>>187155, >>187156, >>187157, >>187158, >>187159
Andrew Leyden @PenguinSix - US Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro just visited the Reflecting Pool alongside National Park Service and US Park Police officials. Afterward, she stopped to speak with a USPP mounted officer and pet the police horse.
https://x.com/PenguinSix/status/2072441289002332205

Andrew Leyden @PenguinSix - The @POTUS leaves the White House while pausing briefly to show the construction work to his son Donald Jr and wife Bettina, along with his other son Eric Trump.
https://x.com/PenguinSix/status/2072325243356520677

Anish Moonka @anishmoonka - A sword has been stuck in a rock in Tuscany since the 1180s. In 2001, a chemist from Italy's professional skeptics society, the people whose whole job is exposing fakes, drilled into the stone to test it. The metal came back medieval.
The knight was Galgano Guidotti, from Chiusdino, a hill town near Siena. Around 1180 he quit fighting. He rode up a nearby hill, drove his sword into the bedrock up to the hilt, and lived next to it until he died in 1181, at 33. Locals built a round chapel over the rock, finished by 1185, and the sword stayed put.
For centuries the obvious explanation was fraud. An iron prop cemented in to impress medieval travelers, the kind of thing you'd expect from a town with a relic to sell. Then Luigi Garlaschelli went in to check. He is a chemist at the University of Pavia and a member of CICAP, the Italian committee that takes apart exactly these claims for a living. His team drilled a small hole into the rock and pulled samples from the buried half of the blade, metal nobody had touched in 800 years.
The samples went through atomic absorption spectroscopy and neutron activation analysis, a nuclear technique that reads a metal's exact elemental fingerprint. No modern alloys anywhere. The trace elements matched iron slag from medieval foundries whose waste still litters the ground around the site, and the blade shape matched swords catalogued from the late 1100s. The hilt above the rock and the section buried inside it are one continuous piece, so nobody jammed a fake handle into a boulder.
My favorite detail is the one they left alone. Radar picked up a cavity directly under the sword, about six and a half feet by three, the dimensions of a grave. Nobody has ever opened it. One caveat, though: the sword snapped during a theft attempt in 1960 and got repaired and re-set with cement, so the thing under the case today is patched, even if the metal is medieval.
The timeline bothers me in a good way. The earliest sword in the stone in the King Arthur legend shows up in a French poem from around 1200. Galgano's sword was in its rock by 1181, chapel and all by 1185. Scholars still argue over which story fed which, but the object beat the legend by roughly two decades, and it was planted by a man walking away from knighthood rather than claiming a throne.
https://x.com/anishmoonka/status/2072606204983906560

Ben Garrison Cartoons - Happy 250th Birthday America 1776-2026 – GrrrGraphics
https://grrrgraphics.com/happy-250th-birthday-america-1776-2026/