Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will see morning showers on a partly cloudy day with a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:43 AM and sunset 8:18 PM, for 14h 34m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 9.5% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the nine hundred ninety-third day.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Committee meets at 4:30 PM.
On this day in 1958, Pres. Eisenhower signs the National Aeronautics and Space Act, establishing NASA.
Recommended for reading in full:
Laura Reiley reports President tweets American farmers ‘starting to do great again’ — except they’re not:
President Trump began his Tuesday with a congratulatory tweet to new British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a shout-out to the military and a rosy assessment of U.S. agriculture: “Farmers are starting to do great again, after 15 years of a downward spiral. The 16 Billion Dollar China ‘replacement’ money didn’t exactly hurt!”
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Before the trade war even began, farmers and ranchers struggled with falling farm income and commodity prices, rising debt, historic floods through the Midwest and rain that delayed, and in many cases prevented, spring planting.
In May, the president announced a $16 billion aid package, the second bailout for farmers since 2018. The bulk of the money was allocated for row crops such as soy, wheat and oats. Niche crops, including tree nuts, sweet cherries, cranberries and grapes, were also eligible for relief, and so were dairy and pork. But farmers say the payments won’t even start to make up for their losses.
“While America’s farmers and ranchers are grateful for the administration’s agriculture assistance package, it only begins to relieve the great difficulty the agriculture industry is currently facing, ranging from extreme weather conditions to depressed markets,” says Dale Moore, executive vice president of the American Farm Bureau Federation.
The U.S. Soybean Export Council reports that shipments of U.S. beans to China were down 19.2 million metric tons, or 705.2 million bushels, in the first 10 months of the current marketing year compared with the 2017-2018 marketing year. Falling sales and lower prices for soybeans have led to a historic carry-over stock of unsold U.S. beans, up 47 percent over the past year, according to the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service.
Lawrence Andrea reports Wisconsin and local officials beef up voting security ahead of the presidential election:
Wisconsin’s second most populated county relies on one computer locked in Madison’s City-County Building to program every municipality’s voting machine. It’s one step one county has taken to try to ensure Wisconsin’s elections are secure as the nation prepares for the next big test of its voting systems — the 2020 presidential election.
In July 2016, “Russian government cyber actors” scanned Wisconsin’s online defenses twice, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Russians attempted to hack 20 other states during the 2016 election.
Former special counsel Robert Mueller in his two-year investigation found the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in “sweeping and systematic fashion.” Numerous Russian officials have been indicted on charges including computer hacking and identity theft.