Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty. Sunrise is 7:09 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 11m 57s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 90.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is both the one thousand four hundred eighty-sixth day and the twenty-seventh day.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 3:30 PM, and the Fire Department via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1775, the USS Alfred becomes the first vessel to fly the Grand Union Flag (the precursor to the Stars and Stripes); the flag is hoisted by John Paul Jones.
Recommended for reading in full —
Philip Rucker reports Trump escalates baseless attacks on election with 46-minute video rant:
Escalating his attack on democracy from within the White House, President Trump on Wednesday distributed an astonishing 46-minute video rant filled with baseless allegations of voter fraud and outright falsehoods in which he declared the nation’s election system “under coordinated assault and siege” and argued that it was “statistically impossible” for him to have lost to President-elect Joe Biden.
Standing behind the presidential lectern in the Diplomatic Reception Room and flanked by the flags of his office and of the country whose Constitution he swore an oath to uphold, Trump tried to leverage the power of the presidency to subvert the vote and overturn the election results.
The rambling and bellicose monologue — which Trump said “may be the most important speech I’ve ever made” and was delivered direct-to-camera with no audience — underscored his desperation to reverse the outcome of his election loss after a month of failed legal challenges and as some key states already have certified Biden’s victory.
A guide to Trump’s false election claims:
Stephanie Saul, Kate Kelly, and Michael LaForgia report 2,596 Trades in One Term: Inside Senator Perdue’s Stock Portfolio (‘The Georgia Republican’s stock trades have included a range of companies within his Senate committees’ oversight, an analysis shows’):
An examination of Mr. Perdue’s stock trading during his six years in office reveals that he has been the Senate’s most prolific stock trader by far, sometimes reporting 20 or more transactions in a single day.
The Times analyzed data compiled by Senate Stock Watcher, a nonpartisan website that aggregates publicly available information on lawmakers’ trading, and found that Mr. Perdue’s transactions accounted for nearly a third of all senators’ trades reported in the past six years. His 2,596 trades, mostly in stocks but also in bonds and funds, roughly equal the combined trading volume of the next five most active traders in the Senate.
The data also shows the breadth of trades Mr. Perdue made in companies that stood to benefit from policy and spending matters that came not just before the Senate as a whole, but before the committees and subcommittees on which he served.
Nearly half of Mr. Perdue’s FireEye trades, for example, occurred while he sat on the cybersecurity panel, a role that potentially could have provided him with nonpublic information about companies like FireEye. During that period, FireEye landed a subcontract worth more than $30 million with the Army Cyber Command, which had operations at Fort Gordon, in Mr. Perdue’s home state. In 2018, Mr. Perdue reported capital gains of up to $15,000 from FireEye trades.
Family in South Australia finds live koala in their Christmas tree:
An Adelaide family came home to find their Christmas tree topped with a new, furry decoration after a juvenile koala wandered inside their home, climbed up the plastic tree and sampled the leaves. The family immediately called the Adelaide and Hills Koala Rescue, but co-founder Dee Hearne-Hellon said the group didn’t believe the story at first. After being removed from the tree, the koala was released into bushland nearby.