Good morning and welcome back to The DONUT. The break was great, for sure, but we here at DONUT HQ are deeeeefinitely glad to be in action again.

Though, just to be clear, the rumors about DONUT staff waking up in the middle of the night screaming, “The Dunkers! They haven’t had their DONUT Holes… in days!!!” are categorically false.

It was too long, right? We missed y’all❣️🍩.

So, um, yea… glad to be back!

Without further Erykah Badu, THE NEWS.

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

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”

–Mark Twain (1835-1910)

On Friday, the Supreme Court overturned the Biden administration’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student-loan debt for 40+ million eligible US borrowers.

📝 The reasoning: In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the Court ruled Biden’s loan forgiveness plan was unlawful because it wasn’t explicitly approved by Congress.

• The majority opinion, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, stated that Court precedent “requires that Congress speak clearly before a department secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy."
• The Court rejected arguments from the Biden admin and dissenting justices claiming the plan was lawful under the 2003 HEROES Act, which allows the Executive Branch to “waive or modify” student loans when there’s a “national emergency” so borrowers aren’t worse off due to the emergency.

🤔 So, what now?... The Biden admin has begun implementing a new plan for student-loan forgiveness that invokes the 1965 Higher Education Act. Some legal scholars say this law gives the Executive Branch broad authority to “compromise, waive or release” such debt, though other experts disagree.

It’s currently unclear whether the new plan will be of a similar scope and scale as Biden's first loan forgiveness program, or if it will hold up against future legal challenges.

👀 Looking ahead… The federal student-loan repayment process will begin again on September 1 after a 3.5-year pause due to the pandemic, with first payments due on October 1. However, borrowers will be spared from most of the consequences of missing a payment – including late fees, default status, and a lower credit rating – until October of next year.

⚖️🌐🏳️‍🌈 Zoom out: They say things come in bunches, and last week the Supreme Court was busier than a moth in a mitten. In addition to striking down Affirmative Action, strengthening protections for religious workers, and reaffirming state courts’ authority over federal elections, SCOTUS also ruled 6-3 along ideological lines that a Christian graphic artist in Colorado can refuse to make wedding websites for gay couples under the First Amendment.

📊 Flash poll: Do you agree with the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Biden’s student-loan forgiveness plan?

Yes

No

Unsure/other

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🇮🇱🇵🇸 Israel’s military withdrew yesterday from Jenin, a city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, days after it deployed hundreds of soldiers and launched airstrikes in the area. A total of 12 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier were killed in the 48-hour military operation. Israeli officials said no non-combatants died, but acknowledged that some of the ~100 wounded Palestinians were civilians. Ahead of yesterday’s withdrawal, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to carry out similar military operations in the West Bank if needed. As the military operation was underway on Tuesday, a Palestinian militant wounded eight Israelis at a Tel Aviv shopping center, in a retaliatory attack claimed by Hamas.

🇨🇳 China is restricting exports of two minerals the US deems critical to the production of semiconductors, solar cells, and missile systems. The minerals – gallium and germanium – will be subject to unspecified export controls starting August 1 to protect China’s national security, Beijing’s Ministry of Commerce said Monday. China currently produces 60% of the world’s germanium and 80% of the world’s gallium – not because the minerals are rare, but because of the relatively high cost to extract them.

🌍🌡️ The world recorded its hottest day ever on Monday… and then again on Tuesday. That’s according to data from the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction and the Climate Reanalyzer project, which go back as far as 1979. Though to be fair, the record average temperatures of 62.6°F and 62.9°F are preliminary, meaning they have yet to be verified by “gold-standard” climate measurement organizations like the NOAA. Experts say the global temperature record will likely be broken many times this summer, as the ongoing El Niño warming effect continues.

Heather Anderson, an Australian rules football player who died by suicide last year at 28, has been posthumously diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), according to a new paper published in Acta Neuropathologica.

And while CTE has been previously found in male athletes participating in contact sports like MMA or football, this marks the first case of the degenerative brain disease being diagnosed in a female professional athlete.

🤔 What is CTE?... a progressive and fatal brain disease associated with concussions and repeated impacts to the head. Symptoms include memory loss, progressive dementia, impulse control problems, and depression, but it can only be officially diagnosed after death via a brain-tissue analysis.

Beyond that, our understanding of the disease is limited – but it’s starting to show up in contact sports like mosquitoes around stagnant water.

• A 2017 study found 87% of donated brains from former high-school, college, and professional football players showed signs of the disease. Former NFL players included in the study showed signs of CTE more than 99% of the time (110/111).
• In comparison, a 2018 Boston University study of the general population found only one CTE case in 164 autopsies – and the one person with CTE had played college football.

🧠 Bottom line: Per the newly-published paper: “As the representation of women in professional contact sports is growing, it seems likely that more CTE cases will be identified… [and] Given females’ greater susceptibility to concussion, there is an urgent need to recognize the risks, and to institute strategies and policies to minimize traumatic brain injuries.”

It sounds like the start of a joke – why did the world’s richest man challenge the world’s richest millennial to a cage fight?

Though not much of a – sorry – punchline, the actual answer is Threads, the microblogging platform released to the public today by the Zuckerberg-owned Instagram. And according to Elon Musk, the app is a Twitter clone.

📱 Pulling the threads… Much like Twitter, Threads allows users to like, comment, repost, and share posts called – believe it or not – “threads.”

• Any of Instagram’s roughly 170 million US- and UK-based users with an iOS or Android phone can sign up for Threads using their existing Instagram username.
• Threads is not currently available in the EU, and there’s no set date for an EU launch. This decision, according to internal sources, is due to Meta’s desire to share private data related to a user’s health, finances, location, and browsing history across different platforms like Facebook and Instagram – and the legal basis the company had claimed for processing Facebook users’ personal data (performance of a contract) was found unlawful at the start of this year.

🐦 Zoom out: Meanwhile in Twitterland, CEO Elon Musk announced over the weekend that user accounts would be capped at viewing a certain amount of tweets per day based on their verification status, in order to curtail bots from scraping content on the platform.

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💬 Quoted… “...I got to eat some hot dogs, and I got a win…”

On Tuesday, Joey Chestnut ate 62 hot dogs in ten minutes. While not a world record – he once consumed 79 franks in the same timeframe – the feat was enough to secure Chestnut his sixteenth victory in the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest.

• On the women's side, Miki Sudo chowed down 39.5 hot dogs, securing her ninth win in the competition.

🍎 Stat of the Day: On Friday, Apple became the first company to close above a $3 trillion valuation. The tech giant’s stock has increased by almost 50% this year – and it’s now worth more than Google parent-company Alphabet and Amazon combined.

🤯 Did You Know?... You’re tallest in the morning, right after waking up. That’s due to the rehydration of our spine's intervertebral discs during sleep, which lose fluid due to daily activities like sitting, standing, and twisting.

📖 Worth a Read: Here’s When We Hit Our Physical and Mental Peaks → (WSJ)

• ☝️ Alef Aeronautics announced that its Model A flying car is the first ever to receive FAA approval for testing in the air and on the ground; the CA-based startup aims to start delivering the $300,000 vehicle to customers by the end of 2025.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 💰 US markets closed down across the board yesterday (S&P: -0.2%; Dow: -0.4%; Nasdaq: -0.2%).
• 🚘 Rivian on Monday reported 12,640 deliveries in Q2, beating analysts’ expectations of 11,000; then, on Tuesday, Amazon announced plans to introduce Rivian EVs to the European market in the coming weeks; Rivian shares have risen ~40% over the past five days.
• ✈️ ​​JetBlue is terminating its partnership with American Airlines in the northeastern US after a federal judge ruled the deal was anticompetitive; JetBlue said it plans to appeal the ruling, but will mostly focus on its deal to acquire Spirit Airlines (which the DOJ has also sued to block).

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

in partnership with DeLo-xx

• 🍿 Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny earned $83.7 million at the domestic box office over the five-day weekend ending July 4; the Harrison Ford-starring film reportedly cost Disney and Lucasfilm $295 million to produce.
• 🎙️ ESPN laid off around 20 on-air commentators last Friday, including Jeff Van Gundy, Jalen Rose, Suzy Kolber, Todd McShay, and Max Kellerman. | ⚖️ Former Fox News producer Abby Grossberg reached a $12 million settlement over allegations that she faced a discriminatory workplace and was coerced into providing false testimony in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation case.
• ⚾ Los Angeles Angels superstar Shohei Ohtani amassed 3.4 wins above replacement (WAR) in June between his pitching and hitting; that’s the highest single-month total in the MLB’s recorded history, dating back to 1972. | 🎾 "Just Stop Oil" protestors interrupted play twice at Wimbledon.

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SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

in partnership with Flume

• 🔋🛻 Toyota announced a new breakthrough the automaker says will allow it to halve the size, weight, and cost of its EV batteries by 2025.
• 🐙 A pair of octopus nurseries were recently found deep below the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Costa Rica; prior to this discovery, there was only one other known deep-sea octopus nursery.
• 📚🤖 Authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad sued OpenAI last week alleging that ChatGPT was illegally trained on their books; their claims are based on the “very accurate summaries” of their books that the chatbot generates.

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MISCELLANEOUS

• 🏛️ A suspicious white powder that led to the evacuation of the White House on Sunday evening was confirmed to be cocaine, government officials said yesterday; President Biden was away at Camp David when the incident occurred.
• 🎓 Three civil rights groups sued Harvard on Monday alleging the university’s legacy admissions process violates federal civil rights law by favoring white applicants over applicants of color.
• ⚖️📲 A federal judge in Louisiana blocked certain Biden administration agencies – including the FBI and HHS – from interacting with social media companies about removing content that contains “protected free speech.” (From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)

CLICKBAIT

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On Friday, before the break, we covered a pair of Supreme Court rulings that effectively ban US colleges and universities from explicitly considering race in their admissions process.

❓ Our question to you: Do you agree with the Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action in college admissions?

• 👍 Yes: 45%
• 👎 No: 36%
• 🤷 Unsure/other: 19%

Click here to read the best responses from Friday’s poll.

+Note on sample size: We received 16,539 votes and 1,597 longform responses.

💭 Picture this: You're out for a surf on a nice summer's day with your friends near San Diego, when you start to see a mysterious shape swim towards your board.

Before you know it, two eyes are peeking out above the water – a baby seal pup saying hello 🦭. 

• The seal pup climbed right up on the boards, then spent the day hanging out with the group of Californian surfers.
• The seal was checked on by local animal rescuers and confirmed to be in good health and not in any distress – he really just wanted to say hello 🥰.
• "[It's] The most beautiful thing that has ever happened to me," one of the surfers told the Sacramento Bee, "never getting rid of this board." 

Which country, pictured above, is home to the two holiest cities in Islam?

(keep scrolling for the answer)

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Start referring.👇

Saudi Arabia, which contains both Mecca and Medina