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

• Why the Threat of More Economic Sanctions May Not Deter Vladimir Putin - The sanctions under consideration by the U.S. and Europe don’t appear to include two measures that could cause real financial pain for the Russian leader and his associates. - link

• Why Ukraine Is on a Precipice - A potential Russian troop withdrawal has not changed the four factors that U.S. officials assess have brought Europe to the brink of its largest conflict since the Second World War. - link

• How the Kosovo Air War Foreshadowed the Crisis in Ukraine - Twenty-three years later, Kremlin propagandists still use the NATO bombing campaign to justify their own actions. - link

• An Oscar-Nominated Short Film About Illness, Loss, and Karaoke - “On My Mind,” by the director Martin Strange-Hansen, is one of two films released by The New Yorker in contention at next month’s Academy Awards. - link

• The Supernatural Menace and Splendor of “Strawberry Mansion” - The filmmakers Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney have conjured a wild, lyrical science-fiction world on a small budget. - link

From Vox

• How the new banned books panic fits into America’s history of school censorship -

  

  What’s at stake? Who gets to control the story of America.

  It seems as though every few years, a new wave of panic sweeps across America about the books being taught in schools. They are too conservative, or too liberal; they’re being suppressed, or they’re dangerous; they’re pushing an agenda; attention must be paid. This winter sees America in the grips of the latest version of this story, with conservative-driven school book bannings heating up across the country. And experts say there’s a special virulence to this particular wave.

  In Tennessee, a school board yanked Art Spiegelman’s graphic Holocaust memoir Maus from the eighth grade curriculum. Last fall, a Texas legislator launched an investigation into 850 books he argued “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex,” including The Legal Atlas of the United States and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” In December, a Pennsylvania school district removed the LGBTQ classic Heather Has Two Mommies from school libraries.

  “There’s definitely a major upsurge” in school book bannings, says Suzanne Nossel, CEO of the free speech organization PEN America. “Normally we hear about a few a year. We would write a letter to the school board or the library asking that the book be restored, and very often that would happen.”

  In contrast, Nossel says, this year she finds herself hearing from different authors by the day about their books being banned. And the bans, too, are much more forceful than they’ve been before. “Some are an individual school board deciding to pull something from a curriculum or take it out of the library,” she says. “But there are also much more sweeping pieces of legislation that are being introduced that purport to ban whole categories of books. And that’s definitely something new.”

  While the extremes to which the most recent book bannings go are new, the pattern they follow is not. Adam Laats, a historian who studies the history of American education, sees our current trend of banned books as being rooted in a backlash that emerged in the US in the 20th century. That backlash, he says, was against “a specific kind of content, seen as teaching children, especially white children, that there’s something wrong with America.”

  Looking at the school book bannings of the 1930s against the bannings of the 2020s can show us how history repeats itself — even when we attempt to bury our history.

  “Was this country founded on liberty? This is a fundamental question.”

  In the 1920s, Harold Rugg, a former civil engineer turned educational reformer, put together a highly respected line of social science textbooks. “Lively and readable, they are the most popular books of their kind, have sold some 2,000,000 copies, are used in 4,000 U. S. schools,” Time magazine reported in 1940. It added ominously: “But recently the heat has been turned on.”

  “They were intended to be a more progressive take on American society,” Laats says. “The banning of those books is almost creepily familiar compared to today.”

  Rugg’s textbooks brought a Depression-era sense of class consciousness to their account of American history. They asked pointed questions about how class inequality persisted so sternly across the US, and whether America really was, as advertised, the land of opportunity.

  For some objectors, these were questions no one had any business asking America’s children: They were un-American, subversive, and potentially Communist. As a jingoistic patriotism spread across the country in the lead-up to World War II, school boards, facing a wave of anti-Rugg sentiment, banned and even burned copies of the textbooks.

  “They went from being one of the most commonly used books in schools to becoming unfindable,” says Laats.

  Rugg’s class- conscious American history didn’t emerge all on its own. It was part of a larger shift in the way the country was beginning to think about itself, says education historian Jonathan Zimmerman.

  “In the early 20th century, the history profession, well, it professionalized,” says Zimmerman. “People got PhDs, they went to Germany, they learned how to do archival research. And they started to ask some different and hard questions. If the American Revolution is a fight for freedom, why are there 4 million enslaved people? Why would a third of white people be Tories and go to Canada? Some of that critique started to get into textbooks, and there was this huge backlash.”

  The challenges to books that questioned America’s narrative of ideological innocence and purity didn’t only come from reactionary WASPs. “German Americans, Polish Americans, Jewish Americans, and African Americans, they are the ones that kept this out,” says Zimmerman. Groups that were in the process of clawing their way into being included in the American founding myth, after all, had a vested interest in keeping that myth going, the better to access the social capital that came with it.

  “If you diminish the revolution, in their minds, you’re diminishing their respective contributions to it,” says Zimmerman.

  By and large, those groups were successful. Over the course of the 20th century, the great founding myth of America has found room to include and celebrate the contributions of all sorts of groups — not just the founders, but also immigrants and women and foreign allies and people of color. But Zimmerman argues that this inclusion has by and large happened uncritically. “You put all these new groups into the story, but the title of the book is still Quest for Liberty: Rise of the American Nation,” he says.

  Zimmerman argues that the most recent slew of conservative book bans is responding to a real change in the way American history is taught. That change was most famously codified by The 1619 Project, a New York Times essay series spearheaded by Nikole Hannah-Jones that reframes the American story as one beginning in 1619, when the first slave ships came to America. And this new narrative, like Ruggs’s book before it, challenges a heroic narrative of liberty and freedom in which anyone might want to be included.

  “The 1619 Project is not a demand for inclusion. It isn’t,” says Zimmerman. “I mean, it’s not against inclusion, of course; those people want inclusion, but that’s not the point. It says, Okay, when we do start including, what happens to that big story? Is it a quest for liberty? Was this country founded on liberty? This is a fundamental question.”

  “With the 1619 Project,” says Laats, “the core of the controversy is roughly: Is history the celebration of the founding fathers? Or is history a celebration of a broader root of freedom fighters, especially including enslaved people and Indigenous people as the true freedom fighters?” The question at stake is, Laats argues: Who are we as Americans?

  “A co-option of the winning terms by the losing side”

  One of the oddities of this recent round of book bannings is that it comes just after a long, outraged news cycle of conservatives arguing that the left had become too censorious, with calls to remove classics like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from school curricula and Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name stripped from a children’s literature award. This conversation arguably reached its peak just last year when publishers faced furious backlash from the right after sending two Dr. Seuss books out of print because of their racist imagery.

  “The cancel culture is canceling Dr. Seuss,” declared Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade in March 2021.

  The disconnect between last year’s outrage and this year’s is striking.

  “If you don’t like cancel culture, so-called; if you don’t like Twitter mobs; if you don’t like protesters on campus who reject conservative speakers; that’s one thing,” says PEN’s Nossel. “But to respond to that with legislative bans on curriculum with prohibitions on certain books and ideas in the classroom is to introduce a cure that’s far worse than any disease. If you put threats to free speech in a hierarchy, there’s just no question that legislative bans based on viewpoint and ideology are at the top of the list.”

  Laats argues that this sort of abrupt about-face from the right, too, is part of a larger historical pattern.

  “The 20th-century pattern is pretty clear, if you take the 100-year perspective,” Laats says. “There has been progress on racial issues. It might feel depressingly stuck, but if you compare it to 1922 or even 1962, there has been progress. Same with LGBTQ rights. The difference is enormous. And with every stage of this broadening of who is considered a true American, there’s been a co-option of the winning terms by the losing side.” The anti-abortion movement is met by the pro-abortion movement; the LGBTQ rights movement on the left is met with claims of religious persecution from the right.

  Laats points to Dinesh D’Souza and William F. Buckley as “masters” of this strategy. “It’s this style of conservatism that is intimately familiar with more progressive attitudes in society, in a way that more progressive pundits tend not to be as familiar with conservative ideas,” he says. “Because progressive ideas — though it might not feel like it, especially not for the last presidency — progressive ideas have become more and more dominant.”

  Zimmerman and Nossel both say that conservatives’ success at banning books from schools should demonstrate that the left had become too willing to censor over the past decade.

  “What I worry about is that free speech is losing its moorings on both the left and the right,” says Nossel.

  “I‘m not equating the two, because this has the teeth of law, what we’re talking about now,” says Zimmerman. “A state legislature passing laws that you can’t make kids feel uncomfortable is different from Dr. Seuss getting a couple books taken off the internet.” But, he adds, there is enough of a continuity between the two cases on principle that he feels the left has put itself in a difficult strategic position. “You cannot protect Beloved if you’re purging Huck Finn,” he says.

  Zimmerman says he still thinks it’s reasonable for citizens to respond to the books that are taught in schools, and even to protest them in certain cases.

  “In the 1960s, there were history textbooks in this country, including in the North, that still described slavery as a mostly beneficent institution devised by benevolent white people to civilize savage Africans,” says Zimmerman. “You know why it changed? Because the NAACP and the Urban League created textbook committees that went into school boards and demanded that racist textbooks not be used.”

  Zimmerman suggests that objecting to a book because of its potential to harm students, which is a subjective measure, is less effective than objecting to a book because of its untruthfulness. “Of course [the textbook committees] said the books were racist, because they were,” he says. “But they also said that they were false, which they were. To me, that’s a much more appropriate line of argument in these discussions.”

  Laats argues that no matter what strategy liberals take, it’s unlikely people will stop arguing about the books we use in schools anytime soon.

  “Whoever gets to control what kids are reading gets to control the definition of, quote-unquote, the real America,” he says. “That resonates with a lot of people.”

• The presidential penalty -

  

  Why voters so often punish the president in midterm elections.

  The historical pattern is clear, and ominous for Joe Biden and Democrats this year: The president’s party usually does poorly in midterm elections.

  “It’s not quite a law of physics, but it’s probably as close as you’re going to get in the social sciences,” says Carlos Algara, a professor of political science at Claremont Graduate University.

  Despite the persistence of this pattern, we know surprisingly little about why it happens — and why, every so often, it’s somehow averted.

  Political scientists have argued about it for decades — there’s a 1988 paper called “The Puzzle of Midterm Loss.” Some theories focus on lower turnout among the president’s supporters. Others emphasize the public’s tendency to sour on an incumbent president. They may both be correct to some extent.

  Other theories focus on why some presidents tend to do worse than others in midterms. Maybe the results are mainly about presidential approval these days. Or maybe they’re about the economy or, more specifically, real personal income growth. Some national crises, like 9/11, are associated with unexpectedly strong midterm performances for the president’s party — but others are associated with blowout defeats.

  None of these signs are looking great for President Biden right now. His approval rating is the second-lowest of any president’s at this point in their presidency since modern polling came into use. The economy is booming by some metrics, but inflation is at a 40-year high and eating into voters’ spending power. The country is still in the midst of the pandemic, but Biden hasn’t unified the country around his leadership.

  There’s no one weird trick that can guarantee midterm success, or one theory to perfectly explain every midterm result. But there are several that, considered together, go a long way toward helping explain why this so often happens — and what November’s midterms might herald for Biden.

  Midterm election outcomes, by the numbers

  The general story of midterm outcomes is clear: The president’s party usually has a bad time. And even in the unlikely event that it has a good time, it isn’t that good.

  The most commonly used shorthand is a simple count of the number of House seats lost (or won) by the president’s party. Every House seat is up in every midterm and presidential year, so this makes a good comparison to the election cycle two years prior. And it shows a stark pattern — the president’s party has lost House seats in 17 of 19 midterms since World War II.

  

  Andrew Prokop/Vox

  The losses have been big, while the gains are both rarer and smaller: Most of these seat losses are double digits, with some rising remarkably high (54 seats in 1994, 63 seats in 2010). But in the only two midterms where the president’s party gained House seats, the gains were small (five seats in 1998 and eight seats in 2002). That imbalance is a clear sign there’s something structural at work here.

  An issue with the seat loss metric, though, is that it’s partly dependent on other factors. A party with a bigger majority going in has more to lose; shifting district lines over the decades affect how many districts are competitive (better gerrymandering makes fewer competitive districts).

  So to assess the overall opinion of the electorate, looking at the nationwide House popular vote — the percentage of voters who voted for Democratic candidates versus Republicans — might be better. Conveniently, that’s been a perfect match for which party ends up with House control (the winner of the popular vote ended up with House control in all of these postwar midterms, though this hasn’t always been the case in presidential years):

  

The president’s party got fewer votes in 14 of these 19 contests, but presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter did all manage to win more votes and hold the House despite losing seats. That was a different era of US politics, though — one that was less nationalized and less polarized, when voters were more willing to split their tickets, when incumbents had more of an advantage, and in which Democrats held the House for 40 years straight. Biden can no longer rely on any of that.

If we look beyond the House, the same general trend is evident, but because there are fewer contests, results are more affected by which seats happen to be up for election and the dynamics of individual races. The president’s party lost Senate seats in 13 of the 19 postwar midterms — most, but hardly all (for instance, Trump’s GOP benefited from a favorable map and picked up seats in 2018). There’s a similar story in governor’s contests, too.

Andrew Prokop/Vox

Overall, waves against the president’s party are common and often quite large, while the best the president has been able to achieve in midterms anytime recently is something close to a draw.

The trend: Why does the president’s party usually lose?

So why does this happen? There are a few clues that can rule out possible explanations. The trend predates World War II, so it’s not about recent developments. It happens in states (the governor’s party usually loses seats in off-year legislature elections), so it’s not just about the presidency. It’s not just an American phenomenon, either. “It also occurs internationally in systems where there is a chief executive election separate from a midterm,” says Matt Grossmann, a professor of political science at Michigan State University.

And the trend usually reverses itself — at least partly — by the time the next presidential election rolls around, since most presidents get reelected and their party’s down-ballot performance usually improves relative to the midterms.

Any explanation must take all this into account. It should also grapple with the two main factors that explain why election results can differ: turnout and persuasion.

Turnout means a change in the composition of the electorate: different people voting or not voting, as compared to last cycle. (There’s a lot of that going on in the midterms, where turnout is always significantly lower than in presidential years.) Persuasion, on the other hand, involves voters who show up both times but change their minds, switching between parties.

One turnout-centric explanation is that the president not being on the ballot is inherently demobilizing to many of his supporters. Perhaps they realize, correctly, that he’ll still be in power after the midterms — the stakes are simply lower for them; there is no prospect of total defeat. Some might also grow disappointed in the new administration’s performance and feel less urgency about voting (though many will show up again when reelection rolls around and the presidency is on the line). Meanwhile, the president’s critics are quite likely to vote — they are fired up in opposition, and motivated to try to check his power.

A persuasion-centric explanation, in contrast, emphasizes public opinion’s tendency to shift against the president, as seen in a common pattern of sinking approval ratings in the first two years of a presidency. This theory holds that the public functions essentially like a thermostat, kicking in when it’s either too hot or too cold to restore the preferred temperature. Voters could conclude things are too conservative under a Republican regime and elect a new Democratic president. But then they could quickly conclude things have become too liberal, and swing back toward Republicans in the midterms. Then after Republicans regain some power, perhaps opinion will swing back toward Democrats and get the president reelected. (The Obama and Clinton presidencies both followed this trajectory.)

In political science, this is referred to as the “thermostatic model.” Some political scientists posit these swings happen in response to policy changes — say, Democrats move policy further to the left than voters prefer. Others argue that it’s not really about policy, but rather who’s in charge — that, for instance, the mere fact that Democrats hold power gives voters the sense that things are too liberal in the country now, swinging many to the right.

Which is correct: turnout and demobilization, or persuasion and thermostatic shifts? It’s a trick question because both are happening, though their relative impacts can vary. The Democratic firm Catalist analyzed voter file data (official government records of who turned out to vote) and concluded that the party’s 2014 midterm woes were more due to plummeting turnout, as Obama voters stayed home; its 2018 successes were more due to persuasion, as Trump voters changed their minds and voted for Democrats.

However, both effects often work in the same direction — supporters can be demobilized and swing voters can be lost for similar reasons. “You tend to get higher turnout on the side that public opinion is moving toward,” says Grossmann. And if that happens, that’s a powerful one-two combination against the president’s party.

The variation: Why are some midterm outcomes worse than others?

So the midterms usually go badly for the president, and they often go very badly, with something like a draw being the best- case plausible outcome. But Democrats would surely love to end up with a draw this year. Why have a few past presidents managed to get there, while others have suffered disastrous blowout defeats?

In recent years, a president’s approval rating has been the clearest predictor of their midterm fate. Over the past seven midterms, we’ve had two presidents with over 60 percent approval by midterm time, and they were the two who defied the trend of midterm defeat: Bill Clinton in 1998 and George W. Bush in 2002. (In 1998, Democrats lost the national House vote, but they did pick up seats.)

Andrew Prokop/Vox

Those two midterms differ dramatically from the other five, which featured presidents with approval ratings in the 40s or below, all of whom fell victim to midterm wave defeats. (Biden’s current approval rating of 41 percent would place him in that latter batch.)

But presidential approval isn’t a perfect predictor, especially if you look further back in the data. Popular presidents like Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan (in his second term), and George H.W. Bush all suffered midterm defeats, as their approval ratings didn’t translate to popularity for Republican candidates down the ballot. That may be an artifact of a time when politics was less nationalized, but it’s a useful caution on the limits of presidential popularity.

Still, how did second-term Bill Clinton and first-term George W. Bush end up becoming so popular? The standard explanations are that Clinton benefited from a strong economy and the overreach of Republicans’ effort to impeach him, while Bush was still riding high off his massive popularity boost after the 9/11 attacks. But they had weaknesses, too — Clinton had just admitted publicly lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, while Bush’s economy still wasn’t strong.

Like Bush, earlier presidents with solid midterm performances may have benefited from being seen as competent leaders in national crises, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Great Depression midterms of 1934 and John F. Kennedy in the post-Cuban missile crisis midterms of 1962. But Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, second-term George W. Bush, Donald Trump, and now Joe Biden can tell you that not every crisis makes the president popular.

It’s the president’s response to that crisis, and whether it appears to produce results, that seems to matter. By 1934 GDP growth was booming, by November 1962 the standoff with the Soviets over Cuba had ended, and in November 2002 there hadn’t been another terror attack comparable to 9/11 on US soil.

The influence of the economy on midterms is not so simple to suss out, and scholars and commentators have argued about it over the years. Suffice to say things aren’t nearly as simple as that a good economy will lead to a good midterm — there’s disagreement about how much economic statistics like GDP tell us, or whether it’s voters’ perceptions of the economy (rather than any objective reality) that are really most important.

Is there a metric that can somehow capture both? University of Denver political scientist Seth Masket has zeroed in on one: real per capita disposable income growth. Rather than, say, GDP or the unemployment rate, this may come closer to reflecting the economy as the average voter experiences it — it measures whether pay is going up, when adjusted for inflation.

Masket found that, on average, higher income growth tends to be associated with better midterm outcomes for the president’s party. Specifically, he measured the growth between the second quarter of the year before the midterms and the second quarter of the midterm year. Here I’ve plotted it against the national House vote margin (Masket used the net change in seats in his own chart).

It does look like there’s a relationship here. Notably, those four Democratic presidents who held the House — Truman in 1950, Kennedy in 1962, Johnson in 1966, and Carter in 1978 — all had incomes growing strongly, and so did Clinton in 1998. Two recent anti-incumbent landslides, 2010 and 1994, are distinguished by weak income growth of around 1 percent. In fact, every cycle with below 3 percent income growth is a bad midterm year, except for George W. Bush in 2002.

But clearly there are other things going on, too. Nixon’s GOP did poorly in 1970 despite 4 percent income growth. And income growth of 2 to 3 percent was associated with outcomes ranging from a 12-point popular vote loss to 5-point popular vote victories. So a strong economy may well help, but it isn’t solely “the economy, stupid.”

What does it mean for Biden and Democrats?

If presidential approval, perceived crisis response, and real per capita disposable income growth are what we should be looking for, Biden is currently flopping on all three.

His approval is currently around 41 percent, and assessments of his handling of the pandemic and the economy have darkened. The income metric is particularly ominous for Biden — some forecasts project real income growth over the past year will be negligible or even negative, because of the effects of inflation. (The most recent data, for the fourth quarter of 2021, showed real incomes decreasing by 0.5 percentage points compared to the previous year, which I’ve added as a red line to the chart here.)

Andrew Prokop/Vox

The only presidents to preside over negative income growth by the midterms — Eisenhower in 1954 and 1958, and Nixon in 1974 — did quite poorly. Even Obama in 2010 and Clinton in 1994, with their historic midterm losses, saw some income growth, though it was notably weak.

But all is not necessarily lost just yet. The midterms are nearly nine months away, and there is still time for things to change.

As Roll Call’s Nathan Gonzales writes, most presidents do not see their approval ratings significantly improve in their second year. There is one notable exception, though. Donald Trump’s approval was mired at 37 percent in December 2017, but by November 2018 it had recovered to about 42 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s tracker. Those midterms still went poorly for the GOP, but they probably would have been significantly worse if Trump’s approval stayed so low.

Feeding into that, there are questions about what will happen with the pandemic and the economy now that the omicron wave is subsiding. Masket’s model specifically focused on income growth in the second quarter of the midterm election year, and that second quarter is fast approaching. No one economic statistic or model is a perfect predictor, but the broader point is that we are heading into the period in which the economy will be fresher on voters’ minds.

Considering how historically difficult it is for a president to even get a draw in the midterms, Biden will probably need not just one but several things to break his way — an improving approval rating, growing real incomes, and an improving pandemic. And he likely needs both turnout and persuasion to break in his favor: He has to give sporadic Democratic voters a reason to cast ballots this year, and to win back some voters who initially approved of him but who have since soured on his presidency.

• The hidden reason Olympic sledding is so dangerous -

  

  “Sled head” is about more than just crashes.

  In recent years, the sliding community — made up of skeleton, bobsleigh, and luge athletes — has experienced a spate of brain injury-related tragedy. At first glance, the reason why seems obvious: Sleds regularly reach speeds that top 90 miles per hour and crashes are unfortunately common.

  But there is growing research that shows it might be the act of sledding itself that is the main driver of brain injury. With every run, athletes are exposed to immense force and vibration, causing micro-concussions that can add up to major damage. Those concussions are mild enough that they can go undiagnosed. But among sledding athletes, the symptoms that indicate a micro-concussion — headaches, dizziness, etc. — are so common they have a special nickname: “sled head.”

  There’s a lot science still doesn’t know about sled head, and about the brain in general. But from what we can tell, it’s pretty clear that sliding sports put the brain health of their athletes at risk.

  Further reading:

  • When researching this piece, we spoke with the German skeleton team’s coach, Mark Wood. He’s pushing for research and regulation that might protect sliding athletes in the future. He wrote an essay sharing his perspective on the sport and its dangers.
  • Neuropsychologist Aliyah Snyder is currently developing a survey surrounding sliding athletes’ concussion and injury histories. It’s not yet available, but if you’re a current or former sliding athlete looking to find out more, email: asnyder@mednet.UCLA.edu.
  • For a review of the literature on sled head: “Concussions in Sledding Sports and the Unrecognized “Sled Head”: A Systematic Review”
  • Matthew Futterman at the New York Times is one of the few reporters writing extensively on sled head.
  • Olympic sledder Christina Smith has a book coming out about her experiences recovering from a brain injury, titled Empowered.

  You can find this video and the entire library of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Volleyball needs drastic revival measures in Telangana - Madhav, three time National gold medallist, laments at the fall from grace for the sport in the State

• NZ vs SA Test | Henry takes 7-23 as NZ bowls out Proteas for 95 in 1st test - By stumps on the first day, New Zealand was 116-3, leading by 21.

• Daily Quiz | John McEnroe - A quiz on John McEnroe, considered one of the greatest tennis players, who was born on 16th February in 1959. Compiled by V.V. Ramanan

• TAKHAR, JINCY AMONG 398 COACHES OFFERED APPOINTMENT BY SAI - SAI COACHES WHOSE CONTRACTS HAD ENDED ALSO REINDUCTED

• Table Tennis | Manika Batra trains with Sathiyan in Chennai - Ranked No. 10 in the world, the mixed doubles pair is keen to move further up the ladder and the duo has roughly planned a calendar to train more together

From The Hindu: National News

• Rather than admitting mistakes, BJP Govt blaming Nehru for people's problems: Manmohan Singh - Manmohan Singh said that the BJP’s nationalism was “fake” and was based on the British policy of “divide and rule”

• Minor fire at Pharma City in Vizag -

• 3.5 magnitude earthquake hits Katra belt of Jammu and Kashmir - The earthquake had a depth of five km with its epicentre lying 84 km east of Katra

• Youth, woman found dead in Thrissur lodge - Police suspect they consumed poison before hanging themselves

• Mysuru’s AIISH to host speech language, hearing conference - Around 1,300 delegates expected; 16 plenary talks by experts scheduled

From BBC: Europe

• Mali conflict: Macron announces troops to leave after nine years - France says growing hostility from Mali’s new military junta forced the withdrawal

• French election: Who’s vying to challenge Emmanuel Macron? - A tight and divisive race is expected when France holds a presidential election in April this year.

• Search ends for 12 missing from Spanish trawler that sank off Canada - The vessel sank off Canada on Monday in Spain’s worst fishing tragedy for almost 40 years.

• Covid: Austria and Germany decide to ease rules - Both countries have pushed for compulsory vaccinations but now decide to lift restrictions.

• UK to scrap visas for rich foreign investors scheme - It comes amid pressure on ministers to cut links to Russian money over the crisis in Ukraine.

From Ars Technica

• The next best thing to OLED is getting cheaper - Cooler Master GP27-FQS gaming monitor will lower the cost of entry. - link

• CDC wants to “give people a break” from masks, says new guidance coming - “I know that everyone is anxious to move beyond this pandemic,” CDC head said. - link

• Android’s toothless “Privacy Sandbox” fails to answer iOS tracking limits - Android “Privacy Sandbox” is optional for advertisers, and that misses the point. - link

• Clearview AI aims to put almost every human in facial recognition database - Investor pitch said 100 billion photos would make almost everyone “identifiable.” - link

• Latest success from Google’s AI group: Controlling a fusion reactor - The AI was trained on a simulator to shape the plasma held within a tokamak. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• When I lost my rifle, the army charged me $85. -

  That’s why in the navy, the captain goes down with the ship.

  submitted by /u/Alexharper051
  [link] [comments]

• I’m currently in a love triangle -

  I like this girl, this girl likes nobody, and nobody likes me.

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

• Pro-Tip: If a girl in a hot bikini DMs you about crypto -

  Ignore him.

  submitted by /u/oc2128
  [link] [comments]

• A plane leaves Los Angeles airport under the control of a Jewish captain. His co-pilot is Chinese. -

  His copilot is Chinese. It’s the first time they’ve flown together, and an awkward silence between the two seems to indicate a mutual dislike.

  Once they reach cruising altitude, the Jewish captain activates the auto-pilot, leans back in his seat, and mutters, ‘I don’t like Chinese.’

  ‘No rike Chinese?’ asks the copilot, ‘….why not?’

  ‘You people bombed Pearl Harbor, that’s why !’ angrily answers the pilot,

  ‘No, no,’ the co-pilot protests, ‘Chinese not bomb Peahl Hahbah! That Japanese, not Chinese.’

  ‘Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese… doesn’t matter, you’re all alike!’

  There’s a few minutes of silence.

  ‘I no rike Jews either!’ the copilot suddenly announces.

  ‘Oh yeah, why not?’ asks the captain.

  ‘Jews sink Titanic.’

  ‘What? That’s insane! Jews didn’t sink the Titanic!’ exclaims the captain, ‘It was an iceberg!’

  ‘Iceberg, Goldberg, Greenberg, Rosenberg …no mattah… all same.’

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

• A man is in a long line at the grocery store -

  A man is in a long line at the grocery store. As he got to the register he realized he had forgotten to get condoms. So he asked the checkout girl if she could have some condoms brought up to the register. She asked, “What size condoms?” The customer replied that he didn’t know. She asked him to drop his pants. He did, she reached over the counter, grabbed hold of him, then picked up the store intercom and said “One box of large condoms to register 10.”

  The next man in line thought this was interesting and, like most of us, up for a cheap thrill. When he got to the register, he told the checker that he too had forgotten to get condoms, and asked if she could have some brought up to the register. She asked him what size, and he stated that he didn’t know. She asked him to drop his pants. He did, she gave him a quick feel, picked up the store intercom and said, “One box of medium sized condoms to register 10.”

  A few customers back was this teen-aged boy. He thought what he had witnessed was way too kewl. He had never had any type of sexual contact with a live female, so he thought this was his chance. When he got up to the register, he told the checker he needed some condoms. She asked him what size, and he said he didn’t know. She asked him to drop his pants and he did. She reached over the counter, gave him one quick squeeze, then picked up the intercom and said, “Clean up at register 10!”

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