• ☝️ The world’s tallest and shortest women met for afternoon tea in London this week to celebrate Guinness World Records Day; Rumeysa Gelgi stands 7 feet and 0.7 inches tall, while Jyoti Amge is 2 feet and 0.7 inches.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

in partnership with Tuft & Needle

• 💰 US markets rose across the board (S&P: +0.5%; Dow: +1.1%; Nasdaq: +0.03%). | 🏘️ US home sales in October were 2.9% higher than last year, marking the first annual increase in over three years. | 💼 Weekly jobless claims fell to a seven-month low.
• ⚖️ Gary Wang, former FTX CTO, will not serve any time in prison. | ✌️ Gary Gensler, chair of Securities and Exchange Commission, is stepping down on January 20.
• 🏦 Digital payment providers processing 50+ million transactions/year, including Apple Pay, Google Wallet, Cash App, PayPal, etc., will soon be subject to bank-like supervision under new rules being finalized by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🎤 Coachella announced the lineup for its 2025 music festival, headlined by Lady Gaga, Post Malone, Green Day, and Travis Scott. | ⚖️ Actor Jussie Smollett’s conviction for falsely staging and reporting a hate crime to Chicago police in 2019 was overturned by Illinois’ Supreme Court; justices ruled Smollett shouldn’t have been charged a second time after previously entering a nonprosecution agreement with authorities.
• 📖🏆 Percival Everett won the National Book Award for fiction – one of America’s most prestigious literary prizes – for James, a reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
• ⛳ The LPGA announced $131 million in prize money for the 2025 season, a 90% increase from 2021. | ⚾ The MLB will test robot umpires in 2025 spring training.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

in partnership with Cornbread Hemp

• 🦧 Chimps can share knowledge like humans do, according to a new study; researchers found female chimps who migrate to new social groups bring skills and technology along with them.
• ☢️ A nuclear fusion breakthrough from Princeton researchers could reduce the need for tritium in fusion reactors by a factor of 10x; tritium is a rare and expensive isotope of hydrogen that’s posed a major hurdle for scientists building nuclear reactors.
• 🛰️ The International Space Station performed a maneuver Tuesday to avoid a piece of space junk, which could have come within 2.5 miles of the station without preemptive action. | 🌌 Astronomers recently captured the first close-up image of a star outside our Milky Way galaxy.

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MISCELLANEOUS

• 🥪 The McRib is coming back to McDonald’s locations nationwide starting December 3; McDonald’s is also selling half-gallon jugs of McRib sauce starting this Monday.
• 🇧🇷⚖️ Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was indicted by the country’s federal police yesterday alongside 36 other defendants for allegedly attempting a coup to keep him in office after losing the 2022 election.
• 🇷🇺🇺🇦 Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed Moscow launched a new intermediate-range ballistic missile at Ukraine early yesterday in response to Ukraine’s recent use of US and UK weapons to strike deeper into Russia; the missile is capable of carrying nuclear warheads, but lacks the range of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). | 🇺🇸🇺🇦 The US agreed to send antipersonnel mines to Ukraine; the international community has long condemned such weapons due to their danger to innocent civilians.

CLICKBAIT

• ☀️👽 The fastest-moving stars in the galaxy may be piloted by intelligent aliens, new paper suggests.