Good morning.
Spring begins in Whitewater with partly sunny skies and a high of forty. Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 7:07 PM, for 12h 11m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 10.3% of its visible disk illuminated . Today is the {tooltip}four hundred ninety-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1854, the Republican Party is founded:
On this date Free Soilers and Whigs outraged by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, met in Ripon to consider forming a new political party. The meeting’s organizer, Alvan E. Bovay, proposed the name “Republican” which had been suggested by New York editor Horace Greeley. You can see eyewitness accounts of the meeting, early Republican campaign documents, and other original sources on our page devoted to Wisconsin and the Republican Party. Though other places have claimed themselves as the birthplace of the Republican Party, this was the earliest meeting held for the purpose and the first to use the term Republican. [Source: History of Wisconsin, II: 218-219]
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ Britain’s Channel 4 News reports Revealed: Trump’s election consultants filmed saying they use bribes and sex workers to entrap politicians:
An undercover investigation by Channel 4 News reveals how Cambridge Analytica secretly campaigns in elections across the world. Bosses were filmed talking about using bribes, ex-spies, fake IDs and sex workers.
(Trump’s consultants troll with the techniques that would appeal to someone like Trump.)
➤ Alexis Madrigal asks What Took Facebook So Long? (“Scholars have been sounding the alarm about data-harvesting firms for nearly a decade. The latest Cambridge Analytica scandal shows it may be too late to stop them”):
While the specifics of this particular violation [data of tens of millions in Trump’s consultants’ access] are important to understand, the story reveals deeper truths about the online world that operates through and within Facebook.
First, some of Facebook’s growth has been driven by apps, which the company found extended the amount of time that people spent on the platform, as retired users of FarmVille could attest. To draw developers, Facebook had quite lax (or, as one might say, “developer-friendly”) data policies for years.
Academic researchers began publishing warnings that third-party Facebook apps represented a major possible source of privacy leakage in the early 2010s. Some noted that the privacy risks inherent in sharing data with apps were not at all clear to users. One group termed our new reality “interdependent privacy,” because your Facebook friends, in part, determine your own level of privacy.
➤ Niraj Chokshi reports Assaults Increased When Cities Hosted Trump Rallies, Study Finds:
A study published on Friday appears to confirm what news reports suggested long ago: President Trump’s campaign rallies were associated with a rise in violence when they came to town.
A city that hosted a Trump rally saw an average of 2.3 more assaults reported on the day of the event than on a typical day, according to the study, led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and published in the journal Epidemiology. The authors found no corresponding link between assaults and rallies for Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.
“It appeared to be a phenomenon that’s unique to Donald Trump’s rally,” said Christopher Morrison, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and the lead author of the study.
It may come as little surprise that the rallies were associated with increased violence, as the often volcanic clashes between Mr. Trump’s supporters and opponents were widely covered at the time.
(See Assaults on Days of Campaign Rallies During the 2016 US Presidential Election.)
➤ Alan Levin reports Russian Hackers Attacked U.S. Aviation as Part of Breaches:
Russian hackers attempted to penetrate the U.S. civilian aviation industry early in 2017 as part of the broad assault on the nation’s sensitive infrastructure.
The attack had limited impact and the industry has taken steps to prevent a repeat of the intrusion, Jeff Troy, executive director of the Aviation Information Sharing and Analysis Center, said Friday. Troy wouldn’t elaborate on the nature of the breach and declined to identify specific companies or the work that was involved.
“It hit a part of our very broad membership,” Troy said. The intrusion wasn’t something that would directly harm airplanes or airlines, he said. “But I did see that this impacted some companies that are in the aviation sector.”
Troy’s comments confirmed the effects on aviation of a Russian attack that was described more broadly on Thursday by U.S. government officials. The assault was aimed at the electric grid, water processing plants and other targets, the officials said, in the first formal confirmation that Russia had gained access to some U.S. computer systems. The Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation identified aviation as one of the targets, but didn’t provide specifics.
➤ Here’s Why Airplanes Still Have Ashtrays In the Bathroom: