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

• Holiday Stories from the Archive - From the magazine’s archive: a selection of pieces about Christmas and the holiday spirit. - link

• “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” Reviewed: Joel Coen’s Sanitized Shakespeare - Coen’s stripped-down adaptation sets out to normalize Shakespearean language, but he ends up going too far. - link

• Joan Didion and the Opposite of Magical Thinking - You didn’t have to agree with her, but you had to submit to her sentences. - link

• What It Means to See Jesus - A new book, at once skeptical and devotional, considers visions of Christ from the early days of Christianity to the present. - link

• Joan Didion’s Specific Vision - In the face of the failure of narrative to make sense of life, she found meaning in the particular. - link

From Vox

• Democrats’ unfinished to-do list -

  

  Voting rights, police reform, and immigration reform are among the priorities they failed to pass in 2021.

  In 2021, Democrats had big legislative plans after winning the White House and both chambers of Congress for the first time in over a decade.

  Many of their goals, however, remain unrealized.

  The current version of the Build Back Better Act, a major climate and spending bill that contains several of President Joe Biden’s legislative priorities, was killed by moderate Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) in December. Voting rights legislation is stalled because lawmakers don’t have the 60 votes in the Senate to pass it and have also resisted a filibuster carveout that would enable them to approve it with a simple majority. Police reform has floundered because Democrats and Republicans have repeatedly failed to agree on a compromise, and lawmakers have resisted doing away with the filibuster on that issue as well.

  Efforts to lower prescription drug prices, establish a path to citizenship for DACA recipients, and raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour as part of larger bills are among those that ended in disappointment.

  The main reasons for the failures thus far: Democrats have very thin majorities, and some want to keep the Senate’s current supermajority rules intact. Since the Senate is split 50-50, Democrats need at least 10 Republicans to join them to overcome the filibuster on any bill. And Democrats need all 50 members to stay united to pass a bill using budget reconciliation, which allows policies related to taxing and spending to circumvent the filibuster.

  The party has been trying to pass the Build Back Better Act using reconciliation but has been unable to do so because Manchin has concerns about the size of social spending programs. They’ve faced a similar issue with establishing a filibuster carveout: Democrats also need all 50 members on board for that, and that’s something Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) have opposed as well.

  Despite their struggles, Democrats have had success this year, too. In March, lawmakers passed a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill called the American Rescue Plan, which included another round of stimulus checks, an enhanced child tax credit that expires at the end of this year, and dedicated relief for states and local governments.

  They were also able to push through a $550 billion infrastructure bill, which provided historic funding for roads, bridges, and clean drinking water. Additionally, they approved more than 40 district court and circuit court judges, the most that any president has seen confirmed in their first year since President Ronald Reagan’s administration.

  “We are proud of what we have gotten done in 2021: the American Rescue Plan, the fastest decrease in unemployment in U.S. history, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, over 200 million Americans vaccinated, schools reopened, the fastest rollout of vaccines to children anywhere in the world, and historic appointments to the Federal judiciary,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement in mid- December.

  Still, there are major bills lawmakers left unfinished in 2021, and they have limited time to pass them before the 2022 midterm elections. There is concern among some Democrats that failing to pass bills on issues like police reform, voting rights, and immigration will come back to haunt them in the next election cycle. They believe some voters, particularly the voters of color on whom the party depends, will think that Democrats deprioritized policies that would benefit them, affecting enthusiasm and turnout.

  “It’s a terrible message,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, in a December press call. “I see the pain and the devastation that [people] feel when they consistently see that they are left behind, that they’re told that… we’re not going to get the changes that are going to keep Black people alive when they’re facing law enforcement, or immigrants to be able to not be deported or separated from their families.”

  What Democrats failed to get done in 2021

  The Build Back Better Act, which Democrats have been negotiating since this summer, is among the major priorities that the party failed to advance this year.

  The roughly $1.75 trillion bill — which included $550 billion for clean energy provisions, funding for child care subsidies, support for universal pre-K, and money for a four-week paid family leave program — weathered months of drawn- out negotiations before Manchin announced that he wouldn’t be able to back the current version in mid-December.

  Democrats are hoping to return to the drawing board with a version of the bill that Manchin can accept. But the setbacks the bill has faced mean that some policies, like the expanded child tax credit that has sent monthly payments of as much as $300 per child to most families, are likely to expire before an extension can be passed.

  While Democrats could still push to include an expanded child tax credit in the next version of the bill, they will likely need to remove their immigration proposals. As Vox’s Nicole Narea explained, their latest immigration provision would have protected many undocumented immigrants from deportation and enabled immigrants who had come to the US by a certain time to pursue five- year renewable work authorizations. But because Build Back Better is being advanced via budget reconciliation, all of its provisions must relate to the budget in some way. The Senate parliamentarian has said that Democrats’ immigration plan didn’t just affect the budget, so it can’t be included in the reconciliation measure. It’s a decision that makes the future of immigration reform uncertain.

  As Build Back Better stalled, Democrats made a last- minute push to approve voting rights legislation. This fall, Senate Democrats were able to reach a compromise on the issue that had the support of all 50 members of their caucus. That was a breakthrough, as previous voting rights bills like the For the People Act, did not have Manchin’s backing.

  The compromise bill makes voter registration more accessible for federal elections and establishes 15 days of early voting. Though the bill has Manchin’s support, it has yet to pass because it still needs 60 votes to clear a potential filibuster, and Democrats have yet to get 10 Republicans on board or change the rules.

  When it was put to a Senate vote in October, Republicans blocked the legislation from advancing, as they have with other voting rights bills. Democrats still don’t have the 50 votes they need to change the Senate rules, so the legislation is currently in a holding pattern. But because of the narrow window the party has to pass it before the midterms — and renewed interest many lawmakers have expressed in doing so — Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said recently that he’ll bring the bill for a vote in early 2022.

  Efforts to address police reform also collapsed in September. Federal police reform became a Democratic priority in the wake of the civil rights protests sparked by the police killings of Americans like Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Democrats and Republicans had been in talks for months in an effort to craft legislation that could get at least 10 GOP votes. But the parties couldn’t get past disagreements about issues like how to address qualified immunity, a shield that protects police officers from some legal liability. Democrats haven’t opted to approve a filibuster rules change for this policy, either.

  Democrats’ failure to address voting rights, immigration reform, and police reform — all of which have major impacts on voters of color — has prompted concerns that enthusiasm among these key groups could be affected in midterm elections that are expected, based on historical trends, to favor Republicans. “The question is: Will they be able to motivate in a midterm year when they haven’t delivered?” asks Aimee Allison, the president of She the People, a group dedicated to electing women of color to political office.

  “It’s not that nothing has happened,” she adds. “It’s that it’s not enough.”

What Democrats did accomplish in 2021

Although there is a lot that Democrats failed to accomplish, they also passed several notable pieces of legislation this year, while advancing a diverse pool of judicial nominees.

The American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion relief package that Congress passed in March, was substantial. It contained enhanced weekly unemployment payments of $300, more stimulus checks, an expanded child tax credit, funding for school re-openings, funding for vaccine distribution, and federal aid for states and local governments.

Many provisions in the ARP have had a sizable impact. Changes to the expanded child tax credit, which made the credit more accessible to low-income families and increased the amount families could receive per child from $2,000 to as much as $3,600, slashed child poverty by 25 percent after the first monthly payment went out. That reduction nets out to about three million children being lifted out of poverty.

The $1,400 stimulus checks in the ARP, which went out to more than 127 million people, helped reduce food insecurity and housing instability in the weeks after the bill was passed, according to a House analysis.

Another major piece of legislation that Congress approved was the $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill, which passed in November. Although experts noted that it would likely take much more money to fully fix national infrastructure problems like lead pipes, the bill still contains a landmark amount of funding for many items, from clean drinking water to Amtrak.

“I think we have shown a lot of what is possible when we control the House, the Senate, and the White House,” Jayapal said.

In response to a surge of anti-Asian hate incidents during the pandemic, Democrats also passed the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act, which aims to improve law enforcement’s tracking of hate crimes and establish better channels for reporting them. Some activists have argued that the legislation will do little to prevent hate crimes, however.

Democrats’ confirmations to the federal judiciary are significant as well, though the Supreme Court remains tilted to the right. This year, Democrats confirmed 40 judges, more than double what former Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama saw confirmed in their first years in office.

These appointments are poised to affect policy decisions for decades: In recent years alone, the judiciary has played a major role on issues including abortion rights, the Affordable Care Act, and protections for undocumented immigrants. The pool of judges that were confirmed brings more demographic diversity and a wider range of professional backgrounds to these roles, with more women and people of color, and more people who were public defenders.

“I’m proud I appointed … more Black women to the federal bench and the circuit courts and more former public defenders to the bench than any administration in American history,” Biden said during a December commencement address he gave at South Carolina State University.

Democrats are poised to face many of the same struggles in 2022

Many of the barriers that stymied Democratic priorities in 2021 will be the same in 2022.

Because of the party’s narrow 50-person majority in the Senate, every member needs to be on board in order to pass any measures on a partisan basis with budget reconciliation. Until the party wins a larger majority, lawmakers will be stuck trying to find common ground with more conservative senators like Manchin and Sinema, who’ve respectively been more opposed to social spending and corporate tax increases.

It’s possible Democrats could find a narrower version of Build Back Better that they could pass with all 50 senators, but it’s not yet clear what that bill would look like. Before announcing he was a “no” on Build Back Better, Manchin had proposed a pared-back iteration of the bill that did not include an expanded child tax credit, but kept funding for universal pre-K, an Affordable Care Act expansion, and climate proposals, according to the Washington Post.

If Democrats are going to try another version of the bill, they’ll need to do so quickly: Reconciliation is a lengthier approach, with rules requiring review of legislation by the Senate parliamentarian as well as a potentially time-consuming amendment process. Many members will need to take time to campaign as the midterm elections approach in the fall. Depending on how the midterms go, Republicans could pick up seats in both the House and Senate in 2022, undoing Democrats’ fragile majorities and ending their ability to approve any more ambitious proposals.

Because of Manchin and Sinema’s opposition to a filibuster carveout, voting rights legislation will likely continue to be stalled. Manchin, in a December Fox News interview, indicated that he did not back altering the filibuster rules so that a voting rights bill could pass with a simple majority vote. Sinema, too, reiterated her opposition to a filibuster carveout for this measure.

In a December letter to colleagues, Schumer said that the Senate would take a floor vote on the Build Back Better Act, as well as on Democrats’ compromise voting rights bill in the new year. Unless things change, both votes will fail, leaving Democrats — and their voters — exactly where they are now.

• Why the new space telescope looks so strange -

  

  A NASA astrophysicist explains humanity’s big new toy.

  After 25 years and nearly $10 billion, the James Webb Space Telescope has finally left planet Earth. Billed as a successor to the beloved Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb’s mirror is six times larger and its instruments are tuned to observe longer wavelengths, in order to detect the stretched-out light from primitive galaxies 13.5 billion light years away.

  That primary mission — to see the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang — determined the unusual and challenging design of the telescope. Instead of a shiny tube, the Webb Telescope looks like a giant honeycomb riding on a silver surfboard. The short answer to why it looks like that is: It needs to be very big and very cold.

  In the video above, NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn and I build a small model of the telescope to explore its extraordinary design.

  You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

  Further reading:

  • Make your own paper model of the Webb Space Telescope
  • The largest space telescope in history is about to blow our minds
  • How telescopes make the universe self-aware
  Unexplainable podcast: The James Webb Space Telescope
• Unexplainable podcast: The James Webb Time Machine

• The space station race -

  

  The ISS will burn up in Earth’s atmosphere in a few years, paving the way for new businesses in space.

  The International Space Station brings together astronauts from around the world to collaborate on cutting-edge research, and some have called it humanity’s greatest achievement. But after two decades in orbit, the ISS will shut down, and a crop of several new space stations will take its place. While these new stations will make it easier for more humans to visit space, they’re also bound to create new political and economic tensions.

  NASA is scaling back its presence in low-Earth orbit as the government focuses on sending humans back to the moon and, eventually, to Mars. As part of that transition, the space agency wants to rent out facilities for its astronauts on new space stations run by private companies. When these stations are ready, NASA will guide the ISS into the atmosphere, where it will burn up and disintegrate. At that point, anyone hoping to work in space will have to choose among several different outposts. That means countries won’t just be using these new stations to strengthen their own national space programs, but as lucrative business ventures, too.

  “Commercial companies have the capability now to do this, and so we don’t want to compete with that,” Robyn Gatens, the director of the ISS, told Recode. “We want to transition lower-Earth orbit over to commercial companies so that the government and NASA can go use resources to do harder things in deep space.”

  Private companies currently backed by NASA, including Lockheed Martin and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, could launch as many as four space stations into Earth’s orbit over the next decade. NASA is also building a space station called Gateway near the moon; a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the living quarters for the station is scheduled to launch in 2024. Russia and India are planning to launch their own space stations to low-Earth orbit, too, and China’s Tiangong station, which is currently under construction, already has astronauts living aboard.

  It’s not clear when the ISS will go offline, but it will happen. NASA has only technically certified the station’s hardware until 2028 and has awarded more than $400 million to fund private replacements. Other longtime ISS partners are already planning their next steps. Russia may leave the ISS as soon as 2025, the same year its space agency, Roscosmos, plans to launch its new $5 billion space station. The European Space Agency, which represents 22 different European countries, is now training its astronauts for eventual missions to Tiangong.

  These new stations are building on technology first seen in the ISS, but they stand to make low-Earth orbit a more politically fraught place. After all, researchers looking to conduct research in space will potentially have to reckon with the political consequences of choosing one nation’s station over that of another. There will also be a new dynamic of several space stations competing for customers in the private sector.

  The nascent space station race isn’t quite a return to the Cold War, but it’s not the pinnacle of internationalism, either. In the best of scenarios, these new stations will learn from each other and massively expand scientific knowledge. But they will also make global politics a much bigger part of space, which could impact what happens here on Earth and how humanity explores the moon and Mars.

  NASA is downsizing in low-Earth orbit

  The ISS is a big operation. It took 42 assembly flights and an estimated $100 billion to build this habitable satellite made of 16 interconnected modules, where astronauts live and work, as well as eight solar arrays that power the station. The ISS serves as a shared laboratory in space, which NASA uses to study technologies that could be deployed on future missions to other planets, including oxygen- and water-recycling systems. Astronauts aboard the space station also research how to mitigate the health risks that come with living in space, like radiation exposure, muscle loss, and bone loss.

  “Up in space, we can measure things that we can’t measure and we can’t observe down here,” explained Cady Coleman, a former astronaut and chemist who spent several months on the ISS.

  The space station is fully functional right now. Eleven astronauts from four different countries are currently aboard the ISS, where they’ve recently added a new module, organized a spacewalk, and fixed faulty components. Much of the work on the ISS happens with the help of private companies, including major aerospace and defense firms like Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. SpaceX, meanwhile, has been carrying supplies to the ISS since 2012 and started transporting astronauts to it last year.

  NASA via Getty Images

But eventually, NASA wants to get out of the expensive business of running the ’90s-era space station. The ISS is the size of a football field and costs as much as $4 billion annually to operate, and NASA estimates that relocating its astronauts to commercial alternatives could save about $1 billion every year. Newer space stations will be smaller than the ISS and include newer tech, and NASA would only need to pay for the portion that it uses. And once these replacements are launched into orbit, the space agency can finally dispose of the ISS.

“We’re looking at ISS technology that was designed beginning in the ’80s, built in the ’90s, and launched in the ’90s and 2000s,” Wendy Whitman Cobb, a professor at the US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, told Recode. “This is definitely aging.”

The plan is to deorbit the ISS right over an area called Point Nemo in the South Pacific Ocean, which is the world’s farthest point from land. This will be a delicate process, and could take up to three years. After letting gravity pull the ISS downward to a critical height of 155 miles above Earth, NASA will organize one final flight to remove any remaining research (or astronauts). Soon afterward, ISS operators will use a cargo spacecraft to push the ISS into the atmosphere. While most of the space station should burn off, “a number of high-density payload and structural components” are likely to break through intact, according to NASA spokesperson Stephanie Schierholz.

While letting the ISS fall to Earth might sound extreme, it’s the same approach the space agency took when it retired Skylab, the first US space station, in 1979. Engineers have been studying this plan for years, and they plan to fine-tune the workflow until the ISS is close to its final descent.

In the meantime, the goal is to keep the ISS functioning as long as possible, which will give NASA more time to prepare. To ensure that happens, a bipartisan set of lawmakers want to extend the space station’s operations until 2030, a proposal that’s currently packaged within the United States Innovation and Competition Act. NASA and Congress are now waiting on a final decision from the Biden administration.

Private companies are building their own space stations

By creating an economy in low-Earth orbit, NASA thinks it can split the cost of operating a space station with the private sector. The agency is hoping that future commercial space stations will operate like coworking spaces. This would allow NASA astronauts to use facilities in low-Earth orbit alongside astronauts from other national space agencies as well as those from the private industry. There could even be media production companies and space hotel guests on board. NASA is also betting that some companies will want to use these stations to manufacture specialty products in microgravity.

To accelerate these plans, NASA has granted seed funding to four different space station concepts. Perhaps the most high-profile grant is the $130 million going to Orbital Reef, a space station project designed by Blue Origin. The company wants this station to function as a “mixed use business park” that includes labs, 3D printers, and a garden. Blue Origin says Orbital Reef will be only slightly smaller than the ISS but would cost an “order of magnitude” less to build. Orbital Reef will also look more modern, with one large, tubular main corridor that’s lined with windows and just a single layer of solar arrays extending from one side of the spacecraft, according to renderings released by the company.

In addition to the Blue Origin project, NASA has backed StarLab — not to be confused with Skylab — a new space station being developed by commercial space company Nanoracks in partnership with Voyager Space and Lockheed Martin. There’s also a proposal from Northrop Grumman. Both StarLab and the unnamed Northrop Grumman space station plan to house up to four astronauts at a time and include lab space.

Separately, NASA has awarded over $140 million to Axiom Space, a company that’s building a module for space tourism that will attach directly to the ISS. Axiom Space hired the French industrial architect and designer Philippe Starck to design the module, which will include a two-meter-high window deck and an aesthetic meant to remind people of “a nest.” When the ISS is decommissioned, the original Axiom module will be attached to other Axiom modules to form an entirely new station.

“Because this has never been a commercial endeavor, the idea of what the market is is all fluid,” Tejpaul Bhatia, the chief revenue officer of Axiom, told Recode. “We have ideas from the research that’s been done on ISS of what kind of advantages pharma, biotech, material science, and industrial manufacturing can get in microgravity.”

Axiom Space

This plan has its risks. NASA is betting there will be a lot of demand for commercial space stations, which are all supposed to launch around 2027. But only a fifth of ISS crew resources that NASA has set aside for private companies to develop their businesses in space have been used thus far, according to Gatens, the ISS director. And competition for customers could get even more intense as space stations launched by China, Russia, and India open for business.

These companies have committed, however, to finding enough business to support their operations. Millions of dollars of their seed funding from NASA is devoted to developing marketing plans, according to contracts with the agency that Recode accessed through a public records request. While Blue Origin has said NASA and its partners will serve as its primary customer for research, the StarLab station will only depend on NASA for 30 percent of its revenue during its first decade.

NASA can’t afford for them to fail. The agency has no plans to build an ISS replacement on its own, but NASA’s inspector general concluded in November that the agency’s critical research in microgravity — which NASA needs for missions to the moon and Mars — won’t be completed by 2030. The space agency’s worst nightmare is not having its own space station to complete that work, several space policy experts told Recode.

Two ISSs on the moon

It’s time for humankind to go back to the moon, and this time we’ll stay, according to NASA’s plans. As part of the space agency’s Artemis missions, NASA will establish a long-term human presence on the lunar surface, including a permanent habitat, a rocket launcher, and even a nuclear power plant. To make that all happen, the space agency is constructing the Gateway, a new space station that will orbit the moon.

Like the ISS, the Gateway is a collaboration between several countries and companies. The European, Canadian, and Japanese space programs are joining NASA in the effort, and several private aerospace space firms, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing, are also involved. SpaceX has already agreed to transport the first components for the Gateway, a habitation module and a propulsion system, on its Falcon Heavy launch system sometime in 2024.

Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

It’s best to think of the Gateway as a transit stop or a scaled-down version of the Space Station V from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Astronauts will use the Gateway as a place to dock before landing on the moon or before traveling back to Earth. The station will be big enough to fit four astronauts for up to three months, and will also double as lab space and a “mission control” center for lunar operations. When complete, the outpost will only be a sixth of the ISS’s size. The tiny station could also play a pivotal role in plans to send humans to Mars, which NASA is hoping to do sometime in the 2030s.

“This Gateway is directly derived from all the hardware and experiences learned on the International Space Station development,” Richard Mastracchio, a former ISS astronaut and current business development director at Northrop Grumman, which is building the Gateway’s habitation module, told Recode. “There’s no reason we can’t develop and utilize the same lessons learned and a lot of the same hardware to have a space station orbiting Mars.”

On the Gateway, astronauts could simulate practice missions to Mars. Astronauts could also use the Gateway to test how well experimental technologies do in space, and the station could even be used to assemble and park vehicles headed deeper into the solar system, according to Mastracchio.

But even as NASA seeks more countries to assist with the Gateway, the space station already has some competition. China and Russia agreed in March to collaborate on moon research efforts, including the construction of an International Scientific Lunar Station. While we don’t know much about these plans yet, countries and companies looking to join an international collaboration to do research on the moon can now choose between two different space stations.

International cooperation in space is more complicated

Space has never been completed isolated from the geopolitical conflict on Earth. The first decades of the Cold War launched the initial space race between the Soviet Union and the US. But even in recent years, politics has influenced what happens in space.

Back in 2011, Congress passed legislation severely restricting NASA from collaborating with the Chinese government, which effectively barred China National Space Administration astronauts from the ISS. Roscosmos has repeatedly threatened to leave the space station in response to US sanctions on its domestic space industry. Space debris created by anti-satellite tests launched by the US, China, Russia, and India continues to fuel geopolitical tensions in space.

But those tensions could become even more complicated as the next generation of stations launch, which will allow the countries operating in space to form international collaborations beyond the ISS.

China’s Tiangong space station plans to host experiments from several other countries and is open to working with the US. New space stations planned by Russia and India are also likely to recruit partner countries and companies. And while the four commercial space stations with NASA funding present themselves as global platforms, they will legally function as American companies and will be subject to US rules limiting what countries they can work with, explains Namrata Goswami, an independent scholar of space policy.

“Anything involving space is not just about space prestige and power, but it’s also a lot about economic benefits and economic development,” Goswami told Recode. “The space industry today is about $400 billion. The space station plays a role in developing these technologies.”

These developments will create new opportunities for countries without space stations — countries like the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, and Australia, which have wanted to send their own astronauts into space but don’t have anywhere to stay in low-Earth orbit. Which space station they choose to partner with won’t just depend on cost, but on political calculations too.

So the ISS’s eventual deorbit won’t be the end of international collaboration in space. On the contrary, it ushers in a new era of space stations, one that will make cooperation a lot more politically and economically complicated. This generation will surely remind us that humanity’s current conflicts are by no means limited to planet Earth.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Bayern sharpshooter Lewandowski has the world in his sights - Despite the controversial Ballon d’Or snub, life has never been better for the 33-year-old. Widely regarded as the best No. 9 on the planet, he is breaking historic goal-scoring records even as Europe’s biggest clubs look to woo him away from Munich

• Has Pena submitting Nunes at UFC 269 set up the ‘biggest women’s fight of all time’? - Experts are calling it the most shocking upset in the sport’s history. Fans are clamouring for a rematch between the former bantamweight champion, widely considered one of the greatest ever, and her conqueror. UFC president Dan White thinks it can eclipse Rousey-Holm

• The Ashes | Do-or-die time for under-siege England - Holder Australia, which is on a roll, needs only to avoid defeat to retain the coveted urn

• Long jumper Shaili, swimmer Riddhima selected for TOPS - Under-20 World Athletics silver medal-winning long jumper Shaili Singh is among 50 sportspersons across eight disciplines who have been added to the C

• Amir to battle it out in French F4 in 2022 - He is the only Indian to figure in the driver line-up

From The Hindu: National News

• Yogi Adityanath kickstarts campaign to distribute smartphones to one crore students of Uttar Pradesh - Tablets and smartphones were distributed to 60,000 students at the Ekana Stadium.

• Punjab Assembly election | 22 farm bodies in Punjab announce political front, to contest State polls - The farm bodies were part of the year-long protest against the three farm laws

• PWD’s heritage division launches project to restore 93-year-old school building in Kanniyakumari - Constructed in 1928, Sethu Lakshmi Bai Government Higher Secondary School was gradually overshadowed by the proliferation of private English medium schools

• Samyukta Kisan Morcha would not contest Assembly polls, say leaders - The platform of more than 400 different ideological organisations is formed for issues surrounding farmers, they say

• ‘We have not finished our mission but large patches of the Ganga are clean’ - Taking care of rivers has to be part of cities’ master plans, says the outgoing Director-General of the National Mission for Clean Ganga

From BBC: Europe

• Pope Francis Urbi et Orbi address: World ignoring huge tragedies - In his Christmas Day speech, the Pope said “immense tragedies” were being passed over in near silence.

• Covid: Christmas flights cancelled and new curbs amid Omicron spread - Millions face travel disruption and more restrictions as Omicron upends Christmas plans worldwide.

• Climate change: Lapland reindeer gone astray in search for food - Herders are struggling to find thousands of reindeer that have run away in search of food.

• French zoo closed temporarily after pack of nine wolves escape - No people were injured during the incident, but the wolf pack was killed due to safety concerns.

• No time for war: Russians see no chance of conflict - With rhetoric becoming harsh and fears of an invasion growing, Muscovites give their views on the crisis.

From Ars Technica

• Santa and the elves aren’t so cuddly in these Nordic Christmas horror gems - Netflix’s new series Elves pairs perfectly with 2010’s Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale - link

• Tune in as NASA and the ESA try launch the next great space telescope - Follow along as astronomers start unwrapping a telescope-sized gift at 7am US Eastern. - link

• Intel apologizes for banning use of components from Xinjiang - Intel the latest multinational caught up in human rights conflict between Beijing, the west. - link

• Tesla will shut off center console gaming while car is in motion [Updated] - Software updates shutting off the feature are in the process of being sent out. - link

• The Wheel of Time’s first season wraps up in an explosive, twisty finale - Our biggest complaint about the season is that there needed to be more of it. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• My girlfriend borrowed $100 from me. After 3years, when we separated, she returned exactly $100. -

  I lost Interest in that relationship.

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

• Chinese man rings his boss… -

  …”Me no work. I sick.” Boss says, “When I’m sick, I fuck my wife. Try that.” Couple hours later, Chinese man rings back,”Me better. You got nice house.”

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

• An Engineer accidentally goes to Hell instead of Heaven -

  An Engineer dies and goes to hell. He’s hot and miserable, so he decides to take action. The A/C has been busted for a long time, so he fixes it. Things cool down quickly.

  The moving walkway motor jammed, so he unjams it. People can get from place to place more easily.

  The TV was grainy and unclear, so he fixes the connection to the Satellite dish and now they get hundreds of high def channels.

  One day, God decides to look down on Hell to see how his grand design is working out and notices that everyone is happy and enjoying umbrella drinks. He asks the Devil what’s going on?

  The Devil replies, “Things are great down here since you sent us that engineer.”

  “What?? An engineer? I didn’t send you one of those, that must have been a mistake. Send him back up right this minute.”

  The Devil responds, “No way! We are going to keep our engineer. We like this guy.”

  God demands, “If you don’t send him to me immediately, I’ll sue!”

  The Devil laughs. “Where are YOU going to get a lawyer?”

  submitted by /u/suave111111
  [link] [comments]

• A 17 year old guy walks into a drug store. -

  He says “I’ve been invited to Christmas dinner at my new girlfriend’s house. Afterwards I hope there is a chance I get lucky, you know what I mean.”

  Clerk: “How about condoms then? They could come in handy. Here’s a pack.”

  The young man after paying walks to the door, stops, smiles, comes back: “you know what, the mom is also smoking hot, I think I’ll take another pack, just in case I get extra lucky.”

  Christmas eve comes around, the boy sits at the dinner table and doesn’t say a word. After a while his girlfriend says: “if I had known you were so quiet, I wouldn’t have invited you.” the young man replies “if you had told me your dad works at the drug store, I wouldn’t have come.”

  submitted by /u/Vitruvius_23
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• AITA for telling daddy I saw mummy kissing another man? -

  Last night, I (7m) couldn’t sleep so I went downstairs. I saw mummy (38f) kissing a strange man. I ran upstairs to tell daddy (41m) but he wasn’t in his bedroom. I went back to bed crying.

  In the morning, mummy woke me up saying, “Merry Christmas” but I ran straight to daddy. I said, “Last night mummy was kissing Santa Claus (1751m)”.

  Mummy looked really embarrassed but daddy just laughed at me.

  Now I’m really confused. AITA?

  submitted by /u/GuvSingh
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