Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 85. Sunrise is 5:34 AM and sunset 8:27 PM, for 14h 53m 14s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 72.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Equal Opportunities Commission meets at 5 PM (canceled).

On this day in 64, the Great Fire of Rome causes widespread devastation and rages on for six days, destroying half of the city.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Jennifer Rubin reports Biden is right. Purveyors of vaccine disinformation are killing people:

President Biden hit the nail on the head Friday in response to a question about platforms such as Facebook that amplify scientifically false anti-vaccines claims, and deter people from getting lifesaving shots. “They’re killing people,” he said. “I mean they really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that’s — they’re killing people.”

One can quibble over whether Facebook or a mendacious Fox News host actually affects an individual’s decision to avoid vaccination, but it is hard to deny they can reinforce life-threatening behavior. (Disclaimer: I am an MSNBC contributor.)

Once more playing the right-wing gotcha game, Fox News’s Peter Doocy on Friday, ostensibly in response to a comment made by White House press secretary Jen Psaki about the handful of people on Facebook who promote most anti-vaccine content on the platform, demanded to know why the White House is spying on people’s social media profiles. That was a ridiculous, demonstrably false assertion. Perhaps if Fox News personnel paid attention to credible news accounts, they would be less inclined to make such wild accusations.

NPR, for example, reported: “Researchers have found just 12 people are responsible for the bulk of the misleading claims and outright lies about COVID-19 vaccines that proliferate on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.” The report cited Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, who told NPR: “The ‘Disinformation Dozen’ produce 65% of the shares of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms.” This is not the government “spying” on people or suppressing free speech. This is the administration reiterating independent research based on information in the public domain.

Psaki addressed the obviously false premise of Doocy’s question. “We’re in regular touch with all of you and your media outlets … as we are in regular touch with social media platforms. This is publicly open information, people sharing information online. Just as you are all reporting information on your news stations,”she said.

 Bethany Dawson reports 20% of Americans believe the conspiracy theory that microchips are inside the COVID-19 vaccines, says YouGov study:

A new study has found that 1-in-5 Americans believe that it is “definitely true” or “probably true” that there is a microchip in the COVID-19 vaccines.

The study by YouGov in conjunction with The Economist has found that 30-44-year-olds are most likely to believe this widely debunked conspiracy, with 7% of people from this age group saying that it is “definitely true” and 20% of them saying it is “probably true.”

Less than half of people surveyed (46%) said that it is “definitely false.”

The conspiracy suggesting that vaccines are a tool to implant microchips into people has been widespread across the globe, acting as one of the major tales of misinformation that has punctuated the pandemic.

There has never been any evidence to support the idea that microchips are a part of the vaccine rollout.

Despite this, false videos and content describing the false-microchip idea in great detail continue to circulate and find an audience on social media.

Volunteers tend to horses injured in U.S. fires:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 83. Sunrise is 5:33 AM and sunset 8:28 PM, for 14h 54m 57s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 63.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1966, Gemini 10 is launched on a 70-hour mission that includes docking with an orbiting Agena target vehicle.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Sharon LaFraniere reports In Undervaccinated Arkansas, Covid Upends Life All Over Again:

MOUNTAIN HOME, Ark. — When the boat factory in this leafy Ozark Mountains city offered free coronavirus vaccinations this spring, Susan Johnson, 62, a receptionist there, declined the offer, figuring she was protected as long as she never left her house without a mask.

Linda Marion, 68, a widow with chronic pulmonary disease, worried that a vaccination might actually trigger Covid-19 and kill her. Barbara Billigmeier, 74, an avid golfer who retired here from California, believed she did not need it because “I never get sick.”

Last week, all three were patients on 2 West, an overflow ward that is now largely devoted to treating Covid-19 at Baxter Regional Medical Center, the largest hospital in north-central Arkansas. Mrs. Billigmeier said the scariest part was that “you can’t breathe.” For 10 days, Ms. Johnson had relied on supplemental oxygen being fed to her lungs through nasal tubes.

Ms. Marion said that at one point, she felt so sick and frightened that she wanted to give up. “It was just terrible,” she said. “I felt like I couldn’t take it.”

Ed Cara reports Journal Retracts Flawed Study That Claimed to Show Face Masks Harm Kids:

A recent paper that suggested masks may be dangerous for kids to wear has now been retracted. It’s the second pandemic-related study written by the lead author to be pulled from publication in less than a month, following the retraction of another paper claiming to show that covid-19 vaccines would kill almost as many people as they would save.

The study was published June 30 in JAMA Pediatrics as a research letter titled: “Experimental Assessment of Carbon Dioxide Content in Inhaled Air With or Without Face Masks in Healthy Children: A Randomized Clinical Trial.” Its lead author was Harald Walach, a clinical psychologist in Germany.

Walach and his colleagues claimed to show that children who wore face masks for only minutes experienced higher than safe levels of carbon dioxide in their bloodstream as a result, presumably because the masks trapped exhaled air in the mask that the children then breathed back in. Based on their and others’ research, they further argued that “children should not be forced to wear face masks.”

The study was quickly criticized for various reasons, including the use of a possibly improper measuring device to gauge carbon dioxide levels near the mask and the lack of other relevant data, like the children’s actual blood oxygen levels. What’s worse, the JAMA study was published literally the same week that Walach’s earlier paper on vaccine safety was retracted for similar data sloppiness, though only after fierce criticism from other scientists, including editors at the very journal where it was published. Just two weeks later, Walach’s second paper would meet the same fate.

….

Walach had earned a reputation as an unscientific crank long before the pandemic, having once been crowned the Pseudoscientist of the Year in 2012 by the Austrian Society for Critical Thinking over his research into alternative medicine and telepathy. So it’s worth wondering how Walach, who also seems to have no relevant experience in studying vaccines or face masks, was able to publish these terrible studies in two separate journals without any red flags popping up.

How One Man In Egypt Is Keeping This 200-Year-Old Tile Tradition Alive:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 81. Sunrise is 5:32 AM and sunset 8:29 PM, for 14h 56m 38s of daytime.  The moon is in its first quarter with 50.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1821, the Kingdom of Spain cedes the territory of Florida to the United States.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Moriah Balingit reports The new child tax credit could lift more than 5 million kids out of poverty. Can it help them learn, too?:

Students growing up in poverty are already lagging behind their classmates by the time they set foot in kindergarten — and the disparities only worsen over time.

But the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, passed in March, will test a new proposition: What does it mean for children when their families receive enough cash benefits to lift them out of poverty?

The plan includes a $100 billion expansion of the child tax credit program, which will infuse family budgets with up to $1,600 more per child, and will allow even the lowest-income families to benefit. Under the previous child tax credit, families got up to $2,000 off their tax bills per child, but many poor families got a smaller benefit — or nothing at all.

Now, even the poorest families who do not make enough to pay income taxes will qualify. Families with citizen children will now get $3,000 per child, and $3,600 for children under the age of 6. Crucially, the benefit will be split up and paid out in monthly increments, with the money set to go out to families via checks, debit cards or direct deposits beginning Thursday, the Biden administration announced. For some families, the money could be transformative. The colossal and historic investment is expected to cut child poverty in half, according to an analysis from Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy.

Jonathan Shorman, Jeanne Kuang, Jake Kincaid, and Derek Kravitz report How Missouri’s inaction allowed delta variant to spread:

A joint investigation by The Kansas City Star and Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation reveals how June became a lost month in the fight to slow the spread of delta across Missouri. Thousands of pages of internal emails and other documents from 19 local health departments trace the growing alarm and a sense of near-resignation among officials about their chances of halting the advance of the variant.

The consequences of the squandered month will last well into summer. CoxHealth, a major Springfield hospital, told The Star it’s bracing for hospitalizations to rise for weeks to come. Delta is still spreading and has now been found in the Kansas City and St. Louis areas, though state officials hope higher vaccination rates in those places will limit increases in cases. Schools will also begin next month with some parents in open rebellion against imposing mask requirements, even with delta all but certain to continue circulating.

The emails, obtained through records requests by the institute’s Documenting COVID-19 project and shared with The Star, paint a portrait of local health officials eager to vaccinate their communities but encountering resistance from residents, apathy from some politicians and a milquetoast state-level response. They document rising frustration with everyone from DHSS to elected officials to the public. An official in one county even privately mocked a video released by DHSS explaining the delta variant.

“I feel like we’re on an island, all alone in the COVID fight, but I know others in the state are feeling the same way,” Laclede County Health Department Administrator Charla Baker wrote to a DHSS official in late June. “With our community leaders and residents not wanting to take any remedial actions to protect themselves and others, we are just very frustrated and concerned with our current situation.”

Twins opening a restaurant inside an airplane in the West Bank:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 78. Sunrise is 5:31 AM and sunset 8:30 PM, for 14h 58m 15s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 39.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1945, the Atomic Age begins when the United States successfully detonates a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon near Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Recommended for reading in full — 

David Frum writes There’s a Word for What Trumpism Is Becoming:

The relentless messaging by Trump and his supporters has inflicted a measurable wound on American democracy. Before the 2020 election, about 60 percent of Democrats and Republicans expected the election to be fair. Since Trump began circulating his ever more radical complaints, Republican confidence in the election has tumbled by half, to barely more than 30 percent, according to polling supported by the Democracy Fund.

The Trump movement was always authoritarian and illiberal. It indulged periodically in the rhetoric of violence. Trump himself chafed against the restraints of law. But what the United States did not have before 2020 was a large national movement willing to justify mob violence to claim political power. Now it does.

….

In the United States, the forces of legality still mobilize more strength than their Trumpist adversaries. But those who uphold the American constitutional order need to understand what they are facing. Trump incited his followers to try to thwart an election result, and to kill or threaten Trump’s own vice president if he would not or could not deliver on Trump’s crazy scheme to keep power.

Dan Diamond, Hannah Knowles, and Tyler Pager report Vaccine hesitancy morphs into hostility, as opposition to shots hardens:

On July Fourth, President Biden celebrated dramatic progress in the war on the coronavirus, with more than 150 million adults fully vaccinated and infections plunging 93 percent since Inauguration Day. “Together, we’re beating the virus,” Biden said at a party on the White House lawn.

But at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, attendees celebrated a different — essentially opposite — milestone: that Biden had missed his goal of vaccinating 70 percent of adults.

“Clearly they were hoping — the government was hoping — that they could sort of sucker 90 percent of the population into getting vaccinated,” activist Alex Berenson told the crowd Saturday, seeming to inflate Biden’s target. “And it isn’t happening.”

The crowd clapped and cheered at that failure.

What began as “vaccine hesitancy” has morphed into outright vaccine hostility, as conservatives increasingly attack the White House’s coronavirus message, mischaracterize its vaccination campaign and, more and more, vow to skip the shots altogether.

Tim Murphy writes It’s Wild That the Attorney General Leading the War on Voter Fraud Has Been Under Indictment for Six Years:

And it’s dissonance that becomes all the more pronounced when you consider that Paxton, the man leading the fight against this kind of fraud in Texas, is himself under indictment for…fraud. First elected attorney general after admitting to violating securities laws, [Texas A.G. Ken Paxton was indicted for security fraud during his first year in office and has been under indictment ever since without going to trial—six years, all told—because political allies succeeded in effectively defunding the prosecution. Even while styling himself as a champion of law and order and democratic  institutions, he has used his enormous privilege and donor networks to thus far evade accountability for his own alleged transgressions (which now include a staff revolt and additional federal investigation into an entirely separate allegation of corruption).

Oregon Bootleg fire threatens 2,000 homes as new wildfires erupt in western states:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with scattered showers and a high of 86. Sunrise is 5:30 AM and sunset 8:31 PM, for 15h 01m 21s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 29.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Joint Review Board meets at 4:30 PM, and the Community Development Authority at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1815, Napoleon surrenders aboard HMS Bellerophon.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Michael Gerson writes GOP anti-vaxxers are sacrificing citizens’ lives for political gain:

Here is perhaps the most important medical and political fact of our time: 99.5 percent of all covid-19-related deaths in the United States occur among unvaccinated people; 0.5 percent of covid deaths occur among vaccinated people. If you tell people not to be vaccinated, you add to the former category.

In this light, the recent outbreak of applause at the Conservative Political Action Conference for the United States’ failure to meet its vaccination target was macabre. Here were political activists — many of whom would call themselves “pro-life” — cheering for the advance of death. How did we get to such a strange, desperate place?

….

In the case of Fox News celebrities in particular, they must know that discouraging vaccination — by exaggerating risks, highlighting unproven alternative therapies and normalizing anti-vaccine voices — will result in additional, unnecessary deaths. This is hard to get my head around. If someone were to pay me as a columnist to argue that cigarette smoking is healthy for children, or to encourage teenagers to take naps on railroad tracks after underage drinking, I don’t think I could make an ethical case for accepting the deal. Should it matter if I belonged to a news network where producing child smokers and trisected teens were institutional policies? Or if one-half of a major political party endorsed such goals? I don’t see why.

 Reis Thebault reports Joint Chiefs chairman feared potential ‘Reichstag moment’ aimed at keeping Trump in power:

As Trump ceaselessly pushed false claims about the 2020 presidential election, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, grew more and more nervous, telling aides he feared that the president and his acolytes might attempt to use the military to stay in office, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker report in “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year.”

Milley described “a stomach-churning” feeling as he listened to Trump’s untrue complaints of election fraud, drawing a comparison to the 1933 attack on Germany’s parliament building that Hitler used as a pretext to establish a Nazi dictatorship.

 Tom Winter reports Banker convicted of bribery for plot to land Trump administration job:

A former Chicago bank executive was convicted Tuesday in a scheme to arrange $16 million in loans for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in exchange for a high-level position in the Trump administration.

Stephen Calk, the former CEO of The Federal Savings Bank, was found guilty of financial institution bribery and conspiracy to commit financial institution bribery after a three-week trial in Manhattan.

“Calk used the federally-insured bank he ran as his personal piggybank to try and buy himself prestige and power,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said in a statement. “Today’s verdict sends the message that corruption at the highest levels of federally regulated financial institutions will be prosecuted by this office.”

This Sand Castle is Now the Guinness World Record Holder for Tallest Ever Built:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 86. Sunrise is 5:30 AM and sunset 8:31 PM, for 15h 01m 21s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 19.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1960, Jane Goodall arrives at the Gombe Stream Reserve in present-day Tanzania to begin her study of chimpanzees in the wild.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Katelyn Ferral reports After years of failure, Defense Department moves to address sex assault in National Guard:

For years, the Defense Department has failed to hold the National Guard accountable for its longstanding sexual assault problem.

But now, the agency is considering adopting broad reforms in how the Guard handles such cases.

Routine audits, prevention policies and more data are among the changes the agency is considering and that were outlined in a Defense Department task force report in June.

The task force’s report reflects the findings of a Journal Sentinel/Cap Times investigation earlier this year that found Guard units have buried sexual assault allegations and do not have basic data on such claims. The investigation also showed how the Guard’s bureaucracy and complex state-federal structure is so impenetrable that it is difficult for victims to navigate and easy for commanders to weaponize.

The task force largely agreed, calling for distinct reforms for the Guard, which is different than full-time, active duty forces and the U.S. Reserves because the Guard is made up of militias in 54 U.S. states and territories and answers to the governor of each state rather than the federal government.

“Recent independent investigations of sexual harassment and sexual assault in the Guard and Reserve have surfaced troubling findings,” the task force report said. “These components face special jurisdictional challenges by their very nature that simply do not resonate with the Active Duty component.”

 Ed Pilkington reports Ken Starr helped Jeffrey Epstein with ‘scorched-earth’ campaign, book claims:

In Perversion of Justice, the Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown writes about Starr’s role in securing the secret 2008 sweetheart deal that granted Epstein effective immunity from federal prosecution. The author, who is credited with blowing open the cover-up, calls Starr a “fixer” who “used his political connections in the White House to get the Justice Department to review Epstein’s case”.

The book says that emails and letters sent by Starr and Epstein’s then criminal defense lawyer Jay Lefkowitz show that the duo were “campaigning to pressure the Justice Department to drop the case”. Starr had been brought into “center stage” of Epstein’s legal team because of his connections in Washington to the Bush administration.

Perversion of Justice will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Rachel Pannett reports Iranian intelligence agents plotted brazen abduction of Brooklyn dissident journalist, U.S. prosecutors say:

Iranian intelligence agents plotted to abduct an Iranian American journalist living in Brooklyn and spirit her away to the Middle Eastern country, possibly via a daring maritime evacuation, the Justice Department alleged in an indictment unsealed Tuesday.

Four Iranians were charged in federal court in Manhattan with conspiring to kidnap the exiled journalist and women’s rights activist, Masih Alinejad, who has long been critical of the regime in Tehran. Alinejad was not identified by prosecutors, but she confirmed on Twitter that she was the intended target.

“I am grateful to FBI for foiling the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Intelligence Ministry’s plot to kidnap me. This plot was orchestrated under Rouhani,” she wrote on Tuesday, referring to outgoing Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

Lab-Grown Foie Gras is Here to Take Away Ethical Concerns: