Overnight Briefing & General Reality Check - Jan 19, 2022

The big business story yesterday was that the bigwigs at Microsoft plan to buy the Activision Blizzard company for nearly $70 billion dollars. Activision does games including Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Warcraft and Overwatch, and Microsoft says it'll help them grow their gaming business. It should, since Activision reportedly has nearly 400 million monthly active players in 190 countries.

Gotta phone that works on 5G? You won't get the same service near an airport. AT&T and Verizon say they'll hold off on rolling out 5G service within two miles of at least 50 airports when the rest of their 5G networks go live today (Wednesday). That's because airliner's altimeters --which tell the planes how high they are-- can get interference from a 5G signal, which might be a problem for landing the aircraft.

DANIEL RADCLIFFE --known for his "Harry Potter" movies-- will soon be playing parody king “Weird Al” YANKOVIC in a new biopic called “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.” Weird Al has won five Grammys during his career, and has had parody songs in every decade since the 1980s. A press release for the movie claims it'll explore every facet of Al’s life, “from his meteoric rise to fame with early hits like ‘Eat It’ and ‘Like a Surgeon’ to his torrid celebrity love affairs and famously depraved lifestyle.” The movie is set to stream exclusively on the Roku Channel when it's finished.

Lucky to be alive: The NY Post reports a carjacker in Ohio stole an Audi A4 vehicle at a Hyundai dealership and didn't think to look in the back seat, where a 19-year-old guy was sleeping. RAYLON SCOTT and his friend had bought the car at the dealership and were going to trade it in until 32-year-old JUSTIN VAUGHN got in and sped away. Thinking quickly, Scott texted real-time updates of their location “as well as messages about [Vaughn’s] driving and threatening behaviors,” and cops were able to track the car down. Unfortunately, Vaughan crashed the car trying to evade the cops and both he and Scott had minor injuries. When he was arrested by police, Vaughan was charged (of course) with car theft --but also kidnapping and aggravated robbery.

You probably didn't see that comet that passed by the Earth yesterday afternoon. It was only 1.2 million miles away --pretty close in astronomical terms-- and was more than three times the size of the Empire State Building. Fortunately, it didn't pose any threat to the Earth, since it was outside the planet's atmosphere, and won't be back until 2105... so you probably won't see it then, either.

COVID infections aren't just for bats and humans --over in China they've had to put down 2,000 small animals after at least 11 hamsters in Hong Kong pet stores tested positive for COVID-19. One of the pet store's employees also tested positive for the Delta variant, after which officials declared they were going to put down the animals and instructed all the pet stores there to stop selling hamsters. They also tested rabbits and chinchillas, but only the hamsters tested positive. And authorities have now told pet owners they should not take their pets out and should avoid kissing their pets, too.

Meanwhile, here in the United States, more than 12-thousand mink in Utah fur farms have died from the virus, after first contracting the virus more than a year ago.

While we're on the subject, FOX reports the Pfizer COVID-19 pill has been approved in Canada to be used for adult patients with mild or moderate COVID-19 who are also at high risk of becoming more seriously ill. Canadian officials have not okayed it for use on teenagers or on patients who are already hospitalized because of COVID-19. Pfizer has said it also expects to have 250-thousand treatments available in the U.S. by the end of January.

And some bad news for people who love oranges and orange juice. A new report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture says orange crops are projected to be down for the second consecutive season, which means less fruit in supermarkets (and higher prices, of course) as well as less juice in stores. The USDA predicts there might be 16% less Florida oranges than last year.