• ☝️ You’re looking at one of the finalists of a design contest for the “I Voted” sticker in Ulster County, NY; the design was created by 14-year-old Hudson Rowan, who said it took him “like, 10 minutes to draw”; as of Wednesday, it had received more than 170,000 of the 190,000 votes cast in the county.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 🔋🏭 Panasonic announced plans to build the world's largest EV battery manufacturing plant in Kansas; it'll invest $4 billion in the new facility and hire up to 4,000 local employees.
• 🐦 Twitter went offline for about 40 minutes yesterday morning, its longest outage since 2016.
• 🛒 See the early results from Amazon’s Prime Day 2022; the company raked in an estimated $12 billion in sales, per Adobe Analytics data, a 8.5% year-over-year increase.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🔠🎲 The New York Times is launching a Wordle-based board game in partnership with Hasbro.
• ⚖️ Amber Heard’s bid for a mistrial in her case against Johnny Depp was denied after a judge found “no evidence of fraud or wrongdoing.”
• 🎤 Disney Plus announced a collaboration with Hybe – the label behind K-pop sensation BTS – to bring “five major content titles” to the platform; at least three are confirmed to feature BTS in some form.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🐦 A new peer-reviewed study upends previous scientific belief about how woodpeckers protect their brains from a seemingly catastrophic impact every time their beak hits wood.
• 🚀 The European Space Agency successfully debuted its new Vega-C rocket this week, using it to launch seven satellites into orbit – the largest of which will test Einstein's general theory of relativity.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• ⚖️ South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdagh was charged with murder yesterday in the deaths of his wife and 22-year-old son; he faces a total of 81 felony charges primarily related to alleged financial crimes.
• 🏛️ Ivana Trump, the ex-wife of former President Trump, died at the age of 73.
• 🌾 Delegates from the UN, Russia, and Ukraine met in Istanbul to negotiate the release of Ukrainian grain supplies stuck behind a Russian blockade in the Black Sea.
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