Author: jplucas

According to a Harvard University study that looked at local eviction records, the influx of federal stimulus money to help stem homelessness coincided with 836 fewer evictions filed in Milwaukee County from August 2009 to March 2010, compared with the same period the previous year. The study was done by Matt Desmond while he was a doctoral student at UW-Madison.

Go back, through a universe of chalk dust and repeating bells, to a classroom outfitted with a line of squat stoves, a long table stacked with dry goods, a row of teenage girls mixing dough in dented bowls, writing down the equation of a good pie in notebooks tracked by ink and flour. It was 1980, and my freshman high school class was taking home economics, learning how to make a pot of stew, set a proper dinner table, bake and frost a cake, as the last months of the Carter administration clicked down.

But not long after that, my school and so many others discontinued the classes. And when I talked to my former home ec teacher recently, her raspy 75-year-old voice conflating the three decades since she taught me how to make soup, she wondered aloud where home economics had gone. It?s a common question. [Features a photograph of UW-Madison home ec students from 1948.]

Chancellor Biddy Martin has many complicated issues to tackle this school year. The Daily Cardinal recently spoke with Martin about the variety of challenges the university will face in the coming months.

After 14 years in prison, Cody Vandenberg will get a new trial for the 1995 attempted murder of a Bellevue man after the Wisconsin Court of Appeals determined Tuesday that new testimony and evidence should be heard.

Vandenberg affirmed his innocence when he was sentenced to 80 years in prison.

The Wisconsin Innocence Project at the University of Wisconsin Law School, a group of law students who work to overturn wrongful convictions, took up Vandenberg?s case in 1999. In the past decade, 22 students have worked on the case.