Daily Bread for 10.23.20

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of sixty.  Sunrise is 7:19 AM and sunset 5:58 PM, for 10h 38m 52s of daytime.  The moon is in its first quarter with 49.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the one thousand four hundred forty-fifth day. 

 Whitewater’s Planning Commission and some city employees will meet today via audiovisual conferencing at 9 AM to discuss amendments to Whitewater’s sign ordinance.

 On this day in 1956, secret police shoot several anti-communist protesters, igniting the Hungarian Revolution.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Julian E. Barnes, Nicole Perlroth, and David E. Sanger report Russia Poses Greater Election Threat Than Iran, Many U.S. Officials Say (‘Russia’s hackers appeared to be preparing to sow chaos amid any uncertainty around election results, officials said’):

While senior Trump administration officials said this week that Iran has been actively interfering in the presidential election, many intelligence officials said they remained far more concerned about Russia, which in recent days has hacked into state and local computer networks in breaches that could allow Moscow broader access to American voting infrastructure.

The discovery of the hacks came as American intelligence agencies, infiltrating Russian networks themselves, have pieced together details of what they believe are Russia’s plans to interfere in the presidential race in its final days or immediately after the election on Nov. 3. Officials did not make clear what Russia planned to do, but they said its operations would be intended to help President Trump, potentially by exacerbating disputes around the results, especially if the race is too close to call.

F.B.I. and Homeland Security officials also announced on Thursday that Russia’s state hackers had targeted dozens of state and local governments and aviation networks starting in September. They stole data from the computer servers of at least two unidentified targets and continued to crawl through some of the affected networks, the agencies said.

Nick Miroff reports Study finds no crime increase in cities that adopted ‘sanctuary’ policies, despite Trump claims:

Cities that have adopted “sanctuary” policies did not record an increase in crime as a result of their decision to limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities, according to a new Stanford University report. The findings appear to rebut the Trump administration’s rhetoric about the policies’ dire effects on public safety.

The study is one of the first to measure those effects by looking at data on violent crime and property crime. Researcher David K. Hausman compared statistics across more than 200 sanctuary counties and jurisdictions between 2010 and 2015, when the policies were adopted in many U.S. cities with a large number of residents living in the country illegally.

The data show that the policies were effective at limiting deportations of nonviolent offenders but did not result in higher crime rates in those cities. And Hausman found that violent criminals continued to be deported at the same pace because the sanctuary policies do little to prevent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials from taking those offenders into custody.

“Sanctuary policies do serve a protective role, but there’s not the cost to public safety that critics claim,” Hausman said in an interview. His findings were published in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

ICE has targeted sanctuary jurisdictions in recent weeks with a campaign called “Operation Rise” that has led to more than 300 arrests and dovetailed with the president’s campaign attacks on Democratic mayors.

Cities and police departments that have adopted the sanctuary measures say they preserve trust between local police officers and immigrants who might be reluctant to report crimes if they fear they could be deported.

 Australian wildlife: 2019 and 2020 bush fires caused unprecedented damage to local fauna: