Daily Bread for 1.5.17

Good morning.

Whitewater’s Thursday will be partly cloudy with a high of ten degrees. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:36 PM, for 9h 11m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 46.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}fifty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Birge Fountain Committee meets at 5:30 PM, her Landmarks Commission at 6 PM, and the Fire Department will hold a business meeting at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1925, Nellie Tayloe Ross becomes governor of Wyoming, and in doing so becomes the first female governor in U.S. history. On this day in 1855, King Camp Gillette, who developed a a safety razor bearing his name, is born in Fond du Lac.

Recommended for reading in full —

Bruce Vielmetti reports that Lawyer regulators charge retired Kenosha County DA: “Recently retired Kenosha County District Attorney Robert Zapf has been charged with ethics violations for his handling of a homicide prosecution in which a former police officer admitted to planting evidence. A complaint filed Dec. 23 by the Office of Lawyer Regulation accuses Zapf of three counts or professional misconduct related to the 2015 prosecution of two men involved in a 2014 shooting death.  It comes 16 months after a Kenosha activist and two lawyers filed their own complaints with OLR [Office of Lawyer Regulation] over the case. “It’s not how I was hoping to start my retirement,” Zapf said when reached at his home Wednesday.

Despite Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s declaration that a water contamination crisis is over, residents are Still Living with Bottled Water in Flint:

Amanda Erickson writes of How the USSR’s effort to destroy Islam created a generation of radicals: “In 1929, Soviet leader Mikhail Kalinin laid out his vision for Central Asia: “teaching the people of the Kirgiz Steppe, the small Uzbek cotton grower, and the Turkmenian gardener the ideals of the Leningrad worker.” It was a tall order, especially when it came to religion. About 90 percent of the population there was Muslim, but atheism was the state religion of the USSR. So in the early 1920s, the Soviet government effectively banned Islam in Central Asia. Books written in Arabic were burned, and Muslims weren’t allowed to hold office. Koranic tribunals and schools were shuttered, and conducting Muslim rituals became almost impossible. In 1912, there were about 26,000 mosques in Central Asia. By 1941, there were just 1,000. Rather than stamp out Islam, though, efforts to stifle Islam only radicalized believers. It’s a trend that’s played out again and again over the past century, and one that could have dire consequences in the war on terror. Today, Central Asian Muslims are radicalizing at alarming rates. Thousands have flocked to the Islamic State, and Turkish media reports suggest that the suspect who killed 39 people in an Istanbul nightclub last week was an ethnic Uighur from Kyrgyzstan.”

Jon Marcus reports on the predictable failure of tuition (or other) price controls, in How University Costs Keep Rising Despite Tuition Freezes: “DAYTON, Ohio—At a time when public anger is laser-focused on tuition charges that are rising three times faster than inflation, something less well understood has actually been largely responsible for pushing up the cost of college: fees. Think tuition is high? Now add fees for student activities, fees for athletics, fees for building maintenance, fees for libraries—even fees for graduation, the bills for which often arrive just as students and their families thought they were finally done paying for their higher education. All are frustratingly piled on top of a long list of expenses beyond tuition that many people never plan for or expect, or that can’t be covered by financial aid—sometimes forcing them to take out more and more loans, or quit college altogether.”

Sometimes one encounters singing ice, with a sci-fi vibe: