Good morning! Today is Tuesday, the fifth of Augst, 2025. In this issue, George looks at why today might be one of the shortest days of 2025, the initial accident report for the Air India Flight 171 crash that points to a disturbing reason for the incident, the arrest of former President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil pending trial, a train crash in Baden-Württenberg, an emergency landing of a Boeing 787 en route to Munich, and the extent of scientific fraud allowing the publication of papers that escape traditional peer-review standards.

George also takes an in-depth look at the James Webb Space Telescope, which has spotted ancient light that should not yet exist.

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A stack of newspapers in Vienna’s Café Prúckel, each in an Original Wiener Zeitungshalter

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@ABOUT GEORGE

George: How to Consume News in a World of Information Overload

George delivers news for curious thinkers in a world of shortened attention spans.

Decades of research on how readers consume information when faced with Information Overload – led by George co-founder Jonathan Spira, one of the foremost authorities on the subject – ensures that each article gets straight to the point with no fluff and no bias.

George presents important news and events of the day clearly and concisely in a format better suited to the modern reader’s limited time and focus, without forsaking the founders’ traditional commitment to fact-driven news, commentary, and dispatches – all prepared by curious thinkers, for curious thinkers.

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@IN BRIEF ON TUESDAY

Tuesday is predicted to be one of the shortest days of the year, as scientists have predicted that 5 August will be 1.34 milliseconds shorter than usual, this according to the International Earth Rotation and Reference System Service and the U.S. Naval Observatory. This will not, however, be the first time that Earth has seen a day shortened by more than a millisecond. Until now, the shortest day ever recorded occurred on 5 July 2024, when it was 1.66 milliseconds short. This year, on 10 July, the day was 1.37 milliseconds shorter than usual.

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In Ukraine, anti-corruption agencies said that they had uncovered a major graft scheme related to the purchase of military equipment including drones, just days after the country’s parliament had restored the agencies’ independence. In a joint statement released on Saturday on social media, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office said the suspects, inculding a member of parliament, local district, and city officials, would “conclude state contracts with supplier companies at deliberately inflated prices” and receive kickbacks of up to 30%.

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The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, India’s air safety organization, issued a preliminary report about the Air India Flight 171 crash, which took place on 12 June 2025. With 260 casualties and only one surviving passenger, the crash is one of the deadliest aviation incidents in recent history. The 15-page report said fuel was cut off to both engines shortly before the Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashed, appearing to rule out mechanical failure or design flaws. This points to a dark and disturbing reason for the crash, namely that, shortly after takeoff, someone cut the flow of fuel to both engines, almost simultaneously. This caused what turned out to be a brief but fatal dual engine shutdown that was impossible to recover from.

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A sneak peek at the desk of George’s executive editor, Jonathan Spira

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The United Kingdom said that it will begin to send migrants back to France within days under a new agreement aimed at curbing illegal Channel crossings. For each person returned, Britain will accept an asylum seeker in France with family in Britain. The plan targets gangs that smuggle migrants across the channel by removing incentives for dangerous crossings and speeding up returns. So far this year, some 25,000 people have already arrived in the country on small boats.

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In the ongoing battle over redistricting in Texas, Mr. Trump on Tuesday said that the Republican party is “entitled to five more seats,” citing his record vote count, although others – including Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Democrat, as well as Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, and Mitt Romney – won higher percentages of the vote than did Mr. Trump.

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Joby Aviation, a maker of electric air taxis, said it will acquire Blade Air Mobility’s passenger business. Blade offersair transportation of up to 100 miles (161 km) for travelers and last-mile critical cargo using helicopters and amphibious seaplanes for passenger routes between Blade terminals in New York City, Vancouver, and several locations in Southern Europe. The company is also one of the largest air medical transporters of human organs for transplant. The medical division was not included in the transaction. In 2024, Blade reported that it flew more than 50,000 passengers from a network of 12 urban terminals including dedicated lounge and terminal bases at John F. Kennedy International Airport and Newark Liberty Airport, as well as the West Side of Manhattan, the East Side of Manhattan and Wall Street.

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In Brazil, former President Jair Bolsonaro was arrested on Monday at the order of the country’s Supremo Tribunal Federal, the country’s supreme court, ahead of his trial for his involvement in a coup to overthrow the country’s current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Along with seven alleged co-conspirators, the 70-year-old former president is standing trial over the events which led up to the storming of government buildings by his supporters on 8 January 2023, a week after Lula’s inauguration.

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A United Airlines pilot declared an emergency shortly after departing Washington Dulles International Airport on 25 July after an engine failure occurred. A United Boeing 787 operating as Flight 108 had just taken off for Munich around 6 p.m. local time. As the aircraft was ascending to 10,000’, the pilot told air-traffic control: “Engine failure, left engine, United 108 declaring an emergency. Mayday, mayday, mayday.”

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In Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany, a regional passenger train derailed in Landkreis Biberach, killing at least three people and seriously injuring at least 50 others on Sunday. Among the dead were the train conductor and one other train worker from the Deutsche Bahn. The cause of the accident remains under investigation.

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The town of Melk, in Niederösterreich, or Lower Austria

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A paper published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paints an alarming picture about the sheer size and sophistication of scientific fraud and uncovered vast evidence of a range of bad actors profiting from fraud. Northwestern University metascientist Reese Richardson and his co-authors found “footprints of activities connected to scientific fraud that extend beyond the production of fake papers to brokerage roles in a widespread network of editors and authors who cooperate to achieve the publication of scientific papers that escape traditional peer-review standards.”

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A new phishing scheme is targeting Austrian shoppers. Cybercriminals are impersonating the parcel delivery service GLS to steal credit card data from Austrian shoppers via convincing looking e-mails that ask shoppers to pay a €2.99 ($3.46) delivery fee by card and redirecting them to a spoofed website that resembles the GLS site.

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@IN DEPTH ON TUESDAY

James Webb Space Telescope is Observing Light That Shouldn’t Yet Exist

The James Webb Space Telescope has been encountering light from objects that, according to current cosmological models, shouldn’t exist yet. The new observations raise questions about our galactic origins as some of the telescope’s farthest observations yet have revealed sources of blue ultraviolet light from an epoch when stars shouldn’t have existed yet.

Designed to conduct infrared astronomy, the JWST is the largest telescope in space. It is equipped with high-resolution and high-sensitivity instruments, allowing it to view objects too old, distant, or faint for the Hubble Space Telescope.

Some of the JWST’s farthest observations yet have revealed sources of blue ultraviolet light from an epoch when stars shouldn’t have existed yet, namely nine new light sources, with six at redshift 17 and three at redshift 25, when the universe was only 200 million to 100 million years old.

Redshift (z) is a measure of how much the light from a distant object has been stretched or shifted towards the red end of the spectrum due to the expansion of the universe. A higher redshift value indicates a greater distance and a more distant past. Because blue is near the highest wavelength of the visible light spectrum, a redshift blue light would indicate that it originated as ultraviolet radiation.

Since its launch in 2021, the JWST has produced new discoveries that have challenged our understanding of everything as we know it.

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@INTERMEZZO

Heavenly Bodies

Celetrial bodies including stars and plans photographed with an Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max on 3 November 2024

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ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

@RECENT DISPATCHES OF NOTE

@QUOTE OF THE DAY

@FOTO OF THE DAY

@PASSINGS

@ WEATHER Forecast for Major Cities in North America, Europe, and Asia

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@RECENT DISPATCHES OF NOTE

A Florida jury found Tesla to be partially liable for a fatal crash in Key Largo that took place in 2019. The vehicle in question, operating in Autopilot mode, killed a pedestrian and left another person badly injured. The jury awarded the plaintiffs $43 million in compensatory damages for pain and suffering plus $200 million in punitive damages, designed to deter future harmful behavior by Tesla. The jury assigned Tesla one-third of the blame and assigned two-thirds to the driver, who was reaching for his cell phone at the time of the crash. The verdict form asked jurors whether Tesla had placed a vehicle on the market “with a defect which was a legal cause of damage” to the plaintiffs. The jurors found that the answer was “yes.”

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Wildfire smoke from Canada is expected to continue to spread across the Midwest and Great Lakes regions and move into the Northeast on Monday. A high-pressure system is set to trap the smoke, with weak winds being unable to blow it away, prompting air-quality warnings. The smoke is likely to reach Europe later in the week as hundreds of fires continue to burn in western Canada..

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@QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“In the [Tesla] showroom, it’s the greatest car ever made,” Schreiber said. “In the courtroom, they say it’s a jalopy.”—Attorney Brett Schreiber addressing the jury in the recent trial in which a Tesla on autopilot killed one person and left another badly injured. Schreiber displayed a 2016 statement by Elon Musk saying that “the emergency braking feature could detect anything, including an alien spaceship or a hunk of metal in the road.”

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@FOTO

Muottas Muragl in Sankt Moritz

Atop Muottas Muragl in Switzerland

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@PASSINGS

Morton Mintz, Investigative Reporter Who Exposed Perils of Thalidomide and Dalkin Shield, Dies at 103

Morton Mintz, a muckraking reporter who exposed scandals including thalidomide and the Dalkin Shield, died on Monday at his residence in Washington. He was 103.

Mr. Mintz, who spent his early years as a reporter working for two St. Louis, Missouri newspapers, the Star-Times and the Globe-Democrat from 1946 through 1958, joined The Washington Post in 1958 where he stayed for 30 years. During his tenure there, he exposed the perils of prescription medical products like thalidomide and the Dalkon Shield, and challenged the auto industry to be more accountable to consumers.

In the course of his reporting for The Washington Post for three decades, he also wrote ten books on corporate corruption and government negligence. Mr. Mintz also gained some renown for having revealed that, in the mid-1960s, General Motors had hired detectives to keep tabs on the consumer protection activist Ralph Nader after he published “Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile,” his best seller whose central theme is that car manufacturers resisted the introduction of safety features such as seat belts, and that Detroit was generally reluctant to spend money on improving safety. The book was particularly critical in its examination of the safety features of the Chevrolet Corvair which, unusual by American standards, was a rear-engine compact auto.

“More than any other reporter, Mintz broke open the walls surrounding the media’s non-coverage of serious consumer, environmental and worker harms and rights,” Mr. Nader said in 2022, when Mr. Mintz celebrated his 100th birthday.

“What made him stay on the story was not just his professionalism and his regard for the readers, but his passion for justice for the underdogs,” Mr. Nader added. “He epitomized the aphorism ‘information is the currency of democracy.’”

In 1983, Mr. Mintz reported on the United States’ refusal during the Second World War to bomb the rail lines to the Konzentrationslager Birkenau, the largest of the more than 40 camps and sub-camps that made up the Auschwitz complex, and to Konzentrationslager Auschwitz itself. The story was based on an exclusive interview with John J. McCloy, who, as an assistant Secretary of War in the 1940s had played a key role in this chapter of the Shoah.

Mr. Mintz was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan on 26 January 1922 and most recently resided in Washington, D.C. He turned 100 in January 2022 and died on 28 July 2025. He was married to Anita Franz for 68 years; Mrs. Mintz died in 2015 and the couple had four children.

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@WEATHER

Kinkakuji, the Golden Pavilion, in Kyoto

Forecast for Major Cities in North America, Europe, and Asia

The forecast for major cities across the United States Tuesday morning as this issue went to press ranged from a high of 85° F and cloudy in New York City, and 86° F and cloudy in Philadelphia, while further south along the I-95 corridor, Washington, D.C. the forecast calls for 80° F with cloudy skies. Elsewhere in the country, the forecast called for 78° F and sunny in Chicago, 93° F and sunny in Dallas, 97° F and partly sunny in Sedona, Arizona, 61° F and cloudy in San Francisco, and 72° F and sunny in Los Angeles.

Here is the National Weather Service forecast issued on Tuesday: “Wildfire smoke continues to result in poor air quality from the Upper Midwest into the Northeast. Multiple days of hot, dry and windy conditions are expected to bring fire weather concerns for portions of the Four Corners region into the central Great Basin and Rockies. Heavy rainfall and a flash flooding threat continues in the Southeast. Severe thunderstorms continue across the Northern Plains.”

In Europe, the forecast on Tuesday at noon Central European Time ranged from 17° C and rain in Oslo, 13° C and rainy in Reykjavik, 19° C and occasional rain in Berlin, 27° C and partly sunny in Vienna, and 22° C and partly sunny in Brussels. In London, the forecast called for 22° C and partly sunny, and the thermometer should reach 33° C with sunny skies in Rome. Jerusalem expects sunny skies with a high of 31° C.

In Asia, the forecast for Tuesday+1 as of noon Eastern Time the previous day is calling for a high of 36° C and cloudy in Bangkok, 36° C and sunny in Beijing, 37° C and sunny skies in Chengdu, 32° C and rainy in Hanoi, 36° C and cloudy in Hong Kong, and 37° C and cloudy in Seoul, 33° C. The forecast for Tokyo calls for a high of 36° and cloudy skies in Tokyo, and 31° C and rain in Singapore.

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 Jonathan Spira, Tim Perry, Alexander Khusid, Kurt Stolz, Anna Breuer, and Paul Riegler contributed to this issue of George.

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