🐤 Deep-sea discovery

🏦 Markets: Tesla rebounded from big losses last week and the broad tech sector helped push the overall market higher to start the week yesterday.

Investors appear bullish about the flurry of corporate earnings reports expected over the course of the week, which includes some of the world’s most valuable tech companies.

All three major indexes finished Monday higher, led by the tech-centric Nasdaq’s gain of more than 1%.

For decades, uncertainty has swirled around the disappearance of early aviator Amelia Earhart. She vanished during a daring flight in 1937 and neither her nor the Lockheed 10-E Electra twin-engine aircraft she was piloting were ever seen again.

But a recent mission involving the latest sonar technology might have resulted in a big clue that could answer some of those nagging questions.

A passion project

Former U.S. Air Force intel officer Tony Romeo now serves as the CEO of Deep Space Vision, and he sold off a slate of commercial property in order to secure the roughly $11 million needed to fund his search of the Pacific Ocean floor in an area around where Earhart was believed to have disappeared.

Along with a team of researchers, Romeo found some telltale images that he believes point to the location of the missing aircraft. The area in question can be found at roughly the midpoint between Australia and Hawaii, about 100 miles off the coast of Howland Island.

Earhart and Fred Noonan, who served as her navigator, were scheduled to land on the small island to refuel as she continued her quest to become the first woman to pilot a flight around the world.

Weighing the evidence

More research is needed to conclusively determine whether the object discovered in those images is Earhart’s plane, but Romeo seems confident.

“There’s no other known crashes in the area, and certainly not of that era in that kind of design with the tail that you see clearly in the image,” he explained.

From here, his team is planning to revisit the area to take clearer photos of the site, which will require even more money — but Romeo thinks it’s worth the investment to possibly solve what he called “the great mystery of all time.”

🛒 Cart blanche: The arrival of a new supermarket might not always be a big deal, but for one Florida community, a new Publix location was cause for celebration. And part of the promotion of its arrival involved a strange bit of marketing on the streets of Wesley Chapel. An oversized Publix shopping cart could be seen cruising through neighborhoods, pumping out the Poison hit “Nothin’ But A Good Time.” Strange sights are par for the course in Florida, but this was one grand opening reminder that locals won’t soon forget.

🥝 Mood food: There’s an old adage that advises “you are what you eat,” and if you’re trying to improve your mood, there’s a little fuzzy fruit you might want to work into your diet. A new study found that kiwifruit appeared to have a direct impact on the mental well-being of those who ate it. Better yet, the positive results could be identified in as few as four days. While the fruit’s high level of vitamin C is likely one of the factors, test subjects who took a vitamin supplement didn’t achieve the same mood-boosting benefits.

💼 Tax leaker: Former President Donald Trump’s tax records sparked some partisan bickering during his term in the White House, and in 2019 the narrative got a big boost when The New York Times gained possession of his confidential records. The former IRS contractor responsible for leaking those documents pleaded guilty in October and was sentenced to five years behind bars on Monday. Charles Littlejohn also leaked the tax data of other wealthy and influential people including Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

↘️ Evergrande saga: The stunning decline of a property developer that was once behind massive projects across China continued this week when its stock price entered a freefall. Shares of Evergrande dropped by more than 20% before a court stepped in to order its assets to be liquidated. As demand for new real estate projects waned in recent years, Evergrande has been at the forefront of a massive debt crisis that has seen ripple effects across China’s economy and a last-ditch restructuring deal never materialized.

The heartbreaking story of Amy and Ano highlights a tragic reality for countless families across the country of Georgia. Shortly after the identical twins were born, they were stolen from their mother and separated, each being sold to a separate family.

Putting the pieces together

When Amy was 12, she was watching an episode of “Georgia’s Got Talent” with her family and a contestant came on stage who looked just like her.

She recalled: “Everyone was calling my mum and asking, ‘Why is Amy dancing under another name?’”

This was the first clue that led to the separated twins piecing together the mystery of their respective pasts.

Years later, Amy posted a TikTok video in which she revealed a face piercing and showed off her blue hair. This time it was Ano who was shocked to find someone who looked so much like her.

She began doing some research and located one of Amy’s Facebook friends who was able to arrange a meeting.

Answering tough questions

The birth certificates they received showed that their birthdays were weeks apart, which seemed to rule out that they were twins. But the similarities — not only in appearance, but in their interests and the fact that they both had a genetic disorder called dysplasia — were too much to ignore.

“Every time I learned something new about Ano, things got stranger,” Amy said.

Then they tracked down their birth mother, whom they suspected could have been the one who sold them. But at an emotional reunion, the woman recalled being told that her daughters died shortly after birth.

As it turns out, this was an all-too-common tactic by human traffickers who, until new laws were passed in 2006, frequently stole babies from hospitals and sold them to families under the guise of a legitimate adoption.

It probably isn’t news to learn that prisoners are frequently required to work as part of their sentences, but the extent to which prison labor contributes to the meals that ultimately reach your dining room table might come as quite a surprise.

Here are the details

The irony isn’t lost on critics that the Louisiana State Penitentiary is located on a former slave plantation, since many say modern-day inmates are treated in much the same way.

• They work for free or receive just pennies per hour for their labor
• They can be sent to solitary confinement or denied parole if they refuse
• They don’t qualify for safety protections afforded to all other workers

There’s no practical way for consumers to avoid spending their money on food products that have their roots in such coerced prison labor. After all, companies from Walmart to McDonald’s are among the final recipients of the meat and other agricultural products benefiting from the process.

Justifiable or unconstitutional?

Some argue that prison labor is just part of the punitive process. And the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, has a clause allowing for involuntary labor as long as it’s part of a criminal’s punishment.

Then there’s Willie Ingraham, who pleaded guilty to a crime he says he didn’t commit to avoid a possible death sentence and went on to spend more than 50 years behind bars at the state pen.

Much of that time was spent toiling in the heat under constant threat of armed guards.

“They’d come, maybe four in the truck, shields over their face, bill clubs, and they’d beat you right there in the field,” he recalled.

There are currently federal and state-level efforts underway to revise laws regarding prison labor … but for now, it’s a deeply ingrained part of American culture.