Good morning. 
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a bit of snow in the evening, and with a daytime high of thirty-five. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:30 PM, for 9h 04m 52s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 18.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand one hundred forty-seventh day.
On this day in 1903, a fire at the Iroquois Theatre in Chicago becomes the deadliest theater fire and the deadliest single-building fire in United States history, resulting in at least 602 deaths.
Recommended for reading in full —
Bram Sable-Smith reports Inside A Rural Wisconsin Doctor’s Fight To Manage Opioid Use (‘Juneau County Doctor Starts Program To Help Address Lack Of Treatment, Alternatives In Rural Areas’):
Dr. Angela Gatzke-Plamann didn’t grasp the full extent of her community’s opioid crisis until one desperate patient called on a Friday afternoon in 2016.
“He was in complete crisis because he was admitting to me that he had lost control of his use of opioids,” recalls Gatzke-Plamann, 40, the only full-time family physician in the central Wisconsin village of Necedah, population 916, nestled among bluffs and pines.
The patient had used opioids for several years for what Gatzke-Plamann calls “a very painful condition.” But a urine screening one week earlier had revealed heroin and morphine in his system as well. He denied any misuse that day. Now he was not only admitting it, but asking for help.
….
In many ways, rural communities like Necedah have become the face of the nation’s opioid epidemic. Drug overdose deaths are more common in rural areas than in urban ones. And rural doctors prescribe opioids more often by far, despite a nationwide decline in prescribing rates since 2012. Meanwhile, rural Americans have fewer alternatives to treat their very real pain, and they disproportionately lack access to effective addiction treatment like the medication buprenorphine.
Sibile Marcellus reports ‘We squandered a major economic recovery’: Harvard professor:
The nation wasted the major economic recovery, according to a new report by Harvard Business School on U.S. competitiveness.
“We had this wonderful recovery. It could have given us the chance to take some significant resources and devote them to some of our well-known challenges, like infrastructure or health care…none of that happened. Instead, we squandered a major economic recovery and didn’t use it to make things better,” said Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, a co-author of the study.
The business community’s role in politics has made a significant contribution to Washington’s dysfunction, according to HBS’s report. The majority of the business leaders surveyed said businesses’ overall engagement worsened the political system by advancing policies that benefited special interests.
The report lays out the different ways in which businesses engage in politics today. The $6 billion spent annually on lobbying is just one facet; others include spending on elections and ballot initiatives, efforts to influence employees’ votes and donations, and adding former government officials to companies’ payrolls.
(Emphasis added.)
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