Alaska Diesel Pardons, a Leap Second Vote, and a Deadly Georgia Coaster

MayaI set three alarms this morning and still felt like I was running a minute behind.

DavidA minute? That's ambitious.

MayaRight? Anyway, this is the Morning Rundown. I'm Maya, and David's here to keep me honest.

DavidSomebody has to. We've got three stories today.

MayaWait, one of them is about time itself?

DavidA vote on whether to mess with the clocks. Seriously.

MayaSo I get to blame somebody for my lateness, finally.

DavidDon't get excited. It's a lighter one, but there are real stakes buried in it.

MayaOkay, and the first one has a president, a stage, and a pen.

DavidWhich is a very Alaska way to do paperwork.

MayaIt really is. We'll get into what got signed and why people are talking about it.

DavidAnd we'll keep it fair because there's an argument on each side of that one.

MayaOkay, and the last one is a different tone. It's about the deadly accident on the Goliath Coaster at Six Flags in Georgia.

DavidHmm. Yeah, we'll be careful with that one and stick to what's actually known.

MayaSo anyway, let's start with a rally in Alaska, where the president signed some paperwork on stage. All right, the paperwork. The two men pardoned in Wasilla are Zachary Czubak and Patrick Fleming. Both pleaded guilty back in 2022 to Clean Air Act tampering.

DavidTampering, which sounds dramatic until you find out what it means.

MayaRight. Taking emissions controls off diesel vehicles. The Hill reported that prosecutors said the two of them and a third man pulled those controls from at least 37 vehicles.

DavidOver what stretch?

MayaJuly 2019 to September 2020. Call it 14 months.

DavidHmm, so not a one-off in somebody's garage.

MayaNo. That's the prosecutor's account, to be clear, and both men did plead guilty.

DavidOkay, but this isn't the first batch. The Hill also says Trump pardoned nine people in similar cases back in July.

MayaNine. And a White House official called those cases overzealous enforcement by earlier administrations. I mean, come on, that's a pretty standard line from this White House.

DavidIt is, but the underlying question is fair. Where should enforcement priorities set when the violation is a mechanic deleting an emissions system? Reasonable people land in different places.

MayaDepends who you ask, right?

DavidTotally. And in Alaska, the pitch has a local hook. Alaska Beacon's coverage of the rally says Senate Dan Sullivan had pushed for these pardons.

MayaWhy him?

DavidHis argument is that the emissions equipment hurts performance in cold weather. That's his claim, not an engineering study, but you can see why it lands up there.

MayaMy car complains at 50 degrees. I can't imagine Wasilla in January.

DavidSame coverage says Trump had earlier pardoned Mackenzie Spurlock of Matanuska Diesel in a related case. So Alaska has been a theme.

MayaAnd the timing is not subtle. He signed these while campaigning for Republicans, Sullivan included.

DavidRight, on stage at a rally, October 13th. That's the date of the Wasilla event in the local coverage.

MayaWhich is exactly how The New York Times read it. Their headline calls the pardons another giveaway in Trump's midterm pitch.

DavidThat's one outlet's framing, and you can see why they'd go there. Pardon plus rally plus midterms. Supporters would say the enforcement went too far to begin with. A headline tells us how one outlet read it, not how voters see it.

MayaAnd what happens next? Any fallout?

DavidNothing in the reporting I have, so I'm not going to guess.

MayaGood. Ask what the rule is for and ask why the announcement came on a stage during a campaign. Neither question cancels the other.

DavidFrom a pardon pen to one tiny tick of the clock, apparently timekeepers may be ready to drop it.

MayaOkay, who decides that?

DavidThe leap second. CNN's Katie Hunt wrote that international timekeepers are on track to vote on eliminating it.

MayaEliminating it. Wait, what does it even do? Be honest, I have never thought about it once.

DavidNobody has. It's the tiny link between Earth's rotation and the world's time standard. Hunt's piece says many people call that link important.

MayaMany, not all.

DavidRight, which is why there's a vote.

MayaSo is it done? Did they vote?

DavidNot that we can tell. The reporting we have says they're on track to vote. No result yet.

MayaOkay, so what's actually on the table?

DavidScientific American laid it out. Right now, the allowed gap between UTC and Earth's rotation is one second. The proposal would widen that.

MayaWiden it how?

DavidTheir headline says leap hour. That's the phrase in the title. And the piece says widening it would effectively end leap seconds for hundreds of years.

MayaHundreds of years. So my great-great-grandkids don't have to think about it either?

DavidProbably not, no. Though the piece only says hundreds of years, so don't hold me to an exact number.

MayaOkay, but explain the gap thing to me like I'm five.

DavidThe way I read it, UTC is the world's time standard, and Earth's rotation is the thing it's linked to. Leap seconds are what keep the two within a second of each other. Widening the allowed gap means they could drift further apart before anyone has to adjust.

MayaSo it's less like stopping the clock and more like loosening the leash.

DavidThat's a fair way to say it, though that's my plain language reading. The sources give us the headline, not the mechanics.

MayaWhen would this start?

DavidPossibly as early as 2027, and that's a proposal, not a decision. Everything hangs on the vote.

MayaFine, but why now? Leap seconds have been around forever. Somebody woke up and got annoyed?

DavidHere's the part I like. It's about risk. Scientific American reports that Patrizia Tavella from the BIPM estimates about a 30% chance of a negative leap second by 2035 if nothing changes.

MayaNegative, as in you take a second away?

DavidThat's the idea of the word, yes. And the piece calls that risk the stated reason for urgency.

MayaHold on, 30%? That's almost one in three.

DavidRoughly, yeah. And it's an estimate, so I wouldn't tattoo it on anything.

MayaNoted. No tattoo.

DavidBut think about the logic. The usual fix is adding a second. Taking one away is the unusual direction, and the sources I have don't go into the technical details of what would break.

MayaRight. So we shouldn't pretend to know.

DavidExactly. What we can say is that the people closest to it treat that possibility as the reason to act now.

MayaAnd 2035 isn't exactly far off.

DavidNo, and the possible 2027 start is even closer. That's why this vote is getting attention now rather than later.

MayaI mean, come on, it's a little funny though. A whole international body, and the thing that gets them moving is a possible minus one second?

DavidSmall number, big headache. That's usually how timekeeping goes.

MayaAnd the other side, the folks who say the link matters?

DavidHunt's piece says many call it important. The summary I have doesn't spell out their reasons, so I'll leave that alone.

MayaFair. Better than me guessing at it. I'd guess wrong, and then somebody's atomic clock would email us.

DavidThey would, politely.

MayaSo where does that leave us? Vote on the way, proposal on the table, no winner yet.

DavidThat's it. We watch for the result. Now, a heavier story from a theme park in Georgia.

MayaA man died on the Goliath coaster at Six Flags Over Georgia, and several other people were hurt.

DavidHmm. What do we actually know?

MayaCNN's live coverage says Six Flags temporarily closed nine rides afterwards. That's nine, not just the one coaster.

DavidNine? That's a lot of the park.

MayaIt is, and that reporting is as of October 14th, so things could move while we're talking.

DavidRight. Updates are likely.

MayaSo if you hear something newer after this, go with the newer report.

DavidAbsolutely. We're only giving you the picture as it stood in this coverage.

MayaOne thing to keep in mind is the word temporary. The summary I have doesn't say which rides those are or when they might reopen.

DavidSo we hold onto temporary, and we don't read more into the number than the report gives.

MayaNow, the man. CBS Atlanta reports police identified him as Hassan Jihad Ibn Kariem. He was 42 years old.

DavidForty-two.

MayaAnd he worked as an IT manager at a charter school in Atlanta.

DavidSo somebody's colleague, somebody's family.

MayaAnd I don't wanna guess at anything beyond that. We only have what police and the reporting give us.

DavidFair. Thank you for that. So who's looking into it?

MayaCBS Atlanta says Cobb County Police are investigating. So is Georgia's Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner's Office.

DavidTwo agencies.

MayaTwo. And Six Flags says it's cooperating with the investigation.

DavidOkay. The question everybody has is how this happened.

MayaYeah, and the answer right now is that we don't have one. Authorities haven't said how he left his seat.

DavidHmm.

MayaCNN's headline used the word ejected, but nobody official has explained what that means in practice, so I'm not going to fill that gap.

DavidGood. Speculation helps nobody here, least of all his family.

MayaTotally. Those investigators will take the time they take, and the details should come from them.

DavidIt's a hard thing to hold because the pull is to want a reason right now, a cause, a mistake, someone to point at.

MayaRight. But first accounts of something like this can be wrong, and the people closest to it deserve the careful version. Authorities haven't explained what happened, so we wait. Nine rides shut, two agencies looking, no explanation yet.

DavidOne more thing from CBS Atlanta. Its headline calls this the latest deadly incident at a Georgia theme park.

MayaRight, and that phrasing tells us this kind of headline has been written there before. But the summary I have doesn't lay out those earlier incidents, so I'm not going to either.

DavidUgh. A rough one to end on.

MayaIt is, and I think it's worth saying plainly, a man is gone, and the people who knew him are dealing with that while the rest of us read headlines.

DavidYes. Whatever the investigators find, he was a person with a job and people who knew him. That's where we should leave it.

MayaOkay. We made it through all three, so quick lap. Alaska first, pardons handed out at a rally in Wasilla, and the argument over what that says about enforcement versus favors is going to keep rolling into the midterms.

DavidRight, and supporters and critics are both going to keep telling their own version of it.

MayaThen the clocks. Timekeepers wanted to stop adding seconds, mostly so nobody has to subtract one.

DavidWhich is a sentence I never expected to say out loud.

MayaSame. And I'll be honest, the result of that vote is not in our sources. So if you hear how it went, you know more than we do.

DavidHmm. Same caveat on Georgia, and that one weighs more.

MayaWay more. The investigation is still open. Nobody has said what went wrong on that coaster, and we're not gonna guess.

DavidRight. Families are waiting for real answers, and those come from investigators, not from us.

MayaTotally. Okay. Go hug somebody, David. Maybe call your mom.

DavidI'll do that before I start the car.

MayaGood. We'll keep an eye on both the vote and the investigation and tell you what we learn when there's something solid to say.

DavidPlease do. Those are the two I'll be watching, and I'd rather wait for real answers than get ahead of them.

MayaThanks for spending the morning with us, and that's the rundown.