Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of fifty-four. Sunrise is 6:39 AM and sunset 7:19 PM, for 12h 40m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 27.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred seventy-first day.
On this day in 1865, the Wisconsinites fight at the Battle at Gravelly Run, Virginia:
The Battle at Gravelly Run erupted east of Petersburg, Virginia. The 6th, 7th and 36th Wisconsin Infantry regiments participated in this battle, which was one of a series of engagements that ultimately drove Confederate forces out of Petersburg. Wisconsin’s Iron Brigade regiments fought at Gravelly Run, and when ordered to fall back before the enemy, they were the last to leave the field.
Recommended for reading in full:
Mariana Zuñiga, Anthony Faiola, and Anton Troianovski report As Maduro confronts a crisis, Russia’s footprint in Venezuela grows:
CARACAS, Venezuela — After two Russian military planes landed near Caracas this month, the Trump administration issued stark warnings over President Nicolás Maduro’s ties to the Kremlin. But a vessel that arrived in the waters off Venezuela’s Caribbean coast a day earlier offered a more telling sign of a deepening relationship that is so alarming to Washington.
Venezuela has the world’s largest known oil reserves, with transport and sales of its thick, sludgy crude long dependent on chemical thinners purchased from the United States. After Washington barred U.S. companies from selling them to Venezuela in January — and warned foreign companies to follow suit — Maduro faced a dire predicament: How would he stave off the industry’s total collapse?
Like manna from Moscow, an answer arrived in the form of a red-and-black tanker, the Serengeti, that loaded a cargo of thinners off the coast of Malta before arriving in Venezuela on March 22. The company that chartered the vessel: Russia’s state-run oil giant Rosneft.
Alina Polyakova writes Want to know what’s next in Russian election interference? Pay attention to Ukraine’s elections:
With Russia’s continued occupation of Crimea and war in the Donbas, Ukraine also remains a key arena of contestation between Russia and the West. Ukraine is a large European country with a population of 45 million people. It is rich in natural resources and human capital, and its success or failure in achieving long-lasting democratic and economic reforms can tip the balance in great power contestation. The Kremlin seeks to prevent Ukraine from moving toward the West by keeping it in a permanent “grey zone.” To achieve that goal, Russia continues to destabilize Ukraine through conventional and nonconventional military means while seeking to undermine Ukraine’s democratic and economic reform process. Deterring an increasingly aggressive Russia must start in Ukraine.
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There have been at least 15 known Russian-attributed cyberattacks on Ukraine since 2014. A December 2015 cyberattack caused a blackout affecting over 230,000 Ukrainians. The malware used in that attack has been detected in electric utilities in the United States.
Why Garfield phones have been washing up on French beaches for decades: