The War in Ukraine Is a Colonial War - For centuries, the country has lived in the shadow of empire. But its past also provides the key to its present. - link
Can Liberty University Be Saved? - After Jerry Falwell, Jr.,’s ouster, some students and alumni have sought a more thorough excavation of Liberty’s values. - link
The Worst Boyfriend on the Upper East Side - For decades, a man has romanced New York women, persuading them to invest in questionable business deals. How did he keep running the same scam? - link
The Border Wall Is Outliving Trump - More than a year after the former President left office, Republican governors, federal regulations, and inaction in Congress are allowing construction to continue. - link
Is Rihanna’s Pregnancy All Bump and No Grind? - As with other elements of a mega-celebrity’s life, a front-facing, pathbreaking pregnancy necessitates some mystification of the pains taken behind the scenes. - link
From Vox
The Great Resignation is becoming a “great midlife crisis” -
The Great Resignation is not just for kids. | Getty Images/iStockphoto
Older, more tenured people are increasingly quitting their jobs.
With prices soaring and analysts predicting a recession on the horizon, it might not seem like the best time to quit your job. But that’s not keeping American workers, especially older, more tenured ones, from doing so.
Higher-paid workers are increasingly quitting their jobs, as the Great Resignation — also known as the Great Reshuffle — enters its second year. Earlier in the pandemic, the trend was led by younger, less-tenured workers in low-paying industries like retail, food service, and health care. Now, the main growth in quit rates is coming from older, more tenured workers in higher-paid industries like finance, tech, and other knowledge worker fields, according to data from two separate human resources and analytics companies. These workers say they are searching for less tangible benefits like meaning and flexibility.
That changing composition of who is quitting paints an increasingly complicated picture of the state of work in America and suggests that while quit rates have decreased slightly from their highs last year, the phenomenon is not going away just yet.
“The Great Resignation is almost like a train, where it’s built all this momentum and it’s hard to slow down, but certain workers are getting off the train and new workers are coming on,” said Luke Pardue, an economist at Gusto, which provides payroll, benefits, and human resource management software to small- and medium-sized businesses.
Rates of quits are always highest among younger workers — those who tend to be less invested in their jobs and whose lives are less stable. This was true during the early stages of the pandemic when these workers quit their jobs amid heightened demand to eke out better wages and conditions elsewhere (though those gains are unlikely to be permanent). But those quit rates have been declining. Data from Gusto, which typically works with companies that have around 25 employees, shows that the average tenure of people who quit has grown in every age group and in nearly every industry. In other words, older people who’ve worked at a job longer are also quitting.
A similar change is happening at bigger companies, according to data from people analytics provider Visier.
Between the first quarter of 2021 and 2022, the greatest growth in resignations was among people aged 40 to 60 and those with a tenure of more than 10 years, a Visier dataset from companies with over 1,000 employees shows. Older and more tenured people are especially likely to be quitting in knowledge worker industries like finance and tech.
Their reasons are myriad.
“Don’t look for one thing that’s driving the Great Resignation,” Ian Cook, Visier’s vice president of people analytics, told Recode. “It’s actually made up from a combination of different patterns and will continue to change as the labor market changes and as the economic recovery changes.”
Among the more financially stable set, quits are being driven byeverything from a desire to continue working remotely to a greater search for meaning to simply having the means to do so.
Columbia Business School professor Adam Galinsky calls this iteration of the Great Resignation the “great midlife crisis.”
“At the midpoint of life, we become aware of our own mortality, and it allows us to reflect on what really matters to us,” said Galinsky. The pandemic has amplified that effect. “A global pandemic obviously makes people reflect on their own mortality in terms of being afraid of dying themselves or having a loved one or family and colleagues pass away.”
Importantly, the people who quit to hold out for the jobs they want or forgo work entirely are usually the ones with the financial means to do so.
Galinsky, who is currently on sabbatical in Hawaii, says he’s seen it among his peers and among other high-earning knowledge workers now working from his island getaway. He mentioned a Bloomberg employee who quit after the finance publication called workers back to the office and who now works on a pasta truck.
Such workers, either due to savings or a spouse’s income, have the freedom to look for other work, including gig work or starting their own business. A Gusto survey of new businesses shows that they’ve shifted from e-commerce startups earlier in the pandemic to more professional services, like, say, an accountant starting her own firm rather than working for someone else.
Many of these workers, especially those who are older and more stable in their careers, now have the perspective to consider what they really want out of their lives and work.
After more than two years of successfully working from home, many knowledge workers are loath to come back to the office, and some are jumping ship if they feel they have to do so. That makes sense. Data from Slack’s ongoing survey of 10,000 knowledge workers just found that with a third of them now back in the office five days a week, their work-related stress and anxiety has reached its highest level since the survey began in 2020.
Growth in knowledge worker quits also might just simply be a case of people copying one another.
“Workers who have this experience, that switched a job, that became more flexible, talk about it and how they had a great experience, and that leads their neighbor or their friend to do the same,” Pardue said.
They’re also quitting because there are a lot of jobs out there for them. The number of business and professional services job openings is at a record high, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. According to job site Indeed, the number of high-paid job postings has not cooled as much as postings for low-paid jobs (postings for both remain above pre-pandemic levels).
So while the future might look grim, the present looks just fine for these workers, who are confident in the current tight job market. As Galinsky put it, “People believe less in global warming on days it snows.”
Oklahoma just passed its own 6-week abortion ban. Here’s what this one does. -
Abortion rights advocates gather outside the Oklahoma Capitol in Oklahoma City on April 5 to protest several anti-abortion bills being considered by the GOP-led legislature. | Sean Murphy/AP
Obtaining an abortion in Oklahoma is about to become all but impossible.
Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma passed a bill on Thursday that would ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, typically around six weeks into pregnancy and before many even know they are pregnant.
Earlier this month, Oklahoma enacted a different bill that nearly totally bans abortion except in cases where the pregnant person’s life is endangered. Under that bill, anyone who performs an abortion would face up to 10 years in prison and up to $100,000 in fines. It will take effect in August unless barred by the courts.
The new bill, which was passed without debate or any questions allowed, is modeled after a Texas law that went into effect last year. It has exceptions for cases where the pregnant person’s life is endangered, but not for cases of rape, incest, or fetal conditions that make life unsustainable after birth. It also imposes additional reporting requirements on physicians and allows private individuals to seek civil penalties, including at least $10,000 in damages, against anyone who aids in or performs an abortion after the six-week term. That’s designed to circumvent current legal limitations on the government’s ability to go after abortion providers.
“It’s identical to the bill that was enacted by the Texas Legislature last year, and that bill has passed muster with the United States Supreme Court,” Tony Lauinger, the chairman of Oklahomans for Life, told the AP. (The Supreme Court, however, never held a full hearing on the bill and merely dismissed a case challenging the bill in a brief order without explaining its reasoning.)
“We are hopeful that this bill will save the lives of more unborn children here in Oklahoma as well,” Lauinger added.
Abortion advocates challenged the bill in the Oklahoma Supreme Court late Thursday, arguing that it prevents Oklahomans from accessing constitutionally protected abortion care.
“For those able to scrape together the necessary funds, [the bill] will force them to travel out of state to access abortion care. Others will attempt to self-manage their own abortions without medical supervision. And many Oklahomans will have no choice but to continue their pregnancies against their will,” they write in the lawsuit.
It’s the latest in a series of anti-abortion laws passed in Oklahoma and in several other GOP-controlled state legislatures that make it all but impossible to obtain an in-state physical abortion, even while the US Supreme Court’s precedent in its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade still stands.
The court will decide a case by early July in which it is expected to partially or completely overturn Roe, which recognized a pregnant person’s fundamental right to seek an abortion, but found that states could still impose restrictions on the procedure in the service of protecting the pregnant person’s health and the potential life of a fetus once it can survive outside the womb. But even if the court doesn’t overturn Roe, the latest Oklahoma bill will likely still stand given that legal challenges to the parallel law in Texas have failed.
Many Texans have flocked to Oklahoma abortion clinics after their state’s heartbeat act went into effect in September. There are just four such facilities across the entire state of Oklahoma, which have seen soaring demand in the months since.
Trust Women — which operates a clinic in Oklahoma City that provides medication and surgical abortions up to the current legal limit of 21.6 weeks — says it has seen a 2,500 percent increase in patients. Even though the clinic has doubled the number of days of the week that it’s open from two to four, patients still may have to wait two to four weeks for an abortion, sometimes forcing them to travel to other states if that puts them over the time period within which it’s legal to have an abortion in Oklahoma.
The passage of the Oklahoma Heartbeat Act will make it even harder to meet that demand.
“Planned Parenthood Great Plains’ providers have served thousands of Texans in the past seven months because of their state’s harsh bounty-hunting scheme, and we have been proud to stand with them and provide essential, constitutionally protected abortion services,” Emily Wales, interim president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, said in a statement. “Now, rather than serving as a haven for patients unable to get care at home, Oklahoma politicians have made outcasts of their own people.”
Title 42, the Trump-era border policy dividing Democrats, explained -
A child in the Movimiento Juventud 2000 shelter for refugee migrants from Central and South American countries seeking asylum in the United States, as Title 42 and Remain In Mexico border restrictions continue, in Tijuana, Baja California state, Mexico, on April 9, 2022. | Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
The once little-known public health law has become a flashpoint in the immigration debate ahead of the midterms.
The Biden administration is proceeding with its plans to end Title 42, a policy implemented under then-President Donald Trump that has allowed the US to expel hundreds of thousands of migrants at the southern border under the guise of curbing the spread of Covid-19.
The policy that was put in place under a dubious public health rationale has become an overt, de facto national immigration and border security strategy. Title 42’s rollback is expected to prompt an increase in migration to the border that will challenge US immigration and border enforcement capabilities and could have huge political consequences for President Joe Biden and Democrats. Republicans are ready to pounce on the anticipated border surge that could come when it lifts, and some Democrats — including ones in tight reelection races in this fall’s midterms — are urging Biden to leave Title 42 in place for now.
The White House insists that Congress will have to intervene if it wants to delay the rollback past May 23, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is under pressure to put it up for a vote.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas headed to Capitol Hill this week to discuss the administration’s plans to handle an influx of migrants. On Wednesday, Republicans threatened him with impeachment as he reiterated pleas for Congress to fix the broken system that the Biden administration inherited on the border and announced that officials are preparing to request supplemental funding to address a spike in arrivals. Biden has also emphasized the need for a coordinated response to the potential spike with his Mexican counterpart Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
But court challenges could also affect the plans, including a case in Louisiana federal court in which a judge issued a ruling Wednesday that prevents the administration from gradually winding down the policy.
Here’s what you need to know about the policy and the political fight over ending it.
Title 42, explained
Title 42 is a previously little-known section of US health law that allows the US government to temporarily block noncitizens from entering the US “when doing so is required in the interest of public health.” When the Trump administration invoked Title 42 in March 2020 at the outset of the pandemic, White House officials argued that it had been recommended by public health officials to prevent the spread of Covid-19 among migrants in crowded Border Patrol stations.
But public health officials weren’t the ones pushing the policy; the effort was led by Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser to Trump and the chief architect of his immigration policy, which focused on reducing overall immigration levels to the US, at times by deliberately cruel means. Even before the pandemic, Miller had been looking for opportunities to use Title 42 to expel migrants, including when there was a mumps outbreak in immigration detention and flu spread in Border Patrol stations in 2019.
The policy has effectively shut out migrants arriving at the southern border from legal pathways to enter the US (there are limited exceptions for some families, unaccompanied children, and Ukrainians). Before Title 42, the migrants would have been processed at Border Patrol facilities and evaluated for eligibility for asylum and other humanitarian protections that would allow them to remain in the US. Migrants have a legal right, enshrined in US and international law, to seek asylum. But under Title 42, migrants are returned to Mexico within a matter of hours and without any such opportunity.
The US has used Title 42 to expel migrants more than 1.8 million times since March 2020. Many have been caught trying to cross the border multiple times because the policy removed any potential adverse legal consequences of doing so.
The policy was controversial when Trump implemented it: It was clear that the primary purpose of the policy was not to protect public health, but to advance Trump’s political goal of cracking down on unauthorized immigration at great human cost.
The Biden administration has had plenty of opportunities to roll back Title 42, starting when Biden made a flurry of executive actions in January 2021 to roll back other Trump-era immigration policies. Because the administration waited more than a year to take action, it has had to affirmatively defend the policy as a necessary public health tool. And the current reality on the border, where most migrants are being turned away under Title 42, has become the new normal.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found earlier this month that Title 42 was no longer necessary to protect public health from the spread of Covid-19. Many public health experts outside the agency argued all along that it was never necessary for public health because community transmission inside the US, not introduction of the virus from Mexico, is what has driven the spread of Covid-19 in the country. They say that the US always had the capacity to safely process migrants by means of testing, quarantining, and enforcing masking. But the Trump administration maintained that Title 42 was a means of mitigating “serious danger to migrants, our front-line agents and officers, and the American people,” as then-acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said at a White House event announcing the policy.
Not only was Title 42 questionable from a public health standpoint, it didn’t deter migration. Before Title 42, migrants might have been subject to swift deportation proceedings, known as “expedited removal,” and criminal prosecution, which would have made it more difficult for them to get legal status in the US down the line. But now they’re simply returned to Mexico and undeterred from trying to cross again.
That’s reflected in the data: There were nearly twice as many border apprehensions in fiscal year 2021 as in fiscal year 2019. Before the pandemic, only 7 percent of people arrested at the border had crossed the border more than once; in fiscal year 2022, it’s 27 percent, and among single adult migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras specifically, it’s 49 percent.
What Title 42 has meant for migrants
Title 42, coupled with other Trump policies designed to keep out migrants, has impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands of migrants who are effectively trapped in Mexico, many living in shelters or camps along the border and relegated to informal work if they can find work at all. Many of them had nowhere else to go: Gang violence, climate-related challenges, and economic instability due to the pandemic are common factors in their decisions to flee their home countries.
Though Title 42 is still the US’s primary means of turning back migrants to Mexico, migrants have also been returned under the Trump administration policy colloquially known as “Remain in Mexico.” The Trump administration used this policy to send 70,000 asylum seekers to Mexico while they awaited their immigration court hearings in the US.
Biden tried to roll back Remain in Mexico last year, but a Trump-appointed judge ordered the administration to reinstate the program in December. The administration appealed that ruling to the US Supreme Court, which heard arguments in the case on Tuesday and will determine whether the rollback of Remain in Mexico can proceed. In the meantime, another 3,012 migrants — most from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela — have since been enrolled in the program under Biden.
Mexico is woefully ill-equipped to administer to the needs of thousands of migrants who have been waiting in border towns for a chance to enter the US. When migrant shelters are full, some have been forced into camps in cities such as Tapachula and Reynosa along Mexico’s southern and northern borders, where they rely on NGOs to provide basic supplies and services, including medical care. During the pandemic, social distancing in these environments has been difficult if not impossible, and access to testing and vaccines has been sparse.
What’s more, Title 42 and Remain in Mexico have endangered migrants by sending them back to Mexico. The refugee advocacy group Human Rights First documented 8,705 reports of kidnappings and other violent attacks against migrants sent back to Mexico by the US. Haitians and other Black migrants have been at particular risk because of the discrimination they face in Mexico.
What will happen when Title 42 is lifted?
Lifting Title 42 would be a seismic change in US policy for migrants who have been stranded in northern Mexico, in many cases for years. After May 23, families and single adults who are caught trying to cross the border will be processed and placed in deportation proceedings. They might be detained while fighting their deportation cases, a process that could take months or even years, or released while being monitored. If they can’t prove that they have a legal basis to stay in the US (such as asylum or other humanitarian protections), then they will be deported, which would also make it harder for them to legally immigrate in the future.
The policy change would bring challenges for Biden administration officials, who face the enormous task of safely and humanely processing what will likely be a sharp increase in the number of migrants arriving on the southern border in the coming months. DHS and State Department officials told reporters earlier this month that they are concerned that smugglers will contribute to that anticipated spike, misrepresenting the policy change to migrants and overstating their chances of getting legal status in the US.
The administration is preparing for a worst-case scenario of as many as 18,000 migrants arriving daily after Title 42 is lifted, up from an average of about 5,900 in February. Secretary Mayorkas told CBS earlier this week that the agency has been preparing for months for that kind of scenario and has already deployed additional resources to the border to deal with it, including hundreds of personnel, transportation, medical resources, and new soft-sided processing facilities.
“We are confident that we can implement our plans when they are needed. … [W]e are planning for different scenarios,” he said. But he also admitted that “certain of those scenarios present significant challenges for us.”
On Tuesday, Mayorkas issued a 20-page memo formalizing those plans, which include surging even more resources to the border, increasing processing efficiency, enforcing legal consequences against migrants who try to cross the border without authorization, bolstering NGO capacity, targeting transnational criminal organizations, and trying to deter migrants from making the journey to the southern border in the first place.
Border Patrol leaders have voiced concern about getting adequate support from the Biden administration and what that could mean for morale. But if they have the support, they think they can implement the new system.
“It’s going to take us a little bit to ramp up. But we’re gonna get there,” Border Patrol El Paso Sector Chief Gloria Chavez told the El Paso Times.
The Biden administration is also in the process of revamping the way that migrants will apply for asylum. Rather than wait in years-long backlogs for a hearing before an immigration judge, they will be referred to an asylum officer and released while US Citizenship and Immigration Services processes their application. The aim is for the application process to take no more than a few months, but the Biden administration has acknowledged that USCIS doesn’t currently have the necessary staffing levels to make that happen. That would require another 800 employees and an additional $180 million in funding.
How ending Title 42 became a fight among Democrats
Republicans have been gearing up for a fight over the policy even before the Biden administration announced that it would end Title 42. They have decried what they predict will be “unmitigated chaos and catastrophe” at the border once the policy is lifted, advancing their planned line of attack on Biden’s immigration policies ahead of the midterms.
Democrats, especially those facing tough 2022 contests, have little interest in taking responsibility for a perceived border crisis by ending Title 42. Democratic Senate candidates, including John Fetterman in Pennsylvania and Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin, have consequently urged the administration to reevaluate whether it should end. Five Democratic senators — Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly of Arizona, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire — even joined Republicans in introducing a bill that would preserve the policy until 60 days after the surgeon general announces the end of the public health emergency related to Covid-19.
“Unless we have a well-thought-out plan, I think it is something that should be revisited and perhaps delayed,” Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, told reporters earlier this month. “I’m going to defer judgment on that until I give the administration the opportunity to fully articulate what that plan is. But I share … concerns of some of my colleagues.”
Moderate Democrats’ reaction to the Biden administration’s decision to end Title 42 has been swift — but for many of them, it’s the first time they have voiced any opinion about the policy at all. Progressives, on the other hand, have been calling on Biden to end Title 42 since shortly after he took office. As early as February 2021, 60 Democratic members of Congress wrote to the administration demanding that it “safely and effectively end all expulsions under title 42 … as soon as practicable and ensure that migrants can access our nation’s asylum system.”
Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus reiterated that message during a meeting with the White House on Monday: “Title 42 should be lifted, and we should focus on border management policy in order to make sure that they have the resources in order to move forward,” caucus chair Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA) told reporters following the meeting.
What are the political implications of lifting Title 42?
There are huge political upsides for Republicans trying to spin the end of Title 42 as the start of a border surge — and not so much for Democrats making the argument that the policy should be rescinded.
According to an April 6 Morning Consult/Politico poll, 55 percent of voters somewhat or strongly oppose the decision to end the policy, including 88 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of Democrats. That represents the biggest backlash to any Biden administration policy among dozens tracked by Morning Consult since January 2021. But there is a big partisan divide in perception of the policy, and Republicans rank immigration overall as a much higher-priority issue than Democrats.
Democratic convulsions over Title 42 show that the party’s consensus on immigration policy is tenuous at best.
The party wasn’t always as pro-immigration as it purports to be today. As recently as 2006, 64 House Democrats and 26 in the Senate voted for the Secure Fence Act, which built some 700 miles of fence — basically, a wall by another name — along the 2,000-mile southern border. That included then-Sens. Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
The Democratic Party’s identity as the party of immigrants is a relatively new development, and now the party seems to be reverting to old patterns. But in failing to present a united front and make the case for why Title 42 should end, Democrats are handing a political win to Republicans.
“It is important for Democrats to articulate to the American public where they stand, which is for a well-managed border and a fair, orderly system,” Tyler Moran, a senior adviser for migration to Biden who stepped down from her post at the end of January, told me earlier this month. “If Democrats don’t say anything, it puts them at a disadvantage because Republicans are able to fill the void.”
What happens next?
It’s not clear whether the Biden administration will choose to delay the Title 42 rollback. White House officials have reportedly considered doing so, but press secretary Jen Psaki said during her April 20 press conference that it would “require congressional action.”
“The CDC has the authority to determine when the conditions exist to lift Title 42 — that was given to them by Congress. If Congress were to want to extend that, they need to take action. It’s not an executive authority from the White House,” she said.
But interested members of Congress might not even need to act if courts intervene first. A Louisiana judge ruled Wednesday that the administration couldn’t begin phasing out Title 42 for at least another 14 days, but has allowed the May 23 end date to stand. The administration had started using expedited removal against migrants who would have otherwise been subject to Title 42.
“It really makes no sense to us that the plaintiffs would demand and that the court would order that DHS be stopped in its use of expedited removal, which is going to prevent us from adequately preparing for the aggressive application of immigration law when the public health order expires,” a senior administration official told reporters on Tuesday, noting that DHS nevertheless intends to comply with the court order.
At least 19 Republican state attorneys general have already challenged the Biden administration’s decision to end Title 42 in court. The latest was Texas, which filed a lawsuit on Friday claiming that the Biden administration didn’t follow the required procedures to end the policy and that the state would pay the price in being forced to support social services for migrants. The judge in that case has yet to issue a ruling.
Update, April 29, 1:50 pm ET: This story has been updated to include the Louisiana ruling.
Update, April 27, 4 pm ET: This story has been updated with new information about Alejandro Mayorkas’s testimony to Congress.
From The Hindu: Sports
IPL 2022 | Kohli scores half-century as RCB post 170 for 6 - RCB has made one change with Suyash Prabhudessai making way for all-rounder Mahipal Lomror
BCCI reschedules Ranji Trophy knockout dates, final from June 22 - The final is slated to be held at the Chinnaswamy stadium in Bengaluru
Sindhu settles for bronze at Badminton Asia Championships - This is Sindhu's second medal in the tournament; she had claimed a bronze in the 2014 Gimcheon edition
Teamwork makes the dream work - Teenagers Treesa Jolly and Gayatri Gopichand have enjoyed a stunning rise in women’s doubles after joining forces on a badminton court last year. What does the future hold for them?
IPL 2022 | Happy but never satisfied, says Punjab Kings’ Arshdeep on his performance - Arshdeep has not picked up too many wickets but his economy rate in the death overs and clear approach are noteworthy
From The Hindu: National News
Nitish dimisses talk of removal of loudspeakers in Bihar - We do not ever interfere in any religious issues in Bihar, says CM after BJP Minister’s comment
PSI recruitment scam: Former Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah demands removal of Home Minister - Former Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah says Home Minister Araga Jnanendra should resign to facilitate an impartial investigation in the PSI recruitment exam scam
Rains uproot trees, electricity poles -
Andhra Pradesh: Naidu condemns ‘attack’ on TDP leader -
Student misbehaviour with teachers appears to be lockdown aftereffects, says HC - It says viral videos on social media must make the State and society wake up to the situation
From BBC: Europe
Ukraine war: US accuses Russia of depravity and brutality - Pentagon spokesman John Kirby appeared emotional as he described Russia’s “cruelty” in Ukraine.
A Ukrainian father’s terrifying journey to a Russian prison and back - Nikita Horban was abducted from his village and taken to Russia. He would come back without any toes.
Ukraine launches hunt for Russian soldiers accused of Bucha war crimes - The 10 Russian soldiers are wanted for alleged war crimes - but at home, they have been hailed as heroes.
OMV: European energy firm mulls Russia rouble demand - A major importer of Russian gas must decide by May whether to use a controversial payment system.
Ukraine war: Russian strike on Kyiv kills reporter Vira Hyrych - Vira Hyrych, who worked for Radio Liberty, died after her residential building was hit on Thursday.
From Ars Technica
Every little bit helps: How to pick the least eco-hostile laptop - Laptops are generally bad for the environment—but some are less bad than others. - link
Coca-Cola’s first “gamer” flavor—and the history of game-and-soda tie-ins - Our dive into gaming-soda history goes back to the dubious Pepsi Invaders. - link
Review: Oura Ring 3 and Whoop 4.0 are 2 ambitious wearables, but they’re tough sells - A focus on recovery is welcome, but not at the cost of easy activity tracking. - link
Elon Musk sold $8.5B in Tesla stock after agreeing to $44B Twitter deal - Says “no further” sales planned after offloading portion of his stake in company. - link
Details of 9 puzzling hepatitis cases rule out SARS-CoV-2 as culprit, CDC says - In new data, CDC notes none of the first 9 cases had history of SARS-CoV-2 infection. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
My interviewer asked me to describe myself in one word. -
A lady walks into a pet shop and asks the clerk if they have a talking parrot. The clerk shows her a cute little parrot and tells her she can speak to the parrot.
The woman says “Hey there little guy! Let me ask you this. If I get home and you see me, what would you say?”
The parrot says “Hello lady”
“Ok good. What if one night I come home with a man. Then what would you say?”
“Hello lady. Hello sir”
“Ok, but what if I come home with two men?”
“Hello slut!”
The lady gets really offended and starts yelling at the clerk. The clerk tells her “I’m very sorry about what happened. You know what? Come back next week while I train the parrot to be more polite and respectful”. The lady leaves. A week later, she comes back and asks him if the parrot is ready. The clerk shows her the parrot and tells her she can now ask the parrot the same questions.
“Hey there little guy. Do you remember me? I want to ask you some questions. Ok? If I come home with a man, what would you say?”
“Hello lady. Hello sir”
“What if I come home with two men?”
“Hello lady. Hello gentlemen.”
“What about coming home with three men?”
“Hello lady. Hello gentlemen.”
“Four men?”
“Hello lady. Hello gentlemen.”
“Five men?”
The parrot finally gets annoyed and turns to the clerk and says “What the fuck did I tell you earlier John? Didn’t I tell you she’s a fucking slut?”
A man who just died is delivered to the mortuary wearing an expensive, expertly tailored black suit.
The mortician asks the deceased’s wife how she would like the body dressed. He points out that the man does look good in the black suit he is already wearing.
The widow, however, says that she always thought her husband looked his best in blue, and that she wants him in a blue suit.
She gives the mortician a blank check and says, “I don’t care what it costs, but please have my husband in a blue suit for the viewing.”
The woman returns the next day for the wake. To her delight, she finds her husband dressed in a gorgeous blue suit with a subtle chalk stripe; the suit fits him perfectly.
She says to the mortician, “Whatever this cost, I’m very satisfied. You did an excellent job and I’m very grateful. How much did you spend?”
To her astonishment, the mortician presents her with the blank check. “There’s no charge,” he says.
“No, really, I must compensate you for the cost of that exquisite blue suit!” the woman says.
“Honestly, ma’am,” the mortician says, “It cost nothing. You see, a deceased gentleman of about your husband’s size was brought in shortly after you left yesterday, and he was wearing an attractive blue suit. I asked his wife if she minded him going to his grave wearing a black suit instead, and she said it made no difference as long as he looked nice.
Then it was just a matter of switching the heads.”
