Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-six. Sunrise is 6:36 AM and sunset 7:20 PM, for 12h 44m 21s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 15.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred forty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1889, at 2:25 PM, Gustave Eiffel hoists a large French Tricolour to the top of his completed tower. On this day in 1998, the Brewers play their first game as a National League Team.
Recommended for reading in full —
Danny Westneat writes that UW professor: The information war is real, and we’re losing it: “[University of Washington professor Kate] Starbird argues in a new paper, set to be presented at a computational social-science conference in May, that these “strange clusters” of wild conspiracy talk, when mapped, point to an emerging alternative media ecosystem on the web of surprising power and reach. It features sites such as Infowars.com, hosted by informal President Donald Trump adviser Alex Jones, which has pushed a range of conspiracies, including that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a staged fake. There are dozens of other conspiracy-propagating websites such as beforeitsnews.com, nodisinfo.com and veteranstoday.com. Starbird cataloged 81 of them, linked through a huge community of interest connected by shared followers on Twitter, with many of the tweets replicated by automated bots.”
Aaron Blake describes The White House’s Sally Yates problem: “Sally Yates was President Trump’s acting attorney general for just 10 days before she was fired. But two months later, she continues to give the Trump administration big-time headaches. The Washington Post’s Devlin Barrett and Adam Entous just broke a big story: that the Trump administration fought to prevent Yates from testifying in front of the House Intelligence Committee just before Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) canceled her hearing. Per emails Barrett and Entous obtained, the Justice Department claimed that a large portion of Yates’s testimony was barred from being discussed at a hearing because of presidential communication privilege. That’s troublesome for the White House, because two other administration officials — FBI Director James B. Comey and National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers — already have testified publicly before the committee. During their testimony, they declined to discuss certain things pertaining to open investigations. But Comey did confirm that there was an ongoing investigation of possible ties between Russian officials and members of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and transition team.”
Sarah Kendzior explains Why Trump’s ties to Russia would be way worse than Watergate: “If you were the president of the United States, sworn under oath to protect and serve the public, wouldn’t you want foreign interference in your campaign to be investigated – at the very least, to prevent the recurrence of similar actions? Or would you try to impede the investigation, by smearing those who seek it (among them intelligence officials, legislators, and reporters) and by installing officials who either benefit from the Russian relationship (like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson), seem selected in order to obfuscate the Russian relationship (like Attorney General Jeff Sessions), or both? Trump chose to assemble an administration designed to cover up and aid his shady dealings with the Kremlin, leading to an administration so spectacularly corrupt and inept it has no corollary in US history.”
Venezuela Muzzles Legislature, Moving Closer to One-Man Rule: “IQUITOS, Peru — Venezuela took its strongest step yet toward one-man rule under the leftist President Nicolás Maduro as his loyalists on the Supreme Court seized power from the National Assembly in a ruling late Wednesday night. The ruling effectively dissolved the elected legislature, which is led by Mr. Maduro’s opponents, and allows the court to write laws itself, experts said. The move caps a year in which the last vestiges of Venezuela’s democracy have been torn down, critics and regional leaders say, leaving what many now describe as not just an authoritarian regime, but an outright dictatorship. “What we have warned of has finally come to pass,” said Luis Almagro, the head of the Organization of American States, a regional diplomacy group that includes Venezuela and is investigating the country for violating the bloc’s Democratic Charter.”
There’s a Puzzle in Poland: Who Bent the Trees?