Good morning. 
Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:30 PM, for 9h 05m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 25.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand one hundred forty-eighth day.
On this day in 1967, the Packers triumph in the ‘Ice Bowl,’ defeating the Cowboys 21-17.
Recommended for reading in full —
Lee Bergquist reports Pollution cases involving ‘forever’ chemicals are growing across Wisconsin:
Often called “forever” chemicals because they do not break down in the environment, the substances have been used for decades in products like stain-resistant fabrics, nonstick cookware and firefighting foam. The chemicals have proven to be especially adept at smothering petroleum blazes and have been used extensively at airports and military bases.
PFAS compounds have highly desirable traits that can both repel water and oil.
“They can move freely in the environment and that’s why they end up everywhere,” said Christy Remucal, an aquatic chemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We are going to be dealing with them for a really long time.”
They figure prominently in several pollution cases, including in Marinette, Madison and a cleanup project getting underway at Mitchell Airport.
Epidemiology studies suggest some PFAS compounds are associated with increased risk of pregnancy-induced hypertension, liver damage, thyroid disease, asthma, decreased fertility, some cancers and a decline in response to vaccines.
The Department of Health Service told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last week it is considering conducting a cancer cluster assessment in the Marinette and Peshtigo areas after residents reported their stories of having cancer and other serious illnesses at a public meeting on Dec. 18.
Patrick Marley reports Wisconsin Elections Commission deadlocks, keeps voters on the rolls for now:
The Wisconsin Elections Commission deadlocked Monday over whether to remove the voter registrations of more than 200,000 people in response to a judge’s order.
The commission’s inability to reach a consensus means the voters will stay on the rolls for at least the time being. An appeal in the case is ongoing and the commission faces a separate lawsuit that is trying to make sure people are not pulled from the rolls.
The three Republicans on the commission sought to take many of them off the rolls, but they were blocked by the three Democrats on the commission.
It was the second time in as many weeks that the commission broke down along party lines over the lawsuit, which has drawn national attention because of Wisconsin’s top-tier status in the 2020 presidential race.
Monday’s commission meeting came as election officials provided new estimates that suggested a smaller number of voters than originally believed — about 144,000 — could be at risk of being taken off the rolls.
Rare video shows a puffin using a tool to scratch an itch:
This was not some nesting behavior gone awry. Puffins collect soft grass for their nests, then hurry into their burrows with beaks full of bedding. The puffin in Iceland dropped the stick after it finished scratching. Hours later, the camera recorded the stick, still discarded, on the ground.
This behavior “fits all current definitions” of tool use, said University of Oxford zoologist Alex Kacelnik, who has studied toolmaking crows and was not a member of the puffin research team.