Good morning.
In Whitewater, the Martin Luther KIng Holiday will see freezing rain in the morning change to rain in the afternoon, with a high of thirty-three. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:48 PM, for 9h 27m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 81.3.% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}sixty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1547, Ivan IV Vasilyevich, Ivan the Terrible, is crowned as ‘Tsar of All the Russias’. On this day in 1863, the 1st Wisconsin Cavalry occupies Kimbrough’s Cross Roads in Tennessee.
Recommended for reading in full —
Christiano Lima reports that Pence denies contact between Trump campaign and Russia: “Vice President-elect Mike Pence on Sunday flatly denied any links between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian officials. “I joined this campaign in the summer, and I can tell you that all the contact by the Trump campaign and the associates were with the American people,” Pence told host Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.”
Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes answer Why Are the Trump Allegations Hanging Around When They Haven’t Been Substantiated?: “Part of the explanation may also be that the salacious allegations and the reports of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence do not take place in a vacuum. They take place amidst the background of a great deal of public evidence of ties between the Trump campaign and Russian actors. Long prior to the election, remember, media outlets reported on links between Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and advisor Carter Page and questionable actors in and around Russia. Those reports led Manafort to resign as campaign manager and for the Trump team to disavow contact with Carter Page. Incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was photographed at an RT dinner in Moscow sitting at the same table as Vladimir Putin. Trump confident Roger Stone claimed ties to Wikileaks and Julian Assange, both of which are suspected of ties to Russia. In fact, the degree of coziness between the Trump team and Russia prompted us to write a somewhat tongue-in-cheek legal analysis on whether Trump qualifies as a Russian agent. So these reports are, at the very least, consistent in key thematic respects with verified public reporting.”
Rainer Buergin reports that Trump Calls NATO Obsolete and Dismisses EU in German Interview: “Trump’s reported comments leave little doubt that he will stick to campaign positions and may in some cases upend decades of U.S. foreign policy, putting him fundamentally at odds with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on issues from free trade and refugees to security and the EU’s role in the world. On Russia, he suggested he might use economic sanctions imposed for Vladimir Putin’s encroachment on Ukraine as leverage in nuclear-arms reduction talks, while NATO, he said, “has problems.” “It’s obsolete, first because it was designed many, many years ago,” Trump was quoted as saying about the trans-Atlantic military alliance. “Secondly, countries aren’t paying what they should” and NATO “didn’t deal with terrorism.”
Dan Egan reports that As new pipelines stall on the Great Plains, oil pressure builds in the Great Lakes: “As pipeline protests have raged out West for the last decade, ever-growing volumes of North American oil have been discreetly flowing through the far more populous Great Lakes region, under its forests, rivers, ponds, wetlands, cities and towns and even, in one extreme case, across the bottom of the Great Lakes themselves. This is the story of what could be called the Great Lakes XXL — a swelling, invisible river of oil flowing through the world’s largest freshwater system at a time when other regions on the continent are rejecting the risk of new pipelines.”
Two divers go swimming with sharks off South Africa, and live to tell the tale —