Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with scattered showers and a high of 86. Sunrise is 5:30 AM and sunset 8:31 PM, for 15h 01m 21s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 29.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Joint Review Board meets at 4:30 PM, and the Community Development Authority at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1815, Napoleon surrenders aboard HMS Bellerophon.
Recommended for reading in full —
Michael Gerson writes GOP anti-vaxxers are sacrificing citizens’ lives for political gain:
Here is perhaps the most important medical and political fact of our time: 99.5 percent of all covid-19-related deaths in the United States occur among unvaccinated people; 0.5 percent of covid deaths occur among vaccinated people. If you tell people not to be vaccinated, you add to the former category.
In this light, the recent outbreak of applause at the Conservative Political Action Conference for the United States’ failure to meet its vaccination target was macabre. Here were political activists — many of whom would call themselves “pro-life” — cheering for the advance of death. How did we get to such a strange, desperate place?
….
In the case of Fox News celebrities in particular, they must know that discouraging vaccination — by exaggerating risks, highlighting unproven alternative therapies and normalizing anti-vaccine voices — will result in additional, unnecessary deaths. This is hard to get my head around. If someone were to pay me as a columnist to argue that cigarette smoking is healthy for children, or to encourage teenagers to take naps on railroad tracks after underage drinking, I don’t think I could make an ethical case for accepting the deal. Should it matter if I belonged to a news network where producing child smokers and trisected teens were institutional policies? Or if one-half of a major political party endorsed such goals? I don’t see why.
Reis Thebault reports Joint Chiefs chairman feared potential ‘Reichstag moment’ aimed at keeping Trump in power:
As Trump ceaselessly pushed false claims about the 2020 presidential election, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, grew more and more nervous, telling aides he feared that the president and his acolytes might attempt to use the military to stay in office, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker report in “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year.”
Milley described “a stomach-churning” feeling as he listened to Trump’s untrue complaints of election fraud, drawing a comparison to the 1933 attack on Germany’s parliament building that Hitler used as a pretext to establish a Nazi dictatorship.
Tom Winter reports Banker convicted of bribery for plot to land Trump administration job:
A former Chicago bank executive was convicted Tuesday in a scheme to arrange $16 million in loans for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in exchange for a high-level position in the Trump administration.
Stephen Calk, the former CEO of The Federal Savings Bank, was found guilty of financial institution bribery and conspiracy to commit financial institution bribery after a three-week trial in Manhattan.
“Calk used the federally-insured bank he ran as his personal piggybank to try and buy himself prestige and power,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said in a statement. “Today’s verdict sends the message that corruption at the highest levels of federally regulated financial institutions will be prosecuted by this office.”
This Sand Castle is Now the Guinness World Record Holder for Tallest Ever Built: