Good morning. The one and only Snoop Dogg recently announced he’ll be releasing his own cereal, Snoop Loopz. Basically, it’s Fruit Loops but with more marshmallows.

🤥 We managed to get our hands on the list of ideas that they passed on.

• Frosted Frizzles
• Bran and Juice
• Drop it Like it’s Hot Porridge 
• Soggy Snoops

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 3.71 minutes to read.

“Success always demands a greater effort.”

–Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

Andrew Tate, an online influencer who brands himself as a “success coach,” has been banned from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube over the past few days for violating their content policies, mostly regarding hate speech.

📅 Background… A former professional kickboxer, Google Search data shows Tate first rose to fame as an influencer earlier this year, as videos and podcast interviews featuring him took off across social media.

• The tag #AndrewTate has been viewed 13.8 billion times to date on TikTok, and Tate had amassed 4.7 million Insta followers and 750,000+ subs on YouTube pre-ban.
• He also founded Hustler’s University in 2021, which describes itself as “an online money-focused community providing education and coaching to over 100,000 students,” offering membership for $50/month.

🤔🚫 So, why was he banned?... Tate styles himself as a men’s self-help guru, but has also said he’s “absolutely a misogynist.” In recent interviews and videos he’s gone on the record saying women belong in the home, can’t drive, and are a man’s property, and described in detail how he would attack a woman accusing him of cheating.

• Meta confirmed to NPR that Tate was banned from FB and Insta for violating its policies regarding dangerous individuals/organizations and hate speech.
• Google said Tate was banned from YouTube for “multiple violations” of their terms of service, “including our hate speech policy,” per The BBC.
• TikTok told WaPo that Tate was banned for violating its policies barring “content that attacks, threatens, incites violence against, or otherwise dehumanizes an individual or a group” based on attributes including sex.

Tate was previously banned from Twitter in 2017 after a series of tweets in which he said women should “bear some responsibility” for being raped.

💬 His response: In a statement to NBC News, Tate denied allegations of misogyny and said he plays an “online character” that involves teaching men to “avoid toxic people as a whole.”

📊 Flash poll: Do you agree with social media platforms’ decisions to deplatform Andrew Tate?

Yes

No

Unsure/other

NYC recently announced a test run of new intelligent speed assistance (ISA) technology in 50 municipal vehicles over the next six months. Which, if you’re anything like us, may not seem like a big deal at face value.

But ISA tech is software that makes your car obey the speed limit. And this is the first instance of its “active” implementation in the world – meaning these 50 municipal vehicles can detect when the driver isn’t obeying the speed limit, and then automatically slow the car down without the ability to be overridden. (As opposed to “passive” ISA, which can be easily overridden by a driver.)

⚙️ How it works: ISA uses a speed sign-recognition video camera and/or GPS-based speed limit data to “advise drivers of the current speed limit and automatically limit the speed of the vehicle as needed."

• According to data from the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, speeding was involved in nearly ⅓ of all fatal accidents over the past two decades.

👀 Looking ahead… If this initial test proves successful, NYC’s Mayor Eric Adams said the city plans to roll out the tech across its entire 30,000-vehicle fleet (excluding emergency services).

+Across the pond: Following an EU-funded test project called PROSPER, which estimated that universal ISA implementation would reduce traffic fatalities between 26% and 50% per country, the European Union officially mandated its use in new models of vehicles.

More people are tuning-in to major women’s athletic events around the world than ever before. Some recent proof: last month’s UEFA European Women's Soccer Championship set an all-time attendance record for both the men’s and women’s tournaments (87,192), per recently released figures.

📈 But wait, there’s more… The 2021-2022 college season set a new all-time record for viewership across all NCAA women’s sports, according to ESPN. This includes the highest total for women’s March Madness since 2004.

Need even more? Coming right up.

• In 2021, the WNBA’s regular season saw a 49% increase in viewership from the previous year. The league’s audience grew an additional 16% this year to reach its highest level since 2008.
• The fledgling National Women's Soccer League (NSWL) recently attracted 456,000 viewers for a preseason match, after drawing no more than 190,000 in its first seven years of existence (through 2019).

👀 Looking ahead… Women's March Madness is projected to be worth $100 million/year on its own by 2025, per an NCAA-commissioned report published last fall. That’s roughly three times the amount ESPN currently pays the NCAA ($34 million) to air championships across 29 sports, including women’s basketball – though that deal is up for renegotiation in 2024.

+In the know: About 42% of all sports fans are women, per a recent study from collegiate sports marketing company Learfield.

☝️ That’s what The Scribes does every time you purchase their notebooks… and since launching ScribesForStudents, they’ve donated over 11,000 notebooks and journals. 🙌

😲 Inconceivable!... No, it’s true! They donate to children in impoverished areas of Honduras, New York, and also to the Boys and Girls Club of America. The Scribes believe they can have the greatest impact by helping kids from less fortunate areas.👏🦸

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Make a positive impact today with a journal from The Scribes.

Pet love is real, y’all. And if you need any more proof, just allow us to point you to some research published in the peer-reviewed journal Current Biology on Monday.

Its findings show that pet dogs’ eyes are filled with tears of happiness when they’re reunited with their owners. Which, if true, would represent the first evidence of emotional crying in nonhuman animals.

💦🐕 A deeper dive… Japanese professor Takefumi Kikusui said he first got the idea to research dog tears after ​​noticing one of his poodles grew teary-eyed whenever she would nurse her puppies. To further investigate the matter, Kikusui recruited a team of fellow scientists to carry out what’s known as the Schirmer Tear Test.

• Following a period of separation between five and seven hours, the researchers discovered that reuniting a dog with their owner increased the amount of tears they produced by an average of 10% above baseline levels.
• Meanwhile, reuniting a dog with someone they’re familiar with – but isn’t their owner – had no effect on tear levels at all.

🐶 Survival of the cutest: Kikusui said it’s possible that dogs evolved tears to further cement the bond between human and canine. When his team showed 74 people pictures of dogs’ faces with and without artificial tears in them, they gave more positive responses when looking at dogs with teary eyes.

💬 Quoted…​​ “Callisto, take me to the moon.”

• Callisto is an AI voice assistant for astronauts jointly developed by Amazon, Cisco, and Lockheed Martin. It’ll be tested for the first time on NASA’s upcoming Artemis test flight around the moon and back, which is set to launch next week.

+For those with an Alexa-enabled device: You can follow the mission’s progress by saying, “Alexa, take me to the moon.”

💰 Stat of the Day: A conservative nonprofit called the Marble Freedom Trust received a $1.6 billion donation last year from Barre Seid, former CEO of electrical-device manufacturer Tripp Lite.

• It stands “among the largest – if not the largest – single contributions ever made to a politically focused nonprofit,” per the NY Times.

🌎 Around the World: Today is Ukraine's Independence Day, and marks six months exactly since the war started.

🤯 Did You Know?... Bill Murray's character in Groundhog Day relived the same day for "30 or 40 years," according to the film's director Harold Ramis.

📖 Worth a Read: Vince Gilligan Wants to Write a Good Guy → (The New Yorker)

• ☝️ Meet Aquanaut, an underwater robot designed by former NASA engineers to cut costs for the maritime industry.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 💰 Bed Bath & Beyond has reportedly selected a lender to shore up its liquidity; details of the deal were unclear as of last night, though the retailer had been seeking ~$375 million to pad its cash levels and help pay down existing debt.
• 🏭 Intel has signed an up to $30B funding partnership with Canadian asset management firm Brookfield Asset Management to finance its chip factory projects.
• ⚖️🐦 Twitter's former head of security, Peiter Zatko, filed a whistleblower complaint with the SEC last month, claiming the company’s execs deceived federal regulators and its board.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🤞 Sony says the PlayStation VR2 is coming in early 2023.
• 🍿 The premiere of HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon was the biggest in network history, drawing 9.99 million viewers.
• 🏀 The NCAA Women's Basketball title game will be broadcast on ABC for the first time in 2022; last year’s title game drew a record 4.85 million viewers.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 📱 Instagram is testing a new feature called IG Candid that lets users share content at a different time each day after receiving a prompt – basically a clone of grassroots social app BeReal. *Sigh*
• 🌱🌌 Space infrastructure startup Redwire announced plans to deploy the first commercially-owned greenhouse in space as early as next year.
• 🏙️🌳 Rio de Janeiro is working with five local neighborhoods to build the world’s largest urban garden by 2024.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• ⚖️ Ex-Louisville police officer Kelly Goodlett pleaded guilty to falsifying a search warrant and report related to the March 2020 fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor; it's the first conviction in the case. 
• ⚖️ Two men involved in the alleged far-right plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer were convicted by a federal jury yesterday; they may face life in prison; a different jury four months ago couldn’t reach unanimous decisions on either of the men but acquitted two others, leading to this second trial.
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Quick recap: In this section, we’re aiming to crowdsource details about epic trips – then provide the whole playbook for the experience to y’all.

• Have you ever gone on an epic, once-in-a-lifetime trip? Tell us about it here.

🚶‍♂️ Who: Cate S. from San Marcos, TX

☀️ Length of trip: 4 days

💬 Quick recap: We went to Vegas for my 22nd birthday. We went with a group of 10 people and stayed off the strip at Resorts World which is a new hotel. It was everyone’s first time in Vegas so we had a lot of things to check off of everyone’s bucket lists.

🚲 Want to learn more? Dive deeper into Cate's must-dos, must-don'ts, and trip expenses here.

P.S. Have your own epic trip you’d like to share? Tell us about it here for a chance to be featured in next Wednesday’s newsletter.

In 1989, a sixth-grade class in Mississippi released messages in bottles down Mississippi's Tallahatchie River. Only one student's message washed ashore a few years later. 

Then for over three decades, no other bottles were found. 

📅 Until last month... when shipbuilder Billy Mitchell found a glass bottle floating in the Yazoo River. Although uncorking it nearly destroyed letter inside, he was able to make out a last name, date, and location of writing. 

🔍 Finding the writer... Through the power of social media, Billy was able to track down Eric and Melanie Dahl, whose son Brian wrote the letter all that time ago. 

• Brian had passed away 15 years previously, and seeing their late son's young handwriting left his parents speechless.

😇 Message from beyond:"He's with them still," said Billy after returning the letter to its rightful owners. "I think that's what the note meant when we found it. To let his parents know that he was watching over them as well."

❓ Trivia: What connects Richard Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and Spiro Agnew?

💥 True or False?... Shrapnel is named after a person.

🤔 Riddle Me This: What’s tall when it’s young, and short when it’s old?

(keep scrolling for the answers)

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What to do: Copy your unique link below, then send it to anyone who you think would like the DONUT. Once you hit each milestone, you'll get an email with a link to claim your prize. (Pro tip: there's no need to ration points, you're entitled to a prize at each tier.)

Start referring.👇

❓ Trivia: They were all vice presidents in the 60s

💥 T/F: True, Henry Shrapnel was a British Army officer and inventor

🤔 Riddle: A candle