FREE WHITEWATER

Daily Bread for 12.19.19

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-three.  Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 01m 46s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 46.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the one thousand one hundred thirty-sixth day.

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Betsy Swan reports Trump Administration Battles New Sanctions on Russia:

The bill, called the “Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression Act of 2019” (DASKA) would level new sanctions against Russian oligarchs, against its banking sector, and against its sovereign debt (which the powerful California Public Employees Retirement System has hundreds of millions of dollars invested). It would also open the door to sanctioning Russia’s ship-building industry in response to the Kremlin’s capture of Ukrainian sailors and ships as they sailed through the Kerch Strait late last year. And it would sanction some crude oil development projects in Russia, as well as energy projects outside the country backed by Russian state-owned entities.

Julia Davis writes Russia’s State TV Calls Trump Their ‘Agent’:

They’ve also added a cynical new a narrative filled with half-joking ironies as they look at the American president’s bleak prospects when he does leave office.

Appearing on Sunday Evening With Vladimir Soloviev, Mikhail Gusman, first deputy director general of ITAR-TASS, Russia’s oldest and largest news agency, predicted: “Sooner or later, the Democrats will come back into power. The next term or the term after that, it doesn’t matter… I have an even more unpleasant forecast for Trump. After the White House, he will face a very unhappy period.”

The host, Vladimir Soloviev, smugly asked: “Should we get another apartment in Rostov ready?” Soloviev’s allusion was to the situation of Viktor Yanukovych, former president of Ukraine, who was forced to flee to Russia in 2014 and settled in the city of Rostov-on-Don.

Such parallels between Yanukovych and Trump are being drawn not only because of their common association with Paul Manafort, adviser to the first, campaign chairman for the second, but also because Russian experts and politicians consider both of them to be openly pro-Kremlin.

Isaac Stanley-Becker reports Russian disinformation network is said to have helped spread smear of U.S. ambassador to Ukraine:

The story that appeared on the Hill website on March 20 was startling.

Marie Yovanovitch, the American ambassador to Ukraine, had given a “list of people whom we should not prosecute” to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuri Lutsenko, according to a write-up of an interview Lutsenko gave to the conservative columnist John Solomon.

Five days later, an image of that purported list appeared in a post on the website Medium and on some other self-publishing platforms in locations as disparate as Germany, South Africa and San Francisco. In less than a week, the Medium essay had been translated into Spanish and German and posted to other websites.

Now, a social media analysis firm, Graphika, has traced those posts to a Russian disinformation campaign — in the first evidence that a network of accounts involved in spreading disinformation before the 2016 presidential election also participated in circulating the false claims about Yovanovitch that earlier this year led to her recall from the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv.

  Why SpaceX And Amazon Are Launching 42,000+ Satellites:

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