1410 WIZM

A massive volunteer effort to clean the mighty Mississippi has now expanded to 30 cities and is growing into a summer-long campaign.  Living Lands & Water will begin its Great Mississippi River Clean-up on June 11^th, when volunteers will gather along the Mississippi from Saint Paul, MN to Prairie Du Chien, WI. Other cities joining this northern most leg of the clean-up will be Red Wing, MN;  Wabasha, MN, Winona, MN; Alma, WI; Buffalo City, WI and  LaCrosse, WI.

The clean-up, which encompassed 22 cities in its inaugural year, has grown to 30, requiring organizers to expand to monthly clean-ups across the summer.  In all, 1,200-1,500 volunteers are expected to take part in this year’s clean-up of the iconic waterway.

Living Lands & Waters is an environmental organization established in 1998 and headquartered in East Moline, Illinois.  LL&W has removed more than six million pounds of trash through cleanup efforts along the Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Illinois and Potomac Rivers since its launch over 12 years ago.

For more information or to sign up as a volunteer, visit www.livinglandsandwaters.org.

Jennifer Shilling will have a primary opponent in the coming state senate recall election for the 32nd district.  La Crosse's James Smith says he'll run as a democrat to challenge Shilling but also to protest the recall process that will mean possibly nine state senate recall elections statewide this summer.  Smith, who made the announcement Monday evening on WIZM's La Crosse Talk PM with Mitch Reynolds, earlier in the day had resigned his post on the executive committee for the La Crosse county republican party.

A workplace tiff has turned into something a little bigger in the eyes of La Crosse police. A woman at a La Crosse hospital says some kidding around in the break room took a serious turn when one of the workers threatened to blow her up. He was talking about putting a bomb in her car, sending her up to heaven in little pieces, triggering the bomb to go off when she opened the door; that kind of thing. He apparently also mentioned something about being a terrorist. Internal investigation at the hospital determined it was all just talk. But after the guy cut the woman off while driving, she got police involved. Guy says he was joking about all the terrorism talk. Cops aren't laughing. They've busted the 43 year-old on disorderly conduct charges.

Your first call when you find your apartment has been broken into? The police, of course. The call that Casey Flower made when he got back to his La Crosse apartment from Minneapolis over the week-end and found his door kicked in. The 21 year-old UWL student probably wasn't thinking that there was anything wrong with the pungent smell of fresh marijuana that police encountered when they got there. After poking around, cops found pot, pot pipes, pot seeds in a little glass vial and some random prescription narcotics to boot. Flower may have been the one to get his door kicked in, but he's the one who faces three drug possession charges now.