What to Know About India’s 2024 Election

The world’s biggest election will take place next week when 960 million eligible voters from a population of 1.4 billion Indians cast their ballot to decide who will fill the 543 seats of the Lok Sabha, the more powerful lower house of Parliament—and who will become India’s next prime minister.

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is competing against a coalition of more than a dozen opposition parties, including the Indian National Congress, which once ruled over the nation for more than 50 years. At the center of the contest is incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who first rose to power in 2014 on the promise of economic reform and a Hindu nationalist mandate. If he wins again, Modi will match the record of India’s first prime minister, the Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru, by staying in power for three consecutive terms.

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Read more: A Make-or-Break Year for Democracy Worldwide

The election is a long and costly exercise: Voting begins on April 19, staggered in seven sequential phases over the course of six weeks, with the results announced on June 4. Similar to 2019, when India last held an election, this year’s election will see over a million polling booths set up across the country, with nearly 15 million polling personnel helping to administer the vote through electronic voting machines. All this is carefully planned and executed by the Election Commission of India. While the 2019 election, which cost $8.5 billion, was seen to be the world’s most expensive election by some estimates, this year’s vote is expected to exceed even that number.

Below, everything you need to know about India’s next election. 

How does India’s election work? 

Following the British parliamentary system that was in place in India until the country’s independence in 1947, India’s democracy is a multiparty parliamentary system with a bicameral legislature. That means that the party or coalition of parties that wins a majority will form a government and nominate a candidate for prime minister. To secure a majority, a party or coalition must get 272 seats.

Each of the seven voting phases is held on separate, single days during which several constituencies in multiple states cast their votes. The staggered polling enables India’s election commission to deploy security personnel who ensure the safety and freedom of electoral officials transporting the voting machines.

The Indian Election Commission will count votes using a complex calculation system and verification. Once complete, the President of India Droupadi Murmu will invite the winning party to form a government and that party’s leader will be appointed prime minister. If no single party wins an outright majority, then the leading party will usually ally with other, smaller parties.

Who are the main contenders in India’s election?

The competition mainly lies between India’s two biggest political parties: the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the opposition Indian National Congress (INC). 

The BJP first came to power in 2014 under the leadership of current Prime Minister Modi, and now rules with a coalition known as the National Democratic Alliance. In the 2019 elections, the BJP enjoyed a landslide victory after clinching an absolute majority by 303 parliamentary seats. 73-year-old Modi, who first projected himself as an outsider with a heavy hand on rampant corruption, has since transformed into one of the most popular—and polarizing—leaders in the nation’s history. Polls suggest a comfortable win for Modi due to widespread support from the country’s Hindu majority.

Read More: How Extreme Heat Will Impact India’s Election

During his second term, Modi’s government struggled with COVID-19 pandemic mismanagement, high levels of unemployment, and increasing attacks against minorities and critics of the government. At the same time, Indians admire Modi’s efforts to propel India on the world stage, which has attracted significant foreign investment and U.S. support for India’s rivalry against neighboring China. Last August, India landed a rover on the moon, becoming the fourth country to achieve the space feat; a month later, New Delhi successfully hosted the G20 summit. In January, Modi also fulfilled his party’s long-held Hindu nationalist promise of opening a Hindu temple in the city of Ayodhya. 

The main challengers to Modi are Congress Party head Mallikarjun Kharge and party scion Rahul Gandhi, who attempted to capture the nation’s imagination by undertaking a “Unite India” march across the country last year. The INC has suffered two consecutive electoral defeats in the past, winning just 44 seats in 2014 and 52 seats in 2019. While campaigning for this year’s election it has also faced several setbacks,  including bank accounts frozen by tax authorities. Last year, Gandhi was handed a two-year jail sentence over defamation charges that the Indian Supreme Court later suspended. 

To contest the BJP, the Congress Party also formed an alliance with several regional opposition parties last June—including the All India Trinamool Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party—under a banner called the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, or INDIA. But the united front has suffered several blows, including parties and party leaders defecting from the alliance over the INC’s insistence on putting forth its candidates for many seats, as well as ideological differences and personality clashes. The alliance has fielded a single primary candidate in most constituencies, but it hasn’t yet decided on its candidate for prime minister.

Read more: Why India’s Political Opposition Is So Weak

What are the key issues in India’s election?

While voters’ concerns will often vary from state to state during most Indian elections, a recent pre-poll survey conducted by Lokniti-CSDS, a Delhi-based research institute, found that more than half the respondents were most concerned about issues like unemployment and inflation, even though India’s economy is now among the fastest-growing in the world. The government has struggled to generate enough jobs, especially for young people under the age of 35, who make up more than 65% of the Indian population. At the end of 2023, the youth unemployment rate for people between the ages of 20 and 24 was 44.9%—compared to an overall unemployment rate of 8.7%, according to the National Sample Survey. 

Along with the difficulty of finding jobs, many have also expressed concerns about rising prices burning holes in their pockets, with 76% of respondents saying that they acutely felt the impact of inflation. More than 40% of the country’s population depends on agriculture for income, but farmers have long struggled to raise their living standards while feeding the country. In agrarian states like Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, rising debt has seen farmers taking to the streets to demand minimum incomes and profit. 

To help offset the burden, the BJP government has delivered what economists like the former Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian have called “new welfarism,” where the government has subsidized the provision of essential goods and services like housing, electricity, bank accounts, and cooking gas. A new digital public infrastructure system designed by the government has also made it easier to transfer cash handouts directly to voters. As such, voters will likely see the continuation of these kinds of welfare programs as important. 

The election will also put a spotlight on Modi’s Hindu-first platform, which is in stark contrast to the country’s once-secular roots. In January, Modi inaugurated a Hindu temple on the site of an old mosque and consolidated his Hindu voting base by delivering on the BJP’s long-held promise. Alongside the temple, the government has also begun implementing its 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, which fast-tracks Indian citizenship for all minorities except Muslims; stripped the Muslim-majority region of Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomy; and imposed state laws to prevent marriages between Hindus and Muslims. These policies have galvanized the 80% of India’s population that is Hindu, while simultaneously alienating 14% of the country that is Muslim. 

Read More: In Photos, India’s Devotees Celebrate the Grand Opening of the Ram Temple

Why is this election important? 

India’s democracy is both vibrant and paradoxical. The Indian Election Commission has long seen high voter turnouts. In 2019, 67% of Indians voted in the elections—no small feat for an electorate as vast and diverse as India. 

At the same time, the BJP-led government has been accused of rolling back human rights in India by imposing a crackdown on independent media and muzzling the voices of critics. Independent watchdogs have also expressed concerns about India’s judiciary and executive agencies falling in line with Modi’s will by giving favorable verdicts to pro-BJP figures in crucial cases and charging opposition leaders. Many international watchdogs have downgraded India’s democratic standing to a “hybrid regime”—one that’s neither a full democracy nor a full autocracy.

Read more: The U.S. Just Released a Scathing Report on Religious Freedom in India

As such, many see the 2024 India election as a test of the country’s democratic values, and a sign of whether the Indian majority will continue to support Modi’s 10-year rule.

source https://time.com/6966257/election-india-2024-guide-results/

German Parliament Votes to Make It Easier for Trans People to Change Their Legal Gender

The German Parliament approved a law on Friday that will make it much easier for people to change their legal gender identities and first names.

The new law, which goes into effect on Nov. 1, allows trans people to change their legal gender by filling out a simple self-disclosure form to inform the registry offices. Under the previous law, trans people had to first be assessed by two psychiatrists and obtain permission from a court before they could legally change their gender. But now, under the self-determination act, name and gender changes will be processed within three months of filing the self-disclosure form. Individuals will also be able to change their legal gender identity to non-binary.

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For children under the age of 14, the law will require parents to submit all relevant documentation, while children over the age of 14 would be able to submit the documentation themselves with the approval of their legal representatives. If the child’s legal representatives do not approve of the change, the child can still override their decision if they get approval from a family court. Once the person’s name and gender are changed, they cannot be changed again for at least one year.

The previous law in place dates back to 1980, and has been criticized by many trans activists as archaic and dehumanizing. German lawmaker, Nyke Slawik, who is transgender, said that under the current law, she spent over $2,000 obtaining assessments from doctors in order to change her legal gender. 

“We finally want to make it easier,” said Slawik on ARD television. “Many other countries have gone this way, and Germany is simply following suit in significantly simplifying this registration.”

In 2023, Spain passed a law that allows individuals over the age of 16 to change their legal genders without any medical professionals’ involvement. Similarly in the U.K., the Scottish parliament passed a law that allows individuals to change their legal gender via a self-declaration so long as they are above the age of 16.

The bill has nevertheless come under attack by Germany’s right wing parties, and the German public remains divided on the issue. A poll from YouGov for the Welt am Sonntag newspaper showed that 46% of respondents were in favor of the bill while 41% against it.

source https://time.com/6966294/germany-transgender-name-change-law/

What Happens to Your Body If You Don’t Stretch

Be honest: do you stretch before and after your workouts? If you don’t, you actually might be onto something. Most physically active adults with reasonable fitness goals may not need to stretch at all.

Here’s what every busy person should know about stretching—and how little you can get away with doing.

What is stretching, anyway?

There are two main types of stretching: static and dynamic. Static is when you hold a stretch for at least 10 to 30 seconds. Reach toward your toes for half a minute, and you’re doing a static stretch. “That’s the stuff you can do at home when you’re on your own in the evening to maintain flexibility,” says Kieran O’Sullivan, a lecturer who studies musculoskeletal pain and injury at the University of Limerick in Ireland.

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The second type is dynamic stretching. This is a faster, “bouncy” type of stretch repeated multiple times. This type of stretching is common among athletes preparing for a game or a race because it helps warm up the muscles more than static stretching does, O’Sullivan says. A dynamic stretch is never held; the person stretching is always in motion. (Imagine swinging your leg up in front of you, then touching your toe with your opposite hand and repeating.) It’s a great way to get warm, which helps bring oxygen to the muscles, activating them so they’re ready to work.

Why do people stretch?

There’s a scientific reason. During a stretch, you temporarily reduce the amount of blood flowing to your muscles, explains Judy Delp, a professor of biomedical sciences at the Florida State University College of Medicine. “That’s actually a good signal for the muscle and for the blood vessels to stimulate changes in metabolism in the muscle,” she says, and stretching triggers the growth of capillaries that deliver blood, oxygen, and nutrients to your muscles to help them function more efficiently.

Read More: Why Walking Isn’t Enough When It Comes to Exercise

But mostly, we stretch because it feels good, says Nicolas Babault, a professor who studies the physiology of exercise at the University of Burgundy in France. “Sometimes that’s the reason why people do some stretching at the end of a very exhausting training session,” he says. “After that, they feel better.” However, stretching either before or after your workout does little to impact muscle soreness over the next few days, according to a Cochrane review of 12 randomized controlled trials.

The limitations of stretching

As you stretch, it might seem like your muscles are getting longer over the course of a few minutes, but that’s not really the case. While long-term regular stretching could have this effect, O’Sullivan says that if you can’t touch your toes when you start stretching but you can after two minutes, what’s really happening is that your muscles become more tolerant of stretching. “Your body relaxes and lets you go a little further,” he says. After you’re done, your muscles pretty much go back to normal.

For athletes whose sports require major flexibility—such as dancing, gymnastics, and ice skating—regular stretching over months and years can elongate muscles and greatly increase range of motion. But some casual stretching before or after a workout probably isn’t going to make you any more flexible than the workout itself does.

What happens if you never stretch?

If you’re completely sedentary—forgoing both stretching and physical activity—your muscles won’t be able to use oxygen as effectively, meaning you’ll lose strength and endurance, says Delp. You’ll also start to lose range of motion over time. Stretching is a good way for people who have become inactive to start working their muscles and rebuilding the blood vessels they need to deliver nutrients that can help them get moving again, she says.

However, “if you walk regularly and you’re taking your joints through that range of motion, you are [stretching] without realizing it,” Delp says. “With every phase of your gait, you are actually lengthening different muscles, and you are actually stretching muscles.”

Read More: Your Brain Doesn’t Want You to Exercise

You can also get some stretching in by doing muscle-strengthening sessions. “Strength training done well will also increase your flexibility,” O’Sullivan says. To get the greatest flexibility gains from weightlifting, make sure you’re working through your full range of motion. That means if you’re doing a bicep curl, once you reach the top and your hand is near your shoulder, you should slowly let the weight back down rather than immediately dropping and releasing the weight.

Stretching has its benefits and can have a place in your exercise routine, but it’s not the most important piece of the fitness puzzle.

“Most people I know say, ‘I have about 45 minutes about four to five times a week,’ or some variation of that,” O’Sullivan says. “And in that period of time, the value of stretching relative to other workouts becomes much less.”

source https://time.com/6965081/is-stretching-important-exercise/

What’s Inside the President’s Nuclear Football

Nuclear threats have reemerged on the world stage. Frequently, Vladimir Putin warns the West that Russia is ready for nuclear war. “Weapons exits in order to use them,” Putin says. North Korea accuses the U.S. of having, “a sinister intention to provoke a nuclear war.” Entwined with the rising rhetoric, one physical object stands alone—the president’s emergency satchel, also known as the nuclear Football.

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This bulging leather briefcase remains with the president at all times, carried by a military aide, and never more than an arm’s length away. It’s an iconic reminder of preeminent power and national mystery. A “nominally secret command-and-control system used to assure presidential control of nuclear use decisions,” historian William Burr says of the Football. Items located inside the president’s emergency satchel confirm his identity and connect him, as commander in chief, to the National Military Command Center, a nuclear bunker located beneath the Pentagon.

Also inside the Football is the Black Book. This cryptic set of documents, parsed down from a much larger operational plan for nuclear war, provides the commander in chief with nuclear launch options should policy dictate the president needs to act. This includes which targets to strike, which delivery systems to use, and the timing of action. “It’s called the Black Book because it involves so much death,” says Dr. Glen McDuff, a nuclear weapons engineer who served as the classified museum historian at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The Football is with the president at all times. The first publicly-released photograph of the Football is from May 1963, at the Kennedy Family Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. It can be seen swinging from the military aide’s hand as he walks directly behind the president. The Football accompanied President Regan to the Red Square in Moscow, in 1988. When President George H.W. Bush was photographed out on jog, his military aide—also in running shorts and sneakers—can be seen just a few steps behind, carrying the iconic briefcase in her left hand.

The Football is always within a few feet of the president of the U.S. Once, when President Clinton was visiting Syria, President Hafez al-Assad’s handlers tried to prevent Clinton’s military aide from riding in an elevator with him. “We could not let that happen, and did not let that happen,” former Secret Service director Lewis Merletti says. Merletti was the special agent in charge of President Clinton’s detail at that time. “The Football must always be with the president,” he asserts. “There are no exceptions.” How the Football came to be has long been shrouded in mystery. “Its origins remain highly classified,” journalist Michael Dobbs wrote in Smithsonian Magazine in 2014. And then, just a few months ago, Los Alamos National Laboratory finally declassified the Football’s origin story. It goes like this.

One day in December 1959, a small group of officials from the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy visited a NATO base in Europe to examine joint-custody nuclear bomb protocols. The NATO pilots stationed there flew Republic F84F jets, the first U.S. Air Force fighter-bomber aircraft designed to carry nuclear bombs. Operation Reflex Action was in effect, air crews were trained and ready to strike predetermined targets in the Soviet Union in less than fifteen minutes from the call to nuclear war. One of the men on this visit was Harold Agnew, a Los Alamos scientist with a unique history.

Read More: Here’s What a Nuclear War Would Actually Look Like

Agnew was one of the three physicists assigned to fly on the Hiroshima bombing mission as a scientific observer. He carried a movie camera with him and took the only existing film footage of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, as seen from the air. Now, in 1959, Agnew was at Los Alamos overseeing thermonuclear bomb tests; he later became the lab’s director. During the trip to the NATO base, Agnew noticed something that made him wary. “I observed four F84F aircraft . . . sitting on the end of a runway, each was carrying two MK 7 [nuclear] gravity bombs,” he wrote in a document declassified in 2023. What this meant was that “custody of the MK 7s was under the watchful eye of one very young U.S. Army private armed with a M1 rifle with 8 rounds of ammunition.” Agnew told his colleagues: “The only safeguard against unauthorized use of an atomic bomb was this single G.I. surrounded by a large number of foreign troops on foreign territory with thousands of Soviet troops just miles away.”

Back in the U.S., Agnew contacted a project engineer at Sandia Laboratories named Don Cotter and asked “if we could insert an electronic ‘lock’ in the [bomb’s] firing circuit that could prevent just any passerby from arming the MK 7.” Cotter got to work. He put together a demonstration of a device, a lock and coded switch, that functioned as follows: “[a] 3-digit code would be entered, a switch was thrown, the green light extinguished, and the red light illuminated indicating the arming circuit was live.”

Agnew and Cotter went to Washington, D.C., to demonstrate this locking device—first to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, then to the president’s top science advisor and finally to the president himself. “We presented it to President Kennedy, who ordered it be done,” Agnew recalled. The military objected. The man in charge of nuclear weapons at the time, General Alfred D. Starbird, opposed the idea. Glen McDuff, who coauthored (with Agnew) the now declassified paper on the subject, summed up the general’s documented concerns. “How is a pilot, U.S. or foreign, somewhere around the world, going to get a code from the President of the United States to arm a nuclear weapon before being overrun by a massively superior number of Soviet troops?” For the U.S. military, the locking device issue opened Pandora’s box. “If gravity bombs were coded,” McDuff explains, “why not all nuclear weapons including missile warheads, atomic demolition munitions, torpedoes, all of them.” The president decided they needed to be.

The answer came in the creation of the Football, the president’s emergency satchel. But what about the nuclear war plans inside? And what about the Black Book? As surprising as this now seems, until 1960, several of the U.S. military branches had their own individual plans for nuclear war. What this meant was that the Army, Navy, and Air Force chiefs each had authority over a uniquely designated stockpile of nuclear weapons—including the delivery systems for those weapons and lists of targets to strike—for them to use at their own discretion in the event of nuclear war. When incoming Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara learned about these multiple, competing nuclear war plans, he ordered them integrated into a single plan. This is how the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, got its name.

Starting in December 1960, for the first time in the nuclear age, the SIOP gave the president, not the military, control of America’s nuclear arsenal. This new locking device designed by Agnew and Cotter, called a Permissive Action Link, or PAL, became an integral part of this new system. Only with the invention of the Football would the order to launch nuclear weapons—and the ability to physically arm them—come from the president alone. “This is how the president got the Football,” writes Agnew.

Over the years, the name for the nuclear war plan has changed. What began as the Single Integrated Operational Plan is now the Operational Plan, or OPLAN. For the Nuclear Information Project, in consort with the Federation of American Scientists, project director Hans Kristensen and senior researcher Matt Korda have identified the current Operational Plan as OPLAN 8010-12. It consists of “‘a family of plans’ directed against four identified adversaries: Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran,” the authors write. The Operation Plan for nuclear war is a colossal and cumbersome set of documents, too large to be carried around in the Football. Parsed down to a more manageable size, the plans become nuclear strike options as delineated in the Black Book.

The number of individuals who have written out their first-hand impressions of the SIOP is extremely limited. John Rubel, an avionics expert who served as an assistant secretary of defense under President Kennedy, wrote about the SIOP in his 2008 memoir, Doomsday Delayed. He liked it to a plan for “mass extermination.” Daniel Ellsberg reflected on the SIOP in his 2017 memoir, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. “It depicted evil beyond any human project ever,” Ellsberg wrote. A plan that calls for “the destruction of most cities and people in the northern hemisphere.” 

As for the Black Book, few details exist on the public record. In 2015, U.S. Strategic Command battle watch commander Colonel Carolyn Bird shared with CNN previously unreported details. An identical Football resides inside the Stratcom nuclear bunker, viewers learned, locked in a safe beneath Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. “The [Black Book inside the] president’s football and our black book are duplicates,” Bird told CNN. “They contain the same information in the same way so that we are talking off the same documents when we are discussing nuclear options.”

In an interview with the History Channel, President Clinton’s former military aide, a colonel named Robert “Buzz” Patterson, likened the Black Book to a “Denny’s breakfast menu.” He made the analogy that choosing retaliatory targets from a predetermined nuclear strike list was as simple as deciding on a combination of food items at a restaurant. “It’s like picking one out of Column A and two out of Column B,” Patterson said.

Read More: America’s Nuclear Missiles Need to be Modernized

Dr. Theodore Postol has seen the contents of the Black Book. His thoughts provide unsettling context to Patterson’s observations. From 1982 to 1984 Postol served as the assistant for weapons technology to the chief of naval operations. In this capacity, he worked on technical details regarding submarine launched ballistic missiles, or SLBMs. “Nitty gritty features,” Postol generalizes. “Seeing the contents of the Black Book,” he recalls, “I was freaked out beyond belief.” Not for reasons he expected; as a weapons technologist Postol was familiar with the mass carnage involved. Instead of being confronted with a succinct summary of these horrifying facts—the targeting of cities, the death tolls in the millions—Postol found the contents of the Black Book to be an obfuscation of the facts. The nuclear launch plans, he says, “had been sterilized down to military terminology designed to remove you from the reality of what would be happening.” An attempt at sanitizing nuclear war into a seemingly more palatable event. “My first thought,” Postol remembers, was “how would a president understand what these attack options actually mean?” This censoring of grim truths about nuclear war extends to the public as well, Postal contends. “You don’t want your population to know you’re planning genocide.” 

What, if any, is the solution to this madness? Between the saber rattling and the secrecy, nuclear matters can present themselves as intractable. And yet, in reporting this story I witnessed a change in attitude from an unlikely source: the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a federal government organization that I’ve covered as a reporter for fifteen years.

“It’s the Oppenheimer effect,” Dr. Glen McDuff told me of this new attitude, “as in Oppenheimer the film.” Ever since the release of Christopher Nolan’s 2023 feature film, “the lab has been inundated with public curiosity about the bomb,” McDuff clarifies. “With requests about nuclear weapons.” And, he says, the lab has done its best to respond. The popularity of the film has renewed dialogue about the existential dangers nuclear weapons pose. And it led to the declassification (at this reporter’s behest) to one of the laboratory’s long-held secrets—the origin story of the Football.

Were the President of the United States to be called upon to open the Football, the situation that would follow would almost certainly spiral out of control. “The world could end in the next couple of hours,” former Stratcom commander General C. Robert Kehler (ret) says of nuclear war.

Nuclear war is the only scenario other than an asteroid strike that could end civilization in a matter hours. The soot from burning cities and forests will blot out the sun and cause a nuclear winter. State-of the art climate modeling predicts five billion humans will die. In the words of Nikita Khrushchev, “the survivors will envy the dead.”

And yet, threats abound. Vladimir Putin insists he is “not bluffing” about the possibility of using weapons of mass destruction. North Korea has test launched more than 100 missiles since January 2022, including nuclear-capable weapons that can hit the U.S. United Nations Secretary General António Guterres warns the world, “Humanity is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.” The world balances on the razor’s edge. “This is madness,” Guterres says, “we must reverse course.” Change is possible. Help reverse course. “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev cautioned the world in a joint statement in 1985. Conversations between these two leaders led to the reduction in nuclear weapons from an all-time high of 70,481 warheads, to some 12,500 today. Dialogue matters. Join the conversation about nuclear weapons now, while we are all still able to have one.

This has been adapted from NUCLEAR WAR: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen with permission of Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.Copyright © 2024 by Anne M. Jacobsen

source https://time.com/6965539/u-s-presidents-nuclear-football/

O.J. Simpson Dies at 76 After Cancer Battle

American football running back O.J. Simpson, 76, died on Wednesday surrounded by his children and grandchildren after losing his battle with cancer.

Simpson’s family announced the news on X. “During this time of transition, his family asks that you please respect their wishes for privacy and grace,” the family said Thursday morning.

Simpson’s health had been in question since he announced his cancer diagnoses in a video posted on X in 2023. “It looks like I beat it,” the former football star said, after sharing that he underwent chemotherapy. In January, Simpson shared a separate video where he said he was doing well. “I’ve been dealing with issues but I am healthy now and I am ready to go,” Simspon said. 

He dispelled rumors that he was in hospice on Feb. 9 and reiterated that “all is well.” It is not clear what cancer he had. 

This is a developing story.

source https://time.com/6965757/o-j-simpson-dies/

How to Tell if Someone Is Lying to You, According to Experts

It’s fortunate that liars’ pants don’t really catch on fire. If they did, much of the world’s population would be ablaze at any given moment. “People lie most days,” says Kevin Colwell, a professor of psychology at Southern Connecticut State University who researches deception. The majority of fibs are the sorts of harmless white lies that don’t hurt anyone. (You don’t actually like Aunt Mildred’s new haircut? She’s not going to be any worse off believing otherwise.) “Lying is a very important social skill,” he says. “It greases the wheels of society and makes our relationships work better.”

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More harmful lies, however—those that are intentional misrepresentations of material facts—have the opposite effect. Being lied to or about can deteriorate someone’s mental health and lead to a ripple effect of outcomes in their life, Colwell notes, including destroying their relationships. That’s why many of us play detective, trying to separate fact from fib.

So how can you tell if someone is lying to you? The key is to enter the conversation without assumptions, says Colwell, who has trained law enforcement officers and investigators with groups like the National Counterterrorism Center in deception detection. “You have to not go into it assuming they’re lying to you, because if you do, it’s going to change how they interact with you,” he says. “You have to be engaging and connect with them in a way that makes the conversation easy for them.”

You won’t always be able to tell for sure. But here’s what to look and listen for if you’re trying to figure out if someone is lying to you.

There will likely be physical signs

To know whether someone’s lying, you must have a baseline understanding of what’s normal for that person, explains Jim Clemente, a former New York State prosecutor and retired FBI special agent. The more time you spend with them, the better you’ll be able to recognize changes in behavior and communication. Some people, for example, might struggle to make eye contact in every conversation; for others, it will be a tell that something is amiss. Once you know what their norm is, pay attention to physiological changes caused by the fight-or-flight response: someone who is lying might start sweating, or their pulse will visibly pound in their neck. As their heart rate and blood pressure shoot up, their salivation will decrease, which means you might notice they’re gulping or licking their lips. Some people will begin fidgeting. “Shifting their torso, moving the chair away from the person talking to them, standing or attempting to leave—I’ve seen all of that,” Clemente says. “You might see rubbing or wringing of the hands, pinching parts of the body, clearing the throat, pulling on the hair. All these things can be stress and tension releases.”

They’ll repeat the same story over and over

Let’s say you ask your partner what they were doing on Wednesday night. After they fill you in, respond: “That sounds neat. I wish I had been there—tell me more about what happened.” People who are telling the truth tend to talk in a natural, free-flowing way, Colwell says—they aren’t worried about getting caught. So they’ll supply new, relevant details they didn’t include the first time around.

Read More: How to Respond to an Insult, According to Therapists

People who are lying, on the other hand, tread carefully. They might talk a lot, but “they’ll tell you the same thing they just told you, the same as how they already said it,” Colwell says. “They’re making sure they don’t contradict themselves and give information that could lead to them getting caught.” If you’re hearing a whole lot of the same thing, continue asking specific questions—and it will likely soon become obvious that you’ve discovered a lie.

They’ll be oddly chronological

People who are lying tend to tell stories chronologically, Colwell notes—as opposed to those who are being truthful, who will go from the most important parts to the least important. If you don’t have anything to hide, “the first thing you’re going to remember is the most important piece of that event, and then the rest of it will come back,” he says. “If you know you’re going to lie, you’ve practiced and you have a script—and scripts start at the beginning and end at the end. Scripts don’t start in the middle.”

They’ll speak more eloquently

Surprisingly, people often speak better when they’re lying than they do when they’re telling the truth. “They’re engaging in impression management,” Colwell says. That might mean using a more complex and sophisticated vocabulary than you would expect, with words you didn’t even realize they knew. So if you’re marveling at your friend’s newfound language mastery? “It’s a clue that they’re lying to you at that moment,” he says.

They’ll drop or change pronouns

When a woman asks her lying husband about his day, he might reply: “I went to the park. Ate lunch.” Notice that he dropped the “I” in front of “ate lunch,” Clemente says. That could be because he’s covering up that he and another person—“we”—ate lunch. Similarly, he recalls suspects who said: “Left my house. It was on fire.” His response: “You left your house because you discovered it was on fire, or because you lit it on fire?”

Their sentences may be full of qualifiers

Some lies are indirect: People omit crucial facts or feign forgetfulness. In these cases, they’ll often answer questions with questions, Clemente says. Consider the famous scene in Seinfeld where Elaine’s friend asks her if she’s having an affair with George. “Why would you think I was having an affair with George?!” a frazzled Elaine responds. (Spoiler alert: She wasn’t, but she was covering for George, who had gone on a date with Marisa Tomei.) Or, when asked if he killed his brother, a murderer might respond: “Why would I want to hurt Jack?” If you ask a yes-or-no question, Clemente says, pay close attention if you don’t get a straight response.

Read More: Are Personality Tests Actually Useful?

People who are lying by omission also tend to be vague or evasive by using phrases like “I think,” “probably,” “sort of,” “maybe I was,” and “I started to,” Clemente points out. “If somebody says, ‘I started to drive to work, and then when I got there….,’ they probably edited out what happened in between,” he says.

They’ll sound different

Paying attention to non-linguistic verbal cues—like tone, volume, pace, and pitch—can be revealing. People who are telling the truth usually speak in a consistent way, Clemente says; those who are lying are likely to have a broken rate, with variations in pitch and amplitude. “If somebody’s under stress, their pitch might go up quite a bit,” he says. “Their pace might slow down because they’re trying to think, or it might be really fast because they’re so nervous.”

Their eyes might hold secrets

There’s a common assumption that people look away when they’re lying—but actually, research suggests that gaze aversion is common when we’re thinking, which doesn’t necessarily equate to telling a fib. “People who have a lie ready to go often look at you straight in the eye, because they want to know if you’re going to buy it,” says Wendy Patrick, a longtime prosecutor and author of Red Flags: How to Spot Frenemies, Underminers, and Ruthless People. “They’re trying to see if you’re buying what they’re selling.”

Plus, people who are lying usually don’t smile with their eyes, she adds. Generally, if someone is telling the truth, “you’ll see their crow’s feet as their eyes relax into their smiles.” It’s probably a safe bet to trust what they’re saying.

Their mannerisms won’t match the situation

When people are truthful, their mood and mannerisms should match the message, Patrick says. If you detect a visual-verbal mismatch, consider it a red flag. That might mean smiling or giggling while discussing a serious subject—like Christopher Watts famously did in 2018 when police interviewed him about whether he murdered his missing wife. (Though Watts initially maintained his innocence, he later confessed to killing his pregnant wife and their two daughters.) “It doesn’t always have to be something so sensational,” she adds. “But it is the dynamic of how our emotions belie our words, and indicate that we’re lying.”

source https://time.com/6964719/how-to-tell-if-someone-is-lying/

What to Know About Amanda Knox’s Slander Trial in Italy

Amanda Knox is facing another trial in Italy this week in connection to a slander conviction for  wrongfully alleging that a bar owner murdered her 21-year-old British roommate in 2007. 

Knox, 36, had planned to appear at Wednesday’s retrial at Florence’s appeals court but remained in the U.S. to take “care of her two young children, one of whom was born recently,” her lawyer said. 

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Italy’s top court had ordered the retrial in October after Knox appealed for the slander condition to be overturned. The legal challenge was made possible after a 2022 reform of Italy’s code of criminal procedure. 

Knox became a household name at age 20 after she and her then boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were convicted of murder following the killing of her roommate Meredith Kercher. Knox and Kercher shared an apartment in Perugia, while the latter was on an Erasmus year abroad. During this time, Kercher’s body was discovered in her bedroom with her throat slashed, more than 40 stab wounds and signs of sexual assault. 

Patrick Lumumba—a Congolese bar owner who had employed Knox—was arrested in November 2007 after Knox accused him of murdering Kercher. Lumumba spent two weeks in jail before a witness provided him with an alibi. 

Read More: Amanda Knox on Her New Show, #MeToo and Life After Prison

Knox was then convicted on charges of murder, sexual assault, and slander, while Sollecito was convicted for murder and sexual assault. They both spent almost four years in jail before their release in 2011. Italy’s highest court overturned their convictions in 2015 in light of “glaring errors” in the case. But Knox’s defamation conviction for falsely implicating Lumumba has remained until now. 

Knox has asked for the slander conviction to be dropped in light of a 2019 European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling, which determined that her rights had been violated during police questioning. Lawyers for Knox, argued that she made allegations against Lumumba under police duress with no legal assistance or an interpreter. The ECHR also ruled that the Italian legal system should pay Knox $20,000 in financial damages. 

A third defendant, Rudy Guede—who was from the Ivory Coast but moved to Italy as a child—was charged with Kercher’s murder at the same time as Knox and Sollecito. Guede’s DNA matched a vaginal swab taken from Kercher. After seeking his own fast-tracked trial, separate from Knox and Sollecito, Guede was originally sentenced to 30 years but this was later reduced.

Guede was freed on parole in November 2021, after completing 13 years of a 16-year-sentence. He is currently under investigation for physical and sexual abuse of an ex-girlfriend. 

Where is Amanda Knox now?

Now a lucrative media personality, Knox has built a career as a podcaster and campaigner for criminal justice reform. Her memoir received a $4m advance and her story will be the focus of an upcoming Hulu series about her battle with Italy’s legal system, with Monica Lewinsky signed on as an executive producer.  

“On the one hand, I am glad I have this chance to clear my name, and hopefully that will take away the stigma that I have been living with,” Knox said during an episode of her podcast Labyrinths in December. “On the other hand, I don’t know if it ever will, in the way I am still traumatized by it,” she added

At the time Knox’s conviction was overturned, Lumumba said the decision “shows the power available for rich people.” Living in Poland after his life and business were harmed by the allegations, Lumumba said he was feeling “very bad” about her acquittal. 

“Amanda is free because she is American, but Americans are human like everybody,” he said.

Knox was previously ordered to pay Lumumba compensation but he had not received any payments according to his lawyer Carlo Pacelli. Pacelli added that his client had not been contacted about the retrial at any point in the process. 

source https://time.com/6965470/amanda-knoxs-slander-trial-italy/