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Good morning and welcome to Tuesday.
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⏰🚀 Ready, Set, Go: Today’s newsletter takes 4.68 minutes to read. (With the 360° view: +2.88 minutes.)
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👇📰 Quick Bits
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🇬🇳 Military Coup In Guinea
Image: BBC
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🎁 Guinea’s military staged a coup on Sunday, arresting President Alpha Condé and dissolving the government while promising to rewrite the country’s constitution.
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Images and videos soon emerged showing the 83-year-old Condé in captivity surrounded by men in military fatigues.
📅 How did we get here?… President Condé’s removal by force comes less than a year after he spearheaded an amendment to the constitution allowing for a third term and won the ensuing election amid violent public protests and allegations of fraud.
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Col. Mamadi Doumbouya, leader of Guinea’s military junta, said “poverty and endemic corruption” drove his forces to remove President Condé from office.
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On Monday, the junta replaced the West African country’s governors with regional military commanders.
🗣️🌎 Public response… Bystander videos from Sunday show hundreds of citizens celebrating in the streets of Guinea’s capital, Conakry, and congratulating soldiers who detained President Condé.
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Meanwhile, the EU, UN, African Union, and Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have all condemned the coup and called for a return to civilian rule.
👁️ Looking ahead… Col. Doumbouya on Monday said a new “union” government would be formed in weeks, but declined to give an exact date – nor did he say what the military plans to do with President Condé, who remains in detention.
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🎟️ Shang-Chi’s Weekend Performance Was…
Image: Giphy
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🎁 ‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,’ Marvel’s first Asian-led superhero film, brought in around $90 million at U.S. theaters between Friday and Monday, obliterating the Labor Day weekend box office record.
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The previous record-holder was "Halloween," which earned a little more than $30 million over the long weekend in 2007.
Behind the numbers…
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According to Bloomberg, citing figures from Disney, Asian filmgoers "represented about 17% of theater attendees over the weekend, more than double the usual turnout for a Marvel film." (Go deeper.)
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At the international box office, the movie grossed $56.2 million. The film doesn’t have a release date in China, which historically accounts for around 12% of Marvel’s global gross.
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Put another way, the movie cost roughly $200 million to make – and then made ~$145 million of it back in four days. All before launching in China.
The audience seems to be digging it, too. It’s currently sitting at 98% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Something to note: “Shang-Chi” is playing only in theaters for 45 days before it hits Disney+.
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Disney CEO Bob Chapek called its theatrical-only release an “interesting experiment” and indicated its ticket sales would influence plans for future releases, such as “Eternals,” which is scheduled for Nov. 5.
What we’re watching (😉 ): “‘Shang-Chi’ is the ultimate confidence-builder for the theatrical movie industry,” Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for data firm Comscore, told the AP. “This was a very important film.”
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Several movies have recently been postponed, including “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Mission Impossible 7,” “Jackass Forever,” and “The Batman.”
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But some studios may change their tune now. Sony moved up the theatrical release date for the Venom sequel by two weeks after Shang-Chi's fantastic weekend box office haul.
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As for the industry: Ticket sales are down 74% year-to-date compared to 2019, and analysts tell Axios they likely won't be able to recover meaningfully until 2022.
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🍩 DONUT Holes…
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☝️ The DeLorean from “Back to the Future” is on display in D.C. until Thursday as part of the “Cars at the Capital” event.
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💼 U.S. employers added 235,000 jobs last month, versus the 720,000 expected.
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📱 Apple plans to delay and make improvements to new iPhone software that aims to identify and report child pornography.
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🇯🇵 Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga plans to step down after just a year in office.
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💵 Three federal pandemic unemployment benefit programs covering a combined 12.1 million people ended on Labor Day. (From the Left | From the Right)
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🔓 Six Palestinian prisoners — four serving life sentences — used an underground tunnel to escape from one of Israel's highest security prisons. A manhunt began just ahead of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. (From the Left | From the Right)
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🔥 The Hot Corner
💬 Heard Through the Grapevine… "I don't know if the Taliban is going to be able to consolidate power and establish governance. They may be, maybe not. But I think there's at least a very good probability of a broader civil war — and that will then in turn lead to conditions that could, in fact, lead to a reconstitution of al-Qaeda or a growth of ISIS or other myriad of terrorist groups." – Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley on Saturday.
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The Taliban said yesterday it has taken control of Panjshir, a province in Afghanistan northeast of the capital Kabul and the last part of Afghanistan still holding out against their rule. Resistance fighters deny being defeated.
From the Left
From the Right
🔢 Stat(s) of the Day: 32% of Americans live in a county or state that declared a federal disaster area in the past three months, the WashPost calculates. The past equivalent for 2016 was 11%.
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2017: 7%
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2018: 5%
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2019: 12%
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2020: 28%.
📖 Worth Your Time… The incredible story of the MLB pitcher who survived a lightning strike to finish a game
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🗣👂 Dose of Discussion
🇸🇻🪙 El Salvador Adopts Bitcoin
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Image: Reuters
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🎁 Today is “B-Day'' for El Salvador, now the first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender – despite public polling showing over ⅔ of Salvadoreans are against the decision and ~90% don't have a clear understanding of the cryptocurrency.
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To promote the move, El Salvador’s government is giving away $30 in bitcoin to each citizen who signs up for the national digital wallet known as Chivo.
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Chivo is available for free on both Android and iOS and is compatible with other digital wallets on the market.
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It reportedly allows users to instantly convert between dollars and bitcoin, make payments, and send money using a QR code – all financed by a $150 million government fund.
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Roughly 200 kiosks will be set up to let people make in-person deposits or withdraw their money in dollars.
📅 How did we get here?… In June, El Salvador’s Congress approved a law requiring all businesses to accept payments in bitcoin starting September 7 unless they lack the technology to do so.
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In practice, the law won’t change much for businesses, since President Nayib Bukele later clarified there will be no penalty for establishments where bitcoin is not accepted.
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Bukele is hoping the move will encourage investors with cryptocurrency to spend more of it in his country, and has asked the more than 2 million Salvadoreans who live overseas to send their remittances - payments to loved ones back home - in bitcoin.
📊 Zoom out… El Salvador received over $5.9 billion in remittances from abroad last year, with the vast majority of it from the U.S. That amount represents ~25% of El Salvador’s GDP and supports nearly one-fifth of the country’s households.
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President Bukele claims the new bitcoin law will save his citizens over $400 million each year in remittance fees, though some experts doubt it will have such a large impact.
👁️ Looking ahead… The governments of Paraguay and Panama are currently considering crypto-friendly laws similar to those adopted in El Salvador.
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🔭🗓 The Week Ahead
Monday: Labor Day (The history behind the holiday)
Tuesday: National Beer Lovers Day
Wednesday: Opening statements in the trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes
Thursday: Deadline for FDA to decide which vaping products may remain on the U.S. market; NFL season kicks off with the Bucs vs. Cowboys
Friday: World Suicide Prevention Day; day before the 20th anniversary of 9/11
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🛸🌄📲 Calling from the Future…
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🪐 Planet Nine?
Illustration of hypothetical Planet Nine; Image: Wikimedia Commons
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🎁 Astronomers created a ‘treasure map’ to find the location of a proposed ninth planet in our solar system (and no, it’s not Pluto).
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The number of planets in our solar system currently sits at eight following the demolition of Pluto to a dwarf planet in 2006.
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But some astronomers believe there is a yet-to-be-discovered Planet Nine hidden at the edge of the solar system, and a new analysis supports that theory.
A 2016 Caltech study examining the unusual orbital behavior of icy chunks of rock beyond the orbit of Neptune - called Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) - claimed to find evidence of a massive object in the outer solar system, but drew criticism from the scientific community.
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Now, the Caltech researchers are back with a new analysis aiming to address some of those complaints – chiefly, that they may have been looking at biased data.
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Using an updated set of KBOs, the astronomers determined there is just a 0.4 percent chance that the orbits are a coincidence, and created a “treasure map” pointing to Planet Nine’s most likely orbital arc.
Keep reading.
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🤗 Daily Dose of Positive
👨🦽💒 Wheeling into Wedded Bliss
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Image: NBC
Josh Smith was on a beach trip with some friends in Virginia when he dove headfirst into a wave, unaware of the sandbar directly below the surface until he smashed his head.
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Josh’s friends noticed something was wrong and pulled him out of the water. In doing so, they realized he was paralyzed from the waist down.
Josh spent four months in the hospital after the incident adapting to his new reality as a parapelgic.
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In under a year, Josh learned to drive an accessible van, went back to work full time, and moved into a custom home built for his needs.
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He even met a girl named Grace, who connected with Josh through a dating app right before the pandemic began.
Luckily, the two were able to quarantine together, and as they grew closer, Josh formulated a plan – he wanted to propose while down on bended knee.
Keep reading.
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💡 Dose of Knowledge
🇺🇸 State of Affairs
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Which of these states did not join the union in the 20th century?
A) Arizona
B) Idaho
C) Oklahoma
D) New Mexico
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(keep scrolling for the answer) |
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💡 Dose of Knowledge Answer
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B) Idaho
A total of five states joined the Union in the 20th century: Oklahoma (1907), Arizona (1912), New Mexico (1912), Alaska (1959) and Hawaii (1959).
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Idaho ratified the Constitution and became a state in July, 1890, the same month as Wyoming.
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🍩 Daily Sprinkle
"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."
–Thomas Edison (1847-1931)
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