WFHB Local News Features

EPA project manager Tom Alcamo updates us on the progress of the massive cleanup going on at Bloomington’s former Westinghouse plant at 300 North Curry Pike. CBS now owns the site and a remediation workplan has been moving forward this summer to purge the property of PCBs, a toxic byproduct from electrical capacitors. An Indiana company called “Focus Contracting” is …

Local resistance to the construction of Interstate 69 has been in the headlines these past few weeks after the Bloomington/Monroe County Metropolitan Planning Organization defied state demands to amend our local transportation plan to include a local property as I-69 right-of-way. Where the state wants to put an interchange for I-69, the city will develop an affordable housing project. It …

Cultural centers at Indiana University have joined efforts to create a brown bag discussion series this fall, “Choice of Colors,” which will address issues of diversity, identity and cultural awareness. The first event, “Diversity at IU: What It Is, What It Is Not and What It Should Be,” took place Thursday at the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center. Panelists included Eric …

At only thirty-two years of age, Jessica Jackley is revolutionizing the world of small business as the co-founder of Kiva.org, the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website. Named as one of the top ideas in 2006 by the New York Times Magazine, Kiva.org lets Internet users lend as little as $25 to specific developing world entrepreneurs, providing affordable capital to help …

News director Chad Carrothers goes on-location at the courthouse for an information fair on the H1N1 Influenza virus hosted by the Monroe County Health Department. Administrator Penny Caudill talks about when we’ll get a vaccine and who will get it first in this WFHB radio exclusive.

A new local group Citizens for Responsible Deer Management presents the Bloomington City Council with a petition bearing 500 signatures, asking the council to partner with the county to create a task force to implement some form of urban deer population control. In his remarks to the Council, Citizens for Responsible Deer Management chairman Mark Day cites not only the …

City council president Andy Ruff recaps the game of chicken played out at City Hall when Mayor Mark Kruzan rendered moot the issue of a “hardship buyout” of I-69 property at Tapp Road and State Road 37 at the most recent meeting of the Bloomington/Monroe County Metropolitan Planning Organization. Instead of amending the local transportation plan to include the property …

A group of Oregon doctors are “Mad As Hell” about the current state of the U.S. healthcare system, or as some of them might say, the absence of one. Rubber gloves hit the road as the Mad As Hell doctors make their way across the country advocating for reform in their RV, the “CARE-a-Van”. They arrived in Bloomington late Saturday …

Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens made a fortune during his forty years in the petroleum industry, and today he joked with a Bloomington audience that he’s ready to repent. Pickens recently spent sixty billion dollars on advertising to promote what he calls the Pickens Plan – a blueprint for energy independence for the United States. The ads helped him recruit …

Indiana University recently took government-mandated steps to reduce emissions from the campus coal plant, but students active in the Sierra Club say that’s not good enough and ask university officials to dump coal altogether. Sierra Club is targeting IU and ten other schools in an effort to get more colleges to transition to cleaner forms of energy. Assistant utilities director …