Politics

Trump assassination attempt ripples across the nation

After the first attempt on a presidential nominee’s life in 23 years, the event takes hold of America. Former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt after just starting a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday.

The 20-year-old suspect, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was killed by secret service after a bullet hit Trump’s upper right ear. The shooting claimed the life of one attendee, Corey Comperatore, a father and former fire chief.

How it unfolded

Around seven minutes into the rally, the gunman opened fire from a nearby rooftop which was 150 yards from the stage (see video). Secret service immediately covered the former president and moved him offstage, where he was seen raising his fist in the air.

Following the attack, a representative for Trump said that he was doing fine and confirmed he would speak at the Republican National Convention, which began yesterday in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. International and US leaders expressed solidarity, offering their support and denouncing political violence, across party lines.

The secret service is under fire

After the attack, questions were obviously raised about potential lapses in security, which the WSJ called the agency’s biggest failure in decades. The 20-year-old shooter was only about 400 feet away from Trump on an open rooftop, where attendees seemingly noticed the shooter before secret service did.

Kimberly Cheatle, the director of the Secret Service, has been requested to testify at a hearing by Republican congressional leaders while a "full investigation" into how the gunman was able to carry out the attack was promised by House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Will this mean anything for the upcoming election? It could, but we need more time to tell. This attack marked the first attempted assassination of a US president since Ronald Reagan in 1981, and Reagan’s approval ratings shot up eight points immediately after.

Traders expect at least a brief uptick in support for Trump, as global markets ramped up around his policies, and his chances of winning the election surged to a record 70% on Polymarket.

Technology

Huge data breach exposes over 100 million of AT&T’s customers

The telecoms company said hackers stole records from “nearly all” of its customers. On Saturday, AT&T announced that it had suffered a significant breach of its data, with phone records belonging to 110 million of its customers being stolen by an unidentified party.

This marks AT&T's second significant data leak in the past 12 months. In March, the company said that 73 million of its current and prior clients' Social Security numbers and other personal information had been compromised and posted on the dark web.

The hack happened months ago

After learning of the hack in April, AT&T launched an investigation and discovered that the hacker downloaded the data through a third-party program called Snowflake, which also handles data for other well-known businesses like Ticketmaster.

• The breach exposed every call and text message customers made between May 1, 2022 and October 31, 2022, as well as some from Jan. 2, 2023.

  • The number of times the callers interacted and the length of the call were included in the breach. However, the contents of texts and calls, as well as what time the interactions happened, were not.

• Roughly 110 of AT&T’s 127 million customers were exposed.

So why did you just find out your calls were leaked? The massive telecoms company opted to hold off on notifying the public (at the DOJ's request) so that the agency could assess the hack as a potential threat to national security.

Why is this a big deal?

It might not be to you, if you don’t care that some random hacker knows the concerningly high amount of times you called home from college. But for most, it could post a big issue. According to reports, the stolen data gave the hackers "NSA-level" access to consumer data.

Legal Liabilities: The telecommunications giant was sued in Texas for failing to protect customers data, alleging the company hasn’t been completely transparent about the “nature and extent of data security lapses impacting its customers.”

UPDATE: AT&T agreed to pay a hacker $370,000 to wipe the data they stole, and provide video showing proof of deletion.

Aerospace

After a perfect 7 years, this rocket had a mishap

The equivalent of the golden star kid in SpaceX’s fleet suffered its first malfunction in almost a decade. The Falcon 9 recently ended its streak of 300 plus successful launches over more than seven years after the rocket encountered an inflight issue on an unmanned mission.

A faulty engine caused the Falcon 9 to disintegrate in midair. The "rapid unscheduled disassembly" happened before the rocket had the ability to insert 20 Starlink satellites into orbit (which are most likely irretrievable) but after the self-landing booster disengaged. The rocket was still able to successfully return to Earth.

This is a rarity

While SpaceX’s Starship rocket (which is still under development) has seen similar issues arise, the Falcon 9 has been without accident since 2016, and hasn’t had an inflight failure since 2015.

• This was the 69th Falcon 9 launch of the year alone.

• SpaceX averaged an insane pace of one launch every two to three days this year, according to CNBC.

Despite it being a rarity, it will still delay SpaceX’s plans: Before Falcon 9 can launch again, the aerospace company needs to look into what happened, figure out what went wrong, and get the FAA's approval.

The investigation into this week's incident could take weeks or even months to finish. Falcon 9 rockets were scheduled to send a NASA mission to the International Space Station by the middle of next month and a private crew to space by the end of this month. Depending on how long the investigation takes, neither may be feasible.

Grab Bag

Want to work an extra day? Move to Greece

While the scenery may be beautiful, is it really worth one free day a week? This month, new laws in Greece went into operation, extending the standard five day workweek to six days for private companies that offer 24-hour services.

But why?

Greece has seen an economic slump over the last decade, so, of course, policymakers decided a six day workweek might fix it.

The regulations have never been implemented before on a nation-wide scale in the EU, some critics have argued the change is unnecessary and labor unions called it “barbaric.”

• The country’s pro-business government claims unpaid overtime and a lack of skilled workers are important issues that can be solved with the change.

They’re already a workaholic nation: According to CNBC, Greek workers already put in more time than workers in any other EU country. They also top workers in the US and Japan, two countries known for their intense work schedules. In 2022, Greek workers put in 1,886 hours on average, while US workers put in 1,811 and EU workers put in 1,571.

In contrast: The four-day workweek is becoming more popular as tests indicate that it boosts employee productivity. According to a KPMG survey conducted in April among CEOs, about one-third of US businesses are thinking about reducing their workweek.

Non-alcoholic beer is taking over

Get ready to see a new category of drinks on even more bar menus. After a fresh wave of funding, Athletic Brewing is being valued at $800 million, showing the huge interest and demand for non-alcoholic drinks, per the WSJ.

The brand more than doubled its previous valuation from just two years ago, thanks to $50 million in funding led by private equity giant General Atlantic. Now that it has some money in its pockets, Athletic Brewing plans to spread to more retailers and ramp up production.

Haven’t heard of them?

Well you’d be in the same boat as me, but we probably should have:

• Going by sales, Athletic is the number one brand in grocery stores.

  • It’s also a top 20 brewery in the US by number of barrels sold.

• Athletic just started in 2018 but has since juiced up production to over 258,000 barrels of beer last year.

• Athletic also holds nearly 20% of the non-alcoholic market share.

Almost half of all Americans say they want to drink less, so naturally, they turn to non-alcoholic drinks. That has made non-alcoholic beer the fastest growing segment of the beer market, and Athletic has pushed 32% of total non-alcoholic beer category growth, per NielsenIQ data.

It’s not a phase: Athletic said that 8 out of 10 of its customers still drink alcohol, but prefer its beer when they need a break. But consumers are also turning to other alternative drink brands like Liquid Death, which was valued at $1.4 billion this spring.

Fast Facts

Whale Words: Researchers with Project Ceti, a project to try and translate sperm whale speak, say they’ve successfully used AI to identify over 150 types of click sequences (called codas) that whales communicate with.

Cooking Contamination: Chinese citizens were infuriated after reports that a state-owned food company used the same tankers to transport fuel and edible cooking oil.

Don’t Disclose: Take a look into how weird celebrities’ NDAs can get.

Ring Reboot: Samsung officially launched its Galaxy Ring. It will cost $400 and track users’ health data like sleep, heart rate, skin temp, and women’s menstrual cycles.

Pufferfish Pasta: Cup Noodles released a new pufferfish flavor. Just hope it doesn’t kill you.