Good morning. 
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-nine. Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 6:07 PM, for 10h 54m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 80.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand seventy-fourth day.
On this day in 1867, the United States takes formal possession of Alaska:
… The troops being promptly formed, were, at precisely half past three o’clock, brought to a ‘present arms’, the signal given to the [USS] Ossipee … which was to fire the salute, and the ceremony was begun by lowering the Russian flag … The United States flag … was properly attached and began its ascent, hoisted by my private secretary [and son], George Lovell Rousseau, and again salutes were fired as before, the Russian water battery leading off. The flag was so hoisted that in the instant it reached its place the report of the big gun of the Ossipee reverberated from the mountains around … Captain Pestchouroff stepped up to me and said, ‘General Rousseau, by authority from his Majesty the Emperor of Russia, I transfer to the United States the Territory of Alaska’ and in a few words I acknowledged the acceptance of the transfer, and the ceremony was at an end.”
Recommended for reading in full:
Karoli Kuns observes Mulvaney Thinks Crimes Admitted To In Public Aren’t Crimes:
During a press conference, Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney admitted to the quid pro quo with Ukraine and defiantly justified it as just a shift in foreign policy.
Toluse Olorunnipa, David A. Fahrenthold, and Jonathan O’Connell
That decision is without precedent in modern American history: The president used his public office to direct a huge contract to himself.
Trump’s Doral resort — set among office parks near Miami International Airport — has been in sharp decline in recent years, according to the Trump Organization’s own records. Its net operating income fell 69 percent from 2015 to 2017; a Trump Organization representative testified last year that the reason was Trump’s damaged brand.
Now, the G-7 summit will draw hundreds of diplomats, journalists and security personnel to the resort during one of its slowest months of the year, when Miami is hot and the hotel is often less than 40 percent full. It will also provide a worldwide spotlight for the club.
….It also appears to signal the collapse of promises made by the president and Eric Trump, his son and the day-to-day leader of Trump’s businesses, at the start of the Trump presidency — when they pledged to create separation between the president’s private business and his new public office.
“I will be leaving my great business in total,” Trump said as president-elect in 2016.
“There are lines that we would never cross, and that’s mixing business with anything government,” Eric Trump said in 2017.
The Trump Organization on Thursday said it was “honored” to have been chosen by its owner, the president, for this event.