COWLWEY COUNTY — One person died in an accident just after 10a.m. Friday in Cowley County.
The Kansas Highway Patrol reported a Dodge Grand Caravan driven by Maurice
Howe, 72, Burden, was southbound on U.S. 77 and crossed the center line striking a northbound Chrysler 200 driven by Darissa Ann Topper, 24, Winfield.Howe was transported to Southwest Medical Center where he died.
Topper was transported to a hospital in Wichita.
Both drivers were properly restrained at the time of the accident, according to the KHP.
DETROIT (AP) — Fiat Chrysler is recalling nearly 180,000 pickup trucks in North America to fix an electrical problem that can knock out the power steering.
The recall covers Ram 1500 pickups from the 2019 model year. Most are in the U.S. and one-third are still on dealer lots.
The company says a fastener that grounds the battery wasn’t secured properly in manufacturing. The connection can become loose, which disables the power steering. Drivers can still steer but the effort it takes wouldn’t be consistent.
FCA says it has no reports of crashes or injuries.
Dealers will secure the fastener at no cost to owners. Fiat Chrysler says it doesn’t have a date for the recall to begin, but it under U.S. law it has to start within 60 days.
Indian Call candidates for Hays High School have been selected. The king and queen will be announced between the girls and boys basketball games on Feb. 8.
2019 Hays High Indian Call candidates: Front row – Alyssa Underwood, Hannah McGuire, Madyson Flax, Brittany Pflaum, Hannah Harman. Back row – Tradgon McCrae, Cade Swayne, Jack Fort, Johnny Fuller, Jacob Maska.
A new rocket-powered ice cream truck might bring you ice cream from the moon someday if some ambitious entrepreneurs from Wilson Elementary have anything to say about it.
Hays High DECA students are celebrating entrepreneurship this week with an elementary student product build and a speaker.
DECA at Wilson
Cassidy Prough, HHS DECA student, discusses the rocket-powered ice cream truck that Wilson students Ben Zeller and Braxton Delzeit have created for their entrepreneurship project.
With the aid of DECA students, the first-grade students drew their creations Wednesday. On Friday, they will build the products out of Legos, present to the class and explain where they would sell their products.
One group of Wilson students created a rocket-powered ice cream truck that would sell alien ice cream.
Another group drew pictures of cherry, strawberry and other food-shaped inflatables for swimming pools.
Another group developed their own Fortnite characters, while two other groups drew images of various designs for jets and airplanes.
“We are trying to promote entrepreneurship around the community,” Madelyn Waddell, junior DECA student, said. “We wanted to use Legos for the kids to express their creativity. We picked the first graders because they are in the middle of learning how to add up money and learning how to use their creativity to put it on paper or build it somehow.”
Although the cost of the students’ projects were supposed to be limited to $5, the students differed greatly on how much they thought their products should sell for.
One group of students who designed jets thought their planes should cost between $100 and $900.
Whereas the students who designed the Fortnite characters thought their in-game purchases should cost “$2,000 billion.”
On Wednesday, the HHS students also read the first graders a book about a person who was struggling to sell lemonade.
Former DECA student returns to HHS for speech
Allyson Werth, a former HHS DECA student and recent FHSU grad, speaks to Hays High students on Wednesday.
Also on Wednesday, HHS students were invited to hear Allyson Werth, a former HHS DECA student and recent FHSU grad, talk about her Farmhouse Crafts business.
Werth started her wooden sign business when she was still in college in 2016. She bought a commercial vinyl cutting machine from her father-in-law.
This allowed her to create custom signs for business windows, wooden signs and door mats. She also offers DIY workshops.
Her signs start at about $35 each. Because all of the signs are custom designs, she requires payment in advance.
Although she has sold to people of all ages and genders, she determined her target market was women between 20 to 50 living in the U.S. She has primarily marketed through word-of-mouth and social media, including Facebook and Instagram. She does giveaways through Facebook posts. She also offers coupons to returning customers.
“More than 50 percent of my customers are return customers, so it is very important that my customers are happy and satisfied with the work that I have given them,” she said.
She said community involvement is important. This helps her grow her customer base through personal interactions. She also gets advice from national social groups of other entrepreneurs and crafters.
In 2018, she launched on Etsy and shipped to 15 states. However, the additional cost and labor involved with handling Etsy orders led her to closing that account at the beginning of this year.
Since graduation, Werth has taken a full-time job in addition to her craft business. She said orders tend not to be stable in her business, which makes it difficult for her to rely on that as a sole source of income.
A home business takes a lot of self-discipline, but Werth said she enjoys being able to set her own hours, learn from her business and take on new challenges.
She also said she received a great deal of satisfaction knowing people enjoy her designs and are pleased with her work.
One of her goals is to start a website for her business this year.
“I always tell people to follow your dreams,” she said. “People are always going to say you are never going to make it in the real world having a business, so that is when you need to weed out that negativity and tell people you are going to make it. It may take awhile. You are not going to be a $100,000 company in a day. It is going to take years and years to build your experience before you get to where you want to be.”
“Many business owners say they are never where they want to be. They are always learning and growing to build their business.”
The theme of this year’s campaign is Passion to Paycheck. The co-chairs of the campaign are Hays High DECA members Brooke Denning, Cassidy Prough and Madelyn Waddell.
DECA prepares emerging leaders and entrepreneurs for careers in marketing, finance, hospitality and management in high schools and colleges around the globe. There are 215,000 members worldwide.
Hays High DECA is active in the community by organizing and conducting the annual Trick or Treat So Others Can Eat Food Drive, supporting and raising funds for Ronald McDonald House Charities of Wichita, and conducting various public relations campaigns as well as various related marketing projects. Hays High DECA members also compete at a state and international level.
A HHS DECA student works with Wilson Elementary first graders Jan Pulido-Ortiz, Noah DeBey, Ella Giebler and Carter Carlisle to create a new product that they could build and sell.Two Hays High DECA students read to first graders Wednesday at Wilson Elementary School.Ella Giebler, first grader, colors her product during a DECA project at Wilson Elementary School.
TOPEKA – The Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) has rescinded a boil water advisory for the city of Timken, located in Rush County. The advisory was issued because the city could not maintain the minimum required chlorine residual. Failure to maintain required chlorine residual levels may put the system at risk for bacterial contamination.
Public water suppliers in Kansas take all measures necessary to notify customers quickly after a system failure or shutdown. Regardless of whether it’s the supplier or KDHE that announces a boil water advisory, KDHE will issue the rescind order following testing at a certified laboratory.
Laboratory testing samples collected from the City of Timken indicate no evidence of contamination and all other conditions that placed the system at risk of contamination are deemed by KDHE officials to be resolved.
Ashlen Leigh Lemon, 19, Hays, died Tuesday, January 22, 2019 at the Geary Community Hospital in Junction City, Kansas.
She was born February 14, 1999 in Hays the daughter of Claude T. and Teresa A. (Schonthaler) Lemon. She graduated from Hays High School in 2017 and was attending Fort Hays State University majoring in Psychology. She worked in the bakery at Wal-Mart in Hays as a cake decorator.
She was very sweet, loving, caring, simple, and creative, and she loved animals and her grandmother.
She is survived by her parents, Claude Lemon and Teresa Lemon, both of Hays, her maternal grandmother, Judy Yarrow of Hays, her paternal grandmother, Beverly Lemon of Monte Vista, Colorado, her boyfriend, Nelson Kawano of Kansas City, Missouri, an uncle, Harold Lemon and partner Jasmin Limtiaco of Fort Garland, Colorado, an aunt and uncle, Carol and Wayne Wise of Sacramento, CA, and her dog Ella and cat Jasper.
She was preceded in death by her maternal grandfathers, William Schonthaler and Stan Yarrow, paternal grandfather, Thomas Lemon, and two aunts, Gina Schonthaler and Leslie Schonthaler.
The family will receive friends from 5:00 pm until 7:00 on Thursday, January 31, 2019 at the Hays Memorial Chapel Funeral Home, 1906 Pine Street, Hays. Inurnment will take place at a later date in the St. John Lutheran Cemetery north of Ellis, Kansas.
Memorials are suggested to the Humane Society of the High Plains, in care of the funeral home. Condolences and memories of Ashlen may be shared with the family at www.haysmemorial.com.
SUMNER COUNTY — An earthquake shook portions of Kansas Friday afternoon.
Image courtesy Kansas Geological Survey
The quake just after 12:30p.m. measured a magnitude 3.8 and was centered approximately 11 miles east of Caldwell in Sumner County, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The quake follows a 2.8 magnitude quake near the same area January 20 and a series of four quakes ranging from a magnitude 2.5 – 4.5 in Sumner County January 16 and 17, according to the USGS.
There are no reports of damage or injury, according to the Sumner County Sheriff’s Department.
RILEY COUNTY — One person was injured in an accident on Thursday afternoon in Riley County.
Google map
Just before 4p.m. Thursday, police responded to a report of a medical emergency near Linear Trail and E Poyntz Avenue in Manhattan, according to the Riley County Police department activity report.
First responders found a 29-year-old woman with major injuries and she had fallen off the railroad bridge just south of US-24 and into the Kansas River.
She was transported to Via Christi in Manhattan for her injuries. The incident remains under investigation and is not believed to be suspicious at this time.
SEDGWICK COUNTY– A jury returned a guilty verdict Thursday against a Kansas woman accused of taking charitable donations meant for a young burn victim.
Davis -photo Sedgwick Co.
Cinthia Davis, 34 of Haysville, was convicted of felony theft after a three-day trial before a jury in Judge Bruce Brown’s courtroom, according to a media release from the Sedgwick County Attorney.
Evidence at trial showed that Davis set up an account on the GoFundMe website to raise money for a 10-year-old Haysville girl who was burned in 2015. The account raised $8,145 from 124 donors in less than a month.
An investigator from the Haysville Police Department testified that all the funds were withdrawn from the GoFundMe account and spent over a period of 60 days after the fundraiser ended. The mother of the injured girl testified that the family only received a few hundred dollars of the donations.
Davis’ husband, Martin Joe Kerr, also was charged with felony theft in the case. Kerr pleaded guilty to his part in the theft and was sentenced to probation in 2018.
Sentencing for Cinthia Davis is scheduled for March 12th.
The longer the government shutdown persists, the more aware we all become of just how many functions the federal government actually performs.
Last week, the Daily Caller published an anonymous op-ed from a senior Trump official who stated s/he hopes the shutdown “lasts a very long time, till the government is changed and can never return to its previous form…Senior officials can reprioritize during an extended shutdown, focus on valuable results and weed out the saboteurs. We do not want most employees to return, because we are working better without them.”
Some results of the shutdown? Farmers have been unable to secure USDA loans. Three people have died while visiting our currently-unstaffed national parks. And thanks to the shortage of TSA agents at airports, a passenger managed to make it through security and onto a flight with a gun in his bag.
I can’t speculate about the identity of the official. I can’t speak to the validity of his/her complaints about government inefficiency — I’ve never been a federal government employee (although my husband is one). But I can safely say that, no, things are not working better without them.
The ripple effects of the shutdown can be seen in a lot of unexpected places. Here are just a handful of ways it’s impacting our First Amendment rights:
We’re less informed about what’s going on in our own country. How’s our economy doing? Are the Trump tariffs actually working? Is it a good time to buy a house, start a business or invest in the stock market? No one knows. As the Brookings Institution reports, “The people who collect, analyze and release all the basic data tracking the path of the economy and its principal aspects are on furlough.” Ordinarily, businesses and consumers rely on these reports to make critical and informed decisions. That’s why the First Amendment protects public access to this information. But there’s not a lot it can do when there’s no information to access.
Businesses can’t communicate with their customers. Last week, D.C. brewery Atlas Beer Works filed a lawsuit claiming the shutdown is violating its First Amendment right to speak to consumers. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau can’t review and approve Atlas’ new labels for its seasonal beer, the brewery can’t ship its kegs interstate without those labels and in the meantime 40 barrels of perishable, apricot-infused India pale ale might go bad. You may scoff at the idea of a beer label as free speech, but as Atlas’ lawyers point out, “It cannot sell, and no one will purchase, random, unidentified liquids.” The requirement for a government agency to review this sort of communication protects consumers from the harm that false or misleading labels could cause.
Prominent First Amendment court cases have ground to a halt. While the courts are still operating, many of them have suspended work on civil cases involving U.S. government lawyers, among them the Pen American Center’s First Amendment lawsuit against President Trump.
While the majority of the Department of Justice (DOJ)’s lawyers are still working during the shutdown, they’re a bit overtaxed right now. Just last week, they had to contend with a lawsuit brought by several groups of federal workers against the government for forcing them to work without pay. The DOJ lawyers defending the government in court were also working without pay.
To add insult to injury, there are limits to how they can express their displeasure about this. A law, the Hatch Act, prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activity when they’re at work and new guidelines have stated that hanging up a “resistance” poster or advocating for impeachment falls into that category. But while there’s been some concern that the new guidelines are too restrictive on the speech of federal employees, the Hatch Act is grounded in a noble purpose. It was passed to protect federal employees from political coercion and ensure their advancement is based on merit and not political affiliation. At the heart of this is a belief in the value of career civil servants, people who are experienced in the way that government runs and do their jobs to the best of their abilities regardless of who’s in power.
That’s why it’s disheartening to read the anonymous Trump official’s call to “weed out saboteurs” in the government, or President Trump’s tweets that most of the federal workers going without pay are Democrats (implying he has less of a reason to care about the shutdown than his Democratic opponents in Congress). He’s using partisan terms to dismiss hundreds of thousands of people who have sworn to do their jobs in a non-partisan fashion.
Lata Nott is executive director of the First Amendment Center of the Freedom Forum Institute. Contact her via email at [email protected], or follow her on Twitter at @LataNott.
By a very small margin, Barbara (Barb) Wasinger was elected our new state representative, but I recently learned from a colleague who had visited her to discuss ways to increase voter participation of her allegations that certain residents of the 111th District tried to steal the election from her.
Who are these unscrupulous characters who wanted to torpedo this fine Republican’s chances for high office? According to Representative Wasinger, they are the notorious FHSU students. Apparently, Ms. Wasinger feels like the District can take their tuition money, their food money, their rent money, their beer money and the money they spend in the mall and downtown stores. They also pay city and state sales tax on most of these purchases. But when it comes to District representation in state government, their political participation is not welcome, if not illegitimate. These students “live” somewhere else, so let them vote somewhere else, seems to be her attitude, even though they spend well over half of their time and money in Hays.
If you think of what Hays would be without FHSU students, another WaKeeney, and the fact that state legislators control FHSU, determine state funding levels to offset tuition costs and set the tax structure that determines how much taxes college students pay, it seems blatantly unfair and un-American to deny them any say in who their state representative will be. Somewhere I heard, “No taxation without representation.” The City already burdens them with additional sales tax they wouldn’t pay at other Kansas universities. Now Wasinger wants them to pay state sales tax with no representation in the state legislature.
It is no secret. The tide is turning. Women, young people, ethnic minorities and now college students are finally realizing that the Republican Party caters to white, male fat-cats like Donald Trump, most of his cabinet and about 5% of his base. They are desperate at this point and looking for any way to suppress the Democratic vote. FHSU students will not be made second-class citizens just because they move to Hays to attend college or because they lean toward liberal political policies.
Ms. Wasinger will see a voter registration drive on the FHSU campus in 2020 that will show her what real democracy looks like. I invite her to speak at a Times Talk session to explain in detail the election fraud these students perpetrated on her campaign. Perhaps our champion against voter fraud, Kris Kobach, can help her stop the corruption she alleges. Nothing is more important for democracy than a valid and inclusive election.
“We are trying to promote entrepreneurship around the community,” Madelyn Waddell, junior DECA student, said. “We wanted to use Legos for the kids to express their creativity. We picked the first graders because they are in the middle of learning how to add up money and learning how to use their creativity to put it on paper or build it somehow.”
