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Good morning and welcome to Thursday.
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⏰🚀 Ready, Set, Go: Today’s newsletter takes 5.42 very engaging minutes to read. (With the 360° view: +3.58 minutes.)
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👇📰 Quick Bits
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🏈 ‘Ringing’ In The New Year
Image: Giphy
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🎁 A brand new - and slightly altered - NFL season kicks off tonight with the defending Super Bowl champion Tom-pa Bay Buccaneers taking on the Dallas Cowboys (8:20 p.m. ET; NBC).
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📅 First things first… This NFL season will feature 17 regular-season games for the first time in history.
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It marks the first change to the season structure since 1978, when the league switched from 14 to 16 regular-season games. Many experts believe the NFL is likely aiming for an 18-game season as soon as 2025, if not earlier.
🏟️ Fans in the stands… During much of last season, fans were not allowed to attend games due to COVID-19. Some teams did allow fans at the end of the regular season and in the playoffs, but not at full capacity.
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This season, all 32 NFL stadiums have been cleared by their local governments to operate at full capacity.
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At least three teams are requiring proof of vaccination or a negative test to attend, while others are enforcing indoor mask mandates. A majority of stadiums haven’t announced any COVID-19 restrictions.
👕 New jersey numbers… One main difference between college and professional football is that most players can't wear whichever jersey number they want in the NFL.
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This changed a little bit this year, after a new rule allowed running backs, wide receivers, tight ends, linebackers, and defensive backs to wear single digits.
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The catch? If a player wants to do so this season, on short notice, they’d have to buy out the entire existing inventory of jersey distributors.
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The purchase requirement goes away if the player waits one year to make the change.
💰 Wanna bet?... Nearly one-fifth of Americans (45.2 million people) plan to wager on the 2021 NFL season, according to research published Tuesday by the American Gaming Association – a 36% increase from last year.
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More than two dozen states have legalized sports gambling since a 2018 Supreme Court decision opened the door for any state to do so if they wish.
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🎓 How to Almost Capture War Criminals 101
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🎁 Three former high-ranking Ukrainian military intelligence officials described to CNN how they orchestrated a sting operation to lure suspected war criminals out of Russia so they could be captured – and the whole situation is kinda bonkers.
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📜 Backstory: A conflict between a mixture of Russian mercenaries and rebels vs. the Ukrainian government broke out in the eastern part of the country seven years ago.
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Amid many other atrocities, a passenger jet traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down by the separatists over eastern Ukraine with a Russian missile, killing all 298 people on board.
💥 The operation starts with a bang… What’s the first thing you do when you want to capture a war criminal? Apparently, post a job.
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But not just any job – Ukrainian operatives posed as a Russian military contracting company and posted a fairly lucrative (for the industry) $5,000/month contract to guard oil facilities in Venezuela.
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Hundreds of applications poured in, and "We started to call them and say, 'Hey, man, OK, tell me something about yourself. Maybe you are not really a fighter, maybe you are a plumber or something like that,'" one of the former military intelligence officers told CNN.
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So the applicants began to send proof of the atrocities they committed. Seriously. Some even linked themselves to the downing of the passenger jet we mentioned earlier.
🤝 “You’re hired”… Offers were extended to the worst of the worst interviewees. Per CNN, the group of around thirty suspected war criminals were told they would be flown to Turkey, and then hop on a flight to Venezuela.
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Then like Patches O’Houlihan, COVID threw a wrench into things. Russia closed its borders due to the virus – but you could still travel to Russia-friendly Belarus. Ukrainian intelligence dodged the wrench, and Istanbul turned into Minsk.
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Once in Minsk, things were delayed, and the suspected criminals were transported to a secluded resort for a few days – where they were promptly captured by the Belarusian government because of an intel leak and paraded around on state TV.
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Belarus suspected Russia sent them to destabilize the country prior to the upcoming elections, CNN reports.
📉 Starts with a bang, ends with a whimper… Soon after their capture, the detainees were released – as we previously mentioned, the Belarusian and Russian governments are pretty friendly with each other and likely figured out the story.
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Thirty-two out of 33 mercenaries returned to Russia, one who was a dual citizen remained in Belarus.
🗣️ The response: "If these people would have ended up here in Ukraine, the details of their criminal acts would have become known around the world," one of the Ukrainian intelligence sources told CNN.
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Ukraine officially denies any involvement, as does the U.S. who was also allegedly involved, while Vladimir Putin says the operation was a joint effort between the U.S. and Ukraine.
Messy world out there, huh.
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🍩 DONUT Holes…
Image: BIG and @bucharest.studio.
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☝️ Billionaire Marc Lore, a former Walmart executive, unveiled plans for “Telosa,” a $400 billion futuristic American city with the mission of “creating a more equitable and sustainable future.”
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🏈 Three former NFL players pleaded guilty this week to attempting to defraud a health care program for retired players suffering from medical difficulties.
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☀️ The U.S. could generate up to 40% of its electricity with solar energy by 2035, up from around 3% currently, according to a new report from the Department of Energy. (From the Left | From the
Right)
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⛏️ The state of Virginia removed a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee this morning and cut it into pieces. It will be stored at an undisclosed facility while a decision is made on what to do with it. (From the Left | From the Right)
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⚖️ Mexico’s Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional to penalize abortion, voting unanimously to decriminalize the procedure in the country; the majority Catholic country is the fifth Latin American nation to make such a move. (From the Left | From the Right)
+Bonus: Researchers completed the first-ever comprehensive global habitat maps of the world's shallow tropical coral reefs. Take a look.
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Did Your Best Friend Poop On Your Kitchen Floor?
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🔥 The Hot Corner
💬 Heard Through the Grapevine… “Get a sneak peek at the biggest advertising campaign any theatre chain has ever made, starring Academy Award winner Nicole Kidman.” – AMC Theatres, announcing a $25 million multimedia ad campaign starring the actress to lure moviegoers back to theatres.
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As we covered on Tuesday, ticket sales are down 74% this year compared to 2019 – but some see opportunity and a possible resurgence following the opening weekend success of "Shang-Chi."
🔢 Stat of the Day: 75% of adults in the U.S. have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
📖 Worth Your Time… The Surprisingly Big Business of Library E-books
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🗣👂 Dose of Discussion
🪙🇺🇸 Cryptocurrency Regulation in America
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Image: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg
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🎁 The SEC is investigating a crypto lending program promoted by Coinbase, offering the latest glimpse at how the agency plans to regulate cryptocurrencies.
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In a series of tweets posted late Tuesday, Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong said the SEC is threatening to sue the company if it launches a new cryptocurrency lending program.
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The proposed lending platform would allow users holding a stablecoin called USD Coin to earn interest by lending it to other traders, with plans to eventually branch out to other cryptocurrencies.
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Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency whose value is tied to an outside asset, such as the U.S. dollar or gold, to stabilize the price and make it easier to swap from one crypto asset to another.
🤿 A deeper dive... The SEC indicated the lending program would constitute a type of investment that needs to be registered with the government under investor-protection laws.
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Regulators in five states have accused other similar crypto lending platforms of violating securities laws.
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Coinbase disputes that its program would constitute an investment contract that should be overseen by the SEC, and says federal regulators refuse to explain their reasoning.
📝 Define ‘DeFi’… The SEC under new Chairman Gary Gensler has yet to establish a clear definition of what makes a cryptocurrency a security, versus some other type of asset. (What’s the difference?)
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Because so many different projects have already launched, the agency has turned to enforcement, a lengthy process that requires investigating a particular product and either suing the team behind it or persuading them to settle and adopt the SEC’s requirements.
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The agency recently sent letters to several startups seeking information such as quarterly revenue, founders, and any analysis concerning whether digital assets are actually securities that should be registered with the SEC, per the WSJ.
👁️ Looking ahead… The U.S. Treasury is reportedly pushing to include more rules for tax compliance on cryptocurrency transactions in the $3.5 trillion budget plan currently being considered in Congress.
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📣🗣💬 This Week’s Poll Responses
Approve – "Only 8 months removed from the 45th president's term, the bar for approval is still incredibly low for me. Biden is not embroiled in controversies of his own making, not desperate to fill every news cycle with his own name. He's following the science on the pandemic, he got us out of a forever war that we never should have started, he has life changing legislation moving through Congress. Good enough for me."
Disapprove – "I strongly disapprove of Biden's performance. The economy is a disaster- inflation and supply shortages are still increasing and there is no push from the Federal Government to get people back to work. The Biden Administration's handling of Afghanistan is embarrassing to the United States of America. It is hard to imagine that Biden could do any worse."
Unsure – "While I believe we needed to pull out of Afghanistan (we've been there much to long) I think the way we could have pulled out could have been much smoother and not as abrupt."
+Note on Sample Size: We received 2,015 responses. 👏🥳 Some may have been lightly edited for grammar or clarity.
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🛸🌄📲 Calling from the Future…
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💨 Breathe A Little Easier
Image: blueringmedia/Getty Images
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🎁 A new artificial intelligence can help diagnose lung cancer with 97% accuracy up to one year earlier than existing methods.
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Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death, accounting for 23% of all such deaths in the U.S. in 2019 (totaling 139,603 people).
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Although conventional CT scans have the ability to reveal early features of lung tumors, the disease is often diagnosed at a later stage, when treatment is least likely to work.
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This is because each CT scan requires an expert radiologist to review ~300 images for the key signs of a tumor, which are often very tiny and subtle.
In a new study, researchers used an AI program trained via a set of CT scans taken from nearly one-thousand patients, testing it on a different group of patients involved in a lung screening trial.
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The scientists found their AI program detected malignant tumors in 172 of the 177 patients who had already been diagnosed with lung cancer via biopsy, giving it a 97% effectiveness rate.
The results also came from one set of CT scans, rather than two, meaning the diagnoses were available one year earlier than they would have been using conventional methods.
Keep reading.
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🤗 Daily Dose of Positive
🗿🌊Paolo’s Underwater Museum
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Image: The Guardian
Paolo Fanciulli has lived his whole life in Talamone, a small Italian village with a population of ~125. Fascinated by shipwrecks and the ocean, he became a fisherman at thirteen and dedicated his life to saving the sea.
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Illegal trawling - fishing with a large net that drags chains along the ocean floor - has wrecked the coast of Talamone, destroying the marine ecosystems and taking a chunk out of the local fish populations.
Although trawling was made illegal in Italy in 2015, Talamone was still falling victim, with gangs of trawlers sneaking out onto the waters at night to catch fish.
So, Paolo came up with a plan – he would build an underwater museum.
Keep reading.
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💡 Dose of Knowledge
🌎 Paint It Black
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If there was a black hole with the mass of the Earth, how big would its diameter be (in other words, its length across)?
A) 70 meters
B) 1.75 centimeters
C) 4.4 millimeters
D) 9.5 kilometers
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(keep scrolling for the answer) |
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🍩 Share The DONUT
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Simply:
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💡 Dose of Knowledge Answer
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B) 1.75 centimeters
The most massive black holes in the universe span up to 78 billion miles in diameter - ~40% the size of our solar system - and contain the same mass as roughly 21 billion suns.
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🍩 Daily Sprinkle
"Beware of false knowledge, it is more dangerous than ignorance."
–George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
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