Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-eight. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:33 PM, for 15h 17m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 63.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the nine hundred forty-fifth day.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1864, Congress honors a Civil War hero:
Colonel Joseph Bailey was honored with a “resolution of commendation,” by the United States Congress for his “distinguished services in the recent campaign on the Red River.” Bailey, a logger from Wisconsin, saved a Union fleet stuck in the Red River, Louisiana, due to a sudden drop in water level. Although his idea of damming the river to relieve the fleet was scorned by many of his peers and superiors (including many West Point graduates), his experience in logging on the Wisconsin River proved invaluable.
Recommended for reading in full:
Jon Swaine reports Company part-owned by Jared Kushner got $90m from unknown offshore investors since 2017:
A real estate company part-owned by Jared Kushner has received $90m in foreign funding from an opaque offshore vehicle since he entered the White House as a senior adviser to his father-in-law Donald Trump.
Investment has flowed from overseas to the company, Cadre, while Kushner works as an international envoy for the US, according to corporate filings and interviews. The money came through a vehicle run by Goldman Sachs in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven that guarantees corporate secrecy.
Kushner, who is married to Trump’s elder daughter Ivanka, kept a stake in Cadre after joining the administration, while selling other assets. His holding is now valued at up to $50m, according to his financial disclosure documents.
Tory Newmyer writes How Trump’s Mexico showdown undermines his standing in other trade talks:
The episode provides a couple of important lessons for governments (think: China, the European Union and Japan) still facing their own showdowns with the Trump administration.
For one, Trump’s willingness to threaten a top trading partner with stiff tariffs — even as his administration pushes ratification of a trade pact with Mexico and Canada as its top legislative priority — sends a clear message about the president’s respect for his own trade deals. That is, even a signed agreement offers no protection against Trump deciding, with no warning, to launch new hostilities.
What’s more, the warmed-over offers from Mexico that Trump is touting as a major victory, along with an unverified claim about new farm purchases, suggest the president cares less about substance than his ability to declare a win. As the New York Times’s Michael Shear and Maggie Haberman detailed over the weekend, the deal “consists largely of actions that Mexico had already promised to take in prior discussions with the United States over the past several months, according to officials from both countries who are familiar with the negotiations.” And Bloomberg News found no support for Trump’s assertion, via tweet, that Mexico has agreed to “immediately begin buying large quantities of agricultural product from our great patriot farmers.”
(Emphasis in original.)