Green Bay News

APPLETON — Every time Nick Goudreau takes the mound he’s thinking no-hitter.

“First pitch,” he says.

Thursday at Fox Cities Stadium the Appleton East junior was thinking no-hitter the whole afternoon and thanks to a few good defensive plays Goudreau was better than good.

Goudreau completed the no-hitter and struck out six as the Patriots topped the Spartans, 2-1, in a Fox Valley Association baseball game, ending North’s winning streak at five games.

“I keep in mind what’s going on,” said Goudreau, who said he pitched a perfect game when he was 12. “Take care of the first inning, got out of it and go on to the second one, so I was keeping track the whole time and I was getting a little nervous sometimes when the ball went up, but it felt good to get it.”

Goudreau ran into trouble in the first inning and actually hit a batter with the bases loaded as North opened with a 1-0 lead. From there, Goudreau always found a way to get out of a potential scoring situation by North with a strikeout, double play or good defensive play.

Oshkosh North is a fantastic team and Nick Goudreau is a solid pitcher,” East coach Randy Reed said. “He got into some trouble and battled his way through it with good defense and pitches.”

There was one scoring play that was questionable in the fifth inning. East’s center fielder Bennett Groves made a sliding attempt to catch a fly ball and it caromed off his glove and onto the ground.

East scored it an error, not a hit, and the no-hitter continued.

Appleton East’s Simon Pflum slides safely into second base during a game Thursday against Oshkosh North at Fox Cities Stadium. (Doug Ritchay/WLUK)

Then in the bottom of the fifth, East scored twice, one run coming on a Goudreau single to center and the other on a throwing error by the pitcher on a pick-off move and the two runs proved to be enough for Goudreau.

“I was so pumped,” Goudreau said. “I knew I only needed those two and I was going to be able to hold it down the rest of the game.”

East moved to 2-3 overall, 1-2 in the FVA. The Patriots’ other conference losses were by one run, so it was nice to turn the tables on one of the league’s title contenders.

“This is huge,” Goudreau said. “We knew they were a good team. We were expecting that we were going to give them a fight and I was real glad we were able to get our first conference win.”

Sometimes a win like Thursday’s can be a stepping stone. East is hoping so.

“This can take us wherever we want to go,” Goudreau said. “We believe we can make a run, so hopefully this is the beginning of a winning streak.”

“Every year I feel like there three, four teams at the top and I’d like to think we’re in the mix every year,” Reed said. “We’ll see how things play out. Kimberly lost to Oshkosh North and we beat Oshkosh North, so maybe we can beat Kimberly, too.”

Follow Doug Ritchay on Twitter @dougritchay

GREEN BAY – To increase the chances of having stolen electronics and merchandise returned to the owner, the Green Bay Police Department launched an online program.

Green Bay Police launched Serial Number Awareness Program (SNAP), a website that stores serial numbers and descriptions of your valuables.

Police say a large portion of stolen property is resold to second hand stores. Second hand stores record the serial numbers of property taken in and send the information to the police. Without identifiable information, stolen property often goes undetected and is never returned.

To get started, log on to SNAP.gbpolice.org, and create an account and password. The information will be stored on a secure server in case it is necessary to access or update anything.

The service is free of charge.

 

OSHKOSH – Police are looking for a man suspected of stealing a computer from a store and breaking in to another store.

Oshkosh police say Sunday night, just before midnight, the man went into Walmart, 351 S. Washburn St. He stayed in the store for almost two hours, and left around 1:15 a.m. carrying a stolen laptop computer.

Around 1:30 a.m., he was seen on surveillance video in the area of Fleet Farm, 177 N. Wasburn St. He left with items from the store around 4:30 a.m., police say.

The man is described as white with dark hair and a medium build. He was wearing a sweatshirt, blue jeans and white athletic shoes.

Anyone with information is asked to call Det. Paul Frey at (920) 236-5267. Anonymous tips can be left with Winnebago County Wide Crime Stoppers by phone at (920) 231-8477, by sending a text message with the keyword IGOTYA to 274637 or online.

GRAND CHUTE – Students celebrated Arbor Day by grabbing some shovels and dirt in Grand Chute Friday.

The town invited the community to participate in the 13th annual tree-planting event at Carter Woods Park.

Students from Badger Elementary School and Houdini Elementary School helped to plant the trees.

The Town of Grand Chute has been a Tree City USA Award recipient since 2005.

The National Arbor Day Foundation awards communities that demonstrate outstanding effort to improve urban forestry.

GREEN BAY – Roundy’s is helping to fight hunger by donating food and funds to 60 pantries in five days.

The bi-annual Roundy’s Foundation Focused on Feeding Families Tour is to help fight hunger and give back to food pantries.

Roundy’s is donating more than $4,000 in food and funds to each pantry. The tour ended Friday with a stop at Copps in Green Bay.

Five local pantries were invited today to receive the donation.

Roundy’s Foundation organizer, Connie Jones, says this event is one of the many projects they have to help end hunger, “We are a food company and we believe strongly that everyone should be able to have food on the table whether they can afford to or not and we are mindful not everyone can walk into our stores and buy the food they need.”

The tour had made 13 stops in the past five days.

 

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. investigators took months to piece together evidence that led to the conclusion that drone strikes had killed two Western hostages and two Americans who worked for al-Qaida, U.S. officials said Friday.

New details were emerging about how the U.S. learned — and announced this week — the pair of deadly drone strikes had killed hostages Warren Weinstein and Italian Giovanni Lo Porto and the two al-Qaida operatives.

The drone strike was ordered because officials believed there were four members of al-Qaida’s leadership in the building in the tribal areas of northern Pakistan. But they later learned six bodies had been buried instead of the four they expected, two U.S. officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The drone strike was carried out by the CIA, which runs a covert drone operation. The two American al-Qaida leaders were Ahmed Farouq, a dual U.S.-Pakistani national who was an al-Qaida operations leader in Pakistan, and Adam Gadahn, an American who served as an al-Qaida spokesman, who was killed in a separate strike on a second compound.

Coincidental intelligence emerged that Weinstein, a contractor with the U.S. Agency for International Development who was captured in 2011, was dead, but intelligence officials didn’t know how, when or where.

They began investigating, parsing through intercepts, and interviewing local sources in Pakistan, the officials said. It wasn’t until two weeks ago that they got the crucial piece of intelligence that led them to conclude that Weinstein and Lo Porto were killed in the January strike.

The location of these hostages was a closely guarded secret even within al-Qaida. Because hostages are so valuable, the group takes extraordinary precautions not to talk about them electronically.

“It is a cruel and bitter truth that in the fog of war generally and our fight against terrorists specifically, mistakes, sometimes deadly mistakes, can occur,” President Barack Obama said.

On Friday, the Pakistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement of condolences to the hostages’ families.

“Having lost thousands of innocent civilians in the war against terrorism, Pakistan can fully understand this tragic loss and stands with the families of Weinstein and Lo Porto in this difficult time,” the ministry said. “The death of Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Lo Porto in a drone strike demonstrates the risk and unintended consequences of the use of this technology that Pakistan has been highlighting for a long time.”

Meanwhile, in Italy, Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni is seeking to explain to Parliament why it took three months to learn about the death of Lo Porto in the U.S. drone strike. Gentiloni told lawmakers Friday that in an inaccessible war zone, where hostage-taking is frequent, it took that long for U.S. intelligence to verify Lo Porto had been killed.

Military technology may grow ever more sophisticated, but there still is no surefire way to ensure innocents will not be caught in harm’s way, even by the most elite of U.S. forces.

In 2010, the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team 6 tried to rescue Scottish aid worker Linda Norgrove from Taliban captors in Afghanistan. She was killed by a grenade thrown by one of the American commandoes.

“Sometimes you get it wrong,” said retired Army Col. Peter Mansoor, a professor of military history at Ohio State University. “There’s no way to have a perfectly clean war.”

In the case of the hostages killed when the CIA targeted an al-Qaida compound, Mansoor said, “It was simply incomplete information and you’re never going to have complete information. … There’s no way to completely excise these sorts of collateral damage incidents from military affairs.”

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News researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York contributed to this report.

 

NEW YORK (AP) – PepsiCo says it’s dropping aspartame from Diet Pepsi in response to customer worries and replacing it with sucralose, another artificial sweetener commonly known as Splenda.

The decision to swap sweeteners comes as Americans keep turning away from popular diet sodas. Rival Coca-Cola said this week that sales volume for Diet Coke, which also uses aspartame, fell 5 percent in North America in the first three months of the year.

Atlanta-based Coca-Cola said in a statement that it has no plans to change the sweetener in Diet Coke, which is the country’s top-selling diet cola.

The Food and Drug Administration says aspartame, known by the brand names Equal and NutraSweet, is “one of the most exhaustively studied substances in the human food supply, with more than 100 studies supporting its safety.”

More recently, a government advisory committee for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s dietary guidelines said aspartame appears to be safe in the amounts consumed by Americans. But it added that there is still uncertainty about whether the sweetener increases risk for some blood cancers in men.

Executives at Coke and Pepsi blame the declines on perceptions that the sweetener isn’t safe.

John Sicher, publisher of industry tracker Beverage Digest, noted that attitudes about aspartame can be very negative. Using an online tool called Topsy that measures Twitter sentiment on a scale of 0 to 100, he noted “aspartame” got a 22 ranking, below a 38 ranking for “Congress.”

By comparison, “love” had a ranking of 96 and “Christmas” had a ranking of 88.

The negative attitudes about aspartame don’t seem to extend to sucralose. Sparkling Ice, a zero-calorie drink created in the 1990s, is sweetened with sucralose and has been enjoying strong growth in recent years.

“Aspartame is the No. 1 reason consumers are dropping diet soda,” said Seth Kaufman, vice president of Pepsi.

In tests, Kaufman said, people still recognized the reformulated drink to be Diet Pepsi, but that it might have a “slightly different mouthfeel.”

Diet Pepsi will also still have acesulfame potassium, or ace-K, which PepsiCo said it added to the drink in late 2012 to help prevent its taste from degrading over time.

PepsiCo says reformulated Diet Pepsi will start hitting shelves in August, with cans stating that the drink is “Now Aspartame Free.” The change only applies to the U.S. market and will affect all varieties of Diet Pepsi, such as Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi and Wild Cherry Diet Pepsi. It will not apply to other PepsiCo drinks, such as Diet Mountain Dew.

Coke also introduced a version of Diet Coke made with Splenda in 2005, but the brand remains small.

Sicher of Beverage Digest said he thinks Diet Pepsi’s change could get some people to try or retry the drink. But he said it’s too early to say how big of an impact it will have over the years.

Volumes for Diet Pepsi and Diet Coke began falling in 2005 and 2006, respectively, according Beverage Digest. Volumes have continued falling since then, and the decline has accelerated in the past two years.

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AP Writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed from Washington, D.C.

NEW YORK (AP) – The Statue of Liberty was evacuated Friday as police responded to a report of a suspicious package.

The New York Police Department had boats at the scene. Visitors said hundreds of people were herded toward a ferry landing and off Liberty Island.

John Blount, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, was in the statue’s crown, chatting with a park ranger.

“All of a sudden he got a call on his phone,” Blount said. “He said ‘OK’, looked up and said, ‘It’s time to leave.’ We had just made it up there.”

He said it was a very calm evacuation down. They got on a boat, and “we were just floating around out there for the past hour and a half.”

His wife’s purse was in a locker; they had to leave without reclaiming their property.

The National Park Service, which oversees the statue and the island, did not respond to phone and email requests for comment.

Statue Cruises, which operates the ferries that carry tourists to the Statue of Liberty National Monument and Ellis Island, said officials found a suspicious package at Liberty Island. The company was postponing all service to the island until the investigation was completed, said Mike Burke, its chief operating officer and vice president.

Eric Gustafson, of Worchester, Massachusetts, was on Liberty Island with his wife and son. They were about to enter the building for the tour when park rangers ushered “everyone to the flagpole” and then told them they had to leave.

“They didn’t give us a reason for it. The communication was lacking,” he said. About 90 minutes later, they were back in Manhattan.

They later saw Twitter accounts about a suspicious package.

“We weren’t nervous. It was mostly just frustrating,” he said, adding that the evacuation was very orderly.

Other tourists said they were taken off boats while trying to leave nearby Ellis Island, then those vessels then were used to evacuate Liberty Island.

Karen Mason, 68, of Cincinnati, Ohio, said they had just boarded a boat at Ellis Island at 12:40 p.m. “All of a sudden, they said ‘Disembark, disembark, disembark. We have to evacuate the boat.'”

She said she didn’t feel like she was in any danger. “But we saw helicopters and we knew something was going on,” she said.

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Associated Press Writers Tom Hays and Kiley Armstrong contributed to this report.

MANITOWOC COUNTY – Officials in Manitowoc County are cautioning residents if they receive a phone call from the Maintowoc Sheriff’s Department asking for money or personal information to clear a warrant.

Deputies say they have multiple reports from residents saying a person called them saying they were from the sheriff’s department asking for money or personal information. The caller would say there was a Federal Complaint filled with the Department of Justice and there was an active warrant issued.

The most alarming part about the calls is residents say they’ve checked their caller ID and the phone number that displays is the general phone line for the Manitowoc Sheriff’s Office, 683-4200. This indicates the unauthorized callers have somehow been able to insert the sheriff’s office number into the caller ID to make it seem legitimate.

Deputies ensure residents, the Manitowoc Sheriff’s Office does not ask for any type of payment for warrants over the phone. As a general rule, payments to law enforcement are made at the law enforcement agencies and you will receive a proper receipt.

If you have any doubts about the call being legitimate, hang up the phone and call the sheriff’s office at 920-683-4200 and press option #1. The dispatcher will be able to confirm if the call is legitimate.

 

 

GRAND CHUTE – Five people have been arrested in a prostitution bust in which officers found two teenagers.

Grand Chute police say they were called to a hotel on Thursday, following a tip. They got warrants to search several hotel rooms.

Officers found a 14-year-old Appleton girl and a 17-year-old Green Bay girl. They also arrested a 29-year-old Green Bay woman on suspicion of prostitution, child enticement and soliciting a child for prostitution.

Four other adults were jailed on probation violations.

The two teens were released to safe environments, police say.

SHEBOYGAN, Wis. (AP) – A Sheboygan County man is accused of causing the death of his fiancee’s 4-year-old son.

Thirty-one-year-old Armando Aguirre is charged with second-degree reckless homicide in the boy’s death last week at the home the couple shared near Cascade. A judge in Sheboygan County Circuit Court set bond at $50,000 cash Friday.

A criminal complaint says Aguirre told investigations he was playing with the boy and spinning him around while holding onto his legs when the child’s head hit the carpeted floor. An autopsy showed the boy, identified only as Trey, died of blunt force injuries to his head. Doctors at Children’s Hospital told investigators the child’s head injuries could not have been caused by “glancing” contact with the carpet.

Aguirre was ordered to have no unsupervised contact with children.

BROWN COUNTY – Three people were hurt in a series of crashes Thursday night on Hwy. 172 over the Fox River.

The Brown Co. Sheriff’s Office says around 9 p.m., a vehicle headed west rear-ended another vehicle and crossed several lanes of traffic, hit the center median rail, bounced back into traffic, hit another westbound vehicle and flipped over.

The driver of the first vehicle, a 21-year-old man from rural Green Bay, was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. The driver of the second vehicle, a 60-year-old Greenville man, was also taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. The driver of the third vehicle, a 56-year-old Ashwaubenon woman, had minor injuries but was not taken to the hospital. None of the drivers had any passengers.

Speed and alcohol appear to have contributed to the crashes, investigators say.

All three lanes of traffic were blocked for about half an hour after the crash. Traffic was diverted off at Webster Ave. to avoid any secondary crashes while the scene was being cleared.

GREEN BAY – A new public-private partnership aimed at encouraging business to leverage the expertise and energy of UW-Green Bay faculty, staff and students with the leadership transformation services of InitiativeOne is underway.

The partnership has the additional benefit of giving the university a downtown presence.

It was formalized Friday morning through a memorandum of understanding signed by Chancellor Gary L. Miller and InitiativeOne CEO Fred Johnson.

The goal is for InitiativeOne’s team of professionals to work together with UW-Green Bay’s Austin E. Cofrin School of Business faculty to explore and develop a series of projects and programs that will influence the greater Green Bay business community.

FOX 11’s Laura Smith is working on this story and will have a full report tonight on FOX 11 News at Five.

APPLETON – Investigators continue to look into why an Appleton man had several dozen potentially explosive chemicals in his apartment.

The chemicals were found in a 32-year-old man’s apartment after he was arrested for forcing his way into his neighbor’s apartment.

Appleton police say they are now going through the man’s electronics to find any possible motive for using the chemicals.

The chemicals are legal to own, but police say they are unusual to have in a normal house. They believe the man bought them on the Internet.

FOX 11’s Ben Krumholz will have an update on this story on FOX 11 News at Nine.

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa – Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker, a likely 2016 presidential candidate, is set to return to Iowa this weekend for several events.

According to Walker’s political group Our American Revival, Walker and Iowa Republican Congressman Rod Blum will meet local activists Friday afternoon in Cedar Rapids. Other stops Friday and Saturday include Davenport, Sioux Center, Sheldon, and Des Moines.

The two-term governor will also speak Saturday night in Waukee at an Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition event.

Walker’s spokesperson says he will “continue to lay out the principles of Our American Revival, share his message of big, bold reform, and discuss the OAR issue platform.”

Walker has traveled to New Hampshire, Iowa, Minnesota and New York in the past week.

The governor continues to split his time between states that are important to a potential 2016 presidential race and Wisconsin. Two new polls have shown Walker’s approval rating has declined recently.

A poll this week from the St. Norbert College Strategic Research Institute shows Walker’s approval rating dropped to 41 percent – down seven points since last fall and 18 points since last spring.

• Click here to read full results of the St. Norbert poll

A Marquette University Law School poll last week also put Walker’s approval rating at 41 points – down eight points from October and the lowest in the three-year history of the survey.

• Click here to read full results of the Marquette poll

Walker attributes the lower numbers to all of the attention on his two-year budget proposal, which included cuts to funding for state universities and public schools.

Lawrence University government professor Arnold Shober said those approval rating numbers really don’t matter much outside of Wisconsin as Walker lays groundwork for a potential

“Outside of the state those are really kind of local issues that don’t have the same importance because in a federal role as president you don’t have a lot of fingerprints over that anymore,” said Shober. “That’s a different level of government. You’re concerned much more with the big issues, if you will.”

As the budget process continues to play out, Shober doesn’t believe the reactions from Wisconsin residents have an impact on his national perception.

“While Gov. Walker’s positions in the budget can inform how people see him – is he conservative enough for us, is he too conservative – the specifics in that budget I don’t think again are that important outside of Wisconsin,” he said.

While in Grand Chute Wednesday, Walker said again he is focused on the state budget process and he won’t announce any decision about a 2016 run until the state budget is passed – likely in June.

FOX 11’s Andrew LaCombe will have a complete story tonight on FOX 11 News at Nine.

MADISON (AP) – Alliant Energy Corp. is asking regulators to build a $750 million gas-fired plant near Beloit.

The Madison-based utility company on Friday filed an application with the state Public Service Commission to build a plant it says will provide cleaner power than the coal plants it’s shutting down. Alliant will close a coal plant on the Mississippi River in Cassville, as well as coal boilers in Sheboygan.

Alliant is also proposing to build a $9 million solar generating facility next to the gas-fueled plant.

The Journal Sentinel says the new plant would be built on the site of the Riverside Energy Center north of Beloit.

DETROIT (AP) – Harley-Davidson is recalling nearly 46,000 motorcycles in the U.S. because they could stay in gear due to clutches that won’t fully disengage.

The recall covers certain Electra Glide, Ultra Limited, Police Electra Glide, Street Glide, Road Glide and Road King models from the 2014 and 2015 model years.

Harley says in documents that gas bubbles can cause the clutch master cylinder to lose its ability to fully disengage the clutch, especially if the bike has been parked for a long time. This could cause a rider to lose control of the motorcycle if it’s started in gear.

The problem was found through customer complaints. Harley reported 27 crashes and four minor injuries.

Dealers will flush the clutch and rebuild the master cylinder. The recall was to start April 23.

KENOSHA (AP) – The trial for a former police officer accused of killing a woman whose body was found in a suitcase along a rural Wisconsin highway has been delayed until November.

Steven Zelich is also suspected in the death of another woman who was found in a second suitcase at the same location in Walworth County.

The 53-year-old was set for trial next month on first-degree intentional homicide and hiding a corpse. According to online court records, on Friday a Kenosha County judge moved the trial to Nov. 16.

Zelich is accused in the 2012 death of 19-year-old Jenny Gamez, a college student from Cottage Grove, Oregon. He’s also suspected of killing 37-year-old Laura Simonson at a Rochester, Minnesota, hotel.

Court records say Zelich told investigators he killed them accidentally during sex.

JANESVILLE (AP) – A woman who went through the drive-thru twice raised the suspicion of an employee at a Taco Bell in Janesville.

The fast food worker called police, suspecting the woman was drunk. Police say she, in fact, was very intoxicated with a blood alcohol content of .27, more than three times the legal limit to drive.

WISC-TV reports the 37-year-old woman was arrested about 1 a.m. Friday while she was waiting for her food at the drive-thru window. Police say it’s the woman’s fourth drunken driving charge.

MADISON (AP) – A Wisconsin man has pleaded not guilty to a federal charge that he tried to join the Islamic State terror group.

Prosecutors have charged 34-year-old Joshua Van Haften with trying to provide material assistance to a foreign terrorist group. He was arrested at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago earlier this month. Investigators said he had flown back from Turkey after a failed bid to join the terror group in Syria. He could face up to 15 years in prison and $250,000 in fines if he’s convicted.

Van Haften appeared in court in Madison on Friday for an arraignment. His attorney, federal public defender Joseph Bugni, entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker set a status conference for May 27.