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Good morning, Happy Hanukkah to everyone celebrating, and welcome back. We've missed you.
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⏰🚀 Ready, Set, Go: Today’s newsletter takes 4.27 minutes to read. (With the 360° view: +3.31 minutes.)
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🍩 Daily Sprinkle
"Ideas do not reach perfection in a day, no matter how much study is put upon them."
–Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922)
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👇📰 Quick Bits
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“A Variant of Concern”
 Image: Thomas Faull/Alamy Live News
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🎁 … is what the WHO deemed Omicron, a new emerging Covid variant, on Friday. It’s the organization's most serious type of variant designation.
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"On the ACE2 receptor — the protein that helps to create an entry point for the coronavirus to infect human cells — the new variant has 10 mutations. In comparison, the Beta variant has three and the Delta variant two," The New York Times reports.
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Health authorities in South Africa, Canada, the UK, Australia, Belgium, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Hong Kong, and Botswana say they’ve detected first cases of the variant.
✋ Yes but: A number of variants have emerged since the outset of the pandemic, and so far, vaccines and other treatments have remained efficacious. Whether the same can be said of Omicron, we just need to see more data.
🌍 Zoom out: But governments aren’t waiting around. By Thursday evening, the UK had banned flights from South Africa (where it was first detected) and some neighboring countries, and by the end of the day Friday, the EU, Singapore, and Japan had followed suit.
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Beginning today, the U.S. will start to restrict travel from South Africa and seven other countries.
+What we’re watching (apart from more data, of course)… The global economic impact. Stocks tumbled in Asia and Europe, oil prices plunged, and the Dow had its worst day of 2021 on Friday.
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Ukraine’s President (Allegedly) Uncovered a Coup
 President Zelensky (middle) addressing members of the press; Image: Reuters
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🎁 Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters on Friday that his security services uncovered a group of Ukrainians and Russians plotting a coup to unseat him this week.
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🤿 A deeper dive… Zelensky said his team has audio recordings of the alleged plotters talking about their plans, which included an attempt to gain the support of Ukraine's richest man, Rinat Akhmetov (who called the claim an “absolute lie”).
- “The president offered no other details, however, leaving many questions about his motives for making the allegations public and what possible actions authorities have taken,” reported the Washington Post.
🤔 Connecting the dots: Zelensky didn’t directly accuse Russia of being behind the alleged plot, per Reuters, and a Kremlin spokesperson later denied any Russian involvement.
But the claim comes amid rising tensions between Kyiv and Moscow, which has also been accused of orchestrating the ongoing migrant crisis on the border separating Belarus and Poland as a distraction from its troop build-up along the Russia-Ukraine border.
- This month, the Biden administration briefed European allies about the potential for a new Russian military operation in Ukraine after Moscow reportedly gathered tens of thousands of troops at the neighboring border. (Russia invaded & annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.)
From the Left: BBC
From the Right: WSJ
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🗣👂 Dose of Discussion
The Arbery Verdict: Guilty
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 From left to right: Travis McMichael, William Bryan Jr., & Gregory McMichael; Image: AP
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🎁 The three men on trial for killing 25-year-old Black man Ahmaud Arbery were found guilty of murder last week. Arbery’s death drew national attention after a video showing the fatal February 2020 shooting circulated last spring.
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🤿 A deeper dive… Travis McMichael, who fatally shot Arbery, was convicted on all the charges against him, including one count of malice murder and four counts of felony murder.
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His father, Gregory McMichael, was also found guilty of four counts of felony murder but was acquitted on a charge of malice murder.
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A third man, William Bryan Jr., was convicted on three counts of felony murder and acquitted on malice murder and an additional felony murder charge.
⚖️ Trial recap: Defense attorneys claimed the three men were protecting their neighborhood after a rash of burglaries and thefts and acted legally under citizens-arrest and self-defense laws when they confronted Arbery, who was out jogging.
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Prosecutors successfully argued there’s no evidence of Arbery actually committing a burglary and that the men attacked Arbery based on “assumptions.”
👁️ Looking ahead… The judge has yet to announce a date for the sentencing hearing. The men all face a mandatory sentence of life in prison, and state prosecutors have said they’ll seek to eliminate the possibility of parole.
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Prosecutors also opted not to present evidence portraying the racial angle of the killing. That’ll be the subject of an upcoming federal hate crimes trial for all three men.
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🗓 This Weekend in Sports & Entertainment
🏈 Scoreboard: No. 5 Michigan beat No. 2 Ohio State 42-27 to clinch a spot in the B1G Championship Game, and Oklahoma head coach Lincoln Riley is heading to USC – catch up on the rest of the weekend in college football. | If the NFL is more your speed, here are the biggest stories from the weekend.
🦃🍿 Thanksgiving at the movies… Moviegoers spent $142 million at North American theatres over the five-day holiday weekend… though pre-pandemic levels regularly exceeded $250 million. On a bright note, Encanto and House of Gucci turned out to be a couple of pandemic-era winners.
This holiday weekend’s box office, in order:
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Disney’s Encanto – $40 million
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Sony’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife – $35 million
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MGM’s House of Gucci – $22 million
🎤🕺 BTS is back, baby… The seven member supergroup kicked off their mini Permission to Dance Tour over the weekend with a raucous performance. Saturday’s show in LA was the first time the group had performed live since the pandemic began.
🎶 “Titan of the American Musical”.... Broadway music composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim passed away at 91 years old. You may know him from West Side Story, Sweeney Todd, and many others.
📈 Prime performance… “We can firmly say that Wheel of Time was the most watched series premiere of the year and one of the Top 5 series launches of all time for Prime Video,” Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke told Deadline.
+What’s the best song of all time ?... According to Billboard, it’s "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd.
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🔥 The Hot Corner
💬 Heard Through the Grapevine… “We predict that Apple's AR headset to be launched in [Q4 2022] will be equipped with two processors. The higher-end processor will have similar computing power as the M1 for Mac, whereas the lower-end processor will be in charge of sensor-related computing.” – An excerpt from a new research report by noted analyst Ming-Chi Kuo regarding Apple’s long-rumored AR headset.
🔢 Stat of the Day: E-commerce sales on Black Friday reached $8.9 billion, down slightly from last year ($9 billion).
- It’s the first time online sales haven’t increased since Adobe Analytics began tracking that data in 2012.
📖 Worth a Read… L.M. Sacasas on instant messenger over instant messenger
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🍩 DONUT Holes…
 Image: Clockwise, starting top left – AP/Jeenah Moon; Deadline; Playbill; AP/Jeenah Moon
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☝️ Scenes from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. See more photos.
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📉 U.S. jobless claims fell below 200,000 last week, its lowest level since the 1960s.
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🇫🇷 France is honoring Josephine Baker, an African-American woman and cabaret dancer who secretly worked as a spy for the French government in World War II; she’ll be the first Black woman inducted into the French Pantheon.
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🚲👊👖 Peloton is suing Lululemon in a feud over the cycle maker’s new apparel line.
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🥣 General Mills plans to raise prices for hundreds of items by 20% at the start of next year, according to a letter obtained by CNN.
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👔 Virgil Abloh, Louis Vuitton artistic director and founder of fashion label Off-White, died of cancer at 41 years old.
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🔭 The Week Ahead
Monday: First full day of Hanukkah (ends next Monday)
Tuesday: Second-to-last College Football Playoff rankings (Top 4 qualify)
Wednesday: SCOTUS will hear arguments in abortion case challenging Roe v. Wade; It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia returns for a 15th season
Thursday: OPEC+ meeting; National Special Education Day
Friday: Congress faces a midnight deadline to avoid a government shutdown
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🛸🌄📲 Calling from the Future…
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Tackling Type 1
Image: EHealth
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🎁 A 64-year-old man may be the first person ever cured of Type 1 Diabetes without needing a full pancreas transplant. The man's body now automatically controls its own insulin and blood sugar levels after participating in a clinical trial from Vertex Pharmaceuticals.
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The company was testing a treatment developed over three decades by a scientist who set out to find a cure after his baby son and teenage daughter were both diagnosed with the disease.
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Unlike the more common and milder Type 2 diabetes, Type 1 is quickly lethal unless patients get regular insulin injections. The disease is also the leading cause of blindness and kidney failure for Americans.
🤿 A deeper dive: Until now, the only cure that has ever worked for diabetes is a pancreas transplant – more specifically, a transplant of the organ’s insulin-producing clusters known as islet cells. But those procedures carry many significant side effects and aren’t often recommended for diabetes patients.
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A team of 15 researchers spent roughly 20 years and $50 million to successfully convert stem cells into islet cells and another decade to set up the ongoing clinical trial where Type 1 Diabetes patients receive an infusion of the man-made islet cells.
👁️ Looking ahead… The clinical trial, which will eventually involve 17 people with severe cases of Type 1 diabetes, is expected to take five years to complete.
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🤗 Daily Dose of Positve
Soccer Helping the Sick
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 Image: The Bridge
Serbia’s men’s football team narrowly defeated Portugal in a qualifying game earlier this month, earning them a direct ticket to the FIFA World Cup 2022.
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What's more, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic also promised the team a bonus of one million euros if they won the game. On the Monday after the match, the massive funds were transferred into the team’s account.
💸Paying it forward… Rather than bask in the glory of the win and impressive bonus, the men collectively decided that 100% of the million euro bonus would be donated to sick children in their country to cover treatment costs.
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💡 Dose of Knowledge
🍿 Monday at the Movies: 21st Century Edition
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Below you’ll find four different quotes from four iconic movies from this century. Your task? Match each quote with the famous movie we took it from. (Bonus points if you can name the actor/actress delivering the line.)
A) "Boy, that escalated quickly. I mean, that really got out of hand fast."
B) "Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking."
C) "Are you not entertained?"
D) "Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen. It's not going to happen."
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(keep scrolling for the answer) |
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🍩 Share The DONUT, Win An iPhone 13 Pro
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💡 Dose of Knowledge Answer
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C) Gladiator (2001), delivered by Russell Crowe.
D) Mean Girls (2004), delivered by Rachel McAdams.
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