Good morning. 
Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of thirty. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:29 PM, for 9h 04m 04s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is both the one thousand five hundred eleventh and the fifty-second day.
On this day in 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen publishes a paper detailing his discovery of a new type of radiation, which later will be known as x-rays.
Recommended for reading in full —
Cynthia McFadden and Kenzi Abou-Sabe report Food banks sound alarm on child hunger as Covid crisis drags on:
More than 50 million people living in America, including 17 million children, are likely to experience food insecurity by the end of the year, according to Feeding America, the country’s largest anti-hunger organization. That amounts to 1 in 6 Americans and 1 in 4 children — an increase of nearly 50 percent over last year.
Catherine D’Amato, president and CEO of the Greater Boston Food Bank, said that in her 40 years of working in food banks, the need has never been greater.
“I’ve been through plenty of disasters … hurricanes and floods,” D’Amato said, but “we haven’t seen it so pervasive,” with every city, every state, every country involved.
Before the pandemic, the Greater Boston Food Bank was providing about 550 food pantries with about a million pounds of food a week, D’Amato said. Now, deliveries have swelled to 2.5 million pounds of food shipped weekly from its massive and meticulously organized warehouse in South Boston.
One of the areas it serves is Norfolk County, where Weymouth is located. The county has a distinction no one would want: a projected 168 percent rise in child hunger since 2018, according to Feeding America, the biggest increase in the country.
While the pandemic didn’t cause the nation’s hunger problem, it has made things much worse.
Pam Denholm, the executive director of the Weymouth Food Pantry, said the pressure on pantries has greatly intensified since March.
“The demand has increased dramatically,” Denholm said. “All across America, we have these middle-class communities that are being deeply affected.”
Jamie Fly writes How Biden can undo damage to U.S.-backed news outlets that counter authoritarian propaganda:
After the Cold War, when RFE/RL (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) faced congressional elimination in the 1990s, Joe Biden — then a Democratic senator from Delaware — was instrumental in saving the broadcaster. And he cautioned in a 1993 Senate report that if federally supported networks “become direct agencies of the U.S. Government, they will maintain neither the appearance nor the reality of journalistic independence.”
Now the president-elect will have an opportunity to protect these broadcasters from future attempts to politicize them. His administration should work with Congress on bipartisan reforms to firmly establish how the U.S. government explains its policies to the world and how it bolsters truth in the digital age.
RFE/RL and the other non-federal networks should be granted more independence from the federal government. Their independence and adherence to the truth even when that runs counter to U.S. policy are what attracts the loyalty of audiences and differentiates them from their authoritarian competitors.
The broadcasters must also bolster their relevance by adapting better to the digital age. They should forge partnerships with social media platforms to expand their reach with key audiences. Doing so would help break through the static of 21st-century information overload and counter authoritarian messaging on the platforms.