Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:22 AM and sunset 8:20 PM, for 14h 58m 18s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 61.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the nine hundred twenty-eighth day.
On this day in 1977, Star Wars opens in theaters.
Recommended for reading in full:
Drew Harwell reports Facebook acknowledges Pelosi video is faked but declines to delete it:
When an edited video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) began spreading across the Web this week, researchers quickly identified it as a distortion, with sound and playback speed that had been manipulated to make her speech appear stilted and slurred.
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YouTube offered a definitive response Thursday afternoon, saying the company had removed the videos because they violated “clear policies that outline what content is not acceptable to post.”
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But Facebook, where the video appeared to gain much of its audience, declined Friday to remove the video, even after Facebook’s independent fact-checking groups, Lead Stories and PolitiFact, deemed the video “false.”
“We don’t have a policy that stipulates that the information you post on Facebook must be true,” Facebook said in a statement to The Washington Post.
(Trump is a dominant political advertiser on Facebook, with Facebook users who share fakes skew older and conservative, so one can expect more of Trump’s dishonesty and Facebook’s leniency.)
Conservative evangelical Michael Gerson observes These are the golden days of sleaze:
That President Trump and members of his circle are corrupt has been established beyond doubt. There is the financial corruption of using the presidency as a marketing tool for Trump businesses; of foreign governments seeking influence by spending at Trump properties; of close associates being paid for influence by foreign entities; of industry advocates and lobbyists being appointed as industry regulators; of the Trump Organization expanding overseas operations with the help of foreign governments; of possible money laundering through Trump properties. And all of this in the context of a president fighting tooth and nail to shield his financial records from public scrutiny.
There is a political corruption of inviting a foreign government to interfere in a presidential election; of seeking politically motivated investigations against opponents; of attempting to block and discredit legitimate investigations of Trump’s own questionable activities; of directing secret payments to women with potentially damaging information; of attempting to influence ongoing federal investigations.
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If you are a sexual harasser who wants to escape consequences, or a businessperson who habitually plays close to ethical lines, your hour has come. If you dream of having a porn-star mistress, or hope to game the tax system for your benefit, you have found your man and your moment. For all that is bent and sleazy, for all that is dishonest and dodgy, these are the golden days.
Here’s a video showing the sixty satellites that SpaceX recently placed in orbit: