Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-four. Sunrise is 7:27 AM and sunset 5:49 PM, for 10h 22m 56s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 95.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand four hundred fifty-first day.
Whitewater’s Fire Department board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1812, the USS Constitution, under the command of Captain William Bainbridge, captures HMS Java off the coast of Brazil after a three-hour battle.
Recommended for reading in full —
Greg Miller and Isaac Stanley-Becker report Trump’s attacks on political adversaries are often followed by threats to their safety:
The CIA’s most endangered employee for much of the past year was not an operative on a mission abroad, but an analyst who faced a torrent of threats after filing a whistleblower report that led to the impeachment of President Trump.
The analyst spent months living in no-frills hotels under surveillance by CIA security, current and former U.S. officials said. He was driven to work by armed officers in an unmarked sedan. On the few occasions he was allowed to reenter his home to retrieve belongings, a security team had to sweep the apartment first to make sure it was safe.
The measures were imposed by the CIA’s Security Protective Service, which monitored thousands of threats across social media and Internet chat rooms. Over time, a pattern emerged: Violent messages surged each time the analyst was targeted in tweets or public remarks by the president.
“The president was tweeting, ‘Where’s the whistleblower? Where’s the whistleblower?’?” said a former senior U.S. official involved in overseeing the protection of the analyst, whose name has not been disclosed by the government. The analyst was never in direct danger, the official said, but some threats were so serious that without security, “there is a strong possibility that grave harm would have come to him.”
Tova O’Brien reports My ‘feral’ [viral] interview with Covid-19 denier Jami-Lee Ross didn’t go as he planned:
We are in a global pandemic that is at least 15 times more fatal than seasonal influenza.
When people argue otherwise it puts more lives at risk; more families will mourn. Covid-19 conspiracies are dangerous. In New Zealand those conspiracies were driven by arguments against lockdowns and misinformation about the seriousness of the virus.
As our country was gearing up for an election, those fringe theories were mainstreamed and amplified by a sitting MP, Jami-Lee Ross. Ross had plummeted from grace this parliamentary term: a high-profile implosion and resignation from the centre-right National party, with allegations of bullying and harassment as well as facing fraud charges in the high court.
….
On election night I was in the studio co-presenting five hours of live coverage. We came off-air somewhere around midnight and I returned to the newsroom the next morning for our post-election special. That’s when I found out we had Ross on the show and I was interviewing him. His party had received 0.9% of the vote, nowhere near enough to return to parliament. The interview was legitimate, capping off an extraordinary and destructive political career but nonetheless I asked my producer to give him half the time we had allotted.
I have been asked about my strategy going into that interview which has since had a dizzying response – what my mentor and former bureau chief Gordon “Flash” McBride would call “feral” (he meant viral). There was no strategy. It was about giving this guy an exit interview and trying to understand why he made some of the choices he made.