Good morning. Some things Instagram is good for:

• Keeping up with acquaintances
• Knowing what food your friends are eating
• Following along with The DONUT’s third-annual Pet Playoffs competition

… and speaking of Pet Playoffs (how ‘bout that segue), the competition officially starts later today. Follow @donutdailynews for news, announcements, and to keep up with all the adorable competitors as this year’s contest unfolds.

Who will be the one pet to rule them all?

If you’re following @donutdailynews on Instagram, you’ll find out soon. But first – we must NEWS.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 4.76 minutes to read.

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"The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The work of life is to develop it. The meaning of life is to give your gift away."

–David Viscott, (1938-1996)

Silence may be the name of the world’s hardest rock-climbing sport route – but it’s also what’s increasingly being heard while taking a visit to one’s local mall. According to a newly published WSJ report, malls are in a “death spiral” and significantly losing value across the board.

This didn’t exactly come out of nowhere

Much like America towards political polarization, things have been trending this way for a while.

Malls were initially envisioned as community gathering centers, where people could come together socially and do some shopping at the same time. The strategy became to anchor these locations with department stores, which drove foot traffic and spending. By 1975, there were more than 30,000 malls across the country, collectively accounting for over 50% of all retail sales.

The good mall times continued to roll through the ‘90s and into the 2000s. But then online shopping started to grow in popularity, throwing an Amazon-sized wrench into the way things were.

Monthly revenue for malls started decreasing in 2010 – and then in 2019, shopping malls across the US hit a 20-year low in sales.

Central to this revenue drop was the decline of many large department stores like Macy’s, Bon-Ton, JCPenney, and Sears – the central draw of many mall locations. The preceding companies shuttered a combined ~875 department stores between 2018 and the end of 2020, compared with 175 in 2016 and 2017.

Overall, less department stores in malls led to decreased foot traffic and spending (the “death spiral”). These factors combined to have a negative impact on property values. And Covid didn’t exactly help, except to exacerbate the existing downward trend.

• Woodbridge Center, a 1.1 million-square-foot mall in central New Jersey, was appraised at $86 million earlier this year, a 76% drop from its last pre-pandemic appraisal in 2014.
• Muncie Mall in Indiana, which was valued at $73 million nine years ago, is currently worth about $6 million according to an appraisal done in March.
• Crystal Mall in Connecticut was valued at $153 million by an appraiser as recently as 2012. The property was sold at auction in June for around $9.5 million.

👀 Looking ahead… More mall closures are on the horizon. Over $14 billion of loans backed by these types of properties come due in the next 12 months. And about one-fifth of all malls financed through commercial mortgage-backed securities are underwater, meaning the properties are worth less than the loans they back, according to data reported by the WSJ.

As traditional malls continue to go away, we could see many channel Mystique and morph into something else entirely – like schools, manufacturing plants, or warehouses.

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🇷🇺🇨🇳🇺🇸 Russia and China are competing against the US military for control of the Arctic region, the WSJ reports. The Arctic has become an increasingly contested territory over the past few decades due to a loss of sea ice, which has resulted in more ship traffic traveling through the Arctic Ocean. In recent months, Russia’s military has further increased the frequency of its Arctic patrols with help from satellite and electronic intelligence supplied by the Chinese government, per the Journal. Both countries have also upped the number of joint naval exercises in the Arctic over the past year.

🏢 A French extreme climber died in a suspected fall while scaling a skyscraper in Hong Kong. Remi Lucidi (social media handle: “Remi Enigma”), 30, had a history of posting images and videos online showing him at the top of various bridges and high-rise buildings around the world. Hong Kong police say their initial investigation appears to confirm Lucidi died while attempting to scale a 68-story residential building.

🇨🇳 China is accused of secretly installing malware in key US military infrastructure systems in America and around the world. The first public hints of China’s alleged malware campaign emerged in late May, when Microsoft said it detected mysterious computer code in telecommunications systems in Guam (home to a large US Air Force base). But in reality, Chinese hackers had been conducting their global malware campaign for at least a year by that point, with an overall goal of allowing Beijing to cut off power, water, and communications to US military bases in the event of future conflict, per a new NYT article citing over a dozen US officials and industry experts.

The Biden administration is pivoting to a second strategy aimed at reducing the amount of federal student-loan debt held by Americans, after the Supreme Court struck down its initial loan forgiveness plan in late June. As they say – if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

🎓 How the new plan works… On Sunday, the Education Department launched a beta website for a new income-driven repayment program called Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE), which contains more than a dozen student-loan policy changes scheduled to take effect over the next year.

These include plans to:

• Eliminate all interest as long as borrowers are making regular payments.
• Forgive the debt of borrowers with principal balances of $12,000 or less following 10 years of regular payments; this period rises by one year for each additional $1,000.
• Increase the amount of exempt income from 150% of the poverty line to 225%; this means single borrowers earning less than $32,800 (or families of four earning less than $67,500) aren’t required to make any loan repayments.

✋ Yes, but: The plan will cost taxpayers an estimated $475 billion over the next decade, per UPenn Wharton, meaning it’s actually more expensive than Biden’s initial $400 billion student-loan forgiveness plan the Supreme Court rejected.

Along with the high price tag, Republican lawmakers have also criticized the SAVE program as “deeply unfair” to the 87% of Americans who don’t have student loans, as well as an overreach of presidential authority that'll likely be struck down in court.

💬 Quoted… “You only know who your real friends are when the chips are down. San Francisco, beautiful San Francisco, though others forsake you, we will always be your friend.”

X, the company formerly known as Twitter, will be bucking a growing trend and staying in the Bay Area for at least the foreseeable future, according to a recent twe-, er, post by owner Elon Musk. 153 companies in California relocated headquarters in 2021, more than double the 75 that left in 2020 and more than triple the 46 that exited in 2018, according to a report from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (these numbers include eleven Fortune 1000 companies).

• Many in San Francisco don’t reciprocate Musk’s enthusiasm, however. The company’s new “X” logo placed on the roof of its HQ on Friday drew 24 complaints from those in the city, including that it was put up without a permit, was unsafe, and was a nuisance (one said its flashing lights made it hard to sleep). The company was seen taking it down yesterday.

🎶🪇🌎 Stat of the Day: When Taylor Swift comes to town, people take notice – even the Earth itself, who wrote in to ask us about the recent “Swift Quake.” Which, to answer your question Mother Earth, is exactly what it sounds like: Taylor Swift's concerts in Seattle on July 22 and July 23 generated seismic activity equivalent to a 2.3 magnitude earthquake.

🤔 Did You Know?... Many common ant species release pungent smells when they’re in danger, squished, or otherwise dead.

📰 Worth a Read: A jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work → (Ars Technica)

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• ☝️ The Hubble Space Telescope recently observed a planet 32 light-years from Earth that’s having its atmosphere blasted away by bursts of energy from its star.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

in partnership with Enerhealth

• 💰 US markets closed up across the board yesterday (S&P: +0.2%; Dow: +0.3%; Nasdaq: +0.2%).
• 🩴 The owner of Birkenstock is reportedly planning a September IPO that could value the footwear brand at more than $8 billion.
• 📱👀 Apple is weeks away from unveiling the iPhone 15. Here’s a sneak peek (spoiler alert: it has a USB-C charging port).

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SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🎭 Paul Reubens, the actor best known for portraying Pee-wee Herman, died Sunday night following a private bout of cancer; he was 70 years old. | 🙏 Angus Cloud, who starred in HBO’s Euphoria, died yesterday at the age of 25.
• ⚽️ The USWNT drew Portugal 0-0; this means the US women advance out of group play; their next match is on Sunday in Australia. 
• ⚾ The MLB trade deadline is at 6pm ET this evening.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

in partnership with DeLo-xx

• 🌕 The first of two supermoons scheduled to take place this month will be visible in the US tonight.
• 🦠 A team of US researchers discovered a way to force cancer cells to self-destruct by hijacking their ability to replicate and turning it against them, per a new peer-reviewed study published in Nature.
• ⚛️⚡ The first US nuclear reactor built entirely from scratch in over three decades officially started commercial operation at Plant Vogtle in Georgia yesterday.

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MISCELLANEOUS

• ⛽ The national average for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline rose 13 cents last week to $3.71, its highest level in eight months, per new data from AAA. (What's behind the increase?)
• 🇭🇹 The State Department is warning all non-emergency US government personnel to leave Haiti immediately, after a New Hampshire woman who works for a nonprofit in Haiti was kidnapped along with her daughter last week.
• ⚖️ Carlos De Oliveira, the property manager of former President Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, appeared in Miami federal court yesterday to face charges that he tried to help Trump hide classified government documents. | 📊 A new NYT/Siena poll found former President Trump currently holds a 54% to 17% lead over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis among likely Republican primary voters. (From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)

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Yesterday, we covered America’s close “unofficial” relationship with the self-governing island of Taiwan, and how China – which opposes any official US-Taiwan relations – has promised to take back control of Taiwan by force if necessary.

❓ Our question to you: If Taiwan is invaded by China, how do you think the US should react?

• 🪖 Deploy US troops to fight against China: 19%
• 💰 Provide military/financial support, but don’t deploy troops: 40%
• ✋ Stay out of the conflict entirely: 24%
• 🤷 Unsure/other: 17%

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

+Note on sample size: We received 10,226 votes and 1,015 longform responses.

Every love story is unique, but Amanda and Rob Ciesielski may be the first to have met via Duolingo. 

💍 The meet-cute: It all started in 2021 when Amanda noticed a user on the language learning app constantly sending "congratulations" messages when she met different milestones. Curious to connect with him irl, the Filipino woman did some digging on Facebook and was able to get in touch with Rob in America. 

• The rest is history, and for the next two years, Amanda and Rob fell in love via video calls and care packages sent from across the world. 

👰🏻 Here comes the bride... The couple were married in the Phillipines in January surrounded by family and friends. In honor of the app, they had bilingual signs and greetings for their multicultural guests.

• "I am still floored to this day that I met him on a language learning app," Amanda said. "Who would have thought learning a language on a mobile app could bring you true love?"

❓ Trivia: What nationality was Alexander Graham Bell?

🌶️ True or False?... Dried jalapeños are called chipotles.

🤔 Riddle Me This: At night they come without being fetched. By day they are lost without being stolen. What are they?

(keep scrolling for the answers)

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❓ Trivia: Scottish

🌶️ T/F: True

🤔 Riddle: Stars