Two climate activists from Just Stop Oil (JSO) were arrested at a London airfield yesterday after they sprayed orange paint on private jets, adding fuel to a fire the group set off with a string of controversial demonstrations in recent days.

JSO posted on X that the two activists cut a fence to the private airfield in an apparent attempt to target Taylor Swift’s jet, which has been scrutinized for having record-high carbon emissions. Local police later said the pop star’s jet hadn’t been parked there.

First came the rocks. Less than 24 hours earlier, other JSO protestors sprayed their signature orange paint on 4,500-year-old Stonehenge, drawing ire from British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who called it “disgraceful,” as well as Druids and pagans, to whom Stonehenge is a sacred place. (The paint dissolved and the monument wasn't damaged.) Members of the group have made headlines in the past for blocking traffic, throwing paint on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting, and running onto Wimbledon courts.

How they’re doing it

According to its website, JSO is a “nonviolent civil resistance group demanding the UK Government stop licensing all new oil, gas and coal projects.”

How’s it funded? Through a mix of donations from the public and wealthy individuals. Most of its money comes from the Climate Emergency Fund, a network tied to the granddaughter of oil baron J. Paul Getty. In the past, it received funding from green energy industrialist Dale Vince and from Hollywood screenwriter and director Adam McKay (of The Big Short and Don’t Look Up).

Is Just Stop Oil stopping oil? Not in any discernible way—at least yet. Last year, Sunak granted 100 new North Sea oil and gas licenses and committed to issuing more. But the group seems unlikely to stop its disturbances, and from their POV, there’s no reason to: A study from the University of Bristol found that radical protests often help raise awareness, and that dislike of protestors had no impact on the public’s support for the issues themselves.—CC

The classic question dreaded by road-tripping parents, weary travelers, and pretty much anybody who’s ever sat in the driver’s seat. It’s a valid question, really—boring road trips are def no fun.

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Say bye-bye to snoozefest traveling.

SCOTUS upheld a tax on foreign income. The Supreme Court’s 7–2 ruling to validate a Trump-era tax provision on US businesses’ foreign profits was overshadowed by a decision it didn’t make on the wealth tax. Experts thought the court might use the foreign income case to preemptively rule on the constitutionality of a tax on Americans’ net worths, which the Biden administration and other Democrats have proposed. But the justices made a narrow ruling, punting on the wealth tax issue for now. Some saw that as a win for Biden, as it keeps alive the possibility of a tax on wealthy Americans’ estates. The court still has a number of significant cases to decide this session, including one on Trump’s demand for total immunity.

Anthropic claims its new AI model is the industry’s best. The company, founded by former OpenAI executives, yesterday announced its latest artificial intelligence model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet. According to Anthropic, it’s twice as fast as the previous version and performs better than competitors “on a wide range of evaluations.” The company also said it showed “marked improvement” in understanding humor and complex instructions. Anthropic is more focused on enterprise business than some of its rivals in the increasingly crowded AI space.

Donald Sutherland died at 88. The beloved Canadian actor, best known for his roles in M*A*S*H, Animal House, and the Hunger Games franchise, died yesterday after a long illness, his son, actor Kiefer Sutherland, confirmed on social media. The elder Sutherland won an Emmy award in 1995 for his role in the TV movie Citizen X, and though he’s considered one of the best actors of all time to never win an Oscar, he was awarded an honorary Academy Award in 2017. He accumulated more than 200 film and TV credits over the course of his six-decade career.

Imagine if Google Workspace or Microsoft Teams crashed, but you still had to go on with your workday. Well, that’s the vibe at car dealers across the US this week: Following back-to-back cyberattacks on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, one of the auto industry’s most popular softwares is temporarily shut down, leaving workers no choice but to record orders with pen and paper.

Hand cramps galore. It’s not clear how many dealerships have been affected or whether customer data has been stolen, but around 15,000 US car dealers—including General Motors and Group 1 Automotive sellers—use the hacked software company in question, CDK Global, to manage payroll, sales, operations, and pretty much everything else.

Some dealers have kept business rolling (albeit more slowly) despite not being able to access ongoing deals or customer info. The outage is worse where CDK services are integrated throughout daily operations. According to employees commiserating on Reddit…

• Some dealerships can’t even look up car parts, receive calls on work phones, or pay out earnings.
• One user described their place of work’s contingency plan as “everyone freaking out and writing sh*t down on sticky notes.”

The outage could last for several days, CNN reported. That could drag on summer car sales and the 3% to 3.5% of GDP that the US auto industry generates each year.—ML

Summer spending should be easy. Instead, it’s often a total rigmarole. Want better insight into your expenses? We recently spilled the deets on how to get a crystal-clear picture of where exactly your money is going as the warmer season sets in. Check out the article.

Plastic, air-filled pillows that pop with the decibel level of a firework will soon be a thing of the past in Amazon packages. The company said yesterday that it has eliminated 95% of the single-use box fillers from its packaging in North America and will likely be completely air pillow-free by the end of the year.

The previous buffers will be replaced with recycled paper, which Amazon found is not only easier to recycle but also does a better job protecting your impulse purchases.

Amazon was caught in a plastic web. In April, nonprofit conservation organization Oceana estimated that the e-commerce giant created 208 million pounds of plastic waste in 2022 from packaging products in the US. And despite the company’s use of plastic packaging dropping 11.6% globally that year, its use went up about 10% in the US. Amazon has already phased out all plastic packaging in Europe and India.

Big picture: This is Amazon’s most significant commitment to reducing its plastic waste to date. The company claims it will remove nearly 15 billion plastic air pillows from circulation every year.—MM

Drake hasn’t been humiliated this badly since he caught Ashley kissing Sean and then got dumped by her on Degrassi. Kendrick Lamar gathered an army of rappers, NBA players, and other celebrities for a Juneteenth concert in Los Angeles on Wednesday that quickly turned into a Drake roast of historic proportions. Lamar performed his diss track, “Not Like Us,” five times for the rapturous audience, leading the internet to declare him the winner of a yearslong, high-profile feud with Drake. “Not Like Us” broke a Spotify record for the song with the most plays in a single day, and went on to become Lamar’s biggest hit in two decades as a solo artist.

The feeling of getting a 5/5 on the Brew’s Weekly News Quiz has been compared to taking an outdoor shower after a long day at the beach.

It’s that satisfying. Ace the quiz.

(FYI—we are using a different software provider, so don’t be alarmed if the quiz looks different.)