Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of fifty. Sunrise is 6:33 AM and sunset 5:41 PM, for 11h 07m 42s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 84.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred seventy-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM today.
On this day in 1815, exiled French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte escapes from Elba, to begin the Hundred Days, during which he would inflict further militarism and suffering on the people of Europe. On this day in 1863, Wisconsin’s Irish residents order a regimental flag for “the 17th Wisconsin Infantry. The flag was to be presented to Colonel Adam Malloy from all of the state’s Irish citizens.”
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ Jane Perlez and Javier C. Hernandez report President Xi’s Strongman Rule Raises New Fears of Hostility and Repression:
President Xi Jinping’s efforts to indefinitely extend his rule as China’s leader, announced on Sunday, raised fresh fears in China of a resurgence of strongman politics — and fears abroad of a new era of hostility and gridlock.
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But Mr. Xi’s assumption of unfettered power may not work out the way he thinks, said Peter Jennings, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and a former senior Australian defense official.
“The risks to his personal fortunes are huge,” he said. “What if the People’s Liberation Army decides he should be cut loose?” And, he added, “What if growth slows more than expected?”
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Moreover, he added, “Where does one ever see the ‘president for life’ model end well?”
➤ Philip Rucker, Joshua Partlow, and Nick Miroff report After testy call with Trump over border wall, Mexican president shelves plan to visit White House:
Tentative plans for Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to make his first visit to the White House to meet with President Trump were scuttled this week after a testy call between the two leaders ended in an impasse over Trump’s promised border wall, according to U.S. and Mexican officials.
Peña Nieto was eyeing an official trip to Washington this month or in March, but both countries agreed to call off the plan after Trump would not agree to publicly affirm Mexico’s position that it would not fund construction of a border wall that the Mexican people widely consider offensive, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a confidential conversation.
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One Mexican official said Trump “lost his temper.” But U.S. officials described him instead as being frustrated and exasperated, saying Trump believed it was unreasonable for Peña Nieto to expect him to back off his crowd-pleasing campaign promise of forcing Mexico to pay for the wall.
(Trump’s so self-absorbed that he thinks others will simply agree to what he finds crowd-pleasing. Even stranger are the Trump officials who think that what’s crowd-pleasing for Trump’s lumpen horde would be acceptable to reasonable and knowledgeable people anywhere else, in America or abroad.)
➤ Michael Birnbaum reports Sweden is taking on Russian meddling ahead of fall elections. The White House might take note:
Hundreds of local election workers have been trained to spot and resist foreign influence. The country’s biggest media outlets have teamed up to combat false news. Political parties scour their email systems to close hacker-friendly holes.
The goal: to Russia-proof Sweden’s political system so that what happened in the United States in 2016 can never happen in this Nordic country of 10 million people.
Although the general election isn’t until Sept. 9, officials say their preemptive actions may already have dissuaded the Kremlin from interfering. In Washington, meanwhile, the FBI says it has received no White House orders to secure the 2018 midterms against Russian influence.
“It would be very risky for a foreign nation to do this now,” said Mikael Tofvesson, who heads the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency’s effort to safeguard elections from malicious foreign influence. “It could risk a backlash. It would be an exposure of their methods.”
The efforts, which are supported by parties across the political spectrum, contrast with the bitterly partisan discussion in Washington about Russia’s behavior during the 2016 election.
(There is a partisan discussion in Washington because so many GOP politicians and operatives have become fellow travelers with Putinism. These men commonly wear American flags of red, white, and blue on their lapels, but it’s a tricolor banner of white, blue, and red that more closely represents their aspirations.)
➤ Sarah Kendzior considers Why Former Trump Staffers May Be Walking Security Threats (“With many White House officials on interim clearances, the president appears to be more interested in personal loyalty than national security”):
Trump’s White House has long been a revolving door, with a turnover rate of 34%. While departures of incompetent or immoral staffers have often inspired public relief, they are actually cause for alarm. That revolving door leads into a bustling marketplace of state secrets, one whose temptations should not be shrugged off given that basic standards of loyalty to country have been put into question by this administration’s actions.
Among the departed White House staffers are former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who has admitted guilt in the Kremlin interference probe; white nationalist (and fellow domestic abuser ) Steve Bannon, who has vowed to destroy the United States; and extremist Seb Gorka, who has ties to neo-Nazi organizations and is being investigated by police in Hungary. (Gorka, like Porter, worked as a Trump advisor despite being denied clearance as a result of his 2016 arrest in the U.S. for bringing a weapon through an airport.)
Men who have already colluded with a foreign power, committed acts of violence, or threatened to destroy the U.S. now know some of the country’s secrets, and it’s easy to imagine the damage they could do in the era of WikiLeaks and illicit foreign deals. Fellow federal indictee Paul Manafort, for example, used his access as Trump’s campaign manager to offer “private briefings” to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who is a close friend of Vladimir Putin and to whom Manafort is alleged to owe a great deal of money.
➤ Could Growing Vaccines in Plants Save Lives?:
This flu season has been nasty in large part because the vaccine didn’t work as well as past versions. So scientists are on the hunt for new ways to make better vaccines and think they might have found one — by growing them in plants..