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

• Donald Trump’s Sons Get Challenged on the Witness Stand - Eric and Donald, Jr., claim they had nothing to do with the fraudulent financial statements that inflated their father’s worth, but prosecutors provided evidence to the contrary. - link

• Will Sam Bankman-Fried’s Guilty Verdict Change Anything? - The former C.E.O. of FTX now faces up to a hundred and ten years in prison. But, beyond resetting his personal fate, it’s not yet clear what the trial accomplished. - link

• Not All of America’s National-Security Threats Are Overseas - Congress’s foreign-aid follies with Israel and Ukraine, and the fear of Trump in 2024. - link

• What Will It Take to Win Brooklyn’s First Majority-Asian District? - In a recently redrawn City Council district, two Chinese American candidates are both trying to claim the mantle of “public safety.” - link

• Why Antisemitism Led a DeSantis Ally to Jump to Trump - A Florida Republican on how, if Trump were President, the war in Israel “wouldn’t have happened.” - link

From Vox

• Will an Israel-Hamas ceasefire happen? The reasons and roadblocks, explained. -

  

  What history can — and can’t — tell us about the hope for a Gaza ceasefire.

  The last time that Israel and Hamas engaged in hostilities that had the potential to ignite a larger war was in May 2021. At the time, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan flew to Cairo and worked with Egyptian officials to negotiate a ceasefire. He drew from his own experience: In November 2012, as an aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he and his Egyptian counterparts had locked in a ceasefire after a different outburst of conflict.

  So I found it revealing about where this war currently stands, and how different it is from the past, when Clinton dismissed any possibility of a ceasefire while speaking last week at Rice University’s Baker Institute. “People who are calling for a ceasefire now do not understand Hamas. That is not possible,” she said. “It would be such a gift to Hamas, because they would spend whatever time there was a ceasefire in effect rebuilding their armaments, creating stronger positions to be able to fend off an eventual assault by the Israelis.”

  Historically, these ceasefires have worked for both Israel and Hamas, until they haven’t.

  But the previous logic of Israel-Hamas wars no longer holds after the October 7 attacks on Israel, in which 1,400 people were killed and 242 people were taken hostage. That has fundamentally altered Israel’s security thinking: It now wants to eliminate Hamas entirely. Israel’s existential catastrophe has changed its approach to security, as we’re seeing through its intensive bombardment of Gaza and its ongoing ground incursion, with more than 9,000 Palestinians killed, including 3,000 children.

  “The technique before was to convince the Israelis that Hamas can be under control,” Nabeel Khoury, a career US diplomat focused on the Middle East who retired as a minister-counselor, told me. “Israelis are way beyond that. They want something much more radical than what happened in the past.”

  The fact that nearly everyone powerful in the US is also rejecting a ceasefire now doesn’t mean one is impossible. What it shows is that Israel just doesn’t want one, period, and the US has largely followed Israel’s lead.

  The old paradigm of ceasefires between Israel and Hamas appears to have been broken, but that doesn’t mean that the many examples of the two parties engaging in talks and upholding agreements are not relevant. Even with Israel locked in what it sees as an existential battle with Hamas, the door isn’t, and can’t be, totally closed to diplomacy.

  There are lessons about who can exert pressure; who has the expertise to work with Hamas; how these talks happen behind closed doors; and, crucially, how the US can play a key role in Israel’s decision-making.

  With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisting Friday that Israel will continue its military operations in Gaza “with full force,” it seems that a ceasefire will only come from a US initiative. Biden hinted as much and discussed the need for a humanitarian “pause” and the release of hostages when interrupted by a protester at a Minnesota event on Wednesday, and the next day Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to the Middle East. As the death toll among Palestinians has grown, the Biden administration has continually readjusted its language with a recognition of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and the need for a political process that would culminate in a Palestinian state.

  Jonathan Ernst/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

  But perhaps the most important lesson to take from those ceasefires past is that they were, in a certain sense, failures: They couldn’t hold in the long-term because they were not tied to a bigger political framework that could lead to a Palestinian state alongside Israel. They ultimately proved unsatisfactory both for the situation of Palestinians in Gaza, and throughout the occupied territories, and for Israel’s own sense of security. That they were ceasefires alone meant they wouldn’t lead to anything that could secure the future for Israelis and Palestinians.

  However this immediate violence ends — Israel declaring victory, a ceasefire, or something else — ultimately the war will only be resolved by difficult diplomacy and US leadership toward a Palestinian state.

  How previous Israel-Hamas wars have ended, briefly explained

  Since 2007, Hamas and the state of Israel have existed in a “violent equilibrium,” as Tareq Baconi of the Palestinian research network Al-Shabaka describes it. That year, Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip after winning the 2006 Palestinian elections; Israel then imposed a crippling blockade on the territory. That led to extreme rates of poverty in Gaza; over 60 percent of people need food assistance, and access to health care is extremely limited. About a quarter of Palestinians in Gaza, and nearly 80 percent of youth, are unemployed.

  “What we see is every few years, or really every few months, a situation occurs where Hamas fires rockets at Israel, when the restrictions of the blockade become too stifling, and essentially force an escalation where a ceasefire is eventually negotiated, and Israel is forced to ease restrictions into the blockade,” Baconi said recently on The Dig podcast.

  A review of the recent Israel-Hamas wars shows that after each conflict stopped, that violent equilibrium was restored. At times there were peace talks, but they were not really tied to a bigger political process that could lead to a larger settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

  Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009 lasted 22 days. In the conflict, 1,400 Palestinians, among them at least 759 civilians, were killed, as well as 10 Israeli soldiers and three civilians. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice worked to secure a ceasefire. “We need urgently to conclude a ceasefire that can endure and that can bring real security,” she told the UN on January 6, 2009. “This would begin a period of true calm that includes an end to rocket, mortar, and other attacks on Israelis, and allows for the cessation of Israel’s military offensive.”

  Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images

  Mahmud Hams/AFP via Getty Images

  This all came on the eve of President Barack Obama coming into the White House. He initially prioritized talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and put limited pressure on Israel to halt the construction of new settlements in the occupied West Bank. Despite that, little progress was made.

  That ceasefire held until November 2012, with an eight-day conflict between Israel and Hamas; 167 Palestinians and six Israelis died. Clinton was secretary of state, and Sullivan played a key role in negotiating a ceasefire.

  That truce broke in the summer of 2014, when a 50-day war between Israel and Hamas left 2,251 Palestinians dead, among them 1,462 civilians, and 67 Israeli soldiers and six civilians. Talks between Israelis and Palestinians had collapsed the spring before and have not relaunched since.

  Each time, the US and Egypt have played important roles in cementing these ceasefires, even as Egypt and Israel restricted movement in and out of the occupied territory of Gaza. Since the US designates Hamas a terrorist group, it depends on third parties for talks with the militant group. “Negotiating between Israel and Hamas has been one of the niche kind of activities that Egypt specialized in,” Ezzedine Choukri Fishere, a former Egyptian diplomat, told me. “For the last 16 years, the Egyptian policy on Gaza has been a stopgap — de-escalate.” In more recent years, Turkey and Qatar have also held indirect talks with Hamas.

  When the Biden White House faced another Israel-Hamas conflict in May 2021, US officials followed the playbook from the two wars that happened under Obama — prevent UN Security Council resolutions and work the backchannel with Hamas. The war lasted 11 days in May 2021, killing 230 Palestinians and 12 Israelis. The lesson Biden took from the Obama years was that all clashes with Israel must happen in private if at all, that there should be no daylight between the countries, and that conflict between allies is detrimental to the point of being unbearable.

  So Biden’s method to ending the May 2021 conflict was quiet diplomacy with Prime Minister Netanyahu. The US blocked United Nations resolutions and stood by Israel, to a point. Biden “held his tongue” when he learned that Netanyahu’s military operation had “no defined objective,” as journalist Franklin Foer recounts in his book The Last Politician. After four phone calls between the two leaders, Biden was blunt to Netanyahu: “Hey man, we’re out of runway here … It’s over.” And then it was.

  What’s different this time

  This Middle East war could last longer than any recent previous conflict between Israel and Hamas. The scope of Hamas’s attack, the ensuing Israeli bombardment and ground incursion, and the level of the death toll is already much more drastic than previous rounds of violence.

  The understandable focus on the destruction of Gaza and the tremendous loss of human life there perhaps obscures what has really happened from an Israeli point of view. “I don’t think there’s enough appreciation of the impact of October 7,” Fishere, who is now a visiting professor at Dartmouth College, told me. “For Israel, this is a new moment. This is not a repetition.”

  Netanyahu says Israel’s goals are the elimination of Hamas and the return of hostages.

  Gili Yaari/NurPhoto via Getty Images

  But it’s not at all clear how Hamas could be removed with force alone — and should it be, what party would govern Gaza. US and Israeli officials have floated trial balloons in unattributed quotes to the press that include a new Palestinian Authority, Egypt stepping in, or a multinational force, and Biden has urged Israel not to take over the territory.

  None of those would be good options. Any day-after plan for Gaza would require some buy-in from Hamas leadership — an agreement that its military wing and affiliated forces like Islamic Jihad would drop their weapons.

  This is the paradox: The ferocity of October 7 has convinced Israeli leadership that it must utterly destroy Hamas, yet there is little evidence it can achieve that goal. In the past, Israel was satisfied with damaging the militant group before settling into a ceasefire state. But this time, Israel is not seeking the kind of cessation of hostilities that defined the end to four previous rounds of conflict. “The only possible ceasefire would be a ceasefire that disarmed Hamas,” Fishere says. “And I don’t think anybody can offer that.”

  But there is another difference to this war: Hamas is holding 242 hostages, a number that dwarfs previous instances of hostage-taking. That gives Hamas leverage, and pretty much precludes Israel from agreeing to unilaterally stop its assault on Gaza.

  In public, there seems to be no path forward: Hamas has said that it won’t negotiate over the hostages until there is a ceasefire, and Israel seems to say it would only go for a ceasefire with unconditional release of hostages.

  What has been floated is a temporary ceasefire — a situation where Hamas’s hostages are exchanged, in essence, for a respite from the fighting and, likely, the release of Palestinian prisoners.

  The exact mechanics of such exchanges are closely held secrets. The Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin worked directly with a Hamas interlocutor to secure the release of Gilad Shalit, who in 2011 was exchanged for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners and Hamas members. “Negotiating for the release of hostages may also be less popular this time around,” Baskin wrote in an opinion column for the New York Times earlier this month. The price for the hostages would be just as high as before.

  Israel has a moral responsibility to bring home all of the hostages. Israel failed to provide security for them. The proposal: all of the hostages for all of the Palestinian prisoners is very difficult to accept but Israel must consider it & if yes, it has to be done quickly.

  — Gershon Baskin جرشون باسكين (@gershonbaskin) October 30, 2023

Netanyahu says the Israeli military incursion will press Hamas to release the hostages. But for now, Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza has seemingly not encouraged Hamas to release hostages. “My analysis is that this Israeli government has in the most cynical way simultaneously written off the lives of the hostages, while using them as political capital in convincing the world that no one can tell them what they can or can’t do in Gaza,” Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, told me. “The hostages will be released despite the government of Israel, not because of it.”

A ceasefire — or more war

The Financial Times was the first international editorial page to call for a ceasefire. UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the World Food Program, the United Nations secretary general, and the Pope now have, too.

Israel categorically rejects these calls. Yet the composite picture is of dwindling international support for Israel’s military campaign, which appears to be putting some pressure on Biden. You can see it in the very gradual shift in action and tone from the administration. Vice President Kamala Harris called for “the urgent need to increase humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza.” Blinken arrived in the Middle East and pushed Netanyahu to temporarily pause its military campaign to allow in humanitarian aid.

There is no easy way to secure a ceasefire. One is only likely to happen if the US and Israel together felt like enough Hamas leaders have been taken out and their military capabilities sufficiently immobilized, and that there is a chance to negotiate some kind of hostage exchange.

While the previously negotiated ceasefires have limited applicability, they do offer faint lessons. One: Third parties like Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey will be integral to the process.

Khoury, the former American diplomat who is now at the Arab Center Washington DC, says Qatar may have more power to influence Hamas than Egypt. Earlier this week, the head of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence services, traveled to Doha. “If Israel and the US would give the Qataris a carte blanche, they can come up with something,” Khoury told me. “But the US and Israel will have to be ready to accept a continued role for Hamas in some capacity. They could say disarm Hamas. But if they wish to obliterate Hamas, Qatar cannot help with that.”

Two: The US has to play a major role behind the scenes. At some point, Biden’s team is going to spell out more clearly to the Israelis that the US is not going to countenance this anymore.

And, perhaps most importantly, three: There must be a clearer picture of what happens after any ceasefire.

“If there’s no political path to deal with the question of occupation, then whatever Israel will do now, regardless of how long it’s gonna take and how many people gonna kill, is not gonna resolve the issue,” Fishere told me. “It will come back and hit us again, at some point in the future, probably not too far.”

• Biden’s new plan for student loan relief, explained -

  

  Biden has a Plan B for student debt. Will it survive the Supreme Court?

  For as long as he’s been president, Joe Biden has been vexed by student loans.

  His primary opponents pushed him to endorse mass loan forgiveness legislation during the 2020 campaign, then pressured him in the days after the election to wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars in debt with the stroke of his executive pen.

  After years of back-and-forth deliberations, he finally announced an enormous loan forgiveness initiative last year, only to have the Supreme Court declare it unconstitutional.

  Meanwhile, as the pandemic stretched for months and then years, he extended the moratorium on loan payments seven times, until congressional Republicans used the threat of financial armageddon to force the collection system back into operation, even as they under-funded the federal agency responsible for collections. Only weeks after payments became due again in October, the Department of Education levied stiff financial penalties on student loan servicers for bungling the job.

  But Biden is not giving up. On Monday, the Department of Education announced new plans to forgive billions of dollars in loans held by struggling borrowers. If it works, people who have spent decades under the yoke of monthly payments will finally be free of their obligations. The question is whether the Supreme Court will once again blow up Biden’s loan forgiveness ambitions before they leave the ground.

  Biden’s first loan forgiveness initiative would have forgiven $10,000 from nearly every federal student loan, and up to $20,000 for low-income borrowers. The Court ruled that the plan was too big — “staggering by any measure,” in the words of Chief Justice John Roberts — and was not based on clear legal authority provided by Congress. The new Biden forgiveness plan is based on a different federal law, the Higher Education Act, and — since the Court’s six-member conservative majority made clear that any attempt to simply replicate the original plan was doomed to fail — it’s less sweeping than its predecessor.

  Rather than provide the same benefit to every borrower regardless of circumstance, Biden’s Plan B targets specific groups of borrowers who are especially in need and shapes their relief accordingly. They fall into four categories:

  • People who owe more money than they originally borrowed, due to accumulating interest charges. Some or all of that excess amount would be forgiven. The principal itself would stay on the books, but borrowers would be allowed to go back to the starting line and begin paying their principal balances down.
  • People who have owed payments on their loans for more than 25 years. These balances would be totally wiped clean. Private lenders routinely write off loans they know will never be repaid; this would amount to the Department of Education doing the same.
  • People who qualify for forgiveness under existing federal programs that benefit longtime borrowers and public servants, but have never applied for relief. Existing law allows people who work for the government or in the nonprofit sector to have their loans zeroed out after 10 years of payments, but it has been very difficult for many people to overcome bureaucratic hurdles to forgiveness.
  • People who took out loans to enroll in job-oriented programs that left them with heavy loan burdens and few prospects to start a well-paying career. Many — although by no means all — such programs were offered by for-profit colleges. Those loans would also be wiped out.

  Notably, the Department of Education included people who took out federal loans through private banks as candidates for loan forgiveness, a group that was cut out of the previous Biden plan. The Department also proposed developing a fifth category of borrowers experiencing “financial hardship” and released a white paper exploring what that phrase might mean. The potential ideas range from having significant medical or child care expenses to dropping out of college, going bankrupt, being old, and points in between.

  Even if everything goes according to plan, it will take some time to implement the new Biden loan plan. The Department of Education is still in the middle of a lengthy, technically complicated rulemaking process that will require a lot of meetings, opportunities for public comment, responses to the public comment, and so forth. That won’t conclude until well into 2024, and forgiveness wouldn’t occur until 2025.

  There’s a significant likelihood, however, that everything won’t go according to plan. The Supreme Court looms over the whole process like an angry pantheon of debtor-hating deities. Is “make interest payments for a while and then have the whole principal forgiven” literally the way Justice Clarence Thomas financed the purchase of a $267,230 recreational vehicle? Apparently! Will he feel some obligation to approve the same deal for millions of struggling college students? Maybe not!

  The Department of Education is clearly trying to craft a legally defensible loan scheme. The challenge is that the legal theory it’s defending against, the so-called “major questions doctrine” prohibiting the executive branch from implementing expansive new interpretations of federal statute, was fabricated from whole cloth by the Court’s conservative majority just last year. The Department is acting in the spirit of the doctrine by limiting forgiveness to “certain limited circumstances,” per Roberts’s majority opinion striking down the original Biden plan. But opponents will likely argue that by explicitly creating forgiveness plans for certain groups of borrowers, like public servants, Congress was implicitly limiting the Department of Education’s authority to unilaterally extend relief to anyone else.

  So if you have a student loan and haven’t started making payments, you should, particularly if you don’t make a lot of money and qualify for the brand-new SAVE program, which limits monthly payments to a small percentage of your discretionary income, doesn’t allow interest charges to accumulate on top of principal, and forgives some smaller loans in as little as 10 years.

  The new Biden plan also marks the end of true mass student loan forgiveness as a viable policy, at least for a while. The journey of “forgive all the loans” from fringe sentiment to a widely accepted part of the Democratic Party’s domestic policy agenda was a genuine triumph of grassroots activism, and might have succeeded if conservatives hadn’t gained a commanding majority on the Court.

  Even in its more limited form, the Biden loan forgiveness agenda is far more expansive and expensive than anything that seemed possible even a few years ago. But the Supreme Court decision means the administration has had to make hard choices about who deserves student loan forgiveness — and, therefore, who does not. And absent a string of Democratic election victories shifting the balance of power in Congress, new loan forgiveness plans will require assent from six judges who have so far proved hostile to the cause.

• Julia Child, the natural gas industry’s most famous influencer -

  

  Documents reveal the untold story of how the natural gas industry infiltrated American’s kitchens through the beloved chef.

  For years on her popular cooking show, The French Chef, Julia Child used a crude, makeshift kitchen that she and her husband would haul to the set for each filming. When she returned to the screen for a new, 13-episode series later in her career, she had one condition: She needed a kitchen that was her own to film in, one “that we could just walk into and work in and leave.”

  Child got her wish — thanks to a generous sponsorship from the American Gas Association (AGA), a powerful lobby for gas utilities, which paid for a new kitchen, complete with a four-burner commercial range and a gas oven rotisserie.

  Her new show, Julia Child & Company, aired in 1978. “We have a new set, and a new theme song,” she said at the time. And each episode that theme music reached its crescendo, a slide noted a “special thanks to The American Gas Association.”

  Child herself never endorsed products on her shows (regulations around public programming forbade it) and there’s no evidence to suggest that she was a willing shill of the AGA. But from the industry’s point of view, Child was potent product placement that could help establish the dominance of gas in the American home. “Millions of viewers week after week will be able to watch Julia Child as she stirs food simmering over a gas flame,” read an October 1978 article from the association’s monthly trade magazine.

  This was a continuation of a larger campaign called “Operation Attack.” Launched by the AGA in the late 1960s, it employed at the time some of the same experts and public relations firms as the tobacco industry to fend off growing threats to gas. The nation was becoming more environmentally conscious; the fossil-fuel industry feared heightened scrutiny from the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency, and energy price shocks had begun to make alternative fuels more appealing. To make matters worse, new research raised questions about gas stove emissions and impacts on public health. Gas was losing ground to electric competition, but the industry had plans to fight back.

  AGA Monthly, courtesy of Climate Investigations Center

  Child’s role in this industry battle would be largely forgotten if not for documents unearthed by the climate watchdog group Climate Investigations Center, which shared them with Vox for review.

  This history adds a new layer to the image of the late TV star, affectionately known as “Joooooolia” by her fans, who was dedicated to teaching. Julia Child was also a weapon wielded by the fossil fuel lobby.

  Reached for comment, the Julia Child Foundation, a grantmaking organization that Child established when she was still alive, expressed concern over the legacy of Child, who died in 2004. “We were unaware of the AGA’s misappropriation of Julia’s legacy for their own agenda,” Todd Schulkin, the foundation’s executive director, wrote in an email. “Julia’s legacy was about learning to cook and appreciating what makes for good food, which extended to an embrace of new technology.”

  How the gas lobby infiltrated Hollywood

  Child had many stoves over her five-decade career, but she was famously devoted to one in particular: the Garland, a squat, six-burner gas range Child used in her home kitchen that cemented gas as her recommendation for professional and home chefs alike. The stove was so iconic that the Smithsonian has dedicated an exhibit to it. “It was a professional gas range, and as soon as I laid eyes on it I knew I must have one,” according to her posthumous memoir published in 2006. “I loved it so much I vowed to take it to my grave!”

  Decades after Child’s glowing endorsement, gas appliances have come under scrutiny in light of new evidence that they produce pollution linked to asthma and cancer, especially when not vented properly. Climate activists have also put pressure on lawmakers to pass local and state-wide bans on expanding gas infrastructure, to curb harmful emissions driving climate change.

  But in 2023, a mention doubting the safety of gas stoves made some politicians apoplectic. In January, the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s Richard Trumka Jr. set off a firestorm for raising the idea of a gas stove ban to which the Republican representative Ronny Jackson from Texas threatened “they can pry it from my cold dead hands.”

  AGA Monthly, courtesy of Climate Investigations Center

  How did the gas stove become such a trigger point? Julia Child’s endearing affinity for gas stoves may have had some influence, but the industry was also reaching deep into Hollywood during the 1960s and ’70s.

  As part of a larger campaign, the American Gas Association established a “Hollywood Bureau” staffed with agents whose job was “obtaining publicity favorable to the natural gas industry within the national media of television and motion pictures,” according to AGA Monthly, the trade publication read by tens of thousands of industry professionals.

  “The fact that these shows make use of gas appliances is hardly an accident,” one of its trade magazine articles noted. The bureau took credit for gas appliances appearing regularly in 25 primetime television series, periodically in another 12, in eight television movies, and nine feature films.

  Throughout the 1970s, AGA launched in-show product placements and paid appearances at conferences with celebrities — a kind of prototype of today’s social media influencer endorsements. The gas stove made appearances alongside stars Mary Tyler Moore and Doris Day. AGA brought football quarterbacks from the Dallas Cowboys and St. Louis Cardinals and famous French chef Jacques Pépin to homebuilders conferences to attract attention. Onlookers who stopped by Pepin’s cooking demonstrations received pamphlets from AGA.

  The industry fought hard to win favor in American kitchens so that it could generate demand to ensure new homes were built equipped with gas. The industry took out advertising in magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal, House Beautiful, and Good Housekeeping specifically to target the American housewife.

  Of course, natural gas utilities weren’t the only companies pursuing celebrity endorsements; General Electric hired then-actor Ronald Reagan to appear in widely watched ads for the all-electric home. But the AGA kept an especially close watch on its image.

  According to an article in its trade magazine, AGA’s influence went so far as to alter scripts that made gas look dangerous. “This ‘watchdog’ function is aided by friends in the industry who alert the bureau to scripts that call for a gas explosion or an asphyxiation,” the article read. “As a result of the Hollywood Bureau’s efforts last year, four potential damaging and misleading portrayals of gas incidents never reached the air.” The group also detailed efforts to land more pro-gas scripts, working with studios so “an environmentally conscious producer or director” might plug the “non-polluting” aspects of “natural” gas in scripts. “If such a screenplay eventually appears,” AGA Monthly claimed, “it will not be entirely an accident of fate.”

  In 1977, American Gas Association’s president gave a sense of the scale of these campaigns, writing “an estimated eight out of 10 Americans saw AGA commercials on major network television in which we appeared as the sponsor of TV spectaculars, major documentaries or sports events.”

  In the course of reporting this story, Vox reached AGA for comment. A spokesperson for the group declined to answer specific questions but provided a general statement.

  “The natural gas industry has collaborated with subject matter experts and credible researchers to develop analysis and scientific studies to inform and educate regulators about the safety of gas cooking appliances and ways to help reduce cooking process emissions, regardless of heating source, from impacting indoor air quality,” AGA spokesperson Emily Carlin wrote in an email.

  Today, approximately 40 million homes, or about 38 percent of households, cook with gas, and 61 percent of households rely on gas for some other use that includes cooking, water, and space heating, according to the Energy Information Administration.

  How the gas lobby uses influencers now

  Since at least 2018, gas interests including the AGA, which represents the vast share of the industry, and the American Public Gas Association have hired influencers — though not quite of Julia Child’s caliber — to promote gas stoves on social media like YouTube and Instagram. These ads have been filled with youthful women posing in their stylish kitchens, flaunting the sponsored hashtag #cookingwithgas.

  One of those influencers is Kate Arends, writer of Wit & Delight, a style website for “designing a life well-lived.” In a sponsored blog post, Arends defended her new natural gas fireplace: “We knew it would be safe and ventilated properly—a MUST if using natural gas anywhere in your home.”

  After I first reported on these campaigns in 2020, Sue Kristjansson, who is now president of Berkshire Gas, fretted in an internal company email: “If we wait to promote natural gas stoves until we have scientific data that they are not causing any air quality issues we’ll be done.”

  AGA Monthly, courtesy of Energy and Policy Institute

AGA’s efforts go beyond hiring influencers. Many of its campaigns aim to thwart environmental regulation. Last year, AGA hired a consulting firm, Gradient, which has a track record defending tobacco and chemical companies, to dispute research from scientists on gas stove emissions.

Gas utility ratepayers ultimately help pay the tab for these efforts. State utility commissions allow the gas industry to add a fee — usually just pennies to every consumer’s gas bill — so it can recoup its membership fees to the American Gas Association. Though small in scale, these fees add up to an expansive war chest in the tens of millions of dollars annually, according to the utility watchdog group Energy and Policy Institute. Environmental groups have called on FERC, the agency that regulates interstate gas and electricity commerce, to close what they see as a loophole that holds ratepayers captive — using funds meant for consumer education, not “political activity that does not benefit them.” They are also pressuring AGA’s utility members to exit, asking seven CEOs to abandon AGA because it is undermining their companies’ stated climate goals.

In addition to hiring social media personalities and sympathetic scientists, AGA and gas utilities also seem to perpetuate disinformation. When the Department of Energy proposed new efficiency regulations for stoves, a process required by law, AGA suggested this spring it amounted to a de facto ban. In reality, a limited number of older, less efficient models would be phased out after 2027, with no effect on existing gas appliances.

Even so, this June, House Republicans passed a bill prohibiting the federal government from issuing any kind of regulations around gas stoves, which would interfere with the Department of Energy’s ability to set new efficiency standards.

The AGA submitted comments to the Department of Energy in response to a proposed regulation to strengthen stove efficiency standards, with a nod to Child: “Thankfully, Julia Child was able to cook her masterful creations and have her gas range displayed in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History before DOE had a chance to ban it.”

From The Hindu: Sports

• Eng vs Aus | England invite Australia to bat - All-rounders Marcus Stoinis and Cameron Green came in for injured Glenn Maxwell and Mitchell Marsh

• ICC World Cup | Board secretary resigns following Sri Lanka’s underwhelming run in World Cup - Sri Lanka lost to India by a massive 302 runs in Mumbai on Thursday. They are virtually out of the semifinal race

• Ten Hag says Rashford going to a nightclub party after United’s heavy City defeat was ‘unacceptable’ - The Man United manager said it was an “internal matter” when asked if Rashford had been fined for an incident

• Pak vs NZ | Pakistan ahead on DLS par score vs New Zealand as rain stops play - Pakistan were placed comfortably at 160 for one in their chase of 402 runs for victory when rain stopped play with 21.3 overs bowled

• Ankle injury rules Hardik Pandya out of World Cup, Prasidh Krishna to replace him in India squad - Pandya had hurt his left ankle while fielding of his own bowling in the game against Bangladesh

From The Hindu: National News

• Former Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu offers prayers at Tirumala temple -

• No one will be spared in Delhi Excise Policy case including Telangana CM’s daughter: Union Minister Anurag Thakur - The Information and Broadcasting Minister told reporters in Hyderabad that the BJP does not have any understanding with the BRS.

• Kerala-based institute has technology for hospitals to convert biomedical waste into soil manure - The new technology, developed by National Institute for Interdisciplinary Science and Technology, will eliminate hardships involved in incinerating biomedical waste collected from hospitals

• Nigerian held on the charge of peddling drugs -

• Enyclopaedia published -

From BBC: Europe

• Tuscany storm and floods ravage central Italy leaving six dead - Six people are confirmed dead and several more are missing as winds and rain buffet parts of Italy.

• Germany: Illegal migration rise prompts border crackdown - Soaring numbers of illegal migrants is sharpening a growing debate about migration in Germany.

• Maersk cuts 10,000 jobs as shipping demand falls - One of the world’s largest export firms reported a huge drop in profits as freight costs have plunged.

• Tycoon Kaoru Nakajima hires iconic Palermo opera for birthday bash - Japanese businessman Kaoru Nakajima has reportedly spent a fortune renting the Sicilian city’s swankiest spots.

• German vice-chancellor Habeck hits out against rising antisemitism - German Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck criticises Islamists, the far right and political left.

From Ars Technica

• How long will Jeff Bezos continue to subsidize his New Shepard rocket? - “It’s definitely a money loser. Always has been.” - link

• Perfect Dark finally gets the full-featured PC port it deserves - Decompilation project adds mouse-and-keyboard controls, upscaled graphics and more. - link

• Intel’s failed 64-bit Itanium CPUs die another death as Linux support ends - Intel stopped selling the last Itanium processors in 2021. - link

• The UAW beat the big three; Elon Musk’s Tesla is among its next targets - Toyota has already given its workers a pay raise in response to the UAW contract. - link

• AI helps 3D printers “write” with coiling fluid ropes like Jackson Pollock - Reinforcement learning lets 3D printers exploit, not suppress, coiling instabilities. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• A husband and wife are having issues in the bedroom. The wife can’t orgasm because it’s too damn hot. -

  They see a sex therapist, and he recommends that they have a constant supply of cool air in the bedroom, so the man asks his best friend to waft a towel while he and his wife make love. Begrudgingly, the friend submits and says yes.

  After 20 minutes of lovemaking, the woman is no closer to orgasm, so the friend wafting the towel recommends that they switch places. So the friend is now having sex with the woman while the husband wafts the towel.

  After two minutes, the woman starts to tremble and lets out an incredible cry as she reaches the most intense orgasm she has ever had.

  The husband looks at his friend, and proudly proclaims, “Now that, my friend, is how you waft a fucking towel.”

  submitted by /u/Powersourze
  [link] [comments]

• Once there was a women’s bowling team. Everyone on the bowling team was so-so at bowling, with the exception of two women. -

  One of the two women was named Martha. Martha was absolutely abysmal at bowling. Every single game, she got at least nine gutter balls.

  The other woman was Linda, and she was the best player who had ever set foot in the bowling alley. Every time the team won a bowling match, Linda was responsible for scoring most of the points.

  Because she was so good at bowling, and because she was such a nice lady, Linda was very popular among her teammates. But there was just one thing about her.

  At the end of every single game, Linda said, “Next game, I might be five minutes late.” Her teammates found it really annoying. She almost always showed up right on time, but still, she always said, “Next game, I might be five minutes late.”

  The one who was most annoyed by this was Martha. One day, right after her bowling her sixth gutter ball of the day, she decided that she wanted to find out why Linda always said that. She went up to Linda just as she had bowled her eighth strike of the day, when she noticed something that made her forget about the five-minutes-late-thing.

  “Linda,” she said, “are you bowling left-handed today?”

  “That I am.”

  “I could have sworn you bowled right-handed at our last game!”

  “That I did.”

  For the rest of the game, and for each game over the next few weeks, all that Martha and her teammates could talk about was the hand Linda was using to bowl.

  “She’s bowling righty today!”

  “I remembered she bowled lefty at her first game!”

  “Could she be alternating hands?”

  “No, I remember last month she bowled three games righty in a row!”

  Finally, Martha decided to ask Linda how she decided which hand to bowl with.

  “Simple,” replied Linda. “I used to be just as bad at bowling as you were. Then I started dating a guy who always slept in the nude, and on his back. Now every morning, when I wake up, I look at my boyfriend. If his penis is hanging over his left leg, I bowl lefty. If it’s hanging over his right leg, I bowl righty. This may sound strange, but ever since I started this method I’ve become better at bowling than I’ve ever been!”

  Martha realized that her boyfriend always slept naked on his back, so she decided that she should try this method too. Whenever she woke up and saw her boyfriend’s penis hanging over his left leg, she bowled lefty. Whenever she woke up and saw her boyfriend’s penis hanging over his right leg, she bowled righty. This method worked surprisingly well. Martha, with her new hand-switching method, now got as many strikes as she had once gotten gutter balls. The team entered a national tournament, and Linda and Martha single-handedly got them to the finals.

  On the morning of the finals, Martha woke up and looked at her boyfriend to see which leg his penis was hanging over… but he had an erection. Now she had no way of knowing which hand to bowl with.

  When Martha arrived at the bowling alley, she once again asked Linda for help. “What do you do when your boyfriend has an erection?” he asked.

  With a sly grin on her face, Linda responded, “Why do you think I always say, ‘Next game, I might be five minutes late’?”

  submitted by /u/wimpykidfan37
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• Handjob -

  My wife gave me a handjob the other day using Vaseline. I came three times trying to wash that shit off.

  submitted by /u/Powersourze
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• I used to love joking about anal sex until I actually tried it. -

  Now I’m slightly torn…

  submitted by /u/LetMeExplainDis
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• What do you get when you cross a hippie and a ninja? -

  Peace and Quiet.

  submitted by /u/wolf805
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