Good morning and welcome to Thursday. If Blink-182’s Enema of the State album asked itself “What’s my age again?” yesterday, the answer it would’ve heard back is “twenty-three.”

Translation: Enema of the State, the famed rock band’s third studio album, turned 23 years old yesterday. And we’re still talking about it… which has to be proof that somebody likes you when you’re 23.

What you'll know after reading today's email:

• 🤔🛢 How some Russian oil is still making it into the US
• 🌊🌱 The size of the world's largest living plant
• 🇨🇦 Eastern Canada's provinces

… and more.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 4.56 minutes to read.

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."

–Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

A Virginia jury found both Amber Heard and Johnny Depp’s lawyer liable for defamation in their lawsuits against each other, awarding Depp $15 million in total damages while Heard received $2 million.

• Depp prevailed in all three of his defamation counts, while Heard won one out of three; the presiding judge later reduced Depp’s punitive damages to $350,000 – the highest amount allowed by state law – bringing his total damages to $10.35 million.

🏴‍☠️️ Depp's argument: The trial centered on a $50 million defamation lawsuit Depp filed in 2019 against ex-wife Heard over a WaPo op-ed in which she referred to herself as “a public figure representing domestic abuse.”

• Depp alleged that, while Heard’s article didn’t mention him by name, she falsely and maliciously implied he was a domestic abuser, which damaged his reputation and career. 
• Depp also alleged that Heard abused him during the relationship.

🧜‍♀️ On the other side: Jurors also considered a $100 million countersuit brought by Heard accusing her ex-husband of defamation.

• She denied Depp’s abuse allegations, and said he defamed her by claiming she fabricated injuries related to her alleged domestic abuse.
• Heard also said everything she wrote in the op-ed is accurate, and that Depp was often physically and emotionally abusive when drunk or high (claims that he denied).

📱 In the metaverse: The trial attracted immense attention on social media, with millions of people tuning in to watch the verdict live on YouTube. Depp also won the online battle; the tag #JusticeForJohnnyDepp garnered 18.8 billion views on TikTok compared to 60.6 million for #JusticeForAmberHeard.

Despite heavy sanctions, some fuels believed to be partially made from Russian crude landed in New York and New Jersey last month. The cargo originated from Indian refineries, according to shipping records.

🤔 What’s going on?... Traders are working to obscure the origins of Russian oil to evade sanctions and keep it flowing, concealing it in blended refined products such as gasoline, diesel and chemicals, the WSJ reports.

• Following Western sanctions, Russian oil has been available at a deep discount, and some countries – like India – are snapping it up. The country’s imports have risen to ~800,000 barrels/day since the war began, compared with 30,000 barrels/day previously, per commodity-markets data company Kpler.
• Oil is also being transferred between ships at sea, similar to how sanctioned Iranian and Venezuelan oil is bought and sold. The transfers are happening in the Mediterranean, with oil then heading toward China, India and Western Europe, per shipping companies.

🛢 The big picture: Russia’s oil exports fell in March, but rose in April by 620,000 barrels to reach 8.1 million barrels/day, close to its pre-war levels.

🇺🇦 Zoom out: President Biden announced a new $700 million weapons package for Ukraine yesterday.

GM reduced the price of its 2023 Chevy Bolt by ~$6,000 yesterday, likely making it the least expensive new EV on the market when it goes on sale sometime this summer (with a price tag of $26,595).

🔌🚘 Bucking the trend… GM’s price cuts come as fellow EV-makers are hiking prices to deal with rising commodity costs caused by inflation and supply chain disruptions.

• Large automakers like Tesla and the GM-owned Cadillac, as well as EV-startups Rivian and Lucid, have all increased prices in recent months.
• GM warned during its Q1 earnings call in April that overall commodity costs for this year are projected to be $5 billion... double what it previously forecast.

🌍 Zoom out: More than half of global car buyers (52%) say they want their next car to be an EV, per new research from Ernst & Young. It’s the first time that number has ever exceeded 50%, and represents an increase of 22 percentage points over the past two years.

✋ Yes, but… US consumers were the least committed to EV ownership among the 18 countries surveyed, with just 29% of Americans saying they want their next vehicle to be electric; Australia was second-to-last with 38%.

🤔 How you ask?... Light Pong! A game console that operates on a single beam of light – AKA 1-dimensional gaming! 🔦🎮

Video games have become more complex and robust than ever before. Instead of following suit, the Light Pong team wants to keep things simple and accessible.

⚙️ How It Works…

• Turn it on
• Grab a friend (or select solo mode)
• Select one of the multiple game modes (Pong, Tug-o-war, Cyclone, and more!)
• Commence endless fun 🎉

💡 Got ideas for games?... Light Pong has dev support so you can create your own game modes!

🎮 When can we play?... Light Pong is currently in development and is expected to ship in September 2022!

➡️ Join the Light Pong email list to stay tuned and up-to-date.

In a first-of-its-kind procedure, a Swiss research team treated a human liver initially considered unfit for transplantation, then implanted it back into a cancer patient. 

One year later, that patient is alive and well.

🏥 A deeper dive...

• The ‘Liver4Life’ team used a specialized perfusion machine that mimics the human body as accurately as possible. This provides ideal conditions for the liver.
• After three days in the machine (where it also received antibiotic and hormonal treatments), the liver was transplanted into a consenting cancer patient who had little chance of getting an organ on the waitlist.
• The next step in the Liver4Life project is a clinical study to demonstrate the procedure’s efficacy and safety on other patients; the scientists said their success would mean that a liver transplant – usually an emergency procedure – could soon be transformed into a plannable elective operation.

🫀 Zoom out: It's been a big week for organ transplants. Houston-based researchers unveiled a novel process yesterday to growing a "ghost heart," a viable organ built around the scaffolding of a pig’s heart that the patient’s body won't reject because it's infused with their own stem cells.

• ☝️ The Platinum Jubilee for 96-year-old Queen Elizabeth II begins today; to celebrate her 70 years on the throne, a feat only achieved by three other recorded rulers, model makers spent 280 hours creating the above 18,000-brick display at Legoland in Windsor.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 👩‍💼 Sheryl Sandberg will step down from her position as chief operating officer of Meta after 14 years.
• ⚖️🖼 Nathaniel Chastain, the former head of product at NFT marketplace OpenSea, was charged in the first-ever digital asset insider trading case yesterday; he allegedly purchased NFTs right before they were featured on the platform's home page, then sold them once the price went up.
• 🎮 GameStop shares spiked 9% in after-hours trading before falling back to closing levels; the company reported a $158 million net loss in Q1.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🚫🎙️ Spotify podcast listeners were unable to access many of their favorite shows for over eight hours Monday night and Tuesday morning; the outage stemmed from Spotify’s failure to renew a security certificate.
• 🎮🏈 The late John Madden will be on the cover of Madden NFL 23 for the first time since 2000.
• 🏌️ Battle lines are being drawn: The commissioner of the PGA Tour reportedly met with the agents of several golfers yesterday to reiterate they won’t be allowed to play on both the tour and the new Saudi-backed LIV Golf Invitational Series; Royal Bank of Canada also ended their sponsorships of Dustin Johnson and Graeme McDowell after they were included in the field for LIV’s first tournament next week.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🌊🌱 The world's largest living plant, a species of seagrass that stretches more than 112 miles (about the distance between LA and San Diego), was discovered off the coast of Australia; the plant in total covers 77 square miles, an area more than 3x the size of Manhattan.
• 👩‍🚀 NASA announced that two private companies, Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace, will be in charge of designing next-gen spacesuits that astronauts will eventually wear on the Moon.
• 💉🐷 Vietnam says it’s developed the world’s first pig vaccine that protects against African swine fever; the country was forced to cull 20% of its 2021 hog herd due to an outbreak.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• 🔓 John Hinckley, the man who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, will be unconditionally released from prison on June 15th.
• 🇲🇽🚭 Mexico’s president signed a measure outlawing the sale of e-cigarettes on Tuesday.
• 🏛️🎓 The Biden administration announced plans to cancel the student debt of ~560,000 students who attended Corinthian Colleges; the for-profit schools have faced a series of lawsuits accusing them of predatory and unlawful practices; it’s the largest single debt forgiveness action taken by the government to date. (From the Left | From the Right)

💬 Quoted… “They should pretend to work somewhere else.”

Elon Musk is apparently not a fan of remote work. The Tesla CEO sent out a series of emails laying out the company's policy, saying all executive staff must be in the office “for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla.”

🌐 Stat of the Day: Apple's Safari Browser now reportedly has 1 billion users. 

• That's good for second place in the browser market, but still way behind Chrome's cool 3.4 billion (for context: the population of the entire world is 7.9 billion).

🤯 Did You Know?... Bats eat enough insects to save Americans more than $3 billion each year in crop damage and pesticide costs.

📖 Worth a Read: Why America has so few carpenters → (The Hustle)

👍 Yes (64%) – “All major tech companies are headquartered in the West Coast, where it’s majority liberal. Even if the company holds a non-affiliation stance, most of their employees are biased, and the features and policies are at the least mirroring their beliefs.”

👎 No (21%) – “I think people see social media sites as censoring more conservative users because those users (as a group) are posting more questionable/ harmful content.”

😬 Unsure/Other (15%) – “Social media companies don’t actually care about politics, they care about engagement. While their methodology is imperfect, they’re not censoring certain topics, but rather certain *behaviors* that result in lower engagement (i.e., misinformation).”

Breakdown by party:

🔴 Conservative/lean conservative:

• 96% “Yes”
• 0% “No”
• 4% Unsure/Other

🔵 Liberal/lean liberal:

• 53% “Yes”
• 32% “No”
• 15% “Unsure/Other

🤷‍♀️ Independent:

• 80% “Yes”
• 16% “No”
• 4% “Unsure/Other”

The small Canadian town of Miramichi, New Brunswick, has been swept up in a mysterious scavenger hunt, with clues and prizes hidden around the town by an anonymous host. 

👻 Halloween in May... The host calls himself Roman Dungarvan – after one of the town's many ghostly legends – and uses a town Facebook page to share his horror-themed clues. The grand prize, handed out on Friday the 13th, was an impressive $1,300. 

• “I don’t think anything of this magnitude has ever happened in Miramichi,” said Adams Robichaud, a high school student in the town. “And we just absolutely love it.”

👆 Name the Eastern Canada provinces.

(keep scrolling for the answers)

👆 Check out the referral prizes you can get just for introducing people you know to little old us. 

What to do: Copy your unique link below, then send it to anyone you think would like the DONUT.

1. Quebec

2. New Brunswick

3. Prince Edward Island

4. Nova Scotia

5. Newfoundland & Labrador