Good morning. 
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of thirty-eight. Sunrise is 7:11 AM and sunset 4:20 PM, for 9h 09m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 75.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is both the one thousand four hundred eighty-eighth day and the twenty-ninth day.
On this day in 1879, Humane Society of Wisconsin is organized in Milwaukee.
Recommended for reading in full —
David Folkenflik writes ‘Substantial Likelihood Of Wrongdoing’ By VOA Parent Agency, Government Watchdog Says:
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel, a federal watchdog, disclosed Wednesday that it had found “a substantial likelihood of wrongdoing” at the parent agency of the Voice of America under the leadership of the CEO appointed by President Trump.
Since taking over the U.S. Agency for Global Media, CEO Michael Pack has turned it upside down, sidelining top executives, firing network chiefs, and deep-sixing requests for visa extensions for foreign staffers. Most notably, Pack had two senior political aides with records of strongly pro-Trump ideological statements investigate journalists for perceived anti-Trump bias and push for sympathetic news coverage of the president during the campaign.
The finding is yet another formal and stinging rebuke to Pack’s actions, though it is not a final determination. In late November, U.S. Judge Beryl Howell ruled that Pack had acted unconstitutionally in investigating his own journalists on political grounds. She ordered him to stop intervening inside VOA’s newsrooms. Suspended executives have separately filed a complaint with the inspector general of the U.S. State Department, which has jurisdiction over the agency.
Catherine Rampell writes The November jobs report has no silver lining:
After a few strong months of job gains earlier this year, hiring has slowed dramatically. In June, for instance, employers added 4.8 million jobs; but last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report published Friday, that number had slowed to a trickle of only 245,000.
Yes, it’s good that U.S. employers are still hiring. In a normal, healthy economy, adding 245,000 jobs would be nothing to sneeze at. But it’s not nearly enough for the economy today. We remain in a deep, deep hole, dug when employers eliminated 22 million jobs on net earlier this year. As a result, the U.S. economy still has a greater jobs deficit today than was the case at the very worst point of every previous postwar recession, including the Great Recession. Which no longer seems so terribly “great” anymore, as this chart illustrates:
As you can see, we’ve recovered only about half the positions lost when the pandemic initially broke out in the United States and shuttered much of the economy. If hiring continues at November’s pace, it will take more than three additional years before the United States regains all the jobs lost in early spring. And that estimate does not account for expected population growth, which would call for more jobs than we had pre-pandemic.
The report contains other bad news, too.
The headline unemployment rate fell because people dropped out of the labor force entirely — that is, they stopped actively looking for work — and therefore are no longer counted as unemployed.
(Emphasis added. Rampell is right that, by job loss, this Pandemic Recession is far worse than the Great Recession. The Great Recession, however, was great – in darkness and danger – for its aftermath as much unemployment: stagnation in parts of America, addictions, malaise, and nativism. It was an illness half-treated, and so led to infections and worse maladies in many of its victims.)
Astronomers produce most detailed 3D map yet of the Milky Way: