Hurricane Milton dumped so much rain over parts of Florida’s Tampa Bay area that it qualified as a 1-in-1,000-year rainfall event.

St. Petersburg had 18.31 inches of rain — or more than 1.5 feet — in the 24-hour period during which the storm made landfall, according to precipitation data from the National Weather Service.

That included a staggering 5.09 inches in one hour, from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. ET — a level considered to have roughly a 0.1% chance of happening in any given year.

Black girls face more discipline and more severe punishments in public schools than girls from other racial backgrounds, according to a groundbreaking new report set for release Thursday by a congressional watchdog.

The report, shared exclusively with NPR, took nearly a year-and-a-half to complete and comes after several Democratic congressional members requested the study. Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, later with support from Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, asked the Government Accountability Office in 2022 to take on the report.

Over the course of the 85-page report, the GAO says it found that in K-12 public schools, Black girls had the highest rates of so-called "exclusionary discipline," such as suspensions and expulsions. Overall, the study found that during the 2017-18 school year, Black girls received nearly half of these punishments, even as they represent only 15% of girls in public schools.

• A new rule proposal from the Biden administration would prohibit products that are subject to U.S.-China tariffs from being eligible for a special customs exemption.

• The de minimis loophole allows packages with a value of less than $800 to enter the United States with relatively little scrutiny.

• Officials say a recent explosion in the number of de minimis shipments is due largely to Chinese-linked online retail giants like Shein and Temu.

What would happen inside an electromechanical central office if you left your phone off hook?

From the channel Connections Museum

AMD is warning about a high-severity CPU vulnerability named SinkClose that impacts multiple generations of its EPYC, Ryzen, and Threadripper processors. The vulnerability allows attackers with Kernel-level (Ring 0) privileges to gain Ring -2 privileges and install malware that becomes nearly undetectable.

Tracked as CVE-2023-31315 and rated of high severity (CVSS score: 7.5), the flaw was discovered by IOActive Enrique Nissim and Krzysztof Okupski, who named privilege elevation attack 'Sinkclose.'

Full details about the attack will be presented by the researchers at tomorrow in a DefCon talk titled "AMD Sinkclose: Universal Ring-2 Privilege Escalation."

• CVE-2023-31315
• AMD-SB-7014

Public sentiment on the importance of safe, lifesaving childhood vaccines has significantly declined in the US since the pandemic—which appears to be solely due to a nosedive in support from people who are Republican or those who lean Republican, according to new polling data from Gallup.

In 2019, 52 percent of Republican-aligned Americans said it was "extremely important" for parents to get their children vaccinated. Now, that figure is 26 percent, falling by half in just five years. In comparison, 63 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners said it was "extremely important" this year, down slightly from 67 percent in 2019.

Last week, the World Health Organization called attention to an mpox outbreak in South Africa. Officials there confirmed 20 cases between May 8 and July 2, with 18 hospitalizations and three deaths.

Another concern is the Democratic Republic of Congo, where an outbreak that began last year has been accelerating — and where the variant is dramatically deadlier than the mpox strain of 2022. About 6% of people who get this type of mpox are dying from it — compared to a 0.2% death rate for the 2022 strain. Most of the deaths in the DRC outbreak are among children.

The electricity grid operators of the three Baltic countries on Tuesday officially notified Russia and Belarus that they will exit a 2001 agreement that has kept Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania connected to an electricity transmission system controlled by Moscow.