You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
63 months
Reality Winner, the NSA contractor who pleaded guilty to leaking a top-secret document about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election to the news website The Intercept, was sentenced to 63 months in prison. Winner is the first person charged by the Trump administration under the Espionage Act for leaking documents, and the sentence is the longest ever for an unauthorized disclosure to the media. [The Guardian]
3 games
Urban Meyer, Ohio State’s football coach, was suspended for the first three games of the upcoming college football season. An investigation revealed that Meyer mishandled allegations of domestic assault against a former Ohio State assistant coach, Zach Smith, and misrepresented to the public what he knew about the situation. [ESPN]
581 years
This week is the hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, and more than 1.7 million foreign pilgrims are in Saudi Arabia for it. In 2012, at its peak attendance, more than 3 million pilgrims attended. Safety concerns have led the Saudi government to expand hajj facilities to allow for higher attendance, but, nevertheless, assuming that there were 3 million people per hajj, the Times calculated that it would take 581 years for every Muslim currently alive on the planet to attend. [The New York Times]
1 candidate
Actually, my colleague Perry Bacon Jr. wrote on Thursday, Republicans are talking about the impeachment of President Trump way more than Democrats are. For one thing, a FiveThirtyEight analysis of the campaign websites of 811 people who appeared on ballots in Democratic primaries revealed that only one candidate called for impeachment. (He lost.) [FiveThirtyEight]
$25 million
More than $25 million in prize money will be at stake this weekend as fierce competitors battle each other on stage in Dota 2, a “multiplayer online battle arena.” The elite video game championship, called The International, is being held at center ice in the hockey arena that is home to the Vancouver Canucks. [NPR, h/t @heckfu]
$1 billion in debt
The CEO of American Media, which publishes the National Enquirer and other tabloids, is a longtime friend of President Trump. But that apparently didn’t stop him from offering information in the criminal investigation into six-figure “hush-money” deals that were struck during the 2016 presidential campaign with two women who said they had had affairs with Trump. Sources told The Wall Street Journal that David Pecker was granted immunity in exchange for information about the president and his former lawyer Michael Cohen. American Media itself, meanwhile, is struggling and has been trying to restructure about $1 billion in debt. [The Wall Street Journal]
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