Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be fair in the morning with an even chance of afternoon thunderstorms, and a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 5:30 AM and sunset 8:11 PM, for 14h 40m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 82% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred eighty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Library Board meets tonight at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1930, Ellen Church becomes the first female flight attendant, when “she embark[s] on a Boeing 80A for a 20-hour flight from Oakland/San Francisco to Chicago with 13 stops and 14 passengers. According to one source, the pilot was another aviation pioneer, Elrey Borge Jeppesen.” On this day in 1911, Janesville, WI proposes “ordinances banning fortune tellers and prohibiting breweries from operating bars in the city. ”
Recommended for reading in full —
Greg Miller observes that Political chaos in Washington is a return on investment for Moscow:
…the Kremlin has collected a different return on its effort to help elect Trump in last year’s election: chaos in Washington.
The president’s decision to fire FBI Director James B. Comey last week was the latest destabilizing jolt to a core institution of the U.S. government. The nation’s top law enforcement agency joined a list of entities that Trump has targeted, including federal judges, U.S. spy services, news organizations and military alliances.
The instability, although driven by Trump, has in some ways extended and amplified the effect Russia sought to achieve with its unprecedented campaign to undermine the 2016 presidential race.
In a declassified report released this year, U.S. spy agencies described destabilization as one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s objectives.
“The Kremlin sought to advance its longstanding desire to undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic order,” it said.
Thomas Erdbrink reports that Iranians See Little Hope Elections Will Alleviate Economic Strain:
TEHRAN — As a college student studying mechanics, Hamidreza Faraji had expected after graduation to land a steady job with a fixed salary, a pension plan and the occasional bonus. He envisioned coming home at 6 p.m. to his family and vacationing at a resort on the Caspian Sea.
But Mr. Faraji, 34, has long since given up on all that. These days, he said, the only people who lead such predictable lives are government employees. Their jobs are well paid and offer security, but are hard to get in part because older employees stay on well past retirement age, limiting opportunities for the next generation.
So millions of Iranians, particularly younger ones, find themselves caught like Mr. Faraji in a vicious cycle of hidden poverty, an exhausting hustle to stay afloat, working multiple jobs and running moneymaking schemes just to keep up. The youth unemployment rate is 30 percent.
Anna Fifield reports that Experts fear North Korea getting closer to developing intercontinental ballistic missile:
TOKYO — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un celebrated a test of the “perfect weapon system” after his engineers launched what they said was a new kind of intermediate-range ballistic missile system capable of carrying “a large-size heavy nuclear warhead.”
The missile, launched Sunday morning, appeared to show substantial progress toward developing an intercontinental ballistic missile that can reach the mainland United States, U.S. rocket scientists said.
“North Korea’s latest successful missile test represents a level of performance never before seen from a North Korean missile,” said John Schilling, an aerospace engineer who specializes in rockets. This means North Korea might be only one year, rather than the expected five, from having an ICBM, he said.
Laura Vozzella reports that White nationalist Richard Spencer leads torch-bearing protesters defending Lee statue:
“What brings us together is that we are white, we are a people, we will not be replaced,” Spencer said at an afternoon protest, the first of two rallies he led in the town where he once attended the University of Virginia.
At the second rally, dozens of torch-bearing protesters gathered in a city park Saturday evening and chanted “You will not replace us” and “Russia is our friend,” local television footage shows. Spencer was not shown addressing that gathering, but he tweeted a photo of himself standing in the crowd carrying what appeared to be a bamboo tiki torch.
The evening protest was short-lived. About 10 minutes in, an altercation between Spencer’s group and counterprotesters drew police to the scene, and the crowd quickly dispersed, the Charlottesville Daily Progress reported.
Sometimes beekeepers make serious mistakes, and when they do, Honey bees attack!: