Good morning, it’s Tuesday.
One of the reasons I became a reporter is because I’m bad at math. I assumed – wrongly, as it turned out – that a career based largely in words, both written and spoken, would not require much in the way of numbers.
That might have been true had I chosen to be a feature writer, or maybe an art critic. But since I decided to cover politics and government, which was in my blood (if you’re new here and don’t know my history, this is my dad), it turned out that a basic knowledge of math was pretty much a requirement.
Budgets? Math. Tax rates? Math. Polls, election results, redistricting? Math, math, and more math. It wasn’t pretty, but somehow I managed to muddle my way through a 20-year journalism career, largely by finding experts who knew what they were talking about and interviewing them.
I would not, however, claim to be proficient at math. Thanks to computers, I don’t really have to worry about that anymore. But then I come across headlines like this one – Earth’s “Unthinkable Speed Surge” on August 5, 2025 Sparks Fears and Divides Scientists Over Its Ominous Implications on Our Planet’s Future – and I wish I paid better attention in my mathematics and Earth Sciences classes.
I’ve now read and re-read several articles about this rather troubling phenomenon, and as far as I can tell, the Earth today will spin faster than usual and no one understands why that is. Every day, our planet completes one full rotation on its own axis, which constitutes the 24-hour cycle that includes one day and one night.
Actually, if you want to get technical about it – as science and math people usually do – the Earth’s rotation takes approximately 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds, and if you want to go deep on that, click here. But “24 hours” is the phrase that is commonly used to represent a full solar day.
Today, for some reason that no one has yet figured out, Earth will finish its usual rotation 1.51 milliseconds earlier than usual. To be clear, a millisecond is an incredibly short period of time – one thousandth of a second. Like blink-and-you’ll-miss-it – literally. A camera flash is usually a few milliseconds long, while it takes the average housefly about 3 millisecond to flap its wings.
So, the average person isn’t going to notice that anything is amiss today, but apparently this faster-than-usual rotation has some big implications, scientifically speaking. Precise timing is going to be thrown for a loop because there will be a disruption in the atomic calendar.
This is actually part of a larger trend. After decades of slowing its roll, the Earth is now reversing course and accelerating its rotation. And no one can agree on why.
If the progressive speeding up of the Earth’s rotation persists through 2029, the removal of something called a negative leap second might be necessary. Apparently, this is not easy to do, and could have a significant impact on our increasingly computerized world in which precision timing is everything.
I only understand about a quarter of what I’ve read on this. But quite frankly, the little I do understand I find quite disturbing. It’s a lot easier to return to my blissfully ignorant world of words, though these days, to be honest, that’s growing hard and harder to understand, too.
It will be mostly cloudy and hazy today with a high temperature near or about 85 degrees.
In the headlines…
Addressing what it calls “a clear national security threat,” the Trump administration will require that some foreign visitors pay bonds of up to $15,000 to help ensure they do not overstay their visas, under a State Department trial program announced.
Foreigners seeking to enter the United States on tourist or business visas from countries with high visa overstay rates will be expected to put down no less than $5,000, the department said in a public notice.
Visitors who fail to leave the United States before their visa expires will forfeit their bond; those who comply with their visa requirements will get their money back.
The State Department said it would announce the countries in question at the “Travel.State.Gov” website no fewer than 15 days before the pilot program takes effect. It also said the list might change, again with 15 days notice.
The Trump administration will restore and reinstall the only statue that had honored a Confederate official in the U.S. capital (Albert Pike) after demonstrators toppled and set it on fire during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
Attorney General Pam Bondi yesterday directed Department of Justice (DOJ) officials to open a grand jury investigation into how Obama administration officials handled intelligence about Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The grand jury probe marks another escalation of the Trump administration’s focus on allegations of wrongdoing by Obama officials, including the former president.
A former senior Justice Department official condemned the move as “a dangerous political stunt.” And a former senior national security official pointed out that multiple past reviews, including ones conducted by Republicans, found no such crimes.
Russia will no longer abide by a defunct treaty prohibiting the deployment of intermediate-range missiles, the country’s Foreign Ministry announced.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is announcing expedited plans to build a nuclear reactor on the moon, the first major action by the former Fox News host as the interim NASA administrator.
Duffy is citing plans by China and Russia to put a reactor on the moon by the mid-2030s as part of a partnership to build a base there. If they were first, China and Russia “could potentially declare a keep-out zone” that would inhibit what the US could do there.
Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is urging the Trump administration to commute the sentence of former Long Island Rep. George Santos, who was sentenced to seven years in prison earlier this year to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
Greene shared a letter yesterday in a post on X that she said she had sent to the Office of the Pardon Attorney urging Trump to commute Santos’s sentence.
Canadian wildfires burning across northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan are sending smoke through central Canada, the Great Lakes region and the northeastern United States, reducing air quality and visibility in major cities.
Pollution from fine particulate matter fueled by the wildfires is expected to push the local Air Quality Index past 100, meaning it will be unhealthy for sensitive groups, including children, older adults and people with heart or lung conditions.
The speaker of the Texas House issued civil arrest warrants for lawmakers who fled the state to deny Republicans a quorum, but the scattered Democrats remained defiant.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said that Democrats cannot do “anything about” Republican redistricting plans amid tension between the two parties over the plans. “Texas will continue to fight for what is right, and that’s exactly what we are doing,” he added.
Six Texas Democratic lawmakers came to Albany yesterday to protest what they allege is a push by Trump’s administration to increase the number of Republican seats in Congress.
Hochul criticized Republicans as “law breaking cowboys” and said she would work with her counterparts in New York to begin the process of redistricting in her own state.
Democratic state legislators from Texas who fled their state yesterday to try to block the passage of gerrymandered House maps stood with Hochul with a message: Any notion of fair political mapmaking has ended.
Independent mayoral candidate and ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced a plan to raise NYPD officers’ starting salaries and expand a controversial police unit known as the Strategic Response Group.
Cuomo also used the occasion to take a shot at Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, who following last week’s Midtown shooting said he was backing away from previous calls to defund the NYPD.
“We’ve seen what the NYPD does when they have a mayor who doesn’t have their back. You know what they do? They turn their backs,” Cuomo said.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, in an opinion piece in Rolling Stone, called Mayor Eric Adams and Cuomo “deeply flawed candidates”; she later defended Mamdani’s calls to raise taxes during a combative interview on CNBC.
Warren also joined Mamdani on the campaign trail to highlight his proposal to enact free universal child care, an issue that she had made a central part of her 2020 presidential campaign.
Warren swung by New York City to pay homage to Mamdani, who overwhelmingly won the Democratic nomination for mayor in June — but still hasn’t secured endorsements from many of New York’s party leaders.
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker refused to endorse Mamdani last week when pressed by CNN host Manu Raju, saying: “I have learned a long time ago, let New York politics be New York politics. We got enough challenges in Jersey.”
State Attorney General Letitia James has embraced Mamdani while other New York Democratic leaders are proceeding with caution.
Mamdani isn’t taking questions from New York Post reporters and his campaign doesn’t regularly share his daily schedule with the paper, its editorial board claims.
A close reading of a new book by Mamdani’s father reveals a generational yearning for community and inclusion.
A DSA leader boasted that the group helped write Mamdani’s radical trans rights platform, which pledges to turn the Big Apple into an “LGBTQIA+ Sanctuary City” and punish hospitals for not performing gender reassignment surgery on minors.
Ohio Republican gubernatorial contender Vivek Ramaswamy warned that the far-left movement that gave rise to mayoral hopeful Mamdani is a threat to the entire country.
Adams slammed Mamdani for blowing off NYPD funerals during his years as a state lawmaker — and only now showing up while making a run for City Hall.
Despite one of the city’s deadliest mass shootings in decades, New York City still had one of the safest Julys on record, Mayor Adams said.
The NYPD’s Quality of Life Division — which focuses on low-level issues like abandoned vehicles, garbage, illegal vending and homelessness — will now be expanding across Brooklyn, following similar rollouts in Manhattan and the Bronx earlier this summer.
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, joined by fellow councilmembers and mental health advocates, celebrated the $50 million investment in mental health and safety initiatives made in the fiscal year 2026 adopted New York City budget.
Council Member Jennifer Gutiérrez wants to protect information about the way you walk – the same way the city guards information about tax records and your fingerprints.
More than half of the immigrants arrested in the New York City area by ICE since Jan. 20 do not have criminal convictions or charges, new data shows.
Big Apple education officials funneled $745,000 to a single Caribbean restaurant in Brooklyn over the past year – with numerous orders for jerk chicken and other cultural favorites blowing past spending limits, officials said.
Sean “Diddy” Combs will remain in custody ahead of his sentencing on prostitution offenses, a Manhattan judge ordered yesterday in denying his latest request for bail.
“Combs fails to meet his burden by clear and convincing evidence,” the judge wrote. “Increasing the amount of the bond or devising additional conditions doesn’t change the calculus given the circumstances and heavy burden of proof that Combs bears.”
The owners of the massive East Williamsburg music complex Avant Gardner — which includes the currently closed Brooklyn Mirage, one of the largest concert venues in New York City — have filed for bankruptcy.
A man who dealt drugs from his Bronx apartment, feet from where his children slept, sold them to a customer from Connecticut who died of an overdose within hours, U.S. prosecutors said.
More New Yorkers will soon be able to visit their libraries on Sundays. Starting Sept. 7, 11 more branches across the five boroughs will open seven days a week.
Joby Aviation, which is developing electric aircraft, will acquire the passenger business of Blade, a New York helicopter operator, for $125 million.
The New York Post said that it would introduce a new version next year called The California Post, aiming to muscle in to an ailing local news ecosystem on the West Coast.
The California Post will have headquarters in Los Angeles and replicate The New York Post’s style of bombastic reporting, sports coverage and celebrity gossip from a California perspective, the company said.
An honors student whose arrest by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement provoked outrage on the Suffolk County Community College campus has been deported to Colombia after more than two months in jail.
Albany Medical Center and the New York State Nurses Association reached a tentative agreement for a four-year contract late last week, ending more than a year of negotiations should members vote to ratify it, the union announced.
An Albany County state Supreme Court judge refused to order a new election in the city’s Third Ward Common Council Democratic primary.
A heavily-used ramp on I-787 will close Friday for a bridge inspection, the state Department of Transportation said.
Photo credit: George Fazio.
