Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-two.  Sunrise is 5:34 AM and sunset 8:07 PM, for 14h 33m 03s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 79.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater School District’s distinctions committee meets at 10:30 AM via audiovisual conferencing.

 On this day in 1997, Deep Blue, a chess-playing supercomputer, defeats Garry Kasparov in the last game of the rematch, becoming the first computer to beat a world-champion chess player in a classic match format.

Recommended for reading in full —

Aaron Davis report In the early days of the pandemic, the U.S. government turned down an offer to manufacture millions of N95 masks in America:

It was Jan. 22, a day after the first case of covid-19 was detected in the United States, and orders were pouring into Michael Bowen’s company outside Fort Worth, some from as far away as Hong Kong.

Bowen’s medical supply company, Prestige Ameritech, could ramp up production to make an additional 1.7 million N95 masks a week. He viewed the shrinking domestic production of medical masks as a national security issue, though, and he wanted to give the federal government first dibs.

“We still have four like-new N95 manufacturing lines,” Bowen wrote that day in an email to top administrators in the Department of Health and Human Services. “Reactivating these machines would be very difficult and very expensive but could be achieved in a dire situation.”

But communications over several days with senior agency officials — including Robert Kad­lec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and emergency response — left Bowen with the clear impression that there was little immediate interest in his offer.

“I don’t believe we as an government are anywhere near answering those questions for you yet,” Laura Wolf, director of the agency’s Division of Critical Infrastructure Protection, responded that same day.

“We are the last major domestic mask company,” he wrote on Jan. 23. “My phones are ringing now, so I don’t ‘need’ government business. I’m just letting you know that I can help you preserve our infrastructure if things ever get really bad. I’m a patriot first, businessman second.”

In the end, the government did not take Bowen up on his offer. Even today, production lines that could be making more than 7 million masks a month sit dormant.

Don Lee reports Coronavirus sends unemployment rate to 14.7%:

Large-scale layoffs since mid-March have affected every major sector of the economy, with restaurant, retail, health services, manufacturing and local government all taking big hits in April. Unemployment rates rose sharply higher for Latinos, blacks, teenagers, part-time workers and those without any college education.

“Clearly, less-educated and low-wage workers have been crushed by this downturn, even more than usual,” said Harry Holzer, a former chief economist at the Labor Department and now a public policy professor at Georgetown University.

Holzer said that besides the 16 million workers who became unemployed last month, another 6.4 million people dropped out of the labor force. In addition, almost 6 million workers went from full time to part time due to the falloff in economic demand.

When such workers are included, a broader government measure of joblessness reached 22.8% last month — close to the peak unemployment of 25% at the height of the Great Depression in 1933.

(Emphasis added.)

 Jupiter looks like a ‘jack-o-lantern’ in high-res infrared views from the ground:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of forty-eight.  Sunrise is 5:35 AM and sunset 8:06 PM, for 14h 30m 53s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 87.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis is captured. The 1st Wisconsin Cavalry was among the units that captured him.

Recommended for reading in full —

David Corn writes Trump Says There’s Plenty of PPE. So Why Did This Union for Nurses Have to Find Its Own?:

On Wednesday, President Trump held an event at the White House to salute nurses. But the gathering turned awkward when Sophia Adams, a nurse who heads the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, said that the supply of personal protective equipment for nurses during the coronavirus pandemic had been “sporadic.” Trump took issue with her statement and insisted, “I have heard we have a tremendous supply to almost all places.”

But Trump was wrong—and one union that represents a large chunk of the nation’s nurses recently had to spend millions of dollars and navigate the chaotic supply-chain world to procure millions of pieces of PPE for its members. This episode shows, yet again, how the Trump administration has not adequately assisted the nation’s front-line health care workers.In late March, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, was on a call with the heads of about 40 of her union’s locals that represent health care workers. Approximately 200,000 of the AFT’s 1.7 million members are health care workers, most of them nurses. This slice also includes physicians, technicians, and maintenance workers in medical facilities.

On the call, these local leaders described how they and their members were coping with the coronavirus crisis. “It was one horror story after another about the lack of PPE and the working conditions,” Weingarten recalls. The level of fear—fear for their own lives and the well-being of their family members—was shocking for Weingarten: “These are people who are normally used to situations where they can risk their health.”

Michael Gerson writes The moment when Trump’s schtick finally failed:

The president recently took the side of “very good people” carrying guns, swastikas and nooses in Michigan. But didn’t he already take the side of “very fine people” carrying guns and Confederate flags in 2017 in Charlottesville? Perhaps there is a list of diversionary tactics in the top drawer of the Resolute desk. Is it time to go after a black athlete or a black mayor or a black legislator? How about complaining of rigged elections and hinting at a third presidential term? Or is the moment right to attack Muslims or Mexican migrants?

Trump’s repertoire is not only stale; it now represents the dishonoring of sacred responsibilities. It is increasingly evident that our Neronian president fiddled while portions of America burned. He preferred to live in a land of hopeful dreams and happy talk for several weeks while a pandemic spread, cough by hacking cough. He ignored warnings in the expectation that a virus would respect his political strategy and cooperate in attempts to talk up the stock market. It was a risk he was willing to take — though the consequences have fallen on others.

 How a Bakery is Restoring Hope in an Appalachian Mining Town:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of fifty-eight.  Sunrise is 5:36 AM and sunset 8:05 PM, for 14h 28m 38s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 94.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1974, House Committee on the Judiciary opens formal and public impeachment hearings against President Nixon.

Recommended for reading in full —

Catherine Rampell writes Trump brings his industry back to the ’80s at last:

The April jobs report was awful. There’s no other way to put it. The U.S. economy shed 20 million jobs in a single month, the largest employment loss on record in both raw numbers and percentage terms. This wiped out nearly a decade of net job gains, taking total employment back to its level in February 2011:

But what was especially striking was the decline in the leisure and hospitality sector. The industry lost almost half its payroll jobs over the course of a single month. This wiped out all the net gains in the industry going all the way back to … 1988:

Needless to say, leisure and hospitality is President Trump’s own industry. We all knew he was a fan of the ’80s, but he probably didn’t intend to take the whole industry back there quite so literally.

The official unemployment rate rocketed to 14.7 percent a figure that understates the severity and extent of the pain. Many people who are now working part-time involuntarily, or who want to work but are not actively looking, are not included in that total. A broader measure of unemployment that includes those groups hit a record-high rate of 22.8 percent.

Elsa Kania writes Trump Wants Answers on the Pandemic’s Origins. Politicizing Intelligence Won’t Help:

Where did the coronavirus come from? The Trump administration says it wants answers to this question—but conflicting statements from U.S. leaders are further undercutting the credibility of U.S. intelligence on the pandemic. Even more worrisome, reporting suggests that political pressure may be shaping U.S. intelligence analysis on the subject. This is dangerous for many reasons. But in this moment of crisis and uncertainty, these dynamics may also have strategic consequences for the United States on the world stage.

When President Trump was asked during one of his latest briefings whether he had seen anything that gave him “a high degree of confidence” that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the point of origin for the pandemic, he replied simply, “Yes, I have,” yet declined to provide any details on the basis or evidence for that claim. Shortly thereafter, in the same briefing on April 30, the president backtracked, saying, “[W]e have people looking at it very, very strongly …. I think we will have a very good answer eventually.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has also swung both ways on the subject. In an interview the same day, he acknowledged candidly, “Well, we don’t know precisely where it began. We don’t know if it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Yet just a few days later, in an interview on May 3, he claimed, “[T]here’s enormous evidence” that the coronavirus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Coronavirus and the misinformation pandemic:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-six.  Sunrise is 5:38 AM and sunset 8:04 PM, for 14h 26m 24s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1429, Joan of Arc lifts the Siege of Orléans, turning the tide of the Hundred Years’ War.

Recommended for reading in full —

Lawrence Summers writes Given what we’re losing in GDP, we should be spending far more to develop tests: 

We are embarked on a policy path of opening things up without major complementary measures, an approach based more on wishful thinking than on logic or evidence. In guidance issued last month, the Trump administration stated this relaxation should only begin when the number of new cases daily had declined for 14 days. This criterion has not been met for the country as a whole or in many states, yet reopening has begun.

A simple calculation illustrates why this path is so dangerous. The most important parameter for understanding an epidemic is what epidemiologists label R0 (R-nought) — the number of people infected by a single individual with the virus. If R0 is greater than 1, an epidemic explodes; if it is less than 1, it diminishes and eventually ceases to be a problem. Experts estimate that before lockdown R0 was about 2.5, which is why lockdown was necessary. They now estimate, in part because case counts have been stable, that R0 is a bit below 1 — perhaps 0.9 or, on an optimistic view, 0.8.

Basic but grim arithmetic implies that if we move from lockdown even 20 percent of the way back to normal life, the epidemic will again be potentially explosive. (For example, if we are currently at an R0 of 0.9, and assuming that the R0 without any distancing is 2.5, then returning to 20 percent of normal would take the R0 to 1.22, clearly in the danger zone.) This is very worrying as the president and many other political leaders seem to be encouraging substantial reversals in lockdown policies.

….

The problem is that the main constraint on economic activity is not mandatory lockdowns. Rather, whatever is technically permitted, people will be reluctant to resume normal behavior for fear of being infected. The likely result: a resurgent pandemic, dramatically lowered economic activity, or both simultaneously.

(Emphasis added.)

Paige Winfield Cunningham reports Coronavirus is shifting from urban areas to rural ones:

Rural areas of the country, where 15 percent of Americans live, are seeing a rise in new daily cases even as the numbers decline in New York City and other urban centers that are now past their peak, according to Carrie Henning-Smith, a rural health researcher at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. These new hot spots aren’t seeing the declines experts had hoped for, even after weeks of social distancing.

In the two-week period between April 13 and 27,  novel coronavirus cases increased 125 percent in non-metro counties, compared to 68 percent in metro counties, according to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation. During that time period, deaths from the virus increased 169 percent in non-metro counties and 113 percent in metro counties.

 The History of Sriracha:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-three.  Sunrise is 5:39 AM and sunset 8:03 PM, for 14h 24m 06s of daytime.  The moon is full with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1945, General Alfred Jodl signs unconditional surrender terms at Reims, France, ending Germany’s participation in the war. The document takes effect the next day.

Recommended for reading in full —

Robert Faturechi and Derek Willis report On the Same Day Sen. Richard Burr Dumped Stock, So Did His Brother-in-Law. Then the Market Crashed:

Sen. Richard Burr was not the only member of his family to sell off a significant portion of his stock holdings in February, ahead of the market crash spurred by coronavirus fears. On the same day Burr sold, his brother-in-law also dumped tens of thousands of dollars worth of shares. The market fell by more than 30% in the subsequent month.

Burr’s brother-in-law, Gerald Fauth, who has a post on the National Mediation Board, sold between $97,000 and $280,000 worth of shares in six companies — including several that have been hit particularly hard in the market swoon and economic downturn.

A person who picked up Fauth’s phone on Wednesday hung up when asked if Fauth and Burr had discussed the sales in advance.

In 2017, President Donald Trump appointed Fauth to the three-person board of the National Mediation Board, a federal agency that facilitates labor-management relations within the nation’s railroad and airline industries. He was previously a lobbyist and president of his own transportation economic consulting firm, G.W. Fauth & Associates.

Burr came under scrutiny after ProPublica reported that he sold off a significant percentage of his stocks shortly before the market tanked, unloading between $628,000 and $1.72 million of his holdings on Feb. 13 in 33 separate transactions. As chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a member of the health committee, Burr had access to the government’s most highly classified information about threats to America’s security and public health concerns.

 Daniel Beer reviews Putin’s People by Catherine Belton – a groundbreaking study that follows the money:

A groundbreaking and meticulously researched anatomy of the Putin regime, Belton’s book shines a light on the pernicious threats Russian money and influence now pose to the west. Deepening social inequality and the rise of populist movements in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis have “left the west wide open to Russia’s aggressive new tactics of fuelling the far right and the far left”. Kremlin largesse has funded political parties across the continent, from the National Front in France to Jobbik in Hungary and the Five Star movement in Italy, which are united in their hostility to both the EU and Nato. The Kremlin’s “black cash”, former Kremlin insider Sergei Pugachev laments, “is like a dirty atomic bomb. In some ways it’s there, in some ways it’s not. Nowadays it’s much harder to trace.” Putin’s People lays bare the scale of the challenge if the west is to decontaminate its politics.

(Putin’s People will be available for sale on 6.16.20, and Amazon is now taking advance orders for electronic or print copies.)

A Grocery Store at the Epicenter of the Pandemic:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-four.  Sunrise is 5:40 AM and sunset 8:02 PM, for 14h 21m 46s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

 The Whitewater Unified School District’s distinctions committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 3 PM.

 On this day in 1915, George Orson Welles is born in Kenosha.

Recommended for reading in full —

Dan Mangan reports Trump does not wear coronavirus mask at Honeywell factory that makes masks:

President Donald Trump did not wear a mask as a coronavirus precaution during a visit Tuesday to a Honeywell factory in Phoenix that is producing millions of N95 masks for the federal government.

Other official visitors with Trump, who did put on safety glasses for his tour, also were not wearing masks.

But Honeywell employees working on the production line were wearing masks. And a sign in the factory said that everyone there is required to wear a mask.

At one point during his tour, the Guns N’ Roses cover of the James Bond movie song “Live and Let Die” was being blasted from the factory’s PA system, as workers performed their tasks.

Trump, who has consistently refused to wear a mask while interacting with others despite federal guidance urging all Americans to do so, earlier Tuesday had said that he would put on a mask if it was required at the Honeywell facility.

A White House official said that Honeywell had told the White House that Trump and other visitors did not need to wear masks.

“If it’s a mask environment, I would certainly do that,” Trump had said Tuesday before boarding Air Force One to fly to Arizona.

“I would wear it. If it’s a mask environment, I would have no problem.”

Trump was not wearing a mask when he walked off Air Force One after it landed in Arizona.

And the president did not wear a mask at a roundtable discussion about Covid-19 assistance to Native Americans, which took place before he toured the Honeywell plant, which is producing masks under a $27.4 million Defense Department contract.

Michelle Ye Hee Lee, Tom Hamburger, and Anu Narayanswamy report Well-connected Trump alumni benefit from coronavirus lobbying rush:

As a wave of coronavirus restrictions shuttered more than two dozen of his hotels, Dallas hotelier Monty Bennett publicly pleaded for help.<

“Every American should expect just enough from government that our businesses can survive. Is that too much to ask?” the longtime GOP donor wrote in a March blog post.

Behind the scenes, Bennett’s companies paid $50,000 to hire two well-connected allies of President Trump for help seeking financial relief: Jeff Miller, former vice chairman of Trump’s inaugural committee, and Roy Bailey, a top fundraiser for the president’s reelection campaign, according to lobbying disclosures.

As lobbyists blitz Washington for a piece of the massive federal response to the global pandemic, a group of former Trump administration officials and campaign alumni are in the center of the action, helping private interests tap into coveted financial and regulatory relief programs.

In all, at least 25 former officials who once worked for the Trump administration, campaign or transition team are now registered as lobbyists for clients with novel coronavirus needs, according to The Washington Post’s analysis of federal lobbying records and employment data compiled by ProPublica.

Fireballs! Eta Aquarid meteors captured by NASA all-sky cameras: