When he [Jorge Thozo, chief of the Thozo community] was a child, numerous prides of lions roamed the game-rich wetlands of the Zambezi Delta. But their numbers were decimated when their prey was overhunted during the drawn-out Mozambican civil wars, which raged from 1977 to 1992. Across Africa, a similar decline is occurring, with wild lion numbers dropping 42 percent in the last two decades, mostly as a result of habitat loss.
In 2018, conservationists, landowners, donors, and the Mozambican government came up with an ambitious plan to add some two million acres to African lions’ range. They identified 24 healthy lions from reserves in South Africa and planned to relocate them to central Mozambique—the largest lion reintroduction ever attempted.
The lions’ proposed new home was the Marromeu Game Reserve—Chief Thozo’s backyard—where the local community subsists in the thick forests that fringe the Zambezi Delta floodplains.
With all the permits signed, partners on board, and the lions ready to go, all pieces were in place to make the ambitious project happen.
….
“You get so inspired when you do something that really matters,” he [Thozo] says. “I hope that one day this place will be a stronghold for the wild African lion. I hope they will be here long after I am gone.”
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:31 PM, for 15h 14m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 19.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
The first ascent of the main summit of Denali came on June 7, 1913, by a party led by Hudson Stuck and Harry Karstens. The first man to reach the summit was Walter Harper, an Alaska Native. Robert Tatum also made the summit. Using the mountain’s contemporary name, Tatum later commented, “The view from the top of Mount McKinley is like looking out the windows of Heaven!”[47] They ascended the Muldrow Glacier route pioneered by the earlier expeditions, which is still often climbed today. Stuck confirmed, via binoculars, the presence of a large pole near the North Summit; this report confirmed the Sourdough [expedition] ascent, and today it is widely believed that the Sourdoughs did succeed on the North Summit.
President Trump’s increasingly hawkish use of tariffs against China and Mexico could have drastic consequences for global trade and American jobs, according to a pair of new reports.
More than 400,000 U.S. jobs would disappear if Trump follows through on plans to activate escalating tariffs on $350 billion in Mexican imports next week, according to an analysis by the Perryman Group, a Texas-based economic consulting firm. That combined with existing levies against China has put global trade on course for its worst year since the 2009 financial crisis, according to Dutch bank ING. Its analysts forecast that international trade will grow 0.2 percent in 2019, a steep falloff from the 3.3 percent recorded in 2018 and 4.8 percent in 2017.
Much of that slowdown would stem from Trump’s ongoing trade war with Beijing. Last month, after negotiations broke down, Trump slapped a 25 percent levy on $250 billion in Chinese goods and began the process of taxing all products from China, which quickly retaliated with tariffs of its own.
Weeks later and angry over migration, Trump threatened tariffs on $350 billion in Mexican goods. That levy is set to kick in Monday at 5 percent and rise incrementally to as much as 25 percent, unless, Trump says, Mexico cracks down on Central American migrants crossing into the United States along their shared border.
Trump routinely misstates how tariffs work, insisting they are absorbed by U.S. trading partners. Tariffs in fact are taxes paid by U.S. companies that bring in products, so those costs are borne by manufacturers, chemical producers and others. U.S. companies typically pass along some of those costs to consumers.
For any man to bungle white-tie dress — something so regimented, so steeped in tradition, so well-documented — he must be a man who doesn’t bother with the details, who doesn’t avail himself of ready expertise, who refuses to be a student of history or even of Google. White-tie attire is more science than art. The fit of the tailcoat is just so. Great flapping yards of the white waistcoat are not meant to hang below the jacket. The sleeves should not stretch to the base of the thumb. The jacket is not to be buttoned. And so on. White tie is fact-based. One cannot fudge it. One does not make white-tie decisions based on one’s gut, lest one end up with the gut overly exposed.
The president’s iteration of white tie at the state banquet at Buckingham Palace was, in a word, a mess. The waistcoat was too long and too tight. The tailcoat did not fit. The trousers were voluminous. And the man himself looked so ill at ease in the whole unfortunate kit that his awkwardness loomed over him like Pig-Pen’s dust cloud.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-seven. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:30 PM, for 15h 13m 41s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 11.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission is scheduled to meet at 6 PM.
The Trump administration is canceling English classes, recreational programs and legal aid for unaccompanied minors staying in federal migrant shelters nationwide, saying the immigration influx at the southern border has created critical budget pressures.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement has begun discontinuing the funding stream for activities — including soccer — that have been deemed “not directly necessary for the protection of life and safety, including education services, legal services, and recreation,” said Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Mark Weber.
(The denial of simple services for minor children is a present to Trump’s base, a gift to his most bigoted admirers.)
It’s (almost) official: The president of the United States is a liar.
This will not come as a revelation to people who have closely followed President Trump’s public statements and Twitter feed and have long doubted his veracity. It is, instead, a late-dawning recognition by mainstream news organizations, which until fairly recently shied away from branding the president’s many questionable utterances as outright lies.
Nowadays, many in the news media are no longer bothering to grant Trump the benefit of the doubt. In routine news and feature stories, Trump’s dishonesty carries no fig leaf. It is described baldly.
A recent sampling:
– CNN: “The Mueller report: A catalog of 77 Trump team lies and falsehoods.”
MADISON – When Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signs into law a bill making way for recreational marijuana use in our neighbor to the south, his signature will put Wisconsin on an island surrounded by legal weed.
Three out of the four states that border Wisconsin — Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota — have now legalized marijuana use and two of them allow residents to purchase and consume cannabis for any reason.
While more and more state legislatures are embracing legal marijuana for medical or recreational reasons — 33 in all — Wisconsin isn’t likely to anytime soon.
Republican lawmakers who control which bills arrive at Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ desk are opposed to legalizing recreational marijuana use and are split on whether the plant should be widely available for medicinal purposes.
(Obvious point: FREE WHITEWATER is not an online newspaper – never aspired to be, never will be. This is a website of independent commentary: aligned with no faction, beholden to no faction.)
A few thoughts on rural newspapers:
1.Begin with a commitment & a focus on content. If a publication doesn’t have a message, no one will care that the publisher aspires to be a messenger. No message, no messenger.
2. Conviction comes first, everything else (including consensus) comes later (if ever).
3. The context of it all for rural communities: economic stagnation and relative decline. Publications that flack the status quo – subsidies for business buddies, tax incremental districts, boosting a few self-promoting local notables along the way – face the same dark future as the publications that have already changed hands.
If that’s one’s outlook, it’s an outlook appealing only to a desperate or deluded – and declining – demographic.
Speak truth to power, even at the local level.
4. Pick tried and tested software. For almost any community group, and for homegrown publications, too – an existing software platform like Facebook, Instagram, etc. is more than adequate to reach lots of people. Public institutions will still need standalone websites, and the occasional blogger may find a standalone website useful (as I do), but for most people, Facebook is more than enough to reach a rural community.
Facebook does skew old, and but if one keeps one’s content punchy, younger people will visit, too. Mix it up with Instagram, and a publication will be in good shape.
5.Never, ever pay someone to publish a Facebook page on one’s own behalf. I can’t stress this enough: no publication or community group should spend even one copper coin on someone else’s Facebook work. I’ll write more about this another time, but anyone selling you what you can do better on your own is nothing more than a greedy peddler.
Write your own ideas in your own voice. When I write, this is truly how I speak. When others write, they should write as they truly speak.
No one needs a vulgar new man to sell him or her only banal, lifeless words.
(Along these same lines, no rural community needs a ‘communications specialist.’ Honest to goodness, learn about Facebook and Instagram and have at it. Learn by reading successful sites each day.)
6. Forget advertising, forget subscriptions. There’s a necessary shift in publications from advertising (which makes little for most publishers) to subscriptions (which may make more for some highly-sought writers). SeeThe Media’s ‘Post-Advertising’ Future. Subscriptions, however, will pay the bills only for a few publications.
The newspapers in our area planning to go behind a restrictive paywall will never make a go of it: they won’t find enough subscribers for their anemic content.
They’ll go under in a few years after the new publishers have sucked the marrow from each paper’s bones.
Worse: in small towns, the few subscribers and advertisers one collects will often prove risk-averse, and insistent on bland content. Appeasing advertisers like that will come at the price of readership growth among creative, vibrant readers.
7. Self-fund. That’s why existing platforms like Facebook and Instagram (or content management solutions like WordPress) are a good idea: they’re inexpensive. If you write with conviction and in your own voice, you’ll gain an audience, but you need to be independent of others’ financial pressures. Stay lean.
Why say, after all this, that what can be done probably won’t be done (at least in the short term)?
Because small-town officials and notables who have run cities like Whitewater into the ground, while extolling their own supposed accomplishments, will do what they can to manage their communities’ narratives right to the time that those men will prove unable to manage anything at all.
Wednesday in Whitewater will see scattered thundershowers with a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:29 PM, for 15h 12m 44s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 5.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Horlick’s product went on to be used as a staple in fountain drinks as well as survival provisions. Malted milk was even included in explorations undertaken by Robert Peary, Roald Amundsen and Richard Byrd.
Foxconn has offshored more than 150 U.S. jobs to Mexico, according to the Labor Department, even as it struggles to meet job-creation targets promised as part of a massive new factory championed by President Donald Trump.
The Taiwan-based electronics maker said in a filing in Indiana in November 2018 that it would lay off 155 workers at a computer factory outside Indianapolis, citing “changes in our business and production objectives.”
The Labor Department in February determined that the jobs were eliminated because the company had shifted some production to Mexico, records obtained by Reuters through a Freedom of Information Act request show.
Foxconn officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company told the Indianapolis Business Journal in November that the plant in Plainfield, Indiana, was operated by a subsidiary firm and added that the layoffs would not affect other Foxconn-related companies.
The 155 jobs amount to a small fraction of Foxconn’s global workforce, which stood at 988,000 at the end of 2017, according to its corporate responsibility report.
But the company is under the spotlight for having so far failed to meet job-creation targets at another facility in Wisconsin unveiled at a White House ceremony in 2017 and cited by Trump as proof that he was reviving American manufacturing.
A key measure of U.S. manufacturing strength just slipped to its lowest level in two-and-a-half years, as pressures from President Trump weighed on the sector.
Add that to a pile of recent worrisome signals that the economy is headed for a slowdown, if not an outright recession, just as the 2020 presidential race starts to kick into higher gear. Trump is counting on the so-far rosy economic picture to boost his reelection chances even as warning signs grow that all is not as good as it appears.
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard put a finer point on it in a Monday presentation opening the possibility of an interest rate cut later this year to jumpstart stalling growth. The central bank “faces an economy that is expected to grow more slowly going forward, with some risk that the slowdown could be sharper than expected due to ongoing global trade regime uncertainty,” he said.
Local newspapers are changing ownership quickly now. Knox gave up publishing the Jefferson County Daily Union in December, and now Bliss will sell the Janesville Gazette (and radio stations) this June.
These changes of ownership are not coming because the papers are strong: these sales are halfway to fire sales.
The new, common ownership (APG) will drain any money they can from the acquisitions, and then sell whatever’s left for scrap within a few years.
These local papers are in irreversible decline in significant measure because they advanced – and refused to abandon – an ideology of local boosterism & babbittry. They’ve made the defense of local officials a crackpot ideology.
One can say that Dean Baquet of the New York Times‘s was half right when he predicted that
the greatest crisis in American journalism is the death of local news . . . I don’t know what the answer is. Their economic model is gone. I think most local newspapers in America are going to die in the next five years, except for the ones that have been bought by a local billionaire.
Baquet is right that most local papers are doomed: they (and online websites that follow their style) have embraced a declining demographic’s desperation and delusion.
He’s wrong, however, to think that a billionaire, local or otherwise, will save these papers. The new publisher, APG, is a terrible place to work where employees see no respect for journalism, few opportunities, onerous requirements, and have low morale. There will simply be less money for the same struggling, poorly-mentored or middling employees.
Update, Tuesday afternoon: digital versions of dull publications won’t save these newspapers: there won’t be enough advertisers or subscribers for electronic editions if the quality of reporting stays the same (and it almost surely will).
Indeed, if digital alone made a difference, these incurious-to-the-point-of-ignorant efforts wouldn’t have changed hands.
Tomorrow: What Can Be Done (Even Though It Probably Won’t Be)?
Tuesday in Whitewater will see occasional showers with a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:29 PM, for 15h 11m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 1.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Women are bound, hands tied with chains or ropes. They look dirty, as if they’ve been kept in a basement. Some are wide-eyed with fear. Others are stamped with a bar code.
If you type “human trafficking” into an image search on your computer, these are the pictures you will see. The message is clear: Women and children are being sold. They’re trapped. These are the makings of a horror film.
But that bar code was edited into the photo. And these are images from a marketing campaign.
Human trafficking in Wisconsin doesn’t look quite like this. It looks like the promise of a new career as a model. It looks like an expensive gift to your child from an acquaintance. It looks like a drug addiction and the hope of something more, as it did for Stratton.
Not all trafficking involves sex. A recent example of labor trafficking surfaced in the Milwaukee area where federal prosecutors charged five people in what they called a conspiracy to force Mexican nationals to work on farms in Wisconsin.
It’s not the easiest crime to recognize, but human trafficking cases have been documented in each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties.
The National Human Trafficking Hotline says it was contacted 122 times about 64 cases in the first six months of 2018 in Wisconsin. Since 2007, the hotline has received 1,523 calls about 362 cases in the state.
Yet no one knows exactly how often people are bought and sold in Wisconsin. Not only do victims sometimes fail to recognize they’re being trafficked and the crimes go unreported, but until this year, the state had no mechanism to collect statewide information on trafficking cases, said Derek Veitenheimer from the Department of Justice.
A new data collection process will include more detailed information about each reported incident.
Meanwhile, Sheboygan Detective Tamara Remington speaks to packed rooms of concerned residents when she shares what she’s learned working trafficking cases.
The average age for kids is 13 or younger
….
If you need help or know someone who does
Contact the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888 or text them at 233733. A live chat option is also available on their website: humantraffickinghotline.org.
If you need immediate assistance, you can also call 9-1-1.
SWAN: Have you ever seen him say or do anything that you would describe as racist or bigoted?
KUSHNER: So, the answer is un — uh, no. Absolutely not. You can’t not be a racist for 69 years, then run for president and be a racist. What I’ll say is that, when a lot of the Democrats call the president a racist, I think they’re doing a disservice to people who suffer because of real racism in this country.
SWAN: Was birtherism racist?
KUSHNER: Um, look I wasn’t really involved in that.
SWAN: I know you weren’t. Was it racist?
KUSHNER: Like I said, I wasn’t involved in that.
SWAN: I know you weren’t. Was it racist?
KUSHNER: I know who the president is, and I have not seen anything in him that is racist. So, again, I was not involved in that.
SWAN: Did you wish he didn’t do that?
KUSHNER: Like I said, I was not involved in that. That was a long time ago.
A coming-of-age story about a shy, young boy sent by his irresponsible mother to spend the summer with his wealthy, eccentric uncles (Michael Caine & Robert Duvall) in Texas. The boy soon learns that there’s more to his new guardians than meets the eye, especially when Caine starts spinning tales about their globetrotting adventures as young men
One can find more information about Secondhand Lions at the Internet Movie Database.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-two. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:28 PM, for 15h 10m 38s of daytime. The moon is new with 0% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the Downtown Whitewater Board at 5 PM.
On this day in 1864, at the Battle of Cold Harbor, when “the 36th Wisconsin Infantry moved to the front, its colonel, Frank Haskell of Madison, was shot dead while commanding his troops to take cover. Co.G of the 1st U.S. Sharpshooters, from Wisconsin, was placed in the front of the battle on this day as well.”
Just weeks before the Supreme Court is expected to rule on whether the Trump administration can add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, new evidence emerged Thursday suggesting the question was crafted specifically to give an electoral advantage to Republicans and whites.
The evidence was found in the files of the prominent Republican redistricting strategist Thomas Hofeller after his death in August. It reveals that Hofeller “played a significant role in orchestrating the addition of the citizenship question to the 2020 Decennial Census in order to create a structural electoral advantage for, in his own words, ‘Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites,’ ” plaintiffs’ lawyers challenging the question wrote in a letter Thursday morning to U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman, one of three federal judges who ruled against the question this year. The lawyers also argued that Trump administration officials purposely obscured Hofeller’s role in court proceedings.
The letter drew on new information discovered on hard drives belonging to Hofeller, which were found inadvertently by his estranged daughter. Stephanie Hofeller Lizon then shared them with the organization Common Cause for a gerrymandering lawsuit it is pursuing in North Carolina.
The files show that Hofeller concluded in a 2015 study that adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census “would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and benefit white Republicans in redistricting. Hofeller then pushed the idea with the Trump administration in 2017, according to the lawyers’ letter to Furman.
The evidence, first reported by the New York Times, contradicts sworn testimony by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s expert adviser A. Mark Neuman and senior Justice Department official John Gore, as well as other testimony by defendants, the letter said.
How did this happen? How did the Republican Party descend from the moral heights of Ronald Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” to this apologist sewer filled with the weak trying to reassure the weaker that weakness is a virtue?
For the first time in American history we have meticulously detailed evidence that a hostile foreign power attempted to influence the choice of an American commander in chief, and the collective Republican response is apparently, “Our side won, move on.”
Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy. Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:27 PM, for 15h 09m 29s of daytime. The moon is new with 1.0% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1966, NASA successfully lands Surveyor 1 on the Moon.
There are a lot of words you could use to describe the Trump tax cuts, but “successful” isn’t one of them.
That, at least, is what the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service found when it looked at how much Trump’s signature accomplishment has actually, well, accomplished so far. The answer isn’t much. Indeed, the CRS estimates that, in the past year, the tax cuts haven’t added a lot, if anything, to growth in wages, investment or the overall economy. The best you can say is that things might be better in the future.
Or, you know, they might not.
The important thing to understand here is that the Trump tax cuts were supposed to help people by helping corporations first. While households got small, temporary tax cuts — then-House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), you might remember, touted that one secretary was getting an extra $1.50 a week — companies got large, permanent ones. The idea being that this would make companies invest a lot more money in their businesses, which, in turn, would make their workers so much more productive, they’d eventually get bigger raises than they otherwise would have. The administration, for its part, rather absurdly claimed that this would be somewhere between $4,000 and $9,000 per household.
That’s why the most damning news isn’t that the gross domestic product is growing only a bit faster but rather that business investment is. If that doesn’t change, then what little boost there’s been to the economy won’t last long, and barely any of it will reach the middle class. Why is that? Well, the tax cuts were supposed to help in two ways: by giving wealthy shareholders more money to spend and corporations more reason to invest. The problem, though, is that the first part should increase growth for just a little while — and not by much, since rich people don’t tend to spend as much of any tax cut — so that second part really has to work for any of this to be sustainable. It’s also the only way, as we mentioned before, that any of this will trickle down to, shall we say, people in less-exclusive income groups. After all, they’re not getting much of a tax cut themselves, so their only hope is that the people who are benefiting more are putting that money to work in investments that will benefit them, too.
But that doesn’t seem to be happening so far. As the CRS points out, the types of investments the Trump administration cut taxes on the most actually grew less last year than others.
