Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-three. Sunrise is 5:26 AM and sunset 8:34 PM, for 15h 08m 13s of daytime. The moon is full today. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred forty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1755, Frenchman Charles de Langlade leads an ambush: “a group of Wisconsin Native Americans (including Ottawa and Ojibway) against the British General Braddock during the French and Indian War. Langlade, acting as “commander” of the Northwestern Indians, ambushed the British troops. The battle is depicted in the oil painting by Edward W. Deming which hangs on the 4th floor of the Wisconsin Historical Society. [Source: Badger Saints and Sinners by Fred L. Holmes, 1939; pg 25]”
Recommended for reading in full —
Joby Warrick considers The secret to Kim’s success? Some experts see Russian echoes in North Korea’s missile advances:
Four months before its July 4 missile test, North Korea offered the world a rare technical preview of its latest missile engine, one said to be capable of lobbing nuclear warheads at U.S. cities. A video on state-run TV depicted a machine with thickets of tubes and vents, and a shape that struck some U.S. experts as familiar — in a distinctly Soviet way.
“It shocked me,” said Michael Elleman, one weapons expert who noticed jarring similarities between the engine tested by North Korea in March and one he frequently encountered in Russia at the end of the Cold War. “It seemed to come out of nowhere.”
After intensive study, Elleman, a former consultant at the Pentagon, and other specialists would report that they had detected multiple design features in the new North Korean missile engine that echo those of a 1960s-era Soviet workhorse called the RD-250.
Jo Becker, Matt Apuzzo, and Adam Goldman report that Trump Team Met With Lawyer Linked to Kremlin During Campaign:
Two weeks after Donald J. Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination last year, his eldest son arranged a meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan with a Russian lawyer who has connections to the Kremlin, according to confidential government records described to The New York Times.
The previously unreported meeting was also attended by Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, as well as the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, according to interviews and the documents, which were outlined by people familiar with them.
While President Trump has been dogged by revelations of undisclosed meetings between his associates and Russians, this episode at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, is the first confirmed private meeting between a Russian national and members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle during the campaign. It is also the first time that his son Donald Trump Jr. is known to have been involved in such a meeting.
(Hallie Jackson reports that “spox for POTUS outside legal team casts mtg as part of oppo effort. Source close to team calls it ‘poss. setup by Russian operatives’.” Bill Kristol correctly observes that Trump’s own private lawyers see the significance of this revelation, and that the “legal team must be worried. If you’re suggesting the meeting is a setup, you’re acknowledging the meeting is on its face problematic.”)
Jonathan Freedland writes that No wonder Trump is Putin’s favourite: he’s making America weak again:
In every respect, Putin now faces a US leadership feebler than at any time in the 17 years he has ruled Russia – or for many decades, for that matter. It’s not just that both the president and his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, are foreign policy novices. Or that the State Department is depleted, with hundreds of key posts unfilled. The problem goes much deeper….
Even if Trump had more skill and was surrounded by more able people, he’d still be in a shaky position. His administration is as distracted as he is by the cloud that hangs over them permanently: the gathering investigation into the Russia affair. From Hamburg, Trump tweeted the laughable claim that: “Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the [Democratic National Committee] server to the FBI and the CIA”, proof that he obsesses over the details of that saga even when he is meant to be engaged in high diplomacy.
It often used to be said that in the US, foreign policy is domestic policy. That maxim referred to the way US diaspora communities could shape decisions on the countries they had left behind. In the age of Trump, it has new meaning. Thanks to his domestic situation, he can barely move on the world stage. No wonder Putin was smiling in Hamburg. He knows he has succeeded in his chief objective: he has made America weak again.
Chris Uhlmann, political editor of the government-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation, describes what a disaster Trump’s G20 appearance was:
What did we learn about @realDonaldTrump at this #G20? @CUhlmann explains. #Insiders pic.twitter.com/TGOXdiFWhB
— Insiders ABC (@InsidersABC) July 8, 2017
Michael Tunick describes Why Swiss cheese has those mysterious, giant holes:
See, also, Tunick’s The Science of Cheese.