Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will see scattered thunderstorms with a high of eighty-seven. Sunrise is 5:20 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 17m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 6.6% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the nine hundred sixty-fourth day.
On this day in 1859, daredevil Jean François Gravelet (professionally known as Charles Blondin) becomes the first person to walk a tightrope across Niagara Falls.
Recommended for reading in full:
Sophie Carson reports Wisconsin gun manufacturer shipped unmarked rifles, pistols to Australian arms dealer illegally, plea deal says:
[Andy] Huebschmann owns Germantown-based Thureon Defense LLC and is licensed to manufacture and deal guns, according to the plea agreement. He met Paul Munro of Australia at a Las Vegas gun trade show about seven years ago, and Munro persuaded him to ship him Thureon guns under the radar.
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To carry out the scheme, Munro and others constructed a shipping crate with a secret compartment under the floor in which to pack the guns and rifle parts and delivered it to the Thureon offices, according to the plea agreement.
Between 2013 and 2016 Huebschmann shipped Munro rifle kits with parts for semi-automatic or fully automatic triggers, frames and slides that could be assembled into full pistols and other weapons. He did not have export licenses for the shipments.
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The maximum sentence for his charge — violating the Arms Export Control Act— is 20 years in prison and a $1 million fine.
(No portion of rights under the Second Amendment includes concealing gun shipments to Australia.)
Elaina Plott reports Another Allegation—And Trump’s Allies Just Don’t Care (‘Inside the president’s orbit, the gravity of sexual-assault accusations against him no longer seems to register’):
“What was she, like, the 28th or something?” one former White House official pondered to me. In a separate conversation, another offered a different guess: “Twenty-two? Twenty-three?”
They were talking about E. Jean Carroll, the longtime Elle advice columnist who, for the first time last week, publicly accused Donald Trump of assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room more than 20 years ago. And what they were trying to do was locate the latest number of women who have accused the president of sexual misconduct. (The answer: at least 22.)
For these former officials, the apparently incalculable magnitude of this number did not cause them to reconsider Trump’s every denial of the varied allegations—to wonder, for example, about the likelihood that 22 or 23 or 28 women were all lying in their stories of harassment, groping, unwanted kissing, and, in Carroll’s case, sexual assault.
Rather, for them, the increase in the number of women seemed to mirror the increase in their indifference. Another accusation, they seemed to say, was like another dollop of numbing cream. “I didn’t read it,” the second former official told me, referring to Carroll’s written account in New York, which was an excerpt from her forthcoming book. “We’re just kind of numb to it all at this point.”