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🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 4.61 minutes to read.

“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Yesterday afternoon marked a major TV news shakeup the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Ron Burgundy was replaced by Veronica Corningstone. Within an hour of each other, both Fox News and CNN revealed they had parted ways with veteran news anchors Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon, respectively.

Neither news org provided a public reason for the departures, which came as a surprise to many. Fox News was still promoting Tucker Carlson Tonight – the No. 1 most-watched show in cable news with 3.25 million average viewers – a few hours before announcing his exit. And Lemon, who had been with CNN since 2006, recorded a show yesterday morning before later publishing a tweet saying he was “shocked” to learn he no longer had a job.

But “shocked” could also refer to the emotions stirred by the news anchors, who both have been the subject of public controversy in recent months.

• Carlson’s departure came less than a week after Fox News reached a record $787.5 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, in a case that publicized a trove of Carlson’s private text messages.
• Lemon was required to undergo formal training in February, following sexist comments he made on-air about GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley. His firing also came weeks after a Variety report alleged that Lemon had a history of making threatening and offensive comments to female workers at CNN.

📰📺 Zoom out: Following a sharp increase in 2020, viewership has declined across all major US cable news networks in each of the past two years. And while things are looking even worse at the moment – every major news network reported at least a double-digit annual drop in ratings last month (led by CNN at -52%, then Fox News at -27%) – cable news typically sees a bump in viewership during presidential election years.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 Welsh soccer club Wrexham FC, owned by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, won its first promotion in 15 years. After the two American actors bought the struggling Wrexham club for $2.5 million in 2021, they began filming a fly-on-the-wall documentary show called Welcome to Wrexham, which follows Reynolds and McElhenney as they learn the ropes of sports club ownership. This season, the two new owners led Wrexham to its first league title at any level since 1977, earning the club an automatic promotion to the English Football League (three divisions below the Premier League).

🌎🪖 Countries around the world spent a combined $2.24 trillion on their militaries last year. That’s per an annual report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which found global military spending last year rose nearly 4% above 2021’s record high when adjusted for inflation. (The US spent $877 billion on its military last year, a sum that’s larger than the next 10 countries combined, as well as 3x larger than second-place China).

🇮🇳 Indian police arrested Sikh separatist leader Amritpal Singh after weeks on the run. Singh is a popular figure within a movement seeking to establish a sovereign region in the state of Punjab for followers of India’s minority Sikh religion. Last month, when Indian police initially began searching for Singh over accusations of attempted murder and creating “disharmony” in society, authorities blocked internet access for nearly all of Punjab’s 30+ million residents in a bid to avoid mass protests.

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The Northern Lights, aka aurora borealis, were visible across the northernmost 30 US states over the past two nights, as a result of specific solar activity that occurred late last week (and surprisingly not magic).

🌌 Some quick background: The Northern and Southern Lights are caused by activity on the surface of the Sun – specifically, solar storms that eject huge clouds of electrically charged particles, which can then collide with the Earth. Or to oversimplify: the sun vomits charged particles in every which direction, and some eventually hit Earth.

• Most of these charged particles are deflected away upon impact, like a girl who’s working on herself but keeps getting hit on by hopeful suitors, though some are captured by the Earth’s magnetic field and attracted to its north and south poles.
• As these charged particles accelerate towards the poles, they slam into atoms and molecules in Earth’s atmosphere, heating them up and leaving a trail of glowing colored light across the sky. This visual phenomenon is what we call the Northern and Southern Lights.

🤔 Bottom line: The reason why the lights were so widely visible this go-around is rooted in an event that happened last Friday. That was when the Sun let off an unusually large burst of plasma, called a coronal mass ejection. Part of this plasma burst collided with Earth on Sunday night, resulting in charged particles (aka the Northern and Southern Lights), appearing closer to the equator than usual on Sunday and Monday evenings.

💬 Quoted… “[A] resounding victory.”

Yesterday, Apple won its antitrust-focused court battle with Fortnite-maker Epic Games over its App Store policies. An opinion issued by the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed an earlier judge’s ruling that the iPhone-maker did not violate antitrust law by banning competing app marketplaces on its devices, and ultimately sided with Apple on every issue except one – the ruling states it's unlawful for the company to prohibit developers from pointing users to other means of payment outside of its App Store.

• Bottom line: Apple’s control over the App Store and the fees it charges likely won’t change significantly as a result of the ongoing legal challenge by Epic Games.

🤖💼 Stat of the Day: Some 62% of US workers believe AI will have a major impact on jobholders overall in the next two decades; on the flip side, just 28% think it will have a major impact on their work personally, per a new Pew Research survey.

🤯 Did You Know?... A 2002 peer-reviewed study found about one in every eight US employees had worked at McDonald’s at some point in their life.

📖 Worth a Read: My High-Flying Life as a Corporate Spy Who Lied His Way to the Top → (Narratively)

• ☝️ You’re looking at the Manhattan apartment belonging to fictional character Kendall Roy in Succession; the 5,500-square-foot triplex apartment just went on the market for $29 million.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 💰 US markets closed mixed yesterday (S&P: +0.1%; Dow: +0.2%; Nasdaq: -0.3%).
• 🏦 First Republic Bank lost ~$100 billion in deposits last month and 41% of its overall deposits last quarter, per the bank’s Q1 earnings report released yesterday; its shares fell ~20% in after-hours trading.
• 🪙⚖️ Coinbase filed a lawsuit against the SEC yesterday seeking to force the regulator to publicly answer whether its existing rule-making processes for securities will be extended to the crypto company.

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SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🤖📉 Snapchat's average US App Store review over the past week was 1.67 stars, down from ~3 stars during Q1; the flood of negative reviews coincides with the release of the app’s “My AI” feature.
• 🏀💰 Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny Knight, will donate $400 million to rebuild Albina, a primarily black community in Portland, Oregon.
• 🤝🏈 The Green Bay Packers reportedly agreed to trade QB Aaron Rodgers and a pair of draft picks (including the 15th overall pick in 2023) to the NY Jets yesterday; the Packers will receive multiple picks from NY, including the Jets’ first and second-rounders this year (Nos. 13 and 42) and a 2024 conditional pick in the top two rounds.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🚘📈 Markups at US car dealerships contributed between 0.3 and 0.7 percentage-points to the 16% increase in the Consumer Price Index from December 2019 to December 2022, per a new study from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• 🇨🇳🌕 China’s National Space Administration announced plans to conduct on-site investigations on the Moon to determine whether materials there can be 3D-printed into usable buildings; the Chang’e 8 mission is currently scheduled for 2026.
• 🚀💥 SpaceX’s Starship, which exploded minutes after its first-ever successful launch last Thursday, rained debris up to six miles away from the launch area; prior to launch, SpaceX had told federal regulators it expected any explosion to be contained to a one-square-mile area.

MISCELLANEOUS

• 🚘 The attorneys general of 17 states sent a letter asking the federal government to recall certain Hyundai and Kia vehicles manufactured between 2011 and 2022 that can be easily stolen due to a lack of safety features; these particular vulnerabilities gained notoriety in 2021 after several viral TikTok videos.
• 🇷🇺🪖 The grim life and brutal death of a Wagner recruit: following a Russian prisoner who agreed to fight in Ukraine in exchange for his freedom.
• ✍️ North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum signed a Republican-backed bill yesterday banning nearly all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy; the only exception is if an abortion can “prevent the death or a serious health risk” of the mother. (From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)

CLICKBAIT

• 🚆🌎 Imagining a New York-to-Paris intercontinental train.

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Yesterday we covered new polling data, as well as an expected announcement this week from President Biden, that shed some light on the upcoming presidential election in 2024.

❓ Our question to you : If the 2024 presidential election were held today, which party would you vote for?

• 🔴 Republican: 34%
• 🔵 Democrat: 40%
• 3️⃣ A third party/independent (like Afroman): 9%
• 🔞 I'm not planning on voting/too young: 7%
• 🤷 Unsure: 10%

Click here to read some of the best responses from yesterday’s poll.

+Note on sample size: We received 11,608 votes and 1,144 longform responses.

British Vogue recently released a series of five covers featuring influential people with disabilities as part of its May 2023 issue. The magazine hopes the covers will spark conversations industry-wide about the disability in the media and society.

• See them all here.

❓ Trivia: Where was margarine invented?

🧠 True or False?... The brain cannot feel pain.

🤔 Riddle Me This… Lose me once I'll come back stronger. Lose me twice I'll leave forever. What am I?

(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 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: France

🧠 T/F: True; the brain has billions of neurons (cells that transmit sensory and other information), but no pain receptors

🤔 Riddle: A tooth