Good morning. 
Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty-three. Sunrise is 6:49 AM and sunset 4:29 PM, for 9h 40m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is both the one thousand four hundred sixty-ninth day and the tenth day.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4:30 PM, and the Library Board via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1990, Pop group Milli Vanilli are stripped of their Grammy Award because the duo did not sing at all on the Girl You Know It’s True album.
Recommended for reading in full —
Ishaan Tharoor reports Europe is ready for Biden to get started:
President Trump and his supporters don’t seem to think it’s over. Over the weekend, thousands marched in Washington protesting the election result. On Twitter, Trump vowed to not concede and repeated baseless and false claims of widespread voter fraud. On Sunday network shows, analysts puzzled over whether Trump’s defiance ought to be read as a corrosive threat to American democracy or one last farce in the waning twilight of his presidency.
But across the Atlantic, societies and governments seem eager to turn the page. A recent Morning Consult poll found that news of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory almost immediately boosted the U.S.’s net favorability by more than 20 points in Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
During a parliamentary session last week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson referred to Trump as the “previous president.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed Biden’s election and hoped he would reinvigorate transatlantic ties. The United States and the European Union “must stand together in order to face the great challenges of our time,” Merkel said.
Those challenges include climate change. Biden is expected to return the United States to the Paris climate pact upon his January inauguration. French President Emmanuel Macron said a Biden presidency presented a new chance to “make our planet great again.”
Susan Hennessey writes How Did a Trump Loyalist Come to Be Named NSA General Counsel—And What Should Biden Do About It?:
Earlier this week, the Washington Post broke the story that Michael Ellis—a former staffer for Rep. Devin Nunes and current National Security Council (NSC) official—has been selected as general counsel of the National Security Agency. This set off alarm bells among commentators and those familiar with the agency, in part because it comes in the same week in which Trump summarily fired the top civilian leadership of the Department of Defense and installed loyalists and cronies in their places.
The circumstances of Ellis’s selection, however, point to something different—and in some respects worse—than the developments at the Pentagon. The firings at the Defense Department involve political appointees, nearly all of whom will be gone as of Jan. 20. By contrast, selecting Ellis as NSA general counsel appears to be an attempt to improperly politicize an important career position. Relatedly, it appears to be an effort to “burrow,” or improperly convert a political appointee into a career position. And to make matters worse, the ample public record suggests that Ellis is particularly ill-suited to discharge the essential functions of the office.
While important details remain unclear, media accounts include numerous indications of irregularity in the process by which Ellis was selected for the job, including interference by the White House. At a minimum, the evidence of possible violations of civil service rules demand immediate investigation by Congress and the inspectors general of the Department of Defense and NSA.
SpaceX Crew-1 astronauts in space – Booster landing, Dragon separation:
NASA astronauts Shannon Walker, Victor Glover, Michael Hopkins and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi are in space after their Falcon 9 launch on Nov. 15, 2020.