Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of eighty. Sunrise is 5:46 AM and sunset 8:15 PM, for 14h 28m 19s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.2% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the nine hundred ninety-sixth day.
The Whitewater Unified School District’s Employee Handbook Committee meets at 3:30 PM, and Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1832, the armed steamboat Warrior blocks the retreat of Black Hawk and the British Band across the Mississippi.
Recommended for reading in full:
Hailey BeMiller reports Nine people in Wisconsin criminally charged after thousands of rape kits tested:
Nine people, including two men accused of sexually assaulting children, have so far been criminally charged after an analysis of thousands of previously untested rape kits, the state Department of Justice announced Wednesday.
The charges come after department officials in 2014 learned that over 6,000 untested rape kits sat in police and hospital storage rooms across Wisconsin for decades, preventing survivors from getting justice. Trained medical professionals collect samples of skin, fingernails and more for these kits that can be analyzed for DNA if a victim consents to testing.
The Department of Justice has since analyzed over 4,300 kits, with 101 remaining that still need to be tested in cases where someone was already convicted. Nearly 500 DNA results have matched offender profiles in the FBI’s national database, and over 1,000 profiles were uploaded to the system.
Laura Reiley reports Trump’s $16 billion farm bailout will make rich farmers richer, report says:
The Trump administration last week revealed details of a $16 billion aid package for farmers hit in the U.S.-China trade war, with key provisions meant to avoid large corporations scooping up big payouts at the expense of small farmers.
According to a report released Tuesday by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG), most of the $8.4 billion given out so far in last year’s farm bailout went to wealthy farmers, exacerbating the economic disparity with smaller farmers.
An EWG analysis found that the top one-tenth of recipients received 54 percent of all payments. Eighty-two farmers have each so far received more than $500,000 in trade relief.
One farm, DeLine Farm Partnership of Charleston, Mo., has so far received $2.8 million.
The top 1 percent of recipients of trade relief received, on average, $183,331. The bottom 80 percent received, on average, less than $5,000, EWG said.
Ilya Arkhipov and Josh Wingrove report Trump Offered Putin U.S. Help Fighting Wildfires, Kremlin Says:
Donald Trump called Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday to offer U.S. help fighting Siberian wildfires, the Kremlin said in a statement.
Wildfires in the U.S. haven’t always drawn sympathy from the American president.
Trump sparked outrage last year as wildfires devastated parts of California by insisting that poor forest management by the state’s Democratic leaders was to blame. He threatened to withhold federal money for maintaining the forests even as the fires raged through Butte County north of Sacramento, effectively destroying the town of Paradise and killing dozens of people.