Good morning. 
Wednesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 60. Sunrise is 6:13 AM and sunset 5:56 PM, for 11h 43m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 8.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 10 AM.
On this day in 2006, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter arrives at Mars.
Recommended for reading in full —
Laura Schulte reports ‘We just want to be OK’: Residents of a small island near La Crosse battle massive ‘forever chemical’ contamination:
TOWN OF CAMPBELL – Getting the kids ready for bed is now a production for Amanda Hartley.
It involves close supervision, as each child fills up a cup from the 5-gallon jug of water in the corner of the kitchen and walks it to the bathroom, using it to wet their toothbrush, brush their teeth and rinse their brush at the end. Her family can no longer use the water from the tap to brush their teeth or drink.
It’s contaminated with “forever chemicals” and could pose a risk to their health.
It’s a constant concern for Hartley, who has to ensure that everyone is drinking, cooking and brushing their teeth only with water from the 5-gallon jug in the corner of the kitchen, even the cats. They don’t want to risk exposure to the chemicals, fearful of the lasting health effects chemicals known as PFAS have been linked to. It’s been a lot of work to make sure the kids — ages 7, 9, 12 and 14 — learn all new habits.
Kari Paul reports A few rightwing ‘super-spreaders’ fueled bulk of election falsehoods, study says:
A report from the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a group that includes Stanford and the University of Washington, analyzed social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok during several months before and after the 2020 elections.
It found that “super-spreaders” – responsible for the most frequent and most impactful misinformation campaigns – included Trump and his two elder sons, as well as other members of the Trump administration and the rightwing media.
The study’s authors and other researchers say the findings underscore the need to disable such accounts to stop the spread of misinformation.
“If there is a limit to how much content moderators can tackle, have them focus on reducing harm by eliminating the most effective spreaders of misinformation,” said Lisa Fazio, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who studies the psychology of fake news but was not involved EIP report. “Rather than trying to enforce the rules equally across all users, focus enforcement on the most powerful accounts.”
Bob Smietana reports Bible teacher Beth Moore, Trump critic and advocate for sexual abuse victims, splits with Southern Baptist Convention:
“I am still a Baptist, but I can no longer identify with Southern Baptists,” Moore said in the phone interview. “I love so many Southern Baptist people, so many Southern Baptist churches, but I don’t identify with some of the things in our heritage that haven’t remained in the past.”
Moore told RNS that she recently ended her longtime publishing partnership with Nashville-based LifeWay Christian. While LifeWay will still distribute her books, it will no longer publish them or administer her live events. (Full disclosure: The author of this article is a former LifeWay employee.)
Kate Bowler, a historian at Duke Divinity School who has studied evangelical women celebrities, said Moore’s departure is a significant loss for the Southern Baptist Convention.
Moore, she said, is one of the denomination’s few stand-alone women leaders, whose platform was based on her own “charisma, leadership and incredible work ethic” and not her marriage to a famed pastor. (Moore’s husband is a plumber by trade.) She also appealed to a wide audience outside her denomination.