Category: State news

The Appleton-based Boldt Company will partner with an international engineering firm on a $250 million state project converting a coal-fired heating plant into one using biomass for fuel.

Work is underway on a biomass power plant at UW Madison. Governor Jim Doyle says the $251 million project to convert the Charter Street Plant on the UW Madison campus from burning coal to burning biomass can help lessen the state?s dependence on imported fuels.

Governor Doyle has broken ground on the bio-mass power plant project at UW-Madison. The move comes as the idea to get electricity from burning wood chips, corn stalks and switch grass remains controversial elsewhere.

The Appleton-based Boldt Company will partner with an international engineering firm on a $250 million state project converting a coal-fired heating plant into one using biomass for fuel.

Work is underway on a biomass power plant at UW Madison. Governor Jim Doyle says the $251 million dollar project to convert the Charter Street Plant on the UW Madison campus from burning coal to burning biomass can help lesson the state?s dependence on imported fuels.

Quoted: Barry C. Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor.

Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Charles Franklin.

Joel Waldinger saw the photographs that changed his life in an exhibit on the grounds of what had once been headquarters for the Nazi Gestapo in Berlin. It was 2006, and Waldinger, a Madison television journalist, was finishing up a journalism fellowship in Germany. On his last day before returning to the United States, Waldinger visited the exhibit, where he saw a series of three photos of a woman identified as Mildred Fish Harnack. They were accompanied by a short blurb about her life. It said she had been beheaded in a Berlin prison in 1943 ? the only American woman executed by the Nazis. And it said she was from Wisconsin, and had studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The candidates for governor have been talking a lot about the economy and health care, but Shamane Mills reports they haven?t been saying much about higher education this year. She has our latest report on issues in this year?s governor?s race. (Audio.)

Bedbugs – two words that together prompt nightmares – are stalking more sleepers in hotels, apartments and homes in Wisconsin, reflecting a national uptick over the past year, according to local officials and exterminators.

Noted: Democrat Tom Barrett went after Republican Scott Walker on the issue of stem cells. ?Scott Walker?s continued phony claim that embryonic stem cell research doesn?t matter, or that the same breakthroughs and discoveries can be achieved with adult stem cells,? Barrett said.

Democrat Tom Barrett has outspent his GOP opponent Scott Walker by 2-to-1 on TV in the race for governor since the Sept. 14 primary, but outside groups have outspent both candidates, effectively leveling the playing field, according to a study of campaign advertising this fall.

The study also finds that ? no great surprise ? the ads have been unrelentingly negative.

?In a negative year nationally and regionally, Wisconsin is leading the way,? said Ken Goldstein, political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is tracking ads in races for governor in six Midwestern states.

U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold rallied student voters on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus Wednesday and led them to register and vote.

Not far from the sprawling storage area of the Wisconsin Historical Society is the society?s film vault, which lies under the grass and steps leading the society?s front door. Here, row after row of microfilm and negatives are stored as part of the collaboration between the society and the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research at UW-Madison.

Deep in a basement on the UW-Madison campus lies the story of our entire state: The cheesehead hat signed last year by President Barack Obama on his visit to Wright Middle School in Madison. The 1 millionth aluminum wheel cover cast at the Reynolds Metal Co. in Beloit in 1996 and signed by the employees. A wild rice threshing machine used on the Lac du Flambeau Reservation. They?re among the 98,000 historical objects and thousands more archaeological artifacts found in the storage of the Wisconsin Historical Society.

President Barack Obama is now in possession of a No. 44 Badgers basketball jersey. That was one of the gifts that UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin gave our 44th president when he visited campus last week, the first sitting president to come to the university in 60 years. Martin was Obama?s official greeter, she explained in an e-mail, before he spoke to a raucous crowd of 17,000 on Library Mall in an attempt to energize Democrats for the midterm elections. She welcomed the president in Memorial Library, along with UW-Madison stem cell pioneer James Thomson, UW System President Kevin Reilly, and the chair of student government, Brandon Williams.