A bill involving emergency contraception actually received a public hearing on Thursday — a rare moment in a state Assembly controlled by social conservatives. But after the hearing, it is not yet clear if the measure will advance any further.
The proposal would require hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims who request it.
The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents had some good ideas Thursday for the UW System’s proposal to develop a “Strategic Framework to Advantage Wisconsin,” but the task force plan was pretty much set when the board got a presentation about it.
Seven task forces are to submit proposals to system President Kevin Reilly and his leadership team of system administrators and university chancellors, who in turn will present to the regents in February a five-year plan for the future based on the input.
The task forces are to deal with topics aimed at planning how Wisconsin can thrive in a global economy with the help of the University of Wisconsin.
Even as she lived in high society, she held it up to public ridicule. Once treated as a minor writer who documented the drawing rooms of the rich, the American novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937) has, ever since the feminist literary revival that started in the 1970s, been recognized as an American master.
Quoted: UW-Madison English professor Emily Auerbach
Dear Editor: ….turning Camp Randall on Labor Day weekend into a miniature version of Red Square on May Day without one word honoring working men or women was shameful.
Dear Editor: Sports editor Adam Mertz recently suggested the charges against Jack Ikegwuonu, the UW football player who was arrested in Illinois for burglary and criminal trespass, were “somewhat dubious or trumped up in nature.”
This goes along with UW Athletic Director Barry Alvarez stating that Ikegwuonu will play football this fall no matter what the court decides. That is a highly questionable example that is being set for the rest of the players and the reputation of the University of Wisconsin.
Perhaps Charter Communications will be next for the Big Ten Network.
BTN on Thursday announced that it had reached an agreement with EchoStar Communications to be carried on its DISH Network satellite TV service. DISH is the No. 2 satellite provider behind DirecTV.
The deal increases BTN’s reach from about 17 million households to about 28.5 million. In the eight Big Ten states, the number of households increases from about 3.5 million to about 6.2 million. EchoStar does not release numbers by local market.
BTN remains mired in stalemated negotiations with the nation’s top cable companies, including Madison area provider Charter and Milwaukee area provider Time Warner. BTN does have deals with more than 120 smaller cable companies.
Mike Urben has spent much of his adult life making University Ridge one of the more popular and successful golf courses in the state. Rick Shafel loved working at the Ridge so much that he got married there and turned down every potential employer who tried to lure him away.
Urben and Shafel both worked at the Ridge since it opened in 1991. Urben is the only general manager the place has ever had; Shafel is its only food and beverage manager.
They were hard-working managers who had no reason to believe their jobs were on the line. Yet on August 27, Urben and Shafel were fired and they are still trying to figure out why.
Terry Murawski was feeling pretty good about himself. Buoyed by a rush of adrenaline at a planning meeting last winter for W Club festivities in Las Vegas preceding Saturday’s University of Wisconsin football game there, he proposed a grand scheme.
“Let’s market this as: ‘The Largest Visiting Team Tailgate Party in the History of the United States,'” he said.
Murawski, the longtime W Club executive director, projected attendance near 15,000 outside Sam Boyd Stadium, the home field of the opponent, UNLV.
Attention, students of modern American politics: The University of Wisconsin Press has a new book that’s perfect for you.
It’s written by one of Wisconsin’s own, David Obey, who has represented the northwestern part of the state in Congress since 1969, and it’s nothing short of a winner.
“Raising Hell for Justice” is a must read for anyone who wants to get a better grasp of the ways of Washington and understand what makes the political process tick.
Students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison continue to go wireless, and show increasing concern over computer security according to the most recent survey of student technology trends.
The report, released this week and conducted online through the school’s Division of Information Technology (DoIT) with about 350 students last spring, shows that more than three quarters (77 percent) of students own a laptop, up from 64 percent in 2006. As a result, reliance on campus wireless network connections increase. Wireless access was up from 30 percent in 2006 to 50 percent in 2007, according to the survey.
Meanwhile, a recent survey of faculty and staff technology trends at UW-Madison revealed that nearly 60 percent use a laptop, more than double the 29 percent in 2006, and 49 percent use a cell phone, up from 20 percent reported last year.
….This Legislature shouldn’t always be looking for new ways to close the doors on higher education. Let’s swing them open and make sure the sons and daughters of Wisconsin’s hard-working families have the opportunity to earn an affordable college degree.
If we’re serious about growing our economy and bringing new jobs to the Badger State, we better get serious about the University of Wisconsin.
….Investing in the University of Wisconsin and making college more affordable and accessible should be values everyone in the Legislature shares.
Fans hoping for a breakthrough in negotiations between Charter Communications and the Big Ten Network seemingly will grasp at any straw.
One favorite theory of bloggers involves the pending deal in which News Corp. is selling its 38.4 percent stake in DirecTV, regional sports networks FSN Pittsburgh, FSN Northwest and FSN Rocky Mountain, and more than $500 million in cash to Liberty Media in exchange for Liberty’s 19 percent voting interest in News Corp.
Quoted: UW-Madison telecommunications professor Barry Orton
WISCONSIN FOOTBALL fans found out the hard way five years ago that the reality of Las Vegas’s racy slogan — what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas — is that what generally stays in Vegas is your money.
Bet on it. All those glittering palaces didn’t get built by the casinos losing.
This weekend will be the first time the football Badgers have traveled to Vegas in five years, when a bizarre episode hit many Wisconsin fans squarely in their wallets.
Armed with one of his (Big) Ten Commandments — “It’s not what happens, but how you react to what happens” — University of Wisconsin football coach Bret Bielema sounded confident after Wednesday’s practice that tailback Lance Smith’s suspension could have positive ramifications on everybody involved, even though the 19-year-old Smith will not be available to compete in any of the team’s five road games during the regular season.
“I think it’s another great opportunity,” Bielema said of the possibilities that may now exist for self-examination and self-improvement on several fronts.
Limited literacy is a health hazard. That’s the message that a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher and a local nurse brought Wednesday to an open house of the Literacy Network, a Madison agency that trains volunteers to help adults learn to read.
Mike Grasmick of the UW Department of Family Medicine worked with UW physician Paul Smith this spring to gain insights from six focus groups, two each in Madison, Racine and Oshkosh, on how well patients understood medical information.
Researchers at Pennsylvania State University, Columbia and other institutions have found a virus that they say contributes to the mysterious collapse of honeybee colonies around the United States.
Quoted: UW-Madison entomologist Phil Pellitteri
Dear Editor: In response to the recent coverage about UW-Madison students, alcohol overdoses and detox, I wanted to share my perspective on the issue.
Alcohol is indeed a problem here at UW-Madison, as it is at many, if not all of our peer institutions. In partnership with students, police, the city and community, the Office of the Dean of Students is committed to the safety of our students, which includes communicating important messages about drinking on our campus and promoting programs that do not involve the consumption of alcohol.
Dear Editor: Charter Communications has been under fire from some subscribers as well as some local media for its inability to close a deal with the Big Ten Network. That may be a bit unfair when one considers an article from AP that appeared in the Aug. 26 edition of a Quad Cities newspaper.
Dear Editor: The Associated Press recently carried the following news item:
“UW-Madison is opening a kosher meat kitchen in a residence hall dining room starting this fall. Muslims who follow Islamic dietary laws, called halal, will also be accommodated.”
Is the University of Wisconsin-Madison violating the Constitution of Wisconsin because it has chosen to accommodate those people whose food consumption is dictated by religion?
This fall’s UW-Cinematheque series takes its audience from France to Japan to India to the farthest regions of outer space — or at least outer space as imagined by Russian filmmakers.
The free on-campus film series has always been a place for cinephiles to see classic and foreign films so obscure or adventuresome that they make the films at Madison’s thriving arthouse theaters look like “Underdog” by comparison.
If it weren’t for the fact that everywhere you turn, you — and your kids — can see and hear beer advertising, I could get excited about those Madison city buses wrapped in a Miller Genuine Draft ad.
Let’s not come unraveled, though, over a beer ad that is presumably helping to keep bus fares down because it might corrupt the children.
….We pack our kids off to college and tell them not to touch a drink until they’re of legal age, even when they’re walking past all those tailgate parties on the way to the football game or sitting behind the Memorial Union with a 21-year-old classmate or two.
Lance Smith, a sophomore running back for the University of Wisconsin football team, has been suspended for five games.
UW athletic director Barry Alvarez and Dean of Students Lori Berquam announced today that Smith will not travel or compete in each of the Badgers’ five road games, starting with Saturday’s game at UNLV.
The suspension, according to a news release serves “as resolution of a nonacademic misconduct case pending against” Smith, who was arrested in July following an incident with his girlfriend.
Critics on Wall Street have often quipped that the Ford Motor Co. is not a car company with health care problems but a health care company with car trouble. Strangely, the universities of the Big Ten sports conference seem to be in danger of falling prey to a similar problem as they launch an expensive new sports channel: becoming a publicly funded sports franchise with classrooms.
The University of Wisconsin football team climbed two spots to No. 5 in both major polls, leapfrogging Texas and Michigan.
The Badgers were alone in that spot in the USA Today coaches’ poll, one of the factors in the Bowl Championship Series standings, but tied with Oklahoma in the Associated Press poll.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) – Clerical, technical and health workers went on strike Wednesday at the University of Minnesota after contract talks with their union broke down.
The union represents about 3,500 workers — about 17 percent of the employees in the University of Minnesota system statewide — but university officials said the second day of fall classes will go ahead as planned.
He wore No. 11 on his University of Wisconsin football jersey. He was a walk-on free safety from Southern Door High School. He was a scout teamer, a practice player.
But there was so much more to Mike Barker.
What’s the buzz?
If you haven’t stepped out of your house the past week or two, that hum you hear outside is from millions of floodwater mosquitoes that have exploded on the scene, following the record rainfalls in August.
Quoted: UW-Madison entomologist Phil Pellitteri
The picture that Big Ten Network President Mark Silverman paints is full of masses of frustrated fans turning their backs on their cable providers and flocking to DirecTV in order to watch their beloved college football teams in action.
DirecTV is the satellite TV service that carries BTN, which went to air for the first time Thursday night. Major cable carriers like Time Warner, Comcast and Charter have not yet struck deals to carry BTN.
Civic and business leaders paying for a study on higher education needs in Waukesha County share a common goal: resolving a debate that has continued for nearly three years.
More than a dozen individuals, companies and educational institutions are funding the $50,000 study, which could determine the future of the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha.
It’s not too much of a stretch to say that public broadcasting was invented in Wisconsin. Since the early experiments of 1917, the stations of Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television have served the citizens of our state with distinctive and groundbreaking educational and informational programming.
On behalf of the members of the Wisconsin Public Radio Association and Friends of WHA-TV, we call on the Legislature to sustain state funding for our state’s public radio and public televisions stations. WPR and WPT are nationally renowned public broadcasting services.
A caregiver who works at University Hospital and the Veterans Hospital has tested positive for a rare form of tuberculosis, but officials say the possibility that the disease was spread to others is slim.
Precautions, however, are being taken to ensure both employee and patient safety, including TB tests of employees who came in contact with the woman. Letters recommending tests are also being sent to the doctors of 100 to 150 hospital patients who may have come in contact.
The Big Ten Network has landed its biggest cable deal yet and reportedly on its terms.
Regional cable operator Insight Communications currently is the nation’s ninth-largest cable operator with 1.4 million households, but its deal with BTN covers just 640,000 households, with the most notable markets being Columbus, Ohio — home to Ohio State University — and Evansville, Ind., not far from Indiana University.
Like many Badger fans, Eric Graf is angry as the Big Ten Network launches tonight without a deal with Charter Communications.
Barring an improbable agreement to break the long and contentious stalemate, Charter subscribers won’t be able to see at least three University of Wisconsin football games and at least 10 UW basketball games scheduled to air on BTN in the next six months.
But Graf isn’t focusing his ire on the network or cable company; he blames the heads of the Big Ten universities, including UW Chancellor John Wiley.
(Professor of telecommunications Barry Orton is quoted.)
“Patient is on the roll.”
With that cue from a hospital security guard, five-year-old Justin Pinchart was wheeled out of his cramped room on the fourth floor of the UW Hospital, and cruised to his fancy new digs at the American Family Children’s Hospital next door.
The nine-minute trip through a maze of hallways and several elevators was swift, with his mom Diane and dad Dan at his rolling bedside, plus several attentive nurses and moving company employees hired to do some of the heavy lifting.
Members of the University of Wisconsin women’s soccer team were well-versed with Paula Wilkins’ credentials through her successful coaching tenure at Penn State.
With six straight Big Ten Conference championships and two NCAA semifinal appearances under Wilkins’ belt with the Nittany Lions, the Badgers realized training would rise to levels they’d never experienced when Wilkins became the fourth coach in UW program history in mid-February.
Dear Editor: As a former University of Wisconsin football player, I am looking forward to another great UW football season and being able to catch this year’s games on the new Big Ten Network.
This network is a welcome idea as it will further elevate the Badgers on a national platform to highlight all of the amazing research and developments that take place at the UW to a much wider audience.
The Big Ten Network is looking to be included on expanded basic cable in Wisconsin and the other Big Ten states. Some have called this network a niche network. They are wrong. The Big Ten Network is definitely not just for sports enthusiasts. This network has mass appeal and deserves to be included among the basic tier along with stations like HGTV, MTV, ESPN, the Travel Channel and others.
It was perhaps 10 years ago when I first heard the term. Jim Delany, commissioner of the Big Ten Conference, described games as “inventory.”
Delany’s conference is currently trying to get its inventory stocked in its own store. The Big Ten Network BTN will debut Thursday. But as the Mountain West Conference has discovered with The mtn., its barely-there network, starting a network is easier than getting a network on cable carriers.
Together, the public schools of southeastern Wisconsin have a regional economic impact nearly as big as the University of Wisconsin-Madison, according to a report released Wednesday
Dane County issued slow, no-wake orders for the entire surface of the four Yahara lakes today, as historic high water levels continue to endanger shoreline properties.
….The order will make it difficult for hundreds of boaters to recreate on Lakes Mendota, Monona, Waubesa and Kegonsa during the upcoming Labor Day weekend.
In arguing against providing funding for state universities that even his fellow Republicans say is needed, Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities Chair Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, offers a quote from Thomas Paine about “the greedy hand of government (in the form of taxation and the demand for revenues) thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping the spoil of the multitude.”
If Nass’ suggestion that the essential founder of the American experiment might have objected to collecting the needed funds for education, the assemblyman might want to familiarize himself with Paine’s suggestion that “those who want to reap the benefits of this great nation must bear the fatigue of supporting it.”
When students return to classes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison next week, many will no doubt be talking about upcoming classes and professors, and the national ranking of the UW football team.
Sadly, few will likely notice the loss of the Department of Wildlife Ecology.
What was the country’s first Department of Wildlife Management, founded by Aldo Leopold — who is considered nationally to be the “father” of modern-day wildlife management — has lost its independent department status.
Sediment tests conducted for the city of Madison show that UW-Madison’s coal-powered power plant on Charter Street is not discharging high levels of contaminants into the soil under Monona Bay, according to the state Department of Natural Resources, although there are some high concentrations of mercury and lead in the bay.
Students in UW-Madison residence halls will be able to watch the Big Ten Network this fall under an agreement between the university and the network.
The network also will be available at Memorial Union and Union South, as well as the J.F. Friedrick Center, the Fluno Center and Lowell Hall.
As a new school year begins, University of Wisconsin officials are launching an effort to make students realize how dangerous alcohol can be.
“This is a messaging campaign aimed at incoming freshmen, primarily in the UW Housing dorms,” said Susan Crowley, director of prevention services at University Health Services at UW-Madison.
“We are very concerned about the increase in the number of students transported to detoxification with very high blood alcohol content. We want to let students know very early in the year about the seriousness of alcohol incapacitation.”
It is not just students, teachers and coaches who gear up for the school year and football weekends. Detox does too.
“We know we will have an increased number on football weekends. We’re prepared. We have to be,” said Melody Music-Twilla, who runs the Dane County Detox Center on Industrial Drive on Madison’s southeast side for Tellurian Ucan, Inc.
Between those sent to detox by Madison Police officers and University of Wisconsin-Madison campus police, Music-Twilla expects all 29 beds in the 24-48 hour triage center to be filled before the end of the night Saturday.
For the state and nation, scores were down slightly compared with the prior year, the College Board announced, but the long-term trends and such things as the increasing number of minority students taking the SAT could be looked at more positively.
To answer the most common question from readers over the past couple weeks: “No.”
That negative response works for the same question being asked about two different channels:
“Is there any word on when (either the NFL Channel or The Big 10 Channel) will be picked up by Time Warner Cable?”
To repeat: No.
University of Wisconsin football coach Bret Bielema closed the door on any possibility fifth-year senior defensive end Jamal Cooper will return to the team.
Bielema announced Friday in a news release that Cooper “had been suspended indefinitely from the program for conduct detrimental to the team,” which appeared to leave open the possibility of Cooper returning to the team at some point. However, the same release also said Cooper “will have access to full academic support services, but will no longer be a part of the football program in any other way.”
Bielema cleared up the confusion during his Monday news conference.
Senior end Jamal Cooper is gone, permanently.
Senior end Kurt Ware is coming off knee surgery and probably isn’t in peak football shape. Redshirt freshman end Kirk DeCremer was limited during camp because of a sore back.
The state of the University of Wisconsin defensive line, particularly at end, doesn’t appear robust as the No. 7 Badgers prepare for the opener Saturday against visiting Washington State.
University of Wisconsin hockey player Sara Bauer, who played on back-to-back national championship teams, was among 30 semifinalists named Monday for the NCAA’s annual Woman of the Year Award.
Kevin Gullikson, a junior forward on the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball team, was cited for underage drinking last weekend.
University of Wisconsin men’s basketball player Kevin Gullikson received a citation early Saturday morning for underage drinking. According to the UW Police Department, he was picked up at 1:25 a.m. and had an alcohol level of .209, more than twice the legal limit.
Gullikson, 20, pleaded no contest in Sept. 2006 to an underage drinking charge.
With California’s adoption of its state budget Tuesday, Wisconsin is now the last state in the nation that began its fiscal year on July 1 but has yet to approve a budget. There are plenty of reasons for the delay.
….But one of the biggest problems with Wisconsin’s budget process has nothing to do with partisan bickering or spineless politicians. The problem is that the budget is packed with noneconomic measures that have little or no place in a fiscal plan.
Dear Editor: As a resident of Wisconsin and student body president of UW-Eau Claire, I am frustrated and troubled by the biennial budget process this year.
We are one of the last states in the country to finalize a 2007-2009 biennial budget and we are nearly two months behind. Significant problems are occurring because of this complacency.
Currently, there are thousands of UW students unsure if they can attend school in September because the Wisconsin Higher Education Grant has not been determined. Also, the UW System Board of Regents had to set tuition with no indication of what the state’s allocation would be.
The lightning strike death of a golfer on the Odana Hills golf course Monday morning should serve as a graphic reminder to all playing or working outside when a thunderstorm blows up: get out of bad weather and into a safe place.
Golf professionals and officials at courses contacted today say they use some type of warning method to make golfers aware of pending storms, with some courses requiring golfers to abandon their rounds and exit the course until after the storms go through and the weather improves.
(University Ridge is included in this story)
This is Kevin Henkes as a child, as he described himself in a recent speech:
“I love books. I love to read them, and I love to look at them. Examine them. Smell them. Run my fingers over the paper. I’m huddled in the corner behind the big red chair (in his living room), with a stack of new library books. I feel complete. Happy. I feel as if nothing can disturb me. I’m enveloped. It’s just me and my books behind the big red chair.”
A profile of the nationaly known children’s book author and illustrator, and a former UW-Madison student.
Jamal Cooper continues to find ways into University of Wisconsin football coach Bret Bielema’s doghouse.
Bielema announced Friday that Cooper, a fifth-year senior defensive end, has been suspended indefinitely from the program for conduct detrimental to the team. According to a news release, Cooper “will have access to full academic support services, but will no longer be a part of the football program in any other way.”
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (AP) — Big Ten Network officials say the new TV network won’t be available to Comcast Cable subscribers when it starts broadcasting Aug. 30.
The new network and the cable company have squabbled for months over where viewers would find BTN and how much it would cost them.
The network, co-owned by the Big Ten conference and Fox Cable Networks, wants to be a basic cable channel for Comcast subscribers, while Comcast wants BTN to be part of a sports-channels package that subscribers pay more to see. According to Comcast, the network also wants the cable company to pay it $1.10 per subscriber.
With effort, tax cutters and easy-answer advocates could learn the value of genuine partnership and mutual service.
Like time and money, such relationships are the alpha and omega of a vibrant community life.
And state support of the university can get us from here . . . to there, according to a column by Richard S. Brooks, the 2006 recipient of the Robert Heidemann Award of Excellence in Public Service at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an outreach program manager in the division of continuing studies and teaches service learning.
Story discusses the Badger receiving corps’ reactions to interim receivers coach DelVaughn Alexander.
