24: In less friendly, fuzzy, and frolicsome animal news, it has been revealed that Joe Biden’s famously foul-tempered dog “Commander” bit US Secret Service agents at least 24 times. The incidents all occurred between October 2022 and July 2023. The German shepherd was removed from the White House last fall.
7.8: How much of the world’s population lives in a “full democracy?” Just 7.8%, according to a new report from the Economist Intelligence Unit. Meanwhile, flawed democracies and authoritarian regimes are each home to about 40% of the world’s people. The study finds that overall, the strength of the world’s democratic institutions is at its lowest ebb since the study began in 2006, as a number of partial democracies slide towards authoritarianism.
100,000: More than 100,000 users of major US cell phone service providers were without signal for part of Thursday in a massive outage that has yet to be explained. Subscribers of AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Cricket were affected. Was it a malicious attack? Nobody knows yet, but Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio made a point of warning that a “Chinese Cyberattack” would be “100 times worse” than Thursday’s outages.Employers in the world’s largest economy are shrugging off the uncertainty brought on by the Iran war and higher energy prices – at least for now. Experts expected roughly 65,000 jobs to be added last month, a significant slide from the 185,000 in March. But if higher gas prices persist, and Americans pair back spending, economists say that could weaken job creation and lift the unemployment rate down the line.
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President Trump unveiled “Project Freedom,” an initiative to escort ships and restore traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, on Sunday. By Tuesday evening, he had unceremoniously suspended it by Truth Social post, shortly after Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters how committed the administration was to it.