Good morning. 
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-six. Sunrise is 6:52 AM and sunset 4:28 PM, for 9h 36m 08s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 14.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is both the one thousand four hundred seventy-first day and the twelfth day.
Whitewater’s Parks and Recreation Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1928, the animated short Steamboat Willie premieres as the first fully synchronized sound cartoon, directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, featuring the third appearances of cartoon characters Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse.
Recommended for reading in full —
Ellen Nakashima and Nick Miroff report Trump fires top DHS official who refuted his claims that the election was rigged:
President Trump on Tuesday fired a top Department of Homeland Security official who led the agency’s efforts to help secure the election and was vocal about tamping down unfounded claims of ballot fraud.
In a tweet, Trump fired Christopher Krebs, who headed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at DHS and led successful efforts to help state and local election offices protect their systems and to rebut misinformation.
Earlier Tuesday, Krebs in a tweet refuted allegations that election systems were manipulated, saying that “59 election security experts all agree, ‘in every case of which we are aware, these claims either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.’
Krebs’s statement amounted to a debunking of Trump’s central claim that the November election was stolen.
….Krebs’s dismissal was not unexpected, as he told associates last week that he was expecting to be fired. His latest tweet about the security of the election, which followed similar earlier assessments by his agency, including on its Rumor Control Web page, angered the president, according to an official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.
In recent weeks Trump has made repeated, unproved charges of voter and ballot fraud, and his campaign is challenging election results in several states — so far with little success.
Krebs’s agency has asserted its independence in recent days, on Thursday issuing a statement thatcontradicted Trump’s allegations of fraud.
Sam Levine reports Pennsylvania court deals blow to Trump campaign’s bid to overturn Biden win:
Philadelphia election officials did not improperly block Donald Trump’s campaign from observing the counting of mail-in ballots, the Pennsylvania supreme court ruled on Tuesday, a major blow to the president’s alreadyflailing legal efforts.
The decision is significant because one of the Trump campaign’s loudest claims since the election has been that they were improperly blocked from observing the counting of ballots in Philadelphia.
….
Even the two Republican justices who dissented from the majority opinion disagreed with the idea, advanced by the Trump campaign, that legitimate votes should be rejected because of improper observation practices.
“Short of demonstrated fraud, the notion that presumptively valid ballots cast by the Pennsylvania electorate would be disregarded based on isolated procedural irregularities that have been redressed – thus disenfranchising potentially thousands of voters – is misguided,” wrote chief justice Thomas Saylor in his dissenting opinion.
“Accordingly, to the degree that there is a concern with protecting or legitimizing the will of the Philadelphians who cast their votes while candidate representatives were unnecessarily restrained at the convention center, I fail to see that there is any real issue.”