Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 31. Sunrise is 6:43 and sunset is 5:34 for 10 hours 51 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 19.4 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1947, in New York City, Edwin Land demonstrates the first “instant camera,” the Polaroid Land Camera, to a meeting of the Optical Society of America.
Polaroid Land Camera Model 95, the first commercially available instant camera, with sales beginning in 1948. By Daderot – Own work, CC0, Link
Farm bankruptcies are on the rise in Wisconsin, following a national trend.
A report from the American Farm Bureau Federation highlighted last year’s increase in Chapter 12 bankruptcies, a category of bankruptcy created specifically for farms and fisheries.
Bankruptcy filings were 46 percent higher than in 2024, according to the report, with more than a third of filings in the Midwest.
See Hope Kirwan, Farm bankruptcies tick up in Wisconsin, US (‘Industry experts say bankruptcy filings are ‘lagging indicator’ of high costs, low pay prices faced by farmers’), February 18, 2026.
While farm bankruptcies in 2025 were higher than in other years over the past decade, five of the six highest years in that decade occurred while Trump was president.
A man in Catania, Sicily, trained his dog to dump bags of rubbish by the roadside in an attempt to evade cameras installed by local authorities to combat fly-tipping [illegal dumping], municipal police have said. The episode was detailed in a Facebook post on the city of Catania’s official page. Accompanying a video of the dog was a remark from the police that ‘inventiveness can never become an alibi for incivility.’ The man has reportedly been identified and fined. Illegal dumping is a major problem in Italy, particularly in the south, with significant environmental and economic costs. In 2023, more than 9,300 waste-related offenses were recorded — a 66% increase on the previous year. In response, growing numbers of Italian municipalities are installing surveillance cameras, wildlife-style ‘camera traps’ and smart monitoring systems to curb fly-tipping and misuse of recycling points.
