Hi, everybody. Hope you're off to a great start to your week. Welcome to Scoop, where we give you a solid

serving of news at the beginning of your week through smarter news, get you ready, give you a good

foundation. So you're prepared for whatever sort of headlines are thrown in your direction.

As we start off on this Monday, we're already seeing some developing stories. And what I'm going to be looking at are some of the big stories that we've watched over the last several days, even over the last week, as we have some significant updates that I think are really important to watch. Some of these topics are heavy. But we're going to go for it today because these are really, really important. Before I get to that, though, I do have something beautiful to show you as we head into the final week of March.

We're already almost a quarter through, 2023, if you can believe it, if you start thinking about it that way, really hits home.

Let me show you this, though. We are in peak bloom in Washington, D.C. and there is a live stream.

You can actually see that cherry blossoms in full bloom in Washington,

D.C. on the National Mall. You just go to bloomcam.org. You even can see it. It could be a little

windy sometimes and the camera starts shaking, but we're getting a really nice view of the beautiful

blossoms there on the National Mall. It was actually many, many years ago

on this day that the first cherry blossom trees were planted in Washington, D.C. And this started

the tradition that we're seeing today. And we have a great backstory on that as well on our

newsletter and on our website today. So definitely check that out. So nice to enter a week

in peak bloom. We'll take that versus not being peak. We might as well be peak, right?

And we're going to go from there to another sort of interesting natural phenomenon that's also

happening this week. Don't have an image of it. I'll actually be looking to you to see if you

capture any images of this. We're going to have an image of it. I'll actually be looking to you to see if you capture any images

of this. We're going to have a unique planet alignment, five planets in alignment, Mercury

through Mars. And if you look basically at the moon, not when it's pitch black. They said the best

time to view it is when it's sort of like that navy blue sky, you should be able

to see the planets in line, even with the naked eye, not necessarily need binoculars.

You look for what looks to be the brightest star in the sky, and that is Venus, actually.

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