Good morning. 
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-eight. Sunrise is 7:00 AM and sunset 6:24 PM, for 11h 23m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 74.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand four hundred twenty-ninth day.
On this day in 1774, Britain passes the Quebec Act, making Wisconsin part of the province of Quebec.
Recommended for reading in full —
Siobhán O’Grady reports In a few days, more people in Trump’s orbit tested positive for coronavirus than in all of Taiwan:
More than a dozen White House officials have recently tested positive for the novel coronavirus, including some who are among the at least nine guests and two journalists who tested positive after they attended Amy Coney Barrett’s Sept. 26 Supreme Court nomination event in the Rose Garden.
Trump announced his positive test early Friday, and was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center later that day. He returned Monday to the White House, where he removed his mask, despite doctors saying he was still contagious.
Meanwhile, Taiwan — the self-ruled island home to 23 million people — reported just eight new cases in the past week.
Patrick Radden Keefe reports The Sackler Family’s Plan to Keep Its Billions (‘The Trump Administration is poised to make a settlement with Purdue Pharma that it can claim as a victory for opioid victims. But the proposed outcome would leave the company’s owners enormously wealthy—and off the hook for good’):
Behind the scenes, lawyers for Purdue and its owners have been quietly negotiating with Donald Trump’s Justice Department to resolve all the various federal investigations in an overarching settlement, which would likely involve a fine but no charges against individual executives. In other words, the deal will be a reprise of the way that the company evaded comprehensive accountability in 2007. Multiple lawyers familiar with the matter told me that members of the Trump Administration have been pushing hard to finalize the deal before Election Day. The Administration will likely present such a settlement as a major victory against Big Pharma—and as another “promise kept” to Trump’s base.
If the deal goes forward, it would mark a stunning turn in the decades-long saga of trying to hold Purdue and the Sacklers responsible for their role in the opioid crisis. But even more stunning is the projected outcome of the bankruptcy proceeding in White Plains. At a recent hearing, the judge, Robert Drain, became defensive when a lawyer representing creditors suggested that the Sacklers might “get away with it.” But, if the Sacklers achieve the result that the family’s legal team is quietly engineering, they seem poised to do just that.
Tory Newmyer reports The $4 trillion federal bailout missed its mark, leaving millions struggling:
Washington seemingly pulled out all the stops in shoveling about $4 trillion into its response to the coronavirus pandemic, more than it spent on 18 years of war in Afghanistan.
But more than half of that sum, roughly $2.3 trillion, has gone to businesses that in many cases didn’t need the help or weren’t required to show they used the taxpayer funds to keep workers on the job.
By contrast, about a fifth, $884 billion, went to help workers and families. And even less aimed at the health crisis itself, with 16 percent of the total going toward testing and tracing, vaccine development, and helping states provide care, among other health-related needs.
(Emphasis in original.)
Elephant seal stranded on street returned to ocean with help from residents in Chile: