Good morning. Today is Veterans Day, previously Armistice Day, a holiday change codified into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954. From then on, November 11 became a day to honor US veterans of all wars.

And on that note, thank you to all of our service members, past and present, as well as their families. Your sacrifice does not go unappreciated🙏.

P.S. We’d be a poor morning newsletter if we didn’t also mention that it’s 11/11. Make a wish.

In today’s edition:

• 🗳️ Voting may be done, but the midterms aren’t over
• 📝💵 The latest inflation report was released
• 🛸 Humanity is one step closer to Mars

… and more.

Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 3.77 minutes to read.

"The richest people are content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.”

–Socrates (470 B.C.E. – 399 B.C.E)

The 2022 election results are coming into clearer focus, though neither party has clinched a victory in the House or Senate just yet. Here’s what we know.

🏠 In the House: Republicans will likely win a majority, but it’s going to be close. As of late last night, the GOP had won 209 seats and Democrats had won 189, per the AP. For a party to control the chamber, it needs 218.

• Of the 40 races yet to be called, 12 were led by Republicans, 25 were led by Democrats, and three were toss-ups, per the NY Times. Results in several competitive house races are expected to take days or weeks to be finalized.

🏛️ In the Senate: It’ll be a few more days until we know the final results from Arizona and Nevada, election officials said yesterday. If Democrats or Republicans win both races, they’ll gain control of the chamber. If the results are split, the Senate will come down to a Georgia runoff election on Dec. 6.

🗳️ Ballot proposals:

• Drugs: Missouri and Maryland joined 19 other states in legalizing recreational cannabis, while identical ballot measures failed in South Dakota, North Dakota and Arkansas. In Colorado, psychedelic mushrooms were legalized.
• Slavery (yes, really): Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee, and Vermont approved measures prohibiting involuntary servitude as punishment for crime. In Louisiana, an amendment intended to clarify a ban on involuntary servitude was rejected after the lawmaker who introduced it pulled his support and promised to put forward an improved version.

+One interesting thing: Despite early vote totals pointing to an all-time record for midterm voter turnout, 2022 is on track to finish with fewer participants than 2018 (~100 million vs. 114 million).

📊 Flash poll: How would you categorize the midterm results so far?

Very surprising

Some surprises, but about what I expected

Not surprising at all

🇨🇳 President Biden will sit down with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday for their first in-person meeting as leaders. US officials said the two are expected to discuss a range of geopolitical challenges including trade policies, Beijing’s relationship with Russia/North Korea, and growing tensions over Taiwan. The meeting will take place in Bali, Indonesia, a day before the annual G20 Summit is hosted there.

🇦🇫 The Taliban has banned all women from parks and gyms, gov’t officials announced yesterday. It marks the Islamist group’s latest crackdown on women’s rights and freedoms since taking full control of Afghanistan last August. Women are already banned from traveling without a male escort, or from going out in public without a hijab or burqa. They’ve also been barred from attending secondary schools for the past year-plus.

🇪🇬 An archaeologist who’s been searching for Cleopatra’s tomb for nearly two decades believes she’s made a key breakthrough. Dr. Kathleen Martinez and her team recently uncovered a 4,300-foot tunnel located 40+ feet underground near Alexandria, Egypt (pictured above). "The excavation revealed a huge religious center with three sanctuaries, a sacred lake, more than 1,500 objects, busts, statues, golden pieces, a huge collection of coins portraying Alexander the Great, Queen Cleopatra and the Ptolemies," she told CNN. Though nobody will know for sure if Cleopatra is actually buried there until more newly-discovered tunnels are excavated.

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The Consumer Price Index (CPI), America’s most widely-used measure of inflation, rose 7.7% in October from the same month a year ago, the Labor Department reported yesterday, its lowest figure since January. That’s also down from 8.2% in September and 9.1% in June, which was the highest rate in 40 years.

🔢 By the numbers… The decline in the index is mainly driven by price decreases for used vehicles (-2.4%), apparel (0.7%), and medical care (0.6%). On a month-to-month basis, the CPI rose 0.4% in October, the same pace as in September. 

• The core index – which excludes often-volatile food and energy prices – rose 0.3%, down from 0.6% the two previous months. 
• On a yearly basis, core inflation increased 6.3%, just shy of a 40-year high that was set last month (+6.6%).

📈 The market reacts: All three major US indexes each rallied for their biggest one-day gains since 2020 yesterday. (Dow: +3.7% | S&P: +5.5% | Nasdaq: +7.4%)

Yesterday morning, NASA sent a giant inflatable heat shield to space and then brought it back down from orbit, splashing in the ocean near Hawaii. Which may sound like a silly thing to do – but in reality, this means we’re one step closer to landing large vehicles on Mars.

🤔 Where’s the connection?... Mars has an ultra-thin atmosphere, meaning there’s less drag on spacecraft plummeting to the surface (which obvi need to slow down). Parachutes aren’t even enough to get smaller payloads down on Mars, Space reports, and the SUV-sized Curiosity and Perseverance rovers required a rocket-powered sky crane to safely land.

Existing capabilities allow NASA to land craft on Mars weighing about 1.5 tons, but larger rockets carrying humans and equipment are projected to weigh 20 tons or more. Enter: yesterday’s inflatable heat shield test, called – wait for it – the Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator. Who said NASA wasn’t creative.

Though to be fair, when you’re literally testing how to get humanity to Mars, the creative focus probably should be elsewhere – like on the engineering.

• The device, measuring 20 feet wide when inflated (and much smaller when folded up), can withstand temperatures of up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
• It’s also designed to fall safely at 18,000 MPH.

📸🚀 Big picture: Mars expeditions are fun to talk about, but humans are scheduled to go back to the Moon first. NASA’s first crewed lunar flight since 1972 is set to take place within two years, while the earliest human-crewed Mars missions will likely take place in the 2040s, if not later.

💬 Quoted…​​ “Hey, GitHub.”

These days, it seems every tech company is rolling out a virtual assistant. And the Microsoft-owned code-hosting platform GitHub is no different.

• Yesterday at its annual GitHub Universe conference, the company announced an experimental coding assistant feature – wake word “Hey, GitHub” – that works in tandem with Copilot, the company’s controversial AI-powered pair-programmer (basically Gmail’s Smart Compose, but for coders).

📱📉 Stat of the Day: ​​The number of teens using Facebook has decreased 55% since 2014, per Pew Research (via Harper’s).

🤯 Did You Know?... A Spanish village near the border with Portugal is currently up for sale, with an asking price of only $259,000. Because why buy a house when you can get an entire village instead.

📖 Worth a Read: AI Art Is Here and the World Is Already Different → (Intelligencer/New York Magazine)

• ☝️ You’re looking at the Toy Hall of Fame Class of 2022: Lite-Brite, Masters of the Universe, and the ancient top. Other finalists who didn’t make the cut include bingo, Catan, Nerf, and the piñata.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 🚬 Juul said it secured financing from early investors to avoid bankruptcy and announced plans to cut 400 jobs (~30% of its workforce).
• 🏢 Keurig Dr Pepper CEO Ozan Dokmecioglu agreed to resign over undisclosed violations of the company’s code of conduct, the board announced yesterday.
• 🪙 Crypto exchange FTX lent billions of dollars worth of customer assets to fund bets placed by its affiliated trading firm, Alameda Research, setting the stage for the exchange's recent implosion, per the WSJ. (Background)

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🐦 Twitter CEO Elon Musk told employees at an all-hands meeting yesterday that he sold ~$4 billion in Tesla stock last week to “save Twitter”; separately, three Twitter executives responsible for security and compliance resigned yesterday.
• 🏈⚖️ The D.C. attorney general filed a civil lawsuit yesterday against the Washington Commanders, team owner Daniel Snyder, the NFL, and commissioner Roger Goodell; the suit alleges collusion to deceive fans and local residents about the NFL’s investigation into allegations of sexual assault and a toxic workplace culture at the Commanders. (Background)

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 👣 Nine paralyzed patients were able to walk again after an experimental new procedure involving electrical stimulation to the spinal cord and physical therapy, per a new study published in Nature.
• 🚀 Sections of the space shuttle Challenger – which exploded shortly after a launch in 1986, killing all seven crew members onboard – were recently found buried in sand at the bottom of the Atlantic, NASA announced yesterday.
• 👃 French surgeons successfully grew a new nose on the arm of a woman who was treated for nasal cavity cancer, before transplanting it to her face.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• 🪖 More than 100,000 Russian soldiers and a similar number of Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or injured in the ongoing war, with an additional 40,000+ civilian casualties, Gen. Mark Milley, the highest-ranking US military officer, said yesterday.
• ⚖️ Alex Jones was ordered to pay an additional $473 million in punitive damages yesterday by a Connecticut judge for promoting false conspiracy theories about the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre; the total judgment against Jones in lawsuits filed by the victims’ families is now $1.44 billion.
• 🎓 ​​A federal judge in Texas struck down the Biden administration’s student-debt forgiveness plan yesterday evening, declaring it “an unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power.” (Background | From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)

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The DONUT’s weekly News Quiz is back, baby. In just two minutes or less, see how your news superpowers stack up against our team.

Clementine is a 75-lb hound dog who spent her first few years on the streets. After being evacuated from her New Orleans animal shelter before Hurricane Ida, Clementine landed at a shelter in Dallas, Texas, where she was adopted and returned twice. 

🙏 Searching for a home... Following two failed adoptions, Clementine was finally taken in by Captain Robert Moree of the Cedar Hill Fire Department. 

• He was looking for a fire station dog to help his men de-stress while on duty, and Clementine was the perfect fit.

🚒 The happy ending: Clementine now lives full-time at the fire station, comforting the firefighters and bringing a little joy to their long shifts.

• “Some nights we come back and have difficult things to deal with,” Capt. Moree said. “She’ll come over and put her head in our laps. She does as much for us as we do for her.”

Below are three lists of ingredients. All you have to do is give us the completed dish they make.

☝️ Recipe #1:

• Frozen puff pastry
• Berry jam
• Cornstarch
• Egg
• Salted butter
• Powdered sugar
• Half and half
• Vanilla and almond extract

✌️ Recipe #2:

• Flour
• Sugar
• Salt
• Baking powder
• Cinnamon
• Nutmeg
• Eggnog
• Vegetable oil
• Eggs
• Vanilla & rum extract
• Powdered sugar

3️⃣ Recipe #3:

• Chicken thighs
• Olive oil
• Veggies
• Garlic
• Red wine
• Crushed tomatoes
• Olives
• Capes
• Dried oregano
• Crushed red pepper flakes
• Fresh basil & parsley
• Parmesan cheese

(keep scrolling for the answers)

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☝️ Recipe #1: Toaster strudels

✌️ Recipe #2: Eggnog bread

3️⃣ Recipe #3: Chicken cacciatore