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

• Sunday Reading: Football Days - From the magazine’s archive: a selection of pieces on the sport. - link

• The Irresistible Allure of Snacking Cakes - My family fell under the spell of Yossy Arefi’s simple recipes for cakes that are meant to be eaten anytime. - link

From Vox

• Migrants in Mexico are on their own against omicron -

  

  US border policies have left them stuck in Mexico without adequate health care access.

  Much like in the US, omicron has led a spike in caseloads and hospitalizations across Mexico. For thousands of migrants stranded in the country due to US border policy, that has meant exposure to the highly contagious variant. Worse, many of these migrants face the prospect of Covid-19 infection without widespread access to vaccines or health care.

  Migrants are legally entitled to public health care in Mexico, but nonprofits serving migrants say hospitals are overwhelmed by Mexican Covid-19 patients, and as a result, migrants are the first to be turned away.

  Neither the US nor the Mexican government provides data on the number of migrants stranded in Mexico. But the data that is available provides some clues. For one, asylum applications in Mexico rose sharply in 2021, suggesting that tens of thousands of migrants looking to enter the US have decided to stay in Mexico instead. Last year, there were 131,000 of those asylum seekers. The Biden administration has also expelled migrants at the border more than 1.1 million times since January 2021. Most of these migrants were sent back to Mexico, but some, including nearly 14,000 Haitians, were instead sent back to their home country.

  Based on those numbers, the number of people waiting for entry into the US could range from the thousands to nearly 1 million. Many are living in shelters, and in camps in cities such as Tapachula and Reynosa along Mexico’s southern and northern borders, in environments that make social distancing difficult if not impossible. There are NGOs providing them with access to Covid-19 testing and treatment as well as primary care. But those NGOs are increasingly overwhelmed by demand. And there is only so much they can do to prevent the spread of Covid-19 given that many have been unable to secure a supply of vaccines.

  “The pandemic isn’t any more significant on this side of the border than it is on the other side of the border,” said Mark McDonald, a project manager for the health care NGO Global Response Management, which operates a clinic for migrants in Matamoros, Mexico. “But resources on the border are still relatively scarce and hospital systems are overrun.”

  More than 635,000 people, or about 13.4 percent of those who have tested positive, are currently hospitalized with the virus in Mexico. Hospitals are stretched thin. According to data from the Mexican Ministry of Health, 228 hospitals across the country have reported that more than 70 percent of their beds were in use as of January 26, compared to just 71 hospitals the month before; 125 of those institutions had no available beds. Daily average deaths have more than doubled over the last month to 330 as of January 26, but are still well below their peak of more than 1,100 before vaccines were available. More than 303,000 people have died of the virus since the outset of the pandemic in Mexico.

  A shortage of hospital space means many sick migrants don’t have anywhere to go. Many face probable danger if they return home. And they can’t enter the US.

  The Biden administration reimplemented the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” program under court order in December 2021; under that program, those seeking entry into the US are required to wait in Mexico until their immigration court hearings. Migrants are also being kept from entering the US under a pandemic- related border restriction first implemented by the Trump administration known as the Title 42 policy, which allows the federal government to bar noncitizens entry into the US for health reasons. The former policy saw those 267 asylum seekers sent back to Mexico recently, and the latter is responsible for Biden’s 1.1 million expulsions in the past year.

  And all those people are more than Mexico can support — particularly amid the current omicron spike.

  The country reported more than 44,000 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday, a more than tenfold increase since December. That is likely an undercount due to the scarcity of available tests, and cases are not being measured among migrants specifically. The current hot spots are primarily in tourist destinations, including Baja California Sur, Yucatan, and Quintana Roo, but transmission remains high across the country.

  About 60 percent of the Mexican population is fully vaccinated, more or less in line with the US, where about 64 percent population is vaccinated. The US has vaccinated the few hundred migrants subject to the Remain in Mexico program so far before sending them back across the border, with adults receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccines and eligible children receiving the Pfizer vaccine.

  There have also been local vaccination campaigns in cities like Tijuana, where thousands of migrants are staying. But Mexico has not launched a national campaign to get migrants vaccinated because it just doesn’t have the capacity. The US does have the capability to fill this void. It’s chosen not to, however, and has instead offloaded its responsibility for the health of those it’s keeping in legal limbo onto Mexico.

  “I think that [the US] has put blinders on and said, ‘We’ve managed whatever crisis may be occurring on the United States side.’ We forget that there’s another side of the border that we’ve also affected,” McDonald said.

  Migrants rely on NGOs to access health care

  Global Response Management is the only health care NGO serving the migrant community in Matamoros, and right now, it’s seeing a peak in demand: about 30 to 40 patients per day with more on a waiting list. The vast majority of those seeking care are Haitians, but there are also Mexicans from the southern part of the country, Nicaraguans, Hondurans, and Guatemalans.

  The clinic is only open Monday through Friday, and while it does have some urgent care capabilities, it doesn’t have the capacity to handle every emergency medical need. For that, it still refers patients to the local hospital system — but if there aren’t enough beds due to Covid-19 patients, migrants are the lowest priority.

  Recently, one of the clinic’s patients was in labor with a high-risk pregnancy and was told that the hospital was full. The clinic was able to partner with legal organizations to help get the patient to a hospital on the other side of the border through what’s called “parole,” a kind of temporary permission to enter the US. But that took time that not every patient might have.

  “Even emergent patients don’t have the guarantee that they’re going to have access to a standard level of care along the border,” McDonald said.

  The clinic has been administering Covid-19 tests, including for new intakes in migrant shelters and for people who have been granted parole into the US. That’s critical to ensuring that migrants aren’t spreading the virus when they are in settings where they can’t abide by social distancing. But those programs are expensive and have been entirely funded by private donors — not by the US or Mexican governments.

  Testing is the main preventative measure migrants have access to; vaccines simply aren’t available to most. To the extent that migrants are vaccinated, it’s usually because they have been enrolled in the United States’ Remain in Mexico program and were vaccinated before they were sent back to Mexico. These migrants are in the minority, however. When it comes to vaccination, there’s little NGOs can do to pick up slack from the US and Mexican governments. Global Response Management, for example, can’t administer vaccines on its own without government support because they have not been able to acquire any and they would need more staff.

  “We would like to be able to do that. But we’ve also recognized an unwillingness or a failure of the US government to make that possible for organizations like ours,” McDonald said. “It should be their responsibility to make sure that public health is a is a priority.”

  Biden can safely resume migrant processing at the border

  The best thing that the US could do to support the health of migrants in Mexico would be to allow them to cross the border to pursue their asylum claims.

  That would require lifting Title 42. The Biden administration has repeatedly defended the policy in court as a public health imperative, but public health experts have long argued that there is no scientific rationale for the policy. They say it’s always been possible to safely process people at the border throughout the pandemic, but especially so now that the US has vaccines, an ample supply of tests, and evidence to support that good masks work to prevent the spread of the virus.

  “Many of us would argue that Title 42 was never justified from the very beginning,” said Dr. Michele Heisler, medical director at Physicians for Human Rights. “Now we have all the tools — it’s just making it even more apparent that this is a political decision.”

  The US recently started requiring that all noncitizens crossing the US-Mexico border provide proof of a US-approved vaccination. But migrants might not be able to access those vaccines in their country of origin or in Mexico. The US has the resources to administer vaccines to them and should step up to do so, Heisler said.

  Indeed, the US is weighing a broader vaccination program for the migrants that it currently allowing across the border (a group of people that’s a much smaller fraction of the migrant population stranded in Mexico.) Under the program, migrants would reportedly receive their first jab at ports of entry prior to being allowed to cross the border, and a second dose would become a condition of being granted parole while they await their court hearings in the US.

  Creating a similar initiative for migrants the US is not allowing to cross would go a long way towards helping reduce infection rates among those trapped in Mexico.

  One potential obstacle could be vaccine hesitancy among the migrant population, Heisler said. That was an obstacle in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities due to a lack of trust in detention center medical providers administering the shots. That could be overcome by sending trusted messengers — such as NGOs like Global Response Management that are already serving the migrant population — and culturally competent communication.

  But the challenges of rolling out a vaccine campaign for migrants wouldn’t really be any different to those that the US has encountered before in getting its own population vaccinated.

  “I think the logistics are pretty straightforward. We’re not in the first year of the pandemic. We know how to do this now,” Heisler said.

• Can VR art help us see the real world differently? -

  

  How artists are thinking about the future of virtual reality.

  I sat on my couch, a virtual reality (VR) headset strapped to my face, my feet hovering over a campfire. If I craned my neck up, I could see the stars. Two trickster poets, young Indigenous men, approached me and looked me straight in the eye. They’d just guided me through true, heart-wrenching stories about other Indigenous men: one who was abused in foster care as a child, and one who died waiting for care in a hospital emergency room for 34 hours. Now, the poets told me, it was time for me to bear witness and consider what my role in the story might be.

  The intimacy of their gaze was a little uncomfortable. It was nothing like watching a movie in which someone looks straight into the camera. I was aware of my eyes, my face, my expression, my impulse to look away, even though I knew they couldn’t see me.

  “I wanted people to look them in their eyes, and be able to see their faces closely, clearly in a different way than you would see in 2D media,” the director of This Is Not a Ceremony told me when I called him afterward. Colin Van Loon is a native artist from Alberta’s Piikani Nation; he works under his traditional name of Ahnahktsipiitaa. He hoped that experience might foster a deeper understanding of the stories themselves.

  Sundance Institute

  He was right. But it sure wasn’t what I had expected.

  I’ve been accustomed to thinking of VR as a platform for escape — leaving this world and entering a “fake” one. It’s often depicted that way in dystopian fiction, or in movies like Ready Player One.

  My experiences with VR have been decidedly mixed, whether at festivals or in museum exhibitions; that feeling of dissociation was often reinforced. That rubs me the wrong way because I strongly believe if we choose to habitually disconnect from our physical reality then we risk losing what makes us human. And even when artists have the best intentions, sometimes the art just doesn’t work for me.

  Every year at Sundance, I’ve wandered through the Festival’s New Frontier section — usually hosted in a big building in downtown Park City, Utah — looking at pieces about identity and imagination and, one year, the ways that scientists are using VR to retrain the brains of paraplegics.

Sometimes it is startling and thought-provoking. I’ve thought about the medical use of VR many times in the years since. But other times it has felt like sitting through a 10-minute 3D sermon, or an Epcot exhibit, or a very janky version of The Sims.

Van Loon’s piece stuck with me not just because of the subject matter, but because it made me aware of my own body in a startling way. I hadn’t felt like a floating avatar or a ghost, as sometimes happens in VR; I was very aware of my own physicality. The experience rested in the back of my mind, like a lingering dream.

This Is Not a Ceremony was among the most affecting pieces I’d seen in 2022’s New Frontier section. This year, about three weeks before the festival was slated to begin, Sundance pivoted from an in-person event with robust virtual offerings to a fully virtual event. But New Frontier was the least affected section; the Festival had already announced that the section would be entirely hosted in the Spaceship, their VR platform. (The “spaceship” metaphor furnished some fun visual touches; in some places, you could look out the windows and see the earth passing below.) A plethora of interesting projects was accessible via computer, VR headset, or mobile device.

Roaming the Spaceship’s gallery during Sundance revealed that artists are thinking about VR in many different ways. For instance, Seven Grams, directed by war correspondent Karim Ben Khelifa, turns audiences’ phones into portals to see the human cost of creating those very devices. On the Morning You Wake (To the End of the World), which I watched through a headset, is a virtual reality documentary that immerses the audience in the experience of waking up to the 2018 ballistic missile alert in Hawaii. I watched — or, really, listened to — 32 Sounds, a documentary that felt like bathing in aural sensation. They Dream in my Bones - Insemnopedy II, by the artist Faye Formisano, takes the viewer on a journey through a fluttering dream reality lodged in the bones of a skeleton. (It’s trippy.)

Yet Van Loon’s perspective startled me. “I’m very excited by this idea that [VR] connects the mind and the body,” he says. Wait, what? I thought. Then, as he went on to remind me that VR more or less short-circuits the ways the brain deals with images, I realized he was correct. You might jump the first time a monster appears in a horror movie, he says, but probably not the second or third time you watch the movie. But in a VR experience — he cites one in which you’re standing on top of a tall building, feeling vertigo — your brain can’t quite handle it, and your body reacts: “There’s nothing I can tell myself that will take away from this reaction, and I think that’s such a powerful tool for storytelling, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.”

In other words, the distance I can place between myself and the image onscreen in a movie evaporates in VR. Whether that might evaporate in the future for people who spend hours and hours in VR remains to be seen, but the immersive, disorienting experience that many hardcore gamers still experience during gameplay suggests it may not.

That also makes VR a unique space in which to create art. One of the best films in the festival was an extraordinary documentary entitled We Met in Virtual Reality, directed by Joe Hunting and entirely filmed on the social VR platform VRChat. I confess that I expected the film to be gimmicky. I was totally wrong. Instead, it’s a beautifully shot meditation on connection and finding a community where you belong, featuring subjects who’d found genuine friendships and relationships in VRChat that extended into the physical world.

Hunting and I talked via Zoom, and he told me that he actually shot his movie as an avatar, holding a virtual camera, replicating the experience of real-life production: adjusting aperture, shooting handheld, and zooming in and racking focus, just as he would in a physical production. Hunting also described an “intimate tension” that exists between filmmaker and subject in that space, between himself and the people he interviewed in the film, which combines conversations with observational techniques. It’s something he hoped to replicate for the audience, who might forget they were watching VR and not “reality.”

And he’s hopeful that the virtual platform will make space for other great art to be created across time and space, in a way that simply isn’t possible in the physical world. Hunting wonders if, in the future, VR will be “just another space that we’ll easily transition into whenever we want to go and see something that we can’t quite reach in the real world.” That, to me, seems quite feasible — that I might want to watch a theater piece or participate in a conversation or take a class (subjects in his film teach sign language and belly dancing) in a more immersive way than logging into Zoom or watching a livestream. In VR, I don’t have to just watch; I can participate.

Participatory VR was a big theme in this year’s Sundance Spaceship, which admittedly was a little intimidating for me. But wearing a VR headset, I went as an avatar to one of the Spaceship’s virtual venues, the Cinema House, to watch a talk between artist and technologist Amelia Winger-Bearskin and writer and curator Jesse Damiani.

Two days later, I met Winger-Bearskin, this time with my real face on, in the virtual reality facilitated by a more familiar technology: Zoom. I wanted to ask her about her experience with and hopes for art in VR.

“I like to think of VR as a dream technology,” she says, putting words to what had lingered in my subconscious after This Is Not a Ceremony. Winger-Bearskin, who holds an endowed chair at the University of Florida’s Digital Worlds Institute, where she is an associate professor of artificial intelligence and the arts, is also Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan, and draws on her own tradition when thinking about virtual reality.

“In my culture, dreams and dream medicine is a really powerful and traditional thing through which we connect with our higher selves and our ancestors,” she went on to explain. And by thinking about VR through the metaphor as a dream — an idea that was reinforced when a friend recounted a dream to Winger-Bearskin, only to realize it was actually a VR art project of hers they’d mentally processed as a dream — then perhaps there are possibilities there, too.

That all sounds too optimistic, but the more I considered what Winger- Bearskin was saying, the more I realized this is what art is always trying to do. The goal of great art is never just to provide an escape from this world. It’s to dislocate the audience — the reader, the watcher, the listener, the viewer — from their present context so that when they return to it, they see it differently. Escape has its place, but great art eventually directs us back to the world around us, helping us see it in a new way, and more importantly, see what it could be.

Yes, VR can be merely escapist. But every artist I spoke to raised the same potentially counterintuitive point as Van Loon: that VR art can connect us to our bodies and the physical world when it helps us “re-see” our reality.

That can present challenges for artists, depending on what they’re aiming to do. “I think it’s very hard to do something preachy to someone in that space,” Winger-Bearskin says, “because you’re like, ‘Well, look, I’m putting this on my face. This is now in my body. You’re close to me, and I don’t really know if I want you to talk to me.’”

Similarly, Van Loon notes, there’s a danger in depending on VR too much to create “empathy.” “It’s something we have to be very careful with,” he says. “It’s terrible that somebody can watch somebody’s life, take off the headset, and forget about the act of witnessing.” In creating a piece that he hoped would have an effect on the viewer, “I wanted to give audience members a real task or responsibility, a duty, something they can carry forward after the film is finished,” he says.

And the VR artist is facing a world rife with challenges. The technology is still expensive and not always easy for your average person to use, if they even want to. There’s also the mounting danger of “colonization” of VR spaces, as Winger-Bearskin terms it, by companies like Facebook, which recently renamed itself Meta and sells the Oculus Quest headset that I was using to access the Spaceship. (I was nonplussed by the discovery that I had to revive my long-deactivated Facebook account in order to log into the headset.) And finding new distribution models for art in VR is going to be tricky, as several artists noted.

If we’ve learned anything from the last few decades of the Internet, those aren’t small hurdles. But the work itself still brings a lot of joy. Documentary filmmaker Sam Green had come up with a delightful plan to debut his 32 Sounds on Sundance’s opening night, with a flesh-and-blood crowd and a virtual crowd being able to see each other filing into their respective theaters before the film began. “So the virtual world and the real world would combine, and everybody would look at each other,” he says to me via Zoom, laughing.

In the end, 32 Sounds only premiered in virtual reality. It’s a documentary about sound, designed to be watched as a film while wearing headphones, or live via a full VR headset. The sound is carefully designed so that you feel like you’re in the film, rather than just an observer, in a way that’s even more immersive than a state-of-the-art movie theater. (Also, at one point, there’s a five-minute dance break.)

Green’s goal was that audiences would find themselves listening to ordinary sounds — a bird, a barking dog, a faucet in the next room — with a totally different set of ears after experiencing 32 Sounds. “There’s a way in which engaging your ears and being open to the sounds around you is very pleasurable, and deep, and a transformative experience,” Green says. “I liked that idea of a movie with a very simple ambition to not change the world, or to get somebody off death row, but just change the way people engage with the world in a small way, in a measurable way.”

For Van Loon, inspiration for reimagining the world through his art lies in his own nation’s tradition — specifically around time. “We don’t have many words for the future or the past,” he tells me. “We have a word for yesterday, and we have a word for the day before yesterday. We have a word for tomorrow, and we have a word for the day after tomorrow.”

That mental model informs his work. If VR art can compress space and create intimacy, then it can recreate that feeling of being close to your own ancestors and descendants across time, as This Is Not a Ceremony does. Thinking about his great-great-great-grandfather or his future grandkids as only two days away, “changes the way you look at things, the way you do things,” he says.

Using VR to help audiences re-situate themselves in space and time might be able to change the way they see the world. And in the end, that’s what the art that lingers in our subconscious — like a dream with some insight for us to attend to — can do best.

• Of course pre-K and cash help kids … right? -

  

  What one study finding pre-K harms kids, and another finding cash can change their brains, can tell us about public policy.

  A team of neuroscientists and social scientists released a study on Monday finding that monthly cash payments of $333 to parents changed their infant children’s brain development. I wrote positively about it, as did the great Jason DeParle at the New York Times.

  The main response I saw to the story on Twitter was some combination of “duh” and “we shouldn’t need this.” One science journalist sneered, “I think the NYT just discovered social determinants.” A historian wrote, “Something’s seriously wrong when we need brain scans to argue that moms and their kids shouldn’t live in poverty.”

  Then I saw another study released around the same time, suggesting that universal pre-K in Tennessee led to worse academic outcomes and increased aggression and misbehavior once kids were in middle school.

  The first lesson from these two studies is that very few questions in social science have obvious answers. Running a neurological experiment on the effects of cash isn’t inherently disrespectful to poor mothers or a waste of energy; it can uncover useful, surprising information.

  My other takeaway is that child development is especially tricky to research, and focusing on just one study (which is something I and other journalists have certainly been guilty of) can lead you astray.

  What the hell happened with Tennessee pre-K?

  The pre-K study was conducted by researchers at Vanderbilt University and looks at Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K, or TN-VPK, which has existed in some form since 1996 and offers many 3- and 4-year-olds free access to pre-K services. The actual pre-K sites were often oversubscribed, and had to resort to random lotteries to pick enrollees. The researchers exploited that feature to track students who were randomly able to enroll in pre-K in 2009 and 2010, and compare them to students who, by random chance, couldn’t enroll.

  In prior work, summarized here, the same authors found that kids who got into pre-K outperformed ones who didn’t on intelligence tests — when they were 5. By the end of kindergarten, however, the benefits seemed to evaporate and by third grade, the pre-K kids were actually doing worse, with lower test scores in math and science.

  The new study follows the same children through sixth grade, adding three more years of data. The upshot? the results just keep getting worse. Reading, writing, and science scores in sixth grade were all lower among pre-K kids than other kids, and the gap has grown since third grade. The researchers also found that pre-K kids were likelier to skip school or get into disciplinary trouble as they got older.

  Why? They don’t really know. The answer might depend on what the students who weren’t in the pre-K program were doing. The authors report that 63 percent were at home with a parent, relative, or other caretakers, and 34 percent were in private day care or Head Start. So you can read the study as suggesting that being home with a parent, grandparent, or nanny is better than going to pre-K; or maybe what’s going on is that Head Start and private care are better for kids than the Tennessee program. It’s hard to say.

  But this isn’t just one study. Research into Quebec’s day care program found long-run negative effects on kids’ behavior, including increased crime. The idea that certain forms of pre-K or child care can harm kids has significant empirical support.

  This stuff is complicated!

  So, what’s my point? It’s not that we should just abandon pre-K as a concept. As Kelsey Piper has written for Future Perfect, you have to weigh any effects on kids alongside benefits for parents, who are less stressed and more able to work with pre-K. Several studies, including ones on the Quebec program that had negative effects on kids, find that pre-K and child care programs make mothers likelier to return to the workforce.

  And less stressed, working parents could mean better-off kids in the very long run, even if that doesn’t show up in test scores.

  My point, simply, is that some center-left folks, like those I cited complaining about the baby brain study above, have a tendency to assume that spending more on nice-sounding things, like pre-K and cash transfers, is obviously good, and that we don’t need any more evidence.

  I think that’s dangerously wrong. And I think the discussion around the baby brain study helps illustrate why. After the study’s first release, commentators like Columbia statistician Andrew Gelman, King’s College London psychologist Stuart Ritchie, and psychiatrist/writer Scott Alexander raised a number of statistical questions poking holes in the finding of an effect on brain waves. Brain imaging is often noisy, Alexander noted, which can lead to spurious findings of effects. Some of the effects on specific brain waves weren’t statistically significant, Ritchie noted. It’s possible that brain scans will show some effect due to random chance even if there is no underlying effect, as Gelman illustrated with randomized simulations.

  One possible response to these critiques is to stick your fingers in your ears and declare that the effect has to be there — or that the policy goal, in these cases of alleviating some of the effects of poverty, is so important that it’s a waste of time to keep looking for evidence. But I think the best response is to take the critiques seriously and allow them to inform your view on the science and the policy.

  My own view is that the brain study itself slightly increased my confidence that cash transfers can help child brain development. The critiques reduced my confidence in turn, but the other effects of cash, like lower poverty and potentially lower hunger, are important enough that I still strongly support giving cash to parents. That kind of holistic analysis, I think, is healthy. Denial of evidence pointing against your viewpoint isn’t.

  Similarly, the research on pre-K helps me think about how Democrats should prioritize Joe Biden’s universal pre-K proposal versus reviving the expanded child tax credit. The evidence that giving cash to parents helps them and their children seems stronger than the evidence that funding pre-K does — so if we have limited funds, the former seems like better policy (especially because the cash can be used for day care or pre-K, potentially getting more Republican support than just subsidizing the latter). Even without drawing an extreme conclusion like “pre-K is bad for kids in all cases,” the research helps us think through difficult policy problems.

  The question of how to help young kids and their parents is really, really hard. Doing more research isn’t repeating the obvious; it’s a necessary and vital part of getting basic questions on how to help kids right.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Australian Open 2022 | Krejcikova and Siniakova fight back to win doubles crown - The win is the Czech duo’s fourth Grand Slam title together, after having claimed the French Open in 2018 and 2021 and Wimbledon in 2018

• Barty and Djokovic keep No.1 ranking; Collins into top 10 - Novak Djokovic, with 20 grand slam titles, will continue as No. 1 despite missing the Australian Open

• Ali leads England to 34-run win over West Indies in 4th T20 - Spinner Ali went on to take 2-28 from four overs as West Indies was held to 159-5

• Venturi’s Mortara takes Formula E lead with victory in Diriyah - Saturday’s win was Mortara’s third in Formula E and handed him a four-point lead in the standings over Friday’s Mercedes race winner Nyck de Vries, with 14 of the season’s 16 races to go

• Nadal turning the improbable into reality - A victory over Medvedev at Rod Laver Arena would complete a remarkable chapter in Nadal’s extraordinary career

From The Hindu: National News

• Rakesh Tikait slams govt., says farmers would observe ‘Betrayal Day’ on Monday - “A nation-wide ‘Betrayal Day’ will be observed on January 31 because of government’s betrayal to farmers.”

• Manipur Assembly elections | Congress, TMC defectors in BJP list of 60 - Party has fielded three women and as many former IAS officers while dropping two sitting MLAs

• Pegasus case: take note of NYT report, Editors Guild tells probe panel - Call Centre, CAG, officials as witnesses to the inquiry, it says

• PM lauds coconut-vendor from Udumalaipettai - She donated ₹1 lakh from her savings to a govt. school at Chinnaveerampatti

• Pictures of only Bhagat Singh, Amedkar in govt. offices: Kejriwal - AAP government will follow their principles and ideals and fulfill their dreams, he says

From BBC: Europe

• Ukraine-Russia tensions: British troops ‘unlikely’ to fight - Truss - The foreign secretary says the UK is using “deterrence and diplomacy” to avoid further conflict.

• Bloody Sunday: Irish PM lays wreath at Bloody Sunday memorial - Thirteen people were killed when British soldiers opened fire on a civil rights march in Londonderry.

• 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?

• Russia: Military drill moved further from Irish shore - Simon Coveney says the news was “welcome” following days of speculation over the exercise.

• Sergio Mattarella: At 80, Italy president re-elected on amid successor row - Sergio Mattarella agreed to stay on after ruling parties failed to find a compromise candidate.

From Ars Technica

• HP wins huge fraud case against Autonomy founder and CEO Mike Lynch - Hours after the ruling, the UK home secretary approved Lynch’s extradition to the US. - link

• The weekend’s best deals: Steam Lunar New Year Sale, Fitbit trackers, and more - Dealmaster also includes the newest Pokémon game, AirPods, and the Surface Pro 8. - link

• Ubisoft execs: “Gamers are always right”—yet they somehow “misunderstand” NFTs - Interview coincidentally lands on same day Ubi announces 2020 game’s shutdown. - link

• Did eating meat really make us human? - Human evolution might boil down to a lot more than what Homo erectus had for dinner. - link

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

From Jokes Subreddit

• God decides it’s finally time to send Jesus back to Earth. -

  poof All of a sudden, Jesus finds himself on the side of a road in the middle of rural America. He sticks out his thumb for a ride and before long a man in a truck stops to give him a lift. Not revealing his true identity, Jesus thanks the man for stopping.

  Jesus: Wow thank you sir, so many people just ignored me standing there.

  Man: don’t worry about it! That’s just what good people do.

  After a few minutes driving the man leans over,

  Man: Hey, I have this sandwich here, ya want some?

  Jesus: wow, thank you sir, that’s so kind of you! I’d love some.

  A few more minutes pass and the man leans over again,

  Man: Hey I have a few beers in the cooler back there, want one?

  Amazed by the man’s kindness Jesus replies,

  Jesus: wow sure! I’d love one. Thank you again.

  After a few more miles down the road the man looks around suspiciously and says,

  Man: hey…I uh, have a little joint here. Want to take a few puffs with me?

  Jesus pauses for a second and replies,

  Jesus: ya know what, why not!

  So the man and Jesus drive down the road smoking the fattest joint listening to music and having a good time. Finally, Jesus speaks up,

  Jesus: okay listen! I can’t keep quiet any longer! You have been so kind, so nice, I want to tell you…I’m Jesus! God sent me down here to help the people and you’ve just been so kind. What can I do to repay you? Anything!

  The man looks at Jesus with a grin on his face and says, “Good shit, huh?”

  submitted by /u/nassauYATCHclub
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• I was told I’ll never be good at poetry because I’m dyslexic. -

  But so far I’ve made 3 jugs and a vase and they are lovely.

  submitted by /u/MudakMudakov
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• One day when Jesus was relaxing in Heaven, He happened to notice a familiar-looking old man. -

  One day when Jesus was relaxing in Heaven, He happened to notice a familiar-looking old man.

  Wondering if the old man was His father Joseph, Jesus asked him, “Did you, by any chance, ever have a son?”

  “Yes,” said the old man, “but he wasn’t my biological son. He was born by a miracle, by the intervention of a magical being from the heavens.”

  “Very interesting,” said Jesus. “Did this boy ever have to fight temptation?”

  “Oh, yes, many times,” answered the old man. “But he eventually won. Unfortunately, he heroically died at one point, but he came back to life shortly afterwards.”

  Jesus couldn’t believe it. Could this actually be His father?

  “One last question,” He said. “Were you a carpenter?”

  “Why yes,” replied the old man. “Yes I was.”

  Jesus rubbed His eyes and said, “Dad?”

  The old man rubbed his eyes and said, “Pinocchio?”

  submitted by /u/anyoclock
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• A Jewish man decides his son isn’t religious enough, so pays for him to go visit Israel. -

  When the son comes back, however, he says he’s a Christian now.

  The father goes to his friend exasperated to explain the situation, and his friend says “that’s funny, I sent my son to Israel last year, and when he came back he also said he was Christian.”

  The two men decide they should speak to their rabbi about this, but when they explain the situation, the rabbi says “that’s funny, two years ago I sent my son to Israel, and he also came back a Christian.”

  The three men decide only God can have the answer, so they pray. The rabbi says aloud “dear God, all three of us sent our sons to Israel, and all of them came back Christian.”

  God’s voice booms down “that’s funny…”

  submitted by /u/fr3akmenot
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• A car full of Irish nuns is sitting at a traffic light in downtown Dublin, when a bunch of rowdy drunks pull up alongside of them. -

  “Hey, show us yer tits, ya bloody penguins !” shouts one of the drunks. Quite shocked, Mother Superior turns to Sister Mary Immaculata and says, “I don’t think they know who we are. Show them your cross.”

  Sister Mary Immaculata rolls down her window and shouts, “Piss off, ya fookin’ little wankers, before I come over there and rip yer balls off !”

  Sister Mary Immaculata then rolls up her window, looks back at Mother Superior, quite innocently, and asks, “Did that sound cross enough ?”

  submitted by /u/xerxes_dandy
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