Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• The Supreme Court Appears Ready, Finally, to Defeat Affirmative Action - Moderate conservative Justices voted with liberals to protect the program in the past, but there are no such Justices now. - link

• The Disillusionment of a Young Biden Official - Andrea Flores’s efforts to roll back Trump’s immigration policies faced opposition inside and outside the White House. - link

• What Makes Putin Fear Ukraine? - The Kyiv-based journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk says that the country’s embrace of democracy and anti-corruption efforts makes it a threat to the Russian leader. - link

• What the Killing of Two N.Y.P.D. Officers Means for New York - The test for Mayor Eric Adams is whether he can curb the recent spike in shootings while balancing police tactics against the rights of poor communities. - link

• At Sundance, There Are No Limits to the Art of the Documentary - The thriving realm of independent filmmaking puts personal history in the spotlight, in fiction and nonfiction alike. - link

From Vox

• Why an Israeli comedian went viral in the Arab world -

  

  An Israeli comedian’s viral Arabic satire, explained.

  It’s rare that an Israeli song goes viral in the Arab world, but such was the power of comedian Noam Shuster-Eliassi’s recent satire, “Dubai, Dubai.”

  Maybe it was because she crooned in flawless Arabic. More likely it was because of her biting punchlines about how Israel and the United Arab Emirates have in recent years normalized relations at the expense of Palestinians.

  For decades, Arab countries would not entertain diplomatic relations with Israel until the rights and self- determination of Palestinians under Israeli occupation were realized. But the Emirates, which had quietly developed economic and military connections with Israel, stridently broke with that convention.

  In 2020, the Trump administration shepherded the Abraham Accords, a series of diplomatic wins that Israel has signed with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. Boosters celebrated them as a breakthrough. It was the first time Israel had established new ties with Arab states since it made peace with the neighboring Kingdom of Jordan in 1994 and Egypt in

1979. “Dubai, Dubai” is among the most public and blunt examples of a satirist lampooning the deal, since the UAE doesn’t tolerate dissent and its power in the Middle East has stifled other public criticism. That’s how an Israeli number became an unlikely Arabic sensation.

      Shuster-Eliassi jokes that it’s easier for Israel to make peace with a country 1,500 miles away than Palestinians next door. “In Dubai, they forgot the siege on Gaza,” she sings. “How nice would it be if only all the Arabs were from Dubai.”

      Her Eurovision-style performance — with backup singers framed by spectacular aerial views of the Persian Gulf megalopolis — puts a catchy pop tune to incongruously sarcastic lyrics.

“Dubai, Dubai” resonated. The song, written by Razi Najjar for a comedy show this month on Israel’s Arabic network Makan, was picked up by regional TV giant Al-Jazeera and Arab news outlets, and then traveled all over social media. Shares and retweets filled a void in the otherwise rich field of Arabic satire.

Critics of the deal have noted that in the Abrahams Accords Israel merely formalized already existing contacts with autocratic governments, and the millions in those Arab countries had no say. Businessmen, social-media influencers, and some tourists now shuttle between Israel and the UAE, but this is a cold peace forged largely around the two countries’ shared anxieties about Iran’s regional power and interests in exchanging tech and financing. Polls suggests many Arabs oppose normalizing relations with Israel, but are afraid to express those opinions.

But despite that antipathy and a textured history of Arab satire, relatively few jokes, cartoons, or memes about the Abraham Accords have appeared in Arabic media. Those who take a stand, like a Jordanian cartoonist who mocked the deal, have been censored or arrested, chilling further discourse.

Much of this relates to the immense influence that the United Arab Emirates exerts across the Middle East, where many countries depend on its financial largess. Dubai, one of the Emirates’ six nation-states, is a repressive absolute monarchy with regional power. So dissident voices in the Emirates and the country’s partners have largely been absent. “No one can say it directly, so this song gave everybody a chance to express how they feel about it without them actually saying it,” said Khalid Albaih, a Sudanese cartoonist who lives in Qatar.

Shuster-Eliassi wants to draw attention to the dire situation in Palestine. “My Palestinian friends are suffering and we are suffering because of the situation here,” she told me. “In the course of history, I’m not going to be willing to be listed among the people who were just silent about these issues.”

Can you speak out in Dubai?

The Arab world has a long history of editorial cartoons and a rich legacy of satirists taking on the powerful, including humorists who have found ways to make fun of Israel and its policies without verging into anti-Semitic territory. But their relative quiet on this issue points to a larger trend.

The red lines are hazy. The website Al-Hudood, the Arab answer to the Onion, has satirized the Emirates, but its authors remain anonymous. Though some cartoonists, especially Palestinians, have published strong barbs about the Abraham Accords, such perspectives have been denied the biggest media platforms of the Arab world.

The global financial capitals of Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the UAE are synonymous with luxury, celebrity, and wealth. But neither are part of a democracy. The United Arab Emirates doesn’t have a free press or free speech; while the country recently reformed some aspects of its criminal and financial laws, there has been no political reform.

In response to peacemaking with Israel, protesters took to the streets of the small kingdom of Bahrain, and Emirati exiles put together petitions and hosted seminars. “There was opposition to the Abraham Accords,” said Dana El Kurd, a scholar of authoritarianism at the University of Richmond. “But in the Emirates, it’s so effectively controlled that people can’t really speak up in opposition.”

It’s basically illegal to mock Emirati leaders. Vaguely worded laws prohibit “disruptive propaganda intending to prejudice the public security, or to spread fear among people or to inflict damage to public interest.” Even April Fools jokes are off limits. The government has shut down spaces that had long fostered independent voices, such as student unions and Islamist groups. Activists, like the democracy advocate Ahmed Mansoor, sit in the country’s jails.

Those who have denounced Emirates-Israel relations have faced consequences. After speaking out, poet Dhabiya Khamis was banned from travel. Last year, dissident Hamad al-Shamsi and other exiles established the UAE Resistance Union Against Normalization. The government then labeled them as “terrorists,” and the group cannot meet inside the country. “This fear-infused atmosphere imposed by the government has prevented Emiratis from expressing their real position on normalization with Israel,” al-Shamsi wrote.

“You cannot criticize the government of the Emirates”

The risks are real for Emiratis, and jokes about the Abraham Accords have been restrained in other Arab countries, too.

In August 2020, the prominent Jordanian cartoonist Emad Hajjaj drew a caricature of the Emirates exchanging peace for Israeli fighter jets. In the cartoon, a dove’s droppings land on the face of an Emirati who looks a lot like the Abu Dhabi crown prince. The image was considered illegal under Jordan’s counterterrorism law for “disturbing relations” with a partner country.

After several days in jail during a Covid-19 surge in his country, Hajjaj was released, but the arrest nevertheless sent a strong message.

Hajjaj told me that now he would not risk it again because the small country of Jordan depends on the Emirates financially and politically. “A Jordanian cartoonist criticizing Emirates will not be tolerated unfortunately,” he said. “You cannot criticize the government of the Emirates.

He wishes that the “Dubai, Dubai” song could be broadcast throughout the Arab world.

Shuster-Eliassi was anxious when I spoke with her. Right-wing Israeli members of the Israeli Parliament had issued a complaint against the TV network for airing “Dubai, Dubai,” and she said that due to complications at the channel, her skit for last Thursday’s show had been put on hold.

She understands that the muted response to the Israel-UAE accords is in large part due to restrictions on expression. The song is subtitled in Arabic, English, and Hebrew, she says, to made sure it could reach everyone, especially “people who disagree with me” and those “who have critical thoughts about what’s going on, but they’re unable to say it.”

• A bizarre Wisconsin hospital lawsuit shows how Covid-19 gave workers new leverage -

  

  The pandemic has been hell for health care workers. It’s also given them new leverage with their employers.

  The staffing crisis in health care reached a farcical extreme last week when ThedaCare, a health system in Wisconsin, filed for a temporary restraining order to block a number of its employees from leaving their jobs and moving to another nearby hospital.

  The hospital argued that, because the pandemic had created a shortage of health care workers, it needed the court to block the employees from leaving at least until it was able to come up with a staffing plan.

  As medical workers burn out, isolate due to Covid-19, and leave for other professions, the ensuing staffing shortage has gotten so severe that ThedaCare turned to the courts to try to fix it. It was a striking example of how the pandemic has turned the health care labor market upside down, putting nurses and doctors in higher demand than ever even as they must face the most grueling working conditions of their careers.

  The workers and the hospital that hired them, Ascension Northeast Wisconsin, countered that ThedaCare could have matched the offers made by Ascension, but didn’t. By declining to match and then failing to come up with a plan before the workers were to set to leave, they argued ThedaCare was attempting to punish the workers for its own shortsightedness.

  It appeared for a moment that ThedaCare’s gambit might work: A local judge granted the temporary injunction. But the judge changed course a few days and lifted the order, allowing the workers — members of an interventional radiology and cardiovascular team — to start work at their new employer.

  It was all bizarre. I talked to several health care economists and none of them could remember a situation in which one hospital had sued another to prevent their employees from leaving. It runs counter to the way the US has set up its health care system, which largely treats medical workers as free agents, able to pick where they will work at will. If anything, before the pandemic, the opposite happened: Nurses had sued hospitals, arguing that they were colluding to depress wages.

  But the pandemic has changed the dynamic. The demand for health care services has grown dramatically but the supply of labor is relatively stagnant. That has allowed health care workers to command better salaries, with many moving to traveling nurse agencies that place workers in high-demand areas for salaries much higher than they would normally make in standard full-time employment.

  “What we have seen is a very rapid shift in the balance of power in hospital labor markets,” Hannah Neprash, a health economist at the University of Minnesota, told me. “This is a pretty extreme example of a health system acting out a bit in the face of this totally shaken-up labor market.”

  Why the pandemic has turned the medical labor market upside down

  On its face, there was nothing unusual about Ascension hiring seven members of ThedaCare’s interventional radiology and cardiovascular team. According to the workers, it was not even a case of poaching; one employee saw the job listing, applied and received an offer, and other members followed suit because the pay and benefits were better.

  But even if they had been poached — hired all at once away from their prior employer — that is just how the game is played. Health systems will sometimes recruit entire teams because they have built a rapport with one another that is essential to good medicine. Hospitals will often market themselves as having good teams in a specific area of treatment — stroke care, for example — and they justify the claims based on the amount of experience the workers have together.

  “That’s not new behavior in any way at all,” Joanne Spetz, a health economist at the University of California San Francisco, told me. “The poaching and recruitment of full teams happened pre-pandemic.”

  But in the last two years, when Covid-19 cases soared, so did the demand for medical workers. In some areas, the number of jobs for certain specialties, such as ICU nurses, increased by more than 300 percent early in the pandemic, according to one study on the health care labor market during Covid-19.

  Even with demand soaring, the supply of health care workers couldn’t keep up. In fact, there was some downward pressure on supply. Many medical workers left the profession in the pandemic, burned out by the most difficult working conditions of their lives. There were also new restrictions on medical workers migrating into the United States during the public health emergency, cutting off another source of new workers to meet the demand.

  As a result, the market had to compensate as best it could. Hospitals facing the greatest strain were willing to pay the highest rates to meet their demand. Many hospitals resorted to traveling nursing agencies to fill their short-term needs. Because of this extraordinary demand, those positions were being paid salaries exponentially higher than the typical full-time employment salary.

  “One way to accommodate that demand is temporary workers moving to where they’re needed at the moment. The wages for these temp workers has gone through the roof,” Joshua Gottlieb, a health care economist at the University of Chicago, told me. “That is normal supply and demand. In the short term, it’s hard for quantities of workers to adjust, so prices have to adjust.”

  This effect has been felt most acutely in the practice areas most strained by Covid-19 itself: ICU workers, ER nurses, etc. As Gottlieb and his co-author Avi Zenilman noted in the paper on labor market elasticity, the pandemic had not had appreciable effect on, for example, the wages of labor and delivery nurses.

  But the pandemic may have still indirectly contributed to the circumstances that led ThedaCare to make such an extraordinary gambit to try to block employees from leaving the interventional radiology and cardiovascular team, which focuses on minimally invasive procedures for heart- and blood-related conditions.

  Hospitals have on the whole fared okay during the pandemic, Spetz told me. There was a dramatic drop in elective procedures in the spring of 2020, but hospitals have largely been able to keep those services operating during subsequent waves. The federal government also provided substantial financial relief to the industry. That is not universally true — some hospitals have been forced to close as a result of Covid-19, concentrated in rural areas that were already struggling before the pandemic — but taken as a whole, the industry has not been as battered as much as was originally feared.

  “There are exceptions, but one does not look at the hospital industry and say this is an industry that’s in big trouble,” she said. “It’s doing just fine from a profitability standpoint.”

  But the government relief has since run out and the omicron variant put new unexpected pressure on hospital systems, forcing some to cancel or postpone more lucrative lines of services once again. Hospitals might be feeling the financial squeeze now more than ever, unless Congress appropriates another round of financial support.

  And this kind of care — interventional radiology — in particular tends to be a moneymaker for hospitals, Neprash pointed out to me.

  “They are doing the stuff that is really lucrative,” she said. She wondered what would have happened if members of the labor and delivery or the inpatient psychiatric teams, two less lucrative areas, had walked out. “It would not have put the institution’s revenue on the line.”

  The gambit failed. But that they attempted it at all is just a sign of the times for the US health system.

• Tucker Carlson and the mainstreaming of anti-Semitic Soros conspiracy theories -

  

  Fox Nation’s “Hungary vs. Soros” is an appalling example of the mainstream right’s embrace of views from the fringe.

  The film opens with soaring music, footage of white children laughing and playing, beautiful vistas of classical European architecture. Fifteen seconds in, the music turns dark. We see images of dark-skinned youth, chaos, and blood. Then there’s a foreboding black-and-white shot of a man in profile, hunched at a desk, the curvature of his nose prominent in silhouette.

  He’s the one responsible for all of this, the brown assault on white tranquility. Europe, we are told, is this predator’s “main hunting area.”

  This is the beginning of Tucker Carlson’s new “documentary” for Fox Nation, the right- wing media giant’s streaming service. It is titled Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization, and it purports to tell the story of how a plucky little democracy in Central Europe has carved out a conservative model in the face of a relentless assault by the forces of global liberalism personified by George Soros, the Hungarian-American financier.

  The story is a lie. Hungary is nominally a democracy but it has made a turn toward authoritarianism in the last decade; Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has painted Soros as a scapegoat whose allegedly nefarious influence justifies Orbán’s anti-democratic moves. The documentary amplifies this propaganda, treating the Jewish philanthropist as the spider at the center of a global web of conspiracy.

  “It’s appalling to see Tucker Carlson & Fox invoke the kind of anti-Semitic tropes typically found in white supremacist media,” writes Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti- Defamation League (an anti-hate group). “There’s no excuse for this kind of fearmongering, especially in light of intensifying anti-Semitism.”

  Neither anti-immigrant demagoguery nor whitewashing Hungary’s descent into autocracy is new for Carlson. What’s striking about the report — part of a series dubbed “Tucker Carlson Originals” — is how it uses conspiratorial, bigoted ideas previously consigned to the far-right fringe to make the explicit case that the American government should emulate an authoritarian regime.

  In recent years, anti-Semitism has become more visible on the right in both its mainstream and fringe incarnations. We saw the deadliest attack on Jews in American history in Pittsburgh; Charlottesville, Virginia, marchers chanting “Jews will not replace us”; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) Jewish space lasers; and President Trump’s anti-Semitic comments of both the overt and coded varieties. Carlson’s attack on Soros is certainly not new but this latest iteration is notable all the same — yet another signpost on the American right’s path to mainstreaming what used to be unacceptably extreme.

  The hateful heart of Hungary vs. Soros

  Carlson’s short documentary is divided into two parts. The first half focuses on Hungary and the 2015 refugee crisis, arguing that Budapest alone has stood up against a Soros plot to open Europe’s borders to migrants. The second half focuses on the Orbán government’s family policies, arguing that its passage of tax incentives to encourage citizens to have more children have turned around the country’s declining birth rate.

  Win McNamee/Getty Images

  The “fight for civilization” in the film’s title is thus positioned as a demographic one. Carlson argues that migration to Hungary is akin to an actual military invasion (which Hungary has experienced many times in its history). These migrants, enabled by Soros through his support of civil society groups who advocate for their rights, are effectively trying to colonize Hungary and replace its population with their babies, the documentary argues.

  “Unlike the threats from the Soviets and the Ottoman Empire, the threat posed by George Soros and his nonprofit organizations is much more subtle and hard to detect,” Carlson says. The country’s government is fighting back against Soros and his hordes by closing the border and providing financial support to native-born (read: white) couples to have more babies.

  This isn’t purely Carlson’s invention, but a product of what the Hungarian leadership told him. In the documentary, Orbán tells Carlson that “we would not like to leave this country to the migrants, we would like to leave it to our grandchildren.” Hungary Family Minister Katalin Novák is similarly blunt: “We don’t think we need to import children in order to overcome our demographic difficulties.”

  In reality, Hungary has a very small foreign-born population. Even during the peak of the 2015 migration crisis, most sought to pass through to other European Union countries. And the data on the effects of Orbán’s natalist policy is mixed at best.

  But it’s not the argument it makes about Orbán’s policy that defines the documentary. It’s how it makes that argument. A recurring visual motif is a contrast between chaotic, scary footage of non-white migrants and tranquil images of happy, white families.

  At one point, Carlson follows Hungarian authorities as they apprehend two migrants attempting to cross the border. The two young men, self- described Syrians who appear to be in their late teens or early 20s, are put up against a metal fence and photographed, as if in a mugshot.

  Fox Nation

  It’s a dehumanizing spectacle, the humiliation of two desperate people seeking a better life, but the viewer is supposed to cheer. Just a few minutes later, the film cuts to domestic scenes of white Hungarian families shopping for cars and playing ping-pong. That, the documentary suggests, is who the border officers were protecting.

  How Carlson’s film mainstreams the anti-Semitic extreme

  An obsession with demographics and children has been a hallmark of far-right rhetoric for decades. The “14 Words,” perhaps the most famous neo-Nazi slogan in America today, goes as such: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Swap in “Hungarian” for “white” and it’s virtually identical to Orbán’s and Carlson’s rhetoric in the film.

  The Fox host has explicitly borrowed from the far right in this area in the past. He has repeatedly used the term “Great Replacement” on-air, a term associated with the anti- immigrant fringe, as part of an argument that Democrats are using immigration policy to conduct “the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries,” as Carlson once put it.

  Carlson has repeatedly dismissed allegations of racism and anti-Semitism from watchdog groups like the Anti-Defamation League, which has publicly called on Fox to fire him in response to his inflammatory remarks. The Hungary documentary represents yet another escalation in insidious rhetoric.

  A Jewish financier and Holocaust survivor who funds progressive and pro-democracy causes around the world, Soros has long been the target of right-wing conspiracy theories. Carlson’s film taps into that narrative and amps it up. Early on, he accuses Soros of plots to ”oust democratically elected leaders” and “install ideologically aligned puppets” in their place. In Carlson’s telling, European leaders like Germany’s Angela Merkel and Britain’s David Cameron decided to admit refugees in 2015 because of Soros.

  “In 2015, Soros got to play a role in transforming the continent of Europe,” Carlson intones. “Soros lobbied European leaders directly to get them to open their borders to impoverished people from around the world, and they did.” He points to “leaked documents” showing a $600,000 investment in pro-refugee public advocacy by an unspecified Soros-backed organization as evidence. (It is evidence — that Soros invests in pro-refugee public advocacy.)

  It’s the imagery that gives away the game. Soros, shown repeatedly in stark black-and-white, is painted as that most hoary of villains — the Jewish financier pulling the strings attached to the world’s leaders.

  Laszlo Balogh/Getty Images

  “Obviously, Soros funds a lot of NGOs across the globe and in Hungary,” says Cas Mudde, an expert on European right-wing politics at the University of Georgia. “However, [Carlson’s] suggestion that he has ‘installed’ politicians who are ‘puppets’ is not just factually wrong but also is very much in line with classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.”

  In particular, Mudde notes the connection to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamous 20th-century Russian forgery that claims a Jewish conspiracy is manipulating Europe’s leaders. A more contemporary parallel is a set of comments made by the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, who killed 11 people and cited the work of the Jewish refugee charity HIAS as his motivation for committing the deadliest act of anti-Semitic violence in American history.

  “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,” the shooter wrote on the social media platform Gab. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.”

  Anti- Semitism and beyond

  Carlson is fully aware that he’s playing with fire. Early in the documentary, he preempts the anti-Semitism charge and instructs his viewers to dismiss such accusations as a liberal media smear — suggesting that, because Soros has been critical of the Israeli government, he somehow cannot be the target of anti-Semitism. (A Fox spokesperson did not respond to my request for comment.)

  “The media dutifully pushed George Soros’s agenda on immigration and culture, while at the same time defending him from all criticism,” he says. “They claim any attack on George Soros is anti-Semitic; Soros himself is an opponent of Israel.”

  The move here is to use images and phrases that evoke racist and anti-Semitic ideas without explicitly blaming minorities or Jews. So long as you avoid explicitly bigoted statements, you can blame any criticism on the overly sensitive wokesters in the liberal media, a maneuver he performed in response to criticism of his documentary during his Thursday night show.

  Carlson takes a similar tack when it comes to Hungary’s democratic decline. Forget the fact that Orbán and his Fidesz party have cultivated a corrupt, pliant class of political elites and seized control of 90 percent of the country’s media outlets — the documentary suggests that criticism of the Hungarian government is a function of the left’s jealousy.

  Attila Kisbenedek/AFP via Getty Images

  “The Western liberals cannot accept that, inside of Western civilization, there is a conservative national alternative which is more successful,” Orbán tells an approving Carlson. (Trump has fully embraced Orbán in his post-presidency, endorsing the prime minister in his 2022 reelection bid.)

  Mudde terms the documentary “classic ‘national conservative’ propaganda,” referring to an intellectual movement that has sprung up since the Trump victory in 2016 to put ideological meat on Trumpism’s bones. These national conservatives generally take the view that Orbán’s mix of anti-immigrant hostility and pro-family policies are a model to be emulated in America. Like Carlson, they tend to dismiss and downplay the evidence of his authoritarianism.

  And also like Carlson, they tend to get in trouble for flirtations with outright bigotry. At the 2019 National Conservatism Conference, University of Pennsylvania’s Amy Wax made headlines by claiming the United States should adopt an immigration policy shaped by an understanding that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.” Yoram Hazony, the Israeli intellectual who convened the conference, defended Wax — writing that she merely “advocated an immigration policy that favors immigrants with cultural affinities to the U.S.” (This month, Wax started another firestorm by writing that “the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration.”)

  Carlson, of course, is far more influential than Wax. There is an argument that his obvious provocations should be ignored — that Carlson feeds on outrage from liberals and the mainstream media. There may be something to that, but it’s a sentiment that assumes that Carlson’s brand of far-right politics is not self-sustaining.

  But one thing we keep learning and re-learning about America is that there is a real constituency for this sort of thing. And that is something worth worrying about.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Australian Open 2022 | Ashleigh Barty lifts title; first Australian to win home Grand Slam - The world number one was 5-1 down in the second set but came storming back to win on a tie-break

• Tech Mahindra partners Mahindra Racing - Tech Mahindra will leverage a dynamic and unique eRace Track Analytics platform with live analytics, wind tunnel simulations, and AI powered systems to develop next-generation green automotive solutions

• Legendary Anand to mentor Indian chess players ahead of Asian Games - Asian Games are scheduled to be held from September 10 to 25

• Beijing Winter Olympics | China media says U.S. pays athletes to ‘disrupt’ Beijing Games - The plan is to “incite athletes from various countries to express their discontent toward China.”

• ‘Ralfie Time’ Rangnick has United headed in the right direction - The Red Devils aren’t playing barnstorming football under their interim manager, who took over when they were seventh. But they are getting the job done and look well placed to secure a Champions League spot for next season

From The Hindu: National News

• Union Minister V.K. Singh calls NYT ‘Supari Media’ over its report on Pegasus - Union Minister Gen. V.K. Singh on Saturday called The New York Times “Supari Media” over its report which claimed that the Indian Government bought t

• Curfew-followed-by-relaxation pattern will at best delay spread of Omicron: Study - Simulation models based on mobility data, rate of infection and demand for ICU beds over the last month suggest that Omicron eventually spreads and will affect nearly as much of the population as it would have without curfew

• A million birds recorded during synchronised bird census in Tamil Nadu - About 40,000 greater flamingos spotted during the census in coastal wetlands

• Corruption is major achievement of BJP government: Congress - Bommai government is only a continuation of BSY regime, says Siddaramaiah

• India delivers 3 tonnes of medical assistance to Afghanistan - Prior to this, India has supplied three shipments of medical assistance, consisting of 500,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine and essential life-saving medicines to Afghanistan.

From BBC: Europe

• Ukraine crisis: Russian attack would be ‘horrific’, US warns - Top US General Mark Milley says the build-up of Russian troops is the largest since the Cold War.

• Ukraine crisis: Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical jigsaw - Invasion or fear strategy: the Russian leader keeps everyone guessing on his real plans for Ukraine.

• Ukraine crisis: BBC tries to track down official bomb shelters in Kyiv - Ukrainian authorities have mapped out Kyiv’s bomb shelters, but can the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford find them?

• Aldo Moro: Note announcing murdered Italy PM’s abduction sold at auction - The note, which sold for €26,000, announced Aldo Moro’s abduction by communist insurgents in 1978.

• Disney: Minnie Mouse to swap her dress for a trouser suit - The iconic cartoon mouse is getting a temporary outfit makeover, to mixed reviews from Disney fans.

From Ars Technica

• Keychron Q2 mechanical keyboard review: Enthusiast luxury at a decent price - An elevated typing experience for a digestible price. - link

• The US plans to reduce roadway deaths with smarter road design - A shift in focus from drivers to the role of street layouts and local policies. - link

• Apple now allows unlisted apps on the App Store - It’s not self-serve, though; you have to fill out a request form. - link

• Gov’t watchdog slams federal COVID response, puts HHS on “high risk” list - Of 115 recommendations for improvement, HHS has not addressed 72 of them. - link

• Spotify support buckles under complaints from angry Neil Young fans - Young: Spotify represents 60 percent of my streams. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• For extra cash consider robbing sex offenders. -

  Their address is easy to find, and they can’t own guns.

  Only downside is politicians usually have good security.

  submitted by /u/RayInRed
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• A chicken goes into the library, walks up to the librarian, and says, “Book.” -

  The librarian says, “You want a book?”

  “Book.”

  “Any book?”

  “Book.”

  So the librarian gives the chicken a novel and off it goes. An hour later the chicken comes back and says, “Bookbook.”

  The librarian says, “Now you want two books?”

  “Book-book.”

  So she gives the chicken two more novels. The chicken leaves but again comes back later.

  “Book-book-book.”

  “Three books?”

  “Book-book-book.”

  So the librarian gives the chicken three books, but she decides she’ll follow the chicken and find out what’s going on. And the chicken goes down the alley, out of town and toward the woods, into the woods and down to the river, down to the swamp, and there is a bullfrog. The chicken sets the books down by him. The bullfrog looks at the books and says, “Reddit…Reddit…Reddit…”

  submitted by /u/FunnyCarp
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• A married couple was in a terrible accident where the woman’s face was severely burned. -

  The doctor told the husband that they couldn’t graft any skin from her body because she was too skinny. So the husband offered to donate some of his own skin.

  However, the only skin on his body that the doctor felt was suitable would have to come from his buttocks. The husband and wife agreed that they would tell no one about where the skin came from, and requested that the doctor also honor their secret. After all, this was a very delicate matter.

  After the surgery was completed, everyone was astounded at the woman’s new beauty. She looked more beautiful than she ever had before! All her friends and relatives just went on and on about her youthful beauty! One day, she was alone with her husband, and she was overcome with emotion at his sacrifice. She said, “Dear, I just want to thank you for everything you did for me. There is no way I could ever repay you.”

  “My darling,” he replied, “think nothing of it. I get all the thanks I need every time I see your mother kiss you on the cheek.”

  submitted by /u/tenebralupo
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• I’m saying goodbye to r/jokes for a little while. -

  My wife says I’m on Reddit every 20 seconds checking it and she can’t stand it anymore! I had to make a choice. So I’m going to be offline for a couple of minutes while I pack her bags.

submitted by /u/MyIpodStillWorks
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• A cowboy, who just moved to Montana from Texas, walks into a bar and orders three mugs of Shiner… -

  He sits in the back of the room, drinking a sip out of each one in turn. When he finishes them, he comes back to the bar and orders three more. The bartender approaches and tells the cowboy, “You know, a mug goes flat after I draw it. It would taste better if you bought one at a time.” The cowboy replies, “Well, you see, I have two brothers. One is in Arizona, the other is in Colorado. When we all left our home in Texas, we promised that we’d drink this way to remember the days when we drank together. So I’m drinking one beer for each of my brothers and one for myself.” The bartender admits that this is a nice custom, and leaves it there. The cowboy becomes a regular in the bar, and always drinks the same way. He orders three mugs and drinks them in turn. One day, he comes in and only orders two mugs. All the regulars take notice and fall silent. When he comes back to the bar for the second round, the bartender says, “I don’t want to intrude on your grief, but I wanted to offer my condolences on your loss.” The cowboy looks quite puzzled for a moment, then a light dawns in his eyes and he laughs. “Oh, no, everybody’s just fine,” he explains. “It’s just that my wife and I joined the Baptist Church and I had to quit drinking.” “It hasn’t affected my brothers though.”

  submitted by /u/mzzzm51
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