As the vaccination campaign to counter COVID-19 gets underway (albeit with a rocky start), a number of companies are attempting to support its rollout in a variety of ways. Healthvana, a health tech startup that began with a specific focus on providing patient information digitally for individuals living with HIV, is helping Los Angeles County roll-out mobile vaccination records for COVID-19 using Apple’s Wallet technology. A cursory appraisal of the implementation of this tech might lead one to believe it’s about providing individuals with easy proof of vaccination – but the tech, and Healthvana, are focused on informing individuals to ensure they participate in their own healthcare programs, not providing an immunity pass.

“I generally consider most of healthcare to look and feel like Windows 95,” Healthvana CEO and founder Ramin Bastani. “We look and feel like Instagram . Why is that important? Because patients can engage in things they understand, it’s easier for them to communicate in the way they’re used to communicating, and that ends up leading them better health outcomes.”

Bastani points out that they began the company by focusing this approach to patient education and communication on HIV, and demonstrated that using their software led to patients being 7.4 times more likely to show up for their next follow-up appointment vs. patients who received follow-up information and appointment notices via traditional methods. The company has built their tooling and their approach around not only producing better health for individuals, but also on reducing costs for healthcare providers by eliminating the need for a lot of the work that goes into clearing up misunderstandings, and essentially hounding patients to follow-up, which can significantly dig into clinician and care staff hours.

“We’re actually also reducing the cost to healthcare providers, because you don’t have 1,000 people calling you asking what are their results, and saying ‘I don’t understand, I can’t log in, I don’t know what it means to be SARS nonreactive,’ or all those things we address through simplicity,” Bastain said. “That’s made a huge difference. Overall, I think the key to all healthcare is going to be to be able to get patients to pay attention, and take action to things around their health.”

That’s the goal of Healthvana’s partnership with LA County on COVID-19 immunization records, too – taking vitally important action to ensure the successful rollout of its vaccination program. All approved COVID-19 vaccines to date require a two-course treatment, including one initial inoculation followed by a booster to be administered sometime later. Keeping LA county residents informed about their COVID-19 inoculation, and when they’re due for a second dose, is the primary purpose of the partnership, and benefits from Healthvana’s experience in improving patient follow-up activities. But the app is also providing users with information about COVID-19 care, and, most usefully, prevention and ways to slow the spread.

While Bastani stresses that Healthvana is, in the end, just “the last mile” for message delivery, and that there are many other layers involved in determining the right steps for proper care and prevention, the way in which they provide actionable info has already proven a big boon to one key measure: contact tracing. In select municipalities, Healthvana will also prompt users who’ve tested positive to anonymously notify close contacts directly from their device, which will provide those individuals with both free testing options and information resources.

“Just us doing this in the greater Los Angeles area for less than two months, 12,000+ people have been notified that they’ve been exposed,” Bastani said. “Each of them likely lives with other people and families – this is how you can help slow the spread.”

Contrast that with the relatively slow uptake of the exposure notification tools built into iOS and Android devices via recent software updates provided by Google and Apple working in a rare collaboration. While the technology that underlies it is sound, and focused on user privacy, its usage numbers thus far are far from earthshaking; only 388 people have sent alerts through Virginia’s app based on the exposure notification framework in three months since its launch, for instance.

Healthvana’s focus on timely and relevant delivery of information, offered to users in ways they’re mostly likely to understand and engage with, is already showing its ability to have an impact on COVID-19 and its community transmission. The startup is already in talks to launch similar programs elsewhere in the country, and that could help improve national vaccination outcomes, and how people handle COVID-19 once they have it, too.

Moderna, the biotech company behind one of the two mRNA-based vaccines currently being rolled out globally to stem the tide of COVID-19, has announced that it will purse development programs around three new vaccine candidates in 2021. These include potential vaccines for HIV, seasonal flu and the Nipah virus. Moderna’s development and clinical trial of its COVID-19 vaccine is among the fastest in history, and thus far its results have been very promising, buoying hopes for the efficacy of other preventative treatments being generated using this technology which is new to human clinical use.

An mRNA vaccine differs from typical, historical vaccines because it involves providing a person with just a set of instructions on how to build specific proteins that will trigger a body’s natural defenses. The mRNA instructions, which are temporary and do not affect a person’s actual DNA, simply prompt the body’s cells to produce proteins that mirror those used by a virus to attach to and infect cells. The independent proteins are then fought off by a person’s natural immune response, which provides a lasting lesson in how to fight off any future proteins that match that profile, including those which help viruses attach to and infect people.

Moderna’s new programs will target not only seasonal flu, but also a combinatory vaccine that could target both the regular flu and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that leads to COVID-19. The HIV candidate, which is developed in collaboration with both the AIDS Vaccine Initiative and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is expected to enter into Phase 1 trials this year, as will the flue face. Nipah virus is a highly lethal illness that can cause respiratory and neurological symptoms, and which is particularly a threat in India, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Singapore.

mRNA-based vaccines have long held potential for future vaccine development, in part because of their flexibility and programmability, and in part because they don’t use any active or dormant virus, which reduces their risks in terms of causing any direct infections up front. The COVID-19 pandemic spurred significant investment and regulatory/health and safety investment into the technology, paving the way for its use in other areas, including these new vaccine candidate trials by Moderna.

A new startup has officially emerged for stealth with the raise of its $62 million Series A funding round. Endeavor BioMedicines is led by co-founder and CEO John Hood, who previously led Impact Biomedicines, and its new funding comes from Omega Funds and Longitude Capital, as well as the company’s own management team. Endeavor is also co-founded by Miguel de los Rios, who serves as its Chief Science Officer and who was previously CEO of Rift Biotherapeutics.

Endeavor’s goal is to develop treatments specifically to address pulmonary disease, and the startup is putting its funding towards two Phase 2 clinical trials that will seek to determine whether their therapeutic candidate can reverse or slow the progression of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a very common type of pulmonary fibrosis that results in long tissue scarring which causes difficulty in breathing for affected patients.

IPF has a significant and worrying fatality rate – the condition comes with “an estimated mean survival of 2-5 years from time of diagnosis,” according to Hood in a press release. Endeavor’s new treatment candidate, called ‘taladegib,’ is an inhibitor that addresses what’s known as the ‘Hedgehog’ pathway for IPF. This pathway, which is primarily responsible for cell differentiation during embryonic development, can also play a role in development of harmful conditions in adults when they malfunction while regulating the regeneration of mature tissues.

Hood’s last company Impact Biomedicines exited in a sale to Celgene Corp worth put to $7 billion, depending on performance milestones set in the terms of the acquisition for passing certain regulatory and sales conditions. That company focused on treatment development specifically for myelofibrosis, a type of blood cancer, using an inhibitor for a specific type of protein kinase.

Eating less meat is the easiest way for anyone to lower their carbon footprint and the prepared food delivery startup, Thistle, has just raised $10.3 million to make that choice even easier for consumers. 

The company delivers plant-based full menus (with meat options available for customers that want them) for its customers along with a range of juices and sides.

That pitch of making tweaks to customer behavior for more conscious consumerism and healthy eating was enough to attract Series B funding from PowerPlant Ventures, with participation from Siddhi Capital, Alumni Ventures Group, and the venture arm of Rich Products Corp.

The company said it would use the financing to expand geographically — setting up a production facility on the East Coast to bring its healthy prepared meals to potential customers along the Eastern seaboard.

“With this funding, we’ll be able to support even more people through scientific, evidence-based principles of nutrition that lead to optimal wellness, enjoyable eating, and a healthier planet,” said Ashwin Cheryian, Co-Founder and CEO of Thistle in a statement. 

Since its launch seven years ago, Thistle has served over 5 million meals and is intent to not just launch in new geographies, but provide more robust services for its customers. Those services will include virtual consultations with an in-house registered Thistle dietitian who can give customers guidance on the best diet for their needs, the company said.   

The new offering was born from customer feedback, according to chief operating officer and Thistle co-founder Shiri Avnery.

“We tested the program last fall, and the responses were overwhelmingly positive. We’re excited to be able to officially roll out the program to our customers this month, with the primary goal to further support our customers along each stage of their wellness journey,” Avnery said. 

The husband and wife duo offer menu plans starting at $42 a week or $11.50 per meal, according to the company’s website and all meals are gluten and dairy free (with vegan options available).

The financing for Thistle comes during a plant-based food boom that’s been sweeping the nation — and the nation’s investors.

“Eating a plant-forward diet is the single most impactful way to reduce your overall environmental footprint, reducing climate change, pollution, resource consumption, and species extinction,” said Dan Gluck, Managing Partner of PowerPlant Ventures, in a statement. “Consumer demand for plant-based foods is outperforming total food growth today, and this trend is expected to increase over the next decade as more people realize that eating more plants is a critical component to the long-term health of both the planet and our population.”

A somewhat nebulous, but high-profile and potentially heavily-moneyed joint venture is coming to an end: Haven, the JV created by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, is being “disbanded” according to CNBC, three years after its original formation. One of the main reasons is that each partner in the venture was apparently just pursuing their own very different strategic approach to their respective healthcare challenges, meaning their really wasn’t much joint in the joint venture to begin with.

In a statement provided to CNBC, a Haven spokesperson highlighted some of the good results that came out of the partnership over the years, however, including improving access to primary care, and making insurance benefits packages easier to grasp for employees. Meanwhile, Amazon has made lots of progress on its own with its Amazon Care program, which is its internal healthcare program for employees at its Washington state facilities.

Amazon Care includes provision of both virtual and in-person primary care doctor visits, and prescription delivery. The company is also reported to be considering expansion of this service to other businesses, which signal its intent to turn it into a real business with aims very much in line with what the Haven JV had originally taken as its guiding light.

To be honest, the original announcement about the JV’s founding was light on details and seemed like one of those things that comes together when very rich people talk about their shared problems over a casual afternoon hang at the club with caviar and mineral water distilled from pristine arctic ice or whatever they enjoy during their repasts, so it’s not all that surprising it didn’t materialize into anything more substantial.

Healthcare startup Color has raised a sizeable $167 million in Series D funding round, at a valuation of $1.5 billion post-money, the company announced today. This brings the total raised by Color to $278 million, with its latest large round intended to help it build on a record year of growth in 2020 with even more expansion to help put in place key health infrastructure systems across the U.S. – including those related to the “last mile” delivery of COVID-19 vaccines.

This latest investment into Color was led by General Catalyst, and by funds invested by T. Rowe Price, along with participation from Viking Global investors as well as others. Alongside the funding, the company is also bringing on a number of key senior executives, including Claire Vo (formerly of Optimizely) as Chief Product Officer, Emily Reuter (formerly of Uber, where she played a key role in its IPO process) as VP of Strategy and Operations, and Ashley Chandler (formerly of Stripe) as VP of Marketing.

“I think with the [COVID-19] crisis, it’s really shone the light on that lack of infrastructure. We saw it multiple times, with lab testing, with antigen testing, and now with vaccines,” Color CEO and co-founder Othman Laraki told me in an interview. “The model that we’ve been developing, that’s been working really well, and we feel like this is the opportunity to really scale it in a very major way. I think literally what’s happening is the building of the public health infrastructure for the country that’s starting off from a technology-first model, as opposed to, what ends up happening in a lot of industries, which is you start off taking your existing logistics and assets, and add technology to them.”

Color’s 2020 was a record year for the company, thanks in part to partnerships like the one it formed with the the City of San Francisco to establish testing for health care workers and residents. Laraki told me they did about five-fold their prior year’s business, and while the company is already set up to grow on its own sustainably based on the revenue it pulls in from customers, its ambitions and plans for 2021 and beyond made this the right time to help it accelerate further with the addition of more capital.

Laraki described Color’s approach as one that is both cost-efficient for the company, and also significant cost-saving for the healthcare providers it works with. He likens their approach to the shift that happened in retail with the move to online sales – and the contribution of one industry heavyweight in particular.

“At some point, you build Amazon – a technology-first stack that’s optimized around access and scale,” Laraki said. “I think that’s literally what we’re seeing now with healthcare. What’s kind of getting catalyzed right now is we’ve been realizing it applies to the COVID crisis, but also, we started actually working on that for prevention and I think actually it’s going to be applying to a huge surface area in healthcare; basically all the aspects of health that are not acute care where you don’t need to show up in hospital.”

Ultimately, Color’s approach is to re-think healthcare delivery in order to “make it accessible at the edge directly in people’s lives,” with “low transaction costs,” in a way that’s “scalable, [and] doesn’t use a lot of clinical resourcing,” Laraki says. He notes that this is actually very possible once you re-asses the problem without relying on a lot of accepted knowledge about the way things are done today, which result in a “heavy stack” vs. what you actually need to deliver the desired outcomes.

Laraki doesn’t think the problem is easy to solve – on the contrary, he acknowledges that 2021 is likely to be even more difficult and challenging than 2020 in many ways for the healthcare industry, and we’ve already begun to see evidence of that in the many challenges already faced by vaccine distribution and delivery in its initial rollout. But he’s optimistic about Color’s ability to help address those challenges, and to build out a ‘last mile’ delivery system for crucial care that expands accessibility, while also making sure things are done right.

“When you take a step back, doing COVID testing, or COVID vaccinations is actually those are not complex procedures at all – they’re extremely simple procedures,” he said. “What’s hard is doing them massive scale, and with a very low transaction cost to the individual and to the system. And that’s a very different tooling.”

DNA testing technology company 23andMe has raised just shy of $82.5 million in new funding, from an offering of $85 million in total equity shares, according to a new SEC filing. The funding, confirmed by the Wall Street Journal, comes from investors including Sequoia Capital and NewView Capital. It brings the total raised by 23andMe to date to over $850 million.

There’s no specific agenda earmarked for this Series F round, according to a statement from the company to the WSJ, beyond general use to continue to fund and grow the business. 23andMe’s business is based on its distribution of individual home genetic testing kits, which provide customers with insights about their potential health and their family tree based on their DNA.

While the company’s pitch to individuals is improved health, and more knowledge about their ancestry and family tree, the company has also turned its attention to conducting research based on the data it has collected in aggregate, both for its own studies including a recent one that examined how genetic markers could affect a person’s susceptibility to COVID-19, and also for use in supporting the work of third-parties – though it stresses that data is only shared in aggregate, de-identified formats for those purposes.

In January, 23andMe confirmed layoffs affecting roughly 14% of its global workforce. The company’s work this year around COVID-19 has, however, perhaps put the value of its platform in a new light, in the face of this pandemic and the potential of future similar global health issues that may arise.

Peloton has announced that it intends to acquire Precor, one of the world’s largest suppliers of commercial fitness equipment. You probably recognize the Precor brand name if you’ve ever spent time in a hotel or standalone commercial gym, which is exactly why Peloton making this purchase makes a ton of sense at this particular time for the hot home workout brand.

The Precor acquisition will be made via a deal that’s valued at a total of $420 million, and in addition to expanding its commercial business, this also helps Peloton bring on a lot more manufacturing capability in a time when its order queue for its Tread and Bike hardware is deeper than ever, thanks to the increase in demand resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Precor already maintains a significant U.S.-based manufacturing operation, as well as dedicated research and development teams and facilities. In total, Peloton says in a press release that it’ll be adding 625,000 square feet of manufacturing facility in the U.S., between Precor facilities in both Whitsett, North Carolina, and Woodinville, Washington.

While the near-term use of the acquisition, which is set to close in 2021 if it meets all approvals, is to speed up delivery times for customers of existing equipment, long-term this deal sets Peloton up nicely for greater commercial market expansion – once the commercial market returns to growth. While the pandemic has been a clear boon for Peloton’s at-home equipment and fitness subscription service, it’s also been devastating for gym chains and hoteliers, meaning that it’s likely Precor’s primary business was taking a considerable hit over the past few months.

This is the largest deal that Peloton has made thus far, but it’s possible it picked up Precor for a relative bargain; Precor owner Anta Sports was said to have been seeking a potential sale fo the company for around $500 million last November. Peloton will be installing Precor President Rob Barker as GM of Peloton Commercial as part of the new deal, and that should help it accelerate the infiltration of its connected equipment in commercial gyms globally once people feel more comfortable about returning to them safely post-pandemic.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issues an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, as expected after an independent panel commissioned by the administration recommended its approval earlier this week. This is the second vaccine now authorized for use in the U.S. under EUA, after the Pfizer -BioNTech vaccine was approved last week.

Moderna’s vaccine could begin being administered to Americans by “Monday or Tuesday” next week, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci speaking to NBC’s Today show in a new interview. That’s in keeping with the timelines between the Pfizer EUA and the first patients actually receiving the vaccine last week.

Like Pfizer’s vaccine, Moderna’s is an mRNA therapy. That means that it contains no actual virus – just genetic instructions that tell a person’s body to create a specific protein. That protein is more or less identical to the one that SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, uses to attach to a host’s cells and replicate. Moderna’s vaccine causes a person to create just the protein, which on its own is harmless, and then their natural defences via their immune system reacts to that and develops a method for fighting it off. That defense system is ‘remembered’ by the body, while the vaccine itself naturally dissolves after a brief time, leaving a person with immunity but nothing else.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which has yet to be approved for use in the U.S., uses a weakened and modified common cold virus that doesn’t spread in humans to create the spike protein in recipients, resulting in the body generating its own immune response. That’s a much more tried-and-tested method for creating a vaccine, but both Moderna and Pfizer’s mRNA therapies have shown to be very effective in preliminary data from their large Phase 3 clinical trials.

We interview the senior senator from Minnesota about fitness trackers, Sony pulls “Cyberpunk 2077” from the PlayStation Store and Indian delivery startup Zomato raises a massive round. This is your Daily Crunch for December 18, 2020.

The big story: Amy Klobuchar discusses Amazon Halo concerns

Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar recently wrote an open letter to Alex Azar of the Department of Health and Human Services, in which she discussed Amazon’s Halo fitness tracker and expressed concern that “the Halo appears to collect an unprecedented level of personal information.”

Klobuchar elaborated on these issues in an interview with TechCrunch. HHS, she said, “should play a larger role in ensuring data privacy when it comes to health” and work with the FTC “to come up with some rules to safeguard private health information.”

Klobuchar added, “I think the Amazon Halo is just the ultimate example of it, but there’s a number of other devices that have the same issues.”

The tech giants

CD Projekt Red, Sony, Microsoft offer refund to Cyberpunk 2077 customers after bug complaints — Sony has pulled “Cyberpunk 2077” from its PlayStation Store after a flood of complaints.

The big Google DOJ antitrust case probably won’t go to trial until 2023 — In a status hearing Friday, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta set a tentative date for the case.

Twitter bots and memorialized users will become ‘new account types’ in 2021 — Twitter plans to add a way of distinguishing bots and other automated accounts.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Indian food delivery giant Zomato secures $660M — The 12-year-old startup is also in the process of closing a $140 million secondary transaction.

Bumble reportedly filed confidentially for an IPO — The news that Bumble is pursuing an IPO is not a surprise.

Unfold launches lightweight, link-centric profiles called Bio Sites — Squarespace acquired social media startup Unfold last year.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

From India’s richest man to Amazon and 100s of startups: The great rush to win neighborhood stores — After spending more than a decade disrupting neighborhood stores in the U.S. and other markets, Amazon and Walmart are employing a different strategy in India.

Watch Space Force commander Gen. John Raymond explain public-private partnerships for space defense — The Space Force commander explained how the new military service operates like a startup and how startups can learn from the Space Force.

Unpacking Poshmark’s IPO filing — From posting regular losses in 2019 to generating net income in 2020.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

TechCrunch Early Stage is coming back in a big way in 2021 — TC Early Stage is all about providing founders access to the top experts across the core competencies involved in entrepreneurship.

Tips for applying an intersectional framework to AI development — What can we do to move away from using AI/ML models that demonstrate unfair bias?

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Kryo, the company behind the ChiliSleep brand, is announcing that it has merged with another sleep technology company, Ebb Therapeutics, and also raised $37 million in new funding led by Ebb’s biggest investor KKR.

Founded in 2007, Kryo/ChiliSleep’s products include the chiliPAD, a device designed to improve sleep by adjusting the temperature of your bed. Co-founder and CEO Tara Youngblood told me that the company has always been focused on “changing sleep through temperature regulation” — but recently, the team has also become “hungry for this software piece” that will allow them to reach consumers without hardware.

Ebb, meanwhile, has created a cooling headband that’s also supposed to help customers sleep better. Youngblood said that the two companies have “a complementary approach,” and that the merger will create a strong portfolio of combined patents.

Youngblood also said that moving forward, the company will be led by Kryo management, but she declined to comment further on whether the Ebb team will be part of the merger.

The plan is to launch a new software platform called Sleep.me in May, which will combine sleep-related community, content and coaching (that last piece will draw on Ebb’s existing coaching service), with free and paid offerings. Youngblood said the company will continue to sell ChiliSleep products as well, while “the Ebb product line and Ebb brand will probably go away.”

Kryo CEO Tara Youngblood

Youngblood acknowledged that there’s been an explosion in sleep-related products in recent decades — something she attributed to growing research and awareness around the importance of sleep to our health.

“What’s going to be different, really, with the platform is that we’re going talk to that individual” and offer personalized advice, she said. “Thermal regulation may be a part of [your personalized approach], or it may not.”

Youngblood also noted that ChiliSleep has a medical advisory board that includes Dr. Michael Grandner of the University of Arizona, Dr. Chris Winter and Dr. Kelly Starrett.

“Insomnia and sleep-related issues are unfortunately on the rise, but fortunately so are effective treatments to address them,” said Ali Satvat, the global head of KKR Health Care Strategic Growth, in a statement. “We are thrilled to support the merger of ChiliSleep and Ebb to bring these innovations to the market and help solve an unmet need for those who need improved sleep.”

We review Apple Fitness+, Gmail goes down and Pornhub cracks down on unverified content. This is your Daily Crunch for December 14, 2020.

The big story: Apple launches Fitness+

Brian Heater tried out Apple’s new $10-per-month subscription service for guided workouts, prompting some broader reflections on exercise during this terrible year — and on how Fitness+ might fit in.

The service requires an Apple Watch to sign up, which is a hurdle if (like me) you don’t already own the device, but Brian writes:

Honestly, the Apple Watch integration is probably the best-executed aspect of the entire undertaking — down to the way the wearable doubles as a start and stop button for the workout. It also ensures a more complete rundown of your workouts at the end of the day.

The tech giants

Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs and other services go down in multiple countries — A huge range of Google services went down for about an hour today.

Reddit acquires Dubsmash — Dubsmash will retain its own platform and brand, while Reddit will integrate its video creation tools.

Apple launches its new app privacy labels across all its App Stores — The new labels aim to give Apple customers an easier way to understand what sort of information an app collects across three categories.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Tonic is betting that synthetic data is the new big data to solve scalability and security — Tonic transforms raw data into more manageable and private data sets usable by software engineers and business analysts.

German Bionic raises $20M led by Samsung for exoskeleton tech to supercharge human labor — The company describes its Cray X robot as “the world’s first connected exoskeleton for industrial use.”

Mombox is a curated kit of postnatal products that puts new moms first — The standard Mombox includes organic overnight pads, a peri bottle, perineal ice pack, post-pregnancy panties and other care products.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

MIT professor wants to overhaul ‘The Hype Machine’ that powers social media — Sinan Aral has spent years analyzing the social media market.

Five questions every IT team should be able to answer — When the CEO comes calling, are you prepared?

IPO delays are bumming me out — Roblox is on ice and Affirm could slip.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

FDA grants emergency use authorization for Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, distribution to begin within days — And vaccinations started today!

Pornhub removes all unverified content, following reports of exploitation — Pornhub announced last week that it would be limiting uploads to only verified users.

Original Content podcast: David Fincher presents a compelling character study in ‘Mank’ — Gary Oldman delivers a mesmerizing performance as the co-writer of “Citizen Kane.”

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.