Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-eight. Sunrise is 5:21 AM and sunset 8:23 PM, for 15h 02m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 4.5% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the {tooltip}two hundredth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1963, Bob Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is released. Around this time in 1673, Marquette & Joliet reach Green Bay.
Recommended for reading in full —
From March, Caleb Melby and David Kocieniewski describe life Inside the Troubled Kushner Tower: Empty Offices and Mounting Debt:
The Manhattan tower co-owned by the family of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, has been losing money for three years and faces increasing loan fees in 2017, which may explain why the family has been negotiating with Chinese insurance behemoth Anbang on new financing.
The fees, at 666 Fifth Avenue, kicked in last month and escalate with each payment until the loan is repaid, a 2011 refinancing agreement shows. December brings another hurdle: Interest paid on the bulk of about $1.1 billion of loans jumps to 6.35 percent, more than double what it was after the debt was refinanced in 2011.
(The Chinese deal fell through about a week after this story, but the financial plight was present, of course, many months earlier, and explains the pressure Kushner would have been under to make a deal with Chinese, or Russian, financial interests.)
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu spoke to his city on the removal of the Confederate monuments. Here is his full, worthy address:
Mariana Zuñiga and Nick Miroff report that Venezuela’s paradox: People are hungry, but farmers can’t feed them:
YUMA, Venezuela — With cash running low and debts piling up, Venezuela’s socialist government has cut back sharply on food imports. And for farmers in most countries, that would present an opportunity.
But this is Venezuela, whose economy operates on its own special plane of dysfunction. At a time of empty supermarkets and spreading hunger, the country’s farms are producing less and less, not more, making the caloric deficit even worse.
Drive around the countryside outside the capital, Caracas, and there’s everything a farmer needs: fertile land, water, sunshine and gasoline at 4 cents a gallon, cheapest in the world. Yet somehow families here are just as scrawny-looking as the city-dwelling Venezuelans waiting in bread lines or picking through garbage for scraps.
Having attempted for years to defy conventional economics, the country now faces a painful reckoning with basic arithmetic.
“Last year I had 200,000 hens,” said Saulo Escobar, who runs a poultry and hog farm here in the state of Aragua, an hour outside Caracas. “Now I have 70,000.”
Gina Barton reports that a Man who died in Milwaukee police custody could have lived with treatment, expert says:
Even if Milwaukee police officers thought Derek Williams was faking an inability to breathe in the moments before he died, they violated his civil rights by failing to get him medical help, according to documents filed Thursday in his family’s lawsuit against the city.
Had Williams received emergency treatment before he lost consciousness in the back of a squad car in 2011 “it is highly likely that he would not have died,” according to Trevonne Thompson, a physician who reviewed the case at the request of Williams’ family.
“Additionally, had Williams arrived at the emergency department alive, he would have most likely survived the emergency department visit,” according to Thompson’s report.
Here’s Blowin’ in the Wind, a single that was also part of Dylan’s 1963 album: