Good morning. Did you know there’s an entire section of the Eiffel Tower that’s made of cheese?

Hope not, because it isn’t true. Just keeping you on your toes! But don’t worry – you passed the test. Which means we can now show you…

THE NEWS!

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 4.98 minutes to read.

“Honor is the foundation of courage.”

–Amelia Earhart (1897-1939)

Facial recognition firm Clearview AI has run nearly 1 million individual searches at the request of US police departments across the country, company founder and CEO Hoan Ton-That told BBC News in an interview published late Monday.

Ton-That also revealed that Clearview AI’s dataface database now contains 30 billion images of people’s faces. That’s up from 20 billion images one year ago.

👥 Some quick background: Last May, Clearview AI was banned from selling its facial recognition services to any US companies after the ACLU successfully sued the firm for breaking consumer privacy laws.

But the ruling carved out an exemption for police, which have been using Clearview to run searches for several years now. And it’s not an insignificant amount of departments.

In a 2020 interview, Ton-That said around 2,400 federal, state, and local US law-enforcement agencies (out of ~18,000) were utilizing the firm’s facial recognition technology to help with criminal investigations.

• Miami’s assistant chief of police recently told BBC News that his department uses the facial recognition software ~450 times a year for every type of crime, from solving murders to clearing shoplifting suspects from suspicion.
• The department’s policy, he said, is to treat facial recognition searches like receiving a tip: “We don't make an arrest because an algorithm tells us to. We either put that name in a photographic line-up or we go about solving the case through traditional means."

✋ Yes, but… Some lawmakers and rights groups have cautioned against widespread use of the technology, warning of potential issues with accuracy and privacy.

Critics also focus on how intimate personal data (aka your face) is, for the most part, scraped from public platforms like Twitter and Instagram without users’ consent. And unlike passwords, phone numbers, or email addresses, this type of data can’t be easily altered after a potential hack.

• The tech also isn’t perfect; since 2019, at least four men – each of them Black – have been falsely arrested in the US due to facial recognition tech, which tends to misidentify people of color more often than white folks.

🇺🇸 Across the US: Since 2019, nearly two dozen state or local governments have passed laws restricting the use of facial recognition technology – though some areas later walked back those restrictions due to procedural reasons or a spike in violent crime.

📊 Flash poll: In your opinion, widespread use of facial recognition technology by police would be a _____ for society.

Good idea

Mostly good idea

Mostly bad idea

Bad idea

Change that has no effect

Unsure/other

🇷🇺 A Russian man who was arrested after his daughter drew anti-war pictures at school has escaped house arrest. Local police started investigating Alexei Moskalyov about a year ago, when his 13-year-old daughter refused to participate in a patriotic class at her school and made several anti-war drawings (including one that said “Glory to Ukraine!”). After the investigation turned up online posts critical of Moscow, Moskalyov was placed under house arrest at the start of this month, and his daughter was taken to an orphanage with no access to family. But yesterday, when Moskalyov failed to appear in court for a sentencing hearing, Russian officials said he had fled the previous night and was currently missing.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿⚖️ Prince Harry, Elton John, and other British celebrities appeared in court for a lawsuit against the Daily Mail. The plaintiffs are alleging that journalists and private investigators working on behalf of the Mail’s publisher, Associated Newspapers, hacked their mobile messages, recorded their phone calls, and broke into their residences over a 25-year period to obtain private information. Associated Newspapers has denied the allegations, and also argued most of the charges are beyond the UK’s statute of limitations.

☢️ Russia will no longer receive some data on the US’ nuclear forces. White House officials said the move is intended to encourage Russia to resume compliance with the 2011 New START treaty, which limits the number of nuclear warheads, bombers, and launchers both countries are allowed to possess. A stipulation of the treaty requires the US and Russia to exchange data on their nuclear arms every six months. Separately, President Vladimir Putin on Sunday said Moscow will station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, which borders Russia and Ukraine, though US officials said there’s no evidence yet that any weapons have been moved.

☝️ Despite what mainstream news may have you believe, there is some good happening in the world…

• A new satellite will track dangerous chemicals in unprecedented detail
• 500 baby sharks to be released in Indonesia
• Latin America poised to become a renewable energy giant

These are just a couple snippets from the latest edition of What Could Go Right?, a weekly newsletter from our friends at The Progress Network, who report on the positive steps being taken on today’s most pressing issues.

🎓🧠 Thoughtfully arranged by a collective made up of 100+ scholars, writers, and innovators, (a bunch of super smart people, really) The Progress Network speaks to a better future in a world dominated by negative voices.

Every week, thousand of readers are staying up to date on all the ways humanity is lifting each other up and building towards a better tomorrow. And The Progress Network is free, forever and always!

Try a different approach to your news with The Progress Network.

Yesterday, Substack announced a $2 million community fundraising round to help the company “build a new economic engine for culture,” which both sounds cool and like a mad lib of Silicon Valley jargon.

In plain English, Substack wants to be a new type of social network where you can support your favorite writers and find new writers to support, too (which by the looks of the data the company shared, it’s well on its way).

🤔 But why raise money from your own customers?... To put it simply, because that may be the only (and best) option Substack has.

In 2021, the company raised $65 million at a $650 million valuation. Then last year it tried and failed to raise an additional $75-$100 million at a $750 million–$1 billion valuation – and as any Patagonia-wearing bro will tell you, fundraising hasn’t gotten any easier since then.

💰 Bottom line: According to some back-of-the-napkin math by The Verge’s Elizabeth Lopatto, the company made around $18.5 million in revenue last year (against a black box of expenses). That’s ~32x its current pre-money valuation on Wefunder, which comes in at $585 million.

But that hasn’t turned away Substack’s supporters. Since going live on Monday evening, the campaign has not only reached its $2 million goal, but also hit the updated goal of $5 million, the maximum a company can raise via crowdfunding in a 12-month period.

Yesterday, Apple announced the launch of a brand-new buy now, pay later (BNPL) product called “Apple Pay Later,” which is currently available to randomly-selected users operating on iOS 16.4.

📱👛 How it works: Using a feature within the Apple Wallet, iPhone and iPad users in the US can apply for a loan between $50 and $1,000.

If approved, the user would be able to spend the money at any online retailer that accepts Apple Pay (more than 85% of them do). The loan would have to be paid back in four equal installments over six weeks, with no added interest or fees.

• According to Apple, the initial approval process won’t affect users’ credit scores, but the subsequent loan and payment history “may be reported to credit bureaus and impact their credit.”

📈 Zoom out: From 2019 to 2021, the total value of BNPL loans granted in the US grew by more than 1,000% to reach $24.2 billion, per the latest federal data.

And much like short form dancing or disappearing picture messaging apps, its users tend to skew young. Some 31% of US adults said they used a BNPL service in 2021 – including nearly half of respondents under the age of 35.

💬 Quoted… “I thought, ‘Yeah, it is beaver country, and it has been for millions of years’”

A new species of ancient beaver, recently discovered by UT Austin scientists, has been named after the popular Texan travel center Buc-ee’s. The inspiration for the name? A local billboard spotted by the lead researcher that read “This is Beaver Country,” in reference to Buc-ee’s longtime mascot.

• The newly-dubbed Anchitheriomys buceei lived in Texas ~15 million years ago, and was around 30% bigger than the beavers of today. Rest stops, beavers, morning-themed news brands located in Austin… maybe everything is bigger in Texas.

💼 Stat of the Day: There's always a lot of economic talk about unemployment numbers – but what about overemployment numbers? Per new data from LendingClub, half of all US employees currently have a second (or third) job to bring in extra income.

🤯 Did You Know?... Tom Cruise is the only actor to star in both a Best Picture Oscar winner and a Worst Picture Razzie winner in the same year. (1988: Rain Man and Cocktail, respectively.)

📖 Worth a Read: Online daters are less open-minded than their filters suggest → (The Economist)

• ☝️ You’re looking at some of the best photos taken last year by spacecraft on or around Mars, as rated by Gizmodo.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 💰 US markets closed down across the board yesterday (S&P: -0.2%; Dow: -0.1%; Nasdaq: -0.5%).
• 🏦 The Senate Banking Committee held a hearing yesterday regarding the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the seizure of Signature Bank; the House Financial Services Committee will hold its own hearing on the bank failures today.
• ⚖️🇨🇳 Sam Bankman-Fried was charged in the US yesterday for allegedly bribing Chinese officials with $40 million to unfreeze his hedge fund’s accounts. | Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, announced it will split into six independent companies that could each pursue their own IPOs.

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SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 📺💰 Succession’s Season 4 premiere was seen by 2.3 million viewers, a series high for the HBO show.
• 🎻📱Apple Music Classical, a new app specifically designed for listening to classical music with an Apple Music subscription, was released yesterday.
• 🏈 Chiefsaholic, the infamous KC football superfan who wears a full wolf costume to Chiefs’ games, skipped bail in Oklahoma yesterday; he’s facing bank robbery charges.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🧩 UK resident David Smith, a self-described shape hobbyist, has discovered a new 13-sided shape that was previously only theoretical, per a new preprint paper.
• 👩‍⚕️ Female physicians earn between 21% and 24% less per hour than their male counterparts, regardless of whether they’re married or have children, per a new peer-reviewed study published in JAMA Health Forum.
• 🦣 A giant meatball made from flesh created from the DNA of an extinct wooly mammoth was unveiled yesterday at Nemo, a science museum in the Netherlands.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• 🙏 At least 38 people were killed and 30 others seriously injured after a fire broke out yesterday at a migrant center in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, located near the US border; security footage appears to show migrants setting the fire in their detention cell while security guards walked away and made no apparent attempt to release the 68 men.
• ⚖️ A Maryland court reinstated the murder conviction of Adnan Syed yesterday, ruling that the victim’s brother should’ve been given more time to attend the September hearing where Syed’s conviction was vacated; Syed, whose case was documented on the hit podcast Serial, was previously freed after spending 23 years fighting charges that he killed his former girlfriend.

CLICKBAIT

• 😋 The best food cities to travel to in 2023.

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Disney fan Nathan Firesheets set out on a mission to visit all twelve Disney parks in twelve days. 

🐭 Around the world... He started his journey in Disneyland Paris on March 8th. And in just under two weeks, Nathan visited Walt Disney Studios, Shanghai Disneyland, Hong Kong Disneyland, Tokyo Disneyland, Tokyo DisneySea, Disneyland, Disney California Adventure, Epcot, Animal Kingdom, and Hollywood Studios. He finished his adventure in Disneyworld's Magic Kingdom.

• What's more, Nathan also managed to ride all 216 operating rides along the way. "It was pretty awesome and kind of surreal," he told KTLA. "I still can't quite believe I did it."

Who are the top five most-streamed artists on Spotify over the past month? (Hint: 4/5 are women)

(keep scrolling for the answers)

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1. The Weeknd
2. Miley Cyrus
3. Ariana Grande
4. Taylor Swift
5. Shakira

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