You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news. Today’s number is $4.7 million, the weekend box office haul for Clint Eastwood’s latest film, “Richard Jewell,” which made less than half of what it was projected to earn despite its wide-release at more than 2,500 movie screens.
0.1 percent
A new report from the San Diego Tribune found that in the last year, after the Trump administration made “drastic changes” to U.S. asylum policy, only 11 people have been granted asylum in the Migrant Protection Protocols program, also known as Remain in Mexico. That’s only 0.1 percent of all completed cases. The policy changes have “effectively made the majority of non-Mexican migrants ineligible for asylum.” [San Diego Union Tribune]
0 white defendants
Over the last 10 years, the Drug Enforcement Administration has made 179 arrests in reverse-sting cases in the Southern District of New York. However, a nonprofit legal defense group representing representing Johansi Lopez, who was arrested earlier this year in one of those stings, says that none of the people arrested in those cases have been white — all but two were black or Latino. The group Federal Defenders of New York is says Lopez’s arrest is “part of an alarming trend” within the DEA and other agencies that has produced racially biased results in both New York and other major American cities. [Washington Post]
234,000 voter registrations
With the next federal election fewer than 11 months away, a state judge in Wisconsin ordered the removal of up to 234,000 people from the registered voter list because they were flagged as having potentially moved. On Friday, Ozaukee County Judge Paul Malloy “sided with three voters represented by a conservative law firm who argued the state elections commission should have immediately deactivated any of the roughly 234,000 voters who didn’t respond to an October mailing within 30 days.” President Trump carried Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes in 2016. Wisconsin residents can still register to vote as late as Election Day as long as they have photo ID and proof of their address. [PBS NewsHour]
400 rounds of ammunition
The investigation into the deadly shooting last week at a kosher deli in Jersey City, New Jersey, carried out by David N. Anderson and Francine Graham is widening. When Anderson took part in the shooting, which killed four people, he had the phone number and address of a pawnshop almost 40 miles south of Jersey City in his back pocket. The New York Times reports on Ahmed A-Hady’s store and its connection to the anti-Semitic shooting. Ten guns and over 400 rounds of ammunition police were found inside the pawnshop on Friday. Early the next day, A-Hady was arrested on criminal weapons charges. [New York Times]
53,000 residents evacuated
World War II may have ended many decades ago, but its weapons still have the capacity to uproot thousands of people. Roughly 53,000 residents of the southern Italian city of Brindisi were evacuated after a 440-pound, unexploded British bomb was discovered. The bomb, containing 40 kilograms of dynamite, was likely dropped on the city during an air raid in 1941. It was successfully defused. [The Telegraph]
$10 million to community colleges
Eva Gordon died last year at the age of 105, but the secret of her estate’s incredible generosity to community and technical colleges in Washington became public knowledge only recently. Seventeen educational institutions will split $10 million — approximately $550,000 each — with some of the funds specially designated for first-year student scholarships and financial aid for student housing. Gordon’s godson John Jacobs, a financial adviser for Morgan Stanley in Seattle, told the Seattle Times that Gordon’s wealth came from, “hard work, thriftiness and smart investing throughout her life.” [Seattle Times]