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Some of the most popular sports, like athletics and swimming, have had unofficial world rankings based largely on form in any given season. But generally onlookers have had to rely on the odds produced by bookmakers for a guide of who is likely to win Olympic glory.

The most comprehensive publicly available projection belongs to Gracenote Sports, an analytics company owned by Nielsen, an American market-research firm.

The immediate global implications will be higher inflation, lower growth and some disruption to financial markets as deeper sanctions take hold.

Sanctions after the invasion of Crimea did not prevent BP, ExxonMobil or Shell from investing in Russia, while American penalties on Rusal, a Russian metals firm, in 2018 were short-lived.

Russia is one of the world’s largest oil producers and a key supplier of industrial metals such as nickel, aluminium and palladium.

Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson never uttered the word 'empathy' in nearly 19 hours of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, but she effectively made clear it's a hallmark of her style and an asset to judicial credibility

Jackson also insisted it has no influence on her legal decisions."I am not importing my personal views or policy preferences," she told the committee. "The entire exercise is about trying to understand what those who created this policy or this law intended."

What Judge Jackson and her supporters tout as a selling point, Republican critics call a major liability.

Despite the $300bn mega-bankruptcy of Evergrande, the risk of an immediate 2008-style crisis in China is slight.

let us linger over the significance of this point. What China is doing is, after all, staggering. By means of its “three red lines” credit policy, it is stopping in its tracks a gigantic real estate boom. China’s real estate sector, created from scratch since the reforms of 1998, is currently valued at $55tn. That is the most rapid accumulation of wealth in history. It is the financial reflection of the surge in China’s urban population by more than 480mn in a matter of decades.

Throughout the history of modern capitalism real estate booms have been associated with credit creation and, as the work of Òscar Jordà, Moritz Schularick and Alan M. Taylor has shown, with major financial crises.

CALIFORNIA -- Californians shouldering the nation's highest gas prices could soon get a tax break, free rides on public transit and up to $800 on debit cards to help pay for fuel under a proposal revealed Wednesday by Gov. Gavin Newsom, but how soon could taxpayers start seeing the money?Gas prices have soared in recent weeks, the result of pandemic-induced inflation and Russia's invasion of Ukraine

State governments across the country have been debating what to do about it, with the most popular choices being slashing fuel taxes or offering rebates to taxpayers.Last week, the governors of Maryland and Georgia signed laws temporarily suspending their state's gas taxes, while Georgia on Wednesday also offered $1.1 billion in refunds to taxpayers in a separate action.California's average gas prices hit a new state record Wednesday at $5.88 per gallon, more than $2 higher than it was a year ago, according to AAA. California has the second-highest gas tax in the country at 51 cents per gallon. But the state's Democratic leaders have been wary of suspending the gas tax because they fear oil companies would not pass along the savings to drivers.

RELATED: Are California drivers paying a hidden gas fee?

On February 24, 2022, Russian forces unleashed a wave of attacks on neighboring Ukraine. Given that Russia had been gathering troops on Ukraine's border since October 2021, the full-scale invasion from the north, east, and south was not totally unexpected. However, American and European Union (EU) officials had hoped that the threat of economic sanctions would deter Russian President Vladimir Putin from taking this drastic action. To better understand how we got here, it is essential to know a little about the long, complicated relationship between the two countries.

In the days leading up to the 2022 attack, he told Russians, "Ukraine is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space. These are our comrades, those dearest to us – not only colleagues, friends, and people who once served together, but also relatives, people bound by blood, by family ties."

The purpose of the consortium of 30 countries is to guarantee the freedom and security of its members through political and military means. President Putin believes that Ukraine's acceptance into NATO would threaten Russia's borders and its sphere of influence.

Indian TV anchors have long been critical of U.S. foreign policy

the criticism has also become more pointed since the election of Biden, a Democrat who is seen as more vocal about India’s alleged human rights issues compared with former president Donald Trump. Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser, has appeared on shows including Shivshankar’s India Upfront, Pande noted, but prominent Democrats are less often seen.

The U.S. government and media, Pande said, “are viewed as outside liberal forces that should mind their own business.”

. In 2014, participants in the two seminar groups lived their lives together seamlessly outside of the seminar, exploring Ithaca and the Cornell campus, eating and laughing together, and setting up a system to govern their community togethe

In 2022, however, I was told that the “Critical Black Studies” students would live and learn separately, creating a fully “black space.” My “Anti-Oppressive Studies” students were separated from them. Instead of participating in a summer community of 32 high-school students, my group was to be a community of 12 (that would dwindle to nine by the time of the mutiny).

in the 2022 community, afternoons and evenings would no longer be spent having fun and doing homework. Two college-age students called “factotums” (led by one I will call “Keisha”) were assigned to create anti-racism workshops to fill the afternoons. There were workshops on white supremacy, on privilege, on African independence movements, on the thought and activism of Angela Davis, and more, all of which followed an initial, day-long workshop on “transformative justice.” Students described the workshops as emotionally draining

The image I had then of a golden future was a book-lined sitting-room with an old, unused piano and a fire crackling away in the grate. Cats (one had to be ginger) would saunter from room to room and there would occasionally be hints of some Elizabeth David-style French casserole wafting in from a distant kitchen.

books – covering every available surface – were the main thing: proof (at least it seemed then) of a life well spent.

I was at that age of being over-attuned to the books-you-had-to-have-read-in-life, and where to start? Whichever you chose, you always wished you were reading another. It was a bit like being a serial monogamist at an orgy – with devastatingly attractive if sometimes impenetrable sexual partners – and the very thing that should have brought you peace and enjoyment only agitated instead

They said Musk’s erratic leadership style also played a role, forcing them to work at a breakneck pace to develop the technology and to push it out to the public before it was ready. Some said they are worried that, even today, the software is not safe to be used on public roads. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

“The system was only progressing very slowly internally” but “the public wanted a product in their hands,” said John Bernal, a former Tesla test operator who worked in its Autopilot department. He was fired in February 2022 when the company alleged improper use of the technology after he had posted videos of Full Self-Driving in action

“Elon keeps tweeting, ‘Oh we’re almost there, we’re almost there,’” Bernal said. But “internally, we’re nowhere close, so now we have to work harder and harder and harder.” The team has also bled members in recent months, including senior executives.

In 2008, the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury Department also stepped in during the subprime lending crisis to coordinate the restructuring of troubled institutions. But creditor and investor rights and the political risks of bailing out banks limited what American regulators can do; arrangements were reached only after hard bargaining with banks and investment houses. In China, financial institutions have to do what the government tells them.

The government’s hand is everywhere. The most fundamental asset in China — land — is owned or controlled by the state. The value of China’s currency, the renminbi, is government-managed and regulators are widely believed to intervene in trading on the country’s stock markets.

Most of China’s biggest and most powerful companies, including all of its major banks, are state-owned, and executives are usually members of the Communist Party, which controls top-level corporate appointments.

A long history of mercantile trade along the eastern shores of Africa left its mark on the DNA of ancient Swahili people.

A new analysis of centuries-old bones and teeth collected from six burial sites across coastal Kenya and Tanzania has found that, around 1,000 years ago, local African women began having children with Persian traders — and that the descendants of these unions gained power and status in the highest levels of pre-colonial Swahili society.

long-told origin stories, passed down through generations of Swahili families, may be more truthful than many outsiders have presumed.

after a decade of failed attempts, David Smith, a self-described shape hobbyist of Bridlington in East Yorkshire, England, suspected that he might have finally solved an open problem in the mathematics of tiling: That is, he thought he might have discovered an “einstein.”

In less poetic terms, an einstein is an “aperiodic monotile,” a shape that tiles a plane, or an infinite two-dimensional flat surface, but only in a nonrepeating pattern. (The term “einstein” comes from the German “ein stein,” or “one stone” — more loosely, “one tile” or “one shape.”)

Your typical wallpaper or tiled floor is part of an infinite pattern that repeats periodically; when shifted, or “translated,” the pattern can be exactly superimposed on itself

After all, much as its backbenchers huff and puff, even Labour has admitted an important principle: there is a limit to the number of refugees this country can accept.

In parliament on Monday, the shadow immigration minister, Stephen Kinnock, said explicitly that “safe and legal routes” for immigration must be “capped” and “based on prioritisation”

With an estimated 32.5 million refugees in the world, this ought to be a statement of the obvious

“We’re in an incredibly dangerous world right now,” says Jin, who was born in Beijing and earned her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard and whose father, Jin Liqun, served as a vice minister of finance for China. “Without more effort made to understand each other’s perspectives, peaceful coexistence may not be possible.”

China’s current economic challenge is to overcome its middle-income trap,11 The term for when wages rise in a country but then stall as a result of higher costs and declining competitiveness. something that the United States might not relate to. It’s not all about displacing the United States as global hegemon, which would come with a huge amount of burdens and responsibilities. And I don’t think China is ready or willing to do that. To see China solely as trying to displace the United States is only going to stoke more fears

That’s not to say that the economic means justify the unfortunate circumstances. But China is a country that has done the most economically for the most number of people in the shortest amount of time. If you look at the new generation, they are open-minded on a whole range of issues, so much more than their parents. They care about animal rights, worker rights, social inequity. That shift gives us hope that China will progress.

after seeing the political turmoil that engulfed Nicola Sturgeon’s final days as Scottish first minister, Starmer is keen to clarify both his personal and his party’s position on the subject.

Speaking about Sturgeon’s gender recognition bill, which proposed self-identification for those wishing to change their legal gender, Starmer says: “The lesson from Scotland is that if you can’t take the public with you on a journey of reform, then you’re probably not on the right journey. And that’s why I think that collectively there ought to be a reset in Scotland.”

It sounds like a marked change of tone from the Labour leader, whose party prevaricated over the issue only weeks ago by first whipping its MSPs to vote for the gender bill in Holyrood, then asking MPs in Westminster to abstain when the government exercised its veto over the legislation.

Ezra Klein, has done some of the most dedicated reporting on the topic since he moved to the Bay Area a few years ago, talking with many of the people creating this new technology.

one is that the people building these systems have only a limited sense of what’s actually happening inside the black box—the bot is doing endless calculations instantaneously, but not in a way even their inventors can actually follow

an obvious question, one Klein has asked: “’If you think calamity so possible, why do this at all?

What her book set out to defend is an intellectual tradition, admittedly ill-choate, that stands for reason, the ennobling potential of education, and the centrality of the “human dimension of life,” as opposed to systems and abstract theories.

ut in the intervening months, advanced chatbots descended; so did the possibility that they might soon imperil the whole of that enterprise. Automation stands poised to displace the production of essays and scholarly inquiry. It’s suddenly plausible to imagine that freethinking, that tradition of poking and prodding at all fixed ideas and institutions, will drift into obsolescence, because an oracular machine will instantly spit back answers to life’s questions with an aura of scientific authority.

Progressives in the academy have bludgeoned humanism’s fundamental precepts. Gone is the old motto “I am human, and consider nothing human alien to me,” replaced by the fetishization of “lived experience.

the technological accomplishment of Bitcoin is that it invented a decentralized way to create scarcity on computers. Bitcoin demonstrated a way for me to send you a computer message so that you’d have it and I wouldn’t, to move items of computer information between us in a way that limited their supply and transferred possession.

The wild thing about Bitcoin is not that Satoshi invented a particular way for people to send numbers to one another and call them payments. It’s that people accepted the numbers as payments.

That social fact, that Bitcoin was accepted by many millions of people as having a lot of value, might be the most impressive thing about Bitcoin, much more than the stuff about hashing.