Good morning. 
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 71. Sunrise is 5:28 AM and sunset 8:13 PM, for 14h 44m 57s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 27.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board’s Handbook Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 3:30 PM.
On this day in 1954, the United States Supreme Court hands down a unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, outlawing racial segregation in public schools
Recommended for reading in full —
Kelly Meyerhofer reports CDC-led study finds little evidence of UW-Madison dorm outbreaks fueling community spread:
A team of scientists answered a lingering question about the ramifications of reopening UW-Madison last fall, finding little evidence that outbreaks in two dorms fueled further spread of COVID-19 into the community.
Researchers sequenced the genetic code of more than 1,200 virus samples from students and community members to examine COVID-19 strains circulating within Dane County after an explosion of cases overwhelmed UW-Madison in early September. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention led the study, the results of which were published last week in a paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed.
UW-Madison pathology professor David O’Connor, who was among the paper’s co-authors, said a stroke of good fortune may have been the biggest factor that prevented outbreaks in the university’s two largest dorms from spreading throughout greater Madison.
“We got lucky,” he said. “I would not want to go to the bank on repeating this scenario 10 times and getting that same outcome.”
The Washington Post editorial board writes China’s repression of Uyghurs is not only cultural, but also physical, a new report shows:
AFTER THE Holocaust, the U.N. General Assembly, meeting in Paris on Dec. 9, 1948, approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It defined genocide as, among other things, “imposing measures intended to prevent births” within a population and said genocide is a crime under international law, whether in peace or war, to be prevented and punished. The promise was “never again.”
But it is happening again in China, a signatory to the treaty, as part of China’s crackdown since 2016 on ethnic minority Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in the Xinjiang region in the far northwest. At first, reports suggested that China was brainwashing the Uyghurs and others, who were forced into concentration camps and coerced to drop their language and traditions. China claimed the camps were for vocational education, but eyewitnesses described an archipelago of austere penitentiaries and brutal reeducation routines intended to wipe out the Uyghur identity and culture.
Evidence is emerging that China’s repression is not only cultural but also physical. In a report last year by researcher Adrian Zenz for the Jamestown Foundation, and in a new report this month by Nathan Ruser and James Leibold for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, both based on China’s own government data, a precipitous drop in Uyghur birthrates is evident in areas of southern Xinjiang. This appears to be the result of a drive by China at mass sterilization, coerced birth control and punitive family policies.
Meteorite that crashed into English driveway is now at London’s Natural History Museum: