Sunday in Whitewater will see an afternoon shower with a high of 50. Sunrise is 5:55 AM and sunset 7:49 PM, for 13h 53m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 95.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1959, the Saint Lawrence Seaway, linking the Great Lakes and the Atlantic, officially opens to shipping.
In Clark County, where Trump won about 67% of the 2020 vote, the vaccination rate as of Friday was about 23% — making it the Wisconsin county with the second lowest vaccination rate.
And Rusk County, where Trump won about 67% of the vote last year, is third lowest in the state when it comes to COVID-19 vaccinations. There, only about 27% of the population had gotten a first dose.
Taylor, Clark and Rusk are rural counties located in the west central and northern parts of the state, in the heart of Wisconsin’s dairy country. But gaps in vaccination rates have emerged around the state — where out of Wisconsin’s 72 counties, the 24 counties with the lowest vaccination rates all backed Trump last year by double-digit margins.
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Of course politics isn’t the only factor. Education is another — counties that are lagging when it comes to vaccinations tend to have more adults who didn’t graduate from high school or college, the Journal Sentinel analysis found. Some of the counties, including Clark and Taylor, have significant Amish and Mennonite populations. And the statewide COVID-19 vaccination trends are similar to those for annual flu shots.
Joe Biden has become the first US president declare formal recognition of the Armenian genocide, more than a century after the mass killings by Ottoman troops and opening a rift between the new US administration and Ankara.
“The American people honour all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today,” Biden said in a statement on Saturday.
“Beginning on 24 April 1915 with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination.”
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The declaration marked the culmination of decades of lobbying by Armenian American organisations.
“This is a critically important moment in the defence of human rights,” said Bryan Ardouny, head of the Armenian Assembly of America. “It’s been a long journey. President Biden is standing firm against a century of denial, and is charting a course in for human rights everywhere.”
The killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians was carried out as the Ottoman empire was collapsing and the modern state of Turkey was being born. Many victims died in death marches into the Syrian desert. The slaughter is widely viewed as a crime on a monumental scale – and a grim precursor to the Nazi Holocaust.
Ronald Reagan referred the Armenian genocide in passing in a statement on the Holocaust in 1981, but it was not followed by a formal recognition. Barack Obama promised Armenian Americans he would take that step but reneged once in office, unwilling to upset an ally. In 2019, both chambers of Congress declared their own recognition, despite Donald Trump’s efforts to stop them.
