FREE WHITEWATER

Daily Bread for 4.10.20

Good morning.

Good Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:18 AM and sunset 7:32 PM, for 13h 10m 54s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 91.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the one thousand two hundred forty-ninth day.

On this day in 1866, Henry Bergh founds the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) in New York City.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Sherrilyn Ifill writes Never Forget Wisconsin:

We must never forget the images we saw in Wisconsin this week. Thousands of mask-wearing Americans standing in staggered lines extended over city blocks as they waited to vote amid the most dangerous pandemic this country has faced in a century. None of them could be certain they would avoid taking the deadly coronavirus home with them after they cast their ballots. And, yet, they waited for hours—keeping as much distance as reasonable from fellow voters waiting in line—to exercise the fundamental right that the Supreme Court described 134 years ago as “preservative of all rights.”

These images of determined, masked voters waiting in lengthy lines—some using canes or in wheelchairs—are a macabre snapshot of American failure. Failure of leadership, politics, and our democracy. Without question, the bulk of the blame falls on the state Legislature, which refused to postpone the election even after Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers issued a stay-at-home order. The governor’s subsequent effort to unilaterally postpone the election by executive order was rejected in a 4–2 vote by the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Monday. That left it to the U.S. Supreme Court to determine whether to leave in place the order of a federal district court judge extending deadlines to allow tens of thousands of voters who requested absentee ballots as a result of the pandemic—but hadn’t received them due to a crush of such requests—additional time to mail in their ballots.

 Adam Rawnsley reports Russian Trolls Hype Coronavirus and Giuliani Conspiracies:

Suspected Russian government trolls are trying to pin the COVID-19 pandemic on the Pentagon; hyping Rudy Giuliani’s conspiracy theories about collusion between Democrats and Ukraine; and trying to meddle in European elections, an investigation by The Daily Beast reveals.

Working with researchers from the disinformation-tracking firm Graphika, The Daily Beast found at least 20 fake news articles pushed by over 40 suspected Kremlin-backed personas across dozens of social media networks like Facebook, Reddit, Medium, and smaller web forums.

“This looks like a Russian disinformation operation we call ‘Secondary Infektion’ that’s been running for years,” said Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika, who has been investigating the operation since Facebook exposed a first set of accounts in May 2019. “It uses blogging platforms as the soft underbelly of the internet, planting false stories based on forged documents or leaks that never happened. The fakes mostly appear designed to trigger tensions between European countries, or between Europe and the United States, but they were generally too clumsy to be believed.”

 Camp Randall honors dispatchers and healthcare workers:

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