Good morning. 
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-one. Sunrise is 7:10 AM and sunset 6:10 PM, for 11h 00m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 93.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand seventy-second day.
Whitewater’s Parks & Rec Board meets today at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1946, ten convicted Nazi war criminals are executed at Nuremberg.
Recommended for reading in full:
Rosalind S. Helderman, Josh Dawsey, Paul Sonne, and Tom Hamburger report How two Soviet-born emigres made it into elite Trump circles — and the center of the impeachment storm:
Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-born emigre, appeared at a dark time in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Less than a month before the election, major GOP donors had been spooked by the revelation that Trump boasted about grabbing women during a recording of the television show “Access Hollywood.”
Parnas had never been a player in national Republican politics. But the onetime stockbroker chose that moment to deliver a $50,000 donation to Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party, and it quickly opened doors.
The contribution helped propel Parnas and his business partner, Belarus-born Igor Fruman, on an extraordinarily rapid rise into the upper echelon of Trump allies — before they became central figures in the presidential impeachment inquiry.
By spring 2018, the two men had dined with Trump, breakfasted with his son and attended exclusive events at Mar-a-Lago and the White House, all while jetting around the world and spending lavishly, particularly at Trump hotels in New York and Washington. That May, a pro-Trump super PAC reported receiving a $325,000 donation from an energy company the duo had recently formed.
Where Parnas and Fruman got their money remains a mystery. When they were arrested Wednesday on charges of campaign finance violations, prosecutors alleged that Parnas and Fruman were backed in part by an unnamed Russian national who used them to funnel donations to state and federal candidates.
and report GOP players in Benghazi probe drop strong defense of congressional oversight:
Several key players in the House impeachment inquiry of President Trump were the strongest proponents of Republicans’ iron-fisted oversight of the Obama administration, culminating in a two-year House probe into the deadly 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
Now, faced with a politically charged investigation into a president of their own party, they have dropped their formerly stout defense of congressional prerogatives and have joined Trump in endorsing a campaign of massive resistance to the impeachment probe — a turnabout that has left many Democrats and even some Republicans aghast.
Among those who participated in the select committee that probed the attacks on U.S. facilities in Libya were Mike Pompeo, then a Kansas congressman and now secretary of state and a key target of the current Democratic investigation, and Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), who is the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee. The panel’s chairman, then-Rep. Trey Gowdy (S.C.), who has since left Congress, was poised to serve as an outside lawyer for Trump. The president said Thursday that Gowdy would have to wait until January to start due to lobbying rules.
Noah Bierman and Chris Megerian report Trump’s children take in millions overseas as president slams Biden’s son:
WASHINGTON — Eric Trump sounded shocked that Hunter Biden hadn’t drawn more criticism for his lucrative business deals in Ukraine and China while his father, Joe Biden, was vice president.
“Can you imagine if I took 3 cents from the Ukraine or 4 cents from China?” President Trump’s second-oldest son asked in a recent Fox Business appearance.
Eric Trump and his older brother, Donald Trump Jr., run the Trump Organization, which conducts business — and takes in tens of millions of dollars annually — around the globe and is still owned by the president. The company is forging ahead with projects in Ireland, India, Indonesia and Uruguay, and is licensing the Trump name in such turbulent areas as Turkey and the Philippines.
Their sister Ivanka is a senior advisor to the president. She kept her international fashion business going for 18 months after she was given a loosely defined White House portfolio that includes interacting with heads of state and working with domestic and international corporate chiefs on economic programs.
OpenAI’s AI-powered robot learned how to solve a Rubik’s cube one-handed: