Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see morning rain give way to partly sunny skies, with a high of sixty-two. Sunrise is 5:48 AM and sunset 7:55 PM, for 14h 07m 17s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 45.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1973, President Richard Nixon announces that White House Counsel John Dean has been fired and that other top aides, most notably H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, have resigned.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jayme Fraser, Daveen Rae Kurutz, Jessica Priest, and Kevin Crowe report Spike in US deaths and cases flagged as pneumonia suggest even greater COVID-19 impact:

Federal data released this week shows that the number of deaths recorded in the U.S. this year is higher than normal, outpacing deaths attributed to COVID-19 in states that have been hit hardest by the virus.

The data provides the first look at death trends this year across the country and offers more evidence that the official tally of coronavirus deaths is low.

The phenomenon is pronounced in states with some of the worst COVID-19 outbreaks. From March 22 to April 11, New York saw 14,403 more deaths than the average of the previous six years, according to data maintained by the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. New Jersey saw an additional 4,439 deaths and Michigan an additional 1,572.

The “excess deaths” surpassed COVID-19 fatalities in those states by a combined 4,563 people.  Experts suspect that unconfirmed coronavirus cases could be responsible for some of those deaths, but it might also be related to a shift in other causes of death. For example, some doctors speculate people might be dying from illnesses from which they would normally recover because the pandemic has changed access to health care.

Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Milwaukee’s Voces de la Frontera Action, writes in the New York Times that There Is a Better Way for Democrats to Win in Wisconsin:

We need the Democrats to run a new kind of campaign this year. Not just one that aggressively adapts to social distancing. But a campaign fueled by a different theory. For years, including in 2016, Democrats have relied heavily on expensive TV ads and traditional canvassing where paid staff members from out-of-state use out-of-date voter lists to contact people they don’t know and will never see again. This year, paid canvassers will likely shift to texting and phone calls.<

But this stranger-to-stranger approach won’t work for many Latinos who don’t appear on the voter rolls because they move often or vote infrequently. Or for those of us who would never open a door to a stranger who might turn out to be an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

My organization tried a different approach in 2018, one that works in the coronavirus era and gets better results. It’s based on leveraging relationships among people who already know one another, which data shows increases voter turnout more than any other single outreach method, including mail, TV and digital advertisements, and twice as much as contact from a stranger.

(One does not have to be a Democrat, as I am not, to see that Neumann-Ortiz’s electoral strategy is practical.)

 A swimming dinosaur: The tail of Spinosaurus: 

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of fifty.  Sunrise is 5:49 AM and sunset 7:54 PM, for 14h 04m 47s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 35.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM.

 On this day in 1945, the Dachau concentration camp is liberated by American troops.

Recommended for reading in full —

Robert Faturechi and Derek Willis report Sen. Richard Burr Is Not Just a Friend to the Health Care Industry. He’s Also a Stockholder:

In his 15 years in the Senate, Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, has been one of the health care industry’s staunchest friends.

Serving on the health care and finance committees, Burr advocated to end the tax on medical device makers, one of the industry’s most-detested aspects of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. He pushed the Food and Drug Administration to speed up its approval process. As one of the most prominent Republican health care policy thinkers, he has sponsored or co-sponsored dozens of health-related bills, including a proposal to replace “Obamacare.” He oversaw the implementation of major legislation to pump taxpayer money into private sector initiatives to address public health threats. “The industry feels very positive about Sen. Burr,” the president of North Carolina’s bioscience trade group said during Burr’s last reelection campaign. “He’s done a stellar job.”

Burr also trades in and out of the industry’s stocks.

Since 2013, Burr and his wife bought and sold between $639,500 and $1.1 million of stock in companies that make medical devices, equipment, supplies and drugs, according to a ProPublica analysis of his financial disclosures.

Jessica Silver-Greenberg, David Enrich, Jesse Drucker, and Stacy Cowley report Large, Troubled Companies Got Bailout Money in Small-Business Loan Program:

A company in Georgia paid $6.5 million to resolve a Justice Department investigation — and, two weeks later, received a $10 million federally backed loan to help it survive the coronavirus crisis.

Another company, AutoWeb, disclosed last week that it had paid its chief executive $1.7 million in 2019 — a week after it received $1.4 million from the same loan program.

And Intellinetics, a software company in Ohio, got $838,700 from the government program — and then agreed, the following week, to spend at least $300,000 to purchase a rival firm.

The vast economic rescue package that President Trump signed into law last month included $349 billion in low-interest loans for small businesses. The so-called Paycheck Protection Program was supposed to help prevent small companies — generally those with fewer than 500 employees in the United States — from capsizing as the economy sinks into what looks like a severe recession.

The loan program was meant for companies that could no longer finance themselves through traditional means, like raising money in the markets or borrowing from banks under existing credit lines. The law required that the federal money — which comes at a low 1 percent interest rate and in some cases doesn’t need to be paid back — be spent on things like payroll or rent.

 Astronaut Nicole Stott offers advice on social distancing: 

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with late afternoon rain and a high of sixty-seven.  Sunrise is 5:51 AM and sunset 7:53 PM, for 14h 02m 15s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 25.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 4:30 PM.

 On this day in 1986, high levels of radiation resulting from the Chernobyl disaster (having occurred on 4.26.1986) are detected at a nuclear power plant in Sweden, leading Soviet authorities to publicly announce the accident.

Recommended for reading in full —

Greg Miller and Ellen Nakashima report President’s intelligence briefing book repeatedly cited virus threat:

U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The repeated warnings were conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments and security threats.

For weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences.

But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience for even the oral summary he takes two or three times per week, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.

Erin Griffith and David McCabe report April Start-Ups Pursue ‘Free Money’ With Relief Funds, Prompting Backlash:

Domio, a start-up that offers short-term rentals, has its headquarters in a New York City loft that features beer on tap, a game room and a wall of house slippers for visitors. The fast-growing and unprofitable company has raised $117 million in venture capital, including $100 million in August.

When the coronavirus pandemic caused Domio’s bookings to dry up last month, it laid off staff but did not ask its investors for more funding. Jay Roberts, Domio’s chief executive, said it had no immediate need to raise more money and most likely had enough cash to last until 2021.

Instead, Domio applied for a federal loan under the Paycheck Protection Program, the $349 billion plan to save jobs at small businesses during the outbreak. It received a loan on April 13. Three days later, the program’s funding ran out, even as hundreds of hard-hit restaurants, hair salons and shops around the country missed out on the relief.

Questions about whether the funds were disbursed fairly and whether some applicants deserved them have drawn scrutiny to the aid program. Several companies that got millions of dollars in loans, such as the Shake Shackand Kura Sushi restaurant chains, faced criticism and eventually gave the money back. On Friday, President Trump signed legislation approving a fresh $320 billion to replenish the program, which the Small Business Administration is directing.

Hubble at 30. New and favorites images explained by astrophysicist:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with an afternoon thunderstorm and a high of sixty.  Sunrise is 5:52 AM and sunset 7:52 PM, for 13h 59m 42s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 17.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Unified School District’s board meets via audiovisual conference in open session at 6 PM, entering closed session shortly thereafter, and resuming an open season at 7 PM.

 On this day in 1945, Benito Mussolini is arrested by Italian partisans while attempting escape disguised as a German soldier.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jeremy W. Peters, Elaina Plott, and Maggie Haberman report 260,000 Words, Full of Self-Praise, From Trump on the Virus:

The New York Times analyzed every word Mr. Trump spoke at his White House briefings and other presidential remarks on the virus — more than 260,000 words — from March 9, when the outbreak began leading to widespread disruptions in daily life, through mid-April. The transcripts show striking patterns and repetitions in the messages he has conveyed, revealing a display of presidential hubris and self-pity unlike anything historians say they have seen before.

By far the most recurring utterances from Mr. Trump in the briefings are self-congratulations, roughly 600 of them, which are often predicated on exaggerations and falsehoods. He does credit others (more than 360 times) for their work, but he also blames others (more than 110 times) for inadequacies in the state and federal response.

Mr. Trump’s attempts to display empathy or appeal to national unity (about 160 instances) amount to only a quarter of the number of times he complimented himself or a top member of his team.

Matthew Miller writes It’s not just the bleach. Trump is a catalog of bad ideas that tax resources (‘Whether it’s nuked hurricanes or alligator-stocked moats, the most persistent of the president’s whims waste time and court danger’):

Consider, for example, some presidential guidance in 2017: Trump — who has no nautical, military or engineering experience — decided the electromagnetic catapults the Navy planned to install on aircraft carriers to launch airplanes into the sky were technically inferior to the steam catapults used in older-generation ships. “Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out,” the president said in announcing he would order the Navy to replace the new catapults. Though experts say the move would cost billions of dollars and degrade the carriers’ capabilities, Trump has repeatedly returned to the topic in the years since, forcing Navy officials to put on their best game face in public pronouncements about the president’s off-the-wall comments.

A favorite object of Trump’s expertise remains the wall he is attempting to build along the southern border. His outlandish suggestions include proposals to paint it black so it would be too hot to climb, electrify it and cap it with spikes. The New York Times reported that he considered adding a water-filled moat that would be stocked with snakes and alligators, a farcical idea for which aides nonetheless felt compelled to seek a cost estimate. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security and the Army Corps of Engineers have spent months constructing prototypes and convincing the commander in chief to abandon impractical, expensive and constantly changing demands.

Disease Experts Warn Against Reopening the Country Too Soon:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-three.  Sunrise is 5:53 AM and sunset 7:50 PM, for 13h 57m 08s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 10.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1865, Union soldiers corner and shoot dead John Wilkes Booth.

Recommended for reading in full —

Beth McMurtrie writes The Next Casualty of the Coronavirus Crisis May Be the Academic Calendar:

As the novel coronavirus rolled across the country in early March, Beloit College scrambled to keep up. Like virtually every other campus in the United States, it sent students home and moved instruction online. But what about the future?

“All we were doing was triage,” says Eric Boynton, provost of the small liberal-arts college in Wisconsin, remembering the days after Covid-19 hit. “I had this sinking feeling that this wasn’t enough.”

So Boynton brought an idea to a committee at Beloit that had spent nearly eight months crafting a new academic plan to differentiate itself from its peers: What if, come fall, Beloit broke the semester into 3.5-week increments, so students and professors could focus on one course at a time? That, he argued, would allow for greater flexibility to respond to what many public-health experts anticipate will be a flare-up in infections in the coming months if social-distancing orders are lifted too soon. And it would, he said, give “solidity” to the fall calendar.

The committee rejected that idea but two days later suggested another: a later start date and two seven-week modules instead of a full semester. That way, if the college needed to move everyone online either early or late in the fall, it could do so with fewer disruptions. The deal was ratified and publicly rolled out within two weeks, giving Beloit a leg up at a time when families are struggling to make sense of what the next academic year will look like.

 Douglas N. Harris asks How will COVID-19 change our schools in the long run?:

Use of online tools? It should be clear from my arguments above that schools will make much greater use of online tools. Most students in the country will soon have laptops and some type of internet access (though the digital divide will remain a significant concern). Teachers are going to like many of the tools out there, and they will have an easier time using them now that students have some experience with them. As Dave Deming recently pointed out, online tools can be helpful complements to in-person instruction—instead of a replacement for it—allowing teachers to focus more on engaging students and mentoring them.

A shift to homeschooling and fully virtual instruction? There may be some shift in this direction. Families will get more accustomed to online learning. However, this approach has the significant disadvantage that families have to play the role of hall monitor and teacher. Few families want or can afford that, given their work schedules and other responsibilities. Moreover, research consistently suggests that students learn less in fully virtual environments. In-person, teacher-led instruction simply has too many advantages.

(Note: Harris’s perspective rests primarily on his study of K-12 education in New Orleans after Katrina.)

Why These Grandmas Swim With Venomous Sea Snakes: