The White House press briefing room briefly had a news boss. Katie Zacharia ended her tenure as President Donald Trump’s press secretary last week after just five days. And questions were immediately raised about the former television pundit’s qualifications for a position with an infamously high turnover rate.

‘Unimpressed’
The 41-year-old graduate of California’s Pepperdine University appeared to garner favor with Trump after regular appearances on the conservative network Newsmax. But her eligibility for the role of press secretary became a topic of discussion after her first White House press briefing in which she spoke for only 14 minutes, read “pro-Trump talking points” and called on three reporters, said CNN. Fox News host Sean Hannity, among others, sounded “unimpressed with her performance and her answers.”

Questions have surrounded Zacharia’s murky legal background. She has consistently described herself as a lawyer and did receive a law degree at Pepperdine. But there’s “no evidence that Zacharia ever passed a bar exam or has been admitted to practice law in any state,” said Judd Legum in his Popular Information newsletter. 

She reportedly lives near Los Angeles but is not listed as an attorney with the State Bar of California. She told reporters she took the bar while living in China, but she “couldn’t have practiced law in China, because foreigners are forbidden to do so,” said The New Republic.

‘Even shorter’ than Scaramucci
After Zacharia’s press conference and botched answers about her professional status, the writing seemed to be on the wall, despite the White House initially standing behind her. She “delivered a commanding inaugural press briefing,” the Trump administration first said in a statement. But five days after she took on the role, several news outlets confirmed that Trump parted ways with her. 

Zacharia’s time as press secretary was the shortest in U.S. history and “even shorter than Anthony Scaramucci’s as White House communications director” during Trump’s first term, said NBC News. Scaramucci was in the role for just 11 days, and “his name became a descriptor for public officials whose terms were exceedingly brief.”

The world’s timekeeping body had a gentle phase-out plan for the leap second, but Earth has been rotating unusually rapidly for the past decade. There’s a chance that before the phase-out in 2035 we would need a negative leap second — that is, deleting a second rather than adding one. This could create “mayhem in the digital time-stamped continuum,” said the Financial Times. So the governing body of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures has voted to condemn the leap second to an earlier grave and introduce a leap hour instead. This could take a “millennium or more” to accumulate, and by then life could be so different that there may be no need to adjust the lag at all.

What are leap seconds?
“For millennia, a day has been defined as one full rotation of the Earth,” said Vahe Peroomian, a USC physics and astronomy professor, at The Conversation. Ancient Egyptians were the first known civilization to divide day and night into 12 parts each, establishing the 24-hour day. Astronomers then built the system of minutes and seconds that, centuries later, devices such as pendulum clocks and quartz watches were able to measure.

But because the speed of the Earth’s rotation can fluctuate, defining a second as a fraction of a solar day is imprecise. In 1967, the General Conference on Weights and Measures adopted a new definition of a second based on the steady oscillations of the cesium-133 atom. To keep this new Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in sync with Earth’s rotation, timekeepers then invented the leap second in 1972.

Once the lag between astronomical time and UTC reaches a certain point, a leap second is inserted to realign them. This has happened 27 times since 1972, with the most recent leap second inserted in 2016.

Why are they being phased out?
Leap seconds have become “increasingly difficult to deal with in the computer age,” said ABC News. They can disrupt computer operating systems, which assume a day is always 86,400 seconds long, resulting in glitches and outages. 

The prospect of the first negative leap second posed an even greater risk. “Many computer programs assume all leap seconds are positive,” said Setnam Shemar, the U.K.’s principal timekeeping scientist, to the Financial Times. So removing a second could have resulted in a “major technology failure in telecommunications or electricity grid networks or satellite navigation systems.”

A dog costumed as a trash can rolls along New York City’s East Village at the 36th Annual Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade. Other costumes included odes to artist Yayoi Kusama, the movie “The Odyssey,” Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, and this year’s winner, New York Knicks MVP Jalen Brunson inside a giant basketball.
Kyle Stevens / Shutterstock

From the classic “whodunit” style to thrilling neonoirs, mystery novels have compelled readers to solve cases alongside detectives like Hercule Poirot. Here are the best, smartest and most revolutionary titles the genre has created.

‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ (1902)
A roundup of the best mystery novels of all time is “incomplete without mentioning Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work,” said Book Riot. Sherlock Holmes is one of the most “recognizable fictional detectives in pop culture.” His iconic novel follows the investigation of an “apparition of a monstrous dog” that purportedly “murdered Sir Charles Baskerville.” ($7, Penguin Random House)

‘Murder on the Orient Express’ (1934)
Sticking all your characters in a “contained bubble” and “throwing away the key” is a great way to “create tension and intrigue,” said thriller writer Hank Phillippi Ryan at The New York Times. Agatha Christie did it with “great panache and sleight of hand.” ($19, HarperCollins)

‘In Cold Blood’ (1965)
Truman Capote’s bestseller “pioneered a new classification of novels”: true crime, said A&E. Capote’s “groundbreaking real-life story” about a terrifying quadruple murder “effortlessly married” the “technique of colorful storytelling” with the “clarity and accuracy of journalism.” ($28, Penguin Random House)

‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ (1990)
The first novel in the Easy Rawlins hardboiled detective series introduced the world to Walter Mosley’s neonoir classic’s World War II veteran protagonist. Strapped for cash, Rawlins accepts a murder case whose resolution necessitates bringing the “superficially submerged tensions” between “Black and white Americans” to the surface, said Time. ($19, Simon & Schuster)