TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas laboratory responsible for testing for contamination in the event of an accident at the state’s only nuclear power plant hasn’t been staffed for several weeks after its final two employees left in September.
The Kansas Department of Health and Environment says an Iowa lab is testing routine samples from the Wolf Creek nuclear plant, and that Kansas has several other agencies that would respond if there were an emergency.
The Topeka Capital-Journal (http://bit.ly/1i0nulk ) reports five people worked at KDHE’s Radiochemistry Section in 2014 but two left before the end of the year. By July staffing was down to the two who left last month.
KDHE says public health isn’t endangered and the agency’s ability to carry out its responsibilities doesn’t rely on any individual department or worker.
HUTCHINSON — The written and oral arguments have gone before an arbitrator, the Hutchinson City Council and now the Reno County District Court.
Oral arguments were heard on Thursday in the civil case filed by two former Hutchinson Police officers who were terminated for lying during an internal investigation.
The local Fraternal Order of Police filed civil action against the city on behalf of Lorenzo Bohringer and Charles Malvo, claiming the city erred in going against an arbitrator’s ruling that the two should be reinstated.
The arguments were much the same as they had been ever since the termination of the two officers took place.
City Attorney Paul Brown went before Judge Trish Rose and said the matter should be handled by the city and not before a court.
He argued that the two officers lied during an internal investigation into a complaint against another officer. He said that lying is strictly forbidden in the police department, and could not be tolerated.
The attorney for the Fraternal Order of Police Matthew Huntsman argued that if that is the case, why did another officer get just a written warning for lying to his superior over the completion of a police report that was to be use in a court hearing?
He also argued that the city wanted to send such matters to arbitration during the latest bargaining agreement, and then went against an arbitrator’s ruling when it didn’t suit them.
Judge Rose announced she will have a ruling in the matter within 30 days.
Each fall, Fort Hays State University’s Residence Hall Association hosts a Halloween Safe Trick-or-Treat in McMindes Hall for local children and families. This year it will be from 6 to 8 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 27.
All elementary school children are invited to participate in the fun and safe environment. Candy will be distributed by participating McMindes residents, and activities are planned in several areas of the building.
Boot Hill Cemetery in Hays City ceased operation in 1874, and most of the bodies buried there were moved to Mount Allen Cemetery.
However, the spirits of the departed desperadoes may still haunt the grounds of the first cemetery to bear the notorious name. Old School Paranormal of Hays will investigate for the annual Ellis County Historical Society special event Haunted Boot Hill. There is no telling what may be found.
The demonstration is scheduled to start at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 28, and is free to the public with free treats (and no tricks). The Ellis County Historical Society acquired the site of Boot Hill in 1972. Located at the corner of 18th and Fort streets, the area is now preserved as a historical park presided over by the Felten statue of The Visitor.
The Ellis County Historical Society Museum is located at 100 W. Seventh and is open Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 1 to 6 p.m. For more information, call (785) 628-2624 or email [email protected].
Kansas Poet Laureate Eric McHenry will speak on the Fort Hays State University campus at 7:30 p.m. Friday in the Fort Hays State Ballroom.
The event is being sponsored by the FHSU’s chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honor Society, and will be the keynote event of the Delta’s High Plains Regional Conference, held Friday and Saturday.
Eric McHenry, Poet Laureate of Kansas
The event is free and open to the public.
McHenry was named the Kansas Poet Laureate this year and will serve in the role until 2017.
“Eric brings to the Poet Laureate of Kansas position an abundance of talent and enthusiasm,” said Julie Mulvihill, executive director of the Kansas Humanities Council, in a release announcing his appointment. “As a writer, his words seem effortless, although we know how meticulously and thoughtfully he deliberates on each. As a teacher, his intelligence and humor make poetry come alive. The combination of these qualities will make Eric an exceptional poet laureate for our state.”
“There’s nothing I love more than sharing poetry with people, and I look forward to doing that in every corner of Kansas over the next two years,” McHenry said. “I think we’re all grateful when we encounter language that’s equal to life’s richness and complexity. Poetry can provide that.”
McHenry’s official page can be found here.
In the video below, here some of McHenry’s work, as read by “Star Trek” icon Leonard Nimoy:
Gene Policinski is senior vice president of the First Amendment Center
It’s Free Speech Week 2015 — and a major debate over free speech has just broken out.
Thanks to the First Amendment, we are free to compliment, cajole, deny or decry. And if you’re looking for something immediate that calls out for more free and unfettered discussion, join this newest national debate over anonymous speech on the Web.
On Wednesday, a coalition of women’s and civil rights groups announced a campaign to pressure colleges, through the U.S. Department of Education, to go on the offensive — pardon that reference — against anonymous social media applications like Yik Yak, which allows students to send social media messages within a specific university’s virtual community.
These groups asked the U.S. Education of Department to treat colleges’ failure to monitor anonymous social media comments, ranging from threats of rape and murder to insults using racial slurs or simply uncomplimentary references, as a violation of federal civil rights laws.
The groups’ letter to the department’s Office of Civil Right cites a number of examples, including “incidents at the University of Mary Washington, where female students were threatened with rape, murder and other abuse via Yik Yak, and at Clemson University where racially abusive Yaks appeared after a student march protesting the failure to indict the police officer responsible for the death of unarmed African-American teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.”
Absent the kind of directed, viable and proximate conditions required for a criminal charge, the examples raise concerns over atmospherics and ideas expressed on campuses — areas which traditionally gain the highest levels of First Amendment protections.
In fact, the coalition is critical of college administrators who it says cite “vague First Amendment concerns” in refusing to squelch Yik Yak and its kin. It calls on federal officials to mandate that universities use campus disciplinary powers, employ technological tools to block certain social media sites, ban the use of campus wi-fi to make objectionable posts, and conduct 24-7 monitoring of social media to spot the errant postings. It also asks for counseling for students traumatized by such online posts.
The groups have a worthy goal: to combat threats of violence and assault that terrorize a perceived victim. The pressing questions — particularly poignant during Free Speech Week, which this year is Oct. 19-25 — are what kind of speech rises to that level? And how do responsible tactics against such threats avoid becoming political correctness run amok and a latter-day, academic version of witch hunts?
Such questions are far from “vague concerns” over a core freedom. And, the “Yik Yak letter” is not the only arena in which we are debating old standards about free expression.
Various economic interests have pressed state legislators to consider or enact laws that aim to prevent activists from gathering information on animal cruelty or evidence that environmental laws are being ignored — attempting to use such so-called “ag-gag” statutes and claims of economic harm to silence those who would hold violators accountable in courts of law or the court of public opinion.
New laws citing privacy and property rights would limit the use and very presence of drones. And concerns over misuse of videos taken from body cameras worn by officers are stoking yet another area of concern in what once was seen as a positive means to empower citizens to speak out on police abuses.
But increasingly it’s college campuses — just a generation ago, the bastion of efforts aimed at tearing down the power of administrators to control student expression — at the forefront of the free speech fight.
Critics worry about overzealous requirements for so-called “trigger warning” of classroom topics that might possibly upset or insult someone or bans on speech that sometime offend even a single person that could gut academic freedom. Professors and administrators are labeled as racist or sexist over perceived “microagressions” — words or phrases linked to negative or disturbing meanings, far from the long-held legal standards of a “true threat,” but simply considered to be “unwelcome.”
According to figures compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), at least 240 campaigns have been conducted in little more than a decade at U.S. universities to prevent speakers from appearing on campuses simply because some students or faculty members find the speakers’ views objectionable. College news outlets have been attacked because of satirical cartoons and clearly labeled op-ed pieces, all too often simply for expressing opinions some students found unsettling.
And then there’s an even a more subtle threat to the Web’s promise of a utopia for free speech. Just a few “clicks” can ensure one only sees sites that reinforce already-held views or limits social media contact only to those already in agreement.
Eliminating the serendipity of discovering other viewpoints or the intellectual challenge of confronting persuasive views that differ from our own drains both the meaning and value of free speech.
We’ve spent decades determining the legal stands for threatening speech, which includes requirements for immediacy and potential.
There’s no question that some ideas are repellent and frightening. Changing public opinion about those ideas is harder and takes more time than changing laws in an attempt to eliminate them. But the counter to speech we don’t like — or even speech we feel is detrimental to many — should be more speech, not less.
The value of free speech rests with reasoned response to the discord of differing views. America’s founders reasoned that ultimately, decisions and attitudes for the public good come from vigorous public debate.
History is replete with the failure to stop ideas by silencing a speaker. A nation rooted in dissent should not use the power of government to tell its citizens, colleges or even childish and juvenile websites to be silent in the name of comfort or a “vague notion” of making us safer by simply by not hearing or posting that which offends.
So speak up, speak out: It’s Free Speech Week.
Gene Policinski is chief operating officer of the Newseum Institute and senior vice president of the Institute’s First Amendment Center. [email protected]
Park Hill High School senior Jordan Elder, speaking at the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce Thursday, said that raising the smoking age to 21 would help her peers form healthy habits that last a lifetime. CREDIT MIKE SHERRY / HEARTLAND HEALTH MONITOR
Business and health leaders on Thursday announced an ambitious initiative to convince elected officials in the dozens of municipalities throughout the Kansas City area to raise the legal age for buying cigarettes from 18 to 21.
Spearheaded by the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City, “Tobacco 21 | KC” aims to build on a movement that now counts nearly 100 communities around the country and the state of Hawaii that have made 21 the legal age for purchasing tobacco products.
“This is our time to make a choice that is different for our children,” said Dr. Bridget McCandless, CEO of the Health Care Foundation of Greater Kansas City and a leader of Healthy KC, the collaboration between the Chamber and Blue Cross.
Chamber leaders said they had no timetable for achieving their goal but were encouraged by initial conversations with local elected officials.
A legislative committee of the Unified Government of Wyandotte County/Kansas City, Kansas, on Monday is scheduled to consider an ordinance raising the tobacco age to 21. If approved, it will likely go before the full commission next month.
Preventing kids from starting to smoke is one of the best ways to keep them from picking up the habit as adults. The Institute of Medicine, in a March 2015 report, said that among adults who become daily smokers, approximately 90 percent say they first smoked before they reached the age of 19 and nearly 100 percent before the age of 26.
“It is one of the most effective ways to prevent kids from starting a noxious habit that can end in their early death,” Chamber CEO Jim Heeter said.
The Health Care Foundation cited Needham, Massachusetts, as an example of what can happen when a community increases the legal age for buying cigarettes.
Needham was the first community in the country, in 2005, to implement Tobacco 21. Between 2006 and 2010, teen smoking in Needham decreased by 46 percent.
Heeter said he hoped Tobacco 21 would mirror the successful campaign to enact local ordinances banning indoor smoking.
“We want the entire metro blanketed with Tobacco 21,” said Scott Hall, the chamber’s vice president of strategic initiatives.
Hall said the aim is not to criminalize purchases if people are caught buying cigarettes under age. Rather, he said, the idea is for municipalities to use a productive approach like sending offenders to a smoking cessation program.
In Missouri, at least, convenience store operators have been a powerful force in stymieing an increase in the cigarette tax, another way health advocates have tried to dissuade people from smoking. They say teens are especially price-sensitive.
Heeter, however, said Tobacco 21 | KC leaders don’t expect concerted opposition from convenience store operators. They are more focused on statewide issues, he said.
The convenience store lobby sought to dissuade the Columbia City Council from raising the tobacco age to 21 last year, said Ginny Chadwick, the former city councilwoman who sponsored the ordinance. The ordinance, however, passed on a 6-1 vote, she said.
Chadwick is an instructor in the School of Health Professions at the University of Missouri – Columbia, where she said students had accepted the change.
“It is part of our normal life now,” she said.
Also at the chamber Thursday was Jordan Elder, 17, a senior at Park Hill High School and co-chair of Youth With Vision, a prevention-focused organization comprised of high school leaders from Platte, Clay and Ray counties in Missouri.
“I recognize the importance of making the right choices, and I know other young people stand with me in this effort,” Elder said. “Tobacco 21 has the ability to help my peers make these good choices, choices that form healthy habits that last a lifetime.”
Editor’s note: The Health Care Foundation of Greater Kansas City provides funding for Heartland Health Monitor.
Mike Sherry is a reporter for Heartland Health Monitor, a news collaboration focusing on health issues and their impact in Missouri and Kansas.
Ellis County and northwest Kansas received another refreshing dose of precipitation Thursday afternoon, with reports showing Hays received about a half-inch of rain in the city.
North of Hays reports were slightly less, with a third of an inch, although there was a report of 0.7 inches near Ellis.
Trego County saw rain in the gauge ranging from 0.75 to 0.83 inches, and there was a report of 1.1 inches of rain in eastern Gove County.
Skies are expected to clear Friday and into the weekend, with windy conditions returning later Friday morning.
The FHSU band will give an exhibition performance at Monday’s High Plains Marching Band festival.
FHSU University Relations and Marketing
Fourteen Kansas marching bands will take the field for the on Oct. 26, at Fort Hays State University’s Lewis Field Stadium.
Dr. Lane Weaver, assistant professor of music, coordinates the festival and directs the FHSU marching band. He said that the bands participating in the festival are diverse, ranging from large schools like Junction City and Liberal to small schools like Dighton.
“Some of the schools coming have eight-man football teams, yet they’re able to march, which is amazing,” said Weaver. “It shows other schools that small schools can do this, too.”
High Plains provides a friendly atmosphere for small schools that want to nurture their marching programs. The festival is smaller and more intimate than the Kansas State University and University of Kansas marching band days, and allows small bands to become comfortable in festival settings before competing in larger ones.
The festival is also important for schools planning on restarting marching programs. High school bands from Hoisington, Plainville, Russell, and Stockton will come and watch with hopes of competing next year. Groups from Hays Middle School will also observe, preparing students to participate in high school band.
This year will be Rock Creek’s first time competing in a festival. Director Nate Craft chose High Plains because other band directors spoke highly of it.
“Our band’s good, but they need to see other bands and what they are doing,” said Craft. “They don’t know yet how disciplined other bands are, and seeing the Fort Hays State band perform will do that.”
The FHSU band will give an exhibition performance before the awards ceremony, where the bands will receive their ratings. Six judges will rate the bands on music, general effect and marching. Percussion and auxiliary will also be judged, but they will not weigh into the rating. All bands will receive written and verbal comments.
The bands are scheduled to perform in order of size, as follows:
10:40 a.m. — Dighton High School
11 a.m. — Ellinwood High School
11:20 a.m. — Ellsworth High School
11:40 a.m. — Stanton County High School
12 noon — Cimarron High School
12:40 p.m. — Larned High School
1 p.m. — Goodland High School
1:20 p.m. — Concordia High School
1:40 p.m. Rock Creek High School 2 p.m. — Hays High School
2:40 p.m. — Ulysses High School
3:00 p.m. — Nickerson High School
3:20 p.m. — Junction City High School
3:40 p.m. — Liberal High School
4 p.m. — Fort Hays State University (exhibition)
4:15 p.m. — Awards
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Wichita police say a man found in wrecked car has died after a shooting was reported in the area.
The Wichita Eagle reports that officers responded to an accident scene in which a car had veered off a road. Wichita police Lt. Dale Mattern says three men in the car were seriously injured and one of them later died.
Mattern would not confirm whether the person died as a result of a shooting or other injuries. The two other occupants of the car were taken to Via Christi Hospital St. Francis in critical condition.
Mattern says police took a man in his 20s into custody at the scene for questioning.
Beginning Monday, October 26, 13th Street will be closed between Main Street and Fort Street to through traffic. Traffic control devices will be in place to direct the traveling public.
This closure is due to work being performed on waterline connections. Work is expected to be completed within approximately two weeks.
The City appreciates the public’s patience and understanding during the course of this project. If there are any questions, please contact the contractor, M&D, at (785) 650-3802 or the Public Works Department at (785) 628-7350.
Low clouds this morning are expected to scatter out later on today with sunshine prevailing by afternoon. A wind shift will occur to the northwest by afternoon with an increase in speed to 15 to 25mph. Highs will range from the mid 60s over far west central KS to the mid 70s across far south central Kansas.
Today Patchy fog before 10am. Otherwise, partly sunny, with a high near 69. South wind 11 to 18 mph becoming west northwest in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 28 mph.
Tonight Partly cloudy, with a low around 40. Northwest wind 9 to 14 mph.
SaturdaySunny, with a high near 65. North wind 5 to 10 mph.
Saturday NightClear, with a low around 36. Northeast wind around 5 mph becoming south after midnight.
SundaySunny, with a high near 68. South wind 5 to 9 mph.
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas laboratory responsible for testing for contamination in the event of an accident at the state’s only nuclear power plant hasn’t been staffed for several weeks after its final two employees left in September.
