Good Wednesday morning.
It’s International Asteroid Day, which is a United Nations sanctioned day of public awareness regarding the risks of asteroid impacts.
Yup. Did you know that every year, the Earth is hit by about 6,100 meteors large enough to reach the ground. That’s about 17 every day, though the vast majority land in remote locations and are never even noticed.
The field of asteroid study gained attention in popular culture in the 1980s, when the mass extinction of the dinosaurs was officially linked to a single strike of a comet or asteroid. (BTW, the difference is that asteroids are rocky, while comets are more like dirty snowballs of space stuff).
In 2000, Australian engineer Michael Paine announced he had undertaken a computer analysis of asteroid impacts indicating that indicated they could cause considerable chaos over a 100,000-year period.
Most disturbing was a 5-kilometer asteroid, which exploded with a power of 23 million megatons – easily enough to wipe out the human population – though he largely ignored this possibility, since it was highly unlikely to occur in any given 100,000-year span.
Paine estimated the annual risk of a fatal asteroid impact at one in 90, concluding that an average of 120,000 people would die per event. The biggest worry is actually not the impact itself, but rather tsunamis that could be caused when an asteroid hits the ocean, which covers about 70 percent of the planet. According to Paine’s simulation, the average tsunami would kill 470,000 people.
According to NASA, there are no known asteroids that will impact Earth in the next 100 years and even then, they have a very low possibility of doing so. The asteroid designated as 2009 FD has a possibility of less than .2 percent to impact Earth in 20185.
So, in other words, this isn’t something to lose sleep over, necessarily. Nevertheless, most experts say that it’s important that we track asteroids and develop deflection methods – just to be on the safe side.
It’s going to be just a hair cooler, with temperatures in the high 80s as opposed to the 90s, and 78 percent humidity, though there’s a heat advisory in effect from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., as the heat index is going to be around 101.
Scattered thunderstorms are possible throughout the morning, some of which may be severe, and this will give way to mainly cloudy skies in the afternoon with storms more likely.
In the headlines…
President Joe Biden argued in Wisconsin that the bipartisan infrastructure proposal he agreed to last week would benefit working and middle-class families around the country.
The president portrayed the compromise as the largest federal infrastructure effort since President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed legislation creating the interstate highway system 65 years ago.
Biden said the deal would result in a “generational investment” that would help replace structurally deficient bridges and aging water lines, and shore up the nation’s energy grid.
The Biden administration is developing an executive order directing agencies to strengthen oversight of industries that they perceive to be dominated by a small number of companies, a wide-ranging attempt to rein in big business power.
The executive order, which Biden could sign next week, would direct regulators of industries from airlines to agriculture to rethink their rule-making process to spur competition and give consumers, workers and suppliers more rights to challenge large producers.
With little fanfare, the Biden administration is working on plans for an organized review of thousands of cases of people who say they were unjustly deported in recent years.
Biden will nominate academic Amy Gutmann as U.S. ambassador to Germany today, as the two countries move closer after relations deteriorated under former President Donald Trump.
The House voted to remove statues honoring Confederate and other white supremacist leaders from public display at the United States Capitol, renewing an effort to rid the seat of American democracy of symbols of rebellion and racism.
The president and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Surfside, Florida tomorrow after a residential building partially collapsed in the coastal city last week, the White House announced.
Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said the Florida state attorney would be calling for a grand jury to do an investigation of the Surfside collapse site, and on how a similar situation can be avoided in the future.
Grand juries in Florida are able to examine criminal matters and explore issues of public policy, returning indictments as well as reports aimed at recommending changes to lawmakers.
At least 12 people are dead and 149 people are unaccounted for in the collapse, while search and rescue teams continue to race to find the missing. No survivors have been found since last week.
The round-the-clock rescue operation now involves 210 workers scouring the giant mound at any given time. In the days since the collapse, crews had moved three million pounds of concrete off the pile.
In the wake of the Champlain Towers South disaster, the building next door is facing new scrutiny: Champlain residents had complained that construction there would regularly cause their units to shake.
Less than three months before the collapse, the president of the condominium association warned in a letter that the damage in the building had “gotten significantly worse” since it was highlighted in a 2018 inspection.
Ross Prieto, the former Surfside building official who had been told of problems at the Champlain Towers South nearly three years ago, is now on leave from his current job.
With a new variant of the coronavirus rapidly spreading across the globe, masks are again the focus of conflicting views, and fears, about the course of pandemic and the restrictions required to manage it.
Countries across the Asia-Pacific region are scrambling to slow the spread of the more infectious Delta variant, reimposing restrictions and stay-at-home orders in a jarring reminder that the pandemic is far from over.
Kim Jong Un said North Korea’s Covid-19 situation has become grave and admonished senior officials for lapses in the fight against the disease.
After World Health Organization officials urged fully vaccinated people to continue wearing masks out of concern about the global spread of the Delta variant, New York City and Los Angeles County appear to now be taking slightly diverging approaches.
Members of the U.S. military who were vaccinated against COVID-19 showed higher-than-expected rates of heart inflammation, although the condition was still extremely rare, according to a study released yesterday.
Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine should remain protective against recently detected viral variants, including the Delta variant first identified in India, the company announced.
Utah’s hospitalized COVID-19 patients jumped to its highest number in months yesterday as the state continues to experience a small surge in cases of the disease.
As the pandemic slows in the U.S., public-health departments say they are finally able to reach for the traditional goal of contact tracing: stopping new outbreaks.
As troubling new variants emerge, doctors say America’s chances of winding down the Covid-19 pandemic in the U.S. will largely depend on how many young adults and children get vaccinated.
After a year of COVID-19 restrictions, Oregon and Washington will reopen their economies today, effectively ending most of the state’s restrictions.
A recent poll found that American workers are more likely to be vaccinated against COVID-19 if their employers offer paid time off for them to get and recover from the shots, indicating a potential way to boost vaccination rates.
Disney Cruise Line postponed its first sailing since the start of the coronavirus pandemic after numerous participants slated to be on the test voyage came back with “inconsistent” virus test results.
The U.S. Supreme Court refused to lift a moratorium on evictions that had been imposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The court rejected an emergency request by landlords and real-estate companies to clear the way for evictions after a federal judge in Washington ruled last month that the moratorium was legally unsupportable.
U.S. home prices surged at their fastest pace ever in April as buyers competing for a limited number of homes on the market pushed the booming housing market to new records.
The federal government has for months refused to reimburse New York City’s public hospital system for more than $860 million in coronavirus-related emergency expenses due to a Kafkaesque payout formula that is incompatible with the “real world.”
Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s plan to build a memorial honoring essential workers is facing growing pushback from elected officials and residents of Battery Park City.
The rules of restaurant spaces are up for grabs as the city’s Department of Transportation looks to the future of street and sidewalk seating.
The law firm retained by the state Assembly to conduct an impeachment investigation of Cuomo has declined to interview numerous current and former state troopers who have worked on the detail that protects the governor.
Lawmakers in the state Assembly anticipate discussions about possibly issuing subpoenas to witnesses involved in the wide-ranging impeachment investigation into Cuomo during a meeting scheduled for today.
State Republican Party leaders seemed hurt that gubernatorial hopeful Andrew Giuliani didn’t do more to schmooze them during his upstate campaign tour, according to audio of the discussions obtained by The NY Post.
The too-close-to-call Democratic primary race that will likely decide New York’s next mayor was thrown into disarray after election officials admitted they accidentally included “test” results in the vote count, resulting in 135,000 extra ballots.
The results released earlier in the day had suggested that the race between Eric Adams and his two closest rivals had tightened significantly.
The results showed Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, held on to his initial lead from the night of the June 22 primary, garnering 51.1% of the more than 920,000 votes the board counted, while Kathryn Garcia had 48.9% of votes.
But just a few hours after releasing the preliminary results, the elections board issued a cryptic tweet revealing a “discrepancy” in the report, saying that it was working with its “technical staff to identify where the discrepancy occurred.”
“The board apologizes for the error and has taken immediate measures to ensure the most accurate up-to-date results are reported,” BOE said in a statement, adding it will try again to get it right today.
In typical elections, absentee ballots mirror those that were cast in-person, but Adams can’t count on that here.
Adams blasted New York City officials for opening fewer cooling centers in Queens during the recent heat wave — particularly in the borough’s southern neighborhoods largely populated by black residents.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has been through eight city budgets, but says there’s no doubt the one he’ll unveil today is the most important of all.
Fox News, once home to accused workplace sexual harassers Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, was whacked with a record $1 million fine by the city’s Commission on Human Rights.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is on the hunt for a new office campus in Dallas that could become the Wall Street bank’s largest presence in the U.S. outside of its Manhattan headquarters.
Rep. Nydia Velazquez wants to nix the MTA’s move to end cash transactions at subway token booths and force the agency to keep the booths staffed indefinitely.
Donald Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen said the ex-president could still face criminal charges whether or not his chief bookkeeper flips.
Attorneys for New York described the opioid industry as one that pushed pills and chased profits while disregarding the human toll of addiction, their initial salvo in the first opioid case in the country where a jury rather than a judge will decide the outcome.
Advocates hope New York’s revamped rent relief program will finally help tenants and landlords who’ve struggled to get assistance since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The latest in the NXIVM saga – “Smallville” actress Allison Mack is set to be sentenced today in federal court for her role in the reputed sex cult.
Four people were arrested in connection with a fast-moving fire in Spring Valley that destroyed an assisted living home in the New York suburbs in March, killing a resident and a firefighter who died trying to rescue those trapped in the burning building.
A Capital Region bank will pay $275,000 in fines and penalties for allegedly allowing auto dealers to mark up the interest rates for minority buyers on cars they underwrote.
As Great Escape, like other businesses, struggles to get enough employees, they are dropping their “grooming guidelines” that required workers to not have “piercings, tattoos and unique hairstyles.”
Some candidates for Saratoga Springs office and social justice advocates say a public meeting and press conference led Monday by a senior police official about recent violent incidents in the city was “political,” “dividing” and contained “dog-whistle racist rhetoric.”
The fire that destroyed row houses Monday was accidentally set by a resident smoking in the rear of one of the buildings who tossed a cigarette onto a pet bed, City of Watervliet officials said.
Albany Medical Center Dean Vincent Verdile will retire at the end of this year after two decades in the medical school’s top spot, Albany Med President and CEO Dennis McKenna said this week.
Doug Grose, who took over the leadership role at Albany Nanotech through its nonprofit entity NY CREATES, is retiring three years after he was brought in to transform an organization once staggered by the arrest of its ex-leader, Alain Kaloyeros.
The state Gaming Commission agreed to increase Powerball drawings from two to three times a week.
Starting yesterday, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers are on track to get their driver’s licenses reinstated as a new law took effect that ends the widespread practice of suspending a person’s license when they can’t afford to pay a traffic fine.
Starting tomorrow, the hourly minimum wage for fast food workers will be raised to $15 per hour throughout New York.
Democratic Assemblyman Billy Jones urged the Biden administration to take “unilateral” action and reopen the U.S. border with Canada, pointing to the economic havoc the continued closure has caused in New York’s North Country region.
Washington County District Attorney Tony Jordan will serve as the next president of the District Attorneys Association of New York, a post that’s become a focal point amid an ongoing debate over criminal justice law changes in the state.
With college athletes poised to cash in on their name, image and likeness for the first time, Siena men’s basketball coach Carmen Maciariello said his program will benefit from the NCAA’s proposed change in policy.
Just in time for July 4th, the latest shortage in America is fireworks. Capital Region vendors are trying to keep up with the demand and prepare for upcoming shows.
An Army veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan is seeking the Democratic nomination for Congress to take on Republican Central New York Rep. John Katko in next year’s midterm elections.
Khalid Bey is the winner of the Syracuse mayoral Democratic primary after absentee ballots were counted.
Brooklyn-bred actor Stuart Damon, who for decades played Dr. Alan Quartermaine on the popular daytime soap “General Hospital,” has died at age 84.
Serena Williams waited two years, through injury and a global pandemic, to return to Wimbledon’s Centre Court yesterday. Her stay lasted all of 34 minutes, cut short by a slip that forced her to withdraw from the tournament.
