You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
16-year pause
Attorney General William Barr has ordered that the federal death penalty be reinstated; the last execution in the federal system came in 2003. Barr also ordered the Bureau of Prisons to go ahead with the executions of five federal inmates convicted of murder, which are now scheduled for late this year and early next year. There are, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, currently 61 federal death row inmates. [NBC News]
26 pounds
A Texan and U.S. citizen named Francisco Erwin Galicia spent 23 days in U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody, where he and 60 other men slept on a crowded floor. Galicia was not allowed to shower, and he says he lost 26 pounds in that time because of a lack of food. The federal officials “had earlier refused to acknowledge his citizenship when presented with his birth certificate.” [The Dallas Morning News]
15 million freebies
As the Tour de France rolls through, well, France, a corporate caravan rolls with it, distributing freebies to the crowds that include snacks, T-shirts and key rings. Many of these items are plastic or at least wrapped in it, irking environmentalists. Tour organizers say the number of distributed freebies has fallen from 18 million in recent years to 15 million this year, and the Tour’s main caterer is ditching plastic for bamboo cutlery and cane and wood pulp containers. [Reuters]
3 large asteroids
From the Department of Blissful Ignorance: Three large asteroids buzzed planet Earth on Wednesday, one coming even closer to us than the moon. That one, called 2019 OD, is 393 feet across at its widest, and it zoomed by at 42,926 miles per hour. None of the three was considered a threat, per NASA. [CNN]
12.2 percentage points
Kamala Harris’s debate bounce is fading, my colleague Nate Silver writes. Per the RealClearPolitics average, Harris moved from 7 points a week before the debate, to a peak of 15.2 points, to 12.2 points now. Her chief debate rival, Joe Biden, moved from 32.1 to 26.0 to 28.4. [FiveThirtyEight]
108.6 Fahrenheit
Paris is burning — well, nearly. The city hit 108.6 degrees Fahrenheit on Thursday, the hottest temperature ever recorded there, breaking a record of 104.7 degrees set in 1947. Record highs were also set in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium. [The New York Times]
From ABC News:
SigDigs: July 26, 2019
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