Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-three. Sunrise is 5:42 AM and sunset 8 PM, for 14h 18m 47s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 74.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred seventy-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
It’s Cinco de Mayo, commemorating the Mexican Army’s victory over the French at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, under the leadership of General Ignacio Zaragoza. On this day in 19671, Alan Shepard became the first American to travel in space, reaching an altitude of 116 miles.
Recommended for reading in full —
James B. Nelson reports that Former Chicago Bear Jay Cutler could be calling Packers games for Fox Sports: “Peter Schrager, a senior national writer for FoxSports.com, tweeted that Cutler has been hired by the network and “will join Kevin Burkhardt and Charles Davis in the booth this season.” Cutler, 34, was released by the Bears in March after 11 seasons. He has not been signed by another NFL team.”
Lena H. Sun reports that Anti-vaccine activists spark a state’s worst measles outbreak in decades: “MINNEAPOLIS — The young mother started getting advice early on from friends in the close-knit Somali immigrant community here. Don’t let your children get the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella — it causes autism, they said. Suaado Salah listened. And this spring, her 3-year-old boy and 18-month-old girl contracted measles in Minnesota’s largest outbreak of the highly infectious and potentially deadly disease in nearly three decades. Her daughter, who had a rash, high fever and a cough, was hospitalized for four nights and needed intravenous fluids and oxygen. Salah no longer believes that the MMR vaccine triggers autism, a discredited theory that spread rapidly through the local Somali community, fanned by meetings organized by anti-vaccine groups. The advocates repeatedly invited Andrew Wakefield, the founder of the modern anti-vaccine movement, to talk to worried parents.”
Jacey Fortin writes that In Flint, Overdue Bills for Unsafe Water Could Lead to Foreclosures: “Following a water crisis that saw sky-high levels of lead contamination in Flint, Mich., many homes in the city still do not have access to safe tap water. But that doesn’t mean they’re not being charged for it. And if they can’t pay in time, they may lose their homes. The city has mailed 8,002 letters to residents in an effort to collect about $5.8 million in unpaid bills for water and sewer services. If homeowners do not pay by May 19, property liens are transferred to tax bills, which begins a process that can end with residents losing their homes unless they pay their outstanding bills before March 2018.”
Vann Newkirk observes The American Health Care Act’s Prosperity Gospel: “What’s a religious philosophy mostly pioneered by wealthy televangelists and megachurches got to do with pre-existing conditions and Medicaid reform? The beliefs of some evangelicals connecting wealth to God’s favor became intertwined with faith healing, and both rose to new heights in the television era on the backs of men like Oral Roberts. While it became part of the cults of personality around the generation of Pat Robertsons and Peter Popoffs that followed Roberts’s lead, faith healing was also undeniably a policy statement. It at least partially rejected the role of science in public health and encouraged a view that faith, virtue, and good works could be enough to secure healing. And although the furthest extremes of the prosperity gospel often bring to mind church scandals, thousand-dollar suits, and parish helicopters, the basic idea that a healthy life was also a sign of favor fit right in with the gospel’s defense of riches. Health is wealth. The prosperity gospel sold by televangelists fit—and fits—so well in many American homes because it mirrors the established national secular ethos….”
(Whether religious or secular in origin, the prosperity gospel is a distortion of traditional Christian teaching, and is most easily understood as a Christian heresy. (1* As he passed by he saw a man blind from birth.a2* His disciples asked him,b “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”3Jesus answered, “Neither he nor his parents sinned.” Jn 9:1-3a.)
NASA just got its closest look at Saturn yet — here’s what it saw: