News you can use
News you can use
Sorted by date Results 1799 - 1823 of 3221
Much to my surprise, a North 40 column from a few weeks ago created a confused hullabaloo among a few readers who were concerned that President Donald Trump actually might be, as I suggested, authorizing a wall of such grand proportions between the U.S. and Canada that the wall would be able to keep the cold northerly winds of Canada from crossing the border into the U.S. Yes, I was writing about a weather-stopping wall. Let me assure you, dear readers, that this notion is...
After a week on the beach, my guests, Don and Denise, and I, boarded the Primera Plus Autobus in Mazatlan, and climbed across the Sierras to my home in Etzatlan. In a country where not everyone has acquired a car and where some people with cars chose to take advantage of the excellent public transportation, I’ve got to tell you, my friends, we are impressed. We used to have pretty decent public transit in our country, too, until every family “needed” two cars in the garag...
During National School Choice, it is important to recognize and celebrate academic innovation that is happening in public schools across Montana. Our state’s education system is unique. We have over 400 hundred school districts and over 800 schools spread out over our vast geographic area. Many districts across our state are creating new programs outside of the traditional school model that prepare students for the future. Montana only has two formal charter schools, The Bridger Charter Academy in Bozeman and the Lincoln C...
The first news stories of each New Year usually feature people working around the clock to make our communities great. Routine coverage includes the men and women who protect our neighborhoods, maintain our roadways and make it possible to access health care at any time of the day or night. It’s a subtle reminder that Montanans value their way of life and are working together to protect it. Health care workers will continue to advance progress as the state’s largest labor force. They are the doctors and nurses who del...
In the final hours of 2017, when most of us were with our families enjoying the holiday season, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and the Trump administration announced that they were making major changes to the sage-grouse land management plans. Before the New Year’s ball dropped, the Bureau of Land Management released six instructional memorandums to state and field offices outlining how to implement significant changes to state-based sage-grouse management plans. These radical changes, made by Zinke and the BLM, gut s...
The disdain for the American Prairie Reserve’s wooly-minded plan to put free-roaming bison back on the prairie continues to grow amongst rural Montanans who also find it incredible that a nonprofit organization is allowed to pursue its land gobbling agenda with seemingly no objections from state or federal officials. It is fair to say there’s going to be problems when an organization steam rolls into rural Montana communities with claims of a higher calling to displace farming and ranching with a 3-4 million acre nature zoo...
In December 2016, four county central committees and the county commissioners of Liberty, Chouteau, Cascade and Hill counties appointed me to the vacated District 14 Senate seat midway through my predecessor’s four-year term. It was a great honor to be entrusted with this responsibility, and I am thrilled to be announcing that I am running for the seat again after representing you in 2017 and 2018. I have been a life-long resident of Northern Montana, raised on the family homestead in northern Liberty County, educated on t...
The burden of trying to be funny this week is too great for my tense and increasing stooped shoulders to bear. Fortunately, we here at Pamville News are fond of gathering odd news and this week has enough of that to fill the gap. They fought the law Reuters reported Wednesday, Jan. 17, that psychic Sally Ann Johnson was sentenced in Boston to 26 months in prison after she admitted trying to avoid paying taxes on $3.5 million she was paid by an elderly Massachusetts woman...
Greetings from Mazatlan. Every morning I sit on my balcony and watch the waves sloppy kiss the sand. Bird Island sits directly across a narrow stretch of water. Condors, vultures by any other name, circle thermals upward from island nests, then split off in search of wider skies and prey. Shrimp boats troll the horizon. Frigate birds patrol the sky. Pelicans dive face first into the sea, bob up with fish hanging from beaks. Morning sun splatters the beach through coconut palm...
O, Canada, our friendly neighbors to the north, keep your lousy weather to yourself. You and your polite people seem like such greet-you-with-warm-cookies kind of friendly — right up to the point you decide to hammer us with back-to-back, arctic-wind driven storms. What’s up with that arctic weather? Eh? I was game for the first storm. I mean, it is winter. Cold and snow are expected at some point in the season — apparently our ecology relies on it and I’ve come to terms with that. Certainly, we needed something to put a s...
Happy New Year from Montana State University-Northern! One of my resolutions is to re-institute the Chancellor’s Corner in the Havre Daily News. I will be using this space to share newsworthy happenings taking place on our campus with our community, and to thank you for your continued support of our great university. January is always an exciting time at MSU-Northern as we welcome both new and returning students to campus. The break was pretty exciting, too, as we used that time to make some facility improvements, i...
We gringos were all invited to attend a double christening for a great-granddaughter and a great-grandson of Delia, the Rancho owner. In preparation, Jim and I went into town to get gifts the day before the event. We figured since we were specially invited, we should bring gifts. Unfortunately, we went with flawed information. We, separately, understood, or misunderstood as the case would be, the ages of the children to be around 8 and 10 years. We don’t know the children a...
The headline will read “Woman dies shopping for refrigerator.” Readers will be expecting to find that I was crushed by a 22 cubic foot appliance, flattened like Wile E. Coyote, but no, shopping is the silent killer. It’ll be a heart attack that gets me, maybe a stroke or an aneurysm just to shake things up a bit. My last words will be “I hate shopping,” then goodnight, Irene, I’ll drop to the floor in a resounding thud of defeat. It shouldn’t be this hard. I know what I d...
I had to decide. She’d had a reaction to the anesthetic which left symptoms similar to epilepsy. Convulsions. Starvation. A rack of bones loosely held in rags of fur. Put her down. A euphemism by any other name … death. My tears soaked her fur. I held her last breath. My Cat Ballou, playful, teasing, gentle sweet kitten-cat. That night I lay in bed, holding memory, accusations rattling around my brain cage, familiar. Why does everyone, everything I love, leave me? What is wro...
Call me a snowflake, I don’t care, but I refuse to participate in the scam called New Year’s resolutions because it is an affront to my emotional well-being. You know the drill. Along with lists of Top 10 Whatevers of the Year, along with the Best This and the Worst That recaps, we get this pressure to come up with awesome ways we are going become the new and improved version of ourselves — eat right, get more sleep, exercise more, lose weight, get a raise/...
“Sure wish I’d known 40, 50, years ago what I know today. I might have done some things differently,” I told my daughter. I was bemoaning my financial status, not for the first time, more like a recurring toothache or a grumpy relative one feels obliged to visit. “There you go again, bad-mouthing your ‘lack-of-planning’ choices. Most people work their whole lives for retirement and then never end up getting to do anything with it. When you worked, you worked hard. Then when y...
I pray you all had a great Christmas and are looking forward to a happy and heathy New Year. Over the past year, I have had the wonderful opportunity and privilege to serve as your District 14 senator. It has been a great experience for me to expand my public service from a county level to the State. Though the learning curve has been steep, I’ve enjoyed the year immensely and look forward to continuing to tackle state and local issues. During my current tenure, Senate District 14 has faced and addressed a number of o...
For years, Washington has grown in its power and wealth while hardworking Americans have struggled to make ends meet. In fact, the nation’s most affluent counties are suburbs of Washington, D.C. Taxpayer dollars have padded the pockets of D.C. for far too long — enough is enough. Just in time for Christmas, I was honored to join Congress in passing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. This historic tax bill will lower rates for hardworking Montanans, boost higher wages and incentivize job creation. It will keep more than $700 mil...
Santa came early for hardworking Montanans. Republicans have kept their promise to the American people and delivered tax reform that will let you keep more of what you earn. In just a couple of months, you’ll see more of your hard-earned money in your paychecks, families will have much needed relief, and small businesses can grow, invest, and create more Montana jobs. This was long overdue — actually 31 years overdue. The last time Washington reformed the tax code, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, and I had a full hea...
One-party passage of the GOP/Trump “Tax Scam” bill that pretends to aid the middle class while tilting the tax system more than ever to the benefit of the super-wealthy and corporations was the nail in the coffin of the populist charade Trump and the GOP leveraged to electoral victory in 2016. The reality in 2018 is that plutocracy once again reigns supreme under the GOP and Trump. Plutocracy is government by the wealthy. Populism is support for the concerns of ordinary people. The historical difference between Rep...
As a young high school American government teacher, I compared our system to an automobile that was useful if it could start, speed up, slow down and stop. When the people thought government needed to be more active, they elected liberal Democrats to press down on the accelerator. When people thought government’s role was getting too large and expensive, they elected Republicans to apply the brakes and slow things down. Our national debt is now $20 trillion and rising. That amounts to about $155,000 in tax liability for t...
With a notoriously poor memory for the events of my childhood and a brain that seems to make stronger, longer-lasting neural links with negative memories than happy ones, it’s nothing short of a Christmas miracle that I have so many fond memories of this holiday from my younger years. Even before the annual hunt for the perfect tree came the package from my Grandma Inez with her version of an advent calendar: a wall hanging of burlap with a green felt Christmas tree. It had t...
“I couldn’t sleep a wink last night,” it’s true. It’s silly to be lovelorn and at my age too. Oh, no. Don’t get excited. It’s not what you think. More’s the pity. I swear, I can hardly believe myself. An animal. A dumb animal. Well, not so dumb, it turns out. Saturday, the chosen day, finally arrived — Cat Ballou took an anticipated trip to the veterinarian for the essential surgery, the one to prevent an unending series of duplicates. Surgery went well. Ballou returned home c...
Imagine this. You wake up Christmas morning and there it is — the biggest gift under the tree has your name on it. Yes, yours. You grab it, place it in front of you, and without even needing to unwrap it, you instinctually know this is going to be the greatest gift you’ve ever received. Moved by this unfamiliar, yet heartwarming feeling, you set in on the task in front of you. Side by side, you carefully peel back the wrapping paper, slowly revealing what’s inside. Vast and rugged, but beautiful and snowy, you begin to see t...
Clinical Assistant Professor in family medicine at Memorial University of Newfoundland Dr. Kyle Sue recently published an article in British Medical Journal that The Guardian described as a “wry” scientific look at how men experience cold and flu virus symptoms worse than women do. Yes, a guy named Sue was looking to prove that “man flu” is a thing. In a not entirely thorough treatise based on some scientific studies and some not-so-scientific stuff, Sue proposes in part that men feel worse when they’re sick because they are...
