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

• George Floyd, the Tulsa Massacre, and Memorial Days - The two tragedies make for easy inferences about the importance of commemoration. But this is not how trauma works. - link

• Great Britain Needs a Vacation - A nation of devoted international travellers has been bottled up by the coronavirus. - link

• Bitcoin’s Troubles Go Far Beyond Elon Musk - Recent moves by China have exposed the vulnerability of the cryptocurrency. - link

• American Democracy Isn’t Dead Yet, but It’s Getting There - A country that cannot even agree to investigate an assault on its Capitol is in big trouble, indeed. - link

• California’s Novel Attempt at Land Reparations - Property seized from a Black family a century ago is being returned to their descendants. - link

From Vox

• Why it’s so satisfying to root for Disney villains -

  

  Characters like Cruella have grown beyond their stories.

  “If she doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will.”

  The jauntily sinister lyrics to “Cruella de Vil,” from the 1961 Disney film One Hundred and One Dalmatians, might be one of the most well-remembered things about the film for many Disney fans — only slightly less well-known than Cruella de Vil herself.

  The vengeful, fur-wearing villainess may seem like the epitome of a character few people could love; she kills puppies, for god’s sake! Instead, she’s the opposite. Over the years, she’s become one of Disney’s most beloved villains, popular enough to have fueled a live-action 1996 remake of One Hundred and One Dalmatians starring Glenn Close, and now a new live-action origin story, Cruella, starring Emma Stone.

  Cruella is merely the latest example of Disney’s enthusiasm for catering to fans of the bad guys, a stance it has increasingly leaned into over the last decade as it’s started to craft franchises around villains after defining itself by its princesses. Frozen’s Elsa was originally intended to be the villain of that film, before the narrative shifted to make her the sympathetic antihero instead. Angelina Jolie headlined two live-action films exploring the backstory of Sleeping Beauty’s evil dragon Maleficent in 2014 and 2019. The company even took the gambit offscreen, launching a new board game franchise, Disney Villainous, in 2018, that encourages characters to play as its most popular evil characters and triumph over the forces of wholesomeness.

  Since the first Disney stores opened in 1987, the company has had a robust line of villain merchandise designed to target fans of its most famous Big Bads, including Cruella, Maleficent, The Little Mermaid’s Ursula, The Lion King’s Scar, and Aladdin’s Jafar, among others. From there, it continued to expand its targeted marketing: In 1992, as part of the Walt Disney World Hollywood Studios attraction, it launched Villains in Vogue, a shop that served park guests for more than 20 years until it was rebranded in 2015. Since then, Disney has held special “villains” theme park events, launched the “Villains” Blu-Ray collection, and in 2020 released a limited-edition line of high-end villain dolls. The collection — check out the Ursula doll below — quickly sold out.

  Disney - Midnight Masquerade Limited Edition Collection

  This marketing method seems to be working. Longstanding rumors of a theme park dedicated entirely to Disney villains have kept fans titillated for years — and though it’s apparently nothing more than an internet myth, it’s a telling sign of how popular Disney villains really are. The first Maleficent film grossed more than $758 million worldwide and came in sixth in the domestic box office rankings in 2014, while the sequel respectably earned nearly $500 million worldwide (and came in 23rd domestically). The aforementioned Villainous board game keeps adding expansion packs. And those sold-out limited-edition dolls? They’re reselling for hundreds of dollars.

  Clearly, this whole celebrating the villains thing is paying off for the Mouse, which may seem counterintuitive. Isn’t Disney, on celluloid at least, supposed to represent good triumphing over evil, and all that’s wholesome and morally upright about society?

  To a degree, the popularity of Disney’s villains is part of the much broader cultural embrace of antiheroism as a way of understanding a world that revolves around assholes. But while antiheroes seem to have reached their peak with the denouement of Donald Trump, Disney villains occupy a different space in the cultural psyche, one that’s withstood the test of time.

  In fiction, villain characters let us vicariously express and indulge our “taboo” and “deviant” sides

  Traditionally, the villain in any story — Disney or otherwise — represents a behavior, character trait, or facet of identity that society has deemed to be taboo or immoral. Perhaps the villain commits one or more of the Biblical seven deadly sins, as explored in David Fincher’s 1995 movie Seven. Maybe they crave vengeance, like the long litany of horror movie villains who’ve come back from the dead or reached out from beyond the grave to destroy all the people who brought them to ruin. Or they might exhibit pure sociopathy and a desire for power, like the kind we sometimes see in real-life criminals.

  Villainy gets even more complicated as a concept when we consider that, historically, the “villain” in any given story is villainous not because of something they do but because of something they are. Far too often, traditional narrative storytelling has worked to further marginalize people who are already marginalized in society by framing aspects of their identities as monstrous, inherently evil, or Other. One of the most famous examples is Frankenstein’s monster, Mary Shelley’s sympathetic but tortured creature who lashes out at his creator, Victor Frankenstein, by killing people around him. As the “villain” of Frankenstein, he has become a twofold cautionary tale: a warning against the vice of scientists playing god, and a tragic story about a freak who will never be able to fit into society.

  Yet a lot of us feel closer to the freaks than to the society that’s keeping them at bay. This is why monsters like werewolves, shapeshifters, vampires, and fairies have also traditionally served as metaphors, standing in for our real-life experiences and identities. Many narratives recognize these connections by reclaiming and reaffirming their respective villains’ humanity and their place in society.

  A well-crafted narrative often reflects viewers’ sympathy by allowing the “villain” to have a lot more fun than the virtuous main character. Often, whether intentionally or subconsciously, the villain also reflects some hidden aspect of the upstanding main character that the character has had to repress — think of virtuous Dr. Jekyll and his murderous alter-ego Mr. Hyde. This doubling is something psychologist Carl Jung famously referred to as the “shadow.”

  “A lot of people tend to use the term shadow as interchangeable with evil, and I don’t think that that is the most helpful way to define shadow,” Dori Koehler, a humanities professor at Southern New Hampshire University, told Vox. Koehler has studied Disney’s storytelling as an example of modern-day Jungian mythology, and authored the 2017 book The Mouse and The Myth: Sacred Art and Secular Ritual of Disneyland. “What shadow really is is the things of which we are unaware, the things which we have not brought to consciousness.”

  In one of my favorite examples of the villain as the shadow, Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1950), one titular stranger, Bruno, functions as a doppelgänger to his heroic counterpart, Guy. He’s fearless, bold, unafraid to shock people by saying what others think, while Guy is straitlaced, uptight, and seething beneath his polite exterior. Bruno pushes his social deviance to an extreme by actually committing murder — but even when Guy is horrified by Bruno, he still likes and identifies with Bruno. That’s because, on some level, Guy is Bruno and Bruno is Guy — the hero can’t exist without the villain, and vice versa. This truth functions as the underlying foundation of countless villain/hero constructions in modern pop culture, from Batman and the Joker to Harry Potter and Voldemort to the entire plot of the 2000 movie Unbreakable (in which a villain engineers a hero’s origin story so he can finally have a nemesis).

  In essence, feeling affection or admiration for a villain allows us to transgress without actually transgressing in the real world. We can identify with the fictional villain and with the taboo sides of ourselves that society typically forbids, discourages, or punishes us for showing.

  But if villains in general allow us to safely transgress social mores, there’s an even more particular satisfaction in cheering on Disney villains — because Disney films typically draw on our most fundamental views of good and evil, and therefore tap into some of our most powerful subconscious desires.

  Disney villains represent dramatic manifestations of deeply embedded cultural archetypes

  “Disney [animation arose] out of the tradition of caricature and cartooning,” Koehler points out. “And there wasn’t a whole lot of space for nuance in that tradition. It was very gag-focused and quite dogmatic. It’s either everything or nothing — all colors, no colors.”

  That literally two-dimensional creative landscape made Disney’s now-classic animated films the perfect vehicle for fairy tales: Not only does animation serve as a unique tool for depicting fantasy worlds, but its foundation of caricature aligns well with fairy tales built around straightforward depictions of good and evil.

  This two-dimensionality also arguably allows animated Disney films to vividly depict many universal figures — those broadly held images of societal roles and various character types that most people recognize. Consider the queen and the princess, the mother and the maiden. Koehler notes that the very first humanoid character to appear in the pantheon of Disney animation was Persephone, the goddess of the underworld, in the 1934 short The Goddess of Spring. With her strange movements and inhumanly long arms, Persephone already looks a bit otherworldly — but Koehler points out that, technically, she might be the first Disney princess and that “all of the Disney princesses have been reiterations of that archetype across time.”

  The Persephone myth, as the short depicts, involves her violent abduction to the underworld at the hands of Hades, against her will and over the strenuous objections of her mother, Demeter. So you could argue that from the start, Disney princesses were constructed from dual traumatic conflicts. As princesses, they typically have to learn to assert their agency within a restrictive, patriarchal society. They typically also have to do this without a mother to guide them. In the process, they often wind up battling a distorted matriarchal figure like the fabled “evil stepmother” — usually a woman who’s eschewed the traditional societal role that the princess seems destined to embrace and accept.

  Pinterest

  Disney is full of these figures, women who’ve essentially prioritized their careers and personal ambitions over family and domesticity. It’s easy to see how plenty of people could find those paths appealing rather than deviant. Disney’s female villains, then, are a reflection, according to Koehler, of “what happens when the feminine isn’t allowed continued renewal in a positive, healthy way.” Villains like Snow White’s evil queen, Cinderella’s evil stepmother, and Ursula the sea witch are jealous of the youth, beauty, and better social standing of their counterparts.

  In contrast, male Disney villains are frequently portrayed as visibly effeminate. Pocahontas’s Governor Radcliffe sings about glitter, while Robin Hood’s Prince John sucks his thumb; Hercules’s Hades literally bursts into flames; Scar, Jafar, The Great Mouse Detective’s Rattigan, The Princess and the Frog’s Dr. Facilier, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame’s Frollo are all of a type: elegant, debonair, coded as flamboyant and emasculated — as well as ruthless. And where most of the female Disney villains often fixate on destroying their younger, prettier princess counterparts, the male villains are usually consumed with power; they’re concerned with destroying whole realms and communities.

  It’s also notable that Disney had a long pattern throughout the 20th century of coding its animal villains as racist stereotypes. It frequently modeled such characters on minstrel caricatures and often unconsciously framed entire cultures — like the notorious Siamese cats of Lady and the Tramp or the monkey tribe of The Jungle Book — through racist lenses. All of these villain portrayals lent an irony to Disney’s reputation: Even as the company branded itself as a moral arbiter for generations of children, its most popular films frequently drew on deeply regressive tropes about what we should fear and why.

  If there’s one thing humans love to do, however, it’s to resist doing what they’re told. And that means Disney villains — unlawful, disobedient, and often depicted unfairly — are primed to be reclaimed and reinterpreted by the audience.

  Disney villains have spawned a deeply interactive mode of fan engagement and interpretation

  “Disney has historically had an interesting intersection between the stories that it tells and the way that the fans have engaged with the stories Disney tells,” Koehler explains. Indeed, over time, many of Disney’s most popular villains have become almost fully extricated from their original source texts, taking on entirely new cultural meanings outside of their storylines.

  One big reason for this is the unique relationship many of them have to queerness and camp. Many Disney characters, from Mulan to Maleficent, have long been read as queer by fans. And perhaps because of the homophobic stereotypes in their portrayals, many of the villains discussed have become symbols for the gay community.

  The most obvious examples here are Ursula, who was actually based on real-life drag queen Divine; Cruella, who was based on Hollywood star Tallulah Bankhead, herself a symbol of camp; and Beauty and the Beast’s Gaston, whose queer-coded portrayal was heavily influenced by the film’s queer lyricist, the late Howard Ashman. “Camp” is notoriously difficult to define, but as it relates to queer culture, I use it to mean that Bankhead, Divine, and their cartoon counterparts all represent performances of gender that are so at odds with typical cisgender expression that they become a kind of performance art, with inherent commentary on how slippery the notion of gender itself is.

  Once again, the caricature aspect of Disney animation (which has often carried through to later live-adaptations) aids these queer readings, and since they’re each bound up with sex and sexuality, there’s a lot of metanarrative — the narrative about the character that exists outside of the actual story — that queer audiences attach to certain characters and what they stand for.

  Sometimes, that metanarrative travels far. For example, at this point in the trajectory of Cruella de Vil, her character has almost nothing to do with puppies. In the new movie, a direct, if far-fetched, prequel to the original animated film, she’s been given a backstory straight out of The Devil Wears Prada that puts her in the fashion industry and pits her against a ruthless female executive (Emma Thompson). It’s clear that Disney is exploring the metanarrative about Cruella, building on her love of furs and fashion as well as fans’ interpretation of her as a fabulously camp performance artist. The film also draws on the current trend of reevaluating demonized women to give her a far more sympathetic persona. Cruella ultimately explains how we arrive at the original One Hundred and One Dalmatians storyline, but it has little connection to that storyline.

  As an example of a reimagined villain who nevertheless still sports all the traits audiences originally celebrated, Cruella is the latest of Disney’s ongoing attempts to capitalize on and build off themes its audiences have layered onto its stories. But it should be noted that Disney’s celebration of such characters often feels exploitative; after all, while Disney is happy to market directly to queer Disney fans, there still isn’t a meaningful example of a queer character in the animated Disney canon.

  And that’s another reason that villains, by default, have a part to play in fiction beyond reflecting societal fears and serving as an outlet for our deep-seated temptations: Embracing them allows us to find ourselves in narratives where many of us continue to be shunted to the side or rendered invisible. Rooting for Disney villains isn’t just an audience-centered way of interacting with a story. It also gives individual viewers — rather than Disney, with its many corporate obligations and strictures on what is and isn’t family-friendly — the agency to determine who we cheer for and identify with, and what version of the narrative we accept.

  “Fictional tropes are the place where we find our healing,” Koehler tells me. “We need to see our villains transformed.”

  When it comes to Disney’s villains, there’s real power in reclaiming their narratives to give them the win, for once, instead of watching them literally and inevitably fall to an oppressive society’s rules.

• Bosses are acting like the pandemic never happened -

  

  The pandemic transformed work. A lot of employers haven’t caught up.

  For more than a year, the Covid-19 pandemic changed how America worked.

  Grocery store cashiers, line cooks, janitors, and millions of others — about a third of the American workforce — saw their jobs become dangerous overnight, as they were asked to keep coming to work in person in spite of the viral threat. Meanwhile, millions more transitioned from going to an office to working from their homes — the percentage of workers logging on remotely rose from 17 percent to 44 percent once the pandemic began. And workers in both groups had to figure out how to take care of their kids when schools and day cares across the country closed their doors.

  Among employers and in the culture at large, there was at least some minimal acknowledgment that work had become harder than anyone had bargained for. Some bosses, especially in white-collar industries, became more understanding of child care responsibilities, granting employees the flexibility to do their work outside a traditional nine-to-five — even if they didn’t necessarily reduce the overall workload. Meanwhile, grocery store chains and other companies began offering hazard pay and other bonuses. It wasn’t enough for what many workers were going through, but it was something.

  Now, with vaccinations on the rise and summer approaching, a lot of employers are going back to business as usual.

  Restaurant and other service industry employers are saying they can’t find workers, and some are blaming expanded unemployment benefits — even as many businesses continue to offer wages that feel stuck in 2019 and safety remains uncertain in an ongoing pandemic. Indeed, a relaxation of mask mandates has brought new potential risks, with service workers now having to contend with more maskless customers. Restaurant workers “have concerns because it is not easy to know who has been vaccinated,” Sekou Siby, president and CEO of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United), which works on behalf of low-wage restaurant workers, told Vox.

  Joe Raedle/Getty Images

  Meanwhile, some large employers are ready to get rid of the flexibility of the pandemic in order to bring all their employees back to the office. “The commute, you know, yes, people don’t like commuting, but so what,” JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon said at a May conference.

  Hazard pay is long gone, and grocery store workers in some places are fighting for even the smallest wage increases. “We were there through the whole pandemic,” Heidy Lopez, a cashier at a Food 4 Less grocery store in the Los Angeles area, told Vox. But now, “you feel like this company doesn’t care.”

  Many have hailed the pandemic as an opportunity for a great reset — a chance to “build back better,” in President Biden’s words. But that can’t happen, labor advocates say, until bosses and policymakers create lasting changes in wages and working conditions, beyond a few weeks of hazard pay or some applause at 7 pm. “Employers really need to see workers as a key part of their business, not just a widget they can plug in and use,” Rakeen Mabud, managing director of policy and research and chief economist at the Groundwork Collaborative, told Vox.

  The last year transformed work in terrifying ways

  The last year has been a harrowing one for many American workers. Even before Covid-19 hit, millions of workers had been dealing with years of stagnant wages and absent or inadequate benefits, as CEOs and shareholders got rich. The ratio of CEO-to-worker compensation was 320 to 1 in 2019, up from 293 to 1 in 2018 and just 21 to 1 in 1965, according to the Economic Policy Institute. “The squeeze that workers have felt for many years, really since the 1970s, has only amplified during the pandemic,” Mabud said.

  When the pandemic hit, workers were forced to take on health risks many of them never thought they’d face on the job. And many say their employers were slow to protect them. Last spring, Food 4 Less workers had to bring their own PPE because the store didn’t provide it, Lopez said. “The company was like, ‘Oh, it’s nothing. It’s not a pandemic.’”

  But Lopez could clearly see the frightening reality of the situation. “As a cashier who was looking at all of my co-workers getting sick, it was scary,” she said — especially because she lives with her 8-year-old nephew and family members who are prone to lung problems. She called her doctor several times last year, not because of Covid-19 symptoms but because of anxiety: “The stress was physically hurting me.”

  Some large companies, like Amazon, Walmart, and Target, did begin offering hazard pay for front-line workers last spring. Kroger, the parent company of Food 4 Less, gave employees a $2 per hour “hero bonus.” But that bonus expired last May, with Covid-19 cases rising in many areas. And when Los Angeles mandated an additional $5 per hour in hazard pay for many grocery store workers earlier this year, Kroger shut down three stores in the area. “It becomes impossible to operate these three stores” with the mandate, the company said in a statement to the Cincinnati Enquirer.

  Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

  Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

It wasn’t just Kroger rolling back hazard pay. Thirty-eight of the 300 largest companies in America announced some form of hazard bonus last spring, according to the watchdog group Just Capital. But by last August, half of those policies had expired.

Now, Food 4 Less workers represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers union are negotiating a new contract, but management is offering a wage increase of just 50 cents an hour to 38 percent of its workers — and no increase to the rest. “Kroger’s offer is a win for Food 4 Less’ 7,000 associates: a competitive wage increase and a strong health care and benefits package,” Bryan Kaltenbach, president of Food 4 Less, said in a press release provided in response to Vox’s request for comment.

And while Covid-19 rates are declining across the country, the pandemic is far from over. In fact, it could be entering a more complicated phase for service workers, with states dropping mask mandates and the CDC issuing guidance that vaccinated people can be indoors without masks. Since there’s no way to tell if someone is vaccinated just by looking at them (and few establishments are going so far as to check vaccination cards), grocery store and other front-line workers have been thrust into a confusing environment in which it’s not clear who could be spreading the virus.

Lopez has been vaccinated, but customers’ behavior at times still has her concerned. “I get people who lick their fingers and give me money,” she said.

Restaurants laid off workers. Now they want them back.

It’s not just grocery stores. Restaurant workers have shouldered some of the highest risks during the pandemic, with line cooks facing the highest risk of Covid-19 mortality of any occupation, according to one study. The industry has also been hit hard by layoffs, with 5.9 million restaurant workers losing their jobs between March and May of last year.

Now business is picking back up with rising vaccination rates and warmer weather, and restaurants are looking to hire again, but many say they can’t find workers. Some are blaming the expanded unemployment insurance in the American Rescue Plan. “You have some cases where it’s more profitable to not work than to work, and you can’t really fault people for wanting to hold on to that as long as possible,” chef Jeremy Fox told the New York Times.

Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

But others say if employers want workers to come back, there’s a simple solution. “Employers post their too-low wages, can’t find workers to fill jobs at that pay level, and claim they’re facing a labor shortage,” Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a recent op-ed. “I often suggest that whenever anyone says, ‘I can’t find the workers I need,’ she should really add, ‘at the wages I want to pay.’”

Indeed, “it is too easy to blame the workers, instead of those who have been making tons of money but who didn’t think it was important to raise wages,” Siby of ROC United said. Restaurant owners benefited from corporate tax cuts passed in 2017 under President Trump, but never passed those savings on to workers, Siby said. Moreover, ROC United pushed earlier in the pandemic for restaurants to adopt right-to-return policies after layoffs, giving laid-off workers first priority when those businesses were hiring again.

“But nobody wanted to listen,” Siby said. “All of a sudden now they need those workers who were left unprotected.”

Some restaurant owners counter that with their low profit margins, they can’t afford to raise wages. But the whole debate feels somehow anachronistic, with employers trying to get workers to accept the same pay they were getting before the pandemic, or only a slight increase, as though the last year didn’t change everything about their jobs.

Restaurant profit margins have always been low, Siby said, yet restaurants survived when New York City instituted a $15 minimum wage in 2019. Now, ROC United is fighting for a true living wage — in some places closer to $24 per hour — as well as an end to the tipped minimum wage, which allows restaurants to pay tipped workers as little as $2.13 an hour. The latter is especially problematic during the pandemic with fewer customers coming to restaurants, meaning fewer tips in servers’ and bartenders’ pockets.

And if restaurants don’t raise wages, Siby believes workers will eventually shift to retail jobs, where pay is often better. “If you’re still paying people less than $15, the law of the labor market is pretty clear,” he said. “They will go to where the offer is higher.”

Corporate employers are pushing a return to the office

While essential workers risked their lives on the job, millions of others were able to work from the relative safety of their homes this year. Working remotely during a pandemic was far from ideal for many, exacerbating a degradation of the boundaries between job and personal life that had already become a hallmark of late capitalism. “Work is our lover,” Vox’s Constance Grady wrote in March. “And this year, we took it to bed.”

However, for some, remote work during the pandemic brought greater flexibility. People moved to be closer to family members. They started hobbies or exercise routines with the time they saved from commuting. For those with young children or other care responsibilities, remote work was the difference between being able to keep working — difficult as it was to balance work and care — and having to quit a job.

In other words, the pandemic may have brought some workplaces closer to what Prithwiraj Choudhury, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies the future of work, calls a “work from anywhere” ideology — one in which workers are no longer constrained to an office or even a particular city, but can live and work for most of the year from a location of their choice.

Such a setup is actually far more inclusive than an office model, Choudhury told Vox, especially for working parents who can choose to live in smaller cities with cheaper day care, or near family who can help with child care. “It takes a village to raise a child, so you can go closer to that village,” Choudhury said.

But now, some companies are trying to turn back the clock on remote work. It’s not just JPMorgan, where Dimon said that “sometime in September, October it will look just like it did before.” Goldman Sachs will also ask a majority of its US and UK workers to come back to the office in June. Retail giant Saks, meanwhile, wants its New York City offices to be the “default” for employees come September, with CEO Mark Metrick calling Zoom “a culture killer for companies” and comparing its rise to “when cigarettes went mainstream,” according to the Times.

But an attachment to in-office work could actually end up hurting companies. CEOs should be thinking “if I try to push my organization back to 2019 and that all-cubicle model,” Choudhury said, “the risk is I’m going to lose my best employees.”

Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images

For workers, meanwhile, a premature return to pre-pandemic conditions can be anywhere from frustrating to outright dangerous. People who are immunocompromised, for example, may not be protected from Covid-19 even if vaccinated. And pockets of vaccine hesitancy could cause further outbreaks around the country this summer and beyond.

But something else has changed since 2019, beyond the conditions of work in America. “Workers have leverage in this moment,” Mabud said. The pandemic has drawn attention to the inequities of low-wage work, and a boost to the social safety net has allowed people to prioritize their health and safety, sometimes for the first time.

“Workers are saying, ‘I’m not willing to take on a job that has terrible pay and requires me to take on customers who don’t want to wear masks,’” Mabud said. “This is a moment for employers to create the workplaces that people want to work in.”

For Lopez, that workplace would be one where she’s respected and treated fairly. “I want to be an essential worker,” she said. “It feels really good to be able to do everything that you can in order to help. But you have to be realistic of what I need also.”

• America’s asylum system is broken. Here’s how Biden could fix it. -

  

  The US isn’t prepared for another spike in migration at the border.

  Republicans have been eager to blame President Joe Biden for inviting a recent spike in arrivals of children and families at the southern border, with his promises of a more humane approach to immigration policy than his predecessor. But it’s not a one-off crisis — it’s part of a recurring problem to which the US has not adapted, and that has persisted even at times when the federal government has pursued restrictionist border policies.

  The Obama administration saw a similar spike in 2014, when more than 237,000 Central Americans, including more than 60,000 unaccompanied children, showed up at the southern border. And it happened again in 2019 under the Trump administration, when officials encountered almost 1 million migrants over the course of a year, including 144,000 in a single month.

  The US doesn’t have a system in place to ensure that migrants are treated humanely and in accordance with federal law when these spikes occur. Children have consequently been kept in jail-like holding facilities operated by US Customs and Border Protection beyond the 72-hour legal time limit. That is why the Obama administration, the Trump administration, and the Biden administration have been condemned for keeping “kids in cages.”

  While the humanitarian challenges on the southern border are far from over, the number of migrant children and families arriving has slightly subsided from record levels in March, and the Biden administration is moving unaccompanied children out of unsuitable CBP holding facilities much more quickly than it was before. As of May 26, there were 619 children in those facilities, down from more than 5,000 in early April, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security. (There are still more than 18,000 children in government-run shelters, many of whom are waiting to be reunited with family in the US.)

  As the pressure on resources at the southern border begins to ease, now is the time for the Biden administration to start charting a path forward to ensure that, the next time the US sees a spike in migrant arrivals, it is prepared.

  Gregory Bull/AP

  “We’ve never had a plan to rapidly surge resources into the immigration system when things get overloaded,” said Theresa Cardinal-Brown, managing director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “And yet, history has shown that we have major migration events that happen every once in a while. We need to think about those more as regular things rather than the odd accidents that may never come again.”

  The US can anticipate these spikes, which are symptoms of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Central America’s “Northern Triangle” — Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. For years, these countries have suffered from gang violence, government corruption, extortion, and some of the highest rates of poverty and violent crime in the world. The pandemic-related economic downturn and a pair of hurricanes late last year that devastated Honduras and Guatemala, in particular, have only exacerbated those longstanding problems. Many of the migrants arriving on the southern border, sometimes in large caravans, likely felt they had no choice but to seek refuge elsewhere — as is their right under US and international law.

  Though the Biden administration has yet to give an outline of its plans to manage the border, several immigrant advocacy groups and think tanks have devised potential frameworks to improve migrant processing. Republican Sen. John Cornyn and Democrat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema have also drafted a bill that would implement related reforms, though it’s not clear whether the legislation will draw significant support from members of either party. Those strategies will become all the more important as the Biden administration begins to lift pandemic-related restrictions at the southern border and resumes processing migrants en masse.

  Customs and Border Protection shouldn’t be primarily responsible for processing vulnerable migrants

  A core problem with the current system is that US Customs and Border Protection, the law enforcement agency responsible for apprehending migrants trying to cross the border without authorization, is also charged with initially processing asylum seekers. That’s a relic of the 1990s and 2000s when single adult males from Mexico accounted for the vast majority of people arriving on the border.

  Since 2014, children and families from the Northern Triangle have arrived in greater numbers with fundamentally different humanitarian needs than the Mexican migrants who came before them, including child care, schooling, and medical and mental health care for trauma victims.

  The Bipartisan Policy Center has argued that the recent shift in migration flows requires the US to rethink its approach to how it processes people at the border: CBP should continue to focus on issues related to border security — crime, drugs, contraband, and terrorism — but should leave processing children, families, and other vulnerable populations who may need emergency relief to other experts.

  In a plan laid out in a recent report by the think tank, migrants apprehended at the border would be taken into temporary influx facilities jointly operated by CBP, FEMA, and the Department of Health and Human Services where they would receive shelter, food, emergency medical care, and access to other relief. Only minimal processing, such as recording basic biographical data, would occur at these facilities.

  People suspected of criminal activity or who have outstanding warrants would still go to secure holding facilities currently operated by CBP. But everyone else would be transported to newly created Regional Migration Processing Centers, where non-uniformed staff (as opposed to CBP officers) would administer legal and medical services to migrants and care for children and trauma victims. There would be separate spaces to house families and children and single adults.

  Christian Chavez/AP

  Jonathan Alpeyrie/Bloomberg via Getty Images

  These centers would be staffed with asylum officers from US Citizenship and Immigration Services who would be able to immediately grant asylum to people with straightforward cases, as opposed to having to go through extensive, time-consuming proceedings in immigration court. Those cases would have to be completed in 20 days or less, or transferred to new, nearby border courts.

  The border courts, staffed with a new slate of immigration judges, would primarily handle cases involving migrants who have recently arrived in the US and would have to issue a decision within 90 days. If it takes longer for migrants’ cases to be decided, they could be transferred to other immigration courts across the US.

  The result would theoretically be that immigration cases could be decided in a matter of weeks or months, rather than years. As of April, immigrants had been waiting an average of more than three years for their cases to be decided in immigration court, which is a lot of time in limbo.

  “We have to have a system that is much more expeditious in deciding cases,” Cardinal-Brown said. “That’s good both for people who deserve protection — who can find out quickly, get their status, and get legal work — and for people who don’t make the cut, who can be sent back in an expeditious manner.”

  Under the plan, those who receive an adverse decision from an asylum officer could appeal in immigration court if they choose, though not everyone will. Single adults and those who aren’t seeking a form of humanitarian protection could still face rapid deportation through a process called “expedited removal,” under which a migrant does not have the opportunity to plead their case before an immigration judge.

  That’s why it’s also important for the US to explore additional legal avenues for people to migrate to the US, such as work visas. The asylum system may be the only currently viable path for Central Americans. Otherwise, they would need a job opportunity requiring certain skills or education or an immediate family member who’s a US citizen and could sponsor them for a visa.

  “We need to vastly expand legal avenues for people so that they’re not coming into the asylum system in lieu of some other available form of relief,” Cardinal-Brown said.

  Biden could look for alternatives to rapid deportations

  While Cardinal-Brown maintains that expedited removal has a place in a functioning immigration system, others have advocated for dramatically scaling back its use, or even abolishing it altogether.

  Expedited removal was implemented more than two decades years ago in the interest of increasing efficiency in immigration enforcement. But in the time since, the backlog of cases in immigration courts has grown to exceed 1.3 million, suggesting that it isn’t necessarily working as intended to relieve pressure in other parts of the immigration system. The Trump administration had nevertheless expanded its use beyond just immigrants arriving at the border. Now, unauthorized immigrants living anywhere in the US can be deported under expedited removal.

  Yael Schacher, senior US advocate at Refugees International, has argued that, once the Biden administration lifts pandemic-related restrictions at the border, it shouldn’t revert to relying on expedited removal as a primary means of managing migration at the southern border.

  In a recent report, she recommends implementing two pilot programs to test out such methods. One program could be based on the administration’s existing system for processing people who qualify for exemptions from the pandemic-related expulsion policy implemented last March under President Donald Trump.

  Similar procedures could be used to identify groups that request asylum at a port of entry and for whom expedited removal has historically proved unfair and inefficient, including speakers of indigenous or rare languages. CBP could release them from custody and instruct them to check in with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which would then refer them to the asylum office to file an application. If they don’t follow through with the application, then the government could initiate deportation proceedings in immigration court, Schacher writes.

  The other proposed pilot program could be modeled after the Biden administration’s current practice of releasing some families into the US due to the fact that Mexico has refused to take them back after they are expelled.

  After being processed by CBP, migrants from countries that have not historically cooperated with US efforts to deport their citizens could be sent to a newly created reception center operated by Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement.

  They would be subject to full deportation proceedings in immigration court, provided with legal orientation services and, if necessary, placed in a case management program designed to ensure immigrants show up for their immigration appointments without putting them in detention. (Although studies have shown that most migrants who were never detained or who were released from detention still show up for their court hearings.) Immigration judges would then terminate deportation proceedings and refer them to the asylum office to file an application.

  These proposed pilot programs might seem unnecessarily complex, requiring various steps of referral to different agencies. But they are designed to work within the existing legal framework and allow the Biden administration to test out potential changes to the asylum system unilaterally.

  “Putting resources into developing that fair process seems to make the most sense from a human rights and efficiency perspective, especially given that the deterrent approach we have taken for the past 25 years certainly has not stopped people from coming to the border, or led to an efficient asylum process,” Schacher said. “I’m trying to encourage us not to presume that the only efficient and fair way to do things is to rush the process while everyone is detained at the border, which I think is the impulse now.”

  The US could put more power in the hands of asylum officers

  It’s clear the current system isn’t operating quickly enough to accommodate the number of asylum seekers arriving on the border. That could actually encourage more migrants to make the journey north, said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.

  “The government is doing all this messaging [about the dangers of migrating], and that is not nearly as meaningful to people as the fact that they know from their communities, their families in the United States, and from smugglers, that if you manage to get here and get into the system, your case is going to be pending for years into the future,” said Meissner, who also served as the commissioner of what was then known as the US Immigration and Naturalization Service under the Clinton administration. “That is a real pull factor.”

  As a fix, Meissner has proposed to empower asylum officers via a regulatory change to grant asylum in cases that arise on the border without having to refer applicants to the immigration courts, unless they want to appeal an adverse decision. It would represent an expansion of their existing responsibilities, which also include issuing decisions for tens of thousands of people annually who apply for asylum from inside the US.

  Shifting processing to the asylum office, which only has a backlog of about 350,000 cases, would in some ways enhance due process for asylum seekers.

  In contrast to the process in the immigration courts, interviews at the asylum office are non-adversarial. Asylum officers undergo extensive training on how to conduct interviews with people who have experienced trauma, such as sexual violence, assault, death threats, kidnapping, and torture. And they are educated on conditions in migrants’ home countries that might have driven them to flee.

  Allowing asylum officers to grant asylum in the first place would also allow immigration judges to focus their resources on more complex cases.

  Gregory Bull/AP

  “It’s important to reserve the immigration court time for cases where there’s a real issue as to whether relief can be granted,” said Paul Schmidt, a former immigration judge who chaired the Board of Immigration Appeals, an appellate body within the DOJ, under the Clinton administration. “I think there’s a lot of cases out there that could easily be granted at the asylum office. They never have to get to the immigration court.”

  But there are some ways in which the asylum office remains under-resourced. Karen Musalo, founding director of the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies and a professor at UC Hastings College of Law, said that asylum seekers are currently required to provide their own interpreters during interviews with asylum officers, meaning that the quality of interpretation can be “quite below standard,” often to the detriment of an applicant’s case.

  Asylum seekers, including unaccompanied children, also don’t have government-appointed lawyers, either at the asylum office or in the immigration courts. There is a robust network of legal aid groups, NGOs, and law firms doing pro bono work that have stepped up to fill that gap somewhat, representing people individually, conducting “know your rights” presentations, and offering legal advice. But more than half of people facing immigration court proceedings still don’t have a lawyer, even though it vastly improves their chances of obtaining relief from deportation.

  Biden recently issued a memorandum seeking to expand access to legal counsel for immigrants, but it’s not yet clear how he would do so.

  “The entire system would run more efficiently and smoothly, and it would be cost-effective, to have appointed counsel for all asylum claims,” Musalo said.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Couldn’t sleep for 8-9 days during IPL, had to pullout: R. Ashwin on family’s fight with COVID - Talking about the ongoing 14-day quarantine in Mumbai, Ashwin gave an idea of the Indian team’s life in the protected environment

• Pirlo leaves Juventus after disappointing year in charge - Reports say the former Italian player was fired but the club’s statement has not mentioned it.

• WTC Final: India, NZ to be adjudged joint winners in case of draw or tie - India and New Zealand will be adjudged joint winners of the inaugural World Test Championship if their final clash in Southampton ends in a draw or

• “Quite surreal”: Marcus Rashford on his chat with Obama for child food poverty campaign - Rashford had led a campaign to end child food poverty and successfully lobbied the British government to continue providing free school meals during the holidays.

• Pochettino looking to bright future with PSG amid Spurs links - Pochettino was sacked by Tottenham six months after leading them to the Champions League final the previous season.

From The Hindu: National News

• Five arrested for death of four in clash - Holenarasipur Police have arrested five people in connection with the death of four people in a clash between two families over a property dispute at

• Coronavirus | Tamil Nadu lockdown extended till June 7 - CM announced that provision stores would be allowed to sell essential supplies through carts or vehicles in their respective localities with permission from local bodies

• Four arrested in murder case - The police have arrested four people in connection with a murder reported on May 23 in Hassan. A team of officers, investigating the murder, arrested

• Lakshadweep’s proposed two-child norm for panchayat polls ‘flawed’ - It should take steps to contain further cut in Total Fertility Rate: Population Foundation of India

• No rift over Lakshadweep ‘development’ push: BJP office bearer - Change necessary for tourism boost, says A.P. Abdullakutty

From BBC: Europe

• Belarus plane: Russia accuses EU of risking passenger safety - Russia condemns a decision to avoid Belarusian airspace over the arrest of a dissident journalist.

• Germany officially recognises colonial-era Namibia genocide - Foreign Minister Heiko Maas asks for forgiveness for atrocities and announces financial aid package.

• Russian hackers target aid groups in new cyber-attack, says Microsoft - A fresh wave of cyber-attacks targets government agencies and human rights groups, mostly in the US.

• Three sentenced over Barcelona and Cambrils jihadist attacks - The men assisted those responsible for attacks in 2017 that killed 16 people and injured 140.

• Mystery plans to redraw Balkan borders alarm leaders - Unofficial plans to change the borders have caused alarm - but no-one knows whose idea they are.

From Ars Technica

• Covert channel in Apple’s M1 is mostly harmless, but it sure is interesting - Technically, it’s a vulnerability, but there’s not much an attacker can do with it. - link

• Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary and the soft, squishy science of language - A deep dive into xenolinguistics, pragmatics, the cooperative principle, and Noam Chomsky! - link

• Rocket Report: Russia plans nuclear space tug, Falcon Heavy launch delays - “Europe really needs to build infrastructure to get to space.” - link

• SolarWinds hackers are back with a new mass campaign, Microsoft says - Kremlin-backed group uses hacked account to impersonate US aid agency. - link

• Ohio lawmakers want to abolish vaccine requirements—all vaccine requirements - Someone would only have to verbally decline vaccination and cite “reasons of conscience.” - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• Satan arrives to welcome a new damned soul to hell. -

  “Congratulations!”, he says, “You wasted your entire pitiful life!”

  “Well,” the man replies, “at least I’m not a adult living in my father’s basement.”

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

• The maid asked for a raise -

  [Long]

  The maid asked for a raise. The woman asked her why.

  Maid : “For three reasons. Number 1, I iron clothes better than you.”

  Woman : “Who said that?”

  Maid : “Your husband said that”

  Woman : “Oh”

  Maid : “Secondly, I cook better than you”

  Woman : " Who said that?"

  Maid : “Your husband”

  Woman : “Oh”

  Maid : “And the third reason is that I am better at sex than you”

  Woman : “Did my husband said that too?”

  Maid : “No, the gardener did.”

  submitted by /u/DarkknightOP-69
  [link] [comments]

• A man walks into a bar and orders a whiskey… -

  A man walks into a bar and orders a whiskey.

  The barkeep says “That’ll be 2 pence”

  “2 pence!?” said the man. “That’s cheap! Do you sell food?”

  “Yep” , said the barkeep

  “Alright, I’ll have a steak and chips” replied the man

  “Sure” said the barkeep, “That’s also 2 pence”

  “Goodness me!” said the man. “How can you charge so little?” … “Are you the owner?”

  “Nope, but I’m a friend of the owner” replied the barkeep.

  “Well where’s the owner?” asked the man

  “Oh, he’s upstairs with my wife!” replied the barkeep

  “What’s he doing upstairs with your wife?” asked the man

  “The same thing I’m doing to his business” replied the barkeep.

  submitted by /u/Brian-Goldwin
  [link] [comments]

• My boss calls me “The computer” -

  Not because of my calculation skills but because I go to sleep when left unattended for 15 minutes.

  submitted by /u/Raziel_01
  [link] [comments]

• Racial Humor -

  An Irish man is sitting at a bar, then a Chinese man sits down next to him. The Chinese takes a drink, the the Irish man says to him, “do you know Kung fu?”. The Chinese man says, “why because I’m Chinese? That’s just racist!”. The Irish man says, “No, I ask because you’re drinking my beer”.

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