Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 40.  Sunrise is 6:38 AM and sunset 5:37 PM, for 10h 59m 56s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 83.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

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

 On this day in 1957, American inventor Walter Frederick Morrison sells the rights to his flying disc to the Wham-O toy company, which later renames it the “Frisbee.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Sarah Hauer reports Activist investors who believe Kohl’s has ‘chronically underperformed’ are trying to take over the company’s board:

Kohl’s Corp. stock rose 6% Monday after a group of activist investors who say the retailer has “chronically underperformed” announced it was trying to take over the company’s board of directors.

The group of investors owns about 9.5% of Kohl’s shares and has become the Menomonee Falls retail chain’s largest shareholder.

The investor group said in a letter sent to shareholders Monday that it has nominated nine candidates to Kohl’s 12-person board for election at the company’s annual meeting of shareholders.

Kohl’s stock closed Monday up 6.2%, at $55.97 a share.

The letter calls for electing the nine new members to the company’s board, arguing that current leadership has been slow to act in its efforts to overcome sluggish sales.

Mike McIntire reports Trump’s Tax Returns Aren’t the Only Crucial Records Prosecutors Will Get:

In addition to the tax returns, Mr. Trump’s accountants, Mazars USA, must also produce business records on which those returns are based and communications with the Trump Organization. Such material could provide important context and background to decisions that Mr. Trump or his accountants made when preparing to file taxes.

John D. Fort, a former chief of the I.R.S. criminal investigation division, said tax returns were a useful tool for uncovering leads, but could only be fully understood with additional financial information obtained elsewhere.

“It’s a very key personal financial document, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle,” said Mr. Fort, a C.P.A. and the director of investigations with Kostelanetz & Fink in Washington. “What you find in the return will need to be followed up on with interviews and subpoenas.”

 Jennifer Rubin writes Pundits are wrong. We don’t need a functional GOP:

It is no secret that modern conservatism, in large part a response to the Cold War, is ideologically spent. The Bulwark’s William Kristol got to the nub of it in a September post:

So perhaps we need to acknowledge that it has come to this: Real, existing conservatism as it exists in America in 2020 is an accomplice to, an apologist for, and an enabler of Trump’s nativist, populist, unconservative, and illiberal authoritarianism. …

[P]erhaps every political movement has a natural lifespan: Modern American conservatism was born in 1955, peaked in full flower in the 1980s, and then aged, mostly gracefully, for three decades. Until it could easily, if suddenly, be pushed aside in its dotage—forced, or induced, to surrender to its younger and stronger, if disreputable, distant relative.

If the Democratic Party were made up purely of devotees of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), one could see space for a center-right party. But contrary to GOP propaganda, that is not the case. A center-left nominee won the presidency. The Senate includes many moderate Democrats, including Warner, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Robert P. Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania.

Perseverance Rover’s Descent and Touchdown on Mars (Official NASA Video):

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 36.  Sunrise is 6:39 AM and sunset 5:36 PM, for 10h 57m 06s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 75.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School District Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 7 PM.

 On this day in 1922, an ice storm of February 21-23 grips Wisconsin and the Midwest with “ice accumulations of 1-2″, with a few reports of around 4″, built up on trees, poles, and wires.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Mary Spicuzza and Dan Bice report Former Gov. Scott Walker, a frequent absentee voter, now backs limiting absentee ballots to nursing homes, military:

Former Republican Gov. Scott Walker — who has voted absentee frequently in recent elections — now says absentee ballots should be limited to people in nursing homes or deployed in the military.

“I voted on Election Day this past Tuesday in person and would gladly do it in the future,” Walker said Saturday night. “Opponents of our photo ID law said it would hurt turnout, but that hasn’t been the case in recent elections.”

Walker, who served as governor from 2011 to 2019, voted absentee in six of the last eight elections, according to the state’s MyVote website.

For example, he voted absentee in the April, August and November 2020 elections, which were held as the coronavirus pandemic descended on Wisconsin and the rest of the country.

Ben Smith writes How Investigative Journalism Flourished in Hostile Russia:

The boom in independent journalism and criticism of the government has reached a level “unseen in our country since the end of the 1990s,” Denis Volkov, the deputy director of the Levada Center, a Russian public opinion research group, wrote recently.

Probiv [a Russian info tool] has been a crucial part of that revival. The practice was at the heart of a stunning revelation late last year by the international investigative collective Bellingcat, working with the Russian site The Insider and other partners, identifying the agents from a secret Russian spy unit who poisoned Mr. Navalny. A reporter spent “a few hundred euros worth of cryptocurrency” for a trove of data. Then, in a riveting piece of theater, Mr. Navalny, working with Bellingcat, called one of those agents, pretending to be a senior government official, and tricked him into a confession. When Mr. Navalny returned to Russia after his treatment in Germany, he was promptly jailed for a parole violation in a case he has called fabricated, and now faces transport to a penal colony.

The irony is delicious, of Mr. Putin seeing his own tools of corruption and surveillance turned against him by the underpaid police and intelligence officials who put the secrets up for sale. “Whatever Putin does keeps backfiring,” said Maria Pevchikh, who runs the investigative unit at Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.

 Jackson Ryan reports NASA Perseverance rover: See ‘first of its kind’ footage from Mars descent on Monday:

Mission experts will present the latest update at 11 a.m. PT/2 p.m. ET on Monday, Feb. 22. A number of mission scientists and NASA staff have really been hyping this one up on Twitter, so we’re expecting to see some mind-blowing footage. And you don’t need to go anywhere — just press play on the link below:

Forced to close its doors, the Louvre takes the chance to spruce up:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with snow this afternoon and evening and a high of 32.  Sunrise is 6:41 AM and sunset 5:35 PM, for 10h 54m 18s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 66.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1947, Edwin Land demonstrates the first “instant camera,” the Polaroid Land Camera, to a meeting of the Optical Society of America.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Cary Spivak reports Milwaukee thought it ousted a notorious central city landlord. Now, it appears Mohammed Rashaed is back:

Elijah Mohammed Rashaed, long known as one of Milwaukee’s most notorious landlords, is back in the business despite a three-year effort by the city to toss him out of it.

About a half-dozen tenants or their lawyers told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel they have recently talked to Rashaed about issues in their rental units even though the properties are owned by companies controlled by his children.

One tenant said she paid Rashaed $1,000, which he refunded after her Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee lawyer demanded the payback because the home she was going to rent had no heat.

“The specter of him still being involved in the background is there,” said Nicole Penegor, a Legal Aid lawyer, who was astonished to learn Rashaed was again active in the central-city landlord business.

….

The city sued Rashaed, charging his real estate empire was a public nuisance that exploited the poor. The city charged that Rashaed targeted individuals who have trouble finding a place to live because of “income limitations, criminal or eviction records, or need to move quickly.”

The lawsuit said that in 2017 there were 269 orders pending against properties owned by an array of Rashaed companies. The city demanded the Rashaed operation fix 1,007 building code violations.

In 2018, Milwaukee Circuit Judge Glenn Yamahiro appointed Ogden & Co. to manage Rashaed’s rental portfolio, stripping him of control of the more than 160 properties and the revenue generated by them.

Anton Troianovski reports China Censors the Internet. So Why Doesn’t Russia?:

But even as Mr. Putin faced the biggest protests in years last month, his government appeared unwilling — and, to some degree, unable — to block websites or take other drastic measures to limit the spread of digital dissent.

The hesitation has underscored the challenge Mr. Putin faces as he tries to blunt the political implications of cheap high-speed internet access reaching into the remote corners of the vast country while avoiding angering a populace that has fallen in love with Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok.

“They’re afraid,” Dmitri Galushko, a Moscow telecommunications consultant, said of why the Kremlin hasn’t clamped down harder. “They’ve got all these weapons, but they don’t know how to use them.”

More broadly, the question of how to deal with the internet lays bare a dilemma for Mr. Putin’s Russia: whether to raise state repression to new heights and risk a public backlash or continue trying to manage public discontent by maintaining some semblance of an open society.

 Hannah Knowles reports United flight rained debris a mile wide near Denver after engine failure, officials say:

The United Airlines flight, Honolulu-bound with more than 200 passengers, returned to Denver International Airport shortly after takeoff Saturday afternoon following an engine failure, strewing debris at least a mile wide in yards and a park where children play, authorities said. Police in Broomfield, Colo. — about a half-hour drive north of Denver — sent out a “code red” urging about 1,400 people to check their yards for fallen wreckage.

How 40 Million Cork Wine Stoppers Are Harvested a Day:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 24.  Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 5:34 PM, for 10h 51m 29s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 57.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1950, in a six-hour speech delivered before the U.S. Senate, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed he had the names of 81 U.S. government officials actively engaged in Communist activities, including “one of our foreign ministers.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Sophie Carson reports 5% of Wisconsin residents fully vaccinated against COVID-19:

More than 300,000 Wisconsin residents have received both doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, state data shows.

That’s about 5.4% of the population.

The number of fully vaccinated residents has jumped by 100,000 in just the last week.

Since second doses are scheduled three to four weeks after first doses, depending on the vaccine, the sudden bump is expected. It comes about three weeks after Wisconsin opened vaccine eligibility to anyone 65 and older and vaccinations increased statewide.

Thursday was the first day that vaccine providers administered more second doses than first doses, said Julie Willems Van Dijk, state Department of Health Services deputy secretary.

 Adam Rogan reports Schools Superintendent candidate Deborah Kerr’s campaign manager and legal counsel quit:

A campaign manager who has continually worked for Democrats and an attorney who has worked often worked with Gov. Tony Evers have both quit Deborah Kerr’s campaign for state superintendent.

The campaign manager, Brandon Savage, said in an email that he resigned Thursday.

“Based on the state of the race, my expertise would not be of any benefit for her moving forward. The campaign will require a different strategy — one that I cannot provide,” wrote Savage, who describes himself as a Democratic strategist. “I’m very pleased with having gotten the campaign to the point of winning the primary election in a seven-way race. But moving forward there will be a different team focused on April.”

Michael Maistelman, who was acting as legal counsel for Kerr, quit Friday. Maistelman has represented Gov. Tony Evers in a number of different roles since 2009.

Kerr, a Caledonia resident who previously was the Brown Deer School District’s superintendent, says she is a Democrat who voted for Joe Biden, although she is backed by Republicans including former Gov. Scott Walker.

 Tobi Thomas reports Dolphins have similar personality traits to humans, study finds:

Dolphins have developed a number of similar personality traits to humans, despite having evolved in vastly different environments, researchers have found.

A study, published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, looked at 134 male and female bottlenose dolphins from eight facilities across the world, with each dolphin’s personality being assessed by staff at the facilities. The results of the study found a convergence of certain personality traits, especially curiosity and sociability.

The study has aided researchers in understanding how certain human personality traits developed independently of immediate environments. These similarities were found despite dolphins having evolved in a completely different environment from primates, with the last common ancestor living about 95m years ago.

Dr Blake Morton, a psychology lecturer at the University of Hull and the lead author of the study, said this research was the first time the personality of dolphins had been studied in this way.

Morton said: “Dolphins were a great animal for this kind of study because, like primates, dolphins are intelligent and social. We reasoned that if factors such as intelligence and gregariousness contribute to personality, then dolphins should have similar personality traits to primates.”

He said: “Dolphins, like many primates, have brains that are considerably larger than what their bodies require for basic bodily functions; this excess of brain matter essentially powers their ability to be intelligent, and intelligent species are often very curious.”

See Perseverance’s first color images of Martian surface:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 21.  Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 5:32 PM, for 10h 48m 41s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 47.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1868, photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis is born near Whitewater.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Kelly Meyerhofer reports UW campuses planning for fall semester to be ‘as close to normal as possible:

Meeting the 75% benchmark would represent a significant change from how classes are currently being delivered.

At UW-Madison, 82% of classes this spring semester are fully online, according to System data. That’s up from 64% of classes delivered remotely last fall.

In fact, every single UW campus increased its share of online classes this semester from what schools offered last fall.

 The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial board writes Ron Johnson’s whitewash of the U.S. Capitol riot shows why Wisconsin’s senior senator has to go:

To hear Ron Johnson tell it, nothing much happened on Jan. 6 inside the U.S. Capitol.

Just a few bad apples got a little rowdy.

“This didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me,” the Oshkosh Republican told talk radio show host Jay Weber.

“I mean ‘armed,’ when you hear ‘armed,’ don’t you think of firearms?  … How many firearms were confiscated? How many shots were fired?”

Johnson’s grasp on reality has been tenuous for years, but even more so since he aligned himself lockstep with former President Donald Trump.

Since Trump left office, two kinds of Republicans have emerged:

Those who want to purge Trump and his cult of white supremacists and conspiracy theorists from the party and those, like Johnson, who long for the return of their would-be king.

From the week the votes were cast last November, Johnson helped spread Trump’s lie that the election was stolen, helped perpetuate the myth that voter fraud cost the former president the election. Johnson used the levers of government to spread the lie, calling a bogus Senate hearing to “investigate” election “irregularities.”

In fact, this election, held during a deadly pandemic, was the “most secure in American history,” according the nation’s lead cybersecurity agency.

See also U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson: Ambitious, Compromised, or Crackpot? and Ron Johnson: ‘No Enemies to the Right’?

 Tariq Panja reports Fake Doctors, Fake Documents: How a Russian Doping Lie Fell Apart (‘With investigators closing in, the high jumper Danil Lysenko needed a paper trail to support his story. Top Russian track officials provided it by creating a fake hospital’):

If the cover-up was to work, the high jumper Danil Lysenko realized far too late, he had better familiarize himself with the Moscow hospital where Russian track and field officials had insisted he had undergone a battery of medical tests.

The details mattered. The tests were the centerpiece of Russia’s explanation for why antidoping officials had been unable to locate Lysenko in the spring of 2018.

….

So in September 2018, fearing investigators were closing in on the truth, a nervous Lysenko sent an email to a top Russian track official, asking if he could provide photographs of the hospital, so at least the athlete would know how to describe it if anyone asked. Then, accompanied by the same official, he drove to the address listed on the hospital’s website. When the car stopped and Lysenko looked around, he was stunned.

There was no hospital. There wasn’t even a building. All he could see was a construction site.

This was going to be harder to explain.

See exactly where Perseverance landed in Mars’ Jezero Crater:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 25.  Sunrise is 6:45 AM and sunset 5:31 PM, for 10h 45m 54s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 38% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.

 On this day in 1930, while studying photographs taken in January, Clyde Tombaugh discovers Pluto.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Rory Linnane reports Superintendent candidate Deborah Kerr deletes account after tweets about her experience with the N-word:

The prompt, from Madison Payton, host of the Race Through Education Podcast: “When was the first time someone called you the n- word?”

Kerr replied, “I was 16 in high school and white — my lips were bigger than most and that was the reference given to me.”

When another Twitter user asked how the experience impacted her, she replied, “It made me realize that we are all different and that is the gift we give to one another.”

(There’s dense and then there’s denser: the consequence of the racial slur directed at the alabaster Kerr would be different from the same slur directed at someone Black, and use of the slur is not a reminder of diversity but an expression of bigotry.)

 Henry Redman reports Election Commissioner Bob Spindell can vote whether or not to investigate himself for election fraud:

Republican elections commissioner Robert Spindell, who has been accused by Law Forward of fraudulently casting an Electoral College vote for former President Donald Trump, will have a say in the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) decision over whether or not he should be investigated, unless he recuses himself due to a conflict of interest. 

Spindell and nine others, including Wisconsin Republican Party chair Andrew Hitt, met on Dec. 14 to cast Wisconsin’s ten electoral votes for Trump, even though Joe Biden won Wisconsin and was awarded the state’s votes.  

Progressive legal outfit Law Forward wrote a letter to Milwaukee County District AttorneyJohn Chisholm and sent a complaint to the Elections Commission alleging that the actions of Spindell, Hitt and others was a violation of state law. 

The Milwaukee County DA has the authority to decide whether or not to file criminal charges against the group and the WEC has the authority to decide whether or not to investigate the allegations made in the complaint. 

Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper report Promotions for Female Generals Were Delayed Over Fears of Trump’s Reaction:

Last fall, the Pentagon’s most senior leaders agreed that two top generals should be promoted to elite, four-star commands.

For the defense secretary at the time, Mark T. Esper, and Gen. Mark A. Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the tricky part was that both of the accomplished officers were women. In 2020 America under President Donald J. Trump, the two Pentagon leaders feared that any candidates other than white men for jobs mostly held by white men might run into turmoil once their nominations reached the White House.

Mr. Esper and General Milley worried that if they even raised their names — Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost of the Air Force and Lt. Gen. Laura J. Richardson of the Army — the Trump White House would replace them with its own candidates before leaving office.

So the Pentagon officials agreed on an unusual strategy: They held back their recommendations until after the November elections, betting that if Joseph R. Biden Jr. won, he and his aides would be more supportive of the Pentagon picks than Mr. Trump, who had feuded with Mr. Esper and had a history of disparaging women. They stuck to the plan even after Mr. Trump fired Mr. Esper six days after the election.

Starbucks Employee Shares ‘Secrets’ on TikTok:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 19.  Sunrise is 6:47 AM and sunset 5:30 PM, for 10h 43m 09s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 29% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Parks and Recreation Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM, and the Whitewater Fire Department Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6 PM. 

 On this day in 1801, an electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr is resolved when Jefferson is elected President of the United States and Burr, Vice President by the House of Representatives.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Bill Glauber, Mary Spicuzza, and Alison Dirr report Milwaukee takes center stage as Joe Biden pitches $1.9 trillion COVID relief, seeks to reassure Americans:

In his first major political trip outside Washington, D.C., as president, Biden vowed that he was committed to passing the relief legislation, claiming it would create “7 million jobs this year” and that “the economy now has to be dealt with.”

“Now is the time we should be spending. Now is the time to go big,” he said during a town hall broadcast by CNN and attended by a socially distant group of Wisconsin voters.

Asked when the country will get back to normal, Biden said experts warned him to “be careful not to predict things.”

“By next Christmas I think we’ll be in a very different circumstance, God willing,” he said.

“A year from now there will be significantly fewer people having to be socially distant, having to wear a mask. But we don’t know. I don’t want to over-promise.”

A key to recovery is the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, which Biden said would be available to every American by the end of July.

“A lot will be vaccinated in the meantime,” he said.

Biden said “it matters where you continue to wear that mask, whether you continue to socially distance, whether you wash your hands with soap and hot water.”

Jon Keegan, Colin Lecher, and Corin Faife report Trump’s False Posts Were Treated with Kid Gloves by Facebook:

In August, as the election approached and misinformation about COVID-19 spread, Facebook announced it would give new fact-checking labels to posts, including more nuanced options than simply “false.” But data from The Markup’s Citizen Browser project, which tracks a nationwide panel of Facebook users’ feeds, shows how unevenly those labels were applied: Posts were rarely called “false,” even when they contained debunked conspiracy theories. And posts by Donald Trump were treated with the less direct flags, even when they contained lies.

The Markup shared the underlying data for this story with Facebook.

“We don’t comment on data that we can’t validate, but we are looking into the examples shared,” Facebook spokesperson Katie Derkits said in a statement.

Overall, we gathered Facebook feed data from more than 2,200 people and examined how often those users saw flagged posts on the platform in December and January. We found more than 330 users in the sample who saw posts that were flagged because they were false, devoid of context, or related to an especially controversial issue, like the presidential election. But Facebook and its partners used the “false” label sparingly—only 12 times.

World’s most endangered right whale spotted off Spanish island:

Divers unwittingly filmed a North Atlantic right whale calf – one of the world’s most endangered whales – as they navigated back to El Hierro in Spain’s Canary Islands. The recently born calf, who appeared to be alone, was thousands of miles from where the species is usually spotted, along the eastern seaboard of Canada and the US.