Good morning. 
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-one. Sunrise is 7:08 AM and sunset 5:07 PM, for 9h 58m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 91% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1961, as part of Project Mercury, the chimpanzee Ham travels into outer space on Mercury-Redstone 2.
Recommended for reading in full —
Rachel Siegel, Andrew Van Dam, and Erica Werner report 2020 was the worst year for economic growth since World War II:
The U.S. economy shrank by 3.5 percent in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged factories, businesses and households, pushing U.S. economic growth to a low not seen since the United States wound down wartime spending in 1946.
Overall, the economy was surprisingly resilient in the second half of the year, given the falloff at the start of the public health crisis, according to data released Thursday from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Yet, the 1 percent growth in the fourth quarter signaled a faltering recovery and a long road ahead, with 9.8 million jobs still missing and 23.8 million adults struggling to feed their families.
“2020 has no precedent in modern economic history,” said David Wilcox, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former director of the domestic economics division at the Federal Reserve. “The influenza of 1918 and 1919 predates our modern system of economic statistics, and since World War II, there’s never been a contraction that even remotely approached the severity and the breadth of the initial collapse in 2020.”
Alana Wise reports ‘Unconscionable’: Capitol Police Union Says Leadership Failed Officers In Riot:
The union representing U.S. Capitol Police officers says the force’s leadership failed to relay the known threat of violence adequately ahead of the Jan. 6 deadly riot, calling the acting chief’s recent admission of prior knowledge of the threat to Congress “a disclosure that has angered and shocked the rank-and-file officers.”
The statement Wednesday from the Capitol Police Labor Committee comes a day after acting Chief Yogananda Pittman testified to Congress, saying in prepared remarks:
By January 4th, the Department knew that the January 6th event would not be like any of the previous protests held in 2020. We knew that militia groups and white supremacists organizations would be attending. We also knew that some of these participants were intending to bring firearms and other weapons to the event. We knew that there was a strong potential for violence and that Congress was the target.
Pittman, who apologized in her testimony for her department’s “failings” during the insurrection, told Congress that the former police chief, Steven Sund, had asked the Capitol Police Board, a three-member oversight body, on Jan. 4 to declare a state of emergency for Jan. 6 and to request National Guard assistance.
Adam Goldman, Katie Benner, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs report How Trump’s Focus on Antifa Distracted Attention From the Far-Right Threat (‘Federal law enforcement shifted resources last year in response to Donald Trump’s insistence that the radical left endangered the country. Meanwhile, right-wing extremism was building ominously’)
Federal prosecutors and agents felt pressure to uncover a left-wing extremist criminal conspiracy that never materialized, according to two people who worked on Justice Department efforts to counter domestic terrorism. They were told to do so even though the F.B.I., in particular, had increasingly expressed concern about the threat from white supremacists, long the top domestic terrorism threat, and well-organized far-right extremist groups that had allied themselves with the president.
White House and Justice Department officials stifled internal efforts to publicly promote concerns about the far-right threat, with aides to Mr. Trump seeking to suppress the phrase “domestic terrorism” in internal discussions, according to a former official at the Department of Homeland Security.