Good morning. 
Fall in Whitewater begins with sunny skies and a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset 6:50 PM, for 12h 06m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 32.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand four hundred fourteenth day.
Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4:30 PM.
On this day in 1979, a bright flash (the ‘Vela Incident’), resembling the detonation of a nuclear weapon, is observed near the Prince Edward Islands. Its cause is never determined.
Recommended for reading in full —
Aaron Gregg and Yeganeh Torbati report Pentagon used taxpayer money meant for masks and swabs to make jet engine parts and body armor:
A $1 billion fund Congress gave the Pentagon in March to build up the country’s supplies of medical equipment has instead been mostly funneled to defense contractors and used for making things such as jet engine parts, body armor and dress uniforms.
The change illustrates how one taxpayer-backed effort to battle the novel coronavirus, which has killed roughly 200,000 Americans, was instead diverted toward patching up long-standing perceived gaps in military supplies.
The Cares Act, which Congress passed earlier this year, gave the Pentagon money to “prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus.” But a few weeks later, the Defense Department began reshaping how it would award the money in a way that represented a major departure from Congress’s original intent.
The payments were made even though U.S. health officials believe there are still major funding gaps in responding to the pandemic. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in Senate testimony last week that states desperately need $6 billion to distribute vaccines to Americans early next year. There remains a severe shortage of N95 masks at numerous U.S. hospitals. These are the types of problems that the money was originally intended to address.
Tim Weiner poses The unanswered question of our time: Is Trump an agent of Russia? (Neither Mueller nor the FBI took it on. It’s crucial someone does. This is a case for super-secret mole hunters’):
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA station chief in Moscow who worked on the epic mole hunts that captured the American turncoats Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, told me that Trump has the classic vulnerabilities that Russian intelligence could and would exploit: his greed, his corruption, his trysts and above all his ego. Trump openly courted Putin. (A 2013 tweet: “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow — if so, will he become my new best friend?”) In turn, Putin, a veteran KGB officer trained to manipulate people, flirted with Trump and flattered him. Putin and his social media minions supported him openly — and with secret political warfare operations. So perhaps Putin had only to influence Trump to win influence in return.
Mowatt-Larssen wonders whether that’s all there is to it. “Is it only because Putin is such a master manipulator and that Trump is so vain that he loves it?” he asked. “Because I could never have imagined that an American president could — whether it’s witting or unwitting — betray American interests so thoroughly to the Russians as has occurred in the last four years.”