Good morning. 
Tuesday in Whitewater will see light morning snow with a high of 17. Sunrise is 6:48 AM and sunset 5:28 PM, for 10h 40m 23s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 20.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1923, Howard Carter unseals the burial chamber of Pharaoh Tutankhamun.
Recommended for reading in full —
Rich Kremer reports Marquette University Laid Off 39 In January. Staff And Students Fear More Cuts Are To Come:
Marquette University laid off 39 staff members last month as part of a yearlong effort to close a $45 million budget deficit brought on by COVID-19 financial losses including a drop in enrollment.
The budget-cutting process has sparked fear on campus among some students and faculty who worry the university is moving away from its liberal arts education and Jesuit mission.
On Sept. 28, Marquette administrators held a virtual town hall to discuss the financial state of the university. Senior Vice President and COO Joel Pogodzinski shared sobering news: university administration is expecting upwards of 300 faculty and staff reductions in the next two years.
Marquette’s 2020 freshman class was the smallest it has been since 1997, which — along with unexpected losses from the pandemic — meant there was an immediate budget deficit of $45 million. By 2024, Pogodzinski anticipates that deficit could grow to as much as $65 million.
Shawn Boburg and Jon Swaine report A GOP donor gave $2.5 million for a voter fraud investigation. Now he wants his money back:
Like many Trump supporters, conservative donor Fred Eshelman awoke the day after the presidential election with the suspicion that something wasn’t right. His candidate’s apparent lead in key battleground states had evaporated overnight.
The next day, the North Carolina financier and his advisers reached out to a small conservative nonprofit group in Texas that was seeking to expose voter fraud. After a 20-minute talk with the group’s president, their first conversation, Eshelman was sold.
“I’m in for 2,” he told the president of True the Vote, according to court documents and interviews with Eshelman and others.
“$2 million,” Eshelman responded.
Over the next 12 days, Eshelman came to regret his donation and to doubt conspiracy theories of rampant illegal voting, according to court records and interviews.
Now, he wants his money back.
Gary Paul Nabhan and Austin Nuñez write Along the Southwest Border, Trump’s Wall Is Only One of the Insults He Left Behind:
Border towns from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Coast have suffered disproportionately, sacrificed to policies that ignore lives and livelihoods in favor of a dubious 450-mile-long monument to presidential hubris.
….
The insults include extreme rates of Covid-19 infection because of botched state and federal responses to the pandemic, the loss of thousands of agricultural jobs as a result of tariff wars and the intertwined catastrophes of drought, fire and flood, which the Trump administration’s hostile climate policies most likely worsened.
Most counties flanking the international boundary suffer from poverty levels double that of the U.S. average. In unincorporated settlements known as colonias, from Texas to California, border residents live without such basic services as clean water and waste removal. The Trump administration exacerbated longstanding problems by vilifying the border and those living along it and ignoring the region’s vital role in U.S. cultural, ecological, and trade relations with Latin America.