Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-six. Sunrise is 6:09 AM and sunset 7:39 PM, for 13h 30m 25s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 35.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand two hundred fifty-fifth day.
On this day in 1963, Dr. King writes pens his Letter from Birmingham Jail while incarcerated in Birmingham, Alabama for protesting against segregation.
Recommended for reading in full —
Joel Rose reports A ‘War’ For Medical Supplies: States Say FEMA Wins By Poaching Orders:
State and local officials are caught up in a fierce global competition for masks, gowns, ventilators and other medical supplies. The White House has told them not to rely on the federal government because it’s just a “backup,” and to find their own gear.
At the same time, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is keeping a tight grip on critical medical supplies leaving the country – and coming in from overseas. This new system is disrupting an emergency supply chain that’s been in place for decades.
And now governors, hospitals and local officials say the federal government is big-footing them by poaching the supplies they ordered.
“We had a good lead with a manufacturer on vents, and they got swept up by FEMA, so we’re not getting them,” Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, in an interview with CNN this month.
Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, says his state placed an order for millions of N-95 respirator masks — but never got them. “We had our 3 million masks that we had ordered … confiscated in the port in New York,” Baker said at a press conference this month.
After federal officials took those masks, Baker says Massachusetts scrambled to arrange a new shipment from China. But this time, state officials used a private plane that belongs to the New England Patriots.
So where did that first order of masks end up?
“I don’t have any specific information on that,” said Captain W. Russell Webster, who is in charge of FEMA’s coronavirus response in New England, in an interview with member station WBUR.
Robert Faturechi reports Senator Richard Burr Sold D.C. Townhouse to Donor at a Rich Price:
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr, has come under fire in recent weeks for unloading stock holdings right before the market crashed on fears of coronavirus and for a timely sale of shares in an obscure Dutch fertilizer company.
Now the North Carolina Republican’s 2017 sale of his Washington, D.C., home to a group led by a donor and powerful lobbyist who had business before Burr’s committee is raising additional ethical questions.
Burr sold the small townhouse, in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, for what, by some estimates, was an above market price — $900,000 — to a team led by lobbyist John Green. That is tens of thousands of dollars above some estimates of the property’s value by tax assessors, a real estate website and a local real estate agent. The sale was done off-market, without the home being listed for sale publicly.
Green is a longtime donor to Burr’s political campaigns and has co-hosted at least one fundraiser for him. In 2017, the year of the sale, Green lobbied on behalf of a stream of clients with business before Burr’s committees.