News Briefs Issue 4

SME holds annual peanut bitter drive for Harvesters

The East Student Council started their annual peanut butter drive that lasted from Oct. 9 to 12. Throughout the week, students brought jars of peanut butter to their first hour classrooms that will be donated to Harvesters.The class with the most peanut butter jars collected at the end of the week will receive a donut party.

Last year, the top class was English teacher Samantha Feinberg’s first hour which collected 61 jars of peanut butter. This year the sophomore StuCo representatives collected the jars of peanut butter on Thursday.

“I would like to shoot for 8 jars per first hour, plus the 40 or so we collected on senior service day,” sophomore class president Ian Gould said.

The winning class has not been determined, but the winning class will be announced this week.

KC votes to extend streetcar route to the plaza

Kansas City voted on Oct. 7 to elect a board for the Main Street Rail Transportation Development district. The board will oversee the expansion of the Kansas City streetcar in the future. The election was the second part of the three-part project to extend streetcar service to the University of Missouri Kansas City.

Out of 35,000 eligible voters, 2,636 cast a ballot to select seven board members from a pool of 19. The elected board members are David Johnson, Cindy Circo, Jeff Krum, Ruben Alonso III, Jan Marcason, Crissy Dastrup and Leonard J. Graham. All of the board are in support of the streetcar according to current KC streetcar board member Matt Staub.

“It’s good that the board elected is a group that’s in support [of the streetcar],” Staub said. “If they weren’t, they could have interfered with the funding and delayed or halted the project.”

In order to build the line extension, a third public vote is needed to secure the $277 million dollars necessary to extend the route from Union Station down Main street to 51st street. The expansion would add 3.6 miles of track to the system and connect the plaza to downtown.

“I would ride it from here downtown,” plaza area resident Betsy Paul said in an interview with the Kansas City Star. “It would be fabulous because it would open a lot of options where I wouldn’t have to drive my car.”

Wildfires destroy Northern California Wine Country

Northern California recently faced deadly wildfires that have destroyed 115,000 acres of land, as well as over 1,500 homes and buildings. Currently, there are 22 uncontrolled fires burning in the California countryside, according to the California government’s fire map.

The worst of the damage occurred in Napa and Sonoma counties, which are famous for producing wine grapes. Over 52,000 acres of land has been torched in those two counties alone. As of Oct. 11, 21 people have died due to fire related causes according to the Los Angeles Times.

The fires are putting off massive amounts of smoke and ash into the air. The Environmental Protection Agency has rated the air quality as “unhealthy,” “very unhealthy” and “hazardous” in some areas of California. Currently, fire departments across California are working to stop the flames.

“The circumstances of these fires by reason of their magnitude, are likely to be beyond the control of the services, personnel, equipment, and facilities of any single local government and require the combined forces of a mutual aid region or regions to combat,” California Governor Jerry Brown said in a press release.

On Oct. 10, Donald Trump approved Gov. Brown’s request for a major disaster and ordered federal aid to assist the state in recovery and prevention efforts according to the White House official website.