Good morning.
Midweek in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of fifty-three. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 5:55 PM, for 10h 34m 13s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 28.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fiftieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM.
On this day in 1760, George William Frederick becomes king of Great Britain and Ireland. On this day in 1836, the first legislative session of the Wisconsin territory takes place: “At this time, the Territory of Wisconsin included all of present-day Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and part of the two Dakotas.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Matthew DeFour reports WEDC board member offers more detail on why Foxconn vote delayed:
In an interview Tuesday with the State Journal, Carpenter offered more detail, saying Hogan told board members last week that the way the deal was structured the agency couldn’t guarantee it could protect taxpayers if the company violated the agreement.
“We could have given them all this money and we wouldn’t have been able to get it back,” Carpenter said.
The state is planning to give the company $3 billion in refundable tax credits in exchange for a $10 billion LCD-screen factory in Racine County, creating up to 13,000 jobs.
Carpenter said Tuesday he decided to discuss the issue in greater detail after Alan Marcuvitz, a lawyer advising the village of Mount Pleasant, discussed the matter with the village board Monday night. Marcuvitz said there were “technical issues” with the contract “because one of the companies is from overseas” and the issue had been resolved, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Carpenter said the problem was “more than a technical issue”….
Erica Orden and Nicole Hong report Former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort Faces Another Money-Laundering Probe (“Manhattan U.S. attorney’s inquiry comes as President Donald Trump is weighing candidates to run the office’):
The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office is pursuing an investigation into possible money laundering by Paul Manafort, said three people familiar with the matter, adding to the federal and state probes concerning the former Trump campaign chairman.
The investigation by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York is being conducted in collaboration with a probe by special counsel Robert Mueller into Mr. Manafort and possible money laundering, according to two of these people….
This is what POTUS calls a 10! Surgery performed with cellphones as flashlights in Puerto Rico today. pic.twitter.com/5pnK5dkkE6
— Alejandro (@agarciapadilla) October 21, 2017
Eleanor Cummins writes Sometimes All It Takes Is One Horrible Photo to Summarize a Catastrophe. This is Puerto Rico’s (“Surgery by flashlight is just the beginning of the public health crisis there”):
On Friday, former Puerto Rican Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla tweeted a photo from inside a hospital, in which scrubbed-up doctors leaned over an operating table performing surgery lit only by a flashlight. “This is what POTUS calls a 10!” García Padilla wrote in the English version of his post. “Surgery performed with cellphones as flashlights in Puerto Rico today.”
The image quickly made the rounds on the internet; it currently has almost 9,000 retweets. That’s probably because this blurry picture feels like it’s worth a good deal more than 1,000 words. Closely cropped and the dictionary definition of “bleak,” it illuminates just a small sliver of the public health crisis Puerto Rico is currently facing.
Some 33 days after Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico, only 23 percent of residents have electricity, according to Status.pr, which provides daily updates on basic services on the island. While there are other, somewhat unrelated problems at play—gas stations have been slow to reopen, and roads are badly damaged—the power grid’s utter annihilation in the category 4 winds is not just a temporary inconvenience. A month later, the ways that lack of electricity can set off a cascade of other crises is becoming increasingly clear.
Nico Hines and Sam Stein report GOP Leaders Refusing To Pay For Dana Rohrabacher’s Travel Over Russia Fears:
House Republican leaders have taken the extraordinary step of curtailing Rep. Dana Rohrabacher’s (R-CA) ability to conduct official business out of fear that he is too compromised by his ties to Russia.
Rohrabacher has drawn scrutiny for his longstanding links with Moscow, his closeness to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and his recent willingness to allow his subcommittee to be used for Kremlin propaganda purposes.
In response, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs has placed heightened restrictions on the trips abroad that he can take with committee money as well as the hearings he can hold through the subcommittee on Europe that he chairs.
When the California congressman made a trip this summer to see Assange, who is holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, he had to do it on his own dime. A congressional source told The Daily Beast that Rohrabacher had requested committee funding for the trip but was denied. The congressman’s staff confirmed that he ended up using his own money though said he had planned to as it was a side trip from his wedding anniversary celebration on the Iberian Peninsula. Still, they admitted he was facing new restrictions.
“His committee travel and hearing requests were curtailed following news accounts of his outside-the-box interest in Russia,” Rohrabacher’s communications director, Ken Grubbs confirmed to The Daily Beast….
(Outside-the-box is more properly understood as tool-of-Putin.)
The natural order is endlessly intriguing, and this specimen of Creatonotos gangis, a species of moth, especially so: