News you can use
News you can use
Sorted by date Results 570 - 594 of 3210
One day in the far distant future, back when I was God, time is relative, one of my very intelligent earth persons proved that, but more will be revealed, anyway, one day one of my other earth persons requested a visit. Which I granted. I set up times for personal visitation, one hour in the early morning and one hour late at night, since most hours in between, I seem to be out of sight, out of mind. I quite like visitation. No matter whom I am scheduled to see, visitation is...
Montana Sen. Jon Tester, the only active farmer in the U.S. Senate, identified the problem when he said, “I just came off the worst year ever on my farm. We need to do something on climate change. I think we spent $144 billion this year on disasters and I don’t think that included crop insurance. So we need to do something on climate, too.” Agricultural producers are on the front lines of climate change and are experiencing the impacts now. Mega droughts, fire, floods and other extreme weather events cost $145 billion in 2021...
At the celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Montana’s 1972 Constitution, there were many memorable moments, including the presentation of Jim Rice, Associate Justice of the Montana Supreme Court, during the panel discussion about “The Basic Rule of Law: The Backbone of a Constitution.” Rice, who prior to his 2001 Supreme Court appointment had been a Republican legislator, spoke out boldly and clearly about the role of the judiciary in defending the institutions of our democracy. Rice said, “we live in a time of extremi...
Yesterday, I took a deep breath and offered my services for a job, for which not only am I ill-prepared, but in my deep heart-of-hearts, I know I cannot do. This will seem like nothing to you but to me it is a BIG DEAL. I offered to go to Glendive to fill in as secretary for my daughter until she could hire somebody adequate to her needs. See? I knew you would say, “So what?” Back when I was in high school (early ’60s) the career opportunities for women were sorely limit...
I don’t know why I’m the one who always has to come up with the solutions to society’s big problems, but here I am shouldering the responsibility again. This time, though, I’m looking to get paid for my genius. After nearly a year of work, just under $300,000 of donor funding spent on creating a new logo for the Montana State Library and an hour-and-a-half of discussion, the library’s commission is now at an impasse over whether the logo aptly portrays the state library’s...
“The damage is catastrophic,” a Red Lodge business owner said. “We’re between a rock and a hard place. And if we don’t get some assistance, we’re not gonna make it.” He speaks for all of us who were hard hit by the flooding last week. We know that there’s a risk of fires and smoke interrupting our summer revenue stream. However, an extreme weather event, like this flooding disaster at the beginning of tourist season, and following on from the coronavirus pandemic, has devastated businesses, infrastructure and households. Man...
My work with children has largely been voluntary over the years, from HELP in the 1980s to CASA this century. Each are programs I heartily recommend. After losing custody of my boys nearly 40 years ago, I also mentored a handful of boys through a program at HRDC. When my sons returned to Havre, we ended up fostering three teenage friends of theirs and took in a disenfranchised foreign exchange student. All of those experiences were gratifying, but nothing has been as challenging and rewarding on a daily basis as driving a...
My husband, Peter, and I went to our first concert in the park last night. We brought our folding chairs and ate food from the food trucks. The weather was perfect, and the music was good. But upstaging the band were a pair of juvenile squirrels in the trees overhead, challenging one another to feats of greater and greater daring. I half expected to have an adolescent squirrel land in my lap. It had been a long day. We had just come from the funeral for one of Peter’s cousins, who died of ALS. It was a somber occasion, as h...
As part of my work as a member of the Senate Interim Education Committee, I was in Helena a couple of days these past two weeks participating in meetings. One discussion was how to get quality based CTE — career and technical education — and dual education credits to rural schools at a cost the state of Montana can afford. The thought is to give rural schools this opportunity through usage of virtual systems. One such program is a CNA — certified nurse assistant — class, which is currently being run out of Miles Communi...
As we all know, or should know, or kind of remember but the exact details escape us, Sweden and Finland applied May 18 to join NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in the wake of Russia’s invasion and ruthless efforts to pummel into submission their fellow European country of Ukraine. No word is out on their application status, but it looks like Finland is winning the popularity contest. Remember, after Sweden and Finland started talking about how they might be, m...
I suppose you’ve all heard about the latest horror disease, monkey pox? Evidently, this near cousin to small pox is transmitted by bodily contact. I want you to know I’ve sworn off sex with monkeys. Not that monkeys are an issue in my life. Nor is the other. I’d no more than digested that bit of breaking news when my friend Kathy informed me Canada is proposing to print a health warning on every individual cigarette. Yep, my reaction too. My mind boggles. Beyond a healthy gigg...
I’ve been under some stress lately. I’ve written a novel, and now I have to wait to find someone who thinks it’s worth publishing. (I happen to think it is, for the record.) So, while I wait, I get more and more nervous. I know all the standard advice for this, and I try to follow it. I try to get plenty of sleep. (But how am I supposed to sleep when I don’t know what will happen tomorrow?!) I try to eat healthy foods at healthy times. (But how am I supposed to avoid snackin...
The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes — CSKT — held their Bison Range Restoration Celebration May 20-22, 2022, which was a monumental day that represented the righting of a terrible time in our U.S. history by restoring and honoring a broken treaty and returning the land and bison back to the CSKT. This monumental day was a day of healing, but it also represented the continued need for healing with all of our Montana tribes and the need to restore and honor many of the broken promises once made. And even though this spe...
Welcome to the latest edition of “Wait … what?” the feature in which we here at Pamville News highlight all the “News to Confuse” — the everyday stories that make us cock our heads to the side and say that catchy phrase, “Wait … what?” For this edition we’re jumping right into the deep end with a May 13 story out of the United Kingdom published online at CNBC.com — and, if I’m honest here, I don’t know why this news wasn’t splashed all over mainstream media. A British...
I want to address Ordinance No. 925 where the ordinance states that “snowmobiles, boats, or other recreational vehicles and campers, camper trailers, or motor homes must be parked in a rear yard unless the rear yard is inaccessible … .” The ordinance also goes on to limit how close it can be to buildings on your own property, among other restrictions. I’m all for getting our streets cleaned up and enforcing parking rules, keeping in mind the needs of contractors who require trailers at a job site of course (which we can do...
Rainy season has arrived early. Hooray! Hooray! Evening rains revive this parched mountain valley. Trees tilt their sombreros when I walk by. When one hasn’t seen rain in nine months, the typical gestation period one might think, each raindrop is a birthing. A renewal. New life. Figuratively and literally. And I laid claim to my Baby Rain, took credit for bringing it about all by myself. I’m human, OK? It may sound silly but it is the way I felt, wet, standing out in the rai...
I have been trying, for as long as I can remember and with limited success, to learn Spanish. My husband, Peter, says I am good, but that is because he does not speak Spanish, so if I say anything that is understood by anyone, he regards it as a minor miracle. I feel that I have been stuck at about the same level of Spanish for at least 20 years. I can ask where things are and communicate in emergencies and exchange the usual greetings, then I dry up. I’d like to change that....
A person’s life has its defining moments, some large and understandably life-changing like an illness or a loss or a great kindness from another person, but others are small, intimate, personal moments that can completely change a person’s mindset and the trajectory of their life, like kneeling down and being unable to get up again without groaning and the use of a prop. One of my favorite activities in the whole world is sitting. Have a seat, take a seat, pull up a chair and...
Not many of us will remember, well, because not many of us were around, in 1938 in New Jersey when Orson Welles adapted the H. G. Wells classic, “The War of the Worlds” for a special Halloween radio broadcast over the “Mercury Theatre on the Air.” Since the story of Martians invading earth seemed too silly and too improbable, more suitable for comic books, Welles asked his writers to gussy it up a bit, give it some bells and whistles. What they came up with was a minute-...
Editor, Last week, Sen. Jon Tester announced he was able to help patients save costs by working with the Biden administration to close a loophole allowing Pharmacy Benefit Managers to charge excessive fees. Sen. Tester noted, “Pharmacy Benefit Managers have been preying on our pharmacies and Medicare patients for years,” and he is absolutely right. These middlemen are often the reason so many have such high out-of-pocket costs at the pharmacy counter when picking up prescriptions. In today’s economy, Sen. Tester is worki...
There have been 27 school shootings in America so far this year. In 2020 there were 612 shootings involving three or more people. In 2020 America experienced 45,222-gun deaths. The U.S. averages more than 20 shootings involving 10 or more people (mass shootings) a year. The victims are white, Black, Asian, Latino, Christian, Jew, Muslim, men, women and children. Who are these people? They are all of America, they are us. There are varying polls, but by any measure more than 75% of Americans, including a large majority of gun...
I think the difference between a politician and a statesman is that the people believe a statesman will do what he or she believes is the right thing regardless of the political consequences. When it gets down to it, a statesman would rather be right than reelected. It is generally accepted that Mike Mansfield was Montana’s greatest statesman. In my younger years I had two wonderful opportunities to have extended conversations with Mansfield. He was “as common as an old shoe” as the saying goes. When he passed in 2001, natio...
Montana’s benchmark wildlife conservation program, Habitat Montana, is back in the news again after voters and the Legislature made historic investments in conservation spending in 2020 and 2021. That program, available to landowners since 1987, has conserved some of Montana’s finest wildlife habitat along the Rocky Mountain Front, The Madison Valley, on the Hi-Line and down in the Big Hole. The program helps family farmers and ranchers protect their home places, while still ensuring that the next generation has the chance to...
“4 New Body Parts Discovered in the Last 10 Years,” it’s the kind of headline you’d expect to read connected to an ongoing serial killer case or maybe it’s an episode name on “Criminal Minds” — but, no, that right there is science. What that SciShow YouTube video headline means is that doctors, scientists, researchers, they’re all still discovering new parts in the human body, our human bodies. Like humans don’t have an identity crisis already. A couple weeks ago I learned...
