Good morning. To quote the great singer/songwriter Adam Sandler, “Put on your yamaka, it's time for Hanukkah!”

This year’s Festival of Lights begins on Sunday evening and goes through December 26th, meaning eight days of lighting the menorah, playing dreidel, and – the most important part according to the Jewish contingent of the DONUT who wrote this – food cooked in oil. We're talkin’ latkes, which are basically deep-fried potato pancakes, and sufganiyot aka deep-fried jelly doughnuts!! That’s right, eight straight days of pancakes and doughnuts.

Have a great weekend, everyone – Jewish and non-Jewish folks alike! We'll see you back here on Monday.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 3.70 minutes to read.

"Reasoning will never make a person correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning they never acquired."

–Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

90% of US school administrators believe the country is in the midst of a growing youth mental health crisis, with more than half saying the problem is the same or worse than it was a year ago, per a new nationwide survey published by mental health service provider Effective School Solutions on Wednesday.

The survey, which polled 200 school administrators and 1,000 parents with kids in grades K-12, also found that ~60% of parents say there’s a growing youth mental health crisis in the US, with similar numbers seen across the rural/suburban/urban divide.

• The ESS isn’t the only scientific org that’s made a similar mental health crisis claim either. In separate research, the CDC discovered more than 44% of US high school students said they were so persistently sad or hopeless at some point last year that they couldn’t engage in regular activities for at least a two-week period.

🇺🇸 Zoom out: About half of all Americans have experienced a severe mental health crisis in their own family, per an October survey from CNN and the Kaiser Family Foundation. And as of 2020, nearly one in five US adults were living with a mental illness.

📊 Flash poll (long-form): What would you recommend doing to improve the mental health of the US as a whole? The best answers will be featured in Monday’s newsletter.

Submit a response here.

🌍 The US plans to invest $55 billion in Africa over the next three years, President Biden said yesterday. The announcement came at the US-Africa Leaders Summit in D.C., where Biden expressed support for a free trade zone in Africa and vowed to provide resources to help enable the continent’s transition to clean energy. While US officials didn’t explicitly mention China by name this week, many analysts said the event was aimed at counteracting Beijing’s growing influence in Africa.

🇪🇺 The EU officially confirmed its adoption of a 15% global minimum tax on large companies yesterday. The move, set to take effect in 2024, was previously approved by the EU, US, and 100+ other countries in October 2021. However, the Biden administration later failed in its attempt to get the plan through Congress, and the legislation’s prospects look even dimmer next year with Republicans taking back control of the House.

🇺🇦 Russia warned of “unpredictable consequences” if the US ends up sending Patriot missiles to Ukraine. Earlier this week, multiple sources reported the US government is finalizing plans to send defensive Patriot missile batteries, which would represent the most advanced weaponry America has given to Ukraine since the war began, per the WSJ. Patriot missile systems take as many as 90 soldiers to run and require months of training to use, and the US military is reportedly planning to begin training Ukrainian soldiers in Germany by next month.

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Yesterday, the National Archives released a trove of more than 13,000 documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who was shot and killed while riding in a motorcade through Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

With the document dump, the government’s largest since 2018, officials say more than 97% of the roughly 5 million pages of records it has regarding JFK’s assassination have now been released.

And while there aren’t any obvious bombshells in this latest batch – ​​like that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t the gunman or there was a conspiracy in Kennedy’s death (as many believe) – here’s what the drop, which is still being combed through, purportedly contains:

• New info about the CIA’s surveillance of Oswald in Mexico. Just weeks before Kennedy was killed, Oswald visited Mexico City to meet with Soviet and Cuban spies, including a KGB assassinations specialist.
• More documents comprising Oswald’s 80-Volume 201 “Personality” File. Much of this file was made public in the past, but portions have been kept secret or redacted.
• Additional info on George Joannides, a CIA operative during the Kennedy administration and the agency’s liaison to a special House committee in the 1970s that re-investigated Kennedy’s murder.

📝 Bottom line: Under the JFK Records Act of 1992, every assassination-related document in government possession was supposed to be released in full by October 2017. But the law also allows the gov’t to indefinitely postpone the release of any document for national security or foreign relations reasons – and many are still heavily-redacted or withheld in full.

Avatar 2, James Cameron’s sequel to the highest-grossing movie of all time, was shown to public audiences for the first time yesterday. And just like that, film-tech-nerd history – aka the best kind – was made.

🤔 What’s the big deal?... Avatar: The Way of Water is the first big film to be released in a high frame rate, but adjusted to keep a “cinematic” look, CNBC reports. What this means is that the movie’s action and underwater scenes are shown to audiences using a high-frame rate of 48 frames/second – since more pictures shown per second helps motion appear clearer and more realistic – but its dramatic scenes have been adjusted to appear like 24 FPS, the traditional rate used for virtually the entire history of film.

And while others have also experimented with higher frame rates, like Peter Jackson in The Hobbit trilogy and Ang Lee in Gemini Man (which used a whopping 120 FPS😳), Avatar 2 is the first to switch between HFR and what looks like a traditional frame rate throughout the film.

• For reference, live sports and newscasts usually appear at 30 frames/second. Video games typically show 60 frames/second.

👀 Looking ahead… Per Cameron, the film needs to make $2 billion-plus to turn a profit. Which – besides being higher than Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson before brunch – may be a tough nut to crack, given its performance in China could be impacted by a widespread Covid outbreak. Though there is some way-too-early good news: international ticket sales are reportedly pacing 124% ahead of the original Avatar so far, which grossed $2.7 billion.

💬 Quoted…​​ “Accurate, comprehensive national data is integral to addressing the root causes, designing prevention strategies and providing the needed support to victims and communities.”

From 2020 to 2021, the rate of state law enforcement agencies participating in the FBI’s hate crime reporting database dropped from 93% to 63%, while the overall number of hate crimes reported fell slightly (8,263 → 7,262).

• This decline in participation has coincided with the FBI and DOJ transitioning to a more detailed and comprehensive crime-reporting system, which remains voluntary for state agencies.

🤖🤑 Stat of the Day: $1 billion = the amount of revenue that OpenAI, the Elon Musk-backed company behind AI chatbot ChatGPT, expects to earn by 2024, Reuters reported yesterday.

🤯 Did You Know?... There’s such a thing as red bananas, which originate from Southeast Asia. They taste sweeter and contain more nutrients compared to regular yellow bananas.

📖 Worth a Read: The secret lives of MI6’s top female spies → (Financial Times)

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• ☝️ Uber Eats is partnering with Cartken, an AI company founded by a team of ex-Google engineers, to use sidewalk robots for food deliveries in Miami, FL.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 🏘 🔑 Rent prices dropped 0.4% in November, the largest single month decrease since 2015, per a Zillow report released this week.
• 🚗💰 Elon Musk sold $3.6 billion in Tesla stock this week, per an SEC filing on Wednesday night; the Tesla CEO has sold a total of $39 billion in shares since late last year.
• 📉 Retail sales fell 0.6% in November, the biggest month-over-month decline this year, the Commerce Department announced Thursday. | US jobless claims fell to 211,000 last week, its lowest figure since September, the Department of Labor announced yesterday.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• ⚽ Major League Soccer renewed a four-year deal to broadcast games on Fox while ending its agreements with ESPN and ABC; the MLS will also begin a 10-year partnership with Apple starting next season.
• 🐎🦸‍♂️ Warner Bros. Discovery will license a slate of recently pulled titles, including Westworld, to free ad-supported streaming platforms, the company announced this week. | Henry Cavill won’t be returning as Superman, new co-head of DC Studios James Gunn announced this week.
• 🏈✈️ UCLA is officially approved to leave the Pac-12 and move to the Big Ten Conference, the UC Board of Regents announced on Wednesday.| Harvard University named Claudine Gay as its next president; she's the first person of color and second woman to hold the title.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🧑‍🔬 Nature’s 10: The ten people who helped shape science in 2022, according to the journal Nature.
• 🛰️🚀 A Russian spacecraft docked with the ISS started leaking coolant uncontrollably on Wednesday night, damaging the craft’s crew capsule and canceling a spacewalk planned for yesterday. | The launch of NASA’s SWOT satellite was delayed by SpaceX until early this morning. (Background)

EVERYTHING ELSE

• 🦠 The White House is giving away four additional free Covid tests by mail to every US household, starting the week of December 19.
• 🏛️ The Senate voted 83-11 to approve an $858 billion defense spending bill that also rescinds the US military’s Covid vaccine mandate; it now heads to President Biden’s desk. (From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)

CLICKBAIT

• 🏡 Millennials are coming for the tiny collectible Christmas village.

Always educational, sometimes challenging, but never disappointing: it's the DONUT's weekly news quiz.

Test your mettle against our team. 

Employees at Blue and Gray Bar & Grill in Gettysburg, PA, had quite the wake-up call when a deer smashed through the front window and into the restaurant. 

• While the restaurant wasn't open yet, several employees were inside when the startled deer began running around the dining room. 

🦌 Get Bambi back to the wild... Luckily, some employees were able to calm down the animal while they waited for local authorities. The deer was checked for injuries, then safely taken to a nearby farm where it was released. 

• Blue and Gray still managed to open on time, regardless. 

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

☝️ Recipe #1:

• Panko bread crumbs
• Vegetable oil
• Garlic & onion powder
• Salt & pepper
• Paprika
• Flour
• Egg
• Cooking spray
• Chicken breast (cut into pieces)

✌️ Recipe #2:

• Cherry/grape tomatoes
• Shallot
• Garlic
• Olive oil
• Salt
• Red pepper flakes
• Feta
• Thyme
• Pasta
• Lemon
• Basil

3️⃣ Recipe #3:

• Chocolate chips
• White chocolate chips
• Peppermint extract
• Crushed candy canes

(keep scrolling for the answers)

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☝️ Chicken nuggets

✌️Baked feta pasta

3️⃣ Peppermint bark