Good morning.
It’s will be a mild day in Whitewater, with a high of sixty-three and a one-third chance of afternoon showers. Sunrise was 5:41 AM and sunset will be 8:21 PM. The moon is in a waning gibbous phase with 70% of the its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1953, an armistice brings an end to the Korean War, begun three years earlier by Communist aggression:
Tokyo, Monday, July 27–Communist and United Nations delegates in Panmunjom signed an armistice at 10:01 A.M. today [9:01 P.M., Sunday, Eastern daylight time]. Under the truce terms, hostilities in the three-year-old Korean war are to cease at 10 o’clock tonight [9 A.M., Monday, Eastern daylight time]….
The historic document was signed in a roadside hall the Communists built specially for the occasion. The ceremony, attended by representatives of sixteen members of the United Nations, took precisely eleven minutes. Then the respective delegations walked from the meeting place without a word or handshake between them.
The matter-of-fact procedure underlined what spokesmen of both sides emphasized: That though the shooting would cease within twelve hours after the signing, only an uneasy armed truce and political difficulties, perhaps even greater than those of the armistice negotiations, were ahead.
Signers Are Expressionless
The representatives of the two sides were expressionless as they put their names to a pile of documents, providing for an exchange of prisoners, establishment of a neutral zone for the cease-fire and a later political conference that would attempt to settle the tragic Korean questions, unsolved by three years of fighting that caused hundreds of thousands of casualties.
On this day in 1894, fire destroys most of a northern Wisconsin town:
1894 – Forest Fire Destroys Phillips
On the afternoon of this day, a forest fire swept over the Price Co. town of Phillips from the west, destroying nearly all the buildings and forcing 2,000 people to flee for their lives. When the sun came up the next morning, 13 people had been killed, the entire downtown was in ashes, and exhausted survivors were wandering through the ruins in a daze. The fire ultimately consumed more than 100,000 acres in Price County. Much of the town was rebuilt within a year.