Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• The Stunning End of Dominion’s Case Against Fox News - The voting-machine company has agreed to a seven-hundred-million-dollar settlement in its defamation suit against Rupert Murdoch’s cable news network. - link

• Biden’s New Green Jobs Are Boosting Purple and Red States - Why the President’s industrial policy could be key to his reëlection bid. - link

• A Christian’s Thoughts on the Problem of Christian Nationalism - The separation of church and state, though under attack from the right, is still ingrained in our national psyche. Who’s best positioned to keep it there? - link

• What Dominion Has to Prove in Its Case Against Fox News - Did the hosts of the country’s most popular cable news network know that Trump’s lies about the election were untrue? - link

• What’s Behind the Bipartisan Attack on TikTok? - A hundred and fifty million Americans are on TikTok. Evan Osnos and Chris Stokel-Walker discuss why politicians are so keen to ban the app. Plus, Broadway’s new comedy of white wokeness. - link

From Vox

• Ari Aster doesn’t want to explain Beau Is Afraid -

  

  The director of the new Joaquin Phoenix film on animation, nightmares, and all those signs.

  Asking Ari Aster to explain his movies is not a winning proposition, and thank goodness. The director of Hereditary and Midsommar works highly intuitively, and that shows up on the screen. While his films seem to beg for a close reading — take, for example, all the many bizarre and hilarious signs in the background of his latest film, Beau Is Afraid — ultimately, they tend to defy explanation.

  That makes his films less locked to one way of thinking about them, less obviously “about” one thing in particular. Audiences get the chance to feel their way through his movies, just as Aster does when he makes them. You can take away your own ideas and discomforts and revelations from Beau Is Afraid, and they might not be the same as anyone else’s, and that’s just fine.

  Nevertheless, it’s fun to talk to Aster, who is deliberate and insightful about his own working process. Shortly before the film’s release, he and I spoke about how he designed some of the movie’s more comical and whimsical elements, what he’s trying to do when he makes a movie, and one little key to understanding Beau.

  This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

  Midsommar fans keep asking me about this movie. The way I describe it is that, whereas Midsommar is an inversion of a Disney Princess fantasy, this is an inverted, twisted hero’s odyssey. Did it start off being that kind of story?

  It was always something of a risk, playing with the hero’s journey. But it’s also a film that’s about an unlived life. It’s set in this cartoon world that should function as a mirror of the world we’re in. It’s awful in all the ways that the world is awful, but with the dial turned just a little bit higher.

  The trick was to make Beau very real. He’s our surrogate. He is who we have to hold on to. The challenge was, how do I make that experience incredibly visceral and immersive, and then at the same time, put him in this world that is just endlessly malign?

  A24

  That’s part of what’s so stressful and good about it. It honestly mirrored some of my most banal but aggravating recurring dreams, and that made it even more tense. I have a recurring nightmare where I need to go somewhere, and everyone I encounter is keeping me from getting there. I have nightmares about everything I do in life being projected in front of the whole world. The fantasy that everyone’s mad at me. These are all very common, boring things that everyone encounters, and yet they are the world as it exists to Beau. Right?

  Yeah. It was very liberating to just have this invented world that allowed me to go wherever my intuition led me. If some very stupid idea made me laugh, the challenge was to find a way to get it in there and have it be cohesive with the whole. But there was nothing too crazy, too stupid, too strange. That was just fun.

  It felt like one guy’s nightmare that just kept getting worse.

  Hopefully, it’s not a pile-on. I tried to shape it so that there were these respites, where the nature of the film would keep changing. Again, it’s tricky, because you hope that all those pieces are in harmony with each other. But with a film like this, you’re really, really clinging to your intuition.

  And nightmares are funny — when you’re not having them.

  Yes, that’s right.

  

  The character of Beau is extremely passive, the kind of guy who, if you accuse him of doing something, he probably assumes he deserves it. He’s afraid of not following the rules. A revealing detail for me is that he’s trying to leave his apartment, but what he goes back for is … dental floss.

  Well, I’ll say this. If you pay close attention, you’ll see that he almost takes the dental floss when he is packing his bag. He stopped. He hesitates, holding the floss, and then takes something else, and then goes back for the floss. I think there’s a key there.

  The movie is so obviously about guilt that it’s not even worth saying that. It’s about a guy who’s really trapped in himself, really, really, really trapped. I’m somebody with a lot of ambivalence. Ambivalence is a very particular kind of hell.

  I really, really want to avoid saying much because I really feel that if you can get on its wavelength, then it’s … it’s a movie that I felt my way through. I have a feeling that’s the only way to watch it as well.

  Robin L Marshall/FilmMagic

  My favorite part of the movie might be the massive amount of signage throughout: the graffiti, the posters in the bedroom, there are signs everywhere. My favorite is that there’s a notice about a brown recluse in the building taped to everybody’s door in Beau’s apartment complex, and on the bottom of the sign is a quote from Winston Churchill: “The price of greatness is responsibility.”

  Oh, you got that, great. There’s always a sadness in me thinking about all those details that will never be noticed. You’re the first person who caught that. That Churchill quote really makes me laugh. It’s the stupidest.

  That was part of the fun of creating this world. I wanted to make sure that every billboard, every poster, every product, every newspaper was made from scratch, and was made in the spirit of the world: evil comedy. All the comic details.

  There’s this term that was coined by Will Elder, from Mad magazine: chicken fat. It’s the overabundance of background gags that have been crammed into any given panel. I wanted there to be a lot of chicken fat here. I spent a long time building out a list of stupid names and names that made me laugh.

  These are things that nobody will know that just made me laugh. Like the city that Beau lives in, in the first part of the film, is called Corrina, Corrina. The city is Corrina. The state is Corrina. That’s a reference to a Whoopi Goldberg and Ray Liotta film from the ’90s.

  Ha! My friends and I were debating about where that actually was supposed to be.

  He lives in Corrina, Corrina. And then he goes to Wasserton at the end, the home of Mona Wassermann.

  That was a very joyful part of the process. Fiona Crombie was the production designer. She was a joy to work with. It was very fun making sure that the world was dense with detail.

  A24

  I couldn’t stop giggling at the poster in the teenage daughter’s bedroom that has the faces of all the K-pop stars, and the band is called “Ki55,” and the tagline is “We are 55 boys and we love you.” And both times I’ve seen it, the whole audience lost it when Beau walks up to his mother’s house and sees the caterer’s van with “Shiva Steve’s Grub For The Grieved” on the back of it.

  There are also those signs nailed to trees as Beau is walking into the woods to meet the theater troupe. They have uplifting slogans about following your dreams and are from musicals, right?

  Those are all lyrics from Broadway musicals and plays. I found that fun that it starts with “Know Thyself,” and then every sign gets dumber and dumber, so it’s all platitude lyrics.

  It took me till the second viewing to realize that Beau’s defense lawyer at the end is standing beneath a sign that says 1-800-DEFENCE on it.

  Well, yeah. They clearly just couldn’t get all the numbers they needed.

  Let’s talk about the animated “Hero Beau” sequence. How did that come into being?

  That’s a sequence in which Beau enters a play. He’s hypnotized, and he enters the play in his mind. We knew that there was going to be a lot of stagecraft involved; that was the original idea. Then I realized that I wanted it to be animated as well, or I wanted there to be animated elements that were interacting with the stagecraft.

  I was really obsessed with this stop-motion monstrosity called La Casa Lobo by Cristobal Leon and Joaquin Cocina. These Chilean animators were so brilliant. I reached out to them to see if they would want to collaborate. I had already shotlisted and storyboarded the sequence, but it became very clear, pretty early on, that not only should they do all the animation, but because that would be interacting with the stagecraft, they should also be the ones to develop the look of the flats and the sets. We spent a long time in development on that, finding an aesthetic that did not clash with the rest of the film.

  I think I drove them nuts, but it was a lot of fun. I’d love to work with them again.

  A24

  We also enlisted the help of an animation producer, a supervisor, to keep everything organized and on track, and make sure that that was always growing as we were making the rest of the film, because it needed constant attention. His name is Jorge Canada Escorihuela. He was really just essential to that getting made in that way and in the right way. He just understood so well what we were doing and kept that train on the tracks. I love him so much, and I know that Cristobal and Joaquin love him. He really, really was so committed to this. He gave it his whole life. It really was a huge undertaking, to be managing that while we were building out all the other worlds. Every shot of that sequence was a world that we not only had to animate later, but we had to build it and shoot it on a stage. So just getting all of that built was a lot.

  When the animated sequence started, I scribbled down “dream ballet?” because it reminded me of those very Freudian dream ballets that pop up in the middle of musicals from the ’50s and ’60s. Sometimes they reveal the desires of the main character or retell the story in these mythic terms. Was that where this sequence came from?

  Well, The Red Shoes certainly came to mind. I know that I sent the guys The Ballad of Narayama, because that is so drawn from kabuki techniques and the artifice is so extreme. What else? We were talking about Karel Zeman, especially Invention for Destruction. We were hoping also just to find a look that was its own.

  Something great about this movie, I think, is that it runs against the tendency of contemporary moviegoers to demand that things be puzzles to be solved or mysteries that can be unlocked.

  I agree.

  With this, it’s about feelings. The pieces are not there to be fitted together into a puzzle.

  No. If anything, the movie’s like an echo chamber. It’s sort of like a hall of mirrors. I want to encourage a deep engagement with it. I want you to search the movie because there’s a lot that I’ve buried as well, and a lot that I think I imagine will make itself much more clear upon a second viewing, just by knowing where it goes, to watch it again and see, “Oh, right. I guess this is a motif.”

  I don’t know how obvious those things are or if I was able to bury them into the fabric so that it’s not just … there. I think the movie very much just is what it is.

  Beau Is Afraid opens in limited theaters on April 13 and wide on April 20.

• The 100-year-old mistake that’s reshaping the American West -

  

  What happens if the Colorado River keeps drying up?

  You may have heard this before: The Colorado River, which supplies drinking water to seven states in the US and two in Mexico, is the lifeblood of the American West and beyond. It’s drying up at an alarming rate, threatening cities, industries, agriculture, and energy sources. As it shrinks, rich ecosystems across its 1,450 miles are also disappearing.

  In this issue of The Highlight, Vox’s reporters across the science, health, climate, and Future Perfect teams explore the interconnected causes of this crisis, the startling consequences that are already reshaping life in this important region of the world, and the difficult trade-offs we may need to accept to avert disaster.

  ---

  Wyatt Hersey for Vox

  The worst-case scenario for drought on the Colorado River

  One in eight Americans depend on a river that’s disappearing.

  By Umair Irfan

  ---

  Benji Jones/Vox

  You — yes, you — are going to pay for the century-old mistake that’s draining the Colorado River

  A huge amount of US food is grown in the desert using water from a river that’s drying up.

  By Benji Jones

  ---

  Wyatt Hersey for Vox

  Let’s talk about the biggest cause of the West’s water crisis

  The Colorado River is going dry … to feed cows.

  By Kenny Torrella

  ---

  Millie von Platen for Vox

  The devil lurking in the dust (Coming Thursday)

  How extreme weather is driving a deadly fungus further into the American West

  By Keren Landman

  ---

  Millie von Platen for Vox

  These 8 species depend on the Colorado River. What happens as it dries up? (Coming Friday)

  Wildlife needs water, too.

  By Benji Jones

  ---

  CREDITS

  Editors: Sam Oltman, Brian Resnick, Adam Clark Estes, Bryan Walsh
  Copy editors/fact-checkers: Elizabeth Crane, Kim Eggleston, Tanya Pai, Caitlin PenzeyMoog
  Additional fact-checking: Anouck Dussaud, Sophie Hurwitz
  Art direction: Dion Lee
  Audience: Gabriela Fernandez, Shira Tarlo, Agnes Mazur
  Production/project editors: Lauren Katz, Nathan Hall

• Let’s talk about the biggest cause of the West’s water crisis -

  

  The Colorado River is going dry … to feed cows.

  Part of the issue The 100-year-old-mistake that’s reshaping the American West from The Highlight, Vox’s home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

  Last May, 30 miles east of the Las Vegas Strip, a barrel containing a dead body washed up on the shores of Lake Mead, the country’s largest water reservoir. In the following months, more human remains surfaced, along with a World War II-era boat and dozens of other vessels.

  While these discoveries might sound like the opening to a crime thriller, they’re more than just morbid curiosities — they’re flashing warning signs that the Colorado River, which supplies water and hydropower to 40 million Americans, is in crisis.

  Along with Lake Powell 300 miles away, Lake Mead stores water for the lower states along the Colorado River: California, Arizona, and Nevada as well as Mexico and around 20 Indigenous reservations. But a climate change-induced “megadrought” has led to higher rates of water evaporation in recent decades and a drastic reduction in water supply, with Lake Mead currently at just 29 percent capacity. The streamflow on the northern part of the river, which supplies Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and five Indigenous reservations, has fallen 20 percent over the last century.

  David McNew/Getty Images

  Heavy snowfall in the Rocky Mountains this winter should give Lake Powell a modest boost as it melts, but not enough to assuage fears over the lakes reaching what’s termed “dead pool” status, when water levels drop too low to flow through the dams. To avoid that fate, the federal government has urged states to cut their water use.

  But despite news stories about drought-stricken Americans in the West taking shorter showers and ditching lawns to conserve their water supply, those efforts are unlikely to amount to much — residential water use accounts for just 13 percent of water drawn from the Colorado River. According to research published in Nature Sustainability, the vast majority of water is used by farmers to irrigate crops.

  

  And when you zoom in to look at exactly which crops receive the bulk of the Colorado River’s water, 70 percent goes to alfalfa, hay, corn silage, and other grasses that are used to fatten up cattle for beef and cows for dairy. Some of the other crops, like soy, corn grain, wheat, barley, and even cotton, may also be used for animal feed.

  

  “Meat production is the most environmentally stressful thing people do, and reducing it would make a huge impact on the planet,” said Ben Ruddell, a professor of informatics and computing at Northern Arizona University and co-author of the Nature Sustainability paper, over email to Vox. “We’ve known this for a long time.”

  The stress on the West’s water supply due to alfalfa is especially acute in Utah: A staggering 68 percent of the state’s available water is used to grow alfalfa for livestock feed, even though it’s responsible for a tiny 0.2 percent of the state’s income. Last year, the editorial board of the state’s largest newspaper, the Salt Lake Tribune, declared that “it’s time for Utah to buy out alfalfa farmers and let the water flow.”

  California takes more water from the Colorado River than any other state, and most of it goes to the Imperial Valley in the southern part of the state. It’s one of the most productive agricultural regions in the US, producing two-thirds of America’s vegetables during winter months. But the majority of the Imperial Valley’s farmland is dedicated to alfalfa and various grasses for livestock.

  In Arizona, Phoenix’s backup water supply is being drained to grow alfalfa by Fondomonte, owned by Saudi Arabia’s largest dairy company, which it ships 8,000 miles back to the Middle East to feed its domestic herds. (Water-starved Saudi Arabia banned growing alfalfa and some other animal feed crops within its own borders in 2018.) Across the 17 Western states, at least 10 percent of alfalfa is shipped to Asia and the Middle East where meat and dairy consumption is low compared to the US but on the rise.

  Jon G. Fuller/VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

  A drought is the product of two interlocking factors: supply and demand. We can point to climate change for the drought that’s drying up the water supply that is the Colorado River, but we have to reckon with the fact that the West’s already limited water is primarily used to grow a low-value crop, alfalfa, while cities are left to spend heavily on water-saving infrastructure to keep the H2O running and ensure reserves. And ironically, all that alfalfa is used to produce beef and dairy — two food groups that themselves contribute significantly to climate change. In other words, we’re using water supplies that have been shrunk in part by climate change to produce food that will in turn worsen climate change.

  The West’s water squeeze can be explained by poor planning in its past, but it raises a difficult question for its future: As local and state governments are forced to adapt their water use to a changing climate, do we also need to start thinking about adapting our diets?

  Who’s really using up the water in the west?

  Why there are so many water-guzzling farms in the desert

  When I asked John Matthews, executive director of the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation, why there are so many water-intensive farming operations in the desert ecosystem of the Southwestern US, he had a simple answer: If we could start from scratch, we would not have designed the system we have today.

  “I don’t think a farmer would design it this way,” he said.

  The West’s water system has its roots in the 1862 federal Homestead Act, which gave Western settlers up to 160 acres of land for free if they agreed to improve it and stay on it for at least five years, and later offered even more land at a reduced price if they agreed to farm it. But because there was so little water and irrigation was shoddy, Congress passed the Reclamation Act in 1902 to “reclaim” arid land in the West for agriculture. The federal government sold tracts of land to fund massive irrigation damming projects to divert rivers and streams to farms. Armed with cheap land and water backed by federal price guarantees — and aided by a warm climate that permitted an expanded growing season — Western settlers began to farm cotton and alfalfa.

  National Archives

  Choosing to put farms on arid land wasn’t the only short-sighted mistake the region made. In 1922, negotiators representing the seven states that share the river’s water grossly overestimated just how much water it could provide, which locked in over-apportionment and thus overuse.

  Of course, government officials at the time also couldn’t foresee a historic, climate change-fueled drought, or the growth of sprawling metropolises like Phoenix and Las Vegas in the decades to come that would compete with agriculture for limited resources. (In 1920, Arizona’s total population was just 334,000 people — around 20 percent of Phoenix’s current population — while all of Nevada had only 77,000 people.)

  And most importantly — and at the heart of the conflict today between California and its fellow Colorado River users — is how water rights were obtained.

  In the Eastern US, water rights are determined using what’s called the riparian doctrine — everyone who lives near a body of water has an equal right to use it, and is entitled to a “reasonable use” of it. The Western US, as is the case in so many other areas, does things differently.

  Water rights in the West were determined — under state laws — by what’s called the prior appropriation doctrine, which gives senior water rights to whoever first uses the water, a right they retain so long as they continue to use it. And those rights were mostly snatched up by miners during the Gold Rush era of the mid-1800s and farmers in the following decades who came to the West after the Homestead and Reclamation Acts (and some of that water and land was taken from Indigenous tribes). Even in times of shortage, senior water rights holders — many of them farmers — get priority over latecomers, like those millions of Western urbanites.

  That created repeated conflict — as the old Western saying goes, “Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting.” Over 150 years after the Gold Rush, fights over the prior appropriation doctrine are as fierce as ever, playing out in communities and between states, like Cochise County, Arizona, residents battling a water-guzzling mega-dairy, or the six Colorado River states that have agreed to slash their use to make up for the shortfall while California refuses to commit to necessary reductions. It’s now the Golden State versus everyone else.

  California public officials, like many California farmers, argue that they don’t need to cut their water use so drastically because they hold senior rights. That’s now up in the air. Earlier this month, the Department of the Interior published a draft analysis detailing three options it can take if states fail to reach an agreement: do nothing, make cuts based on existing water rights, or cut water allotments evenly among California, Arizona, and Nevada.

  “This is what we have inherited: a very rigid and complex system,” said Nick Hagerty, an assistant professor of agricultural economics at Montana State University, back in February.

  Matthews was blunter: “It is a stupid system, but the problem is that people are really heavily invested in that system.”

  However, it’s hard to get those who’ve benefited from the system for so long to change. California’s Imperial Valley, home to many alfalfa farms, gets about as much water from the Colorado River as the entire state of Arizona — and farmers in the Valley pay just $20 per acre foot (326,000 gallons). Meanwhile, farmers and residents in nearby San Diego County pay around $1,000 or more per acre-foot.

  Many Imperial Valley farmers are reluctant to reduce their use, citing their senior water rights. One farmer who chairs an agricultural water committee for the valley’s water district told Cal Matters that unless the federal government adequately compensates farmers, mandated cuts could be akin to property theft, and blamed water shortages on urban growth and excessive use from junior water rights holders.

  The Imperial Irrigation District now conserves around 15 percent of its allocation, though much of that conservation is funded by San Diego County, which receives some water from the district.

  Sudden changes to the water supply can hit farmers hard, and assistance has taken various forms in recent years — and experts like Matthews want to see them get the help they need to adapt to a different, drier economy. As the US Bureau of Reclamation has reduced the water supply for several states and Mexico, a patchwork of federal and state initiatives have moved forward to compensate farmers to reduce water use.

  Sandy Huffaker/Corbis via Getty Images

  Late last year, the Biden administration announced it will use some of the $4 billion in drought mitigation from the Inflation Reduction Act to pay farmers — as well as cities and Indigenous tribes — to cut their water use. Utah lawmakers recently proposed spending $200 million on grants for farmers to invest in promising but costly water-saving technologies, while farmers in Southern California have been paid to skip planting some of their fields.

  But Hagerty says a lot more could be done: “I think it’s incredibly important there be more flexibility in the system.” He wants to see farmers have more leeway to transfer, sell, or lease their water rights to cities. In California, farmers don’t directly hold their water rights and instead are members of irrigation districts that collectively hold those rights. But California law often impedes the districts from leasing water, leading some farmers to use water even if it may not be critical to their operations because if they don’t use it, they lose it.

  One solution he’s proposed is a reverse auction, in which water users make bids to the federal government on how much money they’d accept to forgo a particular amount of water use. But he says any reform will inevitably be incremental because there are so many competing interests at play.

  “Policymakers have been hesitant to make any real major changes, and I think that’s partly because this stuff is very politically fraught,” Hagerty said. “There’s a whole lot of different stakeholders to keep happy.”

  Adapting to climate change includes changing what we eat

  A number of short-term solutions should be enough to help Colorado River states get through the next few years, but in the long term, policymakers and food producers — and us — around the world will need to rethink how we farm and eat in a changing climate. It won’t be enough to simply change farming practices in the Western US, as Ruddell, a co-author of the Nature Sustainability paper, noted to me.

  That means altering the demand side of the water supply-demand equation and shifting diets globally to foods that use less H2O, which ultimately means less meat and dairy, as well as fewer water-intensive tree nuts like almonds, pistachios, and cashews (nut milks, however, require much less water to produce than cow’s milk).

  Agriculture isn’t just the largest user of water in the Southwestern US, it’s the largest globally, consuming 70 percent of freshwater withdrawals. And what we need in the Southwest and beyond isn’t just climate adaptation, but dietary adaptation.

  

  Just as policymakers made the Western US into the agricultural powerhouse it is today, despite its lack of something that is generally considered key to farming — water — they can also shape water policy and broader agricultural policy to ensure water security for the tens of millions of Americans west of the Mississippi River. But that will require policy changes that go beyond the dinner table.

  The federal government, through deregulation, R&D investments, subsidies, and food purchasing (like for public schools and federal cafeterias), heavily favors animal agriculture. Given the meat and dairy lobby’s political influence and farm states’ overrepresentation in the Senate, drastic changes to our food supply in the near term, ones that would favor plant-based agriculture, are out of the realm of political possibility. But change is afoot: In March, the Biden administration announced goals to bolster R&D for plant-based meat and dairy and other animal-free food technologies. Down the road, climate change may force some state and federal government’s hands to turn those goals into comprehensive agriculture policy. Already, American policymakers are mulling and making hard choices about water use, pitting crops for cows against water for people.

  There’s no disagreement that if the Colorado River can continue to supply Americans with running water, there will need to be cuts to agricultural use. We can learn from the mistakes made by Western planners in 1922 who overestimated how much water would flow from the Colorado River, and act now to shape food policy to adapt to a warming, drier climate.

  Special thanks to Laura Bult and Joss Fong on the Vox video team, whose extensive research for a November 2022 video on this subject contributed to this story.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s son Pankaj to become Cycling Federation of India president - Pankaj Singh emerged as the lone candidate for the post of the president of the Cycling Federation of India (CFI); all the 25 members of the CFI executive council will be elected unopposed

• During Ramzan, street cricket lights up Karachi after midnight -

• Suryakumar Yadav continues to lead ICC T20 rankings - Suryakumar, who has endured a lean run of late, remained static on the ICC list with 906 rating points, and is over a 100 points ahead of the second placed Mohammad Rizwan (798) of Pakistan

• Champions League | Rodrygo double eases Real Madrid past Chelsea into semifinals - Rodrygo netted twice from close range for Real Madrid as Chelsea suffer fourth straight defeat under Frank Lampard; AC Milan defeat Napoli 2-1 on aggregate

• Asian Champions Trophy is a litmus test for Asian Games: Harmanpreet Singh - In the previous edition in 2021 held in Dhaka, the Indian team finished with a bronze medal

From The Hindu: National News

• Ambasamudram custodial torture | FIR details horrendous torture suffered by three youth at the hands of suspended IPS officer Balveer Singh - The three were summoned to the Manimuthar police canteen around 1 p.m. on March 25 and allegedly given Rs. 30,000 each by advocate Thirumalaikumar, Ms. Rajakumari and Mr. Abraham Joseph, which was videographed by special branch constable Rajkumar.

• Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s son Pankaj to become Cycling Federation of India president - Pankaj Singh emerged as the lone candidate for the post of the president of the Cycling Federation of India (CFI); all the 25 members of the CFI executive council will be elected unopposed

• MLA’s convoy attacked by suspected Maoists in Chhattisgarh; no one injured - A car carrying a Zila Parishad member was fired upon

• Income Tax officials search properties of Congress leader KGF Babu - The IT sleuths seized around 5,000 sarees meant for distribution among voters besides a large number of demand drafts

• Construction of ABC centre nearing completion - The centre, constructed under the aegis of Alappuzha district panchayat, is expected to give a major boost to the animal birth control programme aimed at curbing the stray dog menace.

From BBC: Europe

• Ukraine war: The Russian ships accused of North Sea sabotage - Disguised Russian ships are said to be preparing sabotage plans in case of war with Western powers.

• Macron tries to escape French pension row with street song - The French leader tries to relaunch his presidency as a video is shared by a group linked to the far right.

• Russia-linked hackers a threat to UK infrastructure, warns minister - Officials are urging organisations to “act now” to defend themselves against the cyber threat.

• Ukraine’s Eurovision 2023 act TVORCHI have war on their mind - Nigerian-Ukrainian duo TVORCHI met in a chance encounter on the street. Now they’re coming to the UK.

• What Americans can learn from Denmark on handling debt ceiling crisis - Only two industrialised nations have debt ceilings - how come only the US fights about it?

From Ars Technica

• Can an e-bike’s fat tires be offset by a fat battery? - A well-implemented electric boost handles some of the worst of ultra-fat tires. - link

• Building telescopes on the Moon is becoming an achievable goal - The current race to the Moon is opening up opportunities for lunar astronomy. - link

• Dealmaster: New low on 55-inch LG C2 TV and 2021 iPad Pro, and more - These are the lowest prices we’ve seen on LG’s 55-inch C2 and Apple’s 2021 iPad Pro - link

• Star Trek fans will finally get a Section 31 movie—with an Oscar-winning lead - Yeoh will reprise her role as Emperor Philippa Georgiou for a streaming movie. - link

• Hundreds of years after the first try, we can finally read a Ptolemy text - The original writing was hidden in part by a 19th century attempt to read it. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• What do you call a deaf gynecologist? -

  A lip reader.

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

• Boys have a thing and girls don’t. -

  One November afternoon when my daughter was in kindergarten, I picked her up after school. She bobbed out to the car and crawled into the back seat.

  “What did you do today?” I asked.

  She couldn’t wait to tell me. “We learned that boys are different from girls” she chirped.

  Looking into the rearview mirror, I could just see the top of her head. “My teacher told us that boys have a thing and girls don’t,” she added.

  “Well, yes they do…” I said cautiously.

  I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so we were quiet for a moment. Then she piped up again. “That’s how girls know that boys are boys,” she said. “They see that thing that hangs down and they know that he is a boy.”

  I mentally calculated the distance home. Our five-minute commute already felt like an hour.

  “Did you know that when the boys see a girl they puff up?”

  My palms were beginning to sweat.

  “Um…well…” I was still searching for something new to say, to change the subject when she asked, “Why do the girls like the boys to have those things?”

  Well, I didn’t know what to say. I mean, what woman hasn’t asked herself that question at least once? “Oh, well…um…” I stammered.

  She didn’t wait for my answer. She had her own. “It’s ‘cause it moves when they walk and then the girls see that and that’s when they know they are boys and that’s when they like them. Then the boy sees the girl and he puffs up, and then the girl knows he likes her, too. And then they get married. And then they get cooked.”

  That last part confused me a bit, but on the whole, I thought she had a pretty good grasp on things.

  As soon as we got home and I pulled into the garage, she hopped out of the car, fishing something out of her school bag.

  “I drew a picture,” she said. “Do you want to see?”

  I wasn’t sure I did, but I looked at it anyway. I had to sit down.

  There, all puffed up so to speak, looking mighty attractive for the ladies, was a crayon drawing of a great big Tom Turkey. His snood, the thing that hangs down over his beak, the thing that female turkeys find so irresistible, was magnificent. His tail feathers were standing tall and proud.

  She was a little offended that I laughed so hard at her drawing, and I laughed until I cried. But when I told her I loved it … and I did … she got over her pique.

  That was the end of that, for her anyway. But I’m not so lucky. Every year I remember that conversation. And to be honest, I haven’t looked at a turkey, or a man, the same way since.

  submitted by /u/Waitsfornoone
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• A boy is born with just a head. -

  A boy is born with just a head. No neck, body, arms or legs. His parents love him, and vow to give him a life like any other child.

  The boy lives a fulfilling and miraculous life, and after a while, he turns 18, and his father takes him to a bar for his first pint of beer.

  The boy takes his first sip, and after finishing the beer, suddenly his neck pops out.

  “By God!”, his father exclaims. “You’ve grown a neck!” His father urges him to drink another beer, to see if anything else might happen. Without hesitating, the boy drinks another beer. Suddenly, a torso pops out. The entire population of the bar are cheering him on.

  His father and everybody else are urging him to drink more, and with each finished drink pops another body part. First, a pair of arms, then a pair of legs. This continues until his entire body is fully grown.

  “Father, I can’t believe it! I can finally walk. I can use my hands, and my legs. I can even run! Watch!”

  Without further ado, the boy runs out of the bar, shouting joyfully.

  Suddenly, the boy runs into a busy road, and is unfortunately ran over by a truck.

  The boy died instantly.

  Everybody in the bar is silent - besides the bartender, who says to the boys father;

  “What a shame. He should have quit whilst he was a head.”

  submitted by /u/PretzelsEqualThursty
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• Wife: I’m afraid our Neighbour died -

  Husband: Who, Ray?

  Wife: It’s inappropriate to cheer when someone dies

  (My 7 year old came up with this joke)

  submitted by /u/Suspicious_Airline89
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• What did Neil Armstrong say when no one laughed at his moon jokes? -

  “I guess you had to be there.”

  submitted by /u/Cubelock
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