Good morning.
Whitewater’s Tuesday will be mostly cloudy with a high of twenty-eight. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:28 PM, for 9h 03m 30s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 2.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1900, fanatical activist Carrie (Carry) Nation took “her campaign against alcohol to Wichita, Kansas, when she smashed the bar at the elegant Carey Hotel. Earlier that year, Nation had abandoned the nonviolent agitation of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in favor of direct action that she called “hatchetation.” Since the Kansas Constitution prohibited alcohol, Nation argued that destroying saloons was an acceptable means of battling the state’s flourishing liquor trade.”
Worth reading in full —
Cara Lombardo and Dee J. Hall report on Failure at the Faucet: Lead in schools, day care centers: “Water from four West Middleton Elementary School faucets taken Sept. 1, the first day of school, had tested high for levels of lead or copper. As a safety precaution, the school would provide bottled water to students until the issue was resolved. Corrigan — whose daughters Brooklyn and Carly are in first and fourth grades — thought little of the news, partly because the email told parents of students at the school west of Madison that it was “highly unlikely” that the water was unsafe to drink. But one faucet at West Middleton had more than six times the federal action level of 15 parts per billion of lead and nearly 19 times the federal action level of 1,300 ppb of copper. Other faucets showed a presence of lead. Any amount of lead can cause permanent brain damage, including reduced intelligence and behavioral problems, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Infants and children are considered the most vulnerable to lead’s negative effects.”
Don Behm reports that Coal tar [is the] main source of toxicity in streams: “Coal-tar sealants applied to blacktop parking lots and driveways are the primary source of toxic chemicals found in the muck at the bottom of Milwaukee-area waterways, according to a study by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District. Tests of muck samples collected at 40 locations along 19 creeks and rivers in the metropolitan area, and dust from six parking lots, found that coal-tar sealants contributed up to 94% of all polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, in streambed sediment, says the study published last week in the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. Fully 78% of the samples contained enough PAHs to be considered toxic and capable of causing adverse effects in aquatic animals, said Austin Baldwin, a USGS scientist and lead author of the study. The most toxic sediment came from Lincoln Creek and Underwood Creek.”
Jeremy Peters reports how Wielding Claims of ‘Fake News,’ Conservatives Take Aim at Mainstream Media: “WASHINGTON — The C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the White House may all agree that Russia was behind the hacking that interfered with the election. But that was of no import to the website Breitbart News, which dismissed reports on the intelligence assessment as “left-wing fake news“….Until now, that term had been widely understood to refer to fabricated news accounts that are meant to spread virally online. But conservative cable and radio personalities, top Republicans and even Mr. Trump himself, incredulous about suggestions that fake stories may have helped swing the election, have appropriated the term and turned it against any news they see as hostile to their agenda.”
Steve Inskeep offers (with 16 criteria) How To Tell Fake News From Real News In ‘Post-Truth’ Era: “Hazardous as the post-trust era may be, it shouldn’t cause despair. It’s all right for Americans to be skeptical of what they read and hear. How could I say otherwise? I’m a journalist. It’s my job to question what I hear. While I shouldn’t cynically dismiss everything people tell me, I should ask for evidence and avoid buying into bogus narratives. Being a skeptical reporter has made me a more skeptical news consumer….”
The planet’s had numerous earthquakes over the last fifteen years, and scientists have created an animated map to show the ‘quakes epicenters: