Briefs are posted every weekday morning, M-F

NEWS

The day after the City of Franklin voted to bring legal action against the company that operates The Rock Sports Complex and Ballpark Commons for failing to pay close to $1 million, ROC Ventures has paid up.

“We wanted to demonstrate our unwavering commitment to our obligation with the city,” ROC Ventures owner and CEO Mike Zimmerman told the Journal Sentinel.

Zimmerman made it clear he still disputes his assessment and the shortfall bill and said he was going to continue investigating the issue and, if the evidence supports it, try to get some of his money back.

Franklin Mayor John Nelson confirmed the payment Wednesday evening.

“He paid in full by 3 o’clock today,” Nelson said of Zimmerman. “He is completely square with the City of Franklin.”

So, what happens to the lawsuit?

Nelson said it won’t be filed and no further action is needed by the council, per the city attorney, because the vote to proceed with legal action was contingent upon nonpayment by ROC Ventures.

“He owes us nothing,” Nelson said. “It would have been a frivolous filing.”

The bill, which was just shy of $935,000, was on the debt service for TID 5, which Franklin says was due in January.

—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

President Joe Biden on Wednesday touted Microsoft’s planned $3.3 billion investment in its Mount Pleasant data center as a product of his administration’s economic growth agenda, contrasting it with the unfulfilled promise of the neighboring Foxconn International Holdings development deal that was negotiated during Donald Trump’s presidency.

Biden joined Microsoft President Brad Smith and Gov. Tony Evers Wednesday at Gateway College’s Integrated Manufacturing and Engineering Technology Center to announce the expansion of Microsoft’s data server complex, and the tech giant’s plans to add about 2,000 permanent jobs over time.

Biden said the Microsoft development is a “comeback story,” playing out across Wisconsin and the nation, that stands in contrast to the 2017 efforts of Trump and state Republican officials to bring Foxconn to Mount Pleasant.

Microsoft is building its data center on land that Foxconn was initially expected to use for a $10 billion LCD manufacturing plant that Trump touted as the “eighth wonder of the world.” Neither the investment nor the 13,000 jobs Foxconn promised materialized.

“Foxconn turned out to be just that,” Biden said. “A con.”

State Sen. Julian Bradley, R-Franklin characterized Biden’s visit as an attempt to “hijack” an “awesome” announcement for Wisconsin workers because he’s “failing everywhere else.”

“Joe Biden is limping back to Racine today to look for a ‘Racine reset,’” Republican Party of Wisconsin chairman Brian Schimming said, noting that Republican former President Donald Trump carried Racine County in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

After a relatively quiet few days, negotiations between University of Wisconsin-Madison leadership and student protest organizers appeared to collapse Wednesday. Administrators also warned of disciplinary action and even arrest for people who interrupt its commencement ceremonies this weekend.

Meanwhile, UW-Madison Police are investigating three different incidents of harassment that happened at the encampment on Library Mall. One incident is being investigated as a hate crime after a student with a pro-Israel sign reported a man approached her and said “Jews shouldn’t be on campus.”

At UW-Milwaukee, Chancellor Mark Mone said the university “will have to take action” in ending the encampment if protesters refuse to do so voluntarily. In his first public statement since the tents went up April 29, he said UWM was not equipped to handle a long-term outdoor campground.

—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Indianapolis police announced Wednesday they’ve opened an investigation into an “NBA player and citizen” altercation that happened at Gainbridge Fieldhouse on the night Bucks guard Patrick Beverley threw a ball at a fan in the final minutes of a season-ending loss to the Pacers.

Police said in a news release the case has been forwarded to detectives, “who are currently investigating this situation and take all accusations seriously.”

Cameras showed Beverley sitting on the bench and tossing a ball into the stands, hitting a fan in the head with about 2 ½ minutes left in the game on May 2. After a different fan threw the ball back to Beverley, who was holding his arm out for it, the Bucks guard fired it back at that spectator.

Beverley spoke about his behavior on an episode of “The Pat Bev Podcast” that was released Wednesday. He said he was called a word that he’d never been called before, but added that his own actions were “still inexcusable.”

—Associated Press

A Georgia grand jury indicted the man accused of killing 22-year-old student Laken Riley on 10 charges, including malice murder and kidnapping.

The indictment in Clarke County Superior Court formally charges Jose Antonio Ibarra in Riley’s murder, which authorities described as a crime of opportunity.

Riley was a nursing student at the Augusta University College of Nursing’s Athens campus. She went for a jog on Feb. 22 and was later found dead with “visible injuries” in a forested area behind Lake Herrick at the University of Georgia campus.

The cause of death was blunt force trauma, police said.

University Police Chief Jeff Clark said at the time that it did not appear that Ibarra knew Riley, adding that it appeared to be a “crime of opportunity, where he saw an individual and bad things happened.”

—NBC News

The rate of guns stolen from cars in the U.S. has tripled over the last decade, making them the largest source of stolen guns in the country, an analysis of FBI data by the gun safety group Everytown found.

The rate of stolen guns from cars climbed nearly every year and spiked during the coronavirus pandemic along with a major surge in weapons purchases in the U.S., according to the report, which analyzes FBI data from 337 cities in 44 states and was provided to The Associated Press.

The stolen weapons have, in some cases, turned up at crime scenes.

The alarming trend underscores the need for Americans to safely secure their firearms to prevent them from getting into the hands of dangerous people, said Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Director Steve Dettelbach, whose agency has separately found links between stolen guns and violent crimes.

“People don’t go to a mall and steal a firearm from a locked car to go hunting. Those guns are going straight to the street,” said Dettelbach, whose agency was not involved in the report. “They’re going to violent people who can’t pass a background check. They’re going to gangs. They’re going to drug dealers, and they’re going to hurt and kill the people who live in the next town, the next county or the next state.”

—Associated Press

Former President Donald Trump tore into former House Speaker Paul Ryan for saying he won’t vote for him in the 2024 presidential election.

“Rupert Murdoch should fire pathetic RINO Paul Ryan from the Board of Fox. Ryan is a loser, always has been, and always will be,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “He was the WEAKEST & MOST INCOMPETENT Speaker of the House in its History. Fox will sink to the absolute bottom of the pack if Paul Ryan has anything to do with it!”

Ryan said this week he did not support Trump in the 2020 election and would not support Trump this time either.

“Character is too important to me,” Ryan said during an interview at the Milken Global Institute Conference. “And it’s a job that requires the kind of character that he just doesn’t have.”

—Just the News

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) appears to have ended her media tour to promote her new book as both Greg Gutfeld and Dana Bash announced last minute cancellations from the governor.

Noem, once considered to be a frontrunner for Donald Trump’s VP spot, has gone through multiple tense and fiery interviews in recent days as she’s attempted to promote her memoir No Going Back, answering for several controversies from the book, including the admission she killed a puppy she deemed untrainable and a now-retracted claim that she met North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

CNN’s Bash announced on Wednesday during Inside Politics that she’d planned on having the governor on, but Noem’s team canceled at the last minute.

Fox News host Gutfeld found himself in a similar position this week.

On Gutfeld! on Tuesday, Gutfeld told his audience that Noem canceled at the last minute due to the “weather.”

“I don’t believe it. I just think it’s a little late to keep her on a short leash. I hoped she’d reconsider, but I’m not going to sit up and beg,” Gutfeld said.

—Mediaite

House Speaker Mike Johnson and his allies easily defeated an effort by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to knock him from power, ending — for now — the threats against his speakership. The vote to kill Greene’s motion to vacate the speaker’s chair was swift, with 196 Republicans and 163 Democrats voting to kill it, versus the 11 Republicans and 32 Democrats who voted to move forward. Both Republicans and Democrats said they didn’t want a repeat of the three-week paralysis that came after then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ouster last fall.

Johnson caught Greene’s ire after he worked with Democrats to help stave off a government shutdown, pushed through the renewal of a critical surveillance tool and passed billions of dollars in foreign aid to Ukraine after months of delays.

When Greene announced her motion to oust Johnson, her colleagues promptly booed her.

—NBC News

Heather Miconi has seven weeks to come up with $2,000 to pay for surgery her daughter needs to breathe more easily.

Merritt Island Surgery Center in Merritt Island, Fla., billed Miconi in advance of the adenoid and tonsil surgery. If she can’t pay for the surgery before it is scheduled to take place next month, the procedure will be put off.

Miconi, whose insurance won’t cover the cost because she has a high deductible, works three jobs and doesn’t have savings to cover the cost. She is now appealing to strangers through a GoFundMe campaign for help.

For years, hospitals and surgery centers waited to perform procedures before sending bills to patients. That often left them chasing after patients for payment, repeatedly sending invoices and enlisting debt collectors.

Now, more hospitals and surgery centers are demanding patients pay in advance.

Advance billing helps the facilities avoid hounding patients to settle up. Yet it is distressing patients who must come up with thousands of dollars while struggling with serious conditions.

Those who can’t come up with the sums have been forced to put off procedures. Some who paid up discovered later they were overcharged, then had to fight for refunds.

Among the procedures that hospitals and surgery centers are seeking prepayments for are knee replacements, CT scans and births.

—Wall Street Journal

An Indiana mother is going viral for admitting that she doesn’t celebrate her mother or mother-in-law on Mother’s Day, but on different days, so she can actually enjoy the holiday for herself.

“This may ruffle feathers,” Emily Wehner said in her TikTok that has gathered 2.1 million views, “but, I am the one deep into the mothering right now.”

“It’s Mother’s Day, not Grandmother’s Day,” Wehner said.

In her post, Wehner said she established the “Mother’s Day Rules” after spending her first Mother’s Day “coordinating grandparent visits” and she didn’t get to do anything for herself.

“I was like ‘I’m not doing this again,’ ” she said.

So now her family celebrates her mother and mother-in-law on different days and they do the same setup for Father’s Day.

“I’m gonna take the day how I wanna take the day,” she ended her video.

Wehner told USA TODAY Tuesday that her mother is very supportive of the change she’s made around the holiday.

For this Mother’s Day, Wehner’s husband made brunch reservations for their family of four and just like she said in her TikTok, she will be spending time solo planting in her garden.

“My garden is one of my happy places and I look forward to planting it all winter” she said.

—USA TODAY

OPINION

A viral debate that spread through social media asks women a weird question: “Would you rather be stuck in the woods with a bear or a man?” The overwhelming answer was “bear.”

Some of us might find the responses surprising, though Forbes provided insight as to why so many women feel this way: “Many women participating in a new viral debate on TikTok say they would rather be alone with a bear than a man in the woods, answering a hypothetical question that is leading many women to open up about negative experiences they have had with men, including domestic violence and sexual assault.”

Countless women flooded TikTok and other platforms with their personal experiences of being verbally or physically harmed by a man, and the general consensus was essentially that the behavior of a wild animal is easier to predict than the potentially evil intentions that lurk in the heart of a random man.

While there might be some truth to that, what was also highlighted was that most women seem to have developed an automatic response toward men that, when asked about a scenario involving the opposite sex, it means danger for them.

No one wants to minimize the trauma that women have dealt with in their interactions with men, but the programming that has them all too ready to take any opportunity to disparage men should raise its own red flags.

Almost all of these women chose the bear, although statistically, it is likely that almost all of them have at some point — likely recently — met a man they didn’t know for a date or invited a man they weren’t well acquainted with over to their apartment. At a minimum, they surely shared an office, elevator, sidewalk, park bench, or restaurant with a man. Women interact with men hundreds of times per day, often without the protection or even knowledge of others, and they emerge from all of it unbothered and definitely unharmed.

Even USA Today owned liberal women on this position (though I’m sure they didn’t mean to, and I’m sure they’ll be called out for their “transphobic” statement). USA Today’s assessment of the survey? “The hypothetical has caused some tension, with some women arguing that men will never truly understand what it’s like to be a woman or the inherent dangers at play.”

The question posed to these women simply gave them an opportunity to criticize men — something feminism has taught them to do at every turn. And based on the poison that has melted too many brains amongst today’s women, the creature that we should really be concerned about is the bear.

—Samantha Koch, The Patriot Post

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY – In 1754 the first political cartoon to appear in an American newspaper: The new British colonies as a divided snake (8 colonies pondering revolution) with the caption “Join or die” – by Benjamin Franklin.

AND, in 1914 US President Woodrow Wilson declares the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.