Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of sixty-nine. Sunrise is 5:41 AM and sunset 8:01 PM, for 14h 20m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous, with 64.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1936, the German airship Hindenburg catches fire and crashes while trying to dock at Lakehurst, New Jersey. Thirty-five of the 97 people on board were killed along with a crewman on the ground.
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ Jonathan O’Connell, David A. Fahrenthold, and Jack Gillum report As the ‘King of Debt,’ Trump borrowed to build his empire. Then he began spending hundreds of millions in cash:
In the nine years before he ran for president, Donald Trump’s company spent more than $400 million in cash on new properties — including 14 transactions paid for in full, without borrowing from banks — during a buying binge that defied real estate industry practices and Trump’s own history as the self-described “King of Debt.”
Trump’s vast outlay of cash, tracked through public records and totaled publicly here for the first time, provides a new window into the president’s private company, which discloses few details about its finances.
It shows that Trump had access to far more cash than previously known, despite his string of commercial bankruptcies and the Great Recession’s hammering of the real estate industry.
Why did the “King of Debt,” as he has called himself in interviews, turn away from that strategy, defying the real estate wisdom that it’s unwise to risk so much of one’s own money in a few projects?
And how did Trump — who had money tied up in golf courses and buildings — raise enough liquid assets to go on this cash buying spree?
(Trump may prove to be one of the largest launderers in American history.)
➤ Michael Daly writes Rudy Giuliani, the Mob-Buster, Now Sounds Like a Mob Mouthpiece (“The prosecutor who liked to leak to the press is now the Trump enabler who says former FBI Director James Comey should face jail time for supposed leaks”):
Giuliani now calls the FBI agents “stormtroopers” even though he knows they must have offered a judge considerable probable cause to believe Cohen had committed what the court papers term “many crimes.”
Investigators had to do that to secure a warrant to put a bug in the Jaguar owned by Sal Avellino, Mafia capo. FBI agents certainly would have to do at least that and probably much more to secure a search warrant for the home and office of Michael Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer.
In interviews and in his book, Comey has said that Trump’s demand for loyalty reminded him of a mob boss. Giuliani, the onetime mob-buster, has now ended up speaking like a mob mouthpiece.
As Giuliani should have learned when he did not get the job he wanted, Trump’s notion of loyalty is indeed enough like that of a mob boss that it carries no obligation for the Big Guy to be reciprocal.
Some people are a one-way street. Trump is a one-way boulevard.
And on this Bigger than Big Boulevard of Lies, Trump and Giuliani may end up proving anew the truth of an old expression:
“With friends like these…”
➤ Doug Stanglin reports Opposition leader Alexei Navalny among more than 1,600 arrested in Russia in anti-Putin protests:
More than 1,600 people — including prominent opposition leader Alexei Navalny — were arrested Saturday in Russia during a day of nationwide protests of the upcoming inauguration of Vladimir Putin for a new six-year term as president, according to a group that monitors political repression.
Navalny, a long-time Putin nemesis and anti-corruption campaigner, organized the nationwide rallies under the slogan “He is not our czar” in response to the president’s re-election in March.
In Moscow, where thousands crowded into Moscow Pushkin Square, police in riot gear waded into the crowd and were seen grabbing some demonstrators and leading them away, but there were no immediate moves to disperse the crowd. A helicopter hovered overhead to monitor the crowd.
“Let my son go!” Iraida Nikolaeva screamed, running after police in Moscow when they detained her son. “He did not do anything! Are you a human or not? Do you live in Russia or not?”
(The time will come – perhaps not long from now – when protests in America will dwarf anything seen before in America or Russia. When they do, we will be wise to remember these brave Russian protesters, who are worthy examples for any and all.)
➤ Avik Selk reports One space between each sentence, they said. Science just proved them wrong:
Enter three psychology researchers from Skidmore College, who decided it’s time for modern science to sort this out once and for all.
“Professionals and amateurs in a variety of fields have passionately argued for either one or two spaces following this punctuation mark,” they wrote in a paper published last week in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.
They cite dozens of theories and previous research, arguing for one space or two. A 2005 study that found two spaces reduced lateral interference in the eye and helped reading. A 2015 study that found the opposite. A 1998 experiment that suggested it didn’t matter.
“However,” they wrote, “to date, there has been no direct empirical evidence in support of these claims, nor in favor of the one-space convention.”
So the researchers, Rebecca L. Johnson, Becky Bui and Lindsay L. Schmitt, rounded up 60 students and some eye tracking equipment, and set out to heal the divide.
…
And the verdict was: two spaces after the period is better. It makes reading slightly easier. Congratulations, Yale University professor Nicholas A. Christakis. Sorry, Lifehacker.
Hurray! Science vindicates my longstanding practice, learned at age 12, of using TWO SPACES after periods in text. NOT ONE SPACE. Text is easier to read that way. Of course, on twitter, I use one space, given 280 characters. https://t.co/4xI6sVbF88 Will arm-wrestle @Neuro_Skeptic pic.twitter.com/XpEr4KFR4x
— Nicholas A. Christakis (@NAChristakis) April 28, 2018
😉
➤ NASA’s InSight Probe Will Plumb the Depths of Mars: