Good morning. 
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of fifty-five. Sunrise is 6:55 AM and sunset 6:30 PM, for 11h 34m 58s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand four hundred twenty-fifth day.
On this day in 1919, Cincinnati Reds pitcher Adolfo Luque becomes the first Latino player to appear in a World Series.
Recommended for reading in full —
Stanley Lupkin reports How Operation Warp Speed’s Big Vaccine Contracts Could Stay Secret:
The Trump administration has compared Operation Warp Speed’s crash program to develop a COVID-19 vaccine to the Manhattan Project. And like the notoriously secretive government project to make the first atomic bomb, the details of Operation Warp Speed’s work may take a long time to unravel.
One reason is that Operation Warp Speed is issuing billions of dollars’ worth of coronavirus vaccine contracts to companies through a nongovernment intermediary, bypassing the regulatory oversight and transparency of traditional federal contracting mechanisms, NPR has learned.
Instead of entering into contracts directly with vaccine makers, more than $6 billion in Operation Warp Speed funding has been routed through a defense contract management firm called Advanced Technologies International, Inc. ATI then awarded contracts to companies working on COVID-19 vaccines.
As a result, the contracts between the pharmaceutical companies and ATI may not be available through public records requests, and additional documents are exempt from public disclosure for five years.
John Cassidy writes How Boeing and the F.A.A. Created the 737 MAX Catastrophe:
The basic outlines of the Boeing 737 max tragedy are already well known—or should be well known. Even so, a detailed new report that the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure released on Wednesday morning is a remarkable document. In two hundred and thirty-eight pages of clearly written prose, it goes a long way toward explaining not only what went so wrong at Boeing but what has gone badly askew with the American corporation in general, and with American governance.
With the connivance of the Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing developed, built, and delivered hundreds of passenger jets that were a potential danger to anyone who stepped onto them. It wasn’t until after there had been two deadly crashes, which killed three hundred and forty-six people, that the U.S. government grounded these planes. Even then, Boeing claimed it had done nothing wrong. In fact, it had rushed an unsafe passenger plane into service, failing to alert its airline customers and their flight crews to the existence of a new piece of safety software that could override the pilots and push down the nose of the plane. This software—known as a Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or mcas—was designed to head off possible stalls, but it also had the potential to cause a catastrophe.
Thanks to the official crash reports and some excellent investigative journalism, this much we already knew. Based on an eighteen-month investigation, the new report adds a wealth of new details—and it points the finger in the right places. It illustrates how Boeing’s management prioritized the company’s profitability and stock price over everything else, including passenger safety. Perhaps even more alarmingly, the report shows how the F.A.A., which once had a sterling reputation for independence and integrity, acted as a virtual agent for the company it was supposed to be overseeing.