Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will see an afternoon shower with a high of 50.  Sunrise is 5:55 AM and sunset 7:49 PM, for 13h 53m 54s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 95.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1959, the Saint Lawrence Seaway, linking the Great Lakes and the Atlantic, officially opens to shipping.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Richard Hansen writes Vaccinations in many conservative Wisconsin counties are lagging, but health officials are hopeful:

In Clark County, where Trump won about 67% of the 2020 vote, the vaccination rate as of Friday was about 23% — making it the Wisconsin county with the second lowest vaccination rate.

And Rusk County, where Trump won about 67% of the vote last year, is third lowest in the state when it comes to COVID-19 vaccinations. There, only about 27% of the population had gotten a first dose.

Taylor, Clark and Rusk are rural counties located in the west central and northern parts of the state, in the heart of Wisconsin’s dairy country. But gaps in vaccination rates have emerged around the state — where out of Wisconsin’s 72 counties, the 24 counties with the lowest vaccination rates all backed Trump last year by double-digit margins.

….

Of course politics isn’t the only factor. Education is another — counties that are lagging when it comes to vaccinations tend to have more adults who didn’t graduate from high school or college, the Journal Sentinel analysis found. Some of the counties, including Clark and Taylor, have significant Amish and Mennonite populations. And the statewide COVID-19 vaccination trends are similar to those for annual flu shots.

 Julian Borger and Martin Chulov report Biden becomes first US president to recognise Armenian genocide:

Joe Biden has become the first US president declare formal recognition of the Armenian genocide, more than a century after the mass killings by Ottoman troops and opening a rift between the new US administration and Ankara.

“The American people honour all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today,” Biden said in a statement on Saturday.

“Beginning on 24 April 1915 with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination.”

….

The declaration marked the culmination of decades of lobbying by Armenian American organisations.

“This is a critically important moment in the defence of human rights,” said Bryan Ardouny, head of the Armenian Assembly of America. “It’s been a long journey. President Biden is standing firm against a century of denial, and is charting a course in for human rights everywhere.”

The killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians was carried out as the Ottoman empire was collapsing and the modern state of Turkey was being born. Many victims died in death marches into the Syrian desert. The slaughter is widely viewed as a crime on a monumental scale – and a grim precursor to the Nazi Holocaust.

Ronald Reagan referred the Armenian genocide in passing in a statement on the Holocaust in 1981, but it was not followed by a formal recognition. Barack Obama promised Armenian Americans he would take that step but reneged once in office, unwilling to upset an ally. In 2019, both chambers of Congress declared their own recognition, despite Donald Trump’s efforts to stop them.

Inside The Mall Where Everything Is Recycled:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 63.  Sunrise is 5:57 AM and sunset 7:48 PM, for 13h 51m 17s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 90% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1977, the Morris Pratt Institute, dedicated to the study of Spiritualism and Mediumship, moves from Whitewater to Waukesha.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Richard Hansen writes Republicans Aren’t Done Messing With Elections:

A new, more dangerous front has opened in the voting wars, and it’s going to be much harder to counteract than the now-familiar fight over voting rules. At stake is something I never expected to worry about in the United States: the integrity of the vote count. The danger of manipulated election results looms.

We already know the contours of the battle over voter suppression. The public has been inundated with stories about Georgia’s new voting law, from Major League Baseball’s decision to pull the All-Star Game from Atlanta to criticism of new restrictions that prevent giving water to people waiting in long lines to vote. With lawsuits already filed against restrictive aspects of that law and with American companies and elite law firms lined up against Republican state efforts to make it harder to register and vote, there’s at least a fighting chance that the worst of these measures will be defeated or weakened.

The new threat of election subversion is even more concerning. These efforts target both personnel and policy; it is not clear if they are coordinated. They nonetheless represent a huge threat to American democracy itself.

Some of these efforts involve removing from power those who stood up to President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The Georgia law removes the secretary of state from decision-making power on the state election board. This seems aimed clearly at Georgia’s current Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, punishing him for rejecting Mr. Trump’s entreaties to “find” 11,780 votes to flip Joe Biden’s lead in the state.

Ed Pilkington reports Ivy League colleges urged to apologize for using bones of Black children in teaching:

Two Ivy League institutions, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton, are facing mounting demands to apologize and make restitution for their handling over decades of the bones of African American children killed by Philadelphia police in 1985.

As calls pour in for action to be taken over the use of the children’s remains as props in an online Princeton anthropology course – without permission from parents of the dead children – there is also rising concern about the whereabouts of the bones.

Fragments belonging to one or possibly two Black children have been held by the universities for 36 years, but now appear to have gone missing.

They are currently in use as a “case study” in an online forensic anthropology course fronted by Princeton that is openly available on the internet. The bones are shown on camera as teaching tools – without the blessing of relatives who were unaware their loved ones’ remains were harboured in academic collections.

The course, Real Bones: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology, is presented by Prof Janet Monge, an expert on bone collections who is on faculty at both Princeton and Penn. On video, she holds up the pelvis and femur of a girl whose remains were collected from the ashes of the 13 May 1985 police bombing of the headquarters of Move, a Philadelphia-based black liberation and back-to-nature group.

Eleven group members died in the fire, including five children.

SpaceX launches Crew-2 astronauts to space station, nails booster landing:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 58.  Sunrise is 5:58 AM and sunset 7:47 PM, for 13h 45m 59s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 81.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1985, Coca-Cola changes its formula and releases New Coke. The response is negative, and the original formula is back on the market in less than three months.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Patrick Marley reports Federal COVID relief coming to Wisconsin and its local governments totals $20 billion, new report says:

The report provides the best accounting yet of the funds flowing into the state because of the pandemic. It tallies $19.9 billion coming to the state but notes that figure likely understates how much Wisconsin will ultimately receive.

By any measure, $20 billion is a stunning sum of money. For instance, it would be enough to run Milwaukee County for 17 years.

The report notes the recent round of aid is about twice as much as Wisconsin governments received from Congress in 2009 in response to the Great Recession.

The biggest share of the COVID-19 aid — $5.2 billion — comes as general relief to the state. Evers must follow federal rules for spending that money but has substantial leeway on what he does with it. He is concentrating the funding on the health care response and economic aid, such as with aid to businesses and renters.

….

Local governments are also getting general relief, with Wisconsin counties and municipalities receiving $2.3 billion in the latest round of help.

The federal government is providing more than $4 billion for the state’s unemployment system because of the pandemic. That provided those who lost their jobs with extra help — $600 a week initially and $300 a week more recently.

Another $3.7 billion is going to K-12 schools, colleges and universities and $800 million toward child care, the report found.

….

The report examines aid going to governmental entities but not directly to individuals. For instance, it does not include in its total the stimulus checks sent to Wisconsinites over the last year, which the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimates to be $13.6 billion.

Adam Serwer writes ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Is What You Say When ‘Whites Only’ Is Too Inclusive:

Last week, far-right Republican Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar distanced themselves from a proposal to create an America First Caucus, after a document bearing the group’s name made reference to “Anglo-Saxon political traditions.”

….

it helps to understand that “Anglo-Saxon” is what you say when “whites only” is simply too inclusive.

The Anglo-Saxonism to which I refer has little to do with the Germanic peoples who settled in medieval England. Rather, it’s an archaic, pseudoscientific intellectual trend that gained popularity during the height of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe to the United States, at the turn of the 20th century. Nativists needed a way to explain why these immigrants—Polish, Russian, Greek, Italian, and Jewish—were distinct from earlier generations, and why their presence posed a danger.

They settled on the idea that the original “native” American settlers were descended from “the tribes that met under the oak-trees of old Germany to make laws and choose chieftains,” as Francis Walker put it in The Atlantic in 1893, and that the new immigrants lacked the biological aptitude for democracy. Anglo-Saxon was a way to distinguish genteel old-money types, such as nativist Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, from members of inferior races who had names such as, well, McCarthy. The influential eugenicist Madison Grant insisted that the Irish possessed an “unstable temperament” and a “lack of coordinating and reasoning power.”

Bar in New York subway station gets noticed:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 58.  Sunrise is 6:00 AM and sunset 7:53 PM, for 13h 45m 59s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 72% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Involvement & Cable TV Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4 PM and the Community Development Authority meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM (subsequently canceled).

On this day in 1876, the first major league baseball game is played at the Jefferson Street Grounds in Philadelphia.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 KellyMeyerhofer reports UW-Madison reports nearly 1,400 COVID-related sanctions this school year:

Messages sent to UW-Madison students last fall, like “Follow public health guidelines or risk suspension,” laid out the high stakes for students weighing whether to break COVID-19 rules.

Disciplinary data show UW-Madison went to that extreme just once, suspending a single student last fall. The university sanctioned nearly 1,400 others for COVID-related public health violations so far this school year.

As the Mifflin Street Block Party slated for Saturday nears, Madison police are reminding students of rules requiring physical distancing at outdoor events and warning of potential fines. UW-Madison officials said the university will assist police in holding students accountable for any public health violations.

Tim O’Brien writes Fox News and the Murdochs Will Keep Tucker Carlson Despite Ad Boycott Over Race:

Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive officer of the Anti-Defamation League, asked advertisers gathered Tuesday for Global Marketer Week to press Fox Corp. to fire its resident flamethrower and ratings-magnet, Tucker Carlson.

Carlson has been trafficking in white supremacist myths recently on Fox News and his broadcasts, Greenblatt said, offer an “example of how hatred is being mainstreamed in America in 2021.” He recommended that advertisers rein in spending on Carlson’s show. “You can hold them accountable like few other actors in society because your dollars are the fuel that enables their business model.”

There is a long tradition of companies using ad budgets to strong-arm reporters, commentators and their publishers into avoiding unfavorable coverage, so invoking the power of the purse to stymie inquiries and conversations is thorny. In this particular instance, though, it’s helpful to remember who Carlson is and what he’s up to. He’s certainly not a reporter, and he’s not a commentator in any classic sense. He’s a deft propagandist and performance artist who steeps himself and his audience in bigotry, racism and “cancel culture” antics to keep the world at bay.

….

Does staying the course make business sense for Rupert Murdoch and his son even if they don’t have ethical qualms about it? They’ve never stopped supporting programs simply because advertisers have threatened to walk, perhaps because advertisers have found other places in the Fox empire to park their money even after abandoning hosts such as Carlson and Laura Ingraham.

Advertisers have been pulling out of Carlson’s show over the last year, and its ad revenues slid accordingly, despite boffo ratings. Carlson has no blue-chip advertisers on his show, and one of his biggest sponsors is My Pillow Inc., the company founded by a Donald Trump loyalist, Mike Lindell. But Fox’s overall ad revenues were up about 14% in its most-recent quarter, in part because of a handsome – and one-time – boost from political advertising tied to the 2020 presidential election.

 Jogger and bear in face-off:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will see occasional showers with a high of 45.  Sunrise is 6:01 AM and sunset 7:44 PM, for 13h 43m 20s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 62.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM.

This day in 753 BC is the traditional date on which Romulus founds Rome.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Excerpts from a full transcript of Biden and Harris on the Chauvin Trial Verdict (‘The president and the vice president addressed the nation on Tuesday evening’):

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS:

Black men are fathers and brothers and sons and uncles and grandfathers and friends and neighbors. Their lives must be valued in our education system, in our health care system, in our housing system, in our economic system, in our criminal justice system, in our nation. Full stop.

Because of smartphones, so many Americans have now seen the racial injustice that Black Americans have known for generations. The racial injustice that we have fought for generations. That my parents protested in the 1960s. That millions of us, Americans of every race, protested last summer.

Here’s the truth about racial injustice: It is not just a Black America problem or a people-of-color problem. It is a problem for every American. It is keeping us from fulfilling the promise of liberty and justice for all. And it is holding our nation back from realizing our full potential. We are all a part of George Floyd’s legacy. And our job now is to honor it and to honor him.

….

PRESIDENT BIDEN:

The murder of George Floyd launched a summer of protests we hadn’t seen since the civil rights era in the ’60s. Protests that unified people of every race and generation in peace and with purpose to say enough. Enough. Enough of the senseless killings. Today — today’s verdict is a step forward. I just spoke with the governor of Minnesota, who thanked me for the close work with his team.

And I also spoke with George Floyd’s family again. Remarkable family of extraordinary courage. Nothing can ever bring their brother, their father back. But this can be a giant step forward in the march toward justice in America. Let’s also be clear that such a verdict is also much too rare. For so many people it seems like it took a unique and extraordinary convergence of factors.

A brave young woman with a smartphone camera, a crowd that was traumatized. Traumatized witnesses, a murder that lasts almost 10 minutes in broad daylight for ultimately the whole world to see. Officers standing up and testifying against a fellow officer instead of just closing ranks, which should be commended. A jury who heard the evidence, carried out their civic duty in the midst of an extraordinary moment under extraordinary pressure.

 David Smith reports Trumpism lives on in new think tank – but critics say it’s ‘just a grift’ (‘The America First Policy Institute calls itself ‘non-partisan’ and a ‘non-profit’ but critics regard it as a cash cow for Trump alumni with stained reputations’):

[Michael] D’Antonio [an author and political commentator on CNN suggested] that the AFPI will spend time attacking Joe Biden and is unlikely to impress political scholars. “I can’t imagine anyone outside of the Trumpian universe taking anything that they produce seriously,” he added. “It’s not exactly a team of policy superstars. Many of these people are so disgraced that their options for gainful employment outside of this make-believe world of Trump policy are very limited.”

Meet the innovators looking to revolutionize housing with sustainable 3D printed homes:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 40.  Sunrise is 6:03 AM and sunset 7:43 PM, for 13h 40m 39s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 51.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

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

On this day in 1775, the Siege of Boston begins, following the battles at Lexington and Concord.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Scott Bauer reports Foxconn, Wisconsin reach new deal on scaled back facility:

Foxconn Technology Group, the world’s largest electronics maker, has reached a new deal with reduced tax breaks for its scaled back manufacturing facility in southeast Wisconsin, Gov. Tony Evers and the company announced on Monday.

Details of the new deal were not immediately released. It was scheduled to be approved at a Tuesday meeting of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., the state’s top jobs agency that previously negotiated the initial deal with Foxconn.

The new deal will reduce the potential tax breaks by billions of dollars and still have potential tax breaks worth more than $10 million for the company, a person with knowledge of the new contract who was not authorized to speak publicly about the deal said Monday.

(The devil’s in the details: the WEDC will vote on this deal without prior public disclosure of its terms, Foxconn has a record of false promises amount to billions, and Foxconn’s ventures in other places are struggling. See Odds are stacked against Foxconn in electric car market.)

 Rachel Abrams reports One America News Network Stays True to Trump:

Months after the inauguration of President Biden, One America News Network, a right-wing cable news channel available in some 35 million households, has continued to broadcast segments questioning the validity of the 2020 presidential election.

“There’s still serious doubts about who’s actually president,” the OAN correspondent Pearson Sharp said in a March 28 report.

That segment was one in a spate of similar reports from a channel that has become a kind of Trump TV for the post-Trump age, an outlet whose reporting has aligned with the former president’s grievances at a time when he is barred from major social media platforms.

Some of OAN’s coverage has not had the full support of the staff. In interviews with 18 current and former OAN newsroom employees, 16 said the channel had broadcast reports that they considered misleading, inaccurate or untrue.

To go by much of OAN’s reporting, it is almost as if a transfer of power had never taken place. The channel did not broadcast live coverage of Mr. Biden’s swearing-in ceremony and Inaugural Address. Into April, news articles on the OAN website consistently referred to Donald J. Trump as “President Trump” and to President Biden as just “Joe Biden” or “Biden.” That practice is not followed by other news organizations, including the OAN competitor Newsmax, a conservative cable channel and news site.

 Andrew Roth reports US ambassador to leave Moscow as tensions rise:

Washington’s ambassador to Moscow has announced that he will return to the US for consultations, days after the Russian government recommended he leave the country during what it said was an “extremely tense situation”.

John Sullivan’s departure will leave both countries’ embassies without their top diplomats at a crucial moment, with Washington and Moscow recently announcing new sanctions, a Russian military buildup near Ukraine, and concerns about the opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s health while in detention.

“I believe it is important for me to speak directly with my new colleagues in the Biden administration in Washington about the current state of bilateral relations between the United States and Russia,” Sullivan said in a statement on Tuesday.

Rediscovered forgotten species brews promise for coffee’s future:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 46.  Sunrise is 6:04 AM and sunset 7:42 PM, for 13h 37m 56s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 41.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1775, the Revolutionary War begins with an American victory in Concord during the battles of Lexington and Concord.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Fred Hiatt writes China’s third phase of genocide denial: Attacking those who speak the truth:

At first, when a few brave journalists at Radio Free Asia began alerting the world to the terrible events unfolding in western China, China’s Communist rulers denied that anything at all was taking place.

Then, when satellite photos and survivor testimony became too overwhelming, the regime admitted that, yes, there are camps. But not concentration camps! Those are … vocational schools! Pay no attention to the barbed wire and guard towers.

Now, even as it maintains its increasingly threadbare lies, the regime is intensifying the third phase of genocide denial: attacking the truth-tellers.

More than 1 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are being held in China’s brutal camps. Hundreds of mosques and Muslim cemeteries have been destroyed. Muslim women are forcibly sterilized; Uyghur children are taken from their homes and sent to state-run boarding schools. Men can be sent away for wearing a beard or declining to consume pork or alcohol. The Chinese Communists are attempting to wipe out a culture, a way of life, a people.

We know this thanks to Radio Free Asia reporter Gulchehra Hoja and her colleagues, to a few dogged academics and to dozens of survivors and exiles who have bravely given testimony.

At a news conference this month, the Chinese Foreign Ministry attacked many of those witnesses as liars, criminals, terrorists and persons of “bad morality,” as RFA reported.

One of those named as a terrorist was Hoja, 48, who agreed to speak with me Friday. While we were talking, she learned that the regime has listed her father, Abduqeyum Hoja, as a terrorist as well.

“He is 80 years old!” she exclaimed. “A retired archaeologist. What kind of terrorist?”

 Kenneth Chang reports NASA’s Mars Helicopter Achieves First Flight on Another World (‘The experimental Ingenuity vehicle completed the short but historic up-and-down flight on Monday morning’):

A small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity made space exploration history on Monday when it lifted off the surface of Mars and hovered in the wispy air of the red planet. It was the first machine from Earth ever to fly like an airplane or a helicopter on another world.

In NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, engineers cheered just before 7 a.m. Eastern time as an image was transmitted back to Earth by the helicopter showing its shadow looming over the Martian surface during its flight, which occurred around 3:30 a.m. on Mars.

The achievement extends NASA’s long, exceptional record of firsts on Mars. But it was also something different for NASA — a high-risk, high-reward project with a modest price tag where failure was an acceptable outcome.

Ingenuity helicopter flies on Mars — see the first pic & video:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 60.  Sunrise is 6:06 AM and sunset 7:41 PM, for 13h 35m 13s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 32.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1923, Yankee Stadium, “The House that Ruth Built,” opens.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Kelly Meyerhofer reports UW branch campuses ‘at risk of closure’ under bill giving tech colleges more freedom:

Wisconsin technical colleges could more easily establish general education degree programs under a Republican bill that the University of Wisconsin System says would threaten the existence of some of its smallest campuses.

The bill introduced earlier this month would eliminate a longstanding requirement that technical colleges receive approval from the UW Board of Regents before starting associate degree programs in arts and sciences on their campuses.

Of the state’s 16 technical colleges, just six offer such two-year programs, which are the most common stepping stone for students to go on to a four-year university and earn a bachelor’s degree. Other technical colleges have tried establishing the programs in recent years but have historically received rare support from the UW System.

That’s because the System’s small branch campuses offer the same two-year programs. Allowing more technical colleges to start their own could cut into branch campus enrollment, which has suffered steep losses in recent years.

….

Nine of the 13 branch campuses this fall had a head count enrollment of 500 or fewer students. Demographics show even fewer students graduating from Wisconsin high schools between 2025 and 2030.

(These branch campuses, like the technical colleges, are principally two-year programs. Campuses like UW-Whitewater at Rock County might be directly affected, but four-year comprehensive programs like UW-Whitewater here in Whitewater indirectly affected by their association with a branch campus.)

Danielle Ivory, Lauren Leatherby, and Robert Gebeloff report Least Vaccinated U.S. Counties Have Something in Common: Trump Voters:

About 31 percent of adults in the United States have now been fully vaccinated. Scientists have estimated that 70 to 90 percent of the total population must acquire resistance to the virus to reach herd immunity. But in hundreds of counties around the country, vaccination rates are low, with some even languishing in the teens.

The disparity in vaccination rates has so far mainly broken down along political lines. The New York Times examined survey and vaccine administration data for nearly every U.S. county and found that both willingness to receive a vaccine and actual vaccination rates to date were lower, on average, in counties where a majority of residents voted to re-elect former President Donald J. Trump in 2020. The phenomenon has left some places with a shortage of supply and others with a glut.

For months, health officials across the United States have been racing to inoculate people as variants of the coronavirus have continued to gain a foothold, carrying mutations that can make infections more contagious and, in some cases, deadlier. Vaccinations have sped up and, in many places, people are still unable to book appointments because of high demand. In Michigan, where cases have spiraled out of control, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, recently urged President Biden to send additional doses.

But in more rural — and more Republican — areas, health officials said that supply is far exceeding demand.

 First-ever camera collar footage from a wild wolf: