Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will see showers and thunderstorms with a high of eighty-four. Sunrise is 6:21 AM and sunset 7:26 PM, for 13h 05m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 56.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1945, Imperial Japan formally surrenders:
Japanese foreign affairs minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signs the Japanese Instrument of Surrender on board USS Missouri as General Richard K. Sutherland watches, September 2, 1945 The surrender of Imperial Japan was announced on August 15 and formally signed on September 2, 1945, bringing the hostilities of World War II to a close. By the end of July 1945, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) was incapable of conducting major operations and an Allied invasion of Japan was imminent. Together with the British Empire and China, the United States called for the unconditional surrender of the Japanese armed forces in the Potsdam Declaration on July 26, 1945—the alternative being “prompt and utter destruction”. While publicly stating their intent to fight on to the bitter end, Japan’s leaders (the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, also known as the “Big Six”) were privately making entreaties to the still-neutral Soviet Union to mediate peace on terms more favorable to the Japanese. Meanwhile, the Soviets were preparing to attack Japanese forces in Manchuria and Korea (in addition to South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands) in fulfillment of promises they had secretly made to the United States and the United Kingdom at the Tehran and Yalta Conferences.
On August 6, 1945, at 8:15 AM local time, the United States detonated an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Sixteen hours later, American President Harry S. Truman called again for Japan’s surrender, warning them to “expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.” Late in the evening of August 8, 1945, in accordance with the Yalta agreements, but in violation of the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, and soon after midnight on August 9, 1945, the Soviet Union invaded the Imperial Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. Later in the day, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb, this time on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Following these events, Emperor Hirohito intervened and ordered the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War to accept the terms the Allies had set down in the Potsdam Declaration for ending the war. After several more days of behind-the-scenes negotiations and a failed coup d’état, Emperor Hirohito gave a recorded radio address across the Empire on August 15. In the radio address, called the Jewel Voice Broadcast….he announced the surrender of Japan to the Allies.
On August 28, the occupation of Japan led by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers began. The surrender ceremony was held on September 2, aboard the United States Navy battleship USS Missouri, at which officials from the Japanese government signed the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, thereby ending the hostilities.
Recommended for reading in full —
Mary Kate McCoy writes More Than One-Third Of Wisconsin Households Can’t Afford Basic Necessities, Report Says:
More than one-third of Wisconsin households can’t afford the basic necessities, according to a new report from the United Way of Wisconsin.
The household survival budget includes housing, food, transportation, health insurance, for families that have children, child care, and new this year — the cost of a cell phone.
Statewide it takes about $60,000 to get by on those basic necessities for a family of four, according to the report, which also breaks cost of living down county by county. And that budget is very conservative, said Charlene Mouille, executive director of United Way of Wisconsin.
“What’s interesting too about the survival budget is this really is basic need,” said Martha Cranley, director of community impact for United Way of Dane County.
(There’s much to consider another time about this analysis, including areas where it falls short of the mark, and others where it is likely spot on. It’s worth considering at length, in detail.)
Patrick Marley reports ‘Absolute incompetence’: Prison nurses didn’t get teen at risk of dying to hospital for 3 days in 2016:
Nurses at the state’s troubled juvenile prison failed to detect for three days in 2016 that a 14-year-old inmate’s appendix was about to burst and gave him crackers and Gatorade instead of rushing him to a hospital — putting him at risk of dying, records show.
Prison officials fired one nurse over the situation but didn’t discipline others, including a nurse who failed to contact a doctor about the boy even though he should have under Department of Corrections policies because his pulse was so elevated.
The doctor who performed emergency surgery on the inmate said she saw widespread problems with the way he was treated at the prison.
“I mean, if this had happened at the hospital, I would demand that the nurse be fired for absolute incompetence,” physician Kristen Wells told a sheriff’s investigator without naming the nurse she was referring to. “She has no idea what she’s looking at. What we call it in the hospital setting is ‘failure to rescue.’ ”
Jim Rutenberg and Maggie Haberman report National Enquirer Had Decades of Trump Dirt. He Wanted to Buy It All:
Federal investigators have provided ample evidence that President Trump was involved in deals to pay two women to keep them from speaking publicly before the 2016 election about affairs that they said they had with him.
But it turns out that Mr. Trump wanted to go even further.
He and his lawyer at the time, Michael D. Cohen, devised a plan to buy up all the dirt on Mr. Trump that the National Enquirer and its parent company had collected on him, dating back to the 1980s, according to several of Mr. Trump’s associates.
….
“It’s all the stuff — all the stuff, because you never know,” Mr. Cohen said on the recording.
Jennifer Rubin writes Voters don’t buy ‘No collusion!’:
Suffolk University’s latest poll has reassuring news for those concerned about the rule of law:
A majority of Americans (55 percent) trust special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election, but 59 percent don’t trust President Donald Trump’s denial that his campaign was involved, according to a new Suffolk University/USA TODAY national poll. The survey also shows unfavorable views of President Donald Trump rising 6 points since June.
Fifty-eight percent of likely voters said they hold an unfavorable view of the president, compared to 52 percent in June, while his favorable rate has held steady at 40 percent since the early-summer poll. Trump’s job approval numbers tell a similar story, with 56 percent of voters either disapproving or strongly disapproving of his job performance, and 40 percent of voters saying they approve or strongly approve. . . . , with 57 percent saying that corruption in the nation’s capital has gotten worse under the Trump administration.
While Paul Manafort’s conviction on eight counts bolstered faith in Mueller, it’s surprising that the person who hurt Trump the most is none other than Michael Cohen. (“36 percent of voters said these convictions gave them more confidence in Mueller’s ongoing investigation, while 21 percent said less, and 35 percent said they had no effect.”). Voters seem to give a whole lot of weight to Cohen’s pointing to Trump as the man who directed the illegal campaign scheme with “61 percent saying that such legal developments raise significant questions about the president’s own behavior, while 27 percent said that the Cohen case has little to do with Trump.”
Bird Is the Word in These Four Stories: