Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 87. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:28 PM, for 15h 11m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 38% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 3:30 PM.
On this day in 1965, Gemini 4, the first multi-day space mission by a NASA crew, launches. Ed White, a crew member, performs the first American spacewalk.
Recommended for reading in full —
Maria Perez reports More than 25% of workers at a Seneca Foods plant got COVID, documents show. But the company blamed community spread:
More than a quarter of the workers at a Seneca Foods plant in Gillett tested positive for COVID-19 in a single month last year, yet a company representative told a federal inspector they believed all cases were due to community spread, according to newly released federal records.
Those records show the company refused to provide information about the workers until it faced a subpoena from the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.
Eleven migrant workers at the green bean canning plant northwest of Green Bay died of COVID last fall, making the outbreak one of the deadliest in the U.S. food processing industry, a recent Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation found. Company and health officials failed to take critical measures to protect the plant’s migrant workers, most of whom lived in company-owned barracks that could house up to 30 people each.
The information provided by company representatives to an OSHA inspector also appears to contradict the accounts provided by migrant workers interviewed by the Journal Sentinel about some aspects of the company’s response to COVID-19.
Company officials also told the OSHA inspector they closed the Gillett plant for the season a few days early “out of abundance of caution,” records show. But by the time the plant closed, numerous workers had tested positive, at least seven had been hospitalized and one had died of the disease.
Silvia Foster-Frau reports Latinos are disproportionately killed by police but often left out of the debate about brutality, some advocates say:
A review of databases that track police killings shows that while their cases have largely gone untold in the national discussion of police violence, Latinos are killed by police at nearly double the rate of White Americans. And while the national debate on police killings has focused on Black Americans, whose deaths at the hands of law enforcement have been high-profile and outnumber those of other people of color, some activists say the situation for the Latino community has become critical.
Experts cite several reasons the Latino community has often been left out of the debate about policing and reform. The historical legacy of police brutality against Black people is well-known and documented, dating back to the slave patrols. Many Americans view immigration as the primary concern of Latinos. The lack of a standardized system for reporting police killings means that Latino victims are often categorized as Black or White. In addition, Latinos as a group include a variety of cultures with different lived experiences.
“I think society has this notion that [police violence] is a Black and White issue, and not for Latinos. It’s kind of like, ‘That’s not your issue. Your issue is immigration,’ ” Rodriguez said. But the number of Latinos killed by police is “off the charts,” he said.
