Good morning. 
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-eight. Sunrise is 7:31 AM and sunset 5:45 PM, for 10h 14m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 31.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand eighty-ninth day.
On this day in 1889, North Dakota and South Dakota are admitted to the Union.
Recommended for reading in full:
David Ignatius writes In Ukraine, the quid pro quo may have started long before the phone call:
What led to Trump’s first meeting on June 20, 2017, with Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko? Ukraine had hired the lobbying firm BGR Group in January 2017 to foster contact with Trump, but nothing had happened .?.?. and then the door opened. Why?
On June 7, less than two weeks before Poroshenko’s White House meeting, Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, had visited Kyiv to give a speech for the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, headed by a prominent Ukrainian oligarch. While Giuliani was there, he also met with Poroshenko and his prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, according a news release issued by the foundation.
Just after Giuliani’s visit, Ukraine’s investigation of the so-called black ledger that listed alleged illicit payments to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was transferred from an anti-corruption bureau, known as NABU , to Poroshenko’s prosecutor general, according to a June 15, 2017, report in the Kyiv Post. The paper quoted Viktor Trepak, former deputy head of the country’s security service, saying: “It is clear for me that somebody gave an order to bury the black ledger.”
The New York Times reported in May 2018 that Ukraine had “halted cooperation” with Mueller’s investigation. The paper quoted Volodymyr Ariev, a parliament ally of Poroshenko, explaining: “In every possible way, we will avoid irritating the top American officials.”
Was there any implicit understanding that Poroshenko’s government would curb its cooperation with the U.S. Justice Department’s investigation of Manafort, who would later be indicted by Mueller?
Molly Beck reports Wisconsin again has the worst gap in academic achievement between its black and white students:
Wisconsin also again bears the distinction of having the worst gap between black and white academic success of any state, according to new results of the National Assessment of Education Progress — known as the Nation’s Report Card.
Wisconsin has the highest percentage of black students exhibiting skills considered below a basic level, according to the assessment, taken by fourth and eighth graders earlier this year.
State superintendent Carolyn Stanford Taylor, the first African American leader of the Department of Public Instruction, said the results indicate a “crisis.”
“We have work ahead to achieve our rigorous expectations,” she said in a statement. “Our persistent achievement gaps are a crisis. Closing these gaps is not only the right thing to do, it is imperative for our state.”
The new test results underscore the hurdles facing the black children in Wisconsin — 82% of whom are considered to be economically disadvantaged by the state DPI.
Meet the 2019 MacArthur Fellow transforming Chicago’s South Side: