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Significant Digits For Friday, Sept. 9, 2016

You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.


5 nuclear tests

The U.S. Geological Survey detected a magnitude 5.3 earthquake early on Friday. The earthquake happened to be observed right near a nuclear weapons test site in North Korea. Indeed, hours later North Korea confirmed that it had conducted a fifth nuclear test. [The Wall Street Journal]


59 percent

With Serena Williams losing in the semifinals, German Angelique Kerber is now the favorite to win the U.S. Open, with a 59 percent chance of doing so according to FiveThirtyEight’s U.S. Open predictions (brought to you by Chase). [FiveThirtyEight]


226 complaints

A Bloomberg analysis found that, since 2008, the 150 largest tech companies in Silicon Valley have faced 226 age discrimination complaints filed with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. There were more complaints regarding age than even race or gender bias. [Bloomberg]


5,300 employees

Wells Fargo has fired 5,300 employees in the past several years for creating unauthorized banking and credit card accounts for unwitting customers — all to earn more fees and up sales figures. Employees filed 565,443 credit card applications in customers’ names without the customers knowing. [CNN]


$100,000

Signing bonus the New York Mets paid to Tim Tebow, who was a not-very-good NFL quarterback but wants to roll the dice playing baseball apparently. That’s the highest bonus a team can give to a post-draft signing without getting penalized. Tebow will play for the Mets’ instructional team. In far better news, football is back! [CBS Sports]


$21.6 million

Amount raised in August by Priorities USA Action, a super PAC supporting Hillary Clinton. Priorities has raised $161 million in the election cycle so far. [The New York Times]


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Walt Hickey was FiveThirtyEight’s chief culture writer.

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