Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 76. Sunrise is 5:16 and sunset is 8:33, for 15 hours, 17 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 99.4 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Equal Opportunities Commission meets at 3 PM and the Public Works Committee meets at 5:15 PM.
On this day in 2003, the Spirit rover is launched, beginning NASA‘s Mars Exploration Rover mission.
Of all the federal budget cuts to make, cutting food aid is among the least necessary but most vindictive:
Every county in America experiences food insecurity, according to a new report from Feeding America. And recent cuts made by the Trump administration mean $1 billion will no longer fund farms, food banks and school programs.
As 600,000 people face food insecurity across Wisconsin, local food pantries now face increasing demand while having less food to distribute.
“The number of families that come through looking for support with food is staggering for the small number of people in our Waushara County,” Susan Herman, a volunteer with Waushara County Food Pantry, told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.”
The Waushara County Food Pantry in central Wisconsin supports about 1,100 people every month. Last year, the pantry distributed nearly 500,000 pounds of food to those in need, including 2,000 pounds of fresh produce donated by local gardeners and farmers.
To help meet the growing demand this year, the pantry is partnering with the Waushara Gardeners club to distribute more fruits and vegetables to those in need. It is one of many Wisconsin pantries looking to gardeners to help feed people in the community.
See Courtney Everett, Wisconsin Gardeners, Food Pantries Unite to Feed the Hungry (‘Amid federal food aid cuts, a call to ‘Plant A Row for the Hungry’), WPR, June 7, 2025.
Cutting food aid won’t make people work harder or longer; they’ll keep the less fortunate where some of the more fortunate want them to stay.
Preserving Wisconsin’s elusive prairie chicken, whose population has steeply declined:
In central Wisconsin, an elusive bird called the greater prairie chicken lives in the grasslands of Portage County.
They are generally only visible during the breeding season in spring, when people can watch the males compete over females. The birds will stomp their feet and inflate orange air sacs on the side of their neck that release a deep billowing call.
Conservationists have been trying to help the prairie chicken, going back to the 1920s. However, over the past 70 years the population has steeply declined. Today, it’s considered a threatened species, mainly due to fragmentation and loss of habitat.