Good morning. 
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-seven. Sunrise is 6:07 AM and sunset 7:40 PM, for 13h 33m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 26.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand two hundred fifty-sixth day.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets via teleconference at 3:30 PM.
On this day in 1970, the ill-fated Apollo 13 spacecraft returns to Earth safely.
Recommended for reading in full —
Joel Rose reports , and report As U.S. discouraged mask use for public, White House team raced to secure face coverings from Taiwan for senior staff:
The urgent appeal to Taiwan on March 14 highlights a stark conflict between the Trump administration’s stance then on the use of masks and the race behind the scenes to obtain them for key White House personnel. At the time, the U.S. government was discouraging the public from wearing masks, saying that healthy people didn’t need them and that the gear should be saved for front-line medical workers most at risk of infection.
Because of that guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the White House was not issuing masks to its staff, according to two officials. But inside the NSC, a top deputy was convinced that face coverings should be used more broadly to protect both his team and the public at large.
The resulting arrangement he struck with Taipei made thousands of masks available for White House staff use two weeks before the administration reversed policy and advised that citizens should broadly begin wearing cloth face coverings in public.
The episode reveals how some top White House officials were pushing for a wider embrace of masks early on to help slow the infection’s spread.
President Trump resisted endorsing such guidance, the subject of sharp debate between his advisers and government health experts, and even after doing so, declared that he would not wear one himself.
David Shribman writes Once a great laboratory, Wisconsin is now a haven for the politics of resentment and revenge:
And so a state where sober and serious-minded voters once strolled to polling places in tidy towns with a sense of duty, a feeling of responsibility and an air of rural rectitude, instead this week found itself convulsed in tumult, conducting perhaps the most physically perilous election in American history, with voters practicing both social distancing and social protest in hopelessly lengthy lines.
The entire dark comedy may have been summarized by a woman in a homemade mask standing in her puffer vest in a line extended by social-distancing protocols. She held a handmade sign proclaiming the only thing Wisconsinites agreed upon this week: ”This is Ridiculous.”
The state’s 2011 redistricting gave the Republicans firm control over the state legislature in a period when Scott Walker, who served as governor from 2011 to last year, had introduced a muscular form of Republicanism into the state; the new GOP battled government-worker unions and liberal redoubts in the huge public university in Madison. Indeed, the University of Wisconsin once was so much a part of the state’s political culture that links between it and the state government were known nationally as the‘’Wisconsin Idea,’’ where knowledge stretched to the borders of the state.
Is it a dog, is it a plane? Dog soars over a farm gate with his tail spinning like a propeller:
Moment adorable dog makes incredible jump over steel gate https://t.co/wxj3IhmKlS via @MailOnline
— John Adams (@DailyAdams) April 17, 2020
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