News you can use
News you can use
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Editor: After the horrific shootings in Connecticut, we all hope to find a way to prevent this tragedy from ever happening again. Right now — as in the past — many in our nation are looking to gun control, and the pundits are insisting we act now, while emotions are still high. Being a member of the Montana Legislature, I am in a position to enact law to protect my fellow Montanans, the teachers and children in our schools. Over the past week, I have lost sleep due to the heartache and trying to find an answer. Some have sug...
With the 2013 session of the Montana Legislature about to convene, hunters, anglers and those who value Montana's outdoor amenities had better prepare to become involved. The 2011 Legislature gave us fair warning that things like privatizing stream access (House Bill 309), blocking acquisition of wildlife habitat (House Bill 272), liberalizing laws to restore cyanide heap leach mining (Senate Bill 306) and even efforts to dilute our Constitutional right to a clean environment (House Bill 292), remain on the "conservative"...
New Years is always a time to look back at the year that was and what it means for us all going forward. Many other columnists will be counting down their best/worst lists of events over the year. But since this columnist loves writing about all the wonderful things the Internet can do for you, I'm just going to use Google. As in the past several years, this year Google has launched a website, http://www.google.com/zeitgeist, to tally the sum of people's curiosity and endeavours around the entire globe through 2012. A video...
I felt pretty old this year. My wife and I bought a house last fall, just days before having our first child. Now that I'm both a father and a homeowner, I have more kinds of insurance policies than I even knew existed a year ago, and I suddenly have opinions about property taxes and school boards. Caleb Hutchins As a young bachelor, I found it easy to be disdainful of social welfare and government intervention. Now that my responsibilities extend beyond renting an apartment and playing video games, issues that were black...
"Recycle? Are you kidding? I don't have room to store a bunch of junk. How would I get it to wherever it's gotta go? It's too hard." I understood her objections. Where I lived in Washington it was easy. The mega-giant Waste Management distributed recycle bins along with the garbage bins and emptied both on pick-up day. We paid for recycling as part of our garbage bill. I sorted aluminum and metal into one bin, cardboard and paper into another and glass into the third. Since th...
Joe Mazurek was a wise and insightful peacemaker. His passing was not unexpected, but his legacy for fairness and gentle persuasion will live on in the memory of all those who had the good fortune to work with him in the political process of our state. Bob Brown Jim McGarvey was a brave and gallant fighter. He could sometimes be unkind to the King's English, but never to a loyal friend. Montana's legendary union leader, he was the true friend of working class people, and never forgot his common roots in the "sacred city" of...
I would like to congratulate the U.S. Supreme Court for doing more for the economy than all of the executive and legislative branches of our government combined. So don't be hatin' them. The president, the Senate, the House, all those economic advisors, department heads and think tank intellectuals, they're all a bunch of second rank amateurs for creating economic stimulus compared to the nine member of the highest court in the land of the free. Pam Burke When the Supreme...
It seems that various teams in the past several Summer Olympics have utilized an amazing secret weapon to help them bring home the Olympic bling: U.S. Navy SEAL training. Go ahead and say it ... Hoo-yah. In March, a group of Navy SEALs went to the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs, Colo., to train the U.S. sailing team in the not-so-subtle art of working as a team while enduring personal physical and mental agony. Pam Burke NBC Channel 9 News reporter Matt Renoux...
Nikki Carlson I remember the day I trekked across the Midwest 1,700 miles to start working as the ag reporter and photographer for the Havre Daily News. I had a garage sale in my home in Shenandoah, Iowa, to sell everything I could to get gas money to get up here to Havre. What I couldn't sell, I gave away or left behind. I loaded up what I could into my 1985 Crown Victoria, said goodbye to my family and began my journey to Montana. It was smooth sailing for the most part. When I had arrived in central North Dakota, the...
I felt like I threw a party and nobody showed up. Sondra Ashton In an effort to clear out the storage pantry of my life, I decided to have a yard sale. Periodically I cruise my rooms, sort out items I haven't used in a while (10 years?), gather up things I realize I will never use, including once-valuable knicker-knackers and other tchotchkes. Trash or treasure, I have a houseful. If I need to rid my life of just a little junk, I donate the stuff to the Salvation Army. But this time, I sorted out a virtual mountain of things....
It's always great to be an Internet user, but after the Federal Communications Commission released a report called Measuring Broadband America at this month's meeting, it's looking even better. The annual report, published first in August 2011, said in its second edition that broadband speeds for several companies has risen in the past year, in some cases quite dramatically. Zach White A USA Today analysis found that the average speed increased from 87 percent of the advertised speeds to 96 percent since last year. The...
Reuters reporter Ben Berkowitz reported Aug. 13 that "Africa's pirates have demands — and letterhead, too." Apparently, professional pirate Jamal Faahiye Culusow wants to be taken seriously by those from whom he and his Pirate Action Group of merry men are extorting money. And they are taking a tip from the many email scammers with questionable English skills: They're putting on the big top with an open memo on letterhead — complete with a logo, official seal and the bos...
We now interrupt your regularly scheduled news and editorials to bring you this special, anti-factual Pamville News Report on the war — the War on Women. ******* Whether the war is real, imagined or just trumped up charges, the so-called War on Women has, thus far, been waged a million miles away from here in states like Florida, Ohio, Virginia and the deep south. Pam Burke However, a recent Republican gathering — billed as "What War on Women?" — in Havre featured forme...
If we assume that this statement is true: That which comes between two true loves is pure evil (and really, what kind of cold-hearted, dirty rotten nogoodnick would think otherwise); we can conclude, then, that stomach flu is pure evil. Only pure evil can come between me and food — my love, my obsession, my four square meals and seven snacks per day. Last week, after explaining to a friend that, no, I could not come out to ride horses because I was violently ill, she c...
If we assume that this statement is true: That which comes between two true loves is pure evil (and really, what kind of cold-hearted, dirty rotten nogoodnick would think otherwise); we can conclude, then, that stomach flu is pure evil. Only pure evil can come between me and food — my love, my obsession, my four square meals and seven snacks per day. Last week, after explaining to a friend that, no, I could not come out to ride horses because I was violently ill, she c...
Going into a phone store is a lot like taking a car to a mechanic, for the most part you don't know what it is you are actually getting and you're pretty sure it shouldn't actually cost that much. But what can you do? They've developed the ridiculously convoluted and ultimately meaningless breakdown of services, fees and surcharges that, by making a lot of money for one company first, has become the standard that all of us have to deal with. Zach White Even though just about every phone out there today is simply a computer...
Recently your newspaper took issue with myself and the other members of the Havre City Council who voted against joining the Vibrant Futures consortium, calling such disagreement troubling for several reasons, "not the least of which was that it was along partisan — and apparently ideological — lines." Such a baseless charge is insulting and I felt the need to respond. Andrew Brekke As a duly elected member of the Havre City Council, I take my job and the concerns of my constituents very seriously. No matter what the iss...
I wanted to write a column about an app I was using to, hopefully, lose a bit of weight. I was going to say that I'm young enough that many people still make the (usually correct) assumption that I can fix their google for them, but I am no longer young enough to make as many visits to the Pizza Hut lunch buffet as I would like. Zach White When looking for a way to preserve my orangutan-like figure, I decided to ask my best friend for advice and the Internet said I should check out MyFitnessPal.com. When you make an account,...
The only simple explanation I can find for my recent 24-hour flurry of homemaking activity is that the high fever I had a month ago must've caused an important part of my brain to melt, and I was having some kind of delayed seizure-like spastic fit of Betty Crocker-y. Why else, after half of a lifetime of avoiding this particular domestic pastime, would I suddenly construct my own homemade chokecherry syrup using only my own bare hands and a few rudimentary kitchen tools....
A woman walking out in the country sees a rattlesnake close to both her barn and her house. A quick glance tells her no sticks or tools to use as an instrument of reptile death are near enough to fetch without giving the creature ample opportunity to escape. She reaches out to a wooden post buried shallowly in soft, wet ground and discovers that the post is loose. She wiggles the post around to loosen it further, then yanks it from the earth and bludgeons the snake to death...
Montanans hold sacred our right of informed participation in government decisions. This right is now enshrined in our Montana Constitution, one of several provisions intended to help us avoid repeating our history of needless human suffering and environmental degradation that occurred when large out-of-state corporations operated unrestrained by regulatory oversight of government agencies. We learned the hard way that sunlight is the best antiseptic. At the federal level, there are similar mechanisms in place intended to...
I get annoyed with people who wish life could come with an instruction manual because they want their life to be easier. Don't be such a noodle, I say. If you're going to wish for it to be easier, ask for a good script, proper lighting and awesome background music. Maybe a hair and makeup artist. And a custom-made wardrobe. Pam Burke Life would be so much easier if I didn't have to figure out what to say and do and wear. My husband John and I went to two parties over the Labor Day weekend. Count 'em — two. Two social g...
(This guest column was submitted by public health officers from throughout Montana.) It is well known that the United States spends a lot of money on medical care, more than $8,000 for each man, woman and child or about $2.6 trillion in 2010. What do we have to show for our investment? Because we spend twice as much on medical care than what the 14 wealthiest nations in the world spend, does that mean we are healthier? No. The U.S. did not even make the top 20 on Bloomberg's recent "Healthiest Countries" ranking. How do we be...
Sondra Ashton I correspond with a small group of Canadian women. There are six of us. We exchange stories, news and encouragement in facing the vicissitudes of daily life. We look at each other as sisters; sisters by choice rather than by birth and blood. I am honored to belong to this group, and, if asked, claim quasi-citizenship in Saskatchewan South. After all, I live barely a hop and skip from the border. My Canadian sisters celebrate Canada Day on the first of July, and w...
For the past five months I have been telling you about people around the world who have been using the Internet in new and interesting ways. Well this week, we at the Havre Daily News will be trying a few new things of our own. Last month we allowed anyone in the world to watch the Havre Festival Days parade as it was happening. More than 80 people tuned in for the live broadcast, and hundreds of people have returned to the video to check for their favorite floats, or themselves, in the weeks since. Zach White We got a lot...
