Good morning. On today’s docket:

• 💥 America's role in the Israel-Hamas war is taking shape
• 🤖🔍 How generative AI could change internet search as we know it
• 📈 A high-level look at last year’s US federal deficit

… and more.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news should be about a 4.68-minute read.

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"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."

–Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

The ongoing war between Israel and Hamas entered its third week on Saturday, and the US’ approach to the conflict is starting to emerge.

President Biden delivered a national address on Friday, in which he asked Congress for $14.3 billion in military support for Israel and $9 billion in humanitarian aid for Israel, Gaza, and Ukraine (the request came as part of a larger $106 billion funding proposal mostly composed of military and economic aid to Ukraine).

One day later, the Pentagon announced the deployment of two aircraft carriers and additional advanced weapons systems to the Middle East, as well as a plan to ready US troops for a potential deployment to the area in non-combat roles.

• Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the moves are part of the Pentagon’s strategy to assist in the defense of Israel, to deter the Israel-Hamas conflict from spreading, and to increase protection for US forces already stationed in the Middle East (who came under attack twice last week).

💥 In other Israel-Hamas news: Israel carried out airstrikes over the weekend against targets in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and Syria, including a mosque in a West Bank refugee camp that Israel says housed underground bunkers used by Hamas.

More updates from the past three days:

• An American mother and daughter taken hostage in Hamas’ surprise attack against Israel on October 7 were released on Friday; they’re the first of an estimated 200 Hamas hostages to be set free.
• The border crossing between Egypt and Gaza was temporarily opened on Saturday to allow the passage of 20 trucks with humanitarian aid. More than 100 additional trucks of aid have assembled on the Egyptian side of the border.
• A pair of video analyses by the AP and WSJ both concluded last week’s explosion at a Gaza hospital – which Hamas claims killed 471 Palestinians, but experts say caused less damage – most likely came from a rocket launched by militants in Gaza.

📊 Flash poll: In your opinion, what role should the US play in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war?

• Deploy troops and aid (military and/or humanitarian) to assist Israel in combat
• Deploy troops and aid (military and/or humanitarian) as a deterrent for wider war, but stay out of Israel
• Send military or humanitarian aid, but don’t deploy any troops
• Focus exclusively on humanitarian aid
• Stay completely out of the conflict
• Unsure/other

🇷🇺🤝🇨🇳 Russian President Vladimir Putin traveled to China last week to meet with President Xi Jinping. A two-day event centered around China’s Belt and Road global infrastructure project was held in Beijing last week, with more than two dozen world leaders mainly from the Global South in attendance. Over the course of the event, both Putin and Xi stressed the close diplomatic ties between their countries, and laid out a vision of an alternative world order less dominated by the US and its Western allies.

🇰🇪⚖️ Kenya is cracking down on fake lawyers. On Saturday, Kenya’s government announced probes into six individuals accused of fraudulently posing as lawyers and trying cases in recent years. Several news reports claimed one of the fake lawyers had won all 26 cases he handled in various courtrooms – but the president of Kenya’s top bar association rejected those claims as false and misleading. Other Kenyan officials say those posing as lawyers should be allowed to keep practicing law if they pass a fair and transparent examination.

🇮🇷 A teenage Iranian girl who fell into a coma after an alleged altercation with morality police was declared brain dead. Armita Geravand, 16, collapsed and was hospitalized shortly after boarding a metro train in Tehran on October 1. Witnesses from the train say Geravand was beaten by Iran’s morality police for not wearing a hijab, while Iranian officials claim she suddenly fainted. The incident occurred slightly over a year after 22-year-old Mahsa Ahmini died while being detained by Tehran’s morality police for allegedly wearing her hijab "improperly," which sparked ongoing mass anti-government protests across Iran (as well as a violent government crackdown).

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Searching the internet could look much different for Gen X and Gen Alpha than it did for millennials in their awkward teenage years.

The Washington Post reported on Friday that Reddit is in discussions with top generative AI companies like OpenAI about being paid for its data. If a deal can’t be reached, the site is considering blocking search crawlers from Google and Bing. This would prevent Reddit from being discovered in searches and reduce the number of visitors to the site, effectively ending the days of people adding “site:reddit.com” to every search query.

• Reddit isn’t alone in this strategy. More than 535 news organizations have already opted to block their content from being scraped by products like ChatGPT without payment.

🤖🔍 Zoom out: An SEO reckoning?... Ravi Sen, an associate professor at Texas A&M who studies the economics of e-commerce, believes that adding generative AI to search engines may destroy the $68 billion SEO industry that companies like Google helped create (b/c many users would rely on the AI’s summaries instead of visiting the sites themselves).

And this concern appears to have some merit. One month after OpenAI launched GPT-4 in March, traffic to the coding community Stack Overflow declined by 15% as programmers turned to AI for answers to their coding questions, CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar told WaPo.

💬 Quoted… “A physical impossibility.”

SharkNinja, a household appliance company best known for its Shark robo-vacuums and Ninja kitchen gadgets, is facing a lawsuit over an ad campaign claiming its line of pots and pans “won’t stick, chip, or flake'' because they’re heated up to 30,000°F during the manufacturing process. The only problem? That temp is ~3x hotter than the surface of the Sun, and the lawsuit notes SharkNinja’s aluminum pans would technically vaporize into gas at 4,478°F. The company also advertises its pans as oven-safe up to just 500°F.

• However – while SharkNinja’s claim sounds outrageous, it could be rooted in truth. A 2002 WaPo article explains how some ceramic-titanium coatings on non-stick pans are heated up to 30,000°F before being applied.

📰📺 Stat of the Day: 32% = the percentage of Americans who trust the mass media either “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to report the news accurately and fairly. That figure is tied with 2016 for the lowest since Gallup first asked that question in 1972 – good news for The DONUT, bad news for America.

🤔 Did You Know?... Forget sniffing for bombs or drugs – dogs can smell the difference between stressed and relaxed humans based on their sweat and breath alone.

📰 Worth a Read: How would we know whether there is life on Earth? This bold experiment found out → (Nature)

🤏 You’ve got just enough money in your bank account to last until Friday… but then Monday rolls around, and you’re in the same situation, again! Food. Bills. Rent. Gas. They dry up every bit of your take-home pay. 

But it doesn’t have to be this hard. With these few smart moves, you could supplement your income – without doing much extra “work.”

Check out this list of ways to supplement your income and start earning today.

• ☝️ Xbox or PlayStation?... The long-standing debate played out in Sin City over the weekend, with both Microsoft and Sony renting out the Vegas Sphere as part of separate marketing campaigns.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

in partnership with Ground News

• 💰 US markets closed down across the board on Friday (S&P: -1.3%; Dow: -0.9%; Nasdaq: -1.5%). | 📝 Earnings: Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft are all set to report this week.
• 📈 US household net worth rose 37% between 2019 and 2022, per a new Federal Reserve survey; that's the largest jump since the survey began more than three decades ago. | 👥 DINKs, dual income no kids, have the most average savings and highest median net worth out of different types of families.
• 🪙⚖️ The Sam Bankman-Fried trial is entering its final stages; the prosecution is set to rest its case on Thursday.

*From our partners: 🏆🗞️ Co-founded by a former NASA Engineer… Ground News gives you the tools you need to find truth beyond partisan spin. Whether you’re an old-school news junkie or just beginning to get informed, Ground will help you navigate today’s hectic news.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• SCOREBOARD: 🏈 CFB: No. 3 Ohio State defeated No. 6 Penn State by a score of 20-12, while unranked Virginia upset No. 10 North Carolina 31-27; see other highlights from the weekend (link). | 🏈 NFL: The Ravens blew out the Lions 38-6, the Patriots upset the Bills 29-25, and the Eagles beat the Dolphins 31-17 (full Week 6 recap). | ⚾ MLB Playoffs (best of seven): The Rangers beat the Astros 9-2 to force a deciding Game 7 tonight.
• 🍿 Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese, earned $23 million in its opening weekend at the domestic box office; the film ranked second behind Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour ($31 million-$32 million), which became the first concert film to hold the top spot for two consecutive weekends.
• 🎮 Twitch now allows streamers to simultaneously stream on any other service they want, including YouTube and Kick.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

in partnership with Rasa

• 🌬️🪐 NASA’s James Webb telescope discovered a 3,000-mile-long jet stream on Jupiter that’s traveling at roughly 320 MPH, or twice the speed of a Category 5 hurricane.
• 🏃 Running short distances – up to two miles – a few times a week provides nearly all the same major health benefits as regularly running long distances, per multiple recent peer-reviewed studies.
• 🗣️🤖 Scientists at Klick Labs created an AI model that can detect type 2 diabetes with an accuracy level of 89% for women and 86% for men based solely on a voice sample, per a new peer-reviewed study.

*From our partners: 🌈 Experience the Rasa rainbow… Order the Rasa Ritual Sample Pack today, which includes eight of Rasas’s best-selling coffee alternatives as well as a delicious creamer, all formulated by a clinical herbalist. 100% satisfaction guaranteed. Sit back, sip, and enjoy the magic. Save 20% with code DONUT20.

MISCELLANEOUS

• 💰 The US government deficit for the fiscal year 2023 – which ended on September 30 – was $1.695 trillion, about $320 billion higher than the previous fiscal year (+23.2%).
• ⚖️ Private Travis King, the 23-year-old US soldier who illegally entered North Korea in July and was returned in September, has reportedly been charged by the US military with desertion and other alleged crimes including possessing sexual images of a child.
• 🗳️ Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) lost a third vote to become Speaker of the House on Friday; Jordan was removed as the GOP's speaker nominee in a closed-door vote later that day. (From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)

CLICKBAIT

• 📅🚘 The best time of year to buy a new car.

Monday: Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) arraigned on corruption charges; National Croc Day

Tuesday: United Nations Day, aka the UN’s 78th birthday; NBA season tips off; Britney Spears's memoir The Woman in Me hits bookshelves

Wednesday: President Biden hosts Australian PM Anthony Albanese at the White House

Thursday: US GDP figures for Q3

Friday: Five Nights at Freddy’s debuts in theaters nationwide

On Friday, we covered the current state of the US economy across a wide range of industries.

❓ Our question to you (long-form): To all working professionals: would you consider the growth outlook in your industry/sector of the economy to be positive or negative over the next 12 months?

• 📈 Positive: 51%
• 📉 Negative: 49%

❓ FOLLOW-UP: Which industry/sector of the economy do you work in?

• 👍 Popular responses for “Positive”: Healthcare, hospitality, construction, aerospace/defense, IT
• 👎 Popular responses for “Negative”: Education, real estate, insurance, IT, automotive

Click here to read some of the best responses.

+Note on sample size: We received 8,729 votes and 449 longform responses.

Ferrisburgh is an American kestrel (the smallest falcon in America) who thinks he's a human. The bird was captured as a baby, and then rescued and raised by the Vermont Institute of Natural Science. 

🎨 Discovering his passion... After Ferrisburgh lost his ability to fly due to a broken bone earlier this year, he turned to art. 

• The American kestrel loves to paint, and his caretakers stress that his hobby is "training by choice." 
• The bird has chosen the activity for himself again and again; making art every day keeps him happy, healthy and engaged.

🦅 Lemon into lemonade: Ferrisburgh is now the host of "Coloring with Kestrels," an event at the nature center where visitors can come make art alongside him while learning about the different birds on site.

Guess the definitions of the following Greek/Latin root words:

1. Calc
2. Derm
3. Fer
4. Leni
5. Myri

(keep scrolling for the answers)

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Start referring.👇

1. Calc = Stone (e.g., calcium, calculus)
2. Derm = Skin (epidermis, dermatologist)
3. Fer = Carry (reference, transfer)
4. Leni = Gentle (leniency)
5. Myri = Countless (myriad, myriapod)