You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
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44 percent
Traffic decrease from Google to the Wall Street Journal after the latter began blocking Google users from reading the site for free. Still, Journal subscriptions went up as a result. [Bloomberg]
44.1 percent
FiveThirtyEight launched a new interactive on Monday to track the national generic congressional ballot (a recurring poll question that asks people whether they would support an unnamed Democrat or an unnamed Republican in their congressional district). Democrats lead the GOP 44.1 percent to 36.9 percent, as of Monday evening. [FiveThirtyEight]
442 non-nominees
President Trump slammed Democrats on Monday for not approving his ambassadors quickly enough. It’s an odd complaint because ambassadors can get through Senate confirmation with zero Democratic support (diplomatic nominees can’t be filibustered), and the actual bottleneck appears to be at the White House: The administration has not yet picked a nominee for 442 of 559 key government positions requiring Senate affirmation. [Yahoo]
$60,000
Approximate amount a drug dealer can make from a kilogram of heroin costing around $4,000. This is done by diluting the pure product. With a kilogram of the far more potent fentanyl (which also costs about $4,000), that dealer can make $1.2 million. This financial incentive is one of many things driving the U.S. opioid crisis. And because fentanyl is far stronger than heroin, it’s also far deadlier. [BuzzFeed]
$2.2 billion
There are major hunger crises in South Sudan, Nigeria, Yemen and Somalia. The United Nations set a goal to raise $6.1 billion to address the crises; so far, only $2.2 billion has been pledged. [The Washington Post]
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