šŸŒ A striking summer

Plus: How the letter X came to be |

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Photo: Mike Blake (Reuters)

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Gautam Adani is selling his shadow banking business. American private equity firm Bain Capital is buying 90% of Adani Capital and Adani Housing.

The morality police shut down a major Iranian e-commerce company. The ā€‹ā€‹Tehran office of Digikala was closed after the firm allegedly published pictures online showing female employees without headscarves.

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The Israeli parliament passed a law that weakens the countryā€™s Supreme Court. This win for prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu came despite massive protests against the measure.

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Barbie beat Oppenheimer at the US box office. Greta Gerwig now holds the record for biggest US opening weekend for a female director.

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A striking summer

The US is staring down what could be one of its largest and costliest strikes ever: a walkout of 340,000 UPS workers. Just a 10-day work stoppage could drain $7 billion from the delivery company.

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Workers across the country have turned the heat up on employers this summer. Hereā€™s a refresher on the latest worker actions:

šŸ˜®ā€šŸ’Ø Broadway actors narrowly avoided a strike after workers reached a deal with producers
šŸŒ³ The timing of NBCUniversalā€™s tree pruning along a picket line spot couldnā€™t be more suspicious
šŸŽ¬ Netflix isnā€™t feeling the impact of the Hollywood writers and actors strikesā€”yet
šŸ›‘ For the first time in 63 years, actors and writers have stopped work at the same time
šŸØ California hotel employees started the largest ever hospitality strike in US history

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One big number: 2 million

Signups for Worldcoin, Sam Altmanā€™s biometrics-based cryptocurrency

Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, launched the digital asset yesterday, and its ambitions are pretty hefty: Distinguish humans from AI, tackle online identity challenges, and solve income inequality. Quartzā€™s Faustine Ngila explains how Worldcoin aims to accomplish all of that.

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How the letter X came to be

Twitter is now X, a letter some linguists theorize came from the Phoenician letter samekh. Samekh is pronounced with a hard ā€œs,ā€ the meaning of which may have been something akin to ā€œpillar,ā€ ā€œpeg,ā€ ā€œsupport,ā€ or quite literally ā€œfish,ā€ given its resemblance to a fish skeleton.

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Quartzā€™s most popular

ā˜„ļø Sam Bankman-Fried wanted to buy the nation of Nauru to wait out the worldā€™s end

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šŸ˜ Every successful relationship is successful for the same exact reasons

šŸ“ˆ Eviction filings are rising in these US cities

šŸ’ The worldā€™s largest office building is filled with diamonds

āœˆļø United Airlines pilots donā€™t want to be promoted

šŸ«µ TSMC blamed a lack of skilled US workers for delays at its Arizona chips plant

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Surprising discoveries

The US has an annual Hemingway lookalike contest. Gerrit Marshall, a man from Wisconsin, beat out 140 other doppelgƤngers.

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The dark bordered beauty moth is flying away from the edge of extinction. If weā€™re being honest, itā€™s not really beautiful, but its story is.

Young adults in China are being hired by their parents. Their job is to be a full-time child who helps around the house, just like in the good olā€™ days, only for money.

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The Mexican government said making its own rain has effectively treated drought in rural areas. But physicists see the method as a Band-Aid solution.

If the UKā€™s biggest meat eaters curbed their intake, itā€™d be like taking millions of cars off the road. Eight million, to be exact.

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