Happy Wednesday Everyone! Today’s newsletter: 1,145 words…4.3 mins
🗞 Today’s Edition: Russian Climbers Scale Empire State... Then Get Engaged, Trump Ghosts USMCA, The Pentagon Wants to Build Missiles Like Big Macs, Harris Dials Up NYC's Socialist Mayor, Inaugural Flight of New Qatari Jet, AOL Goes Public…& much more!
🍞 Did you know Nintendo is older than sliced bread? Scroll down to read about it.
📜THE HIGHLIGHT
One killer insight to stash in your back pocket
Still from the video taken by NYPD chopper of the two Russian rooftoppers
🗽Russian Climbers Scale Empire State... Then Get Engaged
1,454 feet above Manhattan, with an NYPD helicopter circling and no visible harness, a Russian rooftopper got down on one knee.
🪜 The climb: Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus — the pair behind Netflix's Skywalkers: A Love Story — free-climbed the Empire State Building's spire in broad daylight. No ropes, no permits, no explanation for how they got past security.
💌 The message: At the top, they unfurled a banner reading "When the power of love beats the love of power, the world knows peace" — a line usually credited to Jimi Hendrix but is actually 19th-century British PM William Gladstone's.
💍 The real stunt: Descending to a lower platform, Ivan pulled out a ring. Angela said yes, yanked off her mask, and wore it the rest of the way down.
🚓 They were in NYPD custody by 1 p.m. — trespassing and reckless endangerment likely on the charge sheet — with their Netflix doc dropping later this month.
💡 Bottom line: Nothing markets a documentary like getting arrested for your own trailer.
♟️THE CHESSBOARD
Geopolitics Decoded In 3 Moves
🤝 Trump Ghosts USMCA On Its 6th Anniversary
Today is USMCA's mandatory six-year checkup. The U.S. showed up and said no thanks.
The verdict: USTR Jamieson Greer declined to renew the pact for another 16 years, telling Canada and Mexico the deal won't get "a rubber stamp." It stays alive — just downgraded to annual reviews until it expires in 2036.
The split: Canada and Mexico both pushed for renewal. Trump wants tighter auto rules and smaller deficits first.
Trump once called this "the fairest...agreement we have ever signed." Now he says the U.S. doesn't "need anything" from either neighbor.
💡 Bottom line: The deal isn't dead — it's on a decade-long probation.
🍁 Canada's Birthday Party Has Some Awkward Family Drama.
Canada celebrates its 159th birthday today, but Prime Minister Mark Carney spent less time cutting cake and more time trying to stop the family from threatening to move out.
Alberta's separatist movement is growing louder, pipeline fights are back on the menu, and Trump's decision to put USMCA into annual trade limbo just added another headache.
Carney's pitch? Canada is "worth fighting for." name-checking Brexit's economic hangover as the cautionary tale, while dangling a new pipeline to keep Alberta's oil money on Team Canada.
Add to that, Quebec’s perpetual threat of seceding as well, and we’ve got real drama.
💡Bottom line: It's giving "Mom and Dad are fighting in front of the guests." National holiday? Yes. National unity? Still a work in progress.
🍔🚀 The Pentagon Wants to Build Missiles Like Big Macs
The Pentagon is ditching the Ferrari strategy for the McDonald's strategy.
Instead of relying on a small number of million-dollar precision missiles, it's pushing to mass-produce 10,000+ cheaper missiles that could cost around $400,000 each.
The shift comes after Ukraine, the Middle East, and U.S. war games all exposed the same weakness: America could burn through key missile stockpiles within days of a potential major conflict with China.
💡 Why it matters: The Air Force is seeking $12 billion over five years for roughly 28,000 missiles, betting that future wars get won by whoever can out-produce the other side, not just out-engineer them.
🗽THE EMPIRE FILES
Political Drama From DC To NYC
Source: X.com/@WhiteHouse
📞 Harris Dials Up NYC's Socialist Mayor
Kamala Harris is making calls again — this time to the guy running New York as a democratic socialist.
The call: Harris phoned Mayor Zohran Mamdani last week, two days after his endorsed candidates swept 3 congressional primaries, to talk party strategy and plan a longer chat.
She's also met with AOC and pro-Palestinian group Uncommitted Movement’s co-founder Abbas Alawieh.
Neither camp confirmed the call publicly. Axios broke the story anyway.
💡 Harris is weighing a 2028 run and needs the progressive wing she couldn't win over in 2024. But more importantly, it gives us a glimpse into where the Democrat party is heading.
✈️ The Inaugural Flight of the New Air Force One
Trump's new plane is a $400M gift from a foreign government. He calls it "the greatest commercial plane ever built."
The maiden flight: Trump flew the Qatari-gifted Boeing 747-8i from Andrews to North Dakota for the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opening — the plane's first official trip as Air Force One.
The paint job: Red, white, navy, and gold — Trump picked the colors himself, ditching the Kennedy-era baby blue.
Ethics watchdogs call it an unprecedented foreign gift to a sitting president, sparking fierce national security debates.
💡 Trump calls it a "great gesture" from a country that "treated us very well." Critics see something else: the most luxurious political headache money didn't buy.
🤖 CODES & POWER
Tech Wars, Crypto Chaos, and AI’s Black Mirror Moments
💰 🍼 Micron Bets $250M on Baby Wall Street
Trump Accounts launch July 4. Micron just became the first chipmaker to write a check that big for it.
The pitch: $1,000 seeded by the government for eligible newborns, invested in index funds, unlockable at 18.
Micron's adding a $250 community deposit in its operating states plus $1,000 employee matching per kid.
The scale: Up to 1 million children covered — the largest corporate commitment to the program yet.
👶 Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called it a "game changer." Micron called it good branding.
📼 AOL Just IPO'd Again — Yes, That AOL
The dial-up brand that defined 2001's worst merger just walked back onto Nasdaq. Under new management, obviously.
The debut: Bending Spoons (ticker: BSP) — the Italian company that owns AOL, Vimeo, Evernote, and WeTransfer — priced its IPO at $29/share, above range, raising $1.68B.
The math: $18.4B valuation, up from $11B just 8 months ago.
Bending Spoons buys dying internet brands, guts costs, and resells nostalgia at a markup. It's working.
⚡ AOL survived dial-up, Time Warner, and irrelevance — now it's a line item in someone else's IPO.
📺 FUN FACTS & TRIVIA
Nintendo’s first headquarters, Japan 1889
🍞 Nintendo Is Older Than Sliced Bread!
Founded in 1889 as a Kyoto playing-card maker, Nintendo predates the 1928 debut of commercially sliced bread by 39 years.
Nintendo spent its first ~70 years making playing cards, then toys, before exploding into video games with the 1980s NES/Famicom era (Mario, Zelda, etc.).
So yes—Mario’s future employer predates toast as we know it.