Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 78. Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:27 PM, for 15h 08m 55s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 59% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1918, Allied forces under John J. Pershing and James Harbord are victorious at the Battle of Belleau Wood over Imperial German Forces under Wilhelm, German Crown Prince.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Bridgit Bowden reports District Attorney Races In Wisconsin Are Often Uncontested:

In 2020, only seven of the state’s 71 district attorney seats were contested — four in the November general election, and three in the partisan primary. (Menominee and Shawano counties share a district attorney).

In Price County, there wasn’t even anyone officially on the ballot, leaving the race to be decided by write-in votes.

The lack of competition is not a new phenomenon, and not surprising to most people who work in the legal field. However, criminal justice experts from both prosecution and defense backgrounds, as well as reform advocates told WPR that the justice system as a whole would benefit from more competition because district attorney is such an important office.

Their decisions can directly affect incarceration rates and can make or break criminal justice reform efforts in areas like low-level drug offenses, treatment court programs and parole and probation violations, according to reform advocates.

 Michael D. Shear and Zolan Kanno-Youngs report Biden Aims to Rebuild and Expand Legal Immigration:

A 46-page draft blueprint obtained by The New York Times maps out the Biden administration’s plans to significantly expand the legal immigration system, including methodically reversing the efforts to dismantle it by former President Donald J. Trump, who reduced the flow of foreign workers, families and refugees, erecting procedural barriers tougher to cross than his “big, beautiful wall.”

Because of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, the average time it takes to approve employer-sponsored green cards has doubled. The backlog for citizenship applications is up 80 percent since 2014, to more than 900,000 cases. Approval for the U-visa program, which grants legal status for immigrants willing to help the police, has gone from five months to roughly five years.

In almost every case over the last four years, immigrating to the United States has become harder, more expensive and takes longer.

 Mike Allen writes QAnon infects churches:

QAnon conspiracy theories have burrowed so deeply into American churches that pastors are expressing alarm — and a new poll shows the bogus teachings have become as widespread as some denominations.

Why it matters: The problem with misinformation and disinformation is that people — lots of people — believe it. And they don’t believe reality coming from the media and even their ministers.

Russell Moore, one of America’s most respected evangelical Christian thinkers, told me he’s “talking literally every day to pastors, of virtually every denomination, who are exhausted by these theories blowing through their churches or communities.”

….

The poll found that Hispanic Protestants (26%) and white evangelical Protestants (25%) were more likely to agree with the QAnon philosophies than other groups. (Black Protestants were 15%, white Catholics were 11% and white mainline Protestants were 10%.)

(Not all denominations are affected equally; some are more susceptible than others.)

Tonight’s Sky for June:

Good morning.

Memorial Day in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 73. Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:26 PM, for 15h 07m 40s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 68.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1859, the clock tower at the Houses of Parliament, which houses Big Ben, starts keeping time.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Sui-Lui Wee reports China Says It Will Allow Couples to Have 3 Children, Up From 2 (‘The move is the Communist Party’s latest attempt to reverse declining birthrates and avert a population crisis, but experts say it is woefully inadequate’):

“Opening it up to three children is far from enough,” said Huang Wenzheng, a demography expert with the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing-based research center. “It should be fully liberalized, and giving birth should be strongly encouraged.”

“This should be regarded as a crisis for the survival of the Chinese nation, even beyond the pandemic and other environmental issues,” Mr. Huang added. “There should never have been a birth restriction policy in the first place. So it’s not a question of whether this is too late.”

….

“The decision makers have probably realized that the population situation is relatively severe,” said He Yafu, an independent demographer based in the southern Chinese city of Zhanjiang. “But merely opening up the policy to three children and not encouraging births as a whole, I don’t think there will be a significant increase in the fertility rate. Many people don’t want to have a second child, let alone a third child.”

 Steven Zeitchik reports Leading scientist says that without a full investigation of lab leak theory, the world will face ‘covid-26 and covid-32’:

“There’s going to be covid-26 and covid-32 unless we fully understand the origins of covid-19,” Peter Hotez, a professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine and a leading expert on the virus, said Sunday on NBC News’s “Meet The Press.” He said coming to firm conclusions about how the virus emerged was “absolutely essential” in preventing future pandemics.

New reports suggest that China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology was at the center of the outbreak, not animal-to-human transmission elsewhere in Wuhan, which was the long-prevalent opinion. President Biden last week ordered a fresh 90-day intelligence review of the virus’s origins with the goal of examining the possibility that it accidentally leaked from the Wuhan lab instead of being spread by bats or other animals to humans in a zoonotic transmission.

 Sicily’s Mount Etna erupted again on Sunday:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 71. Sunrise is 5:19 AM and sunset 8:25 PM, for 15h 06m 24s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 78.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1899, Pearl Hart, a female outlaw of the Old West, robs a stagecoach 30 miles southeast of Globe, Arizona.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Corri Hess reports Village Paid Foxconn Project Manager Nearly $1 Million (‘Private contractor billed Mount Pleasant for $973,750 and has just gotten a raise’):

The project director hired to oversee the failed Foxconn development in Racine County has been paid nearly $1 million in taxpayer money since he was hired in 2017 — and he was recently given a raise, according to documents obtained by WPR.

Claude Lois is a contracted consultant with Kapur and Associates, who works in Mount Pleasant’s Village Hall. Through April, Kapur and Associates billed Mount Pleasant $973,750, according to records provided to WPR. Of that, $1,681 was for labor and overhead for employees other than Lois.

Since it was announced with much fanfare, Foxconn has repeatedly fallen short on job and building promises. One of the complaints that Racine County residents and some politicians have had with the company is they are unclear what type of work is being done in Mount Pleasant. Still, Village officials praise the work Lois has done in his role as project consultant.

In a written statement, Mount Pleasant Village Administrator Maureen Murphy said Lois “continues to provide exceptional service to the Village as Project Director.”

“Through his work, the Village has acquired and developed thousands of acres, overseen hundreds of millions of dollars in private investment in TID#5 (tax increment district) and continues to help secure and attract new business to the TID, including a $48 million investment in the North Area announced last week,” the statement said.

Lois did not respond to requests for comment from WPR.

Last month, the Mount Pleasant Village Board extended Lois’ contract by two years. He’ll be paid $175 per hour beginning Aug. 31. His salary will increase to $200 per hour on Aug. 21, 2022, according to the contract.

Lois was also hired as the Village of Saukville’s economic development consultant in January 2020.

Lois’s salary is paid using money from the special taxing district created to pay for the local portion of the Foxconn project.

When the Village of Mount Pleasant and Racine County created the $911 million tax-increment finance district, officials said the money would pay for land acquisition, infrastructure upgrades and other expenses. Local governments expect money generated by Foxconn’s projects will cover the costs. But right now, local taxpayers have already spent over $1 billion for the project.

 Sam Levine reports Republicans who embraced Trump’s big lie run to become election officials:

Republicans who have embraced baseless claims about the 2020 election being stolen are now running to serve as the chief elections officials in several states, a move that could give them significant power over election processes.

The campaigns, first detailed by Politico last week, underscore a new focus to take control of election administration. Secretaries of state, who are elected to office in partisan contests that have long been overlooked, wield enormous power over election rules in their state, are responsible for overseeing election equipment, and are a key player in certifying – making official – election results.

Winning secretary of state offices across the country would give conspiracy theorists enormous power to wreak havoc in the 2024 presidential election, including potentially blocking candidates who win the most votes from taking office.

‘Strangely lopsided’ spiral galaxy captured by Hubble:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 65. Sunrise is 5:19 AM and sunset 8:24 PM, for 15h 05m 03s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 87.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1848, Wisconsin enters the Union: “the 30th state to enter the Union with an area of 56,154 square miles, comprising 1/56 of the United States at the time.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Molly Beck reports US warns Wisconsin may lose $1.5 billion in pandemic aid under budget action:

In a letter Friday, a U.S. Department of Education official told State Superintendent Carolyn Stanford Taylor that action taken Thursday by the Legislature’s budget-writing committee puts at risk $1.5 billion in federal pandemic aid for schools.

The Republican-controlled Joint Finance Committee dedicated $128 million in new funding for K-12 schools and set aside $350 million in a separate fund that GOP lawmakers said would be used for schools but was not yet appropriated as such.

That means Wisconsin has fallen short in meeting a $387 million K-12 spending threshold in order to receive the pandemic aid under federal rules that require state officials to spend about 35% of state funds on schools.

“… The $350 million that the State might transfer to the budget stabilization fund may not be considered State support for education at the time of the transfer unless it is actually appropriated for K-12 education for the applicable fiscal year and not ‘for any other purpose,'” said the letter from Ian Rosenblum, a top official at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education.

 Scott Bauer reports Ex-cop hired to probe Wisconsin election has partisan ties:

One of the retired police officers hired by a top Wisconsin Republican to investigate the presidential election in the battleground state has ties to the GOP and previously led a probe into voter fraud in Milwaukee, work that prosecutors disavowed and that a federal judge said was not trustworthy.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos this week said he was hiring three retired police investigators to look into the election results. On Thursday, during an interview with conservative talk radio host Dan O’Donnell, Vos confirmed that one of those he hired is Mike Sandvick, a retired Milwaukee police detective.

“In all honesty, he has Republican leanings,” Vos told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday, without naming Sandvick. “He’s been active in the Republican Party.”

A 2008 report Sandvick wrote about the 2004 presidential election recommended that Wisconsin election laws be changed in light of what he said was voter fraud. That report has been referenced by conservatives since then as evidence there is unchecked fraud in the state. However, the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI all disavowed the report.

In 2013, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman did not allow the report to be admitted as evidence in a lawsuit over Wisconsin’s voter ID law, saying it was not trustworthy.

 Gabriela Miranda reports Farmers and business owners struggle under Australia mouse plague:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 49. Sunrise is 5:20 AM and sunset 8:24 PM, for 15h 03m 38s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 94% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1987, an 18-year-old West German pilot, Mathias Rust, evades Soviet Union air defenses and lands a private plane in Red Square.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth report Russia Appears to Carry Out Hack Through System Used by U.S. Aid Agency:

Hackers linked to Russia’s main intelligence agency surreptitiously seized an email system used by the State Department’s international aid agency to burrow into the computer networks of human rights groups and other organizations of the sort that have been critical of President Vladimir V. Putin, Microsoft Corporation disclosed on Thursday.

Discovery of the breach comes only three weeks before President Biden is scheduled to meet Mr. Putin in Geneva, and at a moment of increased tension between the two nations — in part because of a series of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks emanating from Russia.

The newly disclosed attack was also particularly bold: By breaching the systems of a supplier used by the federal government, the hackers sent out genuine-looking emails to more than 3,000 accounts across more than 150 organizations that regularly receive communications from the United States Agency for International Development. Those emails went out as recently as this week, and Microsoft said it believes the attacks are ongoing.

Nate Schenkkan writes of The Authoritarian Assault on Exiles:

The main factor driving such transgressions is simple: a sense of impunity among authoritarians. Despite his clear complicity in Khashoggi’s killing, Mohammed bin Salman remains the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia. Rwandan President Paul Kagame has given interviews to international media in which he has bragged about the operation his government carried out in August 2020 to abduct the exiled dissident Paul Rusesabagina. Lukashenko and others have clearly taken note. In hijacking the Ryanair flight and seizing Pratasevich, Belarus was not setting a new precedent but merely following an existing one.

Behind all acts of transnational repression is a presumption that the targets “belong” to the state from which they hail and a bet that their host countries—the places where they live, work, raise their families, and maybe even enjoy citizenship—will not risk a fight over someone who is not “native.” The only way to put a stop to this ugly trend is to make that gamble far riskier by hitting back hard against perpetrators—including Lukashenko—and demonstrating to autocrats that they will pay a steep price for carrying out such crimes.

 David Corn writes Emails Tie Top Trump Exec Allen Weisselberg to Yet Another Trump Financial Scandal:

Assorted news reports have identified Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, as a key figure in the criminal and civil investigations of the Trump business being conducted by the New York attorney general and the Manhattan district attorney, who recently empaneled a grand jury to review evidence against the Trump company, its executives, and possibly Trump. Moreover, the New York Times recently reported that Weisselberg himself is being criminally investigated for possible tax fraud, raising the prospect that investigators are looking to flip the longtime Trump executive into a cooperating witness. Now there’s more trouble for Weisselberg and Trump World. Previously unreported emails attached to a little-noticed court document filed last year show that Weisselberg is tied to another Trump financial scandal: the Trump inauguration case, which is currently being investigated by the attorney general of Washington, DC.

Curious palates dig into cicada as Brood X emerges on East Coast:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see scattered showers with a high of 54. Sunrise is 5:21 AM and sunset 8:23 PM, for 15h 02m 12s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1969, the Walt Disney Company releases the cartoon Three Little Pigs, with its hit song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Patrick Marley reports Top Wisconsin Republican Robin Vos hires former cops to investigate November election:

Vos in a Wednesday interview said he was giving the investigators a broad mandate to spend about three months reviewing all tips and following up on the most credible ones. In addition to the grant spending, he said they may look into claims of double voting and review how clerks fixed absentee ballot credentials.

“Is there a whole lot of smoke or is there actual fire? We just don’t know yet,” Vos said.

Ann Jacobs, a Democrat who leads the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said she was worried the investigation would undermine confidence in an election that was conducted properly.

 Stephanie Mencimer writes Doctor, Lawyer, Insurrectionist: The Radicalization of Simone Gold:

When rioters broke into the US Capitol on January 6, chants of “Fuck the police!” “USA!” or “Treason!” echoed in the marble halls. When Dr. Simone Gold got inside the rotunda, she stepped over a velvet rope and announced to anyone who would listen, “I am a Stanford-educated attorney!”

Thus she distinguished herself among the motley crew of Proud Boys, MAGA types, and the QAnon shaman who paraded through the Capitol to overturn the 2020 presidential election, an event that left five people dead. Not only is Gold a Stanford-educated lawyer, she’s also a board-certified emergency room physician. Neither qualification prevented the FBI from coming to her Beverly Hills house on January 18 and arresting her. Nor did it make a federal grand jury think twice in early February before indicting her on five criminal counts, including entering a restricted building and obstructing an official proceeding.

The arrest marked the end of one chapter in her Icarian trajectory into right-wing fame. Before April 2020, Gold had been just another over-achieving Beverly Hills doctor. But with the arrival of the pandemic, she donned her white lab coat to protest lockdowns and promote President Donald Trump’s favorite unproven COVID treatment, the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine. It seems that’s all it took to find an enthusiastic audience among the MAGA faithful, putting her on a glide path to a certain kind of right-wing stardom. Conservatives who love to bash educated, liberal elites as out of touch quickly embraced Gold and gleefully touted her impressive credentials to support their attacks on public health measures designed to combat the pandemic. She sailed into their well-funded ecosystem, snagging speaking gigs, appearances on cable talk shows, and robust opportunities to fundraise.

Elizabeth Dwoskin report Russia is still the biggest player in disinformation, Facebook says:

12.6 pound ice chunk crashes through Elk Mound home:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 77. Sunrise is 5:21 AM and sunset 8:22 PM, for 15h 00m 41s of daytime.  The moon is full with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Pedestrian and Bicycle Advisory Committee meets at 5 PM, and the Whitewater School Board meets in closed session at 6 PM and open session at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1969, Apollo 10 returns to Earth after a successful eight-day test of all the components needed for the forthcoming first manned moon landing.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Patrick Marley and Molly Beck report Top Republican says Wisconsin schools shouldn’t get a general funding increase for the next two years:

The president of the Wisconsin Senate doesn’t want to increase general aid for schools in the next two years because they have received billions of dollars in federal aid since 2020.

“I think we’re good for right now,” Senate President Chris Kapenga said in an interview Tuesday. “My gut is there’s not going to be a big push in the caucus to increase funding.”

The Delafield Republican made the comment as the Legislature’s budget committee prepares to meet Thursday to consider funding for schools and the University of Wisconsin System.

….

Kapenga said school and state officials should think creatively to bring down school costs, such as by reducing the number of school districts from more than 400 to 72 — one for each county.

(The merger of dozens of districts into a one-district-per-county system would plunge Wisconsin into years of political warfare among communities over influence within the consolidated districts.)

Patrick Marley and Hope Karnopp report Republicans quickly end Evers’ special session on BadgerCare Plus without action on plan to bring $1.6 billion in aid to state:

In a matter of seconds Tuesday, Republican lawmakers shut down Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ special session that sought to expand BadgerCare Plus and draw $1.6 billion in federal aid to Wisconsin.

Three Republicans — one in the Senate and two in the Assembly — initiated the special session at 1 p.m. and ended it moments later. Most lawmakers were absent, but some Democrats urged them to keep the session alive.

It’s the latest instance of Republicans declining to take up matters prioritized by Evers. In the last two years, Republicans have passed on acting on Evers’ special sessions to require universal background checks on guns; increase school funding; ban police chokeholds and no-knock warrants; and delay the April 2020 election because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Lois Henry reports The Central California Town That Keeps Sinking (‘The very ground upon which Corcoran, Calif., was built has been slowly but steadily collapsing, a situation caused primarily not by nature but agriculture’):

In California’s San Joaquin Valley, the farming town of Corcoran has a multimillion-dollar problem. It is almost impossible to see, yet so vast it takes NASA scientists using satellite technology to fully grasp.

Corcoran is sinking.

Over the past 14 years, the town has sunk as much as 11.5 feet in some places — enough to swallow the entire first floor of a two-story house and to at times make Corcoran one of the fastest-sinking areas in the country, according to experts with the United States Geological Survey.

Subsidence is the technical term for the phenomenon — the slow-motion deflation of land that occurs when large amounts of water are withdrawn from deep underground, causing underlying sediments to fall in on themselves.

Each year, Corcoran’s entire 7.47 square miles and its 21,960 residents sink just a little bit, as the soil dips anywhere from a few inches to nearly two feet.

Beekeeper rescues bees with her bare hands:

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:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will see periods of sun with a stray thunderstorm and a high of 85. Sunrise is 5:23 AM and sunset 8:20 PM, for 14h 57m 32s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 94% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater School Board meets at 6:30 PM in closed session and 7 PM in open session.

On this day in 1935, the first night game in Major League Baseball history is played in Cincinnati, Ohio, with the Cincinnati Reds beating the Philadelphia Phillies 2–1 at Crosley Field.

Recommended for reading in full — 

David Leonhardt writes The biggest vaccination gap isn’t based on race or partisanship. It’s based on class:

Many unvaccinated Republicans and minorities have something in common: They are working class. And there is a huge class gap in vaccination behavior.

Here is a look at vaccination behavior by racial groups and political identification, based on polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation:

Here are those same groups subdivided by class, using a four-year college degree as the dividing line between working class and professional:

By The New York Times | Source: Kaiser Family Foundation.

As you can see, working-class members of every group are less likely to have received a vaccine and more likely to be skeptical. “No matter which of these groups we looked at, we see an education divide,” Mollyann Brodie, who oversees the Kaiser surveys, told me. In some cases, different racial groups with the same education levels — like Black and white college graduates — look remarkably similar.

Jeanne Whalen, Craig Timberg, and Eva Dou report Chinese businessman with links to Steve Bannon is driving force for a sprawling disinformation network, researchers say:

A sprawling online network tied to Chinese businessman Guo Wengui has become a potent platform for disinformation in the United States, attacking the safety of coronavirus vaccines, promoting false election-fraud claims and spreading baseless QAnon conspiracies, according to research published Monday by the network analysis company Graphika.

The report, provided in advance to The Washington Post, details a network that Graphika says amplifies the views of Guo, a Chinese real estate developer whose association with former Trump White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon became a focus of news coverage last year after Bannon was arrested aboard Guo’s yacht on federal fraud charges.

Graphika said the network includes media websites such as GTV, for which Guo last year publicly said he was raising funds, along with thousands of social media accounts that Graphika said amplify content in a coordinated fashion. The network also includes more than a dozen local-action groups over which Guo has publicly claimed an oversight role, Graphika found.

Graphika’s research sheds more light on Guo, a onetime billionaire real estate developer who, in addition to his relationship with Bannon, has drawn attention for the confusing mix of disinformation and invective he has broadcast since moving to the United States, including contradictory attacks on both the Chinese Communist Party and anti-CCP dissidents in the West.

U.S. cicada invasion excites food enthusiasts:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will see morning showers followed by a thunderstorm this afternoon, and a high of 80. Sunrise is 5:23 AM and sunset 8:19 PM, for 14h 55m 52s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 87.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1854, the first railroad reaches Madison: “On this date the Milwaukee and Mississippi railroad reached Madison, connecting the city with Milwaukee. When the cars pulled into the depot, thousands of people gathered to witness the ceremonial arrival of the first train, and an enormous picnic was held on the Capitol grounds for all the passengers who’d made the seven-hour trip from Milwaukee to inaugurate the line.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Kelly Meyerhofer reports Former UW chancellor paid $135,000 to work on ‘community building,’ new degree program:

Bob Meyer, who retired as chancellor of UW-Stout in August 2019, worked as a System consultant from late 2019 through March 2021, according to a contract obtained under the state’s public records law. Former System president Ray Cross hired him at 40% of his chancellor pay, or about $8,445 monthly.

….

The contract’s lack of any specific assignments stuck out to Judith Wilde, a George Mason University professor who has written extensively about college leaders and the “golden parachutes” they receive after leaving the job. She reviewed Meyer’s contract at the State Journal’s request.

“There’s nothing here that indicates a deliverable,” she said. “If this were a true consultant position, as I have worked as a consultant for universities, there’s always a report or something specifically due at the end. This certainly doesn’t list anything like that.”

….

Meyer is the latest example of a UW administrator earning six figures after stepping down.

Cross was hired as a full-time consultant for three months last year. A contract required him, among other assignments, to submit a written plan on how to increase diversity of students and staff at each UW campus. Cross didn’t write the report, instead providing “verbal recommendations” and shifting his focus to COVID-19 testing. He earned about $125,000.

The System also agreed to pay former UW-Whitewater Chancellor Beverly Kopper at her chancellor’s salary over an eight-month period in 2019 — about $162,000 — while she prepared to return to a full teaching schedule in fall 2019.

Under a work plan Kopper submitted to the System, she committed to preparing syllabi, lesson plans and a report during that time. The State Journal requested those materials but a UW-Whitewater records custodian said the university had no records in its possession.

(Emphasis added.)

 Sarah Pulliam Bailey and Michelle Boorstein report Russell Moore’s departure from the Southern Baptist Convention’s leadership prompts questions over its future:

Prominent Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore, who blasted former president Donald Trump and his evangelical fans, announced Tuesday that he will be leaving the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention where he has been the president of its policy arm since 2013.

Moore’s departure from the convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) follows other high-profile exits from the denomination, including popular Bible teacher Beth Moore (no relation) and Black pastors. Some evangelicals are wondering what their departures signal about the direction of the convention, which has included louder voices on the far right in recent years.

….

Moore was an early critic of Trump and accused other evangelical leaders of “normalizing an awful candidate.” When other Southern Baptist leaders met with the then-presidential candidate at Trump Tower in 2016, Moore suggested they had “drunk the Kool-Aid.”

The first howls of a wolf pup in the Northwoods of Minnesota: