Good morning. 
Monday in Whitewater will see scattered showers and a thunderstorm with a high of 71. Sunrise is 5:44 AM and sunset 7:58 PM, for 14h 14m 03s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 53.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1952, Lieutenant Colonels Joseph O. Fletcher and William P. Benedict of the United States land a plane at the North Pole.
Recommended for reading in full —
Hope Kirwan reports Wisconsin County Fairs Gearing Up To Return This Summer:
With the Wisconsin State Fair returning this summer, county fairs around the state are also gearing up to return to in-person events this year.
Tom Barnett is coordinator of the Oneida County Fair. His county was one of many that decided to cancel its fair last year due to concerns about COVID-19. But Barnett said they decided at the start of this year that they would be bringing back the fair no matter what in 2021.
“We were counting on the vaccine to come out and people feeling more comfortable,” Barnett said. “So we decided way back then that one way or another … that we were going to have a fair.”
Ashley Parker and Marianna Sotomayor report For Republicans, fealty to Trump’s election falsehood becomes defining loyalty test:
Debra Ell, a Republican organizer in Michigan and fervent supporter of former president Donald Trump, said she has good reason to believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
“I think I speak for many people in that Trump has never actually been wrong, and so we’ve learned to trust when he says something, that he’s not just going to spew something out there that’s wrong and not verified,” she said, referring to Trump’s baseless claims that widespread electoral fraud caused his loss to President Biden in November.
In fact, there is no evidence to support Trump’s false assertions, which culminated in a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. But Ell, a Republican precinct delegate in her state, said the 2020 election is one of the reasons she’s working to censure and remove Jason Cabel Roe from his role as the Michigan Republican Party’s executive director — specifically that Roe accepted the 2020 results, telling Politico that “the election wasn’t stolen” and that “there is no one to blame but Trump.”
Michael Levenson reports Newsmax Apologizes for False Claims of Vote-Rigging by a Dominion Employee:
The conservative news outlet Newsmax formally apologized on Friday for spreading baseless allegations that an employee of Dominion Voting Systems had rigged voting machines in an effort to sink President Donald J. Trump’s bid for re-election last year.
In a statement posted on its website, Newsmax acknowledged that it had found “no evidence” for the conspiracy theories advanced by Mr. Trump’s lawyers, supporters and others that the employee, Eric Coomer, had manipulated Dominion voting machines, voting software and the final vote counts in the election.
“On behalf of Newsmax, we would like to apologize for any harm that our reporting of the allegations against Dr. Coomer may have caused to Dr. Coomer and his family,” the statement said.