Extra, Extra
Fairfax and Figures: “The Fairfax County School Board overhauled the Thomas Jefferson admissions process in 2020, scrapping a standardized test. The new policy gives weight in favor of applicants who are economically disadvantaged or still learning English, but it does not take race into account.” The Supreme Court leaves in place the admissions plan at an elite Virginia public high school.
+ You Ransom You Lose Some: “Most recently, LockBit has claimed responsibility for a ransomware attack on Georgia’s Fulton County that has disrupted key county services for weeks.” FBI, police partners take down most prolific ransomware gang to date.
+ Brain Freeze: “The Alabama case focused on whether a patient who mistakenly dropped and destroyed other couples’ frozen embryos could be held liable in a wrongful-death lawsuit. The court ruled the patient could.” Alabama Supreme Court rules frozen embryos are children, imperiling IVF. (These positions are not going to get less extreme.)
+ Bulging Disc: Congratulations, Discover, you’ve been prequalified for a Capital One card – with a limit of $35 billion. Capital One plans to acquire Discover for $35.3 billion. Here’s what it means for the credit card industry and for consumers. In other business news, Walmart is going to acquire Vizio for $2.3 billion to get deeper into the advertising game. And you really, really like comfortable shoes.
+ The Company They Keep: Russian President Vladimir Putin has given North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a luxury Russian-made car. Sometimes it’s OK to judge a man by his friends.
+ The Unbearable Lightness We’re Seeing: “It’s a quasar – the bright core of a galaxy that is powered by a gargantuan black hole some 17 billion times the mass of our Sun.
Known as J0529-4351, the object’s power was confirmed in observations by the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Scientists, reporting in the journal Nature Astronomy, say the black hole has a voracious appetite, consuming the mass equivalent to one Sun every day.” The most luminous object ever detected has been spied in the distant Universe.
