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The Struggle to Vaccinate Springfield, Missouri - COVID cases continue to rise, but many residents remain reluctant to get the vaccine. - link
How Andrew Cuomo Holds On to Power - The editor of the Albany Times Union discusses the sexual-harassment allegations against the governor of New York. - link
Three Big Takeaways from a Strong July Jobs Report - The Biden economy is growing, but there’s a great need, and a great potential, for further job growth. - link
Daily Cartoon: Friday, August 6th - “Ah—it’s great to be back in the office.” - link
Why an Olympic athlete’s complaint became an act of protest.
Belarusian Olympic hopeful Krystsina Tsimanouskaya just wanted to run her race, the 200-meter sprint, in the Tokyo Games. But when she found out that she’d been added to the registration to run the 4x400 relay, a race she hadn’t trained for, the 24-year-old took to Instagram to vent her frustration with her coaches and at her country’s Olympic committee.
That was enough to turn her into a dissident — because in Belarus, run by the authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko for 27 years, even a tiny act of resistance can be a challenge to the state.
Her coaches informed her that she’d been ordered by government officials to return back home immediately. When she balked, they warned her, “If you stay here against [their] will, understand that it will lead to nothing good,” and, “that’s how suicide cases end up, unfortunately.”
At the airport, Tsimanouskaya refused to get on the plane and instead used a translation app on her phone to tell a Japanese police officer she needed help, fearing she would be sent to jail if she returned to Belarus. Tsimanouskaya eventually took refuge in the Polish embassy, and this week, she flew to Poland, which granted her and her husband humanitarian protections.
The saga was a startling reminder of how far Lukashenko’s repression now reaches.
“Because Lukashenko feels threatened from so many angles, from so many sides, he sees treason in every criticism,” said Hanna Liubakova, a Belarusian journalist and nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank.
Lukashenko is conducting a sweeping human rights crackdown after massive protests last year challenged his decades-long hold on power. The regime is targeting journalists, activists, dissidents, even other athletes. Ahead of the anniversary of the protests, he is acting so “there would be basically no structures left among those that dared to criticize him or report properly,” said Maryia Sadouskaya-Komlach, a Belarusian journalist and team lead for Europe and Central Asia at Free Press Unlimited.
Experts and journalists say the escalating crackdown is unprecedented, even for the strongman. That threat has prompted some Belarusians to flee elsewhere to escape the clampdown. And in some instances, Lukashenko has responded by extending the government’s crackdown across its borders.
“Nobody who’s active — an activist politician, journalist, blogger — can feel safe,” Liubakova said. “Not inside the country nor outside the country.”
Lukashenko is Europe’s longest-serving leader, in power since 1994 after winning a democratic election in the post-Soviet state. Throughout his time in power, he’s rigged elections and stifled dissent to maintain control.
This was largely his plan last August, during the country’s most recent presidential election. But it was derailed by a political novice named Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.
Tikhanovskaya’s husband is an activist who wanted to challenge Lukashenko in the presidential race; when he was disqualified and jailed by the regime, Tikhanovskaya, who had no political experience whatsoever, took his place as a candidate. To the surprise of many, she rallied millions of Belarusians in opposition to Lukashenko.
She didn’t win, because that’s not a thing that happens under Lukashenko. But she managed to harness the discontent around Lukashenko’s leadership, fueled by anger about the economy and the coronavirus pandemic. That led to massive and historic protests against the regime.
Lukashenko doubled down, as authoritarians tend to do, with even more repression and brutality. “This has been an autocratic, repressive country for many, many years,” Rachel Denber, deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia division at Human Rights Watch, said. “But what’s happened in the past year is just off the charts. It’s not more of the same — it’s so widespread and broad-scale.”
Lukashenko has referred to it as a “mopping-up operation,” with opposition figures, civil society groups, dissidents, and journalists all swept up in an unrelenting dragnet. “There are repressions going on hourly, hourly, repeatedly, full scale,” Tatyana Margolin, regional director for the Eurasia program with Open Society Foundations, said. “And it’s because these are the final, desperate gasps of a despot who knows the end is near.”
The regime has recently targeted civil society organizations, shutting down more than 50 groups. In July, Belarusian authorities raided the headquarters of the Viasna Human Rights Center, one of the country’s top independent human rights organizations. The organization has been documenting cases of political repression and torture, especially since August 2020. They detained seven people, including Viasna’s leaders, and accused them of tax evasion and “organizing and financing group actions that grossly violate public order.”
Natallia Satsunkevich, who works for Viasna (which means “spring” in Belarusian), fled the country in January; some of her colleagues have also fled in recent months. “It was very dangerous, and I wanted to continue my work, and that was the only possibility,” she told me.
Also in July, police conducted about 70 raids on media outlets and journalists’ homes, which led to 15 arrests, according to a report from Reporters Without Borders. Since last year, journalists have been subject to about 500 arrests or detentions in the country.
The most egregious case happened in May, when Belarusian fighter jets diverted a Ryanair plane that was flying over Belarus en route to Lithuania from Greece and forced it to land in Minsk. Officials claimed (with laughably flimsy evidence) they had received a credible bomb threat against the plane. It was merely a pretext to arrest a prominent Belarusian opposition journalist, Roman Protasevich, and his girlfriend, who were aboard the flight (along with 170 other passengers).
The diversion of the Ryanair plane to detain Protasevich violated international norms and prompted global condemnation and punishment, including from the US and EU. But Lukashenko took the risk because he sees Protasevich — and other journalists and dissidents — as even more of a risk to his political fortunes.
“It’s an absolute existential determination to stay in power at all costs,” Denber said. “I think the degree of this crackdown only reflects the degree that he feels threatened.”
And that desperation means Lukashenko sees enemies everywhere, not just in Belarus.
The Ryanair incident exists on a scale far above what happened to the Olympian, Tsimanouskaya, and the efforts to wrangle her home after she spoke out against her coaches. But it represented, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this week, “another act of transnational repression.”
The Lukashenka regime sought to commit another act of transnational repression: attempting to force Olympian Krystsyna Tsimanouskaya to leave simply for exercising free speech. Such actions violate the Olympic spirit, are an affront to basic rights, and cannot be tolerated.
— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) August 3, 2021
Transnational repression — an authoritarian campaign against dissent that is essentially borderless — is a consequence of our more globalized world. Dissidents can more easily cross borders, but so too can the powers and abuses of the state. Technology, of course, facilitates this, both in how activists communicate abroad and the tools authoritarians can use to surveil or intimidate those they perceive as threats outside a country.
“It’s very difficult for [exiles] to disappear or become invisible to the regime because of that technology,” said Nate Schenkkan, director of research strategy at Freedom House.
Authoritarians use tools of digital repression, like online harassment or spyware, something Iran has reportedly done. They can threaten families at home — and make those threats publicly known. They can manipulate legal structure, like the use of Interpol red notices, a tactic that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has used. Or they can engage in illegal renditions and kidnapping, assassination, murder.
The Saudi murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul remains perhaps the most chilling example of what this kind of transnational repression can look like.
In lots of ways, transnational repression is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. A leader like Lukashenko faces massive popular resistance at home, which he sees as a threat to his rule. He cracks down. People flee. Those people continue to speak out. The threat, in a leader desperate to hold power, amplifies.
Some experts and journalists told me that while Lukashenko fits this mold, his ambitions and audacity may be a tad greater than his actual powers. The Ryanair incident, as astonishing as it was, did happen over Belarusian airspace He isn’t Putin, allegedly ordering the poisoning of ex-spies on a London bench. “Your Belarus KGB is not the same as the [Russian] FSB. The resources are not parallel,” Margolin, of Open Society, said.
“But,” she added, “I think he’s definitely trying to send a message that you’re not safe anymore.” This is especially true in the countries closer to Belarus, particularly in Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland, where many exiles have fled and which have significant Belarusian expat communities.
Recently, 26-year-old Belarusian dissident Vitaly Shishov, who ran an opposition organization from Ukraine, was found hanged in a Ukrainian park after going missing after a run. His supporters have blamed Lukashenko for staging his suicide, and though there’s no evidence yet on the actual cause of death or whether the regime is involved. Still, it speaks to the very palpable fears within the Belarusian community. The mysterious death compounds what observers do know: that Lukashenko will divert a plane, will threaten an Olympian, will jail hundreds of people.
“The regime is, at this point, just really dead set on crossing every red line that exists and really trying the Western world with its actions,” Margolin said.
Belarusian journalists and activists feel it, too. I asked Satsunkevich if she felt safe doing her human rights work abroad. “It’s an interesting question because we see the arrest of Roman Protasevich, and this death of Vitaly Shishov in Ukraine, and nobody knows what it really was,” Satsunkevich said.
She and her colleagues have certain protocols they follow, just in case, to help protect themselves. “I feel safe,” she said, “but I try to be attentive and not to forget the danger.”
Liubakova, the journalist, is no longer in Belarus, but she said she knows that her work is always risky. There are threats on social media. There is fear of possible surveillance. “You kind of always keep in mind that somebody might be watching you, somebody might be observing you,” she said. “This is not paranoid. This is not about paranoia. Myself and my friends are being vigilant, understanding that everything is possible at any moment.”
Companies promised to make their boards more diverse. Here’s how to actually do it.
The Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday approved a Nasdaq proposal that could make company boards — and, by extension, the companies themselves — more diverse. The rule requires companies listed on its exchange to report their board diversity and have on their board — or at least explain why they don’t have — at least one person who identifies as a woman and one person who identifies as an underrepresented minority or LGBTQ person.
After a national reckoning in the summer of 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests around the country, public and private companies alike vowed to add Black directors to their corporate boards. The Nasdaq rule is one of several promising developments that suggest greater board diversity could actually happen. There are also other ways companies could hurry along the process of diversifying their boards.
Investment companies BlackRock and State Street are asking companies they invest in to report their board diversity and improve it. Most notably, California passed a law requiring businesses headquartered there to have at least one board member from an underrepresented community by the end of 2021.
The diversity of a company’s board is important for a number of reasons.
A company’s board of directors is in charge of representing shareholder interests and making sure the company’s financials are accurate as well as picking the company’s CEO and holding that person to task. The board sets the tone for the whole company, and its members serve as an example of what the company stands for.
“Employees, customers, and investors are diverse,” Nell Minow, vice chair of Value Edge Advisors, a consulting firm specializing in corporate governance issues, said. “If the people playing this essential role are not diverse, how are they going to know what they need to know to do their job? They aren’t.”
Indeed, a board affects how a company functions and how well it performs. A number of studies, including ones by McKinsey & Company, BCG, and Deloitte, have shown a correlation between diverse leadership and a company’s financial performance. Stocks for socially responsible companies that abide by certain criteria for environmental, social, and corporate governance, or ESG, are outperforming their peers.
“Now that we know diverse boards perform better financially, they have a fiduciary responsibility to diversify,” Stephanie Lampkin, founder and CEO of diversity analytics and hiring software company Blendoor, told Recode.
Despite all this, boards are too often woefully white and male. Nasdaq found that last year 75 percent of companies listed on the exchange wouldn’t have met its proposal’s arguably easy diversity requirements.
Women hold only about a quarter of board seats at the biggest 1,000 companies in the US, according to data from the beginning of 2021 from corporate governance data firm Equilar. While there’s slight variation by industry, it’s uniformly low.
The same goes for ethnic diversity. Board representation of Black, Latinx, and Asian people is typically way lower than their representation in the population at large.
And while diversity has ticked up, change has been very slow-going.
Many companies have made excuses for why their boards aren’t diverse, and their reasoning generally boils down to a couple of things: 1) It takes time. 2) There aren’t enough diverse people in the pool. Fortunately, both those problems are solvable.
Companies often point to the fact that they can add diverse candidates only when board seats open up. However, there’s nothing obligating board members to keep nominating themselves at the end of their typically one- to three-year terms. Of course, having a seat on a board comes with a lot of perks, such as pay and stock options, so board members are loath to give that up.
So instead of waiting for members to leave, companies could potentially add more board seats and fill those with diverse candidates. Companies could also install tenure limits to accomplish the same goal. The average director tenure is currently around eight years, down from nine and a half years in 2015, according to Equilar. Limits could ensure more turnover.
Then there’s the pipeline problem: Companies often look for CEOs and former CEOs to fill board seats. The chief executive role is a rarified position that also suffers from a lack of diversity, so using a feeder pool known for that is a bad place to start. Instead, companies should continue to look further afield for new board members.
Broadening their base of board candidates to include general counsels, law school professors, heads of charities, cybersecurity experts, and business school professors, among others, will lead to greater diversity of thought as well as of gender and race.
Otherwise, what’s the point? In Minow’s words: “Why not just have one person on the board if they’re all coming from the same place?”
There’s huge moral and financial pressure on companies right now to diversify their boards. Some are making progress, but it might take more systematic change before we get to more diverse, inclusive corporate boards from the companies that promised it last summer.
Leading social media researcher Laura Edelson explains her misinformation fight with Facebook.
New York University researcher Laura Edelson is at the center of the latest major Facebook controversy over the misinformation that’s eroding our democracy and encouraging Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy.
Earlier this week, Facebook abruptly shut down the personal Facebook accounts and research tools of Edelson and two of her colleagues at the NYU Ad Observatory, which studies political advertisements and misinformation on the platform.
Facebook says the Ad Observatory was violating people’s privacy by tracking some users’ data without their permission through its Ad Observer browser extension tool. Edelson denies this and said that her team only collected data from people who volunteered to share their information. Facebook’s move drew condemnation from free speech advocates and lawmakers, who accused Facebook of squelching independent research. The FTC criticized Facebook’s decision, saying the company’s initial rationale was “inaccurate.”
And Edelson says Facebook is trying to stifle her work, which has shown that Facebook has failed to disclose who pays for some political ads and that Facebook users engage with misinformation more than other kinds of information on the platform. “It doesn’t like what we’re finding, and I think it is taking measures to silence us,” Edelson told Recode in her first in-depth interview since the accounts were suspended.
In response to Edelson’s claims that Facebook is silencing her research, Joe Osborne, a spokesperson for Facebook, sent the following statement, in part:
“This doesn’t comport with the facts. We work with researchers around the world, and value work led by NYU’s team. That’s why we went above and beyond to explain these violations to them and offered them an additional privacy-safe dataset containing targeting information for 1.65 million political ads.”
But Facebook’s effective shutdown of the Ad Observatory raises larger questions about whether the company is trying to limit outside interrogation of the company’s business practices in the name of protecting its users’ privacy. At the same time, the social media network has good reason to be worried about privacy as it faces intense regulatory scrutiny for past missteps that led to it having to pay the largest penalty ever imposed by the Federal Trade Commission.
Edelson is one of several researchers who has complained that Facebook doesn’t share enough data with outside researchers to effectively study the scale and impact of misinformation.
Recode’s interview with Edelson, below, has been edited for clarity and length.
I want to ask about Facebook’s rationale for banning you. [Facebook] said the project was tracking users’ information without their consent. Can you explain what your understanding is? Is it true that you were tracking any users’ information without their consent?
We collect ads, and we collect ad tracking-associated information. What Facebook is saying is that those advertiser names — which we do collect, to be really clear — are private user information. And I think, honestly, this is just a point where Facebook and we disagree. We do not think that advertiser names and ads are private information.
So Facebook disagrees with you on the matter that they consider advertisers to be users. But putting that aside, Facebook says Ad Observer was also collecting some user data, not just advertiser data — like comments. What do you say to that?
That’s not true. We do not collect anything other than ads. We do not collect any private information. We do not collect user comments. We actually take great pains to be very careful about ad targeting information [so] that we only collect targeting fields that we know do not contain private information.
If there’s a field we don’t recognize, we don’t collect it. And we take all of those steps because we take user privacy extremely seriously. User privacy is our North Star. And that’s actually why, in addition to everything I’ve just said, Mozilla has done a security and privacy review of Ad Observer. And they agree with us that Ad Observer is safe, and it protects user privacy.
It really gets down to this issue of trust, right? Who do we trust to study Facebook? Do we trust groups like yours? Or do we trust Facebook on how to do this the right way while preserving people’s privacy?
I think this is where I try not to ask people to just trust me. I don’t think that’s a fair thing to ask. I show my work. I make my data public; I make my code public. I try to have other people review my work. Facebook is the one saying, “Trust us.” Facebook is the one saying, “Don’t look behind this curtain.”
Facebook has disputed my research on engagement and other folks’ research on engagement with this information by saying that we don’t have all the data. … But they don’t actually make that data available publicly. So I don’t think that it’s fair for either me or Facebook to just say, “Oh, you should trust us.” But I feel like I have laid my cards on the table. I have been as transparent as I know how to be with the public. And Facebook hasn’t.
Facebook has public data it releases to everyone about its ads through the ad library program. And they have other special programs for researchers as well. Why is that not sufficient for you? Why did you start this project to have users opt in and let you in under the hood to see more information about the ads they’re seeing?
So there are two big questions that we think Ad Observer is the best way to answer. First, I really do want to give Facebook some credit here. Facebook honestly makes a ton of information about political ads available. And we applaud them for that. But what they don’t do is make information about non- political ads available to researchers.
The other big thing that we get from Ad Observer is [ad] targeting data. I think one thing that we realized early on is that ad targeting is really important for understanding how advertisers are trying to get to particularly vulnerable populations. And so in terms of identifying misinformation that is aimed at those vulnerable populations, ad targeting is a really important part of that overall picture. And Facebook does not make ad targeting data available through the ad library API.
Would it be easier for you if Facebook just published [ad targeting data] on its own and you didn’t have to build this browser extension?
Absolutely. You know, I’ve said this before, and I mean it: If Facebook made information about all ads available through their API, and if they made targeting information available for all political ads, we wouldn’t need to do this project. I would love to close up shop and go home, to be honest.
(API stands for Application Programming Interface. An API is an interface that allows two applications to communicate with each other to access data. Some researchers have been calling on Facebook to share the APIs they share with advertisers so these researchers can collect more information about how companies target and display ads to certain people.)
Do you think that Facebook is penalizing you more harshly than other groups for allegedly violating its Terms of Service or privacy parameters?
I don’t want to get into reading Facebook’s mind here. But I will say that we are not the only browser extension that allows users to crowdsource ad observations. There are several others, most notably probably Who Targets Me, which is based out of the UK. The one thing I know of that we do differently is [that] we do publish our data as well.
(Facebook spokesperson Joe Osborne sent the following statement in response to concerns that it is enforcing its rules on some data collection tools but not others:
“We enforce neutrally across the board, regardless of the publicly-expressed intentions of those in violation. The enforcement actions we took against these researchers were consistent with our normal enforcement practices in these kinds of circumstances.”)
On Tuesday night, after news broke that Facebook had revoked your and your colleagues’ access, you wrote that Facebook was silencing your research because it calls attention to problems on its platform and that Facebook “should not have veto power over who is allowed to study them.” What do you mean by that? And can you explain this idea that the company should not have veto power?
Facebook is saying that their hands are tied, that they have to do this in the name of user privacy. It just seems to me that if they actually believed that, they would have taken some action against Ad Observer, our browser extension. But they didn’t do that. They didn’t sue us. They didn’t try to block our extension technologically. They didn’t petition the browser extension stores to have our extension removed. Instead, they took our ability away to research their platform in other ways. So to me, their words just don’t match their actions.
You’re not the first person who has questioned if Facebook is trying to silence research that it disagrees with. Do you think this is a bigger issue? Have you seen other examples of this?
Frankly, yes. I think that the public hand-wringing over CrowdTangle a few weeks ago was just another instance of this. [For] researchers who have been looking into how [Facebook] magnifies certain forms of content, it doesn’t like what we’re finding, and I think it is taking measures to silence us.
(CrowdTangle is a data analytics tool owned by Facebook that has been used to show how right-wing media pages gain high levels of shares and “Likes” on Facebook. Some Facebook executives were reportedly considering limiting outside access to CrowdTangle due to concerns that its data was not portraying the company in a good light, according to recent reporting in the New York Times. Facebook disputes this.)
Why is it important for this type of research to continue?
I think we have reached a point where most people do not trust that Facebook is a healthy ecosystem. I think there’s pretty substantial poll data to show that. And I think we’ve reached a point where disinformation online is having really serious impacts in the world at large. Look at the problems with vaccine disinformation, look at the fact that there are still millions of Americans who think that the election was stolen. We just are not operating with a healthy information ecosystem right now.
And [while] Facebook is not the only reason that this is the case, they’re certainly a part of it. Right now, I really believe that we are racing against the clock to better understand how this is happening, to understand why this is going wrong so badly, to figure out what we can do to combat it. This is a right now problem. And when Facebook stops researchers like me from doing our jobs, they’re taking people out of a fight that we just can’t afford to lose.
There are projects that Facebook does with outside researchers, and many of them do have critical findings of the impact of some of the information on the platform. So how do we make sense of those two realities? Can Facebook both be enabling critical research and stifling it at the same time?
Absolutely. To be really clear about something else: Facebook is a big company with a lot of people. There are many people working inside Facebook; there are many researchers who work collaboratively with Facebook who are doing excellent work. And I think it’s important that those folks continue to do their work. I think that what we are seeing is, you know, almost a little bit of corporate schizophrenia. You have to understand, my project is aimed squarely at ads, and ads are Facebook’s business — advertisers are its customers.
And they are somewhat understandably very sensitive about protecting what they see as the interests of their customers. So I certainly understand why Facebook might have a rational economic interest in making sure that information about ads that they do not control isn’t public. I just happen to think that the public has a right to know. And that trumps any economic interest that Facebook might have.
Sen. Mark Warner made a statement criticizing Facebook for what it did to your research group calling it an attempt to cut off an outside group’s transparency efforts. He called for legislation on this. What do you think about that?
I’m really sad that maybe it has come to this. Maybe it is time for legislative change. I think that means that this voluntary transparency regime is just not working.
I know that you’re not a policymaker, but you’re in the middle of this debate. What do you think that potential policy could look like, that would help researchers have more access to Facebook?
One thing that I’ve put forward in partnership with many other researchers, is that frankly, I think it is time for universal ad transparency.
I think that Facebook and other large platforms that use algorithmic targeting for ads or use self-service ad platforms should make all ad data available to researchers in the public. That includes non-political ads, that includes targeting information. I think that’s the next step we need for the public to have more trust in how they’re being exposed to ads on these platforms. I think probably, in addition to that, other forms of transparency of public content on social media platforms will likely also be necessary.
I think we’ve all just seen too many instances where things as serious as terrorist attacks are being planned in public on social media. I think we have probably reached a point where if platforms want to be the public square, they have to be a lot more open to journalists and researchers.
IPL 2021 | No quarantine for overseas players; families, franchise members could be punished for bubble breach - The remaining matches of the Indian Premier League will now take place in the United Arab Emirates from September 19
Neeraj Chopra wins gold medal in javelin, first athletics medal in Olympics - On August 4, he became the first Indian javelin thrower in history to qualify for the final
Tokyo Olympics | Bajrang Punia wins bronze, India matches best result - India also equalled their best ever Olympic medal haul of six achieved in in the 2012 London edition.
So near yet so par: India’s tryst with fourth-place Olympic heartbreaks continues - Fourth-place heartbreaks at sport’s grandest stage continued — the run beginning way back in 1956.
‘It’s going to be thrilling’: Shana Parmeshwar, who is building a new racetrack near Bengaluru - The 5.5-kilometre circuit in Andhra Pradesh, awaiting FIA Grade 2 certification, is set to become India’s longest racing venue
Weekly cruise-vessel service in Mumbai-Kochi-Lakshadweep corridor to bring cheer to tourism players - The service is scheduled to begin from Mumbai on September 14, in keeping with the onset of the tourist season in the country.
Satheesan calls for a COVID 19 relief commission - Leader of the Opposition V. D. Satheesan called on the state government to set up what he called a COVID 19 Relief Commission to look into all aspect
Tap water for rural homes | Chhattisgarh lagging in 30th position, says Union Minister - Addressing a press conference in Raipur, Jal Shakti Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat said there was 25%growth in the national coverage under Jal Jeevan Mission.
Distrust between Opposition and government grows - Government unwilling to concede any ground on Insurance Bill
Bible in Greek and Hebrew published - Bible Society of India collaborates with German Bible Society
Greece wildfires spread, causing mass evacuations - Thousands of people are evacuated north of the capital, Athens, as fires continue to rage.
Tokyo Olympics: Team USA beat France 87-82 to claim fourth straight gold medal - USA beat France to win their fourth basketball gold medal in a row.
Tokyo Olympics: Israel’s Linoy Ashram ends Russian dominance in rhythmic gymnastics - Israel’s Linoy Ashram caused a huge upset in the Olympic rhythmic gymnastics individual all-around final, becoming the first non-Russian champion since 1996.
Olympics expels Belarus coaches over athlete removal - Ms Timanovskaya said she was forced to leave Tokyo after she complained about her coaches online.
Covid: Italy rolls out ‘green pass’ for public venue access - All those aged 12 and over with at least one jab will be able to access bars, cinemas and gyms.
Deep dive into stupid: Meet the growing group that rejects germ theory - Germ theory denialist Facebook group went from 147 members in April 2020 to 18.4K now. - link
The 2021 Audi SQ5 Sportback: Cool looks, but it drinks too much - This sporty SUV would be improved by the addition of an electric powertrain. - link
Spotify calls off plans to support AirPlay 2, frustrating iPhone users - It’s not a surprise to iOS users, but it’s still a disappointment. - link
Facebook blocks research into political ads, falsely blames FTC privacy order - FTC says Facebook privacy settlement doesn’t require blocking researchers. - link
Why I love Bandcamp: Waived-fee Fridays, solid app, no DRM, more - Promo is back for every “first Friday” of 2021—one of many reasons to use the service. - link
Her husband walks in, so one hides in the closet, the second under the bed and the deaf man hides in the balcony.
The husband opened the closet, and yells who the hell are you, the man says I’m the handyman, I’m fixing your closet, you owe me 100 bucks. He gives him his money and send him on his way.
The husband then looks under the bed and yells who the fuck are you, the second one says I’m also a handyman and I was fixing your bed, so the husband gives him another $100 and let him leave.
The deaf man then storms into the room, and yells, I fucked her too, that’ll be a $100.
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It’s not my job to give you the answer. Do your own research.
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A teenage boy was delivering papers to an apartment house. While there, a stunning young woman came out of the apartment next to the mailboxes wearing only a robe. The boy smiled at the young woman and she started up a conversation with him. As they talked, her robe slipped open, and it was obvious that she had nothing else on. The poor kid broke into a sweat trying to maintain eye contact.
After a few minutes of flirting, she placed her hand on his arm and said, “Let’s go to my apartment, I hear someone coming.”
He followed her into her apartment; she closed the door and leaned against it, allowing her robe to fall off completely. Now nude, she purred at him, “What would you say is my best feature?”
Flustered and embarrassed, he finally squeaked, “It has to be your ears.”
Astounded, and a little hurt she asked, “My ears? Look at these breasts; they are a full 38 inches and 100 percent natural. I work out every day and my ass is firm and solid. I have a 28 inch waist. Look at my skin, not a blemish anywhere. How can you think that the best part of my body is my ears?”
Clearing his throat, he stammered, “Outside, when you said you heard someone coming…that was me.”
Edit: sweet front page thanks guys. I wish I heard it coming.
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They end up speaking to the leader of the tribe who tells them that they will be free to go and won’t be eaten if they can go into the jungle and find 10 of the same type of fruit and bring it back to him.
So all three of them set off.
After a short while the first guy comes back with plums.
The tribe leader says “ok, now shove them up your ass and you are free to go.”
The guy is obviously confused, but obliged because it’s obviously better than being eaten. He manages to shove only 3 up his ass and he can’t do anymore, so he is killed and eaten.
The second guy comes up with tangerines and is told the same thing. He gets to the 9th tangerine before he starts to laugh uncontrollably and forces all of the tangerines out of his rectum violently. He is then killed, of course.
So the first two guys meet up at the pearly gates and the first one says to the second: “man, you were so close, why did you start to laugh?!”
“Because…”
“I saw Bill walking up with pineapples.”
submitted by /u/Sarcastic-being
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The bartender spends a minute measuring and pouring ingredients, and when he’s done he takes a spoon out of his shirt pocket, stirs the drink, and hands it to the guy.
The guy takes a sip and then asks the bartender: “do you always carry a spoon in your shirt pocket?”
The bartender replies, “Funny you should ask! The owner hired an efficiency consultant recently to help us streamline things around here. One of his ideas was for the bar staff to always carry a spoon on our person. That way we don’t have to walk to the other end of the bar to get one every time we need to stir a drink.”
The guy is suitably impressed. He has a few more drinks before he notices that the bartender also has a string coming out the fly of his jeans. He’s a little drunk by now so he asks the bartender, “Hey, what’s with the string coming out of your fly?”
The bartender laughs and says, “Good eye! That’s actually from the efficiency consultant too. Basically, it’s tied to my dick so that when go to take a piss, I can just pull my dick out with the string and then I don’t have to spend a minute washing my hands. Time is money, after all.”
The guy thinks about this for a little while. Eventually he says to the bartender, “There’s one thing I don’t understand. I can see how you’d use the string to pull it out and hold it while you’re taking a piss, but how do you get it back in when you’re done?”
To this the bartender replies, “Well, I can’t speak for the rest of the staff but I just use the spoon.”
submitted by /u/PaleontologistFluid9
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