Spartan Newsroom (https://news.jrn.msu.edu/tag/eric-freedman/page/2/)
By ERIC FREEDMAN
Capital News Service
LANSING — There was the lawyer who stabbed an opposing attorney in the shoulder with a pen in the courthouse. And the litigant who tried to run down a lawyer with a tractor. And the client who, angry about his bill, smashed his lawyer’s car hood with a baseball bat. Unusual? Not at all in Michigan, according to a newly published study.
By ERIC FREEDMAN
Capital News Service
LANSING — Most butternut trees in the Great Lakes region are dead — victims of an as-yet unstoppable fatal fungus — and the survivors may be doomed as well, leaving a hole in the diversity of the region’s hardwoods. Butternut canker has killed an estimated 90 percent or more of Michigan’s butternut trees — also known as white walnuts –for example, said Mike Ostry, a research plant pathologist who studied the fungus from the 1970s until last May, when he retired from the U.S. Forest Service’s Northern Research Station. “In some respects, butternut canker is far more serious than the chestnut blight in what it does to its host,” he said. The cankers are elongated sunken areas in branches, trunks and exposed roots, according to a study published by Purdue University Extension. As the disease advances, it girdles and kills the tree.
By ERIC FREEDMAN
Capital News Service
LANSING — Two Upper Peninsula sites have been added to the National Register of Historic Places– one culturally important to members of the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians and the other related to a strike important to labor and women’s history. Rice Bay in Gogebic County is a traditional wild rice-growing area covering a quarter-mile-square on northeastern Lac Vieux Desert, a lake straddling the Michigan-Wisconsin border. And the 128-year-old Braastad-Gossard Building in downtown Ishpeming served as a department store and a factory that manufactured women’s undergarments before being renovated for an interior mall and offices. “The National Register is the official list of the nation’s historic places worthy of preservation,” according to the National Park Service, which administers the program. Lac Vieux Desert is the headwaters of the Wisconsin River, and most Michigan wild rice sites are within 10 miles of the state border.
By ERIC FREEDMAN
Capital News Service
LANSING — The roster of Lower Peninsula sites on the National Register of Historic Places has grown by four with new designations in Saugatuck, Elk Rapids, Alpena and Detroit. Among them are a 1904 pump house and a turn-of-the-20th-century church, both now serving as local history museums.
“The National Register is the official list of the nation’s historic places worthy of preservation,” according to the National Park Service (NPS), which administers the program. Sites must be significant “in American history, architecture, archeology, engineering and culture” and “possess integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling and association.”
Under NPS guidelines, they are “associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of our history or with the lives of significant persons in our past.”
In West Michigan, the brick Saugatuck Pump House on the bank of the Kalamazoo River marks where Saugatuck developed its water system after devastating fires wiped out a hotel and other buildings. No organized fire department existed at the time, and the village was gaining popularity as a tourist destination, connected by steamship to Chicago and by rail to Grand Rapids, according to the nomination. The building was abandoned in the 1930s because its pumping and generating functions were inadequate, and it was later renovated as a cottage by private tenants.
By ERIC FREEDMAN
Capital News Service
LANSING — The owners of a dog shot and seriously wounded by a Corrections Department investigator can sue the state for emotional distress and mental anguish damages under federal civil rights law, a judge has ruled. U.S. District Judge Gershwin Drain rejected the state’s argument that the owners, Erica Moreno and Katti Putman, would be entitled only to economic damages if they prove that the investigator acted unconstitutionally. The investigator, Ronald Hughes, several state troopers and a Flint police officer on a multiagency team went to the wrong house in Flint while searching for a fugitive in June 2014, according to court documents. They had an arrest warrant for the fugitive. Hughes mistakenly went into the backyard of the fugitive’s next-door neighbors, where he saw 58-pound Clohe, a 15-year-old pit bull mix, coming out the door and shot her in the face, the decision said.
By ERIC FREEDMAN
Capital News Service
LANSING — One draws more than a million visitors each year, others only a fraction of that number. Some boast internationally recognizable names, others fall outside the public spotlight. They’re Michigan units of the National Park Service (NPS), which celebrates its centennial this year. Popular or not, widely familiar or not, they’re publicly owned treasures of environmental and natural resources, historic and cultural wealth, recreation and national identity. While the system has its origins in an 1872 law creating Yellowstone National Park, Congress waited until 1916 and Woodrow Wilson’s presidency to establish the NPS.
By ERIC FREEDMAN
Capital News Service
LANSING — The round goby is one of the nastiest aliens in the Great Lakes — with what the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) calls its “voracious appetite and an aggressive nature which allows them to dominate over native species.”
But smallmouth bass find them yummy chow, and that’s also good news for crayfish that used to top the smallmouth bass menu. “Changes in growth seem to be occurring to the greatest extent with the youngest bass,” said Derek Crane, a fisheries biologist who works with Lake Superior State University’s Aquatic Research Laboratory. Female growth increased more than male growth. Those findings likely apply throughout the Great Lakes, Crane said. Crane, who teaches at Carolina Coastal University in South Carolina, is the co-author of a new study of changes in the diet and growth of smallmouth bass since the round goby invaded Lake Erie.
By ERIC FREEDMAN
Capital News Service
LANSING — The controversy about elevated levels of lead in Flint’s drinking water has sparked significant concern about water quality across Michigan, a new statewide poll shows. More than 90 percent of those surveyed want the state to examine urban water systems for indications of faulty infrastructure and 84 percent want the state to test the water in public schools at least annually. Meanwhile on a second environmental issue, widespread publicity about autonomous cars has directed public attention to questions about the safety of driverless vehicles. Despite qualms about safety, however, a majority of those polled “accept that this will be how people get around in the near future,” according to a Nov. 3-5 telephone survey of 600 Michigan adults.
By ERIC FREEDMAN
Capital News Service
LANSING — Transgendered Michigan residents can pursue a constitutional lawsuit challenging the Secretary of State’s requirements to change the gender on their drivers’ licenses and state ID cards, a federal judge has ruled. The decision rejects a bid by Secretary of State Ruth Johnson to get the case thrown out without trial but doesn’t determine whether the challengers ultimately will win the case. At issue is whether Johnson’s office can legally require transgendered residents to undergo sex-reassignment — “gender confirmation” — surgery so they can provide an amended birth certificate to change the listed gender. The agency adopted that policy in 2011. A lawyer for the challengers, Jay Kaplan of the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, said his organization had met several times during almost three years with Johnson’s representatives before filing suit.
By ERIC FREEDMAN
Capital News Service
LANSING — What can happen when scientific research and traditional Native American cultural practices combine to combat an environmental threat? When the topic is the destructive emerald ash borer, the results of collaboration may point the way to reducing the spread of the invasive insect that’s decimated hundreds of millions of ash in the Great Lakes region and beyond. The collaboration showed how the traditional practice of submerging black ash logs until they’re ready to use for basket-making can kill borer larvae and prevent adults from emerging. On a large scale, “this control method has limited application” but it’s significant for tribes with a black ash basket-making heritage, said U.S. Forest Service research entomologist Therese Poland, the project leader and lead author of a new study. “This gives the tribes a tool to continue using black ash for basket-making” while scientists investigate potential “landscape-level” strategies to combat the borer, said Poland, who is based in East Lansing.