Good morning. 
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 7:28 AM and sunset 5:48 PM, for 10h 20m 21s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand four hundred fifty-second day.
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 9 AM.
On this day in 1938, Orson Welles broadcasts his radio play of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, causing anxiety in some of the audience in the United States.
Recommended for reading in full —
Tory Newmyer reports Executives pocketed big bonuses before declaring bankruptcy, firing thousands:
“Since the pandemic took hold in March, at least 18 large companies have rewarded executives with six- and seven-figure payouts before asking bankruptcy courts to shield them from landlords, suppliers and other creditors while they restructured,” Abha Bhattarai and Daniela Santamariña report. “They collectively meted out more than $135 million, documents show, while listing $79 billion in debts.”
The payouts preceded layoffs of tens of thousands of workers. Hertz, for one, awarded “$16.2 million three days before its Chapter 11 filing in May;” then won court approval to hand executives another $8.2 million tied to meeting financial goals as it fired 11,000 workers.
The story is the latest in a series of Washington Post investigations into an economic recovery concentrating its benefits among the wealthiest, while piling pain onto workers.
The situation is primed to deteriorate further.
Coronavirus cases are spiking across the country, notching new daily highs. And emergency aid from Washington has largely expired, as lawmakers head home until the election without providing more relief. Those developments prompted stocks to tank on Monday.
But small businesses and millions of jobless workers are facing more acute pain as winter sets in. The pandemic is “exacerbating existing disparities in labor market outcomes,” Lael Brainard, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, said in a speech last week. She noted that the pace of the job market’s recovery is slowing down and likely to continue doing so, threatening to leave permanent scars without another major spending package from Washington.
(Emphasis in original.)
Keziah Weir reports Is the GOP Gaming the New York Times Best-Seller Lists?:
In November 2019, Donald Trump Jr.’s book Triggered debuted at the top of the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. A week later, the paper’s books desk released a report that a nearly $100,000 bulk purchase of the book by the RNC had contributed to the ranking.
Trump Jr. wasn’t the first in his family to discover the joy of bulk sales—three decades earlier, as the New Republic reported in 2017, his dad encouraged owners of Trump properties to buy thousands of copies of The Art of the Deal, helping it ride the list for 48 weeks. Since then, dozens of nonfiction books each year—including by politicians like Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, and Sarah Palin—have appeared on the list with an assist from bulk buys. Many of those authors used campaign funds to finance the purchases, which the FEC allows as long as the author doesn’t keep the royalties.
In 2020, 17 books on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list have scored their spots by dint of bulk buys. All but two have been written by Trumpworld superstars: Trump Jr.; founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk; Glenn Beck; conservative commentator Dave Rubin; Fox News host Pete Hegseth; Dinesh D’Souza; Newt Gingrich; Freedom Center founder David Horowitz; Ben Shapiro; Sean Hannity; Sarah Huckabee Sanders; Candace Owens; Jeanine Pirro; the American Conservative editor Rod Dreher; and Ted Cruz. Of these 15, nine appeared on the list for three weeks or less.
(Emphasis in original.)
Orson Welles – War Of The Worlds – Radio Broadcast 1938 – Complete Broadcast: