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

• In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things - The truth is new and counterintuitive: we have the technology necessary to rapidly ditch fossil fuels. - link

• Jerome Powell’s Double Message on Inflation - The Fed raised interest rates for the first time since 2018, but its chair insists the move won’t deliver a serious hit to the wider economy. - link

• Zelensky Invokes Pearl Harbor and 9/11 as He Pleads for More from Washington - The U.S. sent more than a billion dollars in aid in the past week. But Biden has refused Ukraine’s two biggest requests. - link

• Have iPhone Cameras Become Too Smart? - Apple’s newest smartphone models use machine learning to make every image look professionally taken. That doesn’t mean the photos are good. - link

• Ukraine’s Radio Station of National Resistance - High up in the Carpathian Mountains, two Kyiv broadcasters keep the signal alive. - link

From Vox

• How you can help all refugees — from Ukraine and beyond -

  

  Let’s move past the myth of the “deserving” refugee to ease global suffering.

  The war in Ukraine has captured the world’s attention, and that’s as it should be. The devastation is tragic, and it’s been heartening to see governments and ordinary citizens taking a real interest in Ukrainian refugees and giving generously to help them.

  At the same time, we have to ask ourselves why we aren’t just as attentive and altruistic toward other refugees around the world in circumstances that are just as desperate. Many of us are donating time, money, and even Airbnbs to help Ukrainians — but how many of us have done the same for refugees from Iraq? Myanmar? South Sudan? Yemen?

  “There’s been a lot of attention and compassion for Ukrainian refugees and it’s a stark contrast with other groups,” said Lamis Abdelaaty, a political scientist at Syracuse University who researches why the world treats some refugees better than others. “First of all, it has to do with the identity of the people who are fleeing from Ukraine. They’re seen as white and Christian. People tend to sympathize with refugees who they think share their identity.”

  You may have seen discrimination on the basis of race and religion worming its way into media reports. Take, for example, NBC News correspondent Kelly Cobiella, who said that “these are not refugees from Syria, these are refugees from Ukraine. … They’re Christian, they’re white, they’re very similar.”

  Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images

  Or take CBS’s senior correspondent Charlie D’Agata, who said in Kyiv that “this isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan. … This is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully, too — city where you wouldn’t expect that.”

  Foreign policy is also a salient factor, as is justified moral outrage over the invasion of one country by another. “It matters that Ukrainians are fleeing an invasion by Russia,” Abdelaaty said. “Being especially attuned to them and welcoming them is a powerful way to condemn this aggression … to send a signal that you are on the side of democracy.” Governments as well as ordinary citizens have a chance to position themselves in a satisfying narrative: aligned with the Hero, fighting against the clear Bad Guy.

  Nevertheless, Abdelaaty told me, “My hope is that this crisis will lead people to think deeply about why they empathize with certain people over others, and lead people to recognize that all refugees are equally deserving of our compassion.”

  The myth of the “deserving” refugee

  The number of forcibly displaced people in the world is at a record high — 84 million by last year’s count, more than the entire population of Germany, and more than double what the number was a decade ago. They’re fleeing their homes for reasons ranging from human rights violations (like in Afghanistan) to famines and floods spurred by climate change (like in South Sudan).

  But depending on who these displaced people are and where they’re coming from, the world tends to look at them very differently.

Youyou Zhou/Vox

“There’s a dichotomy that tends to be drawn between the ‘deserving’ refugee and the ‘undeserving’ migrant,” Abdelaaty said.

Under the 1951 Refugee Convention, ratified when the world was still dealing with millions of people displaced during World War II, a refugee is someone fleeing persecution that’s targeted to them as an individual based on their race, religion, or political opinions. Most Ukrainians actually wouldn’t qualify for refugee status, because they’re fleeing generalized violence, rather than being specifically targeted for one of those criteria, Abdelaaaty explained.

Yet governments and the media were quick to label them refugees — in stark contrast to the reaction in 2015, when there was a lot of hand-wringing about whether to call the people arriving in Europe “refugees” or “migrants.” The use of the term “migrants” to describe Syrians likely had a negative impact on public opinion about them.

Even now, Middle Easterners coming to Europe suffer from a double standard. Nowhere is this clearer today than in Poland. On that country’s border with Ukraine, Ukrainians are being welcomed with open arms. Meanwhile, on Poland’s border with Belarus, Syrians, Iraqis, and Afghans have been forcefully kept out; Poland is even building a $400 million wall to repel them.

Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via Getty Images

“The fact that Ukrainians are being labeled refugees means, for many people, that they are deserving, because they’re being forced to move. Whereas in the popular parlance, people who are migrants are choosing to move and therefore they’re not deserving of our compassion,” Abdelaaty said. “But I would urge people to consider whether people who are moving because they’re fleeing crushing poverty or the effects of climate change are any less deserving of our compassion. I’d argue no.”

How you can help refugees effectively

All refugees need support, and most refugee crises are underfunded — especially those that have fallen out of the media spotlight or never captured it to begin with.

Before the war in Ukraine, 85 percent of the world’s refugees lived in low- and middle-income countries, often in far greater numbers than in rich countries. Turkey, for example, still hosts 3.6 million Syrian refugees. (The US, by contrast, settled fewer than 12,000 refugees altogether in fiscal year 2020.) These countries often don’t have the resources to support their own people, let alone millions of newcomers.

That’s why Helen Dempster, an assistant director at the Center for Global Development, says, “Countries neighboring Ukraine, such as Poland, definitely do require support, though I would argue not as much support as those low- and middle-income countries that have been hosting refugees for years or decades.”

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, provides an annual list of the most financially neglected crises. Here’s the most recent list:

Youyou Zhou/Vox

So how can you help people in these crises?

First of all, you can donate to organizations that are doing effective, transparent, and accountable work. Abdelaaty and Dempster recommended several options:

• If you want to support refugees and host communities on the ground, you can donate to organizations like the International Rescue Committee, UNHCR, Oxfam, and Doctors Without Borders. It’s best if you give an unrestricted donation, allowing your money to be used where and when it’s most needed.
• If you really want to support people in a specific crisis, you can donate cash directly to affected people through GiveDirectly or to vetted local organizations through GlobalGiving. (Disclosure: I donated to GiveDirectly in 2021.)
• If you want to support systemic policy change that will benefit refugee populations, you can donate to nonprofits with a strong track record of achieving results. A prime example is the International Refugee Assistance Project, which advocates for reforms to the US resettlement program while also providing legal aid to displaced people around the world.
• If you want to support refugees once they’ve already arrived in your country, you can donate to your local resettlement agency, which gives refugees short-term support to help them rebuild their lives in their new community.

Beyond donations, you can play an important role by pressuring your government to provide enough aid for people on the ground — and to be receptive to newcomers who are arriving at your country’s borders. If you’re in the US, for example, here are concrete things you can do:

• You can contact your representatives to tell the Biden administration to end Title 42, a Trump-era policy blocking displaced people from Central America, Haiti, and around the world from accessing their right to apply for asylum.
• You can contact your representatives to tell them to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act to give evacuated Afghans permanent legal status in the US.

Finally, you can volunteer your time and energy to help refugees settle into their new lives.

• You can sponsor an Afghan refugee family in your community.
• You can volunteer with your local resettlement agency, helping with everything from furnishing a refugee family’s new apartment to enrolling children in school.

In the US, the official resettlement infrastructure was decimated under the Trump administration, and it still hasn’t recovered; the Biden administration has arguably been too slow undoing the damage. A huge backlog of refugees need to have their applications processed and then be integrated into new communities. Investing in rebuilding the refugee resettlement infrastructure is a key step to addressing the backlog that’s preventing thousands of people from restarting their lives in the US.

At the end of the day, donating, advocating, or volunteering in any of the ways listed above is a valuable way to make a difference. Refugees need immediate support when they’re fleeing a nightmare on the ground; they need advocates to shape welcoming policies at their destinations; and they need assistance settling in when they reach their new homes. All of these roles are important.

So if the heart-wrenching war in Ukraine has strengthened your desire to reduce the suffering of refugees, it’s worth trying to expand the circle of compassion to include refugees beyond Ukraine, and get to work helping them, too.

A version of this story was initially published in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe!

• Standup comedy and the myth of cancel culture -

  

  David Cross on political humor, how standup has changed, and why complaints about cancellation are “bullshit.”

  What do we want from comedians?

  We want them to be funny. We want them to turn outrage into laughter. We want them to look at the absurdity of the world and reflect back on it in some kind of cathartic way. We also want them to “punch up,” to mock the powerful. And then sometimes we just want them to get us to stop thinking and laugh.

  The role of comedy is always an open question, but it seems to pop up a lot these days. Comics like Michael Che and Dave Chappelle have been in the news, for different reasons, and it’s usually about free speech or “cancel culture.”

  Most of these debates are boring and circular, but I am interested in how comics engage with the world, and what they decide to make fun of and why. So I reached out to David Cross for the latest episode of Vox Conversations. You probably know him from his TV work. He was the star and co-creator of HBO’s Mr. Show and he famously played Tobias Funke on the cult hit Arrested Development. But he’s also a long-time standup comedian and has a new special out, called I’m From the Future.

  We talk about the evolution of his comedy, why he doesn’t think of himself as a political comedian, and what he thinks about “cancel culture” and the idea of “selling out.”

  Below is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so subscribe to Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

  ---

  Sean Illing

  This is one of those moments where I feel like everyone’s pissed off about everything, and you definitely seem as pissed off as the rest of us in this special. Did you feel like you had an unusual amount of rage bottled up for this one?

  David Cross

  I’d say it was normal rage. It’s always there. The question is always what am I directing it toward? But everything is tempered now because I’m a dad and so I try to infuse some sort of optimism in all the anger and negativity and cynicism because I just have to for my kid’s sake.

  But I don’t know if it’s rage, exactly. It’s mostly incredulousness. It’s just the frustration of looking at a world that makes no sense. And you’re twisting everything to make it make sense to you and it just doesn’t on so many levels. And that’s part of where the anger stems from, I guess. We could have a truly great society, but you guys keep fucking it up.

  Sean Illing

  My favorite bit in the show is where you’re pretending to stand in front of all these imaginary kids and you’re telling them all the ridiculous shit they’ll organize their political identities around when they’re older, all the inane stuff they’ll be pissed off about.

  David Cross

  Yeah, that’s where the title of the show comes from, I’m From the Future. That’s a good example of a bit where I had a very vague idea of doing something about people who scream at other people in a store for speaking Spanish. They overhear them speaking Spanish and they scream at them. I worked on that for months and I could not find the angle at all, and it just wasn’t working. It sounded preachy.

  And then it occurred to me, “Oh, what if they were 5 or 6 years old and you showed them the person that they were going to become?” The kids would be like, “No, I don’t want to do that.” So that’s where that whole thing came from.

  Sean Illing

  It’s funny, when I started preparing for this interview, I thought about the distinction between a political comic and a comic who just talks about politics, and I said to myself, “Of course, Cross is a political comic!” Then I heard you say that you’re absolutely not a political comic, and naturally I felt like a jackass.

  David Cross

  Well, it’s not dumb. I’ll let you finish your thought, but I’ll just say that I can point to different comedians that are political comedians, and the bulk of their material, let’s say more than 75 percent of it, deals directly with politics or cultural wedge issues, which might feel like it’s political, and mine doesn’t.

  I truly understand why sometimes it feels like more of the set is political, and my last few shows have been a little weightier and not as light and breezy as some of the others. I still have some really stupid dad puns, some bad jokes, and some silly impressions and absurdist stuff in there, but when you’re doing material about Trump or Obama or even going all the way back to Bush, it feels like it has more weight to it.

  Sean Illing

  I don’t want to dump on any other comics, but there are some who I’m not sure they’d have anything to talk about if they weren’t talking about politics, and I definitely don’t think of you that way. There are the late-night-style comics who use politics as fodder, but they’re not really saying anything — it’s all discardable blooper stuff. And then there are comics who obviously are funny and tell jokes but there’s a moral clarity behind it, and I’ve always thought of you in that way, even though there’s plenty of silliness in your material.

  David Cross

  I didn’t take it as an insult or anything, and I’m not bothered by the idea that I’m pigeonholed that way. It’s just one of those things where I feel like I have to clarify things because I definitely talk about politics and I definitely have a strong point of view. But I still don’t think of myself as a “political comedian.”

  Sean Illing

  Do you talk about politics because you feel like you have to?

  David Cross

  Not at all. I find that a little pretentious for my taste, the idea that I have a moral obligation to do this thing. And it also implies that I have some sort of galaxy brain that I have to share with people so that they’re enlightened. This is the kind of stuff I’d be saying over a few pints at a bar with friends. And when these shows develop, I start at small rooms, like 99-seat rooms in a basement in a club in Brooklyn. So they are my friends. They’re all right there in front of me. That’s where this stuff develops.

  Sean Illing

  I guess it’s the ideological comics that don’t really work for me. I think you can be a funny political comedian, but I’m not sure you can be a funny ideologue. I think you stop being funny when you stop telling the truth and it’s hard to tell the truth and serve an ideological audience at the same time.

  David Cross

  I think you’ve hit on something, whether intentional or not, and it has to do with the polarization and the capitalization and the exploitation of our audiences. And I think you see a lot more people doing that kind of thing. They’re speaking to a consumer base and they’re looking at it like that. It used to be, back in the late ’80s or the early ’90s, that there was a kind of stigma around the comics who were just doing standup so that they could get on a sitcom. That was a real thing. Other comics would recognize it immediately.

  And now there are people who are trying to backdoor into standup via other avenues so you can get a podcast or something because that’s where the money is. It’s a 180 from where it used to be. People are getting into standup now for the money. So you get a lot of people with a foot in both worlds that are using standup specifically to build their base, to build their revenue-streaming possibilities.

  Sean Illing

  It really does feel like comedy has changed so much over the last 20 years, going back to the Bush era and up until today. You put out this amazing comedy album shortly after 9/11 and it was one of the first pieces of popular art in those early days that anticipated the horrors of that era, and it seems like things have just gotten steadily darker since.

  David Cross

  It’s both a continuation and a heightening of more of the same thing. But I look back, I haven’t listened to that album, Shut Up, You Fucking Baby!, in quite a while. But that’s a younger guy. That’s a guy who didn’t know that things were going to remain awful and actually get worse and worse and worse. That was a guy in his 30s who has the world in front of him and who kind of knew what it was going to be like.

  I had just moved to New York, maybe eight months prior to that, after being in LA for nine years, where every minute was spent like, “I got to get out of here.” And all the material that has developed subsequently is just a standup getting older and more outraged. But as I said earlier, I’ve got to filter things and be as optimistic as I can because of my daughter and her friends. I’m around kids a lot more now. I wasn’t around kids a lot, certainly not back then. And so it’s interesting because I’m just a different person now. I’m the same standup, but my experiences are different. My world is different.

  Sean Illing

  Have you noticed a shift in the audience over the years?

  David Cross

  Yeah, they’re older! They used to be in their 20s and 30s, now they’re in their 50s. What’s going on?

  Sean Illing

  I just turned 40, man, I think I’m one of the olds now. But seriously, do you feel like things have changed on the demand side in terms of where the lines are or what people will laugh at? There’s so much noise about “cancel culture” in comedy and I find most of it boring and I assume comics have always adapted with the times. Do you feel like the pace of adaptation is quicker now than maybe it was when you first started?

  David Cross

  I don’t think so. Nobody’s getting arrested.

  Sean Illing

  I don’t actually know of any comedians who’ve been “canceled.”

  David Cross

  No, they haven’t been. That’s bullshit. If we think about it in less histrionic terminology, there’s certainly a reality now where if you say something and if you don’t apologize and you double down and then you triple down, then you’re going to have a segment of your fan base react. And you’re going to have lots of people who didn’t care about you in the first place doing that whole performative outrage thing. They’re just showing their weight as consumers. It’s not that different from people saying, “We’re going to boycott this thing because they advertise on Tucker Carlson and I don’t like what he said.”

  People have every right to do that. We live in a capitalist society, and that’s how it works. So people aren’t getting canceled. They’re either getting their tickets refunded or trying to shame people from going to see somebody’s live show. Who knows what kind of effect that’ll have? Probably not very much.

  I don’t know anybody that’s not able to do standup anymore because they said something offensive. Obviously, there are people who have done some egregious things that have nothing to do with their comedy and lots of people have made their feelings known about that. But if you say something extremely homophobic or misogynist or racist or anti-Semitic that cannot be defended and people go, “Hey that person’s appearing on Apple TV or Netflix or whatever. Let’s boycott the sponsors,” then that’s their right. But nobody’s not able to do standup. Maybe you can’t sell out Madison Square Garden eight shows in a row, but you’re still going to get to do standup.

  To hear the rest of the conversation, click here, and be sure to subscribe to Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

• Europe’s embrace of Ukrainian refugees, explained in six charts and one map -

  

  Data shows why Ukrainian refugees are being treated differently than others fleeing violence.

  More than 3 million people have fled Ukraine in the weeks since the start of Russia’s invasion. Europe hasn’t seen an exodus of this scale and speed since World War II. Equally unprecedented is the welcoming attitude that countries neighboring Ukraine have had toward these refugees.

  Race, culture, and religion certainly play a role in the warm welcome fleeing Ukrainians have received. But recent history is another factor. Though Ukraine isn’t part of the European Union, the ease with which Ukrainians have been able to work and travel to EU countries have made them fixtures in the bloc, and that — perhaps even more than geography — has contributed to a sense that they are Europeans currently in need of aid from other Europeans.

  In the weeks since the start of the invasion, all of Ukraine’s borders except those with Russia and Belarus have remained open. Most refugees used one of the 31 border checkpoints in western Ukraine and entered Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova. Poland took the majority, close to 2 million as of March 18.

  

  The governments of these nations — and non-governmental groups — quickly worked out emergency plans to help those fleeing the Russian invasion. The EU announced on March 4 that Ukrainian citizens (who, pre-war, didn’t need a visa to stay up to 90 days in the EU territory) would be entitled to the newly enacted temporary protection directive —permitting them to live, work, and study in EU member states for up to three years.

  The exact implementation may differ from country to country, and some plans may still shift. For the five neighboring countries that opened borders to let Ukrainians in, all except Moldova are EU members.

  

  Non-Ukrainians, however, didn’t get the same rights or legal protection. In the first few days of Russia’s invasion, there were incidents in which Ukrainian citizens were allowed to cross the border while non-Ukrainians faced obstacles to doing so. Now, at least on paper, people can cross the border regardless of nationality. Poland issues a 15-day temporary permit, Romania a 90-day transit visa, and Hungary a 30-day residence permit to non-Ukrainians. Officials expect them to go back to their home countries before those permits expire, or apply for asylum if they wish to stay longer.

  The disparity between how Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian refugees are being treated is stark. It brings to the fore longstanding debates about what makes someone European, and who is worthy of Europe’s protection. It’s also key to understanding why Ukrainians have been met with open arms by the rest of Europe.

  Why refugees from Ukraine have been treated differently

  European countries haven’t seen such a large number of displaced people in this short period of time in recent history. It took three weeks for 3 million to leave Ukraine. While at least a couple hundred thousand Ukrainians have returned home, that’s still an overwhelmingly fast flow of people. When 3 million Syrians fled their country due to the war, it took two years to reach that milestone, and an even longer time for Syrian refugees to reach Europe.

  To put the size of the population fleeing Ukraine into perspective, nearly 6 million people applied for asylum in European Union countries from 2013 to 2021. About 2.5 million sought asylum during 2015 and 2016.

Syrian refugees saw a very different reception than the Ukrainians currently fleeing Russia’s assault have — one that’s more reminiscent of the welcome non-Ukrainians have received, and consistent with the experiences other refugees of color have faced when trying to reach Europe. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán called arriving migrants fleeing the Syrian war a Muslim invasion in 2015 and built border walls to fence them off. Last October, Poland entered a state of emergency when thousands of refugees from Afghanistan and Iraq attempted to cross the border from Belarus into the European Union.

Polls across the EU reflect a deep wariness about certain immigrants. Generally, European countries are less welcoming to immigrants of races and ethnicities that differ from their predominantly white populations. And people in eastern European countries, including Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland, are less likely to think immigrants should be allowed in than their western counterparts, according to the latest European Social Survey, conducted across the bloc in 2018.

A push to repatriate refugees has led to efforts like Denmark working to send its Syrian refugees from Damascus back home. Across Europe, far-right parties have expanded their power, both in individual nations and the EU parliament, partially on an anti-immigration platform.

The different treatment toward Ukrainian refugees is rooted in a sense that, although Ukraine isn’t in the EU, its citizens are European. People from European countries see themselves in the Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war. That has been clear from their public statements, including those tinged with racist and xenophobic ideas about what it means to be European.

“These people are Europeans,” Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov said. “These people are intelligent. They are educated people. … This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists.”

While refugees from Middle Eastern, African, or Asian countries are seen as “others,” the geographic proximity, similar skin colors and religions, as well as the social-economic ties to the EU states all contribute to the identification of Ukrainians as “us” — Europeans.

An increasingly unified European identity has formed among the eastern European countries that joined the EU in the 2000s. Most citizens of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania see themselves as citizens of the European Union.

While Ukrainians aren’t EU citizens, they have enjoyed visa-free travel in the EU member states since 2017. By 2020, they were the third-largest group of non-EU citizens living in the bloc, behind citizens of Morocco and Turkey.

Before the war, most Ukrainians in the EU came for work. More than half of Ukrainian migrants residing in the EU got their residence permits through work. In 2020, 86 percent of the Ukrainians who applied for residence permits for the first time received their permits for employment-related reasons, the highest among all other nationals.

Ultimately, Ukrainians want their country to join the EU. Four days into the war, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy submitted an application for EU membership, an act then mirrored by former Soviet states Moldova and Georgia. The EU application and linkage processes take a long time, and western members of the bloc have rebuffed Ukraine’s request to fast-track its approval. But after years of roadblocks, the path is “open for them to take.”

From The Hindu: Sports

• IPL 2022 | We have got a title winning squad, now need to execute skills under pressure: Punjab Kings captain Mayank Agarwal - After four seasons with the team, Agarwal has been given the leadership responsibility

• Sri Lanka to host Asia Cup T20 tournament from Aug 27 to Sept 11 - Sri Lanka were supposed to host the 2020 edition, but the pandemic pushed event to 2021 before finally being moved to 2022

• Jay Shah's term as Asian Cricket Council president extended by one year - Shah had taken over the reins of the ACC in January last year from Bangladesh Cricket Board president Nazmul Hassan

• Australia vs Pakistan | Steve Smith hopes to score big in Lahore Test - Steve Smith is disappointed not to have capitalised on two good starts against Pakistan

• IPL 2022 | I'm a work in progress, focussing on controllables: Hardik Pandya - Captain of new franchise Gujarat Titans, Pandya has been battling fitness concerns ever since injuring his back in 2019

From The Hindu: National News

• Geography in Indian Ocean is our basic advantage and we are utilising it: Navy - Building capacity to counter whatever capacity China can bring into the region, it tells House Committee

• Congress bags mayoral posts in Ballari Municipal Corporation - M. Rajeshwari and Malan B. got 29 of 44 votes each to get elected as Mayor and Deputy Mayor while their BJP rivals each polled 15 votes

• Manipur CM Biren summoned to Delhi again - The BJP is yet to form the government in the State

• When forest fringes went up in flames - Forest department fights fires with the help of local people’s participation

• Gujarat govt.’s 5th phase of water conservation campaign to generate 25 lakh mandays of work under MGNREGA - Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel formally launched the project with the deepening of a lake in the village, with the State aiming to carry out around 13,000 water conservation works by May 31.

From BBC: Europe

• Russians board International Space Station in Ukrainian colours - Three cosmonauts ditch the standard-issue Russian uniforms in an apparent show of solidarity.

• French elections: Putin’s war gives Macron boost in presidential race - Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shaken up France’s presidential elections, with only three weeks to go.

• Putin hails Crimea annexation and war with lessons on heroism - Eight years after Russia seized Crimea, the event is being celebrated with a concert and in schools.

• Four dead after US military plane crashes in Norway - All four passengers are killed in the accident, which involved a US Marine Corps aircraft.

• Lupin: Seven charged over armed heist on Paris filming set - Around 20 hooded attackers used fireworks to steal €300,000 worth of equipment from the crew.

From Ars Technica

• How did a vast Amazon warehouse change life in a former mining town? - Looking back a decade after the mine closed and Amazon opened up. - link

• Leaked ransomware documents show Conti helping Putin from the shadows - Hacker gang sometimes acts in Russia’s interest, with ad hoc links to FSB, Cozy Bear. - link

• Please stop putting COVID-19 test solution in your eyes and nose, FDA says - FDA says it has received reports that people are injuring themselves with the tests. - link

• Android 13 preview locks down notifications, adds more to the tablet taskbar - Tablets get an apps button in the taskbar and what sounds like a smart-display mode. - link

• Some types of brain studies need thousands of participants to be reliable - Researchers split up a big, reliable data set to find out where things go wrong. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• A man sitting next to me on the bus today showed me a picture of his wife. -

  He says to me “Isn’t she beautiful”?

  I replied to him “If you think she’s pretty, you should see my wife”

  He then asked “Oh, is your wife beautiful too”?, to which I replied “No, she’s an optometrist”.

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

• filthy old man -

  A desperate looking woman stood poised on the edge of a cliff, about to jump off.

  An old homeless man who was wandering by stopped and said

  “Look since you’ll be dead in a few minutes, and it won’t matter to you, how about a quickie before you go?”

  She screamed “NO! Fuck off you filthy old bastard”

  He shrugged and turned away saying “OK then, I’ll just wait at the bottom”

  (She didn’t jump… Counselling works!!!)

  submitted by /u/mattysms1980
  [link] [comments]

• A woman marries a man and has 10 children. The man dies, so the woman remarries and has 10 more children. The next man dies, so the woman remarries again and has ten more children. That man dies, so the woman remarries and has 10 more children… -

  The husband dies again and finally the woman dies as well.

  At the funeral, the priest mutters, “Thank God! They’re finally together!”

  A man at the funeral asks another man on his left, “Which husband do you think he means? The first, second, or third?”

  The man on his left says, “I think he means her legs.”

  submitted by /u/808gecko808
  [link] [comments]

• Once upon a time in a village, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each… -

  The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them.

  The man bought thousands at $10 and as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He further announced that he would now buy at $20. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.

  Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so little that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it!

  The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on behalf of him.

  In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers; “Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each.”

  The villagers rounded up with all their savings and bought all the monkeys.

  They never saw the man nor his assistant, only monkeys everywhere!

  Now you have a better understanding of how the cryptocurrency market works.

  submitted by /u/YZXFILE
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• You’re offered $50,000, but if you accept it the person you hate the most in the entire world will get $100,000. You taking it? -

  Yes why wouldn’t I want $150,000.

  submitted by /u/mostly-chill
  [link] [comments]