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:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon showers and a high of 88. Sunrise is 5:24 AM and sunset 8:18 PM, for 14h 54m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 78.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1804, the Lewis and Clark Expedition officially begins as the Corps of Discovery departs from St. Charles, Missouri.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Todd Milewski reports UW says secrecy needed in AD search; open records advocate says there’s ‘no evidence’ to support that:

UW denied the Wisconsin State Journal’s public records request for minutes of the April 14, April 21 and May 4 meetings of the search committee established by Blank. The school argued there’s a greater public interest in it keeping a competitive position in job searches than in it making information public.

“Should materials regarding a search that is not completed be required to be released to the public, the foreseeable result would be an inability to attract applicants for athletic department searches specifically and university positions in general,” public records custodian Lisa Hull wrote in response to the State Journal’s request.

Open records advocates questioned UW’s reasoning, which the State Journal has appealed.

“The UW has offered exactly no evidence in support of its claim that releasing any part of records that deal with the search for an important public position would wreak havoc on its process because future applicants would refuse to apply if their names might become known,” said Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council. “That’s because it’s a bogus claim.”

Madison attorney Christa Westerberg said UW could have redacted names of candidates from the minutes. Applicants are given anonymity if they request it in writing.

“Setting aside whether that is a valid concern, there is a strong public interest in understanding the manner in which the search is conducted,” Westerberg said. “The minutes should reflect that. This, of course, is in addition to the presumption in favor of access in the text of the open records law.”

Wisconsin’s public records law says the “denial of public access generally is contrary to the public interest, and only in an exceptional case may access be denied.”

 Sophie Carson reports A Bay View resident was looking for a chess club. Now people of all ages are gathering for games in her front yard:

In one moment Sunday afternoon, empty chairs and cushions sat waiting on Olga Thomas’ front lawn in Milwaukee’s Bay View neighborhood.

In the next, chess lovers and enthusiastic beginners alike were arriving, taking their seats, setting up their boards and diving into games.

It was the second meeting of the new Bay View Knights Chess Club, started by Thomas after inquiring in a neighborhood Facebook group about chess clubs in the area for her 14-year-old son.

Or maybe, she wrote, someone would want to stop by her home on East Oklahoma Avenue for a game.

The response was “overwhelmingly positive,” Thomas said. Hundreds of people replied offering to play or saying they’d always wanted to learn.

“Looking at all these messages coming in, I realized that it should be an organized event. There was no way of keeping up with everything,” she said.

“So within a week we had a logo, a brand, a chess club, chess tables, chessboards and an event scheduled,” she said.

The first event drew about 50 people, Thomas said. She knew some of the attendees, but others were total strangers who had seen the event on Facebook and wanted to stop by.

Ukrainians keep wild beekeeping tradition alive:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 83. Sunrise is 5:25 AM and sunset 8:17 PM, for 14h 52m 24s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 67.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1856, Lawrence, Kansas is captured and burned by pro-slavery forces.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Perry Bacon Jr. writes American democracy is in even worse shape than you think:

By far the biggest problem is the Republican Party. Presented with a clear chance to move on from Trumpism after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the GOP has instead continued its drift toward anti-democratic action and white grievance. The future looks scary. A Republican-controlled House could attempt to impeach Biden in 2023 and 2024 on basically any pretext, as payback for Trump’s two impeachments. If Republicans win the governorships of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin next year, taking total control in those key swing states, they could impose all kinds of electoral barriers for the next presidential election. The Republicans are laying the groundwork to refuse to certify a 2024 Democratic presidential victory should the GOP hold a House majority.

“The radicalization of the Republican Party has outpaced what even most critical observers imagined,” Georgetown University historian Thomas Zimmer told me. “We need to grapple with what that should mean for our expectations going forward and start thinking about real worst-case scenarios.”

Further, Republicans are poised to take a lot of undemocratic actions at the state level, where they already have total control in 23 states. Expect to see Republicans elsewhere gerrymander legislative districts the way they have in Wisconsin, where it is now virtually impossible for Democrats to win a majority in either house of the legislature. GOP-controlled state governments are both blocking cities from implementing new policies and reversing old ones, preventing the Democratic-leaning jurisdictions from determining how their communities are run. America won’t be much of a democracy, Zimmer said, if it has a federal system in which more than 20 states “resemble apartheid South Africa more than a functioning multiracial democracy.”

(Trump, himself, may be finished through a combination of 2020 electoral failure and legal liability, but Trumpism yet stalks America. See Man and Movement.)

Lisa A. Gennetian and Hirokazu Yoshikawa write Anti-poverty policies for children must level the playing field across both racial and economic lines:

The expanded child tax credit proposed under the Biden American Rescue Plan is the largest single anti-poverty investment in children since the introduction of Head Start to over half a million families in the summer of 1965. With Black, Native American, and Latinx children representing nearly three-quarters of children in poverty as of 2019, scholars and policy pundits are simultaneously touting the expanded child tax credit as a policy of racial equity. Reducing poverty through these new policy investments will go a long way: Evidence points to how income-based policies that reduce poverty may cushion against the blows of pandemic-induced income loss, protect children from further harm, and support their development. Relief from continued stimulus payments and the expanded child tax credit will also more generally alleviate the negative ripple effects of economic and health distress on family life and parenting. However, these policy investments in isolation may not reach their full impact without also addressing the long-standing racial disparities of structural racism—some of which contributed to child poverty in the first place.

‘Cajun Navy’ Helps Louisiana Residents Amid Floods:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with thunderstorms and a high of 81. Sunrise is 5:26 AM and sunset 8:16 PM, for 14h 50m 37s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 57.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Alcohol Licensing Review Committee meets at 4:45 PM and there will be a joint Common Council Meeting, Plan and Architectural Review Commission, and Community Development Authority meeting at 6 PM.

On this day in 1873, Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis receive a U.S. patent for blue jeans with copper rivets.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Craig Gilbert writes House votes to create bipartisan Jan. 6 commission, with all 5 Wisconsin Republican congressmen in opposition:

In the end, 35 Republicans broke with their party leaders and joined all 217 Democrats in supporting the establishment of the panel.

Meanwhile, 175 Republicans opposed the commission, including all five GOP lawmakers from Wisconsin: Bryan Steil, Scott Fitzgerald, Glenn Grothman, Tom Tiffany and Mike Gallagher.

The commission would have subpoena power to call witnesses and produce a report by Dec. 31 of this year. Modeled after the independent panel that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, it would be charged with scrutinizing what provoked a pro-Trump mob to assault the Capitol and what can be done to prevent another attack.

The 10 members of the commission would be equally divided between Democrats and Republicans under the legislation, which was the product of bipartisan negotiations in the House.

David Smith writes Investigate the Capitol attack? Republicans prefer to back the big lie:

Rarely has the old question “What did the president know and when he did know it?” been more applicable than to Trump on the day that a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol as his election defeat was being certified.

It was one of the greatest security failures in American history. US Capitol police were overrun. More than three hours passed before the national guard was deployed. A full investigation is surely critical for the public record.

But Republicans’ logic is ruthlessly simple. Now that they have surrendered to Donald Trump, manifest in the ousting of Liz Cheney from House leadership, they would rather recycle false claims of election fraud than talk about 6 January.

It was the spectacular culmination of Trump’s presidency, the moment when all the forces of anger and hatred he stoked for years were unleashed at the cost of five lives. Whereas 9/11 bequeathed memorials carved in granite – never forget – there is a concerted effort under way to airbrush 1/6 from history.

Kurt Bardella, a political commentator who quit the Republican party, tweeted: “Asking Republicans to investigate 1.6 is like asking Al-Qaeda to investigate 9.11. The people who helped plan/promote the attack aren’t going to be partners in the investigation.”

 Marc Stein reports For Jrue Holiday, It’s a Good Game When His Wife Says So (‘The pressure is on as the Bucks head to the N.B.A. playoffs, but Holiday has somebody at home who understands competition: his wife, Lauren, who faced high expectations on the U.S. national soccer team’):

After his productive first quarter, Jrue Holiday scored only 1 point in nearly six minutes in the second quarter. Lauren Holiday, who won two Olympic gold medals and the 2015 World Cup as a bustling midfielder with the United States women’s national soccer team, did not regard the sweep of the Nets or her husband’s play as a significant statement. She said she “felt like he took the quarter off.”

“It’s not that I think he did poorly,” Lauren Holiday said. “I just wanted to know what his thinking was — just help me understand. At first he said, ‘I took what the defense dictated,’ and I said, ‘No, I don’t agree.’ Those are the conversations he has to have just because I’m also a competitor.”

How Do You Actually Mine Bitcoin?:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with thunderstorms and a high of 78. Sunrise is 5:26 AM and sunset 8:15 PM, for 14h 48m 46s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 46.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets at 10 AM and Whitewater’s Park Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1780, New England’s Dark Day, an unusual darkening of the day sky, was observed over the New England states and parts of Canada.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Quinta Jurecic, Molly E. Reynolds, and Benjamin Wittes write What’s in the Jan. 6 Commission Bill?:

Particularly if Congress does not adjust the composition of the commission, the effectiveness of the body will depend pervasively on the specific individuals named as commissioners and as key staff. If the commissioners want to doggedly pursue the truth and tell the story of what happened on Jan. 6, they can do so under this proposed structure. They can hire a non-partisan staff with critical and diverse expertise, and they can issue subpoenas if needed. But even if only five commissioners want to hit the breaks, they can do that too. And if a few want to use the commission as a forum for denying that the insurrection even happened, there is little to stop them. Indeed, under this legislation, the commission could act a whole lot like a congressional committee, with divided staff chosen more for political loyalty and ties than for expertise and investigative seriousness. Under this bipartisan compromise, the policy will really only be as good as the people.

Danny Hakim, William K. Rashbaum, and Ben Protess report New York’s Attorney General Joins Criminal Inquiry Into Trump Organization:

Donald J. Trump and his family came under increasing pressure from New York investigators after the attorney general’s office said Tuesday it was working alongside the Manhattan district attorney in an ongoing criminal fraud investigation.

The two offices have been conducting parallel investigations for more than a year, though the inquiry by the office of New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, has been a civil one, meaning it could result in a lawsuit or fines. The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., has been conducting a criminal investigation, which could result in charges.

 Steve Benen writes Why Trump’s new tech ‘platform’ is so hilariously underwhelming:

Jason Miller, a controversial spokesperson for Trump’s 2020 campaign, told Fox News at the time that the former president was poised to “completely redefine the game” with his new tech initiative.

It was against this backdrop that Fox News ran this report yesterday on Team Trump’s new tech rollout.

Former President Trump launched a communications platform on Tuesday, which will serve as “a place to speak freely and safely,” and will eventually give him the ability to communicate directly with his followers, after months of being banned from sites like Twitter and Facebook. The platform, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump” appears on www.DonaldJTrump.com/desk.

 

The same report added that the former president’s project appears to be powered by Campaign Nucleus — the “digital ecosystem made for efficiently managing political campaigns and organizations,” created by Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager.

For now, it’s not clear how much Trump and his team paid for this “communications platform,” though I’m awfully curious to find out just how big an investment this was — because the project is hilariously underwhelming.

In fact, to describe this as a “communications platform” is itself generous to the point of comedy. What Team Trump has created is, for all intents and purposes, a rudimentary blog for the former president.

The crazy plan to catch space trash:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with afternoon showers and a high of 72. Sunrise is 5:27 AM and sunset 8:14 PM, for 14h 46m 52s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 36.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1863, the Siege of Vicksburg begins.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Shawn Johnson reports Advocates Rally at Capitol for Nonpartisan Redistricting Plan (‘Plan For Drawing Political Maps Is Based On A Similar System In Iowa’):

With the next round of redistricting looming, a group of lawmakers has reintroduced a long shot proposal to create a nonpartisan system for drawing the state’s political map for the next decade.

The plan, which is modeled after Iowa’s longstanding redistricting system, would require the Legislature’s nonpartisan attorneys to draw the next boundaries for Wisconsin’s state Assembly, Senate and congressional districts. Lawmakers would then have the chance to vote them up or down.

It’s largely backed by Democrats who were shut out of the last round of redistricting 10 years ago, but it’s identical to a bill from last session that had bipartisan support.

The idea is to largely depoliticize one of state government’s most political processes, one that is all but certain to spawn lawsuits, potentially for years to come.

“This bill is not about any party,” said Rep. Deb Andraca, D-Whitefish Bay, at a rally on the steps of the Wisconsin Capitol Monday. “It’s about establishing a process that gets politicians out of the map-making process altogether.”

 Douglas MacMillan reports Under Armour founder sold $138 million in stock during time period company allegedly misled investors about slowing sales:

Kevin Plank gushed about his business on a call with Wall Street analysts in October 2015.

Under Armour, the sports apparel maker Plank founded two decades earlier in the basement of his grandmother’s D.C. townhouse, had grown into a global juggernaut, he said, securing endorsements with some of the world’s biggest sports stars, amassing data on millions of fitness app users and growing sales more than 20 percent every quarter for more than five years.

The company’s track record of rapid profit and revenue growth “gives us great confidence for the future,” Plank said on the call. “We are just getting started.”

Six days later, Plank entered into a scheduled stock selling plan — a common way for public company executives to sell stock in accordance with federal regulations — that netted him $138 million over the following six months, a period when the company continued to report a fast rise in revenue.

The public comments and financial statements of Under Armour executives from late 2015 to early 2017 were the subject of a four-year accounting probe by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which charged Under Armour with violating securities laws. In its May 3 order, the SEC said the Baltimore-based company failed “to disclose material information about its revenue management practices that rendered statements it made misleading.” Under Armour agreed to pay $9 million to settle the claims without admitting or denying the charges. Neither Plank nor any other executive was charged.

Drone footage shows fire and scale of massive train derailment in US:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 71. Sunrise is 5:28 AM and sunset 8:13 PM, for 14h 44m 57s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 27.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater School Board’s Handbook Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 3:30 PM.

On this day in 1954, the United States Supreme Court hands down a unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, outlawing racial segregation in public schools

Recommended for reading in full — 

Kelly Meyerhofer reports CDC-led study finds little evidence of UW-Madison dorm outbreaks fueling community spread:

A team of scientists answered a lingering question about the ramifications of reopening UW-Madison last fall, finding little evidence that outbreaks in two dorms fueled further spread of COVID-19 into the community.

Researchers sequenced the genetic code of more than 1,200 virus samples from students and community members to examine COVID-19 strains circulating within Dane County after an explosion of cases overwhelmed UW-Madison in early September. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention led the study, the results of which were published last week in a paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed.

UW-Madison pathology professor David O’Connor, who was among the paper’s co-authors, said a stroke of good fortune may have been the biggest factor that prevented outbreaks in the university’s two largest dorms from spreading throughout greater Madison.

“We got lucky,” he said. “I would not want to go to the bank on repeating this scenario 10 times and getting that same outcome.”

 The Washington Post editorial board writes China’s repression of Uyghurs is not only cultural, but also physical, a new report shows:

AFTER THE Holocaust, the U.N. General Assembly, meeting in Paris on Dec. 9, 1948, approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It defined genocide as, among other things, “imposing measures intended to prevent births” within a population and said genocide is a crime under international law, whether in peace or war, to be prevented and punished. The promise was “never again.”

But it is happening again in China, a signatory to the treaty, as part of China’s crackdown since 2016 on ethnic minority Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in the Xinjiang region in the far northwest. At first, reports suggested that China was brainwashing the Uyghurs and others, who were forced into concentration camps and coerced to drop their language and traditions. China claimed the camps were for vocational education, but eyewitnesses described an archipelago of austere penitentiaries and brutal reeducation routines intended to wipe out the Uyghur identity and culture.

Evidence is emerging that China’s repression is not only cultural but also physical. In a report last year by researcher Adrian Zenz for the Jamestown Foundation, and in a new report this month by Nathan Ruser and James Leibold for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, both based on China’s own government data, a precipitous drop in Uyghur birthrates is evident in areas of southern Xinjiang. This appears to be the result of a drive by China at mass sterilization, coerced birth control and punitive family policies.

Meteorite that crashed into English driveway is now at London’s Natural History Museum: