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Happy Friday,
One-in-302.6 million. Those are the astronomical odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot of $910 million in its next drawing tonight. It’s the eighth biggest jackpot of all time and the fifth biggest Mega Millions ever.
If a winner emerges, they can choose a lump sum payment of $464.2 million or 30 annual payments of $30.33 million (before taxes). Which option would you choose? Reply and let us know.
BREAKING NEWS
Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith levied three new felony charges Thursday against former President Donald Trump. Prosecutors allege Trump tried to have security footage from his Mar-A-Lago estate deleted before it could be obtained by investigators, claiming resort employees Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira attempted to delete the footage. De Oliveira, Mar-A-Lago’s head of maintenance, was named as a new defendant in Trump’s case Thursday in a superseding indictment.
The 75th Emmy Awards ceremony—which was scheduled to take place on September 18—has reportedly been delayed by broadcaster Fox and the TV Academy, as Hollywood continues to grapple with the fallout of the simultaneous writers’ and actors’ strikes. According to the Los Angeles Times, Fox will announce a new date for the ceremony soon and it is expected to be moved to January.
BUSINESS + FINANCE
The U.S. economy grew faster than expected during 2023’s second quarter, as GDP rose by 2.4% on an annual basis during the three-month period ending June 30. However, Thursday’s report also revealed signs of a labor market slowdown, as the government reported a moderation in personal income growth from $278 billion to $236 billion over the last two quarters.
The Federal Trade Commission is readying a behemoth antitrust lawsuit that aims to break up Amazon’s $1.2 trillion empire, according to multiple reports. An FTC document obtained by Bloomberg reportedly shows the lawsuit’s main focus will be the online marketplace and how it allegedly forces merchants to use the company’s other logistics services. This lawsuit could be a career-defining moment for FTC Chair Lina Khan, who has experienced a meteoric rise to prominence on the back of her promises to break up monopolies.
TECH + INNOVATION
Tesla programmed its dashboards to exaggerate how far the vehicles can drive on a single charge, and canceled service appointments for customers who noticed their cars’ range was shorter than expected, Reuters reported. It’s unclear if the faulty algorithms are still being used for range estimates, but the company has been flagged several times for lying about vehicles’ range, including by the South Korean government, which fined Tesla $2.2 million earlier this year.
Despite Meta reporting quarterly revenue that surpassed Wall Street expectations, the company’s metaverse and virtual-reality division lost $3.73 billion last quarter, according to Bloomberg. “We remain fully committed to the metaverse vision,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the earning’s call, adding that it is focusing its efforts on combining artificial intelligence and the metaverse.
MONEY + POLITICS
Conservative users on Facebook during the 2020 presidential election saw more misinformation than the platform’s liberal users, a series of papers published by Meta researchers and academics in Science and Nature found. One of the study’s papers found that news outlets on the right post a higher fraction of news stories rated false by Meta’s third-party fact-checking program.
SPORTS + ENTERTAINMENT
Rob Manfred has signed a five year extension to stay on as Major League Baseball’s commissioner through January 2029. Since he took the job in 2015, the average MLB team value has increased from $1.2 billion to $2.32 billion—that works out to an average annual gain of 8.6%, or 5.3% per year after inflation.
SCIENCE + HEALTHCARE
To help reduce wildfires, the U.S. Forest Service aims to thin out 70 million acres of western forests over the next decade—and it’s customary for most logs to go to sawmills or be piled up and burned under controlled conditions. But startup Kodama Systems has other plans: The company, which has raised $6.6 million in seed funding from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy and others, wants to bury the leftover logs in earthen vaults to help slow climate change and to reap salable carbon offsets (and maybe, someday, tax credits too).
TRAVEL + LEISURE
Sips, the innovative Barcelona “drinkery house” renowned for its “couture cocktails at prêt-à-porter prices” was named World Best Bar at the 17th annual Spirited Awards at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans. U.S. winners include Faye Chen and GN Chan’s Double Chicken Please in New York City, which won World’s Best Cocktail Menu—an impressive feat for a bar that opened in the midst of the pandemic in November 2020.
A surprising earnings report from luxury giant LVMH this week showed a drop in U.S. sales as Chinese shoppers and others in Asia held up the market for the owner of Louis Vuitton, Dior and other big-name brands. The reopening of China’s shopping districts primed the region for a comeback, while a survey found 53% of U.S. consumers planned to cut spending on luxury products in the first half of the year.
DAILY COVER STORY
TikTok Has Pushed Chinese Propaganda Ads To Millions Across Europe
TOPLINE TikTok’s newly released advertising library revealed that the social platform has served up a flood of ads from Chinese state propaganda outlets to millions of Europeans in recent months. The ads covered a range of topics, from defenses of Chinese Covid-19 lockdowns, to adorable cats playing on the Great Wall of China.
One ad shown in March, paid for by China News International, appeared to be an attempt to recast the country’s Xinjiang region—where it has persecuted and detained more than one million mostly Muslim Uyghurs—as a spectacular tourist destination. It featured a man doing a traditional dance under the caption “Xinjiang is a good place!”
An analysis of TikTok’s ad library conducted by Forbes showed that as of July 26, more than 1,000 ads from Chinese state media outlets like People’s Daily and CGTN have run on the platform since October 2022. They have been served to millions of users across Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland and the U.K. (The ad library does not yet display data on ads presented to users in the U.S., Canada, Australia and other countries outside of Europe.)
TikTok’s ad policies prohibit advertising about social issues, elections and politics, though they note that “government entities may be eligible to advertise if working with a TikTok Sales Representative.” TikTok spokesperson Jamie Favazza did not reply to questions about whether ads criticizing Western governments’ responses to China’s Belt & Road initiative, defending China’s Covid-19 policies, and promoting tourism in Xinjiang were permitted under TikTok’s no-political-ads policy.
Asked whether the People’s Daily, Global Times, and other Chinese state media outlets were working with a sales representative, Favazza said the company did not consider state-controlled media to be government agencies, so its rules on government, politician and political parties did not apply. She noted that the ads appeared to be primarily purchased through agencies. The state media agencies did not respond to a request for comment.
Both Meta and Google label content posted by state media outlets, and in January, TikTok announced that it would join them in doing so. Still, the rollout of TikTok’s policy was rocky—it failed to label an account operated by an outpost of China Central Television, until it was flagged by Forbes.
WHY IT MATTERS TikTok is facing numerous government inquiries in Europe and abroad about its ties to the Chinese state, and one of regulators’ top concerns is a fear that it could be used by the Chinese government to warp civic discourse in democratic nations. Still, when TikTok announced its ad library, some transparency advocates cast the announcement as evidence of regulation at work.
MORE: As Many As 700,000 Turkish TikTok Accounts Were Hacked Before The Country’s Presidential Election
FACTS AND COMMENTS
French soccer star Kylian Mbappé reportedly refused to meet with Saudi Arabian team Al Hilal—which offered the 24-year-old a world-record $1.1 billion deal:
$775 million: The reported salary package Mbappé would earn in his first season, plus a $332 million transfer fee
$400 million: Al Hilal’s offer to Lionel Messi, who signed with Inter Miami
$628 million: The combined 2023 payroll of MLB’s New York Mets and New York Yankees, according to sports financial website Spotrac.com
STRATEGY AND SUCCESS
What’s the difference between traditional AI and generative AI? Traditional AI performs a specific task, like a computer that plays chess, while generative AI can create something new based on training data. Both have significant roles to play as we continue to explore the immense potential of AI, so understanding their differences is crucial.
VIDEO
QUIZ
Mastercard asked financial institutions to stop accepting certain transactions through pin debit cards, reducing the ways consumers have to purchase what marginally legal substance without cash?
A. Smokeless tobacco
B. Flavored e-cigarettes
C. Marijuana
D. Highly caffeinated energy drinks
Check your answer here.
ACROSS THE NEWSROOM
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