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

• Prince Andrew’s Very Bad Week - A ruling in a New York legal case, in which Andrew is accused of sexual abuse, led to the Duke of York being stripped of his military titles. - link

• The Supreme Court’s Vexing Mixed Message on Vaccine Mandates - Two rulings reveal just how hard-conservative the core of the Court is. - link

• The Latinx Community and COVID-Disinformation Campaigns - Researchers debate how best to counter false narratives—and racial stereotypes. - link

• Sunday Reading: Honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. - From the magazine’s archive: a selection of pieces about the significance of Dr. King’s extraordinary work and devotion to principle. - link

• The Rival Shows of “Yellowjackets” - On watching girls—and genres—devour one another. - link

From Vox

• We’ll never have a normal flu season again -

  

  This terrible Covid and flu season is a preview of the post-pandemic normal.

  Even as omicron is surging, the seasonal flu is back: More than 2,500 Americans were admitted to the hospital with influenza in the last week of December. The flu hospitalization rate is still about half of the pre-Covid normal, but it is eight times higher than it was last year when one side effect of pandemic restrictions was that flu cases fell off dramatically.

  This is the first glimpse of a harsh new reality that will outlast this wave of the pandemic: Flu season has transformed into Covid-and-flu season — a “flu-rona” wave every winter.

  Before the pandemic, the flu alone could sometimes push hospital systems into crisis mode, where they cancel elective procedures and limit other kinds of care. Now there’s Covid-19, which has done the same thing on its own.

  Suddenly conjuring more hospital capacity every winter to handle the expected surges of flu and Covid-19 is not going to happen. Thousands of additional hospital beds are not coming in the next few years, and the US would not have the doctors and nurses to staff them anyway. It will take much longer — years or maybe decades — to improve the gaps in America’s health care infrastructure and workforce that have been exposed during Covid-19.

  This means the imperative to “flatten the curve,” to limit the spread of these viruses to stop hospitals from being overwhelmed, will be with us for a long time. But the makeup of the curve will change, measuring multiple diseases instead of one.

  Public health experts believe now and going forward the US needs a new public health strategy that treats Covid-19 and influenza as one unified threat. We can’t think that we will endure the omicron wave and then all of these problems will be behind us. This is the new reality. Responding to it adequately, along the lines some experts are calling for, would require a massive effort — nothing less than a complete rethinking of how we respond to the annual winter surge in respiratory illness.

  “We are on the lip. We are in a transitional phase, moving from pandemic to endemic,” William Schaffner, the medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases and a Vanderbilt University professor, told me. “With two of these respiratory viruses going on at pretty much the same time, I think that will create a greater stress on the health care system.”

  Get ready to live through Covid-and-flu seasons for the foreseeable future

  The flu is reliably seasonal. The dominant strains for a given year usually start circulating in October and November before reaching their peak between December and February. Then the virus peters out over the next few months, then a new mutation arrives the next fall.

  Every year, influenza strains the US health care system. In the flu season before Covid-19 arrived, 2018-2019, an estimated 29 million Americans were infected, there were more than 380,000 flu-related hospitalizations, and 28,000 people died from the virus. Covid-19 is not as bound by the calendar. US hospitals may endure not only a winter wave, in tandem with the flu, but also periodic spikes throughout the year as well. Both 2020 and 2021 saw small surges in the summer, followed by a massive wave once winter and the cold weather hit.

  “It is sort of the worst of both worlds,” said Emily Martin, a University of Michigan epidemiologist. “You’re always gonna expect a really bad winter season, but then you might have other bad times as well.”

  The reasons for seasonality are complex. But generally speaking, viruses survive better in colder environments and people’s behavior also tends to change when the weather gets cold — spending more time inside, traveling for the holidays — in ways that makes it easier for pathogens to spread.

  Last winter was an aberration: widespread social distancing dramatically reduced the spread of flu. But this winter, the CDC estimates that there have been about four times as many outpatient visits for respiratory illnesses, including flu, as last year, closer to the level seen in the two years before the pandemic.

  Meanwhile, Covid-19 is surging again too, with case numbers and hospitalizations surpassing the records set the previous winter. Hospitals also report a significant jump in flu cases compared to last year, with some such as Houston Methodist seeing comparable case numbers to their pre-Covid normal. This rebound in flu is happening at the same time that some hospitals are seeing as many Covid-19 patients as they have at any point in the pandemic so far.

  Brandon Bell/Getty Images

  The crunch already being felt by US hospitals has spurred some public health experts to propose comprehensive policy plans that would help the health system tackle the flu and Covid-19 in the future.

  “The ‘new normal’ requires recognizing that SARS-CoV-2 is but one of several circulating respiratory viruses that include influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and more,” a group of advisers to President Joe Biden’s transition team wrote in a recent medical journal article. “Covid-19 must now be considered among the risks posed by all respiratory viral illnesses combined.”

  They argued that public health officials should begin by discarding distinct case and death counts for flu, Covid-19, RSV, and other respiratory illnesses. Instead, they say we should focus on the aggregate risk of all these diseases combined. Based on the available evidence, we should expect that risk to peak every winter.

  These experts said the goal should be to keep the collective effect of all these infections at or below those of a severe flu season. In the 2017-2018 flu season, for example, the US had 41 million cases, 710,000 hospitalizations, and 52,000 deaths. And that was without Covid-19, another highly contagious and dangerous virus that will make future winters even more difficult for the health care system to manage.

  “We know during a pretty bad flu season, that can put a strain on things,” Richard Webby, influenza expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, told me. “Now we’re talking about two flu seasons.”

  This is all still somewhat hypothetical. It’s possible, Webby pointed out, that the flu and Covid-19 won’t surge simultaneously, but will trade off, spiking and fading in cycles, over months. Alternating waves might decrease the risk of an enormous flood of patients overwhelming hospitals at any particular moment, but they would still create a sustained crisis every winter that strains hospitals for months without a break.

  The steps to avoid worst-case scenarios of overwhelmed hospitals and rationed care might sound familiar.

  Anand Parekh, chief medical adviser at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said any strategy for navigating the Covid-and-flu seasons to come should have at least four components: vaccination, testing, treatment, and masking.

  But executing that plan is easier said than done. The US has struggled with some of these interventions throughout the pandemic. Deploying them annually would require a fundamental shift in how US hospitals and all of society approach the winter season. We can no longer muddle through every year and hope for the best.

  1. Vaccination

  Vaccination is the best way to stop a bad Covid-and-flu season before it starts.

  Every year, the FDA fast-tracks approval of that season’s flu vaccine, which must be updated annually to protect against whatever flu strain is expected to become dominant. A similar routine could happen with Covid-19. The former Biden advisers, in their plan, wrote that people should anticipate a need for periodic, possibly seasonal Covid-19 vaccines as well and urged the federal government to start preparing an expedited approval process. Moderna has also announced it’s working on a shot that would combine its flu and Covid-19 vaccines. So, in theory, you would have to get only one shot each year to be protected from both Covid-19 and the flu.

  The problem is that, historically, the United States has not done a good job of vaccinating people against the flu. Fewer than half of US adults get their flu shots every year. Even among people over 65, the most vulnerable to dying from the flu, the vaccination rate is usually stuck under 70 percent.

  Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

  A Covid-and-flu public health response could build on the momentum of the Covid-19 vaccination campaign. Though the US has struggled somewhat compared to its European peers, it is still outperforming the typical flu vaccine drive, with more than 70 percent of eligible Americans receiving at least two shots, including almost 90 percent of people over 65.

  Mandates and other policies — such as paid sick leave that makes it easier for people to take time off, a policy that surveys have found makes it more likely people will get the Covid-19 vaccine — could help push vaccination rates higher, Biden’s former advisers said.

  2. At-home testing

  Surveillance is critical, starting with early-warning systems. Public health institutions have long monitored the flu and they are already tracking Covid-19 in a similar manner. Monitoring the amount of virus detected in local wastewater has proven to be a reliable leading indicator of new Covid-19 waves during the pandemic. And widespread, reliable testing will be essential — including at-home tests for both Covid-19 and the flu.

  Right now, flu tests are common at the doctor’s office, but there’s never been an option for people to administer a test themselves at home. In their recommendations for adjusting to an endemic Covid-19 world, former Biden advisers urged the government to invest in new technologies that could test for multiple pathogens at once. Public health experts are imagining a future in which people can take one test, find out if they have the flu or Covid-19 or neither, and respond accordingly. They could isolate rather than going into their work and spreading it to other people; several experts told me they hoped it would become more common after the pandemic for people to stay home if they are sick. People at higher risk of severe flu symptoms could also get prescribed antivirals earlier, when those medications are most effective.

  “I think it is highly likely, finally, that home testing will become something that virtually everybody becomes comfortable with,” said Mara Aspinall, an Arizona State University professor who publishes a newsletter on Covid-19 testing. “A lot of at-home testing in this scenario is really important and I think will be a key factor going forward.”

  There’s a long history of tests moving from doctor’s offices into the home. Aspinall pointed to pregnancy tests as one example of a diagnostic test that used to be done almost exclusively by doctors until at-home tests came to market and flourished. The same thing happened for HIV testing and is already underway with Covid-19.

  But there is still work to do to prepare for that shift. It would start with making tests available for free or at a reasonable cost. Experts have criticized the Biden White House’s current plan of asking people with private insurance to submit their bills for reimbursement; his former transition advisers pointed to the example of states sending free kits to their residents as one possible model to follow.

  A lot of at-home testing will be useful for surveillance, but only if people report the results. That has already been a problem with at-home Covid-19 tests. In one memorable case, public health officials in Las Vegas realized only weeks after the fact that a Phish concert on Halloween had been a superspreader event. They had no idea because people took tests at home and never reported the results.

  The point being: Sorting out which tests to use when and what to do with the results has already been a struggle in the heat of the pandemic. Coming up with clear guidelines and educating the public will be necessary if we are to get the most out of at-home tests in the Covid-and- flu seasons to come.

  3. Treatments

  Frequent testing lets people know that they should isolate. If they are at higher risk of severe illness, they can get on antivirals quickly. The current therapies are most effective at stopping serious symptoms that could require hospitalization if they are taken within the first few days of an illness. Research in the last decade has found that flu antivirals are too often underprescribed for patients who would benefit most; improving prescription rates is only more critical now that the health system will be contending with both the flu and Covid-19 going forward.

  That’s because the goal of these plans is really to “flatten the curve” by preventing as much severe illness as possible, which reserves hospitals’ capacity for the most vulnerable patients and also allows them to treat all of the other patients who need hospital-level care.

  Capacity at “the brick and mortar hospitals that are needed for care for the severely ill will continue to be finite,” Schaffner said. “There will not be a major increase there.” That means alleviating the pressure on hospitals is crucial. But it will take more than a lot of at-home testing to achieve it.

Brontë Wittpenn/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

The former Biden advisers said the US needs to come up with a mechanism so that, the moment somebody tests positive for Covid-19, they are offered treatment. They also said that it may make sense for certain at-risk populations to be prescribed antivirals preemptively, as a prophylactic.

Other experts also argued it needs to be as easy as possible for people to get flu and Covid-19 treatments, either over the counter at the pharmacy or after a brief doctor’s visit.

“Over-the-counter testing and over-the-counter treatment can be really powerful going forward,” Martin said.

4. Masks and other non-pharmaceutical interventions

Other successful pieces of the pandemic response should also stick, experts said. We have the playbook and we’ve now run more plays from it than ever before.

Masking has become normalized for many people, and experts expect public health authorities to continue to recommend it for particular populations or even for everybody if respiratory viruses are spreading rapidly. Medical providers have more experience using telemedicine during health emergencies, in order to reduce the risks of exposure while still providing guidance and remote care for their patients. Public health experts say Covid has demonstrated the importance of good ventilation, which could be improved in schools and other public spaces to reduce the chances of transmission.

During severe outbreaks of flu or Covid-19 or both, experts think companies could more readily switch to remote work now that managers and workers are accustomed to it. Social distancing measures — mask mandates, even restrictions for large gatherings — could be put back in place on a selective basis, now that we have experience with them because of Covid-19.

If, that is, politicians are willing to implement them and the public will abide by them. The current crisis has revealed just how delicate even the best-laid plans are because they are subject to backlash, confusion, and politicization. In some states, lawmakers have actually acted to limit the ability of local governments or public health officials to take these steps on their own in the middle of a public health crisis.

“Public health laws are being dismantled in many jurisdictions, dramatically limiting the ability of public health officials to require actions that limit disease transmission,” said Ron Bialek, president of the Public Health Foundation. “Unfortunately, for too many elected officials, making political points has become a higher priority than serving and helping to protect their constituencies.”

We are not going to leave Covid-19 behind. The same policy problems and debates that have defined the pandemic will be with us in the flu/Covid-19 seasons going forward.

“The role of government in this communicable disease arena will continue to be under discussion. We’re divided about this,” Schaffner said. “It’s not going to be eliminated by a reflection on what did and didn’t work with Covid.”

• A physicist’s lessons about race, power, and the universe -

  

  In her book The Disordered Cosmos, Black queer scientist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein argues that physics can be more universal.

  When Chanda Prescod-Weinstein was a 10-year-old growing up in East Los Angeles, she came across the Errol Morris documentary A Brief History of Time, which chronicled the life of the physicist Stephen Hawking. Watching it, Prescod-Weinstein says, she realized Hawking “was being paid to use math all day to solve problems Einstein hadn’t worked out.”

  For a queer Black Jewish kid from a working-class neighborhood who liked doing math, that seemed like a pretty good deal. “That was really where I got my first taste of the idea that math is kind of like the language of the universe,” Prescod-Weinstein told me.

  She’s now an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire, where she studies dark matter and particle physics. She’s also on the core faculty of the university’s Women’s Studies department — a seemingly unusual combination that hints at the multifaceted approach she brings to her work.

  In 2021, Prescod- Weinstein published The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred, a wide-ranging book that is both a scientific explainer and an argument that unjust power structures shape the world of physics. She tells stories of subatomic particles like baryons, which are the building blocks of atoms; she critiques a trend she’s seen, in which writers compare the mystery and invisibility of dark matter to the lived experiences of Black people. In a chapter called “Rape Is Part of This Scientific Story” — a chapter that grew unexpectedly out of her writing on the dark universe, and that she debated including in the book — she writes about how her own experience of sexual assault shaped her understanding of injustices in her field.

  I recently asked Prescod- Weinstein about being one of the few Black women in her field, how concepts from physics apply to our lives, and why dark matter is a complicated metaphor. She spoke to me from her home office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at a desk covered with books, notepads, and at least two figurines of Star Trek’s Lieutenant Commander Uhura. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

  Early in your book, you write that particle physics continues to teach you that “the universe is always more bizarre and more wonderfully queer than we think.” How do you see queerness in the universe?

  Yeah, I think the universe is weird, man! There are so many things about it that are counterintuitive. What we do in science is exist at the boundary of what humanity understands about the universe, and you try and push that boundary forward. And that means living in the place where things are not known, and that means being confused and asking a lot of questions. So science is really a practice of question asking.

  Queerness is just like that. Queerness is living at that boundary of what is known and unknown. There are certain understandings of queerness that in 2021 seem antiquated. And similarly, there were scientific ideas back in 2000 that we know better than now. We know what the mass of the Higgs [boson] is now. We did not know that in

2000. So I think there’s a real way in which queerness and science track with each other.

      You describe yourself in the book as a “griot of the universe, a storyteller.” Could you explain what that means?

      Griot is a West African word that I think comes up in a few different languages across the region. As I understand it, it’s traditionally a community storyteller and oral historian, and I think that’s what I do. I’m a storyteller about the universe. I’m using a very particular language — mathematics — with a set of rules associated with it. But all forms of storytelling have rules that we impose on them.

      You write a lot about invisibility — literally, in the case of dark matter, and metaphorically when it comes to the contributions of women, nonbinary folks, and people of color in the field of physics. At one point, you write about physicists who draw a comparison between dark matter and the lived experiences of Black people. Can you talk a bit about that?

      I literally have this chapter called “Black People Are Luminous Matter.” I have a very clear agenda there that I wanted to hit home. We’re not magical Negros. We feel pain. We feel pain just as much as white people do, despite a widespread belief from medical students and doctors.

      I wanted to look at our physicality, not as a uniform thing but in its breadth. There are a lot of different ways to be Black. But all of them come from baryons, and none of them come from dark matter.

      How are baryons and dark matter different?

      When I say baryons, I mean the stuff that everything we can see is generally made of. When I talk about dark matter, I’m talking about this invisible, transparent thing that seems to dominate galaxy structure. But it’s literally invisible. It doesn’t have a color.

      Is there a better metaphor to be found in physics?

      Yeah, if you really want a cosmic analogy for race and racism, weak gravitational lensing is much more useful.

      Essentially, one of the big lessons of general relativity is that spacetime tells matter how to move, and matter tells spacetime how to curve. So when you have matter in spacetime — say, the sun — the spacetime is being distorted by the presence of that matter. Your spacetime is actually bending. If you get a lot of dark matter together, it can bend light as though it has gone through a funhouse mirror. The light looks like it’s coming from one place when it’s actually coming from another.

      This is called gravitational lensing, and the most fantastical version of it, when you really have a lot of dark matter, is that you can actually see multiple images of a galaxy. There’s only one galaxy, but your telescope sees multiple images because the photons are riding on very funny paths. Sometimes it’s really dramatic and you see multiple images, and sometimes you just see distortion. The question always is, “Is that gravitational lensing, or is that galaxy just weird?” The way that you figure that out is you do statistics. You look at everything and say, “Are all of these distorted in a way that is consistent?”

      I’ve been a Black Jew around white Jews. It’s very easy to be, like, “Are you sure that when that white Jewish professor was asking you if you’re really Jewish, it was because you’re Black?” But get a bunch of Black Jews together and talk to them about their experiences, and you’re like, “Ah, we all seem to experience that same distortion, and how people think it’s okay to talk to us.” That’s systemic. It becomes a lot harder to deny when there’s a systemic picture there.

      Cover design by Pete Garceau

      You write about the difficulties of joining the field as one of the few Black woman physicists in the country, and the shame you still feel about your B-minus college average. This really spoke to me — I didn’t know cosmology professors have imposter syndrome! How do you keep working through that?

      I should say that I don’t actually think I have imposter syndrome. We often tell people that they have imposter syndrome when people are correctly identifying: “Oh, I don’t belong here.” The system is not built for them. And that’s correct. There is some fundamental sense in which you do not belong.

      Should you feel like you belong? Should the space be a place where you do belong? Yes. But are you wrong for assessing that you don’t? No. That means your capacity for analysis is working. I actually think that we need to be telling people that their ability to identify that is actually a sign of competency.

      I like that reframing. Throughout the book, you point to scientists assuming their work is free from the messiness of society and politics and history. You show us that culture and society are deeply embedded in physics, but few people are willing to have that conversation. Is that starting to change?

      I guess there are two different answers to this question. I feel like things are dramatically different than they were 15 years ago, and I also feel like there’s been very little change. I have a chapter on sexual misconduct and specifically the impact it had on my daily life. We’re still at the point where whisper networks are essential, and that relies unreasonably on women and other minoritized-gender people to do the labor of sharing information that could cause us professional problems if people find out that they are the ones sharing the information.

      This brings to mind the name of another chapter, called “Wages for Scientific Housework.”

      Absolutely. The victims or survivors, however they see themselves, who come forward do an enormous service to the community. It’s an incredible piece of emotional housework and labor to push astronomy to be a better place and safer place. And people who have survived serious incidents of sexual misconduct, myself included, live with an enormous amount of guilt about not naming names in public. But it’s really like, do you feel like climbing on a cross or not? Or do you want to have a life and be doing this work? You know, I like math. I still actually really like math. I want to be able to do that in peace, and it seems like this is the more peaceful option than the alternative.

      Your book ends with a letter to your mother and a section from the Torah. How do your family and your faith fit into your work?

      Until I was 10, I thought being Jewish meant you were a labor organizer, because that was the kind of Jewish family I came from. I know it’s super dorky, but it’s also 100 percent what I thought, coming from an organizing family. I think their influences imprinted all over the book. I don’t think I would be a scientist who thinks so deeply about these social questions if I hadn’t been raised to ask all of these questions, and to think expansively about what it means to understand the world. That’s not just a mathematical question. It’s not just a physical question. It is also a social and a political question.

• How to sponsor an Afghan refugee family -

  

Americans have an incredible new opportunity to do good.

The Biden administration has begun allowing private citizens to sponsor Afghan refugees looking to start a new life in the US. Under the Sponsor Circle Program, you and a few of your friends can pool together funds to dramatically improve the prospects for an Afghan family.

It’s a desperately needed program: The botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan last year left many vulnerable Afghans behind. Some are now stuck at home under the control of the Taliban, or in nearby countries to which they fled.

More than 75,000 Afghans have made it into the US through Operation Allies Welcome, and around 52,000 of them have been resettled in communities across the country. But the rest are still waiting on US military bases — safe from the Taliban but unable to get jobs, enroll their kids in school, or begin to heal and move on from the trauma they’ve experienced.

Americans can help them get resettled in a community so they can do all those things sooner.

Forming a Sponsor Circle involves bringing together at least five adults in your area and raising $2,275 for each Afghan individual you want to resettle in your community. Sponsors commit to assisting them through the first three months there, which can include locating housing, helping adults find jobs, and registering kids for school.

To be clear, by forming a Sponsor Circle, you’re not directly enabling Afghans to enter the US who otherwise wouldn’t be able to do so.

Instead, you’re speeding up the process of resettling Afghans who have already entered the US through what is known as humanitarian “parole,” but who are stuck on military bases because the official resettlement infrastructure — decimated under the Trump administration — can’t get everyone settled right away.

Don’t underestimate the good speeding up resettlement can do. “Getting off a base and into a community sooner can have a profound impact on a family,” said Elizabeth Foydel, ​​the private sponsorship program director at the nonprofit International Refugee Assistance Project. “It’s the difference between being stuck in limbo for several months or being able to really begin your life again.”

That said, she added there’s another big development coming down the pike: The Biden administration is planning in the first half of this year to launch a fuller private sponsorship program — one that would allow Americans to sponsor an Afghan family to enter the US who otherwise would not be able to.

How to form a Sponsor Circle, in 6 steps

Afghans who’ve been stuck on military bases for months have noted how psychologically taxing it is to live life in limbo. “I stayed at Fort Pickett [in Virginia] for 91 days and some of my colleagues are still at the fort and probably will not be out until mid-February 2022,” Ahmad Zafar Shakibi told CNN. “This caused mass depression.”

Others have described the difficulty of not having enough warm clothes to go around; of being unable to access timely medical care; of feeling misunderstood by US military staff; and of enduring crushing boredom in their barracks or tents day after day. As Esrar Ahmad Saber said of his fellow refugees at a base in New Jersey, ”They just want to get out as soon as possible.”

Here’s how you can help them achieve that.

1) Form a group of five or more adults. If you’re excited about this program, you can reach out to four friends to start a conversation. (You can email them this page or even this article to get the conversation going.)

2) Have each group member complete a mandatory background check. This is a quick online process checking whether you have a criminal record.

3) Have one group member complete an online course. This gives you some tips on how to ensure your sponsor circle will be skillful and successful.

4) Fill out a welcome plan. You’ll want to devote at least a day to this since it requires you to research the resources available in your community for needs like job and language training.

5) Fundraise. You’ll need bank records or other proof showing that you’ve got $2,275 per Afghan newcomer you hope to welcome.

6) Fill out the application form. Once you’ve done steps 1-5, this will only take 10 minutes.

That’s it! If your group is motivated, you can probably complete this process over a couple of weeks of intermittent work. If your application is approved, you can welcome an Afghan family into your community — which research suggests will likely benefit not just the newcomers, but your community as a whole.

Want to sponsor Afghans for immigration to the US? Prepare now.

If you prefer to wait until the US launches its fuller private sponsorship program — the program that provides an immigration pathway so more Afghans can enter the US — it’s a good idea to start preparing now.

This will likely require more money. Canada’s highly successful private sponsorship program, for example, requires a sponsor to raise nearly $23,000 USD to bring over a family of four refugees. The US equivalent of that program could easily require money on a similar scale.

You might be thinking: Why should it fall to private citizens to fork over so much cash to resettle refugees — that’s the government’s job!

It’s a fair point. That’s why Foydel and others have been advocating for any refugees who come to the US via private sponsorship to be in addition to the number of traditional, government- assisted resettlement cases.

“That is what we are anticipating,” Foydel told me. “We think it’s important to make clear that the US government is maintaining its responsibility to resettle refugees itself.”

Biden’s official target for fiscal year 2022 is to resettle 125,000 refugees (coming from all countries, not just Afghanistan). The government is unlikely to meet that goal because refugee agencies don’t have the capacity to absorb that many newcomers. Their funding is tied to the refugee cap, and since the Trump administration slashed refugee admissions — 2020 saw a historic low of 15,000 allowed to enter — the agencies were forced to lay off staff and shutter offices. They’re now in the undesirable position of having to rebuild even as they try to serve thousands of Afghans with the scant resources they currently have.

Even if the government does manage to resettle 125,000 refugees this fiscal year, though, refugee advocates’ expectation is that private sponsorship would be able to bring in thousands more above and beyond that.

The US spent 20 years in Afghanistan trying and failing to remake the country. Now, Americans arguably have a moral responsibility to assist Afghans suffering the consequences. And considering that refugee programs may have much less support if a Republican wins the White House in 2024, now is the time to fulfill that responsibility.

As my colleague Nicole Narea has written, even if the US was right to withdraw last year, “the ensuing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is the product of America’s ill-conceived and failed attempts at nation-building. The US therefore has a responsibility to ensure that Afghans facing danger or persecution as the Taliban reassert their vision of religious law can reach safety in the US or in other countries, whether or not they worked alongside American troops.”

So, if you’re thinking about forming either a Sponsor Circle or a private sponsorship, it makes sense to view it not as an act of charity, but as an act of justice. Neither will fully right the wrong that’s been done, but as Foydel told me, “They’re both incredibly impactful.”

From The Hindu: Sports

• Australian Open | Medvedev advances, Fernandez out in first round - Aiming to be the first man in the Open era to win his second major title on his next Grand Slam appearance, Medvedev had a 6-1, 6-4, 7-6 (3) win over Henri Laaksonen

• Prost and Alpine F1 team part ways - Prost said on his Instagram page that he was “very disappointed” with how the news had come out

• U-19 WC | Sri Lanka defeats Australia; Pak scores easy win over Zimbabwe - West Indies beat Scotland in a Group D match in Basseterre

• FIH introduces new penalty corner rule - Defenders can keep wearing protective face gear within the 23m area

• PKL-8 | Gill powers Yoddha past Paltan - Second phase begins on Jan. 20

From The Hindu: National News

• Minister inaugurates oxygen plant in Cuddalore - The plant, at Kurinjipadi GH, will cater to 13 ICU beds, help treat COVID patients and address other related ailments

• PM’s Davos address | Rahul Gandhi takes ‘teleprompter’ jibe at Modi, BJP leaders cite ‘technical glitch’ - Fact-checking website Alt News co-founder Pratik Sinha said it is unlikely that the Prime Minister had a teleprompter gaffe

• IEI to hold discussion on Mekedatu project, invite Medha Patkar and Chethan Ahimsa - Social activist Medha Patkar argues that the project will have an adverse impact on the environment and has urged the Karnataka Government to drop the project

• OPS calls for Chennai airport’s re-inclusion for Haj pilgrimage - He wants Chief Minister Stalin to personally get in touch with the Prime Minister regarding the issue

• WFH has put working women under ‘triple burden’: Kovind - “The new stress on family time should be welcome for male employees, so that they can share some of the responsibilities of their partners.”

From BBC: Europe

• Sweden drones: Sightings reported over nuclear plants and palace - Security services take over an inquiry into a series of sightings and it is unclear who is to blame.

• Dean Verberckmoes: Police find body of Belgian four-year old - Dean Verberckmoes disappeared last week, sparking a major search in Belgium and the Netherlands.

• Russia-Ukraine crisis: UK sending weapons to defend Ukraine, says defence secretary - The defence secretary says he is sending short-range anti-tank missiles amid Russian invasion fears.

• Russia-Ukraine crisis: Why Brussels fears Europe is ‘closest to war’ in decades - Fears are rising over Russia’s plans to shake up the region, writes BBC Europe editor Katya Adler.

• Eric Zemmour: Far-right candidate found guilty of hate speech - Eric Zemmour called unaccompanied migrant children coming to France “thieves” and “murderers”.

From Ars Technica

• Oscar Isaac finally enters the MCU with official Moon Knight trailer - “The voices in your head—there’s chaos in you. Embrace the chaos.” - link

• Over 100 different species made this 2,200-year-old shipwreck home, study finds - Ship’s ram from First Punic War serves as “ecological memory” of 2 millennia of underwater life. - link

• Microsoft warns of destructive disk wiper targeting Ukraine - Ukrainian authorities blame Russia for attacks as geopolitical tensions escalate. - link

• Pfizer and Moderna expect seasonal booster shots after omicron wave - Seasonal COVID boosters may be combined with flu shots in the future, Moderna says. - link

• Fan does Blizzard’s job, releases remastered WarCraft III campaign files - Cinematic angles, remixed maps hark back to 2018 BlizzCon promises. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• Joe had suffered from really bad headaches for the last 20 years. He eventually decides to go and see a Doctor. -

  The Doctor said, ’Joe, the good news is I can cure your headaches. The bad news is that it will require castration. You have a very rare condition which causes your testicles to press on your spine and the pressure creates one hell of a headache.

  The only way to relieve the pressure is to remove the testicles.’

  Joe was shocked and depressed. He wondered if he had anything to live for.

  He had no choice but to go under the knife. The surgery cost him $15,000.

  When he left the hospital, he was without a headache for the first time in 20 years, but he felt like he was missing an important part of himself.

  As he walked down the street, he realized that he felt like a different person. He could make a new beginning and live a new life.

  He saw a Men’s clothing store and thought, ‘That’s what I need… A new suit.’

  He entered the shop and told the salesman, ‘I’d like a new suit.’

  The elderly tailor eyed him briefly and said, ’Let’s see… size 44 long.

  Joe laughed, ‘That’s right, how did you know?’

  ‘Been in the business 60 years!’ the tailor said.

  Joe tried on the suit it fitted perfectly.

  As Joe admired himself in the mirror, the salesman asked, ‘How about a new shirt?’

  Joe thought for a moment and then said, ‘Sure.’

  The salesman eyed Joe and said, ‘Let’s see, 34 sleeves and 16-1/2 neck.’

  Joe was surprised, ‘That’s right, how did you know?’

  ‘Been in the business 60 years.’

  Joe tried the shirt and it fitted perfectly.

  Joe walked comfortably around the shop and the salesman asked, ‘How about some new underwear?’

  Joe thought for a moment and said, ‘Sure.’

  The salesman said, ‘Let’s see… size 36’.

  Joe laughed, ‘Ah ha! I got you! I’ve worn a size 34 since I was 18 years old.’

  The salesman shook his head, ‘You can’t wear a size 34. A size 34 would press your testicles up against the base of your spine and give you one hell of a Headache.’

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

• A Montana cowboy was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud toward him. -

  The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?” The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, “Sure, Why not?”

  The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Iphone cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Ipad that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

  Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.” “That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” says the cowboy. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car. Then the cowboy says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?”

  The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?” “You’re a Congressman in the U.S. government,” says the cowboy. “Wow, that’s correct,” says the yuppie. “But how did you guess that?” “No guessing required,” answered the cowboy. “You showed up here even though nobody called you, you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are, and you don’t know a thing about cows. This is a herd of sheep. Now give me back my dog.”

  submitted by /u/YZXFILE
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• Monday - Greg, Tuesday - Ian, Wednesday - Greg, Thursday - Ian, Friday - Greg, Saturday - Ian, and Sunday - Greg -

  The Gregorian Calendar

  submitted by /u/jrobbio
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• NASA was interviewing professionals to be sent to Mars. Only one could go, and he couldn’t return to Earth. -

  The first applicant, an engineer, was asked how much he wanted to be paid for going. “A million dollars,” he answered, “because I want to donate it to M.I.T.”

  The next applicant, a doctor, was asked the same question. He asked for two million dollars. “I want to give a million to my family”, he explained, “and leave the other million for the advancement of medical research.”

  The last applicant was a politician. When asked how much money he wanted, he whispered in the interviewer’s ear, “Three million dollars.”

  “Why so much more than the others?” the interviewer asked.

  The politician replied, “If you give me $3 million, I’ll give you $1 million, I’ll keep $1 million, and we’ll send the engineer.”

  submitted by /u/YZXFILE
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• Every day, my teacher reads a joke from Reddit to start the class, but today she is absent. -

  So instead, a subreddit.

  submitted by /u/Fantastic-Throat2665
  [link] [comments]