You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
1 damn paper
Yesterday afternoon, a gunman armed with smoke grenades and a shotgun stormed into the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, shooting five of its employees dead and injuring two others. “I can tell you this,” Chase Cook, a Capital Gazette reporter, tweeted later that evening, “We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow.” [The Baltimore Sun]
16 teams
And then there were 16. The knockout bracket for what has been a surprising and riveting World Cup is now set. Brazil and Spain sit far atop our predictions, with 25 and 20 percent chances to win the whole gosh darn thing, respectively. [FiveThirtyEight]
76 physicians
In what the Justice Department is calling the largest health care fraud takedown in American history, more than 600 people were charged in a multi-billion-dollar scheme involving opioids. Of those, 162, including 76 doctors, were “charged for their roles in prescribing and distributing opioids and other dangerous narcotics,” according to the Justice Department. [CBS News]
1343
The city of Amsterdam first had a mayor nearly 700 years ago, in 1343. Yesterday, it chose its first woman mayor, Femke Halsema. Halsema, 52 years-old, studied social science at Utrecht University, and has worked as a politician, writer, documentary filmmaker and researcher. [BBC]
About $300,000
As we all know, it’s every child’s dream to run a courier business on behalf of an enormous e-commerce and cloud computing company. And now, a few of those precious dreams could come true. Amazon is offering incentives, and potentially profits of $300,000 a year, for people who start a delivery company to deliver its boxes on its behalf. You don’t even need experience in delivery or logistics, the company said! If you live along the Q train in Brooklyn, expect to see yours truly bearing your Christmas gifts to you this year. [Business Insider]
$5 million for interns
The U.S. Senate has allocated $5 million to compensate its interns, who until now have been unpaid, which is patently absurd. (The measure must still be approved by the House.) The measure is an effort to open D.C.’s “halls of power to more economically diverse students,” per the Times. People, for God’s sake: Pay your interns. [The New York Times]
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