Sunday Reads

• The West's decline would hurt China. (Project Syndicate)
• Why you can't switch off at the weekend. (BBC Capital)
• India lifts veil on Army as Narendra Modi prepares to spend U.S.$150 billion (Bloomberg)

Can Technology Save Us from Global Warming?

Via Jones Oil.

Sunday Reads

"It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others." Read Justin Fox's brilliant piece on how "meritocracy is just another way of bringing you down" (Bloomberg). 

• The Feds brought down the world's biggest file-sharing website. (Foreign Policy)
• Educated terrorists and victimhood. (New IE)

And in the end...

Before bowling to (the visibly healthy) Mike Gatting in a test match, Aussie fast bowler Dennis Lille said, ”Hell Gatt, move out of the way... I can’t see the stumps”.

Sunday Reads

• Why Turkey's stability matters (BBC) 
• China's South China Sea arguments only prove its own perverse logic of history (FirstPost)
• Why you need to read and how to do it efficiently (Medium)
  

Also read: Man in New Zealand quits his job to play Pokemon Go full-time (BBC)

Things You Should Know - Episode XX

• Google has a pet T-rex, named Stan, which lives at their California headquarters. Founders bought it to remind the employees to not let Google go extinct.

• Tuvalu is the world's smallest national economy with a GDP of about U.S.$33 million because of its very small population, a lack of natural resources, reliance on foreign aid, negligible capital investment, demographic problems, and low average incomes.
  
• Saudi Arabia is the world's only country to forbid women from driving. While it is not technically illegal for women to drive, only men are awarded driving licences - and women who drive in public risk being fined and arrested by the police.
  
  
• At U.S.$2.46 trillion in GDP, California is now the sixth-largest economy in the world, surpassing France, thanks to a robust state economy and strong U.S. dollar. California was the world’s eighth-largest economy in 2014. France is the world’s seventh-largest economy with a growth domestic product of U.S.$2.42 trillion, and India is the eighth-largest with U.S.$2.09 trillion, according to the latest International Monetary Fund data. Read more here.
  
  
• ABBA is a Swedish pop group formed in Stockholm in 1972 by members Agnetha Fältskog, Bjorn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. They became one of the most commercially successful acts in the history of popular music, topping the charts worldwide from 1974 to 1982. 

  

  (from left) Benny Andersson, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Agnetha Fältskog, & Bjorn Ulvaeus 

  
  

  
  During the band's active years, Fältskog & Ulvaeus and Lyngstad & Andersson were married. At the height of their popularity, both relationships were suffering strain which ultimately resulted in the collapse of the Ulvaeus–Fältskog marriage in 1979 and the Andersson–Lyngstad marriage in 1981. These relationship changes were reflected in the group's music, with later compositions featuring more introspective and dark lyrics in contrast to their usual pure-pop sound. (Source for text & picture: Wikipedia) 

Sunday Reads

• Newslaundry, your fact-check on the PM's interview has been fact-checked. (OPIndia)
• The political resonance of the 'Game of Thrones'. (New Yorker)
• Bangladesh at crossroads. (BBC)
• Indian Muslim women fight to overturn Triple Talaq. (AlJazeera)

Check out this infographic on Job Interview Cautions here.