Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will see a partly sunny day with a high of thirty-three. Sunrise is 6:26 AM and sunset 7:27 PM, for 13h 00m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 66% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}five hundred twelfth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1917, the United States declares war on Imperial Germany:
On the battlefields of France in spring 1918, the war-weary Allied armies enthusiastically greeted the fresh American troops. They arrived at the rate of 10,000 a day,[47] at a time when the Germans were unable to replace their losses. The Americans won a victory at Cantigny, then again in defensive stands at Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood. The Americans helped the British Empire, French and Portuguese forces defeat and turn back the powerful final German offensive (Spring Offensive of March to July, 1918), and most importantly, the Americans played a role in the Allied final offensive (Hundred Days Offensive of August to November). However, many American commanders used the same flawed tactics which the British, French, Germans and others had abandoned early in the war, and so many American offensives were not particularly effective. Pershing continued to commit troops to these full- frontal attacks, resulting in high casualties against experienced veteran German and Austrian-Hungarian units. Nevertheless, the infusion of new and fresh US troops greatly strengthened the Allies’ strategic position and boosted morale. The Allies achieved victory over Germany on November 11, 1918 after German morale had collapsed both at home and on the battlefield.[50][51]
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ Ella Nilsen and Rachel Wolfe of Vox Sentences write of Facebook in Once more, into the (data) breach:
- Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg heads to Capitol Hill to testify before Congress twice next week, and lawmakers have a lot of questions for him. [Vox / Jen Kirby and Emily Stewart]
- This comes after a few weeks of not-great news for Facebook, starting with the Cambridge Analytica scandal a few weeks ago, when it was revealed that the data of 50 million users was secretly used by the firm as part of its work for Trump’s 2016 campaign. [NYT / Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Confessore, and Carole Cadwalladr]
- Since then, the number of users whose data was harvested by Cambridge Analytica has been revised to 87 million. [BBC]
- But the news doesn’t stop there. On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that Facebook admitted “malicious actors” used certain search tools to get at the information of most of its 2 billion users all over the world. Basically, the company admitted that if you were a user, there was a good chance your information had been accessed at some point. (Those search tools have since been disabled.) [Washington Post / Craig Timberg, Tony Romm, and Elizabeth Dwoskin]
- The narrative here could be that things are getting bad for Facebook, but the reality is that’s because things haven’t been great for Facebook users, whose data has apparently been vulnerable for quite a while. Zuckerberg has been owning up to the responsibility, a notable change in tone from right after the 2016 election, when people were asking questions about Russia using social media to influence the outcome. [Recode / Kurt Wagner]
- Zuckerberg is also trying to address how the company is combating fake news that was disseminated by Russians and spread across the social network, telling Vox’s Ezra Klein in a recent interview that it’s something the company is taking seriously. [Vox / Ezra Klein]
- He’ll have to talk about all this and more on Capitol Hill — where lawmakers of both parties will likely have a lot of questions. [Washington Post / Tony Romm and Craig Timberg]
➤ The Washington Post condemns Trump’s mind-boggling gift to America’s enemies:
Mr. Trump’s new position [on Syria], which envisions a U.S. withdrawal in months and suspends the modest reconstruction aid recently allocated by the State Department, abdicates responsibility for those challenges. It also delivers a stab in the back to the Syrian forces, led by Kurds, who have collaborated with the United States in fighting the Islamic State and now could be left to deal alone with a Turkish regime irrationally bent on annihilating them.
That Mr. Trump’s intended retreat is a gift to Vladimir Putin perhaps should not be surprising, given Mr. Trump’s curious eagerness to accommodate the Russian ruler. But by boosting Iran at Israel’s expense, Mr. Trump is flagrantly undermining a central tenet of his foreign policy. Israel has said it cannot tolerate the presence of Iranian bases near its northern border, but a U.S. evacuation would remove one of the main obstacles to Tehran’s military expansion. The eventual result could be an Israeli-Iranian war that could devastate Syria, Lebanon and Israel itself.
➤ Arelis R. Hernández reports In Puerto Rico’s ‘last mile,’ power is still elusive as next hurricane season looms:
The neighbors belong to a community along Puerto Rico’s “last mile,” the cluster of communities marking Hurricane Maria’s destructive path across difficult and isolated terrain, from the island’s southeast corner through the central mountains and out the northwest coast. They are among the last people on the island still without power, more than six months after the storm.
The hurricane knocked down the frail power grid that distributes wattage from generation plants in the south across transmission towers spread like dominoes along the peaks of the island’s mountains. The local public utility, which struggled to maintain normalcy in good times, has been trying alongside the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to restore electrical service since September.
It has been a wearisome operation tainted by allegations of corruption and coordination, meltdowns, and the cacophony of politics, experts say. Many residents report that having been without power for so long has led them to lose faith in the state-owned power company and, ultimately, the island’s government.
“There has been no sense of urgency,” said Josian Santiago, the mayor of Comerio, whose town still has outages in its more isolated sections; some might never have their municipal power restored and will have to resort to alternatives. “The problem is not that we don’t have a lightbulb to turn on or a refrigerator to cool… They are torturing the people.”
(Puerto Ricans are American citizens, and Trump has been disgracefully neglected them.)
➤ Betsy Woodruff contends Want Asylum in America? Get Ready for Hell:
Jason Dzubow, an immigration attorney based in Northern Virginia who specializes in asylum cases, told The Daily Beast that the last four times he’s gone with a client for an asylum interview, the client’s documentation—which he turned in prior to the questioning—had been mysteriously lost.
“I don’t know how often it happens, but I know I’m zero for four in the last four interviews,” Dzubow said. “Not a good success rate. Whether that will affect the outcome, I don’t know.
“Maybe they’re permanently lost or they’re just temporarily lost, I don’t know,” he added. “But this is an epidemic.”
Those documents are important; they’re a key part of how many asylum-seekers make the case for staying in the United States. If the asylum officers questioning them don’t have the documents, then a significant part of the asylum-seeker’s case is just missing.
Sui Chung, the president of the South Florida chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, says she and her South Florida colleagues have faced this problem numerous times.
➤ So, How do turtles survive in winter?: