Colin Powell’s Fateful Moment - Though Powell created a doctrine of avoiding war unless absolutely necessary, he will be remembered for making the faulty case for invading Iraq. - link
America’s Workers Are Fighting Back: Can They Win? - For decades, the leverage has been on the side of management, but the pandemic has changed that. - link
A Chicago High School Reopens, with Fears of Gun Violence - Students at Michele Clark High were relieved to return to classes, but shootings on the West Side mean that their problems are far from over. - link
Donald Trump’s Outrageous Reading of Executive Privilege Can’t Save Steve Bannon - If the planning of events that led to the January 6th assault on the Capitol is an activity of the executive branch, it’s certainly not a legitimate one. - link
The Stanford Sailing Coach’s Defense in the Varsity Blues Case - In a new book, John Vandemoer, who pleaded guilty to racketeering charges, claims that he was among its victims. - link
</figure>A Covid-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11 could be authorized by early November.
A Food and Drug Administration review this week determined that Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine is safe and effective for children ages 5 to 11, paving the way for a shot to be authorized for that age group as soon as early November.
Pfizer also announced on Friday that the vaccine is more than 90 percent effective at protecting school-age children from serious illness or hospitalization from Covid-19, similar to the level of protection it provides in adults.
The FDA analysis looked at data from Pfizer clinical trials in four different scenarios and concluded that any risks — in particular, a vaccine-related pediatric myocarditis that typically lasts a few days — were negligible in comparison to the benefits for the age group.
Previous data from Pfizer showed that young children were able to tolerate the vaccine well and produced a strong immune response, and the results of Friday’s FDA review are further confirmation of its effectiveness.
The 2,268 children ages 5 through 11 in Pfizer’s clinical trials received doses a third the size of an adult vaccine dose, spaced 21 days apart.
Now that the initial review is complete, there are just a few steps left before Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine can be authorized for the approximately 28 million American children ages 5 through 11.
Next week, the FDA’s panel of independent experts will examine the research and make specific recommendations to the FDA about administering the Pfizer vaccine to this age group.
Much as with recommendations about booster shots, the advisory committee is able to offer specific, granular guidance about the vaccine’s safety and necessity. For example, in September of this year, after the Biden administration had planned a widespread rollout of vaccine boosters, the FDA panel recommended that only certain populations receive an additional shot.
However, as Vox’s Dylan Scott points out, “the groups already okayed by the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for booster shots are quite broad and cover much of the adult population.”
The FDA panel will meet Tuesday and offer FDA leadership its assessment. The FDA typically follows the advice of its expert panel, but its guidance isn’t binding.
If the advisory committee’s advice conforms with the agency’s initial review of the data, the FDA will likely authorize the vaccine soon after.
After that, Pfizer then must present its data to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices or ACIP. It’s a similar body to the FDA’s advisory committee — a rotating, independent panel of scientists and other experts who can make specific recommendations to the CDC about administering the vaccine. That panel is scheduled to meet November 2 and 3 to discuss pediatric vaccines, according to CNN.
Then, ultimately, it’s up to CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky to guide the CDC’s decision on pediatric Covid-19 vaccines. As with the FDA’s advisory body, ACIP’s recommendations aren’t binding, but the CDC typically follows them.
Both bodies have to authorize the vaccine; the FDA is first and foremost concerned with the safety of anything submitted for emergency use authorization or full regulatory approval. That means asking not only whether the drug itself is safe, but also inspecting manufacturing facilities and practices while the drug in question is licensed. Meanwhile, the CDC’s concerns are geared more toward how the drug should be administered and to whom, in addition to its safety and efficacy.
As the White House waits for authorization, President Joe Biden announced a plan earlier this week to distribute pediatric vaccines in 25,000 pediatrician’s and primary care offices, as well as in children’s hospitals and school- and community-based clinics. The administration has already purchased enough doses to inoculate all children in this age group; the shots come in reconfigured packaging, with smaller needles for smaller arms.
“Kids have different needs than adults and our operational planning is geared to meet those specific needs, including by offering vaccinations in settings that parents and kids are familiar with and trust,” Jeff Zients, the White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator, told reporters on Wednesday.
The plan aims to avoid the bumpy, chaotic rollout adults faced earlier this year, as well as to build trust with families who may be hesitant to vaccinate their children by relying heavily on trusted sites like pediatrician’s offices, and messaging through schools.
The likely authorization of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine for children ages 5 through 11 stands to make schools a much safer place as Covid-19 continues to spread in the US.
Though children don’t often experience symptoms from Covid-19, as Vox’s German Lopez explained earlier this month, the combination of the delta variant and a return to classrooms last month resulted in a sharp rise in pediatric Covid-19 cases relative to earlier in the pandemic.
According to the the American Academy of Pediatrics, almost 6.2 million children have tested positive for Covid-19 since the pandemic began. In just the six weeks prior to October 14, 1.1 million children tested positive.
About 280 children under the age of 18 died of Covid-19 between January and September this year, according to Lopez.
“In this latest wave of Covid-19, particularly down south, there have been thousands of children hospitalized. And, frankly, it’s an embarrassment in a developed country to have even 100 children, like we’ve had, die of infectious disease that’s preventable,” Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said at a town hall earlier this month.
Since US school districts have implemented a patchwork quilt of vaccine and mask recommendations — with some states like Texas and Florida ignoring scientific evidence on the efficacy of masking and banning mask and vaccine mandates in school systems — both students and teachers are vulnerable to the illness.
And despite the eagerness of many children, teachers, and parents to get students back in the classroom, high infection rates across the US mean there have been some stops and starts, from quarantining exposed students to shutting down whole campuses after an outbreak. Vaccinating school children would help reduce the virus’s spread — not to mention reduce the number of disruptions to the school year.
Despite the upsides, however, some parents say they are still wary of vaccinating their children, or will opt not to do so. According to a September study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, only about a third of parents surveyed — 34 percent — said they would vaccinate their 5- to 11-year-olds as soon as that age group becomes eligible. Thirty-two percent said they would “wait and see” how well the vaccine works before having their child get the shot, and 24 percent said they wouldn’t have their children vaccinated at all.
The authorization of a Covid-19 vaccine for children ages 5 through 11 would mean that nearly everyone in the US is eligible for a vaccine, and drug companies are already making headway on shots for even younger children.
Pfizer, which along with BioNTech manufactures the only vaccine authorized for use in children under 18, is also performing clinical trials on children ages 2 to 5, and separate trials for children as young as six months.
Data from those trials is expected before the end of the year, according to Pfizer.
Moderna, which manufactures the other mRNA vaccine authorized for US adults, is also recruiting for its pediatric clinical trials on children ages 6 months to 11 years. The company submitted its clinical trial data on the vaccine’s effectiveness in teenagers ages 12 to 18 in June, but the FDA has pressed pause on authorizing it due to a possible elevated risk of myocarditis in young men. Health authorities in Sweden and Denmark have stopped administering Moderna vaccines to people under 18 in those countries due to this possible elevated risk.
With more authorizations on the horizon, many parents will likely be relieved to add Covid-19 shots to their kids’ vaccination schedules: As Friday’s FDA review confirmed, the vaccine is safe and effective for young children, and the Biden administration plans to make it widely available as soon as it’s authorized. And if Covid-19 is something we’ll have to live with as a society, as experts increasingly believe, then getting one step closer making the Covid-19 vaccine routine for young kids is very good news indeed.
Dave Chappelle’s trans friend knew how to take a joke. So what?
Toward the end of Dave Chappelle’s incendiary Netflix standup special The Closer, he says something revealing about the fight he’s waged against trans people — a fight that’s drawn Netflix itself into the fray and which led to a walkout and protest against the company on October 20.
After discussing the death of his friend, a trans comedian named Daphne Dorman who Chappelle also mentioned in his previous special Sticks and Stones, Chappelle makes a joke where the punchline is to blatantly misgender her. Then he says, “As hard as it is to hear a joke like that, I’m telling you right now — Daphne would have loved that joke.”
As I’ve attempted to grapple with the aims of Chappelle’s comedy, this line has stuck with me. Chappelle’s use of Dorman as a kind of totem for the type of relationship he’d like to have with the trans community at large is both telling and confusing — not because of what it says about Chappelle and Dorman, but because of what it says about the nature of comedy and the nature of pain.
Trans people have expressed outrage at both Chappelle and Netflix for amplifying overtly transphobic and anti-scientific views about gender and trans identity. In his defense of Chappelle, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos first said that he didn’t believe The Closer could cause any real-world harm, and then, after recanting that statement, said that trans people would simply have to deal with the special being on the platform. What we wind up with, then, is this: Yes, The Closer could cause real-world harm, but trans people will just have to get over it.
So perhaps the real question is, should trans people have to get over it? “Yes” seems to be the answer from The Closer, more or less. There’s no getting around the reality that transphobic rhetoric like Chappelle’s absolutely contributes to real-life harm. But Chappelle seems to view that hurt, and even the immediate pain of his transphobic jokes, as a worthy trade-off.
Throughout The Closer, Chappelle argues — often savvily, if with glaring hypocrisy — that many queer and trans people enjoy white privilege, and that their white privilege makes them essentially more cosseted and protected than Chappelle and other Black men in America. “Gay people are minorities until they need to be white again,” he notes at one point. Chappelle gets close to lobbing a critique of social justice movements that mainly focus on aiding white people, but his analysis lacks nuance: He frames whiteness as the protective cover most gay and transgender people default to, ignoring Black trans people in the course of the show.
Chappelle repeatedly attempts to redirect the conversation back to concerns of Black oppression and violence against Black communities. These are serious problems — but in contrast, he treats the equality movement among sexual and gender minorities as essentially shrill window-dressing. Chappelle rarely acknowledges that these communities contain people of color; instead, he frames the concerns of queer and genderqueer people — especially the linguistic arguments about pronouns, anatomy, and bodily functions that often arise from conversations about trans and nonbinary identity — as solely a product of white progressive hysteria gone mad.
In fact, in the moment where he comes closest to accepting trans identity, again using his friend Daphne as his lodestar, it’s the semantic argument that makes the crucial difference for Chappelle. Praising Dorman for her skills as a comedian and her good-natured attitude, he recalls Dorman telling him, “I don’t need you to understand me. I just need you to believe that I’m having a human experience.” Then he points out that he accepted her explicitly “because she didn’t say anything about pronouns” or make him feel like he was about to be “in trouble” for saying something wrong.
On one level, Chappelle’s anxiety here is deeply relatable. It’s the anxiety felt by many people who are frustrated by cancel culture and what they perceive as its policing of language and free speech. No one likes to be yelled at or told they’re problematic, especially if they say the “wrong” thing when they’re trying to get clarity on complex situations. Much of the conversation around “canceling” and the reactionary politics it engenders — reactionary politics that include all of Chappelle’s recent comedy material — seems to demand a degree of patience with people who are still working out the basic issues surrounding complicated identity vectors. Often, thinking about these things is hard.
But Chappelle makes it clear that he needs Dorman to exist on his terms, not hers — not as a trans woman with autonomy, but as a trans woman who’s proven she deserves autonomy by way of having a chill, laid-back sense of humor. Furthermore, in repeatedly reducing Dorman’s existence to her body parts and her relationship to them and the language surrounding them, Chappelle dehumanizes her and dehumanizes other trans people.
Dorman’s fate — she died by suicide shortly after the release of Sticks and Stones in 2019 — directly undermines Chappelle’s logic. Because Dorman was trans, she was at an extremely high risk of dying by suicide or transphobic violence. Any way you look at it, trans people are among the most vulnerable populations in society:
This is what Chappelle’s critics mean when they discuss the real-world impact of Chappelle’s transphobia. His comedy, which involves continually insisting, against science, that gender is always tied to biology, isn’t just reactionary semantics. It’s dangerous rhetoric that’s been shown in study after study can directly impact the levels of anti-trans violence and societal prejudice that trans people already face daily.
It’s important not to omit this reality from the equation — which is what Chappelle does when he treats Dorman as though she’s a comedian first and a trans woman second.
Chappelle views comedians as their own “tribe.” In The Closer, he even claims Dorman for his own “tribe” and not for the trans community: “She wasn’t their tribe, she was mine,” he says. “She was a comedian in her soul.”
Chappelle’s not just talking about comedy as a medium here, he’s talking about comedy as a worldview. Comedy is a subculture, after all, with its own very particular set of rules and mores. Perhaps the chief rule is the one comedians tend to embrace the hardest: Always, always be able to take a joke.
In the past, this principle has led to the privileging, within the comedy community, of the comedian’s right to make rude, disturbing, or even heinously offensive jokes. The logic goes that if the comedian can take a joke, the audience should be less sensitive, too. (See, for instance, the notorious moment in 2012 when a comedian heckled a woman in the audience who reacted to a sketch about rape jokes by making a rape joke about her.) Much of the recent cultural conversation over comedy and free speech has centered on the idea that comedians should be able to discomfit their audiences, whether in the service of making them laugh or making them think, without backlash — and that if you can’t handle a joke that makes you uncomfortable, that’s your problem, not the joke-maker’s.
Dorman herself was adept at taking an offensive joke. As Chappelle recalls, when an audience member interrupted one of Dorman’s shows with a transphobic question, she shot back by making an even better joke about her own anatomy. This, Chappelle wants us all to know, should be the response when we’re confronted with transphobia: not anger, hurt, or pain; not a walkout in protest of Netflix, but good-humored deflection.
This rule applies, at best, within the realm of comedy, between a comedian and their audience, not to the lived experiences of people in their everyday lives. Chappelle seems to need all trans people to accept the mores of his own very specific professional subculture, and he makes this request sound reasonable — he’s just a guy wanting to be allowed to make transphobic jokes without getting canceled for it, geez — but in practice, it’s baffling. Most people aren’t comedians, and most people are sensitive to jokes designed specifically to hurt them. Chappelle’s idea that trans people should have to prove, like Dorman, that they can take a joke without getting offended before they’re worthy of respect is a bit like a journalist demanding trans people prove they can use AP style before allowing them to command a conversation about their own gender identity.
What’s more, if “always be able to take a joke” is sacrosanct, there’s another rule that comedy holds just as dear: the one about never “punching down.” In comedy, punching down refers to humor that targets vulnerable groups of people who don’t hold much power in society. It exists in opposition to the kind of “punch up” that aims to critique people and institutions with power. Onstage, punching down is generally considered a huge “No” — the kind of thing that can immediately alienate an audience if you’re not doing it to make a deeper point. (Chappelle talks about this concept in The Closer, asking the larger LGBTQIA community not to “punch down” on his people, using Kevin Hart and DaBaby as examples.)
Chappelle’s deeper point seems to return again and again to the idea that trans people are too sensitive and that this sensitivity is somehow bolstered by white fragility. He seems to feel that his prioritization of the pain of Black communities over those of trans communities — as if, again, they are entirely separate — justifies an evening devoted to homophobic and transphobic jokes. Because Chappelle seems to believe that all queer and trans people have white privilege, he views himself as punching neither up nor down and even quotes Dorman as suggesting as much.
But Chappelle, of all people, should know better. He’s hyper-aware, as a comedian who frequently uses humor to make points about racial and social justice, that comedy impacts the real world. In fact, in 2005, Chappelle completely killed his own hit comedy show, the legendary Chappelle’s Show, because of one joke that made him realize, according to an interview he gave to Time, that rather than critiquing racist comedy, he might instead be reinforcing racist stereotypes for white audiences who were enjoying the joke unironically.
At the very least, then, Chappelle should know that there’s a possibility his jokes about trans people could be taken the wrong way and used to hurt trans people. There’s even an echo of the 2005 moment in the new special, when Chappelle has to stop and gently reprimand an audience member who starts to applaud a transphobic law. As Vulture’s Craig Jenkins put it, “You talk enough shit, and you’ll draw flies.”
Rather than acknowledging this possibility and its potential for harm, Chappelle not only justifies his comedy using white privilege, but seems to go a step further: He suggests that being hurt is good for trans and nonbinary people. When he says, “As hard as it is to hear a joke like that,” and then follows it up with any kind of defense, he’s telling audiences that he knows the joke is painful, hurtful, and transphobic — but that it’s somehow productive for trans people to be confronted by it. That it’s a learning experience to be confronted with transphobia onstage, as though trans people aren’t confronted with gender policing in every other moment of their lives.
Only then, in Chappelle’s telling, can Chappelle and trans people “[start] getting to the bottom of shit.” Once trans people have shown him that they’re capable of being good-humored about other people’s continual objectification and degrading dismissal of transgender identity issues, they can — on the terms of the person using transphobia to interact with them — be heard and accepted and loved.
This isn’t equality. Chappelle, who’s spent his entire comedy career using humor to make sharp, trenchant commentary on racism and injustice, should know that. Trans people should never have to just live with or get over or get used to rhetoric that dehumanizes them. The man who speaks viscerally about the fear Black Americans experience daily should know that asking trans people to accept and embrace transphobic ideology isn’t tolerance. It certainly isn’t the love and good humor he wants to be credited with.
And despite the audience laughing with Chappelle, it’s not funny at all.
Three big questions about booster shots, answered.
It may be time for your Covid-19 vaccine booster shot.
The Food and Drug Administration has now authorized additional doses of all three Covid-19 vaccines in the US — Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson — for certain higher-risk groups and has said that booster shots don’t have to be the same brand as the first round of vaccination. The CDC has seconded those recommendations.
The government’s recommendations for booster doses are based on different subgroups’ risk from Covid-19; thus far, boosters are only recommended for older adults or people at higher risk because of their health or occupation. Experts have debated to what extent boosters are appropriate for everybody, given the evidence of persistently strong protection against severe illness for many people. But most seem to agree an additional dose makes sense to increase immunity for people considered more vulnerable to the virus.
While boosters still aren’t technically recommended for everyone yet, the groups already okayed by the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for booster shots are quite broad and cover much of the adult population. Everybody over age 65 is eligible for an additional dose — that’s <a
The bottom line for now: If you were vaccinated at least six months ago with the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna shot and you’re at higher risk for Covid-19 based on your age, job, or medical history, it’s recommended that you receive a booster. So should anyone vaccinated at least two months ago with the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, according to the FDA.
The FDA has approved booster shots of the Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, and J&J vaccines, and the CDC has finalized matching recommendations for who should receive a booster.
Under the FDA’s authorization, the following people are eligible for an additional Covid-19 vaccine dose:
The lists of medical conditions and occupations that qualify for a booster shot extend eligibility to a lot of Americans. Those medical conditions include not only heart disease, diabetes, and cancer but also depression and pregnancy. High-risk jobs include the people in the food and agriculture industry, nursing home workers, and US Postal Service employees. Check the list — more people are eligible than you may think.
Age is the strongest indicator for a booster shot, according to the experts I’ve spoken to. Even those who think the case for booster shots for younger and healthier people is not as strong agree that people over 65 would likely benefit from an additional dose. Most experts also support boosters for immunocompromised people, though the vaccines are still not as effective for those people to begin with.
There is less consensus among experts about workers in jobs considered to be high risk, if they don’t already qualify because of age or health. Experts stress that research continues to show strong protection against severe illness for younger people without any significant medical conditions. But senior government health officials have insisted on including those workers in the groups eligible for a booster shot.
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Alejandra Villa Loarca/Newsday RM via Getty Images
For the eligible people whose first doses were either the Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, they can receive their next dose at least six months after their initial vaccine course was completed, the FDA said. For people whose first dose was the J&J vaccine, they can get a booster shot two months after their first shot.
The federal guidance matches what many experts have said is appropriate based on the current scientific evidence. There have been indications of the Covid-19 vaccines waning in effectiveness over time and against the delta variant. But the protection they provide against severe disease — resulting in hospitalization or death — remains strong for many people.
The exceptions are older people, who have seen a greater drop in efficacy over time, and people with compromised immune systems, for whom the vaccines are often not as effective to start with. They are the focus of the booster guidelines, along with workers in higher-risk settings.
All of the Covid-19 vaccines offer good protection against severe illness, but they are not equal.
The Moderna vaccine has held up the best over time, including since the delta variant became dominant. Pfizer/BioNTech performs the next best, while Johnson & Johnson was the weakest of the three in its original one-dose regimen (though it has not seen much waning over time).
Those differences have led some people — J&J recipients, in particular — to wonder whether they should get a dose of one of the better-performing vaccines for their booster shot.
As the Atlantic reported last week, research from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has found the people who received a first dose of J&J and a second dose of Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech showed higher antibody levels than the people who got J&J for both doses. Antibody levels are not the only metric by which immunity is measured, but they are a useful proxy.
The evidence is not as clear about whether it’s better to get a Moderna booster if you previously received the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine (or vice versa) because the NIH study used a full dose of the Moderna vaccine for its booster, whereas, in the real world, the Moderna booster will be a half dose.
The new FDA guidance does say that people should be okay mixing and matching different vaccines. Generally speaking, they can get whichever booster shot they like if they fall in one of the subgroups recommended for an additional dose and sufficient time has passed: again, two months for J&J recipients or six months for Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna recipients.
Different vaccines also have different side effects, another consideration for booster shots. Younger men who receive the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna mRNA vaccines have been found to be at a slightly higher risk of heart inflammation. Younger women who receive the J&J vaccine may be at a somewhat elevated risk of a rare blood-clotting problem.
Both of those side effects, though serious, have been rare, and the FDA said the expected benefits of a booster shot for each of the vaccines outweigh the risks.
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Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
First off: The vaccines work. Recent waves of Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths have been concentrated in the remaining unvaccinated population. People who receive a vaccine are less likely to contract Covid-19 in the first place, much less likely to develop severe symptoms, less likely to transmit the virus to other people, and less likely to develop long Covid.
But the vaccines aren’t perfect. There are going to be breakthrough cases. For some people, they don’t work as well. The recent death of former Secretary of State Colin Powell — who was fully vaccinated but immunocompromised because of blood cancer — served as a reminder that some people remain at risk so long as the virus is still circulating.
The current federal guidance is concentrated on those people, to provide them more protection ahead of the winter. In the best-case scenario over the next few months, at-risk people get this additional immunity, more people get their first vaccine dose, and the virus slows down without new variants emerging. We should see fewer deaths than we did during last winter’s devastating wave.
Still, Covid-19 isn’t going to disappear entirely, and experts expect booster shots may eventually be authorized for most people. A lot of Americans had already gone ahead and gotten an extra dose before the FDA officially approved it.
Wafaa El-Sadr, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia University, told me she thought people who are already eligible should get their booster “as soon as possible.”
Other people might consider it, she said, if they were expecting to congregate with a lot of others during the holiday season or if they have to spend a lot of time around unvaccinated people or individuals whose vaccination status they don’t know.
Covid-19 is here to stay, and booster shots are a reflection of that reality. They are one way to make it more palatable to live with this disease.
Key To The Mint and Fuhrer impress - Key To The Mint and Fuhrer impressed when the horses were exercised here on Sunday (Oct. 24) morning.Sand track: 600m: Esfir (rb) 39. Easy. Multiencyr
T20 World Cup | After chaotic build-up, Afghanistan open their campaign against spirited Scotland - Scotland are high on confidence after winning all their matches in the first round, including a famous win over Bangladesh.
ICC Twenty20 World Cup | Naim and Rahim take Bangladesh to competivive total against Sri Lanka - Both sides made one change each from the first XI of their previous first round match.
New IPL teams: BCCI expecting anything between ₹7,000 cr and ₹10,000 cr with Adani, Goenka, Aurobindo in fray - There are 22 companies which have picked up tender document worth ₹10 lakh but with base price for new teams pegged at ₹2,000 crore, there is expected to be only five to six serious bidders in fray
Russian Rublev seals fifth ATP Finals singles spot - Rublev is ranked sixth after reaching a career-high number five in the men’s rankings last month
Vizag-LTT special to leave at 9.35 a.m. on October 25 - The train No. 08519 Visakhapatnam-Lokmanya Tilak Terminus (Mumbai) special, scheduled to leave Visakhapatnam, at 11.20 p.m. on Sunday (October 24) is
A matchbox to cost ₹2 from December 1, consumers to get more matchsticks - The proposed price increase comes after a gap of 14 years
Cruise drugs case| Witness alleges NCB official demanded ₹25 cr from Shah Rukh Khan to release his son; agency denies claim - The independent witness alleged that Shah Rukh Khan was demanded ₹25 crore for the release his son, NCB official termed the claim to be “completely false and malicious”.
Union Minister Athawale says NCB’s Wankhede has not done anything wrong, slams Nawab Malik for targeting him - “The state government should ensure there is no threat to Wankhede’s life,” said the Union Minister.
Kolkata Metro bids adieu to non-AC rakes - The last non-AC Metro rake was ceremonially sent off to Noapara carshed from Mahanayak Uttam Kumar station
Turkey moves to throw out US envoy and nine others - President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declares them “persona non grata” for urging an activist’s release.
Matteo Salvini: Right-wing Italy politician on trial for blocking migrant boat - The right-wing politician is charged with kidnapping and dereliction of duty, which he denies.
Greta Thunberg: ‘We need public pressure, not just summits’ - The climate activist speaks to the BBC about the COP26 conference, emissions targets and rickrolling.
Picasso masterpieces fetch nearly $110m at Las Vegas auction - The works, which were owned by MGM Resorts, featured in the Picasso Restaurant at the Bellagio Hotel.
Trafficked to Europe for sex: A survivor’s story - Expecting to become a carer in Copenhagen, Jewel was forced into prostitution. But two chance meetings enabled her to get away.
Plastic industry pollution to overtake coal in US by 2030, report says - Supply chain for plastic production is rife with carbon emissions. - link
A look inside Apple’s silicon playbook - Apple execs talk on the record about the new Apple silicon. - link
300-year-old tree rings confirm recent uptick in hurricane-driven rainfall - There’s been nothing like these cyclone seasons for at least several centuries. - link
Microplastics may be cooling—and heating—Earth’s climate - Tiny bits of plastic swirling in the sky could be subtly affecting the climate. - link
Pixar lamp and Mystique inspire novel approaches to shapeshifting materials - Two new papers highlight promising methods for making shapeshifting structures. - link
The barman says “That looks nasty, what happened”? The man says" My wife complained that we don’t make love like they do in the movies, so I ripped her clothes off and bent her over the sink. Then I fucked her hard while spanking her and then pulled out, spat on my dick and stuck it in her ass. I then threw her on the floor and came on her face and tits".
The barman said " Wow, that sounds amazing, but why the black eye“?”Well, it turns out we don’t watch the same movies".
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We’d have IX/XI instead.
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The first thing he’ll do is to assemble his cabinet.
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But cases continue to rise.
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The doctor checks him out almost everywhere but sees no problem.
He says “take off your pants for me”.
The man hesitates but abides.
The doctor inspects him and says “I see! Your penis is about 6 inches too long, it’s pulling on your vocal chords and causing you to stutter”. The man has no clue how that’s possible but he’s not a doctor so he accepts the diagnosis”
The doctor asks if he wants to lose 6 inches or keep his stutter.
The man replies “M-my wife says I’m t-t-too big for her anyway so t-t-take the six inches, p-p-please.”
Six months later the man calls back to the doctor’s office. “Hey doc, it works perfectly! I don’t have a stutter anymore, I’m better than ever in bed, and I just got a promotion, you’re a miracle worker!”
The doctor responds “I’m g-g-glad t-t-to hear the g-g-good news.”
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