or name of an ETF or mutual fund to see how it rates in terms of fossil fuels, gender equality, or guns, among other items.
A quick spin around As You Sow’s ratings shows this ESG marketing play in action. Behar pointed to a “Fossil Fuel Reserves Free” ETF; according to his group’s analysis, it has holdings in 23 fossil fuel companies, including ones in coal and oil and gas. It’s under 2 percent of the overall fund, but it’s not nothing. “Why do you name a fund ‘fossil fuel reserves free’?” Behar said. “It’s marketing.”
Investing better means paying a little bit of attention
There’s an old maxim in investing attributed to Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain that says you should put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch the basket. If you want to invest ethically, you have to watch the basket or leave it with someone who will.
Minow, from ValueEdge Advisors, said that the easiest way to try to move your money toward doing good (or at least not something terrible) is to take a look at your 401(k). If there’s an index fund with an ESG component in there and the potential social benefits outweigh the potential costs, consider choosing it. A next step, if you’re up for it, is to look at how funds vote their proxies, meaning ballots shareholders get to vote annually on various corporate issues.
In the case of many funds, the firms behind them vote on behalf of their individual investors, and because they have so many shares, they have quite a bit of sway. Are they voting for or against outrageous CEO pay packages? Climate proposals? Diversity requirements? Big investment managers like BlackRock say they’re paying attention, but are they?
“Either they put their money where their mouth is or they don’t,” Minow said. “If a company says we’re making a commitment to be carbon-neutral by 2050 but they don’t make that part of the CEO’s pay plan, don’t listen to them, because they’re not serious about it.”
There are ways to dive in a little more, if you’re willing to put in the energy. For people who have an investment adviser, you can talk to them about your priorities, where your money is being invested, and why. To be sure, that requires thinking about what matters to you.
“What’s the issue you care about or want to have an impact on? How are you measuring that issue and your impact? And who are you working with to do that?” said Rachel Robasciotti, founder and CEO of Adasina Social Capital. Adasina works directly with social justice groups to craft its investment strategies and offers a suite of products for investors. “What social movements say to us very often is: ‘What future are you investing in?’” Robasciotti said.
If you’re up for it and you remember, you can also vote your proxy on shares of the companies you’re invested in during their annual meetings. (You should get a ballot and information from the company ahead of time, and you can find a company’s proxy statement on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website.) It’s a little tricky, impact-wise, because big institutions have much more voting power than individuals do, but it’s something. And some votes are non-binding, meaning management doesn’t have to do what shareholders say.
Proponents of divestment point out that even if it doesn’t necessarily hurt companies or affect their stock price in the short term, it can make a difference in the long term in creating negative attention. “Social movements make visible that an asset is not a good investment when they mobilize investors to leave that asset. Over time, it can become a toxic asset,” Robasciotti said. This is true even if it doesn’t necessarily hurt companies or affect their stock price in the short term.
In the short term, though, selling shares doesn’t hurt the company or really ding its stock price — someone else just comes along and picks up those shares. The shares being divested are already trading among secondary shareholders, so instead of Harvard holding shares of Exxon or Chevron, it’s just some hedge fund or other investor — often an investor that doesn’t care.
“The people who have the least social interest are the ones who end up holding the stock,” said Alex Thaler, the co-founder and CEO of Ikonik, a soon-to-be-launched trading platform that lets individual investors band together for shareholder campaigns. Proponents of divestment often point to campaigns around South Africa in an effort to bring apartheid to an end decades ago, but evidence on just how much of a role divestment played there compared to other factors is mixed.
“The only thing that it does is allow people to cover their asses, because they can basically say, ‘I’ve washed my hands of it.’ Oil companies still exist,” Fancy said.
A small, climate-conscious activist investment firm secured three seats on Exxon’s board of directors in a shareholder push earlier this year, which activists say could have big implications for its climate-related activities. They wouldn’t have been able to do that had they given up their seat at the table (and, probably, if Exxon hadn’t been losing money in recent years).
You can’t save the planet with your Robinhood account
As good as it feels to believe we’re doing something about the issues we care about, it’s also true that as individuals, we can only do so much. Thinking about a problem as enormous as climate change can make you want to act, including through your 401(k). Indeed, some fossil fuel companies would much rather you think about it through the lens of what you’re doing rather than what they are. But saving the planet — including trying to help with your stocks and retirement fund — requires more than your own action and attention. The government also needs to step in.
One place to start, experts say: The SEC is working to define what ESG is, and it needs to do more. There are many inconsistencies among ESG products, and the firms offering those products are allowed to get away with a lot. The SEC and federal prosecutors are reportedly looking into Deutsche Bank’s sustainability claims, but the German bank is hardly the only one stretching the limits.
The Department of Labor is also taking a look at its guidance for ESG criteria in retirement investment plans. This can be a little wonky, but managers of retirement plans have a fiduciary duty that’s essentially to protect the investment and make money with it. And it’s not clear where issues such as sustainability and social responsibility fit into that.
Experts, such as Lenore Palladino, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, say that asset managers should be able to look at a bigger picture as part of their fiduciary duty. “There is this whole world of ESG funds and sustainable investing, but they all stay within the framework of essentially the only thing you can do with your money is put it into a fund, and the only thing the person managing that money should care about is increasing the value of money,” Palladino said. “They can’t also care about the status of the planet if that will contradict their ability to make money.”
People with a pension fund to live off during retirement also, presumably, want a planet to live on. Regulators need to open the door more for managers to take that into account. Palladino also said it should come with a bigger shift in how we think about investing.
“If you think the whole purpose of buying and selling shares in corporations is to raise the value of those corporations, but then you realize we as shareholders also live on the planet and deal with the negative externalities created, if you don’t allow for or even push money managers to take into account the fact that we are whole humans and we live in a society, then it’s not ethical investing in my view,” she said.
To be sure, there are significant limits in how much change can be accomplished through investing or shareholder advocacy. The federal government needs to act directly on climate change, and corporations do too.
Fancy, the former BlackRock chief investment officer who now runs an education nonprofit called Rumie, takes a pretty nihilistic view of the entire ecosystem of socially minded and ESG investing. His argument is that ESG products are useless — a fund just shuffles some shares around between ETFs and mutual funds, slaps a label (and likely a higher fee) on top, and keeps churning. He worries it’s a “placebo” that makes people think they’re accomplishing something when they’re really not.
“If you really care about social changes, invest your portfolio as you’ve always done, which is to get the best returns and preserve your savings, and then turn to the government and push political action around solving climate change, because that’s the only level where it can actually be solved,” Fancy said.
Many of the other experts I spoke to for this story disputed that view and held that ESG investing can work — but it requires some effort on the part of investors, and it can’t be the only thing they do.
“We’re kind of ignorantly complicit in the world that we see around us because we’re supporting the companies that are in an extractive and destructive business,” Behar said. “The core of it is to know what you want and then align it with your values.”
From The Hindu: Sports
Kokomo, Exemplify, Bloomsbury and Flaming Lamborgini caych the eye - Kokomo, Exemplify, Bloomsbury and Flaming Lamborgini caught the eye when the horses were exercised here on Monday (Oct.
morning.Sand track:600m: A
Dinesh Karthik on his sports NFT: ‘I wanted fans to relive the moment around my last-ball six’ - Cricketer Dinesh Karthik has captured the emotion behind his last-ball six against Bangladesh through digital art NFT
FIFA unveils ‘Ibha’ - official mascot of U-17 2022 Women’s World Cup - Ibha aims to inspire women and girls across India and around the world to realise their potential.
IPL 2021 | RCB release Sri Lankans Hasaranga, Chameera from bio-bubble - They will join the national team for the T20 World Cup qualifiers
India blank Netherlands 5-0 in Thomas Cup - World championship bronze-medallist B. Sai Praneeth then demolished Robin Mesman 21-4 21-12 in just 27 minutes in the second singles match to give India an unassailable 3-0 lead
From The Hindu: National News
Sanction not required for prosecuting policemen: HC - Upholds Kollam court’s sentencing of five police officers for assault
Amit Shah holds meet with Power, Coal Ministers amid reports of coal shortage - The meeting came in the wake of several States warning of a possible power crisis due to the shortage of coal supply to power plants
Surveillance by state is assault on democratic rights, says Siddharth Varadarajan - ‘Right to privacy is the central part of right to life’
Bus fares in the express lane - Prices of Dasara specials hiked to make up for empty return routes, stresses APSRTC
Holiday bug yet to bite the Railways - APSRTC and private operators go into overdrive, but special trains haven’t been announced yet
From BBC: Europe
Mass protests in Poland amid EU exit fears - The nationwide protests come after Poland’s top court challenged the supremacy of EU rules.
Expelled: Russia, repression and me - The BBC’s Sarah Rainsford reflects on being barred from Russia and the assault on the country’s freedoms.
Austria gets new leader after Kurz quits amid corruption claims - Alexander Schallenberg takes over, after his predecessor resigned amid corruption allegations.
Czech election: Milos Zeman in intensive care after vote - Milos Zeman is in intensive care the day after a surprise opposition win in parliamentary elections.
Ireland says UK repeatedly dismissing EU solutions - The Irish foreign minister says this is “more serious” as EU prepares new package on NI Protocol.
From Ars Technica
The electric Ford Mustang Mach-E GT finally lives up to its famous name - With better tires and shocks, the $64,900 Performance Edition is the one to get. - link
9 past mistakes offer lessons for today’s hot new automakers - More than 2,000 American automakers have come and gone in this chaotic industry. - link
These virtual obstacle courses help real robots learn to walk - Specialized chips, simulations teach a four-legged robot to navigate stairs and blocks. - link
Capt. Michael Burnham and crew face a dire threat in ST: Discovery S4 trailer - “Once we enter the anomaly, we are going where no one has gone before.” - link
How to transfer save data from one Nintendo Switch to another - Bring all your games with you when you move into that shiny new Switch OLED. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
Batman: “It’s been a long day. Alfred, please fill up the bathtub.” -
He sits the octopus down on a stool and tells everyone in the bar that this is a very talented octopus. He can play any musical instrument in the world. He hears everyone in the crowd laughing at him, so he says that he will wager $50 to anyone who has an instrument that the octopus can’t play.
A man walks up and gives the octopus a guitar. The octopus starts playing better than Yngwie Malmsteen, just rippin’ it up. So the man pays his $50.
Another guy walks up with a trumpet. The octopus plays the trumpet better than Chuck Mangione. So the man pays his $50.
Then a Scotsman walks up with bagpipes. He sits them down and the octopus fumbles with it for a minute and sits it down with a confused look.
“Ha!” the Scot says. “Ye canna play it?”
The octopus looks up at him and says, “Play it? I’m going to fuck it as soon as I figure out how to get its pyjamas off.”
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