Good morning. 
Tuesday in Whitewater will see clouds with a stray thunderstorm and a high of 81. Sunrise is 5:22 AM and sunset 8:21 PM, for 14h 59m 08s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 4:30 PM.
On this day in 1977, Star Wars (retroactively titled Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope) is released in theaters.
Recommended for reading in full —
Christina Larson reports Wolves scare deer and reduce auto collisions 24%, study says:
Ecologist Rolf Peterson remembers driving remote stretches of road in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and seeing areas strewn with deer carcasses. But that changed after gray wolves arrived in the region from Canada and Minnesota.
“When wolves moved in during the 1990s and 2000s, the deer-vehicle collisions went way down,” said the Michigan Tech researcher.
Recently, another team of scientists has gathered data about road collisions and wolf movements in Wisconsin to quantify how the arrival wolves there affected the frequency of deer-auto collisions. They found it created what scientists call “a landscape of fear.”
“In a pretty short period of time, once wolves colonize a county, deer vehicle collisions go down about 24%,” said Dominic Parker, a natural resources economist at UW-Madison and co-author of their new study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Both thinning of the deer population by wolves and behavior changes in fearful deer are factors in the drop-off, Parker said.
“When you have a major predator around, it impacts how the prey behave,” he said. “Wolves use linear features of a landscape as travel corridors, like roads, pipelines and stream beds. Deer learn this and can adapt by staying away.”
Gray wolves, among the first species protected under the Endangered Species Act in 1973, were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995. But in other regions of the U.S., gray wolves have dispersed naturally; the population in the lower 48 states now totals about 5,500.
Shawn Boburg reports Commerce Department security unit evolved into counterintelligence-like operation, Washington Post examination found:
An obscure security unit tasked with protecting the Commerce Department’s officials and facilities has evolved into something more akin to a counterintelligence operation that collected information on hundreds of people inside and outside the department, a Washington Post examination found.
The Investigations and Threat Management Service (ITMS) covertly searched employees’ offices at night, ran broad keyword searches of their emails trying to surface signs of foreign influence and scoured Americans’ social media for critical comments about the census, according to documents and interviews with five former investigators.
In one instance, the unit opened a case on a 68-year-old retiree in Florida who tweeted that the census, which is run by the Commerce Department, would be manipulated “to benefit the Trump Party!” records show.
In another example, the unit searched Commerce servers for particular Chinese words, documents show. The search resulted in the monitoring of many Asian American employees over benign correspondence, according to two former investigators.
The office “has been allowed to operate far outside the bounds of federal law enforcement norms and has created an environment of paranoia and retaliation at the Department,” John Costello, a former deputy assistant secretary of intelligence and security at Commerce in the Trump administration, said in a statement for this story.
ITMS “rests on questionable legal authority and has suffered from poor management and lack of sufficient legal and managerial oversight for much of its existence,” Costello said.
Hawaii’s surprise volcanic eruption: Lessons from Kilauea 2018: