Today's Features

Put together a frosty Saturday morning, a placid lake with the sun glinting off the water, a dozen canoes and dozens of “morning people,” and what do you have?

A crew of exuberant volunteers all set to clean up Lake Shelby by canoe, of course.

The volunteers, consisting of Collins Army ROTC members, Clear Creek Trailblazer volunteers, and some individuals, braved a chilly morning, rain gorged waterways and muddy creek banks to participate in the annual Clear Creek Cleanup, which also included a cleanup by Boy Scouts who policed along the banks.

The heinous bombing at the Boston Marathon on Monday that killed three people and injured 183 others reverberated around the world and home to Shelby County.

There were a handful of persons who listed Shelby County addresses on the official marathon entry list, and some of the finished the event with an awed reaction for what happened shortly afterward.

Susanne Busey Osberg, a Shelby County native who has lived in Boston for 41 years, said the bombing brought back the horrible events of Sept. 11, 2001, to her in a very real way.

Shelby Countians must be doing something right, judging by the county’s steadily rise as one of the healthiest counties in the state.

Shelby County is up to third this year, according to the 2013 County Health Rankings of all states, complied annually by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute in collaboration with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Each day – every day for nearly 16 years – Tania Williams awoke in the orphanage in Ukraine.  Sixteen – the dreaded age that orphans in this Eastern European country “age out” to the streets, often thrown into a life of prostitution, drugs and crime. For Tania, it was a time of fear and anxiety, faced with no family and no physical or emotional support.