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Black Friday pulls in a record $7.4 billion

This year’s Black Friday shaped up to be the biggest yet. Americans spent $7.4 billion on Black Friday and $4.2 billion on Thanksgiving Day.

With Thanksgiving landing six days later than last year, retailers amped up their advertising and served up deep discounts on items such as appliances, sporting goods, televisions, consumers and toys, according to Adobe Analytics.

“We’ve got a shorter holiday selling season,” Jason Woosley, Adobe’s vice president of commerce product and platform, told CNN Business earlier this week. “That’s creating a compression effect.”

Consumers spent $11.6 billion over the two days. Friday was also the biggest day ever for mobile sales, as $2.9 billion came from smartphones. People are getting more comfortable with buying online and on smaller screens.

As the cyber weekend continues, Small Business Saturday, a day to support smaller retailers, had pulled in $470 million, as of 9 am ET.

And the shopping sprees are far from over, giving a boost to retailers. Cyber Monday is poised to be even bigger. Adobe is projecting $9.4 billion in online sales. It anticipates that the last few hours of Cyber Monday will attract a lot of sales from people unwilling to miss out on deals.

Woosley estimates that consumers will spend $29 billion online between Thursday and Monday. That five-day “Cyber Week” period should account for a 20% chunk of the $143.8 billion in online sales Adobe predicted for this holiday season.

2 of 3 children missing in Arizona flood are found dead

Two of three children who went missing after floodwater swept up their vehicle in central Arizona have been found dead, the Gila County Sheriff’s Office said Saturday.

The search continues for the third child, authorities said.

The children vanished Friday when a car crossing Tonto Creek, about 60 miles west of the New Mexico border, was caught in flooding around 4 p.m. local time, Gila County Undersheriff Mike Johnson said.

Four children and one adult managed to get out of the vehicle and were stranded on an island in the creek, where they were rescued by a helicopter from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, Johnson said.

A woman who was in the water also got out, but three children were unaccounted for, the undersheriff said.

The children and two adults were all in the car together when it was overtaken by floodwater, Johnson told CNN. It’s unclear how they know each other and how old they are.

A Florida high school is the first in the world to provide synthetic frogs for students to dissect

For some students, dissecting animals in class can be the highlight of the semester. For others, however, it’s cruel and … maybe kind of gross.

But for students at a Florida high school, the learning experience can now come without having to poke and prod a once living, breathing, and hopping animal.

Students at J.W. Mitchell High School in New Port Richey, Florida have become the first in the world to use synthetic frogs for dissection, according to the school.

The high school worked with SynDaver, a company which designs and builds “sophisticated and synthetic humans and animals for surgical training, anatomy education and medical device testing.”

On November 20, the students dissected the realistic, man-made SynFrogs for the first time.

“We are so excited to have partnered with Syndaver so that our Mustangs could be the first students in the world to dissect synthetic frogs,” the high school said on Twitter.

Pelosi to lead group of lawmakers to UN climate change conferenceHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi will lead a group of Democratic lawmakers to a United Nations conference on climate change less than a month after the Trump administration began formally withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord.

The House speaker on Saturday announced she will lead the congressional delegation to the UN COP25 environmental summit “to combat the existential threat of our time: the climate crisis.” Pelosi did not specify which dates the group will attend the conference, which takes place from December 2-13 in Madrid.

“On behalf of the United States Congress, I extend my gratitude to the Spanish government for hosting this critical meeting, and for elevating the priority of the climate crisis to the forefront of the international conversation,” Pelosi said Saturday in a statement.

Pelosi said she was proud to lead the congressional group — which includes Florida Rep. Kathy Castor, who Pelosi tapped to lead the House’s select committee on climate change — “to reaffirm the commitment of the American people to combating the climate crisis.”

—From wire reports

Under the landmark agreement to reduce emissions of planet-warming gases, countries are supposed to increase their commitments to reduce emissions of planet-warming gases every five years — with the first of these updated pledges submitted by the end of 2020. Those revised pledges will be a key focus of the UN COP25 summit.

The State Department also {a href=”https://www.state.gov/u-s-delegation-to-the-25th-session-of-the-conference-of-the-parties-to-the-un-framework-convention-on-climate-change/” target=”_blank”}announced{/a} Saturday that it will send a deputy assistant secretary to lead US officials from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and the Treasury Department to the summit. The statement reiterated that the administration notified the UN on November 4 to {a href=”https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/01/politics/trump-paris-climate-decision/index.html” target=”_blank”}officially begin the US exit{/a} from the Paris agreement.

That lengthy process won’t be completed until just after the 2020 presidential election, but the US withdrawal sent a powerful message: That as the damaging impacts of climate change become more apparent, the US — which according to a recent analysis has contributed more to global warming than any other country — will not be a part of the international charge to solve the crisis.

The Trump administration has {a href=”https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/04/politics/trump-climate-change-policy-rollbacks/index.html” target=”_blank”}steadily worked to roll back{/a} Obama-era environmental regulations that aim to limit air and water pollution and stem the impacts of climate change.

In August, President Donald Trump {a href=”https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/26/politics/donald-trump-g7-climate-summit/index.html” target=”_blank”}skipped a climate change session{/a} held at the G7 summit, and in September, he {a href=”https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/23/politics/un-global-climate-summit/index.html” target=”_blank”}attended the UN Climate Action Summit in New York for roughly 15 minutes{/a} before leaving to hold a session on worldwide religious persecution. The US did not speak at the climate event, where various world leaders gathered to present concrete plans of how to tackle the climate crisis.

A {a href=”https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/26/us/climate-change-un-emissions-report-2019-trnd/index.html” target=”_blank”}UN report released this week{/a} said that the commitments countries pledged to limit the climate crisis are nowhere near enough to stave off record-high temperatures.

CNN’s Drew Kann and Nicole Gaouette contributed to this report.