Good morning! Congratulations to all the T-Mobile customers who, after enduring years of social abuse, were vindicated yesterday when AT&T crashed. It was a difficult five hours of… having to use wifi instead of data.

AI chipmaker Nvidia broke a stock market record yesterday when it gained $277 billion in value in a single trading day. The record it broke? Meta’s from just three weeks ago. Sorry, Zuck.

BIDEN

🏛️ Joe Biden’s big week

President Biden had a very busy week. Then again, he’s the president, so you’d think that’s probably pretty typical.

His dog: The president’s German shepherd, Commander Biden, is a bad boy. According to documents obtained by CNN, he’s bitten Secret Service agents “at least 24 times.” It got so bad that agents and other White House personnel began changing their routines to avoid him. Eventually, Commander was finally shipped off to a farm upstate the beach in Delaware.

Russia: Biden met with the widow and daughter of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. Following this, he announced the U.S. would hit Russia with more than 500 sanctions. These will mostly be carried out by the Treasury and State departments alongside similar sanctions from the U.K.

IVF: The Alabama Supreme Court ruled frozen embryos are children, causing IVF clinics in the state to pause services. Biden called the decision "outrageous and unacceptable." Several high-profile Republicans had similar takes.

Immigration: The Senate immigration bill died in the House, but the border crisis hasn’t let up. So Biden is considering taking a page from Trump's playbook and using the same law Trump used in his so-called “Muslim ban.” Biden would use it to try to turn migrants away at the southern border.

Cash: Biden set a fundraising record (for this point in the cycle) when he brought in over $42 million in January alone. The Biden camp said 97% of donations were less than $200 (which is, of course, different from 97% of that money). He began February with $130 million cash on hand. It's an impressive sum, especially when his (likely) opponent is spending millions on legal bills.

Loans: The Biden administration keeps chipping away at student loan forgiveness after its original, bigger plan was slapped down by the Supreme Court for not being congressionally authorized. This time it's 153,000 borrowers who've been paying loans of less than $12,000 for a decade.

Ports: President Biden signed an executive order boosting cyber security at U.S. seaports by $20 billion. Changes include the use of more American-made equipment. The FBI said recently malicious Chinese software is constantly trying to disrupt U.S. critical infrastructure.

POLITICS

🔵 Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) won’t rule out running for president… in 2028. The two-term governor served 10 years in the House before becoming the first openly gay man elected a U.S. governor. He’s somewhat libertarian-leaning for a Democrat and has a strangely active personal social media account. Oh, and he's also worth hundreds of millions of dollars from founding a greeting card site in the 90s.

🔴 The Conservative Political Action Conference, known to the cool kids as CPAC, kicked off yesterday. The event features tantalizing speeches from members of Congress, wannabe members of Congress, governors, conservative journalists, and activists. This year, they also managed to book the shortest-tenured prime minister in British history, Liz Truss.

🔴 The South Carolina Republican presidential primary is tomorrow (Saturday). Despite this being former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s home state — and the state where she was twice elected governor — former President Donald Trump is probably going to win this in a walk. Recent polling has him leading 63% to 35%. Ouch. Fifty Republican convention delegates are at stake here. They’ll be split between the statewide winner and the winner in each of the state’s congressional districts.

🔴 Arizona U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake (R) told “McCain Republicans” to scram during her losing 2022 gubernatorial campaign. Turns out, insulting the man who won eight elections in a row there was a poor electoral strategy. Now the former local news anchor is trying to make amends. She reached out to the late Sen. John McCain’s daughter, Meghan, on social media and asked to meet for coffee and chat about how to “work together.” Meghan McCain responded with three words: “NO PEACE, B****.”

TRIVIA

President Biden this week said Republicans were worse than some of the “real racists” he served with in the Senate back in the day. He then referenced an old Senate colleague named Strom Thurmond.

Aside from all the, ya know, racism issues, Thurmond is well known for being the oldest person ever to serve in Congress. How old was Sen. Strom Thurmond when he finally retired in 2003?

WORLD

🇺🇸 United States: A New York appellate court axed a New York City municipal law that would've let 800,000 legal noncitizen residents vote in local elections. The court’s 3-1 ruling said the law violated the New York State Constitution. Their constitution doesn’t explicitly ban the practice but only ever references citizens in the context of voting rights.

🇿🇦 South Africa: Since Nelson Mandela won South Africa's first integrated election in 1994, his African National Congress (a political party) is undefeated. But polls suggest the ANC's win streak might soon be coming to an end. Rampant corruption and a 32% unemployment rate will do that. On May 29, South Africans will vote for Parliament. Parliament will then elect the president.

🇨🇳 China: China owns all but one of the world's giant pandas. They've been loaning them out to zoos around the world for decades as part of a practice called "panda diplomacy." The loans have run out for all American zoos aside from Atlanta. Zookeepers feared this was due to diplomatic tensions. But China said yesterday it would soon send more pandas to the United States beginning with the San Diego Zoo. The National Zoo in Washington, D.C. is in talks to get some, too.

BRIEFS

• Astronomers discovered the brightest known object in the universe that’s 500 trillion times brighter than the sun

• Nanoparticle paint that's 90% lighter could save billions of dollars by shaving up to a thousand pounds of paint weight off of planes

• Google pauses Gemini’s ability to create images after consistent historical inaccuracies

• Bobi, formerly the world's oldest dog, was posthumously stripped of its title by Guinness World Records

• Japan’s stock market hit an all-time high yesterday, breaking a record set a whopping 34 years ago

• Electric vehicle maker Rivian laid off 10% of its salaried workers yesterday after losing $43,000 on every vehicle it sold in Q4

• Buzz from "Home Alone" pleaded guilty to domestic violence charges stemming from a 2021 incident at an OKC hotel

• Yale will again require standardized test scores for admissions in reversal of pandemic-era policy

• The Supreme Court gave the go-ahead to the Boy Scout’s $2.46 billion sex abuse settlement

• House China Committee Chair Mike Gallagher reassures Taiwan of U.S. support regardless of 2024 election outcome

QUOTE

SNACKS

🌙 Moon: An American spacecraft landed on the moon last night for the first time since 1972. The unmanned Odysseus was privately built by Intuitive Machines, was launched by a SpaceX rocket, and holds some NASA scientific equipment. NASA hopes to put a man on the moon again in the next few years.

🍕 Food: Are you feeling a bit too healthy? Did you give up pizza for Lent? Say no more. KFC announced the release of Chizza — two hunks of fried chicken topped with marinara sauce, mozzarella cheese, and crispy pepperoni. Much like the people who eat it, Chizza won't last long, so get it while the gettin’s good.

🏀 Sports: Just in time for March Madness, Apple is making it easier to check the score during meetings (that could’ve been emails). The new, free Apple Sports app will push real-time scoring updates straight to your lock screen.

ANSWER

Strom Thurmond served in the United States Senate until he was one hundred years old. Yes, 100. Dude ran for president in 1948! We’re not sure if this is a nice story about how age is just a number or an indictment on American politics that the country is run by people who belong on Smucker’s jars.