Good morning.
Midweek in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:31 PM, for 15h 15m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eleventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1776, Richard Henry Lee puts forth a motion to the Continental Congress to declare independence from Great Britain:
Resolved: That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.
On this day in 1926, Milwaukee first has airmail service: “Milwaukee’s first airmail service was flown from the Milwaukee County Airport by the Charles Dickinson Line, which operated from Chicago to St. Paul via Milwaukee and LaCrosse.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Ben Guarino reports that Tyrannosaurus rex had scaly skin and wasn’t covered in feathers, a new study says:
Tyrannosaurus rex was an odd animal, a predator with teeth the size of bananas, a massive head and tiny arms. Given that many dinosaurs had feathers, could T. rex have been even weirder — a giant carnivore with a downy coat?
A new study in the journal Biology Letters crushes any tyrant chicken dreams: T. rex was covered in scales. The new research “shows without question that T. rex had scaly skin,” study author Phil R. Bell, a paleontologist at Australia’s University of New England, said in an email to The Washington Post.
When T. rex first appeared in pop culture, as in 1918 film “The Ghost of Slumber Mountain,” the dinosaur had wrinkled skin and stood upright, dragging its tail. Scientists began dismantling this reptilian misconception in the late 1960s, and in 1993’s “Jurassic Park,” a fairly accurate, horizontal T. rex menaced the silver screen.
Born in the shadowy reaches of the internet, most fake news stories prove impossible to trace to their origin. But researchers at the Atlantic Council, a think tank, excavated the root of one such fake story, involving an incident in the Black Sea in which a Russian warplane repeatedly buzzed a United States Navy destroyer, the Donald Cook.
Like much fake news, the story was based on a kernel of truth. The brief, tense confrontation happened on April 12, 2014, and the Pentagon issued a statement. Then in April, three years later, the story resurfaced, completely twisted, on one of Russia’s main state-run TV news programs.
The new version gloated that the warplane had deployed an electronic weapon to disable all operating systems aboard the Cook. That was false, but it soon spread, showing that even with all the global attention on combating fake news, it could still circulate with alarming speed and ease….
FoxNews.com soon picked up The Sun’s version of the story. Refet Kaplan, the managing editor of FoxNews.com, said the story was considered “not as a serious report on Russia’s military capability, but as another example of Russian media hyperbole.” That was not set out in the headline or the article, other than an oblique reference to the original as “propaganda.”
After The New York Times asked about the article, it was deleted from the FoxNews.com website.
Spencer Ackerman reports that Michael Flynn Had a Plan to Work With Russia’s Military. It Wasn’t Exactly Legal:
Donald Trump’s first national security adviser pushed so hard for the Pentagon to cooperate with the Russian military that his initiative would likely have broken the law if it had ever been enacted.
Four current and former Pentagon officials told The Daily Beast that during Michael Flynn’s brief White House tenure, the retired general advocated for the expansion of a relatively narrow military communications channel—one meant to keep U.S. and Russian pilots safe from one another—to see if the two nations could jointly fight the so-called Islamic State.
The initiative never went anywhere, in part because of opposition from the Pentagon and from U.S. Central Command; a legal prohibition set by Congress; and, ultimately, Flynn’s firing.
Inside the Pentagon, “there was a lot of fear that we’d move to outright cooperation [with Russia] through this channel,” according to a former senior defense official.
Michael Harriot describes How Police Brutality Keeps America Poor and Uneducated:
Cops don’t pay for police brutality—you do.
There is often a large public outcry when law-enforcement officers don’t face charges or are acquitted after killing unarmed citizens. Likewise, media outlets hop on the outrage bandwagon and trumpet the statistics about brutality, illegal searches and police misconduct. But even when there are no criminal charges or prosecution, juries often find police departments liable in civil cases, resulting in large settlements to victims and their families.
When this happens, cities, counties and states don’t go to the offending police departments and pass the hat until officers come up with the compensation money. Oftentimes, the officer keeps his or her job, the department doesn’t lose funding, and the taxpayers end up paying the salary of a cop who killed an innocent victim and millions in court settlements. in 2015 the Wall Street Journal reported that the 10 largest police departments spent over $1 billion on police brutality cases.
Take Chicago, for instance. Between 2004 and March 2016, the city paid over $662 million in legal fees, settlements and court costs for police misconduct, according to CBS News. After spending $147 million settling lawsuits in 2016, Los Angeles needs to borrow money to cover this year’s projected legal costs. The New York City Police Department paid $482 million in false arrest and civil rights settlements between 2009 and 2014—and that doesn’t include the $228 million it paid in 2016 alone. That’s right: New York City has paid almost three-quarters of a billion dollars because of police misconduct in less than 10 years….
Colorado has (at least) one musical bear:
Black bear invades apartment, tickles the ivories in Colorado surveillance video. Read more: https://t.co/1bXyDRCBlX pic.twitter.com/9rBqQWJNMZ
— AP West Region (@APWestRegion) June 7, 2017