Reliable, Trustworthy Reporting, Capturing The Heartbeat Of Our Community
Reliable, Trustworthy Reporting, Capturing The Heartbeat Of Our Community
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Three taxidermied penguins preside over Room 426 in Allwine Hall, standing atop a row of metal cabinets in the back corner. The Antarctic birds are locked in an everlasting staring contest with a stuffed hornbill whose craned neck protrudes from a bookcase holding a row of primate skulls. To the students who file into professor James Wilson's mammalogy class, these are ordinary sights. What grabs their attention on this Monday afternoon are the short stacks of paper spread neatly across the...
With the rapid rise in internet use among children, the dangers of online exploitation have grown alarmingly. Children’s access to the internet has become nearly ubiquitous, especially following the COVID-19 pandemic. Remote learning, online gaming, and social media are now integral to daily life, meaning more children, even preschool-age children, are regularly online, often unsupervised and unprotected. This new reality demands that we consider not only physical safety for our children, but also the dangers they are facing online. The S...
Like a comet that swings by the earth every few years, there's been talk now and then about placing some huge development between Omaha and Lincoln along the Platte River. Between the state's two largest cities would be an ideal location for a new football stadium for the Cornhuskers, the reasoning goes. An airport there would attract more flights to and from our state. And wouldn't a huge lake look great along Interstate 80 in that spot? Back in the day, the idea was to dam up the Platte River...
A group of Ewing residents didn't have to travel far to get a taste of the Olympic spirit. They met Saturday at St. Dominic's Hall for the 105th annual Sunset Banquet, a Ewing tradition honoring area residents ages 70-plus. This year, guests celebrated the Olympic Games, with music, games, food and prizes associated with the athletic event. Tradition plays a big part of the banquet. Food for this year's theme included a smorgasbord from around the world, including lasagna, Runza casserole,...
Online learning seems new, but it’s older than you think. The field’s predecessor, distance education, can be traced back centuries. From Sir Isaac Pitman, who taught shorthand by correspondence in 1840, to lectures broadcast on the radio in the early 1920s, all the way through to the early 1990s when colleges and universities took advantage of the newly minted World Wide Web and began to offer online education programs, it has evolved alongside technological advances. In those early days of the internet, online learning was an adjustment for...
The year was 1974. It was early fall. Or was it late spring? Never mind all that, Gary Hergenrader says. It isn't the season he remembers today, but the site: the old campground across the water, a dozen red cabins clinging like ticks to the canyon walls, the lodge overlooking Keystone Lake, the geology exposed in the rocky shelves above. Before retiring in 2005, Hergenrader served nearly 25 years as the Nebraska state forester. But back in 1974, he was a 34-year-old professor at the University...
Half of U.S. children depend on government programs for health care, and in some states, they're beginning to lose that coverage at rates that have concerned the federal government. Foothold Technology analyzed data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and state health departments collected by the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families to illustrate which states have allowed children to lose health care at an alarmingly fast pace. Passed in March 2020, the...
The beginning of high school is time for young people to discover who they are and learn how to lead. Having the chance to join clubs, organizations and take part in special programs allows youth to figure out who they are. "Unfortunately, as a 2023 graduate, class members never got to fully experience what high school is really like. For me, the lack of experience meant I was lost amongst the crowd and really didn't feel confident in who I was," said Faith King. In 2020, freshman year was cut...
Technology has come a long way in the past 200 years. The telegraph was invented in 1837 and made rapid long range communication possible. Messages could be sent around the world through a series of connected wires. The telegraph had medical applications in the Civil War. It was used to order medical supplies and report information about injuries and casualties to medical teams. This was cutting edge technology at the time, but it now is considered an obsolete method of communication. Alexander...
Term limits claim 13 Nebraska state senators while two are leaving for other reasons. That'll mean 15 new faces in the nation's only one-house nonpartisan legislature come January. I've made it clear before how I feel about term limits. I don't like them. This isn't the Washington, DC, swamp. This is Nebraska, one of those mostly square states out west where it's not that hard to vote somebody out of office. It has worked for years. Then along came the two-term limit, eight years, and...
Nebraska is now down to one surgical abortion provider less than a year after lawmakers passed a 12-week ban. The Bellevue clinic founded by the late Dr. LeRoy Carhart – once one of only three providers in the country to perform third-trimester abortions – no longer does surgical procedures but does offer patients abortion pills, clinic employees confirmed to the Flatwater Free Press. That means Nebraskans who want a surgical abortion or who are past the cutoff for the abortion pill must go to...
Wait, what? Governor Jim Pillen has reversed his opposition to a federal summer grocery program that would aid around 150,000 children of low-income families. Pillen succumbed to a lot of outside pressure from a bipartisan group of state lawmakers, a bill introduced by one of them to request the aid and another state senator who made it his priority to ensure it would be debated in the remaining days of the legislative session. Back in December he proclaimed that he didn't "believe in welfare."...
The hole keeps getting deeper. Remember when I suggested someone should give the governor a shovel so he could dig a deeper hole for himself? That was when he had refused to read a published report on high levels of nitrates on his pig farms because it was written by "someone from Communist China." He subsequently refused to apologize to the reporter with a Chinese surname who is a graduate of an American university and has been working for news organizations in the United States for several yea...
TAYLOR – Bailley Leibert walks into civics class and plops her sunflower-print backpack onto an empty table. The 15-year-old rummages for her notebook and colored pens. Around her are enough chairs to seat 10 students. But today, and every day, there are nine empty seats. It's just the ninth-grader and social studies teacher Ken Wright – an unintentional private lesson for the only freshman in this school. At Loup County High School, Bailley is the sole member of the class of 2027. The cla...
Remember the Christmas bonus? Probably a thing of past given the changed face of the workplace. Perhaps your "bonus" allows you to work from home. Be grateful the next time you slide in behind your computer, in your jammies at some odd hour to complete a project. It seems that even the work-from-home mentality is changing in favor of the hybrid work week – two or three days in the office and two or three days working remotely. The latest figures from the University of Nebraska at Omaha's C...
When Janneken Smucker, professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, was researching quilt making using the Library of Congress’s resources, she came across hoards of quilt-making photos from the early 1930s. This seemed out of the norm to Smucker, a lifelong quilt maker and researcher. Upon further digging, Smucker learned quilts were integral to the federal government’s New Deal strategy to mend the country’s economy and morale during the Great Depression. This discovery started a yearslong research and curatorial process, resulting i...
Despite hysteria from social media, late night comedy shows or even presidential administrations, net neutrality is not a policy that needs to be controversial. Net neutrality is the idea that internet service providers should treat all data on their networks fairly, without favoring or disfavoring certain types of internet traffic. This means that service providers shouldn’t block lawful content, slow down access to content or unjustly prioritize traffic to certain sites. The basic p...
North Central District Health Department will sponsor a vaccine clinic, Friday, in Orchard at the community center. The clinic will run from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. Vaccines for influenza, shingles, Tdap, RSV, pneumonia and COVID-19 will be available....
Infrastructure is often the first hurdle to high-speed internet access for rural Nebraskans, but it isn’t the last. Once the wires have been laid, residents still have to pay to use the service. Subscriber fees can vary widely, but they are frequently higher for communities and households in rural areas, where long stretches of fiber optic cable reach fewer access points relative to urban settings that have more people living within a smaller space. Greater lengths of cable means higher i...
This week, the House was set to continue its work on the 12 annual appropriations bills to ensure the government is responsibly funded. Unfortunately, our legislative work to cut wasteful spending was disrupted when a small handful of Republicans voted with Democrats to remove the speaker of the House. I voted against vacating the chair because it sets a disruptive precedent and because the House should be focused on delivering results for the American people. House Republicans already have a...
Getting a haircut is like turning the page of a well-worn book, where each snip of the scissors marks the beginning of a fresh chapter in the story of your life. If Larissa Thomson had followed one snip from a haircut, her chapter would have included nursing. "I always wanted to be a nurse," she said. She received a certified nursing assistant license and worked at an area care center during her senior year. Then, COVID-19 hit and she found herself balancing homework with long work shifts....
If you thought that the mostly one-sided filibuster-driven debate on transgender issues and abortion was the thing that dragged the 2023 Nebraska Legislature to a near standstill, steel yourself for what could lie ahead. State Senator Dave Murman of Glenvil, the chair of the Legislature's Education Committee, says he wants to study the use of critical race theory and other controversial subjects in the classroom. Innocently enough, the studies stem from a request to investigate the Nebraska...
Any Nebraska resident enrolled in a licensed practical nurse program, associate degree of nursing program or accelerated Bachelor of Science in nursing program is eligible for a Fall 2023 scholarship up to $2,500. In 2022, the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services was granted $5 million in scholarships through the American Rescue Plan Act for Nebraska nursing students. So far, approximately $1.1 million in scholarships have been disbursed to nearly 400 nursing students for the spring and summer 2023 semesters. The nursing program...
A 2023 Summerland graduate ended her high school SkillsUSA career with a finish in the top 10 at the 2023 SkillsUSA National Leadership Conference in Atlanta, June 19 - 23. Faith King competed in Job Skills Demonstration A, where a contestant explains an entry-level technical skill used in an occupational area. She demonstrated how to perform the Heimlich maneuver on an infant. "Although nationals did not turn out the way that I would have hoped, I had the time of my life, celebrating my last...
Area residents received the red carpet treat, June 29, as Antelope Memorial Hospital unveiled its latest updates. "We rolled out the red carpet at Antelope Memorial Hospital to celebrate the open house for our newly remodeled patient rooms/nursing floor and infusion room," said Diane Brugger, AMH chief executive officer. "More than 100 individuals from area communities attended." The $3.7 million project started in September 2021 and completed in three phases to allow the hospital to continue...
