DIS & DAT

 Well, President Donald Trump said he will decide today on the potential agreement with Iran.

• However Iran's Foreign Ministry said today that the nuclear issue was not negotiable. Plus, Iran's semi-official Fars news agency indicated what Trump is saying is a mixture of truth and lies.  And what about Lebanon?

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  Stock market?

Stocks rose in afternoon trading on Wall Street Friday, adding to the all-time highs they set a day earlier.   The S&P 500 rose 0.2% Friday. The index is coming off six gains in a row and is headed for a ninth straight winning week, which would be the longest such streak since 2023.

Jeff Bezos' Blue Horizon exploded on its pad in Florida yesterday.  

• Watch the explosion.  
• No injuries or deaths, but a costly loss, for their only pad has been destroyed.  
• Amazon was expecting this rocket to take 48 satellites into space on the next launch.  That's now cancelled.  
• Did you know that there are maybe 15,000 satellites up there, with up to 12,000 perhaps actively operating?  

• 
  Elon Musk's SpaceX alone operates over 10,000 Starlink satellites.  You ask, how did he do that?
• Falcon 9 rockets are reusable, and can carry up to 60 satellites per flight.
• Launched multiple batches every month from Florida and California.
• When the Falcon 9 reaches Low Earth Orbit, satellites are released, and each has built-in thrusters  and autonomous tracking to space themselves out into their precise orbital planes.
• Amazing!  10,000 satellites, or more.

“Most unfortunate. Rockets are hard,” he said shortly after the incident.  Musk and Bezos remain direct competitors in the race to return astronauts to the moon in the face of China’s expressed goal of landing astronauts on the moon by 2030. Both companies are developing lunar landers for NASA’s Artemis program.

Congress, with some prodding from the White House, is considering issuing a $250 Donald Trump bill.  Get it?  250th anniversary for the USA this year.  Will this actually happen.  No.  Needs 60% or more of senators to approve.

Something about Southeast Asia, but that current rescue of seven Laotians certainly reminds me of what happened in Thailand in 2018.  Then, twelve members of a soccer team and their coach suffered through a similar rescue from June 23 to July 10, or 18 days.  There were 10,000 rescuers from 20 different countries. All were saved, but two Thai volunteers died.  Ron Howard directed a 2022 film, 13 Lives, which got 85/93 scores from Rotten Tomatoes.

Here are the finalists for the 2026 Scripps National Spelling Bee.  held in Washington, DC, the first time in 15 years.

• The winner was 14-year old Shrey Parikh from California.  
• Will take home $52,500, the Scripps Cup, a commemorative medal and other prizes.  
• Has had some history here, for he placed third in 2024 and 89th at the age of 10.
• Practiced five hours per day, and said he had an amazing community helping him.

• 
  The winning word was bromocriptine, which is a polypeptide alkaloid.  Some other tough ones were cara sposa and quincke tube.  I'm a PhD biochemical engineer, and never before heard any of them.

• 
  According to Google AI, since 2000, this competition has been won by students whose parents came from India....16 times.  
• The last most recent non-India winner was Zaila Avant-garde in 2021.  Her parents are African American.  She was the first Black winner.

• 
  Katharine Close was the last White American to win....in 2006.
• The Scripps Spelling Bee began in 1925.

How's Caitlin Clark doing?  Well she's not hurt and just became the first WNBA player in history to record 500 career assists and 1000 points in only 59 games.  The next fastest was Sue Bird, who took 82 games to achieve those numbers.

• All top 5 of the league's most-watched games in the last two years have featured Clark.
• Her merchandise sells at the level of top NBA stars like LeBron James.
• However, the Golden State Valkyries don't have a huge star (they do have Kate Martin and Kayla Thornton), but led the league in average attendance last year with 18,064 fans/game, more than the Indiana Fever with 16,560.  The Valkyries still lead the charts this year.  And they beat the Fever 90-88 when Clark set the above record.  WNBA is doing well.  Maybe I'll get a fantasy team next year.

Crystal cruises started building a new ship in Venice, Italy.  

• To be called the Crystal Grace, she is the first new ship for Crystal (now owned by Abercrombie & Kent, as of 2022) in a quarter century.   The 659-passenger ship will make its debut in 2028. 

• 
  I remember cruising a couple of times on their Crystal Harmony, which was built in Nagasaki, Japan in 1990.  Left Crystal in 1990 and renamed the MS Asuka II, which continues to operate as the largest cruise ship in Japan.  

• 
  We have been on the Crystal Symphony a couple of times, and will sail on their Crystal Serenity in the Spring of 2027, from Bali to Thailand, then Hong Kong to Tokyo.

Ocean storm Jangmi becomes a typhoon today.  However, the eye will remain to the east until it weakens and reaches southern Kyushu.  Currently expected to move along the eastern coast of Japan as a tropical storm and move up at sea parallel to Tokyo on June 3.  But that is only a prediction.

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