Spring ahead:
2017
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Sports: Iola’s Holloway earns league honors See B1
The Weekender Saturday, March 11, 2017
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As Topeka watches, governor eyes Rome By JOHN HANNA The Associated Press
file on Higgins: “Rocket Man: How an unemployed blogger confirmed that Syria had used chemical weapons.” Around that time, Higgins dropped the Brown Moses tag and his work, which by then had moved beyond the fighting in the Middle East, was being frequently cited in the New York Times and Washington Post and in other major media outlets. In early 2014, Higgins launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the creation of an entirely new website that would bring together a network of dedicated open-source analysts. Higgins’s site went live that summer, three
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — When he was one of the nation’s most powerful governors, Sam Brownback could ask fellow Kansas Republicans to Sam Brownback slash income taxes and they fell into line. He made the state a lab for conservative ideas, and lawmakers faced serious risks if they balked at his demands. But with Kansas now struggling to pay its bills, the governor’s star has fallen so low that legislators don’t fear crossing him anymore. And recent reports indicate that Brownback is preparing to take a low-profile ambassadorship in Italy that would end his administration almost two years early. Even some fellow Republicans are hoping he leaves, seeing him as a roadblock to fixing the state’s budget problems. But if he doesn’t depart before the GOP-controlled Legislature finishes its annual session, bipartisan majorities are drafting proposals to roll back his cherished tax cuts even if he vetoes the idea. “We’re feeling that we have the responsibility to fix the budget — without him,” Senate President Susan Wagle, a Wichita Republican, said Thursday. Wagle’s emergence as a Brownback critic is a stark il-
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Iola High School (‘06) graduate Aric Toler gives a presentation on open-source intelligence gathering at a conference last year. Toler, a Russia expert, works as an analyst for British-based Bellingcat, where he is a member of the team that investigated the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. He currently lives in Charlotte, N.C., but lectures worldwide. COURTESY PHOTO
OUT IN THE OPEN
Iola High alum a world leader in open-source investigations By RICK DANLEY The Iola Register
I
t was an afternoon in late July of 2014. Aric Toler, living in Charlotte at the time and working in the corporate security division at Bank of America, was at home, scrolling through his Twitter feed. Toler was following, sporadically, the news coming out of eastern Ukraine concerning Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, which had crashed under suspicious circumstances near
the Ukraine-Russia border a few days earlier. An Iola native, Toler had graduated with a master’s degree from the University of Kansas’s Department of Slavic Languages & Literature the previous year and spoke fluent Russian, and so he took a more than usual interest in the region and had been watching the fighting between pro-Russian and Ukrainian forces at an interested but casual remove since the Russian annexation of Crimea earlier that year. But, this day, something
new caught his eye. A British blogger and citizen journalist named Eliot Higgins had tweeted a photo of an unidentified military vehicle taken somewhere in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine. Since 2012, Higgins, known online as Brown Moses, maintained an influential open-source investigations blog, which was beginning to gain mainstream acclaim for the rigor and accuracy with which it analyzed the publicly available data pouring out of the conflicts in Syria and Libya — data, mostly, in the form of YouTube videos and Facebook posts and satellite images. In the fall of 2013, The New Yorker ran a pro-
WAR ZONE
Side Project artists Barry Cook and Cathy Whitworth perform at the Iola Elks Lodge. REGISTER/SHELLIE SMITLEY
‘Living a Country Song’ By SHELLIE SMITLEY The Iola Register
While Barry Cook and Cathy Whitworth, Chanute, are entertaining guests at the Iola Elks Lodge and at REB’s Place, Humboldt, they have a side project that is taking them to Nashville, Tenn. They met while performing with a local band, Cook said. Whitworth sang and Cook played the guitar. Both of them had aspirations of mak-
ing music a full-time career. She had already written some of her own music, and in 2007 had auditioned for, the now canceled, “Nashville Star,” a country music version of “American Idol.” “You had to have an original song and it had to be copy written,” Whitworth said, “It was quite an experience.” Since then the two have banned together and encourSee SONG | Page A5
Quote of the day Vol. 119, No. 89
Thursday’s thunderstorms that roared through Allen County Thursday were particularly rough on LaHarpe, where golf ball-sized hail blasted Tara Lampe’s car while it was parked at TLC Garden Center. At right, the hail stones covered the ground in LaHarpe, giving the appearance of a winter storm. PHOTOS COURTESY OF
TISH MALONEY (AB0VE) AND ROBON MANBECK
“Nothing is impossible, the word itself says ‘I’m possible.’” — Audrey Hepburn 75 Cents
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