Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 75. Sunrise is 5:48 AM and sunset 8:13 PM, for 14h 24m 54s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 32% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission Grants and Sponsorship Sub-Committee meets at 4:30 PM.

On this day in 1939, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard write a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging him to begin the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Hannah Knowles reports ‘I should have gotten the damn vaccine,’ woman says fiance texted before he died of covid-19:

Micheal Freedy was not opposed to vaccination, his fiancee said. Like many Americans who have yet to get their coronavirus shots, the 39-year-old father just wanted to wait and learn more about how people reacted to the vaccines.

“All we were doing is waiting one year,” Jessica DuPreez, 37, told The Washington Post on Sunday.

Then everything changed. This weekend — DuPreez’s grief days old and her voice breaking — the Las Vegas mother of five gave interview after interview to spread the same message: Get the vaccine. She said Freedy came to the same conclusion early on in the fight with covid-19 that put him in an intensive care unit in July.

“I should have gotten the damn vaccine,” he texted DuPreez, according to a picture she shared with The Post.

Freedy, who is listed in her phone as “My Heart,” died on Thursday, leaving behind young children, including a 17-month-old.

Danielle Kaeding reports Town of Peshtigo Residents Have Lived with PFAS Pollution for Years. They’re Still Waiting for a Permanent Source of Safe Water:

Furton and around 140 other residents in the corner of northeastern Wisconsin have been drinking bottled water for years due to PFAS pollution of private wells. The contamination stems from the use of firefighting foam that contained the chemicals at Tyco Fire Products’ fire training facility in Marinette.

Residents knew little about PFAS when the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources directed the company to investigate in the fall of 2017. Several years later, they’re no closer to a permanent source of clean, safe drinking water.

“It shouldn’t be a normal part of life that the water coming into your home isn’t safe,” said Furton.

PFAS are a class of thousands of harmful chemicals that have been linked to serious health issues including testicular and kidney cancers, fertility problems and thyroid disease. Often called forever chemicals because they don’t break down easily in the environment, PFAS substances are used in firefighting foam and everyday products like nonstick cookware and stain-resistant clothing.

Furton was diagnosed with thyroid disease a year after they moved back. She can’t say for sure that it’s due to the contamination, but residents reached a $17.5 million settlement with Tyco earlier this year over their exposure to the chemicals in private wells.

PFAS has seeped into so many parts of their lives that they even give filtered water to their pet chickens Gertrude and Mayo. While they would joke about it, research has shown a link between PFAS concentrations in hens’ drinking water and the levels detected in eggs.

“It just highlights the multiple paths of exposure,” she said.

Peshtigo was the first of many communities in the state to deal with pollution from PFAS. Eau Claire is one of the latest cities to find PFAS in municipal wells.

Moose Gets Loose – and Tranquilized – in Parking Garage:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 77. Sunrise is 5:47 AM and sunset 8:14 PM, for 14h 27m 09s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 41% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1774, British scientist Joseph Priestley discovers oxygen gas, corroborating the prior discovery of this element by German-Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Rick Barrett and Kelli Arseneau report With poor data, deficient requirements and little oversight, massive public spending still hasn’t solved the rural internet access problem:

The Federal Communications Commission has said that nationwide around 14 million people lack access to broadband, also known as high-speed internet. However, the firm Broadband Now, which helps consumers find service, estimates it’s closer to 42 million. And although Microsoft Corp. doesn’t have the ability to measure everyone’s actual internet connection, the tech giant says approximately 120 million Americans aren’t using the internet at true broadband speeds of at least 25-megabit-per-second downloads and 3 Mbps uploads — a further indication of how many people have been left behind.

In education, jobs, telemedicine and entertainment, large swaths of the countryside are stifled in basic tasks such as uploading a video or taking an online class.

Today, many believe the nation is at a pivotal moment as President Joe Biden’s administration has proposed spending $65 billion for broadband expansion.

Biden’s initiative, part of his $1.2 trillion American Jobs Plan, would prioritize the creation of future-proof networks, “so we finally reach 100 percent coverage,” the White House said in a recent statement.

[Price County resident Jeff] Hallstrand and others across rural America have heard this before.

In 2004, President George W. Bush called for affordable, high-speed internet access for all Americans by 2007. It was, he said, essential to the nation’s economic growth.

In 2010, President Barack Obama promoted a National Broadband Plan as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The 360-page plan outlined 208 recommendations. “It is a call to action,” the document said, “to replace talk with practical results.”

In 2019, President Donald Trump unveiled the $20 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, saying that farmers “just haven’t been treated properly” when it comes to internet  access. Billions had already been spent on broadband.

None of the efforts under any of the administrations succeeded, and some of the reasons were fairly straightforward. The data on who has broadband  — and who doesn’t  — has been flawed. Some of the upgrades quickly became obsolete. There’s been limited accountability.

“We have given away $40 billion in the last 10 years … and haven’t solved the problem,” said Tom Wheeler, who was FCC chairman in Obama’s administration.

 The New York Times editorial board writes Russia’s New Form of Organized Crime Is Menacing the World:

Whatever the true scope, the problem will not be solved with patches, antivirus software or two-factor authentication, though security experts stress that every bit of protection helps. “We’re not going to defend ourselves out of this problem,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, the chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator and a leading authority on ransomware. “We have too many vulnerabilities. Companies that are small, libraries, fire departments will never afford the required security technology and talent.”

The battle must be joined elsewhere, and the place to start is Russia. That, according to the experts, is where the majority of attacks originate. Three other countries — China, Iran and North Korea — are also serious players, and the obvious commonality is that all are autocracies whose security apparatuses doubtlessly know full well who the hackers are and could shut them down in a minute. So the presumption is that the criminals are protected, either through bribes — which, given their apparent profits, they can distribute lavishly — or by doing pro bono work for the government or both.

Tonight’s Sky for August: