Category: UW-Madison Related

Madison is not only the capital of Wisconsin, it’s also a college town disguised by big-city buildings. The University of Wisconsin is the main reason this could-be-stuffy government city is a thriving epicenter for music, arts, and theater.

Decontamination exercise: Emergency government officials will be conducting a decontamination exercise tonight beginning at 6:30 p.m., so people living near area hospitals should expect to hear sirens from EMS vehicles arriving at the emergency rooms later, during the test.

The exercise will take place at a UW-Madison soccer field, where about 35 people will be “exposed” to a chemical agent, with the field decontamination operations set up in UW campus lot 60 behind the UW Hospital complex.

Letter to the editor: I am concerned about the method of disciplining UW athletes who have been arrested as there appears to be little accountability for their actions by the UW Athletic Department. They often excuse the actions if the player involved is a prominent member of the UW football team.

No drugs were found in the blood stream of a 21-year-old Green Bay woman pulled from the Fox River on July 26.

Brown County Medical Examiner Al Klimek said the toxicology report showed Mahalia Xiongâ??s blood alcohol level was 0.12 percent, but no other significant substances were discovered. The legal limit of intoxication is 0.08 percent.

Kevin Hinckley stood on Capitol Square last week, collecting signatures. The east-side Madison resident has started a petition asking the city to stop accepting alcohol and gambling advertising on Metro buses.

“I think it’s inappropriate,” says Hinckley. “It’s as bad as promoting cigarettes.”

Police say limiting the number of downtown liquor licenses would reduce crime and prevent a bar-time drain of police resources from other parts of the city, but not all City Council members agree.

As the investigation into the murder of Kelly Nolan moves into its second month, police still need your help.

The body of Kelly Nolan was discovered one month ago. But, police want people to think 2 weeks prior to that.

It is during that time that police believe Nolan’s body was dumped in the woods. Also during the weekend of June 23rd, Oregon was holding its annual summerfest celebration.

MADISON, Wis. — It was a month ago on Thursday that the body of Kelly Nolan was discovered in a wooded area near Schneider Drive in the Town of Dunn.

Madison detectives said that they are continuing to work the case full time. They said that they’re actively getting assistance from the FBI, the Wisconsin Department of Criminal Investigation, the Dane County Sheriff’s Department and Fitchburg police, WISC-TV reported.

Madison police are taking a proactive approach to curb alcohol-related problems. Officers are educating bar employees in an effort to get businesses to comply with laws. Police hosted a Tavern Safety Training class and about a dozen people showed up.

When you have lots of people and alcohol things can sometimes get out of hand. “Someone is pushing your trigger and you know they’re doing it on purpose because they’re intoxicated… what do you do?,” asked Officer Mark Allen.

Frank Lasee has a strong opinion about Wisconsin lawyers: There are too many.

He’s a state representative whose proposal to cut state funding to the University of Wisconsin Law School recently cleared the Wisconsin State Assembly.

His plan would cut the law school’s funding by $1 million this year and completely by 2010 — or about 10 percent of the school’s total funding, sparking fear of higher tuitions.

I’m writing about a story that says USDA reviews complaint alleging UW-Madison lab mistreated monkeys.

I think the fact that any animal is used in an experiment that involves attaching things to the spine and brain is absolutely disgusting.

The incompetence of the technicians baffles me. How could you knowingly let an animal of any kind suffer and die? That is cruel and unnecessary.

As far as I’m concerned, any benefit that may come out of the experiments does not outweigh the negatives involved. Some people may think that I am being oversensitive on the issue, but I think that more people need to be a little more sensitive.

Carrie Arthurs

It’s been a month since the body of 22-year-old Kelly Nolan was found in a wooded area outside of Madison. Police say the death of the UW student was a homicide, but Madison public information officer Joel DeSpain isn’t saying much about a suspect. However, he says police believe any potential suspect is still in Wisconsin.

Madison, Wis. – Years from now, when sports medicine, orthopedics, and perhaps even breast cancer treatment has advanced to the point where the extent of soft tissue damage can be precisely measured, the medical community may have a Wisconsin company to thank.

Echo Metrics, a medical software company that is being spun out of research at the University of Wisconsin Madison, already has a patent to its credit and it has brought Madison biotech executive Barb Israel into the fold.

The three young men standing together in front of a busy bar on State Street at 1:30 a.m. are starting to irritate Madison police Sgt. Dave McCaw.

They’ve been drinking, though they aren’t falling-down drunk, and they aren’t doing anything criminal. As much as anything, it’s their tone – one of exaggerated politeness, with a hint of condescension – that seems about to set McCaw off.They just want to know , they say, over and over again, why their good friend had to be hustled into the back of that long police van parked nearby after they all left the bar a few moments earlier.

An additional reason to encourage drinking tap water, particularly for children and adolescents, is that it contains fluoride.

A surgeon generalâ??s report in 2000 ranked oral health as a serious health problem in children in America. For low-income families in particular, substituting bottled water without fluoride for tap water in formula feeding or for general use increases the likelihood of dental caries and poor oral health.

High-risk children donâ??t need to buy â??status water,â? which will add one more problem to a long list of adverse health outcomes they face.

John J. Frey III, M.D.
Madison, Wis., Aug. 1, 2007

The writer is a professor of family medicine, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

Taxpayers do not want UW System to be treated as a stone on which to grind political axes.
That message should ring through loud and clear to the legislative committee working out a compromise state budget bill.

G. Linn Roth and Jean Martinelli always intended to help UW-Madison by naming the university in their will. But then they figured, why wait?

The University of Wisconsin, its flagship campus Madison, the U-W Extension and Colleges have all been mighty anxious lately in light of the assault on the UW budget by the Republican-controlled State Assembly. UW officials are decrying the cuts and predicting dire consequences if they are enacted.

And the cuts are, virtually without exception, absurd at best and destructive at worst, hurting nearly every citizen of this state. And we stand ready to oppose them all and defend this state’s most valuable asset. We’re just not sure we need to go there yet.

Green Bay police have confirmed the body pulled from the Fox River Thursday is that of a missing young woman. Captain Karl Fleury says the positive identification has been made, confirming 21 year old Mahalia Xiong was the occupant of a car pulled from the water

University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor John Wiley Thursday asked Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch (R-West Salem) to consider the effect of short-term budget relief on the strength of higher education in Wisconsin.

A powerful Republican lawmaker is trying to use the power of the purse to eliminate academic programs he disagrees with philosophically and make cuts that would punish university administrators he does not like.

Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, said he proposed cutting funding for a University of Wisconsin-Madison center that studies social change because it is “too far to the left.”

UW-Madison officials complain frequently about raids by other universities that pay more to steal key faculty, leading Gov. Jim Doyle to include a $10 million faculty retention fund in his proposed UW System budget earlier this year.

But the University of Wisconsin-Madison takes as well as gives.
Statistics from the UW show that faculty received 116 offers from others in 2005-06, and 78 of those were retained — 67 percent. But the UW-Madison offered 176 positions and 116 accepted — 66 percent — during that time.

The newest multimillion-dollar residence halls on Madison campuses feature semi-private bathrooms, walk-in closets, wireless Internet connections and even spots for professors to hold office hours.

The uPortal project to develop a free, sharable Web portal for higher education won the 2007 Catalyst award, given by the Educause association for innovation and excellence in campus IT.

Mary Lu Anderson has been waiting for years to accompany her granddaughter to Grandparents University on the UW-Madison campus.

This week her dream came true.

“Ever since Amira was born I’ve been waiting to do this,” said Anderson, 65, an alumna of the University of Wisconsin. “I postponed knee surgery to be here.”

A section of Ross Hill’s apartment building was burning Saturday when he said he went back inside to get his college diploma and some pictures of his kids. When he came back out, he said, a firefighter nearly tackled him and asked him if he was looting.

By his account, which contrasts with what police and firefighters report, an officer put him under arrest before he knew it, tentatively charging him with a felony.

Authorities are not ruling out foul play in the disappearance of a 50-year-old town of Windsor woman who disappeared Tuesday night, but at the same time the investigator in the case stressed that the disappearance of Francine Tate is not similar to that of a 22-year-old UW-Whitewater student who was murdered earlier this month.

Three versions of the next state budget pending in the Capitol disagree on tax increases and spending levels, but all swim in a sea of red ink – future deficits of $669 million to $877 million.

Madison is one step closer to not having any new bars on the Isthmus, but it’ll be another month before the Alcohol Licensing Committee votes on the density plan

Wednesday night, Madison leaders debated the density plan and heard public comment.

The idea behind the plan – we’ll see less crime, if there are less liquor licenses…

Right now a third of Madison’s liquor licenses belong to downtown bars.

Dear Editor: Every once in a while someone says something so crazy or so outrageous it garners attention. Rep. Frank Lasee, R-Green Bay, has made a career of this.

Last year, Lasee suggested the way to reduce school violence was to put guns in schools.

Lasee again made headlines last week with his budget proposal to eliminate state funding for the University of Wisconsin Law School. Why, you ask? Because he doesn’t like lawyers.

It’s time for Wisconsin to treat its Main Street businesses fairly by collecting a sales tax on more Internet and catalog purchases.
State budget negotiators should quickly accept the Senate’s proposal to do just that.

I tried to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison marching band concert in Kohler on July 5.

As a Kohler resident, but a native of Ohio, I was curious to see what all the fuss was about. I arrived at 7:35 p.m. only to find out that the band was done already.

A 30-minute performance? Pathetic.

FOR A while there Monday, this was going to be a column about how a Madison native and UW-Madison graduate named Ben Relles is riding the new technology wave to fame and fortune, with the sequel to his hugely successful “I Got a Crush on Obama” music video hitting the Internet Monday morning and generating approximately 600 million hits in the first hour, with a book deal, HBO special and maybe even a chain of restaurants announced before sundown.

Wisconsin got the sad news last week that it missed out on an opportunity to land a major national laboratory.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison wasnâ??t among the five finalists selected as possible sites for a $450 million lab that will study deadly animal illnesses such as bird flu and other dangerous contagions like anthrax.

The University Club is a century old this year. So may be its ghost.

I hope the Republicans who control the state Assembly were just playing silly political games last week when they voted to slash a host of state programs for the most vulnerable among us and then lopped off a crippling $120 million from the University of Wisconsin budget.

Because if they are actually serious about the draconian budget they passed, then we might just as well kiss our world-class university goodbye.

In the two widely divergent state budget plans that emerged from Wisconsin’s Democrat-controlled Senate and Republican-run Assembly lurk some really bad ideas.

Following two recent murders with connections to Madison’s downtown, the city is gearing up to install the first of ten video surveillance cameras in the downtown.

Security cameras are just one part of the Mayor’s Downtown Safety Initiative, it also includes funding for police overtime and beefing up downtown neighborhood watches. It’s a $100,000 investment the city and State Street restaurants say is well spent.

The budget Assembly Republicans passed this week would all but eliminate taxpayer support for public broadcasting, a move that officials said Thursday would cripple the state’s Amber Alert program.

Wisconsin Public Radio is the backbone for the state’s child abduction warning system, said Malcolm Brett, broadcasting director of the University of Wisconsin Extension, which runs Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television. Also mentions the defunding of the UW Law School.

The Assembly’s version of the state budget hits Wisconsin’s technical college districts hard in two ways, said Dan Clancy, president of the Wisconsin Technical College System.

UW-Madison officials want to learn more about why their bid for a national disease research facility failed to survive the latest round of cuts.

The Department of Homeland Security announced Wednesday the selection of sites in Texas, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi and North Carolina for an environmental impact study before a final site for the National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility is selected in early 2009.

MADISON, Wis. — Madison police are offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the person responsible for the death of a college student who vanished last month.

Dane County Coroner John Stanley confirmed late Tuesday night that the body found in a wooded area south of Madison on Monday was that of 22-year-old Kelly Nolan. He is still working to determine the cause of death, but police said she was killed.

MADISON, WIS. – A decomposed body found in a densely wooded area Monday morning was that of a college student who vanished two weeks earlier, the Dane County coroner confirmed late Tuesday.

The body was positively identified as University of Wisconsin-Whitewater student Kelly Nolan, 22, coroner John Stanley said in a prepared statement.

FITCHBURG, Wis. — Dane County Coroner John Stanley positively identified the body found in a rural Wisconsin area Monday as that of missing college student Kelly Nolan Tuesday night.

Investigators on Tuesday took the body from the heavily wooded area were it was discovered to a morgue for an autopsy. A team of experts worked all day Tuesday to gather evidence at the scene 10 miles south of Madison on Schneider Drive.

Madison firefighters started a weeklong training that is a bit different from what they usually do. UW’s Ogg Hall, the former home of students, still provided a learning atmosphere.

Firefighters say it has been about 3 years since the last high rise fire in Madison, which is why they need to train more on it.

Since Ogg Hall is being torn down in August the university offered it to the fire department for training.

They had previously allowed the department to use the stairwells as practice during holidays, but never a vacant building.

A UW dorm set for demolition will serve as a training ground for local first responders.

Monday, UW police and Madison fire officials will begin using the 13-story Ogg Hall as an emergency-training facility.

An estimated 40-thousand students have lived in the Dayton Street residence hall since it opened in 1965.

Authorities say the body they found Monday may be that of a college student who vanished last month after a night of drinking. 22-year-old Kelly Nolan was a student at University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

A body was found Monday morning in a Fitchburg field about 10 miles south of where Nolan vanished. Dane Count Coroner John Stanley says the body is a young female and it may be Nolan’s but they haven’t made positive ID yet.

My brother visited Madison recently, and he spent a morning photographing a Madison architectural landmark.
The Capitol? No.

A Frank Lloyd Wright design? Definitely not.

No, he was documenting the wonders of the George L. Mosse Humanities Building, the most maligned structure on campus. UW-Madison officials can hardly wait to knock it down; the chancellor himself has joked about auctioning off the privilege of pushing the demolition plunger.

The Republican-run Assembly will take up a budget Tuesday that does not raise taxes while providing fewer funds for schools and the University of Wisconsin System than Democrats had sought.

A $10,000 reward is now available to anyone who can help police find Kelly Nolan.

Saturday, the 22-year-old’s family announced there are two separate awards.

One, a $5,000 reward, was donated by a close family friend who wishes to remain anonymous.

Employees of a bar on Madison’s West Gilman Street told 27 News they’ve been asked by police detectives whether they saw missing UW-Whitewater student Kelly Nolan at bar time before her disappearance two weeks ago.

Bartender Chris Kornell of Lava Lounge at 461 W. Gilman St., told 27 News he did not see Nolan as he served, and then dispersed a crowd in the early morning hours of Saturday, June 23.

But sources close to the search for the college student confirmed for 27 News police have interviewed a man who spent time with Nolan at Lava Lounge and then walked with her outside the bar.

A former UW student who faked her own abduction has finally paid off her debt to the city of Madison.

A new report suggests changed are needed in how the UW System is managed.

The study conducted by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank, examined the UW System over the past 35 years. Coordinator Tom Fletemeyer says an outdated administration is preventing the System from reaching its full potential, largely because the UW has become too decentralized in its management. As a result, issues are difficult to address because too many people are involved.

When the University of Pennsylvania tried to recruit UW-Madison professor Laura Kiessling last year, the pitch was simple.

“They pretty much asked us to tell them what we wanted — and they would give us that,” Kiessling said, of the joint offer made to Kiessling and husband Ronald Raines, a fellow UW-Madison biochemist.

It is also not lost on us that the announcement of a regional transportation authority comes with the support of the leaders of the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce, Downtown Madison, Incorporated, and the University of Wisconsin Madison. Such support only reinforces the regional breadth of the effort. But without the Mayor and County Executive leading the effort together no plan was going anywhere and we were in danger of being left with nothing. So credit to them for coming together. Our transportation future just got a lot brighter.

The search continues today for Kelly K. Nolan, 22, the missing woman who disappeared early Saturday morning after partying with friends downtown.

If there’s no progress in the investigation today, all indications are that Madison police will put out a national law enforcement bulletin this afternoon, trying to get some clues as to the young woman’s whereabouts.

Nolan’s family started a search for her Thursday, while Madison detectives and a dive team looked for her downtown and on the UW campus.

“Divers went into Lake Mendota in the Union Terrace area,” (police spoksperson Joel) DeSpain said. “Detectives were also combing the area, checking with people at fraternity and sorority houses.”

Throughout Dane County, growing traffic congestion, aging roads and tight budgets point to the need for regional cooperation on transportation solutions.
That’s why Wednesday’s agreement between Madison and Dane County, envisioning a regional transit authority with the power to impose a 0.5 percent sales tax, is an important breakthrough.

The family of missing college student, Kelly Nolan, and Madison Police detectives and officers are continuing their search for Nolan, who has not been heard from for close to five days.

Nolan’s younger sister, April, said Nolan was out with friends in downtown Madison last Friday, June 23, but split off from them at 11:30 p.m. April Nolan said her sister made phone contact with a family member early Saturday morning, but that was the last she was heard from.

EDGERTON, Wis. — Authorities have identified the victim of a fatal crash Wednesday night on Interstate 90 as a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Paula Poorman, 56, a psychology professor, pronounced dead at the crash scene Wednesday night.

“This is a huge loss to our campus family. Her colleagues, students and friends on campus will miss her greatly,” said Richard Telfer, interim chancellor at UW-Whitewater.

MADISON, Wis. — On short notice about 50 family and friends turned out for a vigil in downtown Madison Thursday night to support the family of a missing 22-year-old.

The group gathered at Library Mall to show support and bring more awareness to the community of Kelly Nolan’s disappearance.

University of Wisconsin-Whitewater student Kelly Nolan hasn’t been seen since around midnight on Saturday, June 23, in downtown Madison, WISC-TV reported.