Good morning. 
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-three. Sunrise is 6:11 AM and sunset 7:42 PM, for 13h 31m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 25.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand three hundred eighty-fourth day.
On this day in 1864, the Union Navy captures Fort Morgan, Alabama, thus breaking Confederate dominance of all ports on the Gulf of Mexico except Galveston, Texas.
Recommended for reading in full —
Michael Hiltzik writes DeJoy’s appointment as postmaster general looks even more dishonest than you thought:
Thus far, speculation about the appointment of DeJoy, who assumed his job in mid-June, has focused on his role as a major fundraiser for President Trump and the fact that he is the first postmaster general in some two decades to not have any experience with the USPS.
But congressional testimony this week by David Williams, a former USPS inspector general and former vice chairman of the service’s board of governors, put some meat on those bare bones.
Williams told the Congressional Progressive Caucus that he resigned from the USPS board when it became clear it was about to appoint DeJoy.
He says DeJoy’s name came to the board outside the normal route, which went through the headhunting firm Russell Reynolds. Instead it came from board member John M. Barger, a Southern California investment executive who was supervising the postmaster search.
Barger told the board he had had lunch with DeJoy and “wanted to move his name forward,” Williams said. “It wasn’t clear how [Barger] had met Mr. DeJoy to me, and I don’t think anyone was clear on it.”
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Williams said that DeJoy did not appear to have received the background check normal for appointees to high government positions. That should have included an audit of a contract his former company had held with the USPS.“It looked like there were concerns about whether his company was billing correctly and performing fully,” Williams said. “That contract file needs to be examined. … We didn’t do that.”
Robyn Dixon reports Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, comatose in a Berlin with suspected poisoning, was under covert surveillance, Russian media reports:
As Russia’s most prominent opposition politician was fighting for this life in a Berlin hospital Sunday, Russian media reported that he was under constant surveillance by federal security agents during the Siberian trip where he fell ill with suspected poisoning.
Alexei Navalny was evacuated from the Siberian city of Omsk to Berlin Saturday in a medical ambulance funded by the foundation of Russian philanthropist and former telecommunications mogul, Dmitry Zimin, after doctors initially denied permission for him to leave the country.
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A Russian news report cited sources in Russian security agencies who said Navalny was subject to an intense plainclothes surveillance operation during his entire trip.The report in Moskovsky Komsomolets published details of the surveillance of his every movement, including what he and his associates ate, who he met, his credit card records, shopping receipts, where he stayed, what vehicles he traveled in, even down to a sushi order and a nighttime swim in the river.
Navalny was extremely cautious when he traveled, keeping a low profile and taking safety precautions, according to the security agents cited in the report. He stayed in safe houses in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and in a hotel in Tomsk. In the hotel, Navalny’s team took more rooms than they required and Navalny did not stay in the room that was registered in his name, according to the report.