• News tips, submissions
• Questions, comments
• Contact webmaster

• Sick Vietnam War vets eligible for more benefits; state briefs

The federal government has recognized three more illnesses associated with the use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Veterans in southwestern Wisconsin are looking to see if they're eligible for benefits.

Herbicides referred to as Agent Orange were used to defoliate trees and remove cover for the enemy during the Vietnam War. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 2.6 million military personnel may have been exposed from 1965 to 1970.

Jim Gausmann is a Veterans Service officer with La Crosse County. He says he's seen several veterans in the past two weeks with the diseases recently associated with Agent Orange including a rare form of leukemia.

Ischemic heart disease and Parkinson's disease are the others added to the Veterans Affairs list, bringing the total to 15 illnesses presumed to have resulted from Agent Orange.

Tom Pamperin, deputy director of compensation with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, says they've identified about 86,000 people who've dealt with these three illnesses over the last two decades. He says they will deal with the veterans' claims as quickly and compassionately as possible.

However, Pamperin says eligible veterans may not receive payment until next spring. In the meantime, Gausmann says they're helping vets gather medical evidence and file claims.

The compensation vets receive depends on the severity of each illness. Gausmann says there are 10,000 veterans in La Crosse County, 2,600 of which served during Vietnam.

-- Danielle Kaeding, WLSU/WHLA-La Crosse

Barrett will decide soon on governor's race

MILWAUKEE -- Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett says he'll announce by the end of this week, as to whether he's running for governor. Barrett was asked about his potential candidacy in Milwaukee Tuesday.

He says he's working out the situation at home.

Barrett has a wife who works in the Milwaukee Public Schools, as well as four children in the school system. He's said he won't ask the kids to transfer to new schools, but is reportedly looking at ways he could govern from Milwaukee on some days, if elected.

Gov. Jim Doyle has been encouraging Barrett to run for his office. Republicans have criticized Barrett for taking time to decide.

-- Chuck Quirmbach, WHAD-Delafield/Milwaukee

Obey: abortion shouldn't hold up health reform

More than 40 abortion rights supporters in Congress are threatening to block health care reform if a tough new anti-abortion amendment isn't removed from the final bill.

The senior Democrat in Wisconsin's congressional delegation, Dave Obey, says that would be a mistake.

The amendment, written by Upper Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak, broke a logjam Saturday night, and paved the way for passage of the health care bill with just two votes to spare.

Obey supports abortion rights, but he says he would vote for the anti-abortion language again if he had to. Obey says the amendment wasn't necessary, but the bill wouldn't have passed without it.

But more than 40 Democrats say they would vote "no," because in their view the amendment would take abortion coverage away from women who have it now.

Obey says he doesn't read the language that way and he's urging his colleagues to compromise. Obey says Democrats have to stop blocking each other and get what they can to get enough votes since that's the only way to help Americans.

Obey says if a health care bill makes it to the President's desk, it will be an historic occasion. He calls health reform the fourth most important thing Congress will have done since the turn of the 19th century, behind the Civil Rights Act, Social Security and Medicare.

Obey predicts an uphill battle for the legislation in the U.S. Senate.

-- Glen Moberg, WHRM/WLBL-Wausau

Middleton lands VA billing center

MIDDLETON -- A suburb of Madison has won out against nearly a dozen other locations for a federal facility that will bring a couple hundred jobs. Supporters say the project shows the role small business can play in landing bigger fish.

The Department of Veterans Affairs needed a place to do regional billing. A Middleton businessman with a high tech company had a building that needed filling. The two parties got together and the result is a new federal facility just 5 miles from the Madison VA hospital.

Middleton mayor Kurt Sonnentag says some existing employees will be brought in, but there are 225 jobs still open. He says they are high paying jobs that will provide more than $350 million in salary in the next 20 years.

The positions with the VA billing center (the North Central Patient Account Center) range in pay from $38,000 to $60,000 a year. Getting the facility ready for the VA will provide more jobs, says building owner and Intelix CEO, Steve Cohan. He says in the next nine months, $3.5 million will be spent to renovate the building.

The facility's location near major highways helped clinch the deal, as did tax increment financing from Middleton. But Cohan and city politicians also credit what they call grassroots marketing, and federal and local officials working to strengthen the state's economy.

-- Shamane Mills, WHA/WERN-Madison

Madison hosts Veterans Day art exhibit

-- Gil Halsted, WHA/WERN-Madison

MADISON -- Among the many Veterans Day events in Wisconsin, Vietnam Veterans are being singled out for special recognition in Madison. There's a special portrait exhibit of Vietnam Vets at the Chazen Art Museum on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.

There are 26 photos in the "Back in the World" exhibit at the Chazen. It's part of a larger Wisconsin Public Television documentary project that includes veterans from all the nation's wars.

Photographer Jim Gill says the portraits represent a geographical cross section of the state. He traveled all over the state to do the portraits and says Wisconsin Vietnam War veterans are well represented.

Gill says what he found in talking with the Vietnam Veterans he photographed was a sense of anger and bitterness that he didn't find in working on a similar exhibit of veterans from World War II and Korea.

He says in general, Vietnam veterans feel they were never welcomed back to the United States, and 40 years later, it's important to make them feel their service was worth it to the country.

There will be a special gallery talk with a panel of veterans whose portraits are included in the exhibit Wednesday beginning at 6 pm at the Chazen. The Back in the World exhibit will remain in Madison through January 3rd and then head to La Crosse, Superior and finally Green Bay in May for a special weekend of Vietnam veteran activities at Lambeau Field.

Former Assembly Speaker wants criminal retrial moved

-- Shawn Johnson, WHA/WERN-Madison

MADISON -- A lawyer for former Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen told the Wisconsin Supreme Court today that Jensen's criminal retrial should be moved to his home county instead of where his alleged crimes occurred.

Jensen was first charged with using his state office to run political campaigns more than seven years ago, and a Dane County jury found him guilty of felony counts back in 2006. The former Republican Speaker won a retrial after an appeals court found the trial judge had given bad jury instructions and stifled Jensen on the witness stand.

Normally Jensen's retrial would be held where his trial was. But the legislature passed a law in 2007 saying that lawmakers charged with crimes related to their offices should be tried in their home counties.

Jensen Attorney Robert Friebert says that law applies in this example and Jensen's case should be tried where he lives. For Jensen, that would mean a jury pool from the Republican-friendly Waukesha County versus another jury from the Democratic stronghold of Dane County.

But Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard told the court the new law only applies to cases initiated by the Government Accountability Board. Speaking to reporters after oral arguments, Blanchard noted that Board did not even exist when Jensen was charged and tried the first time around.

He says the in 2007, the legislature was looking forward, not backward and Jensen's case doesn't fall within the 2007 law.

An appeals court sided with Blanchard back in January, but the final say rests with the six justices who heard this case. Justice David Prosser, who served with Jensen in the legislature and was a character witness in his first trial, sat out this case.

Jensen was one of four former high-ranking lawmakers charged in the legislative caucus scandal, but he was the only one to fight his case at trial.

-- Shawn Johnson, WHA/WERN-Madison

Jobs at Republic Airways retained with state help

MILWAUKEE - Gov. Doyle's office says state tax credits will help keep hundreds of airline jobs in Wisconsin and may lead to hundreds of new jobs.

Indiana-based Republic Airways now owns Midwest Airlines of Milwaukee, as well as Denver-based Frontier Airlines.

Republic says it will consolidate some airplane maintenance and operation work in Milwaukee, retaining 800 jobs in the area and creating another 800 by the end of next year. If the job targets are hit, the state of Wisconsin will give the firm $27 million in income and payroll tax credits.

Republic CEO Bryan Bedford says the available talent pool of former Midwest Airlines workers was one reason his company chose Milwaukee for the consolidation site.

He says some of the operations jobs will pay about the same as Midwest Airlines used to pay. But he says flight crews will earn less money. That's if Republic hires any of the nearly 400 former Midwest pilots that are now out of work.

Capt. Anthony Freitas heads the local pilots union. He says Republic and Frontier also have pilots on lay off.

Freitas says discussions have started on merging seniority lists of the pilots, something that could affect who gets hired at Republic in Milwaukee or elsewhere.

-- Chuck Quirmbach, WHAD-Delafield/Milwaukee

Home sales up, first time in two years

A statewide realtors group says home sales are up this quarter, the first time since the recession began nearly two years ago.

The Wisconsin Realtors Association says home sales climbed 5.8 percent in the third quarter of 2009, compared to the same period last year. But the WRA says the national economy still has a long ways to go. Unemployment is 10 percent nationwide, and 7.7 percent in Wisconsin.

UW-Business School real estate professor Stephen Malpezzi says "an unemployment check barely covers the average mortgage in Wisconsin." He says the federal government has focused on helping people who took out badly-designed subprime mortgages, but Malpezzi says the newly created federal programs don't help people who are unemployed pay a 30-year fixed mortgage.

He adds the federal government should redirect some money to help pay the mortgage for someone who's unemployed.

Malpezzi says unless something is done at the federal level, another wave of foreclosures could hit in the coming months.

-- Brian Bull, WHA/WERN-Madison

Holocaust survivor speaks in Marshfield

MARSHFIELD -- A survivor of the Nazi Holocaust brought a message of hope and forgiveness to central Wisconsin this week and a warning to the medical community.

In 1944, Eva Mozes Kor, her twin sister, Miriam, and their family were shipped to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. The parents were killed.

Eva says only their will to live allowed the twins to survive the medical experiments of the notorious "Angel of Death," Josef Mengele.

She was injected with a variety of diseases and became very ill.

Eva Mozes Kor brought a message from the concentration camp to the medical community in Marshfield: "never value your science more than you value your humanity."

She says if doctors do experiments for science and not to help human beings, they are headed in the direction of the Nazi doctors.

Eva says that in the years that followed her imprisonment, she learned to forgive Josef Mengele and the Nazis, not for their sake, but for hers.

Eva Mozes Kor shared her message of forgiveness this week with children at Marshfield Columbus Catholic High School. Her appearance, and her message to the medical community, was sponsored in part by the Marshfield Clinic.

-- Glen Moberg, WHRM/WLBL-Wausau

Effort underway to save old ships

A relative of a crewmember of the sunken ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald is on a mission to save other ships that were out on the lake that night 34 years ago.

On Nov. 10, 1975, the Edmund Fitzgerald foundered on Lake Superior, taking the lives of all of its crew of 29.

That night winds were clocked at 100 miles per hour and waves up to 30 feet high. Even so, the freighter Arthur M. Anderson left the safety of Whitefish Bay to search for the missing Fitzgerald.

John Soyring of Green Bay lost his uncle Buck Champeau that night. Champeau was an engineer on the Fitz. Now, Soyring wants to make sure older Great Lakes ships including the Anderson aren't scrapped because of new federal pollution control rules. He says he can't sit back and watch historic ships scrapped.

As part of his effort, Soyring will get to meet the watchman who was on duty on the Anderson that night. He'll shake hands with retired watchman Bill Maki at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at a memorial ceremony.

Maki was in the pilothouse when Anderson Captain Jesse Cooper asked the crew if they should go back in the storm to search for the Fitzgerald.

Maki says the crew felt it was a duty to go out that night and make an effort to help the Edmund Fitzgerald, since it was the only loaded ship out there that night,

It's been three decades since Maki sailed the Anderson. He hopes the ship will continue to sail the Great Lakes. He says seeing the vessel brings back memories.

For now, the new guidelines have been modified to exempt older Great Lakes freighters so the Anderson will continue sailing after 57 years.

-- Mike Simonson, KUWS-Superior