Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon thundershowers with a high of 90. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:32 PM, for 15h 16m 35s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 0.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Park and Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1973, Secretariat wins the Triple Crown.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Patrick Marley reports Wisconsin to receive an unprecedented $4.4 billion in additional tax collections over three years, new report shows:

Wisconsin officials learned Tuesday they would take in a game-changing sum over three years — $4.4 billion more than previously projected — but they may not be able to agree on what to do with it.

The windfall would allow Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and Republican lawmakers to cut taxes, slash borrowing, greatly increase funding for schools, boost spending on other programs or enact a combination of all those ideas.

To do that, they would need to cut a deal — something that has often eluded them. The governor and legislative leaders have rarely talked during the two years that they have shared power.

“The increase in general fund tax collections in 2021, particularly in the months of April and May, is unprecedented,” Bob Lang, the director of the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau, wrote in a memo published Tuesday.

 Rob Mentzer reports Assembly Representative Attacks Nonprofit Children’s Museum With Nazi Analogy:

On Friday, Rep. Shae Sortwell, of Two Rivers, shared a Facebook post by Stevens Point’s Central Wisconsin Children’s Museum about the museum’s mask policy. Like many national retail chains, the museum is asking people older than age 5 who are not vaccinated against COVID-19 to continue to wear masks during their visits to the indoor space. The museum said masks would be optional for those with vaccination cards.

Museum director Cory Rusch said the policy was an attempt to protect the health and safety of the many vulnerable grandparents who visit the museum with their grandkids, and he stressed no one will be turned away from the museum based on their vaccination status. But Sortwell’s Facebook post, made Friday morning on his verified Assembly social media account, shared the museum’s post with his own words added: “The Gestapo wants to see your papers, please.”

The Gestapo were a Nazi police force, directly responsible for torturing and killing political opponents of the regime and coordinating the deportation of Jews to death camps.

Sortwell did not respond to a request for comment from WPR on whether his use of the analogy trivializes the systematic murder of 6 million Jews and millions of others in the Holocaust.

Sortwell’s post was shared hundreds of times on Facebook, and as of Monday afternoon, the original post had more than 500 comments, many of which include misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine or the false claim that a business requesting to see proof of vaccination is violating a health information privacy law.

 Reid J. Epstein and Lisa Lerer report Rejecting Biden’s Win, Rising Republicans Attack Legitimacy of Elections:

Across the country, a rising class of Republican challengers has embraced the fiction that the 2020 election was illegitimate, marred by fraud and inconsistencies. Aggressively pushing Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that he was robbed of re-election, these candidates represent the next generation of aspiring G.O.P. leaders, who would bring to Congress the real possibility that the party’s assault on the legitimacy of elections, a bedrock principle of American democracy, could continue through the 2024 contests.

Drone refuels U.S. Navy fighter jet in midair for first time:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon thundershowers with a high of 88. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:32 PM, for 15h 15m 51s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 3.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 1 PM and the Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM.

On this day in 1949, George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four is published.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Annie Mattea reports Marquette University joins Beloit College, Lawrence University in requiring students to vaccinated for COVID-19:

Marquette University has joined the growing list of universities requiring a COVID-19 vaccination for the fall semester, according to a message sent Monday by university president Michael Lovell. 

The requirement is that all students (professional, graduate and undergraduate) who will be attending classes are fully vaccinated by August 1.

In Wisconsin, only two other colleges have announced a similar requirement so far: Beloit College and Lawrence University. 

Beloit College’s decision allows those vaccinated to not wear masks. Lawrence University expects those vaccinated to continue to wear a mask and social distance when in public space.

Both universities plan to have in-person instruction in the fall, similar to Marquette’s plans.

  Elizabeth Beyer reports Madison School District to offer online option in fall after some students thrived virtually:

The Madison School District will offer online learning for up to 250 students in grades 6-12 at the start of the 2021-22 school year through a new online academy.

If successful, the Madison Promise Academy could be expanded beyond that. School Board member Ananda Mirilli said during a board meeting Monday that the academy stems from a desire to do things differently after the COVID-19 pandemic upended traditional models of public education.

“We learned that some students were very successful with virtual,” Superintendent Carlton Jenkins said.

….

“It would be a tremendous loss for us to abandon virtual learning when we have the opportunity now to strengthen virtual learning and to create a program with integrity,” Madison School Board president Ali Muldrow said.

Liz Essley Whyte reports Spreading Vaccine Fears. And Cashing In (“Meet the influencers making millions by dealing doubt about the coronavirus vaccines):

Scientists widely agree vaccines prevent dangerous diseases and do not cause autism or allergies. But in a few years [Heather] Simpson had gone from accepting that consensus to preaching against it. And it all started with the documentary series made by Tennessee couple Ty and Charlene Bollinger, who got their start by questioning mainstream cancer treatments such as chemotherapy.

More than 450,000 people signed up to view the series the year it debuted, according to figures the Bollingers posted online, and 25,000 bought copies. At the price Simpson paid, the couple would have grossed $5 million in sales.

For the Bollingers and a network of similar influencers, speaking out against vaccines, including the coronavirus shots, is not just a personal crusade. It’s also a profitable business.

The Bollingers, for example, sell documentaries and books; other influencers hawk dietary supplements, essential oils or online “bootcamps” designed to train followers in anti-vaccine talking points. They frequently share links to each other’s content and products. Although the total value of anti-vaccine businesses is unknown, records indicate that the top influencers alone make up a multimillion-dollar industry. In 2020, the Bollingers told a court their cancer business had raked in $25 million in transactions since 2014.

In their videos, the Bollingers speak in earnest, unscripted, Southern-accented tones, as if they were friendly neighbors sharing lawn-care tips. Evangelicals with four children, they pepper their messages with Bible verses. They are among the most influential conduits for anti-vaccine messages online, with more than 1.6 million followers on various social media platforms and 2 million they say subscribe to their emails.

British Guiana One-Cent Magenta stamp goes at auction:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will see afternoon thundershowers with a high of 88. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:31 PM, for 15h 15m 02s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 7.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Equal Opportunities Commission meets at 5 PM.

On this day in 1899, Temperance crusader Carrie Nation begins her campaign of vandalizing alcohol-serving establishments by destroying the inventory in a saloon in Kiowa, Kansas.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Jessie Opoien reports Wisconsin Democrats line up to challenge Sen. Ron Johnson:

Six Democrats vying for the chance to unseat Republican Sen. Ron Johnson in 2022 made their cases to the party base on Sunday, each lobbing more barbs at the incumbent than at their primary opponents.

But it’s still not clear whether Johnson will seek reelection. He hasn’t ruled it out, despite having vowed while running in 2016 that he would not run for a third term. Former President Donald Trump endorsed Johnson in April, urging him to run again. Johnson told reporters during a recent virtual Milwaukee Press Club event that he doesn’t feel pressure to decide anytime soon.

The candidates seeking the Democratic nomination are Outagamie County executive Tom Nelson, Milwaukee Bucks executive Alex Lasry, state treasurer Sarah Godlewski, state Sen. Chris Larson and physician Gillian Battino. Millennial Action Project founder Steven Olikara also spoke during the virtual Democratic Party of Wisconsin convention, although his campaign is still in an “exploratory” phase.

Still unknown is whether Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes will remain on the ticket with Gov. Tony Evers as the governor seeks reelection, or if he will launch his own Senate bid.

  Wang Feng and Yong Cai write The Real Reason Behind China’s Three-Child Policy:

The Chinese public’s reaction to the new policy — judging by the dismay, jokes and ridicule expressed in popular posts on social media — suggests deep skepticism at the least.

Yet the Chinese Communist Party is aware of all this, of course. So why is it pursuing a policy that it can only know is bound to fail and already seems unpopular?

Even when the government eases rules about procreation, it is only confirming that such rules exist — and that they are the party’s to dictate. This, too, is population control, and population control is a foundation of any surveillance state. The Chinese Communist Party simply cannot give that up.

Family planning has been an essential state policy for decades, a pillar of the Chinese Communist Party’s monumental social engineering project. By loosening caps on births today, the party may be acknowledging that China is facing a demographic crisis. But it still can’t allow the very notion of population control to be called into question — no more than it can tolerate, say, any admission or any open discussion about the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 or the atrocities committed during the Cultural Revolution.

And so the Chinese government isn’t just encouraging women to have more children — and hoping to coax them with maternity leave and other benefits, as well as promises to mobilize resources at all levels of the state. It has vowed to “guide young people to have the correct perspectives on dating, marriage and family.”

Lifting controls over births would be, for the Chinese Communist Party, a tacit admission that its past policies have failed. And yet anything short of removing all such regulations will only ensure more failure.

NASA to return to Venus with DAVINCI+ and VERITAS missions:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will see sunny skies with a high of 91. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:30 PM, for 15h 14m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 13.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1944, the Allied invasion of Normandy begins: “A 1,200-plane airborne assault preceded an amphibious assault involving more than 5,000 vessels. Nearly 160,000 troops crossed the English Channel on 6 June, and more than two million Allied troops were in France by the end of August.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Laurel White reports Gov. Tony Evers Announces 2022 Re-Election Bid At State Democratic Convention:

“Wisconsin, I’m in. I’m running for re-election. We’ve accomplished a lot in the last few years, but we’re just getting started. We have more work to do, together,” he said. “This is the moment where we can choose to fix the big problems in Wisconsin and bounce back stronger than ever before.”

Evers won the 2018 election by just 29,227 votes.

“We know Republicans aren’t going to make this easy,” he said. “The one predictable thing about this pandemic —and heck, ever since November of 2018 — is that Republicans will do everything in their power to stop our success, to keep us from getting things done, to keep Wisconsin headed in the right direction.”

In late 2018, GOP leaders in the state Legislature used a lame duck session to pass new limits on the governor’s power, just weeks before Evers’ inauguration.

Since then, Republicans have passed bills that would take away Evers’ authority to oversee federal funds, challenged his administration’s authority to issue public health orders in court and bypassed several of his special session calls on things like policing, gun laws, and Medicaid.

  Amy B. Wang reports Trump called Arizona Senate president to thank her ‘for pushing to prove any fraud’ in election, emails show:

Newly released emails sent to and from Arizona state senators reveal that President Donald Trump and his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani reached out personally to urge GOP officials there to move forward with a partisan recount of the 2020 election, despite a lack of evidence of widespread fraud or other issues.

Hundreds of pages of emails related to the GOP-ordered audit underway in Maricopa County were obtained by the nonprofit legal watchdog group American Oversight through a records request under the Freedom of Information Act. The group published them Friday, along with a scathing statement that decried the audit as a “sham partisan crusade.”

In one email dated Dec. 2, Arizona state Senate President Karen Fann (R) told two constituents that she had spoken with Giuliani “at least 6 times over the past two weeks.”

In another exchange dated Dec. 28, a constituent threatened that Fann would be recalled by “the new patriot movement of the United States” for not standing up for Trump.

Fann assured him that the state Senate was “doing everything legally possible to get the forensic audit done” and that they planned to sue the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. (The Republican-led board in November had voted unanimously to certify the county’s election results, with the board chairman declaring there was no evidence of fraud or misconduct “and that is with a big zero.”)

“I have been in numerous conversations with Rudy Guiliani [sic] over the past weeks trying to get this done,” Fann wrote in the Dec. 28 message. “I have the full support of him and a personal call from President Trump thanking us for pushing to prove any fraud.”

 Footage of the London forest that appeared overnight:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will see sunny skies with a high of 94. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:30 PM, for 15h 13m 14s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 20.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1883, William Horlick patents the first powdered milk in the world: “He named his new product, intended to be used as a health food for infants, “Malted Milk.” Horlick’s product went on to be used as a staple in fountain drinks as well as survival provisions. Malted milk was even included in explorations undertaken by Robert Peary, Roald Amundsen, and Richard Byrd.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Kelly Meyerhofer reports UW Board of Regents elects Gov. Tony Evers-appointee in rare contested president election:

In just the sixth contested election in University of Wisconsin System history, the UW Board of Regents elected an appointee of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers as board president for the next year.

Ed Manydeeds, an Eau Claire attorney, defeated Michael M. Grebe, an appointee of former Republican Gov. Scott Walker, in a 10-8 vote. His election signals a shift to a more Democratic agenda for the state’s public universities after six years of Republican control of the board. Manydeeds was appointed to the board by former Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and was re-appointed by Evers in 2019.

The Regent president has significant say in setting the board’s agenda and selects who serves on search committees for chancellors and presidents.

A previous search for System president abruptly ended a year ago this month when the sole finalist withdrew amid backlash from faculty and staff who weren’t represented on the search committee.

  Nicole Perlroth, Noam Scheiber, and Julie Creswell report Russian Cybercriminal Group Was Behind Meat Plant Attack, F.B.I. Says:

The perpetrators of a ransomware attack that shut down some operations at the world’s largest meat processor this week was a Russian-based cybercriminal group known for its attacks on prominent American companies, the F.B.I. said Wednesday.

The group, known as REvil, is one of the most prolific of the roughly 40 ransomware organizations that cybersecurity experts track and has been identified as responsible for a coordinated strike against operations in almost two dozen Texas cities in 2019.

The group is among dozens of ransomware groups that enjoy safe harbor in Russia, where they are rarely arrested or extradited for their crimes. REvil, which stands for Ransomware Evil, is known as a “ransomware as a service” organization, meaning it leases its ransomware to other criminals, even the technically inept. One of its previous affiliates was a group called DarkSide, which was responsible for the ransomware attack last month on Colonial Pipeline, a conduit for nearly half the gas and jet fuel to the East Coast. DarkSide is believed to have split off from REvil last year.

REvil is considered one of the most sophisticated ransomware groups and has demanded as much as $50 million to recover data belonging to companies as prominent as Apple. Its attack on JBS, a Brazilian company that accounts for roughly a fifth of cattle and hog slaughter in the United States, temporarily shut down some operations at a time when prices were already surging for beef, poultry and pork.

 David Attenborough Netflix film looks at Australia’s bushfires and the climate crisis:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will see morning showers, then partly sunny skies with a high of 91. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:29 PM, for 15h 12m 15s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 28.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1989, the Tiananmen Square protests are suppressed in Beijing by the People’s Liberation Army, with between 241 and 10,000 dead.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Catherine Rampell writes One of Trump’s dumbest economic policies remains in place. Time for Biden to scrap it:

Trump began waging a series of trade wars three years ago — not primarily with U.S. adversaries, mind you, but with friends. Among the dumbest and most self-sabotaging measures were global tariffs levied on nearly $50 billion of imported steel and aluminum.

These tariffs were ostensibly intended to punish China for flooding the market with state-subsidized metals. But the United States had already imposed trade restrictions covering more than 90 percent of U.S. imports of steel and aluminum from China, so the countries most affected by Trump’s move were our close economic and military allies, including the European Union, Canada and Japan.

Adding insult to injury, Trump claimed that such tariffs were necessary to safeguard “national security.” Our allies were, understandably, infuriated by the suggestion that trade with them somehow threatened U.S. national security, particularly given a long-established understanding that maintaining close industrial relationships with many of these trading partners enhances the United States’ ability to defend itself.

….

Downstream firms that use steel or inputs made of steel, which employ about 80 times more workers than the steel industry does, faced higher costs. One estimate found that Trump’s steel tariffs alone cost U.S. consumers and businesses about $900,000 for every job created or saved.

 Charles C.W. Cooke, of National Review, writes Maggie Haberman Is Right:

Two days ago, the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman reported that Donald Trump “has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August.” In response, many figures on the right inserted their fingers into their ears and started screaming about fake news.

Instead, they should have listened — because Haberman’s reporting was correct. I can attest, from speaking to an array of different sources, that Donald Trump does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former senators David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be “reinstated” to office this summer after “audits” of the 2020 elections in Arizona, Georgia, and a handful of other states have been completed. I can attest, too, that Trump is trying hard to recruit journalists, politicians, and other influential figures to promulgate this belief — not as a fundraising tool or an infantile bit of trolling or a trial balloon, but as a fact.

….

The scale of Trump’s delusion is quite startling. This is not merely an eccentric interpretation of the facts or an interesting foible, nor is it an irrelevant example of anguished post-presidency chatter. It is a rejection of reality, a rejection of law, and, ultimately, a rejection of the entire system of American government.

 Julian E. Barnes and Helene Cooper report U.S. Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Can’t Rule It Out, Either:

American intelligence officials have found no evidence that aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots in recent years are alien spacecraft, but they still cannot explain the unusual movements that have mystified scientists and the military, according to senior administration officials briefed on the findings of a highly anticipated government report.

The report determines that a vast majority of more than 120 incidents over the past two decades did not originate from any American military or other advanced U.S. government technology, the officials said.

Teenage girl fights off bear to protect her dogs:

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.

Escaped elephants wreak havoc in south-west China:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 80. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:28 PM, for 15h 10m 05s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 48.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1997, Timothy McVeigh is convicted on 15 counts of murder and conspiracy for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, in which 168 people died. He was executed four years later.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Lauren White reports Evers Says Full Budget Veto Possible:

Over the past several weeks, Republicans have removed hundreds of the governor’s priorities from the state spending plan, including major items like an expansion of Medicaid and legalization of marijuana.

The governor has the power to partially veto the state budget, as he did in 2019 to increase school spending, or to veto the entire budget outright  — a step Evers said Tuesday he hasn’t ruled out.

“That’s too early to tell, but that is always an option that’s on the table,” he said.

If the governor were to veto the entire budget, the current 2019-2021 spending plan would be extended to fund programs while Evers and lawmakers began negotiations again from square one.

 Edgar Sandoval, David Montgomery, and Manny Fernandez report ‘Contested, Heated Culture Wars’ Mark Ultraconservative Texas Session (‘This was the session that pushed Texas further to the right, at a time when it seemed least likely to do so — as the state becomes younger, less white and less Republican’):

State Representative Jarvis D. Johnson, a Democrat from Houston, said this had been a particularly partisan session. He cited but one example: the dismissive Republican response to his efforts to abolish Confederate Heroes Day, an official state holiday in Texas.

“Last session I was able to get a committee hearing on this,” Mr. Johnson said. “That’s something I could not even get this year.”

Mr. Johnson had a heated exchange on the House floor with a Republican lawmaker over the role of slavery in the Texas Revolution, one of many confrontations and arguments between Democratic and Republican legislators.

 Kate Lyon reports US secretary of state warns Pacific leaders about ‘coercion’ in veiled swipe at China:

The US secretary of state has warned leaders of Pacific countries about “threats to the rules-based international order” and “economic coercion”, in what appears to be a veiled swipe at China’s growing influence in the region.

Antony Blinken was addressing leaders and their delegates from 11 Pacific countries and territories including Fiji, Solomon Islands, Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, French Polynesia, Palau and Marshall Islands as part of the Pacific Islands Conference of Leaders, which is held in Hawaii.

….

But the main focus of his televised address was China’s growing influence in the region.

“Economic coercion across the region is on the rise. The US is all for more development and investment in the islands, but that investment should adhere to international standards for environmentally and socially sustainable development and should be pursued transparently, with public consultation,” he said. “And every country, no matter its size, should always be able to make choices without fear of retribution.”

Rare Black-Footed Ferret Kits Born at Phoenix Zoo: