Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 4:58 PM, for 9h 42m 56s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 11.8% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}seventy-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Patrick Marley writes that Teen Lincoln Hills inmates allege excessive pepper spraying: “Madison — Juvenile inmates filed a class action lawsuit Monday against Wisconsin officials, alleging they used pepper spray excessively and kept teens in solitary confinement for weeks or months at a time. Over eight months last year, one 14-year-old boy was kept in solitary confinement for all but two weeks, the lawsuit alleges. Pepper spray was used nearly 200 times over 10 months at Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls, which share a campus 30 miles north of Wausau, according to the lawsuit. “The state routinely subjects these youth to unlawful solitary confinement, mechanical restraints and pepper spraying,” attorney Rachel Graham wrote in the suit. “Prior to state and federal raids on the facility at the end of 2015, staff also regularly physically abused youth in the facility….In the first 10 months of last year, pepper spray was used 198 times, according to the lawsuit. Often, a brand of pepper spray is used that is meant to protect hikers from bears.”
Michael D. Shear and Emmarie Huetteman report that Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote in Meeting With Lawmakers: “WASHINGTON — President Trump used his first official meeting with congressional leaders on Monday to falsely claim that millions of unauthorized immigrants had robbed him of a popular vote majority, a return to his obsession with the election’s results even as he seeks support for his legislative agenda. The claim, which he has made before on Twitter, has been judged untrue by numerous fact-checkers. The new president’s willingness to bring it up at a White House reception in the State Dining Room is an indication that he continues to dwell on the implications of his popular vote loss even after assuming power.”
Patrick Thornton explains that Headlines Matter When Your President Lies All the Time: “The most important part of your story on Trump’s lie is, in fact, your headline. If your headline reports the claim, and doesn’t note it’s false, that it isn’t based on a shred of evidence, it would deliberately misinform the public, no matter what you wrote beneath it. Why? Because for a lot of your audience now, the headline is the story. 72 percent of Americans get news on smartphones, where they discover stories via news alerts (most recipients don’t click through to stories) and social media. Most users catch glimpses of headlines on Facebook and Twitter. Sometimes they click through to read the story, but many times they do not. Journalists must craft headlines that live with the reality of how people actually consume news online. Our job as journalists is not to wish that people slowed down and read every word we write; our job is to deliver information to people in ways that they’ll actually consume and internalize it.”
In Forbes, Ally Bogard and Allie Hoffman describe Resilience: How Laura Dunn Went From Campus Assault Survivor To Groundbreaking Legal Advocate: “Laura Dunn became an activist, an advocate, a lawyer, a litigator, a founder and an entrepreneur – the day that she survived a campus assault. It was the life-defining experience that could have catapulted her into despair, or become the ultimate act of resilience. She chose the latter; today she runs the national nonprofit SurvJustice, which provides vital legal assistance to fellow survivors. Since its founding in 2014, they’ve assisted on 189 cases, and Laura has been recognized by the American Law Institute, the American Bar Association, and the White House for her pioneering advocacy. We hope she inspires you, as she did us….”
The local University of Wisconsin campus, UW-Whitewater, has been the subject of two federal complaints to the U.S. Department of Education and one federal lawsuit, all directly or relatedly concerning reporting of sexual assaults on campus. Atty. Dunn represents two of those survivors. For a category link to posts about these cases, and the topic more generally, see Assault Awareness & Prevention.
Barnaby Dixon doesn’t just make puppets, he makes amazing puppets, including a first-class raptor: