The Israeli Settlers Attacking Their Palestinian Neighbors - With the world’s focus on Gaza, settlers have used wartime chaos as cover for violence and dispossession. - link
What a Major Solar Storm Could Do to Our Planet - Disturbances on the sun may have the potential to devastate our power grid and communication systems. When the next big storm arrives, will we be prepared for it? - link
A Professor Claimed to Be Native American. Did She Know She Wasn’t? - Elizabeth Hoover, who has taught at Brown and Berkeley, insists that she made an honest mistake. Her critics say she has been lying for more than a decade. - link
Inside North Korea’s Forced-Labor Program in China - Workers sent from the country to Chinese factories describe enduring beatings and sexual abuse, having their wages taken by the state, and being told that if they try to escape they will be “killed without a trace.” - link
The Increasing Attacks on Kamala Harris - The Vice-President is trying to cast herself as a leader and connect with voters who are not excited about the Democratic ticket. - link
From Vox
Black Nazis? A woman pope? That’s just the start of Google’s AI problem. -
Screenshot of @EndWokeness’s post on X
The Gemini image generator isn’t just suffering from a technical problem, but from a philosophical one.
Just last week, Google was forced to pump the brakes on its AI image generator, called Gemini, after critics complained that it was pushing bias … against white people.
The controversy started with — you guessed it — a viral post on X. According to that post from the user @EndWokeness, when asked for an image of a Founding Father of America, Gemini showed a Black man, a Native American man, an Asian man, and a relatively dark-skinned man. Asked for a portrait of a pope, it showed a Black man and a woman of color. Nazis, too, were reportedly portrayed as racially diverse.
After complaints from the likes of Elon Musk, who called Gemini’s output “racist” and Google “woke,” the company suspended the AI tool’s ability to generate pictures of people.
“It’s clear that this feature missed the mark. Some of the images generated are inaccurate or even offensive,” Google Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan wrote, adding that Gemini does sometimes “overcompensate” in its quest to show diversity.
Raghavan gave a technical explanation for why the tool overcompensates: Google had taught Gemini to avoid falling into some of AI’s classic traps, like stereotypically portraying all lawyers as men. But, Raghavan wrote, “our tuning to ensure that Gemini showed a range of people failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range.”
This might all sound like just the latest iteration of the dreary culture war over “wokeness” — and one that, at least this time, can be solved by quickly patching a technical problem. (Google plans to relaunch the tool in a few weeks.)
But there’s something deeper going on here. The problem with Gemini is not just a technical problem.
It’s a philosophical problem — one for which the AI world has no clear-cut solution.
What does bias mean?
Imagine that you work at Google. Your boss tells you to design an AI image generator. That’s a piece of cake for you — you’re a brilliant computer scientist! But one day, as you’re testing the tool, you realize you’ve got a conundrum.
You ask the AI to generate an image of a CEO. Lo and behold, it’s a man. On the one hand, you live in a world where the vast majority of CEOs are male, so maybe your tool should accurately reflect that, creating images of man after man after man. On the other hand, that may reinforce gender stereotypes that keep women out of the C-suite. And there’s nothing in the definition of “CEO” that specifies a gender. So should you instead make a tool that shows a balanced mix, even if it’s not a mix that reflects today’s reality?
This comes down to how you understand bias.
Computer scientists are used to thinking about “bias” in terms of its statistical meaning: A program for making predictions is biased if it’s consistently wrong in one direction or another. (For example, if a weather app always overestimates the probability of rain, its predictions are statistically biased.) That’s very clear, but it’s also very different from the way most people use the word “bias” — which is more like “prejudiced against a certain group.”
The problem is, if you design your image generator to make statistically unbiased predictions about the gender breakdown among CEOs, then it will be biased in the second sense of the word. And if you design it not to have its predictions correlate with gender, it will be biased in the statistical sense.
So how should you resolve the trade-off?
“I don’t think there can be a clear answer to these questions,” Julia Stoyanovich, director of the NYU Center for Responsible AI, told me when I previously reported on this topic. “Because this is all based on values.”
Embedded within any algorithm is a value judgment about what to prioritize, including when it comes to these competing notions of bias. So companies have to decide whether they want to be accurate in portraying what society currently looks like, or promote a vision of what they think society could or even should look like — a dream world.
How can tech companies do a better job navigating this tension?
The first thing we should expect companies to do is get explicit about what an algorithm is optimizing for: Which type of bias will it focus on reducing? Then companies have to figure out how to build that into the algorithm.
Part of that is predicting how people are likely to use an AI tool. They might try to create historical depictions of the world (think: white popes) but they might also try to create depictions of a dream world (female popes, bring it on!).
“In Gemini, they erred towards the ‘dream world’ approach, understanding that defaulting to the historic biases that the model learned would (minimally) result in massive public pushback,” wrote Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at the AI startup Hugging Face.
Google might have used certain tricks “under the hood” to push Gemini to produce dream-world images, Mitchell explained. For example, it may have been appending diversity terms to users’ prompts, turning “a pope” into “a pope who is female” or “a Founding Father” into “a Founding Father who is Black.”
But instead of adopting only a dream-world approach, Google could have equipped Gemini to suss out which approach the user actually wants (say, by soliciting feedback about the user’s preferences) — and then generate that, assuming the user isn’t asking for something off-limits.
What counts as off-limits comes down, once again, to values. Every company needs to explicitly define its values and then equip its AI tool to refuse requests that violate them. Otherwise, we end up with things like Taylor Swift porn.
AI developers have the technical ability to do this. The question is whether they’ve got the philosophical ability to reckon with the value choices they’re making — and the integrity to be transparent about them.
Should Big Pharma pay poor countries for finding new diseases? -
African nations were left waiting for Covid-19 vaccines. Can the world come up with a plan to prevent that from happening in future pandemics? | Osvaldo Silva/AFP via Getty Images
There’s a stalemate over stopping future pandemics — and it comes down to money.
The Covid-19 pandemic revealed that, in a global health emergency, all the aspirational rhetoric about international cooperation didn’t mean much. Once groundbreaking Covid-19 vaccines became available a year into the pandemic, rich countries looked out for themselves and poorer countries were largely left behind.
That brought recriminations, but also a pledge from the world’s nations to learn from those mistakes and create a better playbook for when a future pathogen inevitably threatens the world. So at the end of 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the global community would negotiate a pandemic treaty to set the rules for international cooperation in future public health crises. Those efforts were supposed to reach a triumphant conclusion this May, at the World Health Assembly in Geneva, where the final product of treaty negotiations would be reviewed and ratified by the world’s nations.
But the last few months of negotiations have instead been tumultuous. The same divisions between rich and poor countries that emerged during Covid are now threatening to derail what was meant to be a landmark achievement in protecting the world from catastrophic pandemics.
The fundamental problem is that, much as they were in the thick of the pandemic, wealthy nations remain largely allied with Big Pharma against the Global South’s interests.
The stalemate over sharing information about emerging diseases
One major sticking point in the pandemic treaty is about coming to an agreement on sharing information about dangerous new pathogens — a key component of keeping the world safe from future pandemics.
Africa in particular is the source of many emerging diseases that could pose a risk to humans. Under the system being contemplated in the pandemic treaty talks, once a potentially dangerous virus is identified, developing countries would share access to viral samples with developed countries, home to the bulk of the world’s biopharmaceutical industry. The industry would then take that information to begin developing medical countermeasures, like vaccines or new treatments. Then those new medicines would be shared equitably between the nations where they were developed and the nations that provided the raw material about the diseases.
In exchange for providing pathogen samples, African nations want pharmaceutical companies to pay an annual fee to support a centralized system for sharing pathogen information and for sharing the medical products that are ultimately developed from that information, potentially managed by a major multilateral body like the WHO. They also want pharmaceutical companies to commit to making a certain percentage of the products developed from these pathogen samples (diagnostics, vaccines, medicines) available for free or for the cost of production in a future pandemic.
But Big Pharma opposes both compensating countries for sharing pathogen information and the creation of a centralized bureaucracy to manage that process, arguing that it would slow down the development of medical breakthroughs. Drug companies have been largely supported in that position by the US and European Union.
Big Pharma’s argument should be familiar to anybody who has followed the drug pricing debate in the US: Whenever a new regulation is proposed, the drug industry warns that it will stifle innovation. Research on drug development, however, suggests that may not be true.
The pharmaceutical industry says it does not have a problem with reserving some of its products for low-income countries. But its conditions for providing that conflict directly with the desires of the Global South.
Pharma companies want free, unfettered access to the pathogen information from the Global South. They also want intellectual property rights to treatments to be protected, which could make it harder for new medicines to get to developing countries by limiting the scale of production. (Relaxing IP rules, on the other hand, would make it easier for other parties to manufacture their own version of the medicines and distribute them in an emergency.)
During Covid, the vaccination initiative Covax attempted to circumvent IP rights in order to quickly produce and distribute vaccines, but those efforts were delayed and ultimately watered down, in part with the support of international actors like the EU, where many big drugmakers are based. “By organizing its multilateral effort with a commitment to saving IP rights at the same time as saving lives, [COVAX] created a terribly limited and limiting vaccine supply system for underserved and excluded populations,” according to a recent analysis in the journal New Political Economy.
Private interests could derail the pandemic treaty
That is exactly the type of situation that a pandemic accord is meant to prevent. But the current stalemate suggests that the underlying dynamics that led to millions in the Global South missing out on Covid vaccines haven’t changed.
Wealthy states remain too often beholden to their biopharma industries. They have established a complex web of regulations that protect the companies’ IP, giving nations first access to the drugs and vaccines their drugmakers produce. That entanglement has created what the authors of the New Policy Economy paper, Matthew Sparke of the University of California Santa Cruz and Owain Williams of the University of Leeds, describe as collusion between developed nations and the drug industry.
“They serve to capture value from biomedical innovation in ways that limit global access to medicines while simultaneously entrenching the dominance of high-income countries, lead firms and the interests of investors,” they wrote.
Many other questions about the pandemic treaty must still be resolved in the coming months, including the nature of the agreement itself. Should it be opt-in or opt-out? The latter would mean that it comes into force more quickly (and that some of its provisions could be watered down). But an opt-out treaty might be politically difficult in countries like the US, where broad swaths of the public are skeptical of global health authorities, and a Republican-controlled House may not ratify such an agreement.
It is too early to declare the pandemic treaty dead — negotiators are in the midst of a two-week meeting to try to resolve these issues. But the obstacles are substantial. Pharma’s influence has frequently thwarted drug cost control efforts in the US and around the world. Let’s hope this time policymakers can overcome it.
Can Biden contain the fallout from his Gaza policy in Michigan? -
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) speaks alongside Shawn Fain, president of the United Automobile Workers, at a press conference calling for a ceasefire in the Middle East, outside of the US Capitol on December 14, 2023, in Washington, DC. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Biden’s support for Israel’s military campaign is testing Arab American voters’ loyalty in Michigan and beyond.
Editor’s note, February 28, 6:45 am ET: President Joe Biden won Michigan’s Democratic primary Tuesday night. With nearly all of the vote counted, about 13 percent went to “uncommitted.” The original story that follows was published February 27.
Arab American activists and their allies are urging voters to cast ballots as “uncommitted” in Michigan’s Democratic primary on Tuesday in protest of President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. They’re unlikely to change the result of the contest, in which Biden is the only major candidate, but they’re hoping to signal their anger — and send a warning — to Democrats in one of the most critical swing states on the 2024 map.
Michigan is home to more than 300,000 people who claim Middle Eastern or North African heritage, many of them concentrated in the city of Dearborn — one of the largest Arab American communities in the US. These are voters who helped deliver Michigan to Biden in 2020, when his margin of victory in the state was just over 154,000 votes. In Wayne County, where Dearborn is located, as well as Oakland County, where Arab Americans also make up a significant share of the population, voters backed him at rates of about 69 and 56 percent, respectively.
Those days, however, are over. Biden is currently losing to former President Donald Trump in seven major polls conducted in Michigan since the beginning of the war. There are multiple reasons for that, including falling support in the powerful auto workers union, which endorsed Biden glaringly late in the game this year, but Arab Americans and young progressive voters in the state have also cited Gaza as an important factor, and most Michiganders support a ceasefire.
Arab American officials in Michigan have become prominent critics of the US’s support for Israel’s campaign, which has killed about 30,000 Palestinians since the October 7 attack by Hamas. The mayor of Dearborn — Abdullah Hammoud, who has Lebanese ancestry — wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times Wednesday that “We don’t have to imagine the violence and injustice being carried out against the Palestinian people. Many of us lived it, and still bear the scars of life under occupation and apartheid.” US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), the only Palestinian member of Congress, has explicitly told voters not to support Biden.
Tlaib’s sister, Layla Elabed, is now heading up the “Listen to Michigan” campaign to encourage at least 10,000 Michiganders to vote “uncommitted” in support of a ceasefire in Gaza. Now endorsed by progressive organizations including Our Revolution and the Democratic Socialists of America, the campaign has been conducting text and phone banking, buying digital ads, knocking on doors, and sending out mailers throughout Michigan.
“This is a protest vote against genocide,” Elabed said. “The resounding sense in a lot of Arab American communities and Muslim American communities is that our voices don’t matter here. And our lives don’t matter abroad.”
Even if the organizers of the uncommitted campaign succeed, they won’t affect Biden’s chances of securing his party’s nomination. But depending on how large the uncommitted vote is in Michigan, it could spell trouble for Biden in the fall, should Arab Americans and their allies stay home or cast a ballot for Trump in a state Biden, currently in a tight contest nationally, will likely need to win.
Biden has faltered on Arab American outreach
The uncommitted campaign is the product of what Arab American leaders say is the White House’s failure to listen to them and address their concerns through traditional outreach channels. Since October, Arab American leaders have been trying to no avail to get an audience with Biden to voice their concerns about the war, said Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, who grew up in Dearborn.
Biden quietly hosted a group of five Muslim leaders in late October at the White House, where they told him that he had failed to show empathy for the acute suffering in Gaza. But that was seen as a slight by the ethnic constituency of Arab Americans, who are also Christian, Druze, Jewish, Mandaen, and other faiths, as well as secular, Berry said. And in February, Biden skipped a scheduled stop in Dearborn while visiting Michigan, instead meeting with auto workers in the Detroit metro area.
“For months, we’ve been asking for meaningful engagement on policy, and, frankly, are being ignored,” Berry said.
The Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee did not respond to requests for comment.
Officials from the Biden campaign and the White House, as well as Biden surrogates, have visited Michigan multiple times in the last two months with the intent of smoothing things over with the Arab American community. In January, Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez held small meetings with some Arab American leaders after others made clear that they were too angry to be open to dialogue in a planned larger meeting. And even after adjusting the plan, there was one meeting in which all 10 to 15 people invited declined to attend in protest.
To Elabed, the fact that Biden sent his campaign manager to Michigan signaled that he was more interested in securing Arab American votes than talking “about how this failed policy is affecting our communities,” she said.
In February, a group of White House officials, including USAID administrator Samantha Power, also visited Michigan to highlight how the administration is trying to get humanitarian aid to Palestinians. In a closed-door meeting, deputy national security adviser Jon Finer reportedly admitted that the administration had “misstepped in the course of responding to this crisis” and “left a very damaging impression, based on what has been a wholly inadequate public accounting for how much the president, the administration, the country values the lives of Palestinians.”
Biden ally Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) — who supports a ceasefire in Gaza and cutting off further aid to Israel — met with Arab and Muslim leaders in Michigan earlier this month to talk about how to build support for their policy demands in Washington.
But Elabed said it still doesn’t feel as though Biden is adequately responding to the concerns of the Arab American community. His sharpest critique of Israel’s campaign came only earlier this month, when he said that it was “over the top” and that civilian suffering and death “had to stop.” Meanwhile, the US recently vetoed a ceasefire resolution at the United Nations for the third time since the start of the war. The Biden administration continues to push for a $14.1 billion supplemental aid package for Israel on top of the approximately $3.3 billion it already receives annually from the US, and is continuing to make major arms sales while offering unconditional military support to Israel.
“For Joe Biden to ignore the very communities that largely brought him Michigan in 2020 is a slap in the face,” Elabed said. “It does feel so dehumanizing that a party that I have supported my whole adult life is now ignoring the deaths and murder of my people and the destruction of my ancestral land.”
Arab Americans say blame Biden if Trump wins a second term — not them
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is urging voters in her state not to vote uncommitted. “It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that any vote that’s not cast for Joe Biden supports a second Trump term,” she said on Sunday during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union.
But many Arab American activists are arguing that Whitmer and others critiquing uncommitted voters should instead lay the blame at Biden’s feet.
“If the outcome is that we have another Trump presidency, it is going to be Joe Biden and his administration and the Democratic Party that hands over the White House to the Trump administration,” Elabed said. “Because when you ignore your core constituency … you have no one to blame but yourselves.”
Many Arab American voters fear a second Trump presidency — not just on the issue of Gaza — and acknowledge that his foreign policy was disastrous for Palestinians and the Arab world, Berry said.
He moved the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2017 — a choice made in recognition of the fact that Israel had made unified Jerusalem its capital but a decidedly controversial one given that control of Jerusalem has historically been a key sticking point in negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians. The US recognized the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights under Trump and reaffirmed it under Biden.
The Trump administration also argued in 2019 that Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bankare not necessarily illegal, lending legitimacy to Israel’s claims on the territories, but the annexations and moves toward it are widely regarded as illegal under international law, and no other country has recognized them.
None of this is news to Arab American voters. But activists argue it’s still hard for them to justify voting for Biden when the Biden administration has in their minds failed to adequately push back on the slaughter of Palestinians after October 7.
“We fought back for those four years,” Abed Ayoub, national executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said. “We pushed back and we found ways to fight back against [Trump’s] policies. But the one thing we didn’t have was a genocide.”
Berry said her organization is pushing hard to ensure that Arab Americans don’t just sit this election out as a result of anger with Biden, which she said is not how the community’s best interests are served, but isn’t encouraging that they vote any particular way. The alternatives include voting for third-party candidates or casting a ballot for Trump. Many Iraqi Chaldean Christians in Michigan’s Macomb and Oakland counties already backed him in 2020, when he promised to shield them from deportation.
Ayoub said he himself doesn’t think Trump is the right option. But given what he’s been hearing from Arab and Muslim voters, he said they’re willing to consider him.
“We’ll speak to [Trump]. And if he does the right moves in the campaign … we don’t mind voting for him,” Ayoub said. “Those dead family members, those dead bodies, those images we’re seeing … That’s enough for them to say, give me a few bad tweets and a few mean words and let my family members live.”
What does all of this really mean, in Michigan and nationally?
The national contest between Biden and Trump, who is all but assured the GOP nomination, is tight. As one of six major battleground states in 2024, Michigan could determine the outcome of the election overall, and Biden can’t afford any significant splintering of his coalition there.
The Arab American community in Michigan is small, making up slightly over 1 percent of the state’s population of 10 million. And outside the Arab American community, there are “not that many” voters who disagree with Biden’s policies in Gaza and even fewer are “so motivated in their anger against Biden that they would vote uncommitted in a Democratic primary,” Bill Ballenger, a longtime political pundit in Michigan, said.
But if the margins in Michigan are anywhere as close as they were in 2020 and 2016, “maybe the loss of support in the Arab American community could spell the difference between victory and defeat for Biden,” Ballenger said. “No wonder he’s worried.”
And while the war in Gaza looms large in Michigan because of its large Arab American community, it’s an issue that has resonated nationally among Arab Americans, who also have sizable and growing communities in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Georgia. The movement to abandon Biden over his stance on Gaza has already spread to some of those states, and his campaign is struggling to secure surrogates and endorsements that could help bridge the gap with Arab Americans and young progressives. Nationally, Biden’s support among Arab American voters has fallen from 59 in 2020 to 17 percent after the war in Gaza broke out in October.
Democrats generally have also increasingly turned against the war in Gaza. About half of 2020 Biden voters said that they believe Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in a February poll by YouGov/The Economist.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll decide how to vote based on Biden’s response to the war; the economy remains a bipartisan priority for voters, and Democrats also citehealth care, climate change, poverty, racism, abortion, and women’s rights as top concerns. Biden is pushing the progress he’s made on the economy and trying to draw a sharp contrast with Trump on these other issues so far. But the number of uncommitted voters in Michigan could signal just how deep Democratic discontent is.
“This is not only isolated to Arab or Muslim voters in Michigan,” Ayoub said.
Haleema Shah contributed reporting to this article.
Clarification, February 27, 10:30 am: This story has been updated to clarify Abed Ayoub’s views and those of Arab American voters.
From The Hindu: Sports
Chennai’s growing Boccia community celebrates friendship, while winning laurels along the way - With national champions in their midst, boccia players from Chennai make sure to not skip a Ssaturday training session, and tell us about how the paralympic sport has impacted their lives
Jaiswal rises to 12th, Jurel to 69th in ICC Test rankings - Joe Root is back in the top three.
Erling Haaland scores five as Man City thrash Luton in FA Cup - 23-year-old Haaland’s first four goals against Luton were all assisted by Kevin De Bruyne
Ind vs Eng Tests | Dreams come true when you hold on to them against the odds - Not so long ago our best players came from the cities and traditional centres: Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Delhi, Chennai. For a little over a generation now, they have emerged from the old backwaters. This continues.
Dedicate primed to complete a hat-trick -
From The Hindu: National News
Here are the big stories from Karnataka today - Welcome to the Karnataka Today newsletter, your guide from The Hindu on the major news stories to follow today. Curated and written by Nalme Nachiyar.
Railways land-for-job case: Delhi court grants bail to ex-Bihar CM Rabri Devi, 2 daughters - The central probe agency submitted that stringent conditions should be imposed on the accused while granting them bail.
Actor assault case: Kerala HC declines plea for cancelling bail granted to actor Dileep - In view of the fact that case trial is nearing completion
Eco-theatre: Tierra to connect children with nature -
NCB-Navy-Gujarat ATS joint operation makes largest ever offshore drug seizure - The Indian Navy mobilised its mission-deployed maritime patrol aircraft and warship, following which the boat was intercepted early on Tuesday morning
From BBC: Europe
To defeat Putin, stop being boring, Yulia Navalnaya tells MEPs - “If you really want to defeat Putin, you have to become an innovator,” Alexei Navalny’s widow says. “And you have to stop being boring.”
Navalny to be buried on Friday in Moscow - The Russian opposition leader’s widow says she fears police could make arrests at the funeral.
Grenfell-style cladding fear after Valencia fire - Construction pictures suggest the cladding used on the building may be of a type now banned in the UK.
Catalonia’s farmers demand more help over drought - As Spain continues to be blighted by a lack of rain, farmers want more government assistance.
Partner of woman held in Russia calls for her release - Dual US-Russian citizen Ksenia Karelina is accused of treason and raising funds for the Ukrainian army.
From Ars Technica
How strong is Nintendo’s legal case against Switch emulator Yuzu? - Nintendo is “basically taking the position that emulation itself is unlawful.” - link
Smallish car, biggish price—we try out the 2024 BMW X2 M35i - We drive the new Sports Activity Coupe, but there’s no EV version for the US market. - link
OpenAI accuses NYT of hacking ChatGPT to set up copyright suit - OpenAI “bizarrely” mischaracterizes hacking, NYT lawyer says. - link
Wendy’s will experiment with dynamic surge pricing for food in 2025 - Surge pricing test next year means your cheeseburger may get more expensive at 6 pm. - link
It turns out that Odysseus landed on the Moon without any altimetry data - “Hours after we got off the launch pad, we almost lost the spacecraft.” - link
From Jokes Subreddit
A Jewish son tells his father he is moving out. -
The son returns a year later and tells his father that he has converted to Christianity. The father is upset and calls his friend who is also Jewish. “You won’t believe this, my son David moved out for a year and came back and told me he converted to Christianity.” His friend says, “you won’t believe this…my son Benjamin moved away for a year and when he came back HE converted to Christianity too”!
Both upset, they call their rabbi and explain what happened. The rabbi says, “you won’t believe this, my son Joshua moved away and when HE came back he told me he converted to Christianity too”! The rabbi suggests they call God and tell him.
The rabbi tells God that all three men had sons who moved away and converted to Christianity and don’t know what to do. God says to them, “you won’t believe this…
I’ve told her not to get her hopes up. “After all,” I say, “we’re only going to celebrate it for half a minute” when she asked what in the world I was talking about, I pointed out “This is your thirty-second birthday”
She says she wants to open an account and deposit the money there, and proceeds to put a big pile of bills in the counter.
This catches the eye of the Banks manager, Mr Barry, who, with a smile, says he will take care of this and invites her to his office.
They start the paperwork for opening the account and the manager starts asking some questions
"Here at The Somerset Bank we are glad to have you as a client Mrs Smith, but regulations require us to investigate the origin of large quantities of money.
Would you mind telling us where it comes from?"
“It’s quite simple, I’m very good at betting”
“Bets? sports betting?”
“Well, I usually bet on less common matters”
“Like what?”
“Well, maybe you’d like to go against me on one of such bets. I bet $200K that your balls are not round, they are square”
The manager is surprised by that.
“You mean my testicles??”
“Yes, your testicles, I bet $200K they are square”
The manager hesitates, he’s sure as hell his balls are not square, and she certainly has the money, so he thinks this is an easy bet to win without risking anything.
“Okay then, you got yourself a bet Mrs Smith!” And they shake hands.
The lady says: “since the amount is so high, I would like to bring a notary to witness so there’s no disputes, we will come tomorrow morning”
The manager agrees to the deal and says goodbye to the lady. That night, just to make sure, he looked at his balls in the mirror, reassuring himself as he started to think what he was going to spend the money on.
The next day, the lady appears in the office with a man accompanying him and the manager takes them to his office.
There, the lady asks him to take out his pants and underwear, and he complies, a bit nervous.
Lady says: “I’ll need to check them with my own hands, it’s a big amount of money and I need to make sure”
The manager agrees, it is a big amount of money after all.
She starts touching the balls and looking them closely and says “yes, I think they might be round”, and at the same time, the notary starts banging his head against the wall.
“What’s wrong with him!!??” asks the manager.
“I told you I was good at betting Mr Barry, I might have lost $200K to you, but yesterday I bet this guy $800K that by this morning I would have the balls of the manager of the Bank of Somerset in my own hands!!”
