News from Home

Items from other parts of the country that might interest our winter visitors.

Ohio
Wendy's International Inc. said that sagging sales will force it to close the Columbus restaurant where the United States' third-largest hamburger chain began in 1969.

The iconic restaurant, filled with memorabilia and photographs of the late Wendy's founder, Dave Thomas, will close March 2.

Thomas, who died in 2002 of liver cancer, opened his first Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers on Nov. 15, 1969. He named the restaurant after his 8-year-old daughter, Melinda Lou, nicknamed Wendy. He later became a nationally known figure as a Wendy's pitchman in television commercials.

Arkansas
Little Rock's school district has been freed from federal supervision, a half-century after a defiant governor's refusal to allow nine black students into an all-white Central High sparked one of the biggest crises of the civil rights era.

U.S. District Judge William R. Wilson Jr. issued a ruling that found that the district was substantially complying with a 1998 desegregation plan worked out in the 27,000-student district.

Little Rock, which now has a black-majority school board, was satisfactorily evaluating its academic programs in the effort to improve achievement on blacks, the ruling found.

In 1957, President Eisenhower dispatched the 101st Airborne to enforce a U.S. Supreme Court order striking down segregation after Gov. Orval Faubus tried to prevent black students from enrolling at Central High.

Wyoming
State and federal wildlife managers counted 1,059 bison on the National Elk Refuge in northwest Wyoming this month.

The National Elk Refuge, Grand Teton National Park, and Wyoming Game and Fish conducted the bison count on Feb. 14.

The annual count is carried out through ground surveys on the National Elk Refuge and concurrent aerial detection flights over the refuge, Grand Teton National Park, and adjacent Bridger-Teton National Forest lands.

A total of 974 animals were counted on refuge feed lines. Combined with an additional 85 bison counted outside feed lines, the 2007 count yielded a total of 1,059 bison.

Virginia
The Virginia House of Delegates voted unanimously Saturday to express "profound regret" for the state's role in slavery, the latest in a series of strides the state has made in overcoming its segregationist past.

Sponsors of the resolution say they know of no other state that has apologized for slavery, although Missouri lawmakers are considering such a measure. The resolution does not carry the weight of law but sends an important symbolic message, supporters said.