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Visit Eau Claire recently announced multiple grants that celebrate our local events and favorite places. The total is $81,700 in Tourism and Cultural Arts Grants and $64,000 in sponsorship funding to area organizations and events. The April grant pool received 13 cultural arts and 22 tourism applicants. CLICK HERE FOR MORE DETAILS

 Khari Sanford will likely spend the rest of his life in prison for killing his ex-girlfriend’s parents two years ago. A jury convicted him yesterday of the murders of Beth Potter and her husband, Robin Carre. They were found at the UW Arboretum in March of 2020. Sanford didn’t testify in the case, in fact his lawyers asked very few if any questions of the witnesses from the prosecution. Dane County’s D.A. said Sanford killed the two because he hated

Workers at Middleton’s Raven Software are the first video game workers in America to vote to unionize. Nineteen of the 22 workers at the Middleton office voted to form a union yesterday. The workers are quality assurance testers for Activision Blizzard. The team worked on the popular Call of Duty game. There’s no word just when the union will begin negotiations with Activision, or when a new contract will be coming.

Questions are coming up surrounding authorities’ response to concerns about a six-year-old’s safety before his death.  The family of Eli Hart says they expressed concern for his safety before he was found shot to death inside the trunk of his mother’s car.  Police pulled 28-year-old Julissa Thaler over Friday and found the boy’s body and a shotgun in her trunk.  Thaler is charged with his murder.

We know who, but we don’t know why. Police in La Crosse say 15-year-old Storm Vondrashek was the person killed in Sunday’s double shooting. Police will only say the shooting does not appear to be random. Vondrashek was a student at Logan High School in La Crosse. The city’s school district says there’s ‘minimal danger’ to other students, and said yesterday there will be counselors available for students who need to speak with someone.

Milwaukee’s medical examiner says a five-year-old’s death earlier this month could be fentanyl related. Prosecutors last week charged the boy’s mom, 24-year-old Kanesha Jones, with felony child neglect. Police found her son’s body at her home back on May 11th. She originally told investigators that her son simply went to sleep, but police later said she suspected he died after getting into her boyfriend’s stash of drugs. Jones is being held on 15 thousand-dollars cash bond.

School leaders in Wausau are trying to calm fears about changes to their sex-ed curriculum. Parents turned out at last night’s school board meeting to oppose what they feared would be a switch to abstinence-only classes. Superintendent Keith Hilts, however, said the only change for sex-ed in Wausau schools is the addition of a state-required lesson on dropping babies off at fire stations. He says they will continue to teach about sex and reproduction, including discussions about birth control, in

Eau Claire is on the map, literally, as part of the University of Wisconsin’s Badger football scavenger hunt. Thursday marks 100 days til the start of the next season, and to celebrate the university has hidden 100 mini helmets in parks in Eau Claire, Madison, Appleton, Racine, and Kenosha. Each helmet has a code for a prize, the grand prize is a 100 dollar Pick ‘n Save gift card and two tickets to a Badger home game.

Leaders in Eau Claire say a proposed bottled water plant will not sap too much of the city’s water supply. The city council is scheduled to vote on the plan to build a Niagara Bottling facility on the city’s northwest side. The city says the plant will mean at least 100 new jobs, and will improve the city’s economy. On the other side, there are some folks in town who worry about water supplies for the rest of the city.

There’s a recommendation for kids in Wisconsin to get a booster shot. The state’s Department of Health Services yesterday said kids between five and 11 should get a booster if it’s been at least five months since they got their first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. The Pfizer shot is the only shot approved for kids under 11 in the U.S.  DHS says nearly 136 thousand kids between five and 11 in Wisconsin have gotten a shot so far.