Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of fifty. Sunrise is 7:31 AM and sunset 5:45 PM, for 10h 13m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission is scheduled to meet at 6 PM, and her Fire Department to have a board meeting at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1947, Howard Hughes’s Hughes H-4 Hercules (‘Spruce Goose’) makes its only flight:
The Hughes H-4 Hercules (also known as the Spruce Goose registration NX37602) is a prototype strategic airliftflying boat designed and built by the Hughes Aircraft Company. Intended as a transatlantic flight transport for use during World War II, it was not completed in time to be used in the war. The aircraft made only one brief flight on November 2, 1947, and the project never advanced beyond the single example produced. Built from wood because of wartime restrictions on the use of aluminum and concerns about weight, it was nicknamed by critics the Spruce Goose, although it was made almost entirely of birch.[2][3] The Hercules is the largest flying boat ever built, and it has the largest wingspan of any aircraft that has ever flown.[4][N 1] It remains in good condition and is on display at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, United States.[5]
Recommended for reading in full —
Natalia V. Osipova and Aaron Byrd describe How Russian Bots and Trolls Invade Our Lives — and Elections:
Ben Collins, Gideon Resnick, Andrew Desiderio, Spencer Ackerman, and Joseph Cox report House Drops Motherlode of Russian Propaganda (“House Democrats released a trove of data, metadata, Facebook ads, and Twitter accounts run out of the Kremlin’s troll farm”):
The ad was highly specific—and specifically Russian.
It was for a Facebook group called Defend The 2nd. Above an image showing a cornucopia of bullets, it billed itself as “The community of 2nd Amendment supporters, guns lovers & patriots.” That was how it appeared to the public—the American public—but Facebook internally held data that told a different story.
Ad targeting information associated with Defend The 2nd showed how highly targeted it was. The location for viewership had to be within the United States. They had to be between the ages of 18 to over 65. They had to match Facebook users with interests including the National Rifle Association, Second Amendment Sisters, Gun Owners of America, Concealed carry in the United States, and Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The ad did not come from people for whom the Second Amendment applies. Payment, through the online payment service Qiwi, came in the form of 48,305.55 Rubles, or roughly $829. For that, Russia garnered over 301,000 “impressions” from Americans, with no questions asked by Facebook.
That ad was one of dozens of inflammatory Facebook and Twitter ads from Kremlin-backed fake social media accounts, including several The Daily Beast has already identified, with names like “Being Patriotic,” “Secured Borders,” and “United Muslims of America.” They were released on Wednesday, along with accompanying metadata showing their Russian provenance, not by the companies themselves, but by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election….
Natasha Bertrand reports Russia organized 2 sides of a Texas protest and encouraged ‘both sides to battle in the streets’:
Russian actors organized both anti-Islam and pro-Islam protests on May 21 in the exact same location using separate Facebook pages that were being operated out of a troll factory in St. Petersburg, the Senate Intelligence Committee revealed on Wednesday.
The Heart of Texas Facebook page, whose link to Russia was first reported by Business Insider, organized a rally at noon on May 21 at the Islamic Da’wesh Center in Houston, Texas, to “Stop Islamization of Texas.” The account paid to promote the event, which was viewed by about 12,000 people, according to committee chair Richard Burr.
Another Russia-linked account, United Muslims of America, effectively organized a counterprotest: At noon on May 21 at the Islamic Da’wesh Center in Houston, Texas, dozens of people showed up for a “Save Islamic Knowledge” rally….
Rebecca Nelson writes of Melissa Hall that She Knew She’d Deliver Her Son While She Was in Jail. She Didn’t Expect to Do It in Chains (“Melissa Hall claims that, as an inmate in the Milwaukee County Jail, she was shackled during labor, childbirth, and postpartum recovery. Now she’s fighting back and hoping to end the much-condemned practice”):
Melissa Hall couldn’t hold her partner’s hand, so, as she wheezed through painful contractions and obeyed the nurse’s directives to push, push, push, she squeezed the chain shackling her to the hospital bed.
When Hall, then 25, went into labor in April 2013, she was two months into a year-long sentence at the Milwaukee County Jail. In her delivery room at St. Francis Hospital, a heavy manacle around her right wrist kept her fastened to the bed. There was less than a foot of give, severely limiting her movement. A cuff on her left ankle — heavy, metal, tight — kept her leg bound straight. Both cuffs dug into her flesh.
The chains made it difficult to administer the epidural. It worked on only part of her body, leaving her numb from the waist down on her left side while her right side blazed with pain. She couldn’t scoot back on the bed, so she had to lie flat while she pushed. Throughout the three hours she was in labor, whenever she had to go to the bathroom, armed guards wrapped another chain around her small frame. That one rested on her belly.
And when Hall held her baby boy, Jesus, for the first time, and looked into his brown eyes, she had to put a pillow between his tiny body and the crook of her arm so he wouldn’t get hit by her chains….
Here’s How eating spicy food affects your brain and body: