Highlights from today’s top stories. Subscribe here to receive this rundown daily.
A U.S. senator from Oregon is pressing Amazon for information on a hack that exposed sensitive data from more than 100 million Capital One customers. Sen. Ron Wyden sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos asking about the nature of the hack and whether vulnerabilities in Amazon’s cloud services played a role. Paige Thompson, a former Amazon Web Services engineer, was arrested last week in connection with the incident. Read the story.
The Seattle region may have a reputation as a liberal enclave, but it’s also home to a virtual safe haven for right-wing extremism. Bellevue, Wash.-based web service provider Epik Inc. helped 8chan get back online after others blacklisted the forum due to its ties to the mass shooting in El Paso. It’s not the first time Epik has done this. Read the story.
Melinda Gates thinks 208 years is far too long to reach gender equality. The recent projection from the World Economic Forum sparked Gates to launch a new campaign Tuesday called “Equality Can’t Wait” with the help of celebrity comedians. Check out the initiative here.
A Seattle startup was snapped up in a $40 million merger just eight months after spinning out of the University of Washington. Neoleukin Therapeutics, maker of cancer-fighting proteins, is combining with Aquinox Pharmaceuticals, a publicly traded company based in Vancouver, B.C. The merged company will be based in Seattle, further boosting the region’s life sciences cred.
Jeff Bezos appears to be selling Amazon shares at a faster clip. New filings show that the Amazon CEO sold an additional $1 billion in stock, bringing his seven-day total to nearly $3 billion. Getting humans back to the moon ain’t cheap, folks! Read the updated story.
Amazon is conducting a mysterious test involving 50 prototype mobile devices, an experimental slice of the electromagnetic spectrum … and a massage parlor. Read the story.
In case you missed it, be sure to read our inside look at the abrupt shutdown of BMW’s ReachNow car-sharing service in Seattle and Portland.
Random Channel: Is it possible to bake bread from 4,500-year-old yeast recovered from the pores of ancient Egyptian pottery? Yes and it’s incredibly delicious, reports Seamus Blackley, one of the original creators of Microsoft’s Xbox, who documented his crazy project in this amazing Twitter thread.
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