MILWAUKEE (WTAQ) - Wisconsin health officials now say they’re investigating 19 cases of the rare stomach illness Cyclospora.

It’s possible that only six of the cases are linked to a national outbreak in which 535 people apparently got sick from eating a bagged salad mix made in Mexico.

State epidemiologist Justin Kohl says it’s plausible that not all of Wisconsin’s cases are from the same source. He tells the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that doctors are becoming more aware and vigilant about Cyclospora – and as a result, many of the state’s cases may not be related to an outbreak that has covered 18 states.

Six Wisconsin cases of Cyclospora were reported a few weeks ago. Three were in Grant County, with the rest in Milwaukee and Brown counties.

The FDA said it found clusters of illnesses from those eating a salad mix from Taylor Farms de Mexico, served at Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants in Iowa and Nebraska.

The same thing was not found in any of the other states. Texas has the most cases with 215, followed by Iowa with 153. Most of Iowa’s cases were in the Cedar Rapids area.

ALGOMA, WI (WTAQ) - A $1,500 reward is being offered to find those who recently put up six anti-Semitic signs in Algoma.

The Anti-Defamation League offered the reward, as the FBI and local police investigate the matter as a hate crime.

Elana Kahn-Oren of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation tells Wisconsin Public Radio that the signs appeared in late July and were quickly taken down. She said the signs had messages like, “Jew go back where you came from” and “Kill the Jews, Keep Algoma clean.”

Local officials issued a statement that Algoma would not tolerate signs which are discriminatory or threatening. 

MANITOWOC, WI (WTAQ) - The owners of the S.S. Badger car ferry will have to wait a little longer to find out if the boat can operate next year.

The federal EPA granted a two-year extension in March to the Badger’s operating permit, which allows the boat to keep dumping coal ash into Lake Michigan.

A federal court is taking longer than expected to act on the extension. That’s because officials are still reviewing thousands of public comments on the matter.

The EPA and the Justice Department now have until October 26th to ask a judge for a final approval of the extension.

In the meantime, the Badger continues its daily runs between Manitowoc and Ludington Michigan while the request is being reviewed.

The Badger – the oldest steamship on the Great Lakes – was supposed to shut down after last year unless it could find a cleaner way to dump its exhaust. The owners say they’re working on alternatives. 

NEENAH, WI (WTAQ) - A shooting at a Walmart in Neenah sends one woman to the hospital. 

Theda Clark Medical Center says the victim is in critical condition. 

Neenah police say a female suspect is in custody. 

The shooting involved a Walmart employee in the liquor section of the store around 11:15 a.m Wednesday. 

The victim reportedly was shot in the torso.  

WAUTOMA, WI (WTAQ) - Waushare County Sheriff's Deparmtent says a standoff with a suspect they believe was responsible for an armed robbery at a pharmacy ends with the suspect taking his own life.

The man, identified Thursday as 33-year-old Timothy Pawlacyk, was holed up inside a vacant home in Wautoma after exchanging gunfire with police.

Around midnight, deputies said the situation was over and the suspect was dead. 

it all started Wednesday afternoon when Pawlacyk robbed the CHN Pharmacy of the painkiller Oxycontin.

Deputies were called and later found the Pawlacyk’s car. An officer shot at the vehicle to try and stop it, but missed.

He drove into a construction zone and got stuck, so Pawlacyk ran to a house where the occupants were on vacation. There, the man exchanged bullets with an officer. The deputy fired 3 to 5 times, but it was not certain whether any of those hit the suspect.

Neighbors were evacuated. Around 11 p.m.,  a SWAT team from Oshkosh went into the home’s basement and found the suspect shot to death. 

(information from Wheeler News Service used in this report)

MILWAUKEE, WI (WTAQ) - NBC 26’s parent company is asking for the state Attorney General to intervene in a contract dispute with Time Warner Cable after they their transmission was pulled from the cable provider’s programming. 

The Journal Broadcast Group says the cable provider is charging customers despite a decision to remove it's Wisconsin TV stations from programming. 

JBG is asking the Wisconsin Department of Justice to commence enforcement actions to require Time Warner to fulfill its statutory obligations to provide Wisconsin consumers with a credit for the service they have denied and to stop charging for programming it no longer provides.

On July 25^th, Time Warner Cable removed JBG station programming from across the country including Green Bay’s WGBA-TV and Milwaukee’s WTMJ-TV. 

“We continue to work towards a resolution with Time Warner and ask them again to engage with us in productive negotiations,” says JBG Executive Vice President of Television and Radio Operations Steve Wexler. 

According to a press release, Journal Broadcast Group gave Time Warner permission to continue to broadcast while the parties worked to reach agreement on a contract.

Included in JBG’s media release was a supposed letter sent to Wexler from Time Warner Cable Vice President and Assistant Chief Counsel Michael Quinn. 

The cable provider says Wisconsin's Video Programming Service Subscriber Rights Law only applies to a total service outage, and does not apply to dropping of a channel. 

Time Warner claims Journal is misleading it’s cable customers in thinking they are entitled to a refund for the loss of Journal’s rebroadcasted signals.

GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) - A Green Bay mother of three is leading a small army of grassroots supporters in lobbying city leaders to get notifications sent to residents if a sex offender wants move into their area. 

Vicki Marquardt was upset after learning that a child sex offender was approved by the Sex Offender Residency Board to move in next door, and she didn’t know anything about it.

“If we would have been notified, we would have come to the meeting and voiced our opinion before he was approved,” Marquardt said.

The board voted Wednesday to recommend the city look into establishing a proximity notice policy. 

The board will also reconsider the sex offender Marquardt was concerned about, 50-year-old Samuel Brandt.  He is expected to be released later this month and wanted to move into his mother’s home. 

Last year, Alderman Andy Nicolson pushed for a similar proposal that Marquardt is pursuing now, but it failed at the city council because of the added work for the clerk’s office, manpower, and costs.

MADISON, WI (WTAQ) - The state’s education agency Thursday announced the 25 private school systems throughout Wisconsin that can take part in the newly expanded voucher program.

48 systems originally expressed an interest is admitting low income students with state-funded vouchers this fall. Because more than 500 youngsters applied, only the 25 systems with the largest numbers of student applications could be considered.

Over 2,400 students applied in all. Almost 2,100 are from the 25 chosen districts. From those, the department will hold a lottery next week to choose the 500 students who can make the move. 500 is the maximum allowed in the majority of the state where the voucher program is being offered for the first time.

Republicans expanded the program to give parents an alternative to under-performing public schools. But it won’t work that way this year, because two-thirds of the youngsters who applied were from private schools.

Only 24 percent of the applicants wanted to move from public schools.

The GOP calls it a technical error, and they promise to fix it during the fall session so more public school youngsters can be among the 1,000 to be admitted in next year’s choice program. 

HERE IS THE LIST OF SCHOOL SYSTEMS (APPLICANTS IN PARENTHESIS)

Appleton Xavier Catholic system (193) Eau Claire-Altoona Regis Catholic (113) Green Bay Area Catholic East (110) Oshkosh Lourdes (110) Wisconsin Rapids Assumption system (109) Stevens Point Area Catholic Schools (106) Rock County Christian School, Beloit-Janesville (102) La Crosse Aquinas-Onalaska Catholic (100)Kenosha St. Joseph (100) Kenosha Friedens Lutheran (95) Valley Christian, Oshkosh (95) Wausau-Rothschild Newman Catholic (94) St. Francis of Assisi, Manitowoc (93) Chippewa Falls McDonell system  (88) Marshfield Columbus system (83) Green Bay Notre Dame (82) Manitowoc Roncalli High School (65) Green Bay Area Catholic South (64) Fond du Lac Springs (64) Green Bay Area Catholic West (62) Sheboygan Christian (59) St. John’s Lutheran, Plymouth (42) Sheboygan Lutheran High School (42) Immanuel Lutheran, Wisconsin Rapids (40) Lighthouse Christian, Madison (31) 

NEENAH, WI (WTAQ) - Neenah police are talking more about a workplace shooting that took place at a Wal-Mart store on Wednesday.

Police officers were called to the store at 1155 W. Winneconne Avenue around 11:13 a.m. for a report of a shot being fired.

Police say 46-year-old Justine Boyd remains jailed after allegedly shooting 56-year-old Sharon Goffard while she was working in the liquor department. Both are cashiers employed by Wal-Mart.

On Thursday, authorities say the motive continues to be a mystery.

"There's nothing obvious to us, I mean, if there was a long-standing feud between the two, we're not aware of that, if there was a heated argument that morning, we're not aware of that," says Neenah Police Chief Kevin Wilkinson. "There is nothing to suggest that there is any kind of motivation such as robbery or a theft, from all appearances it was some kind of personal conflict we're attempting to understand."

Boyd remains jailed in Winnebago County on one count of attempted first-degree intentional homicide. 

Wilkinson said Boyd was arrested while at a checkout stand inside Wal-Mart shortly after the shooting. The handgun police believe was used in the shooting was also recovered.

"It's my understanding that it was legally possessed, that it was something she or her husband owned," says Wilkinson. 

Wilkinson says they're continuing the investigation by collecting statements, gathering evidence and evaluating video surveillance recordings.

Meantime, Theda Clark Medical Center Director of Trauma Dr. Ray Georgen says Goffard is lucky to be alive.

"Unfortunately the bullet damaged a number of vital structures and would've been a lethal injury if she had not been responded to quickly and put under emergency surgery," says Dr. Georgen. "Sharon required a tremendous amount of blood, we transfused her over 3 times her total blood volume to keep her alive."

Goffard remains in critical condition at Theda Clark.

FOND DU LAC, WI (WTAQ) - A Plymouth woman accused of causing a fatal crash in Fond du Lac County Wednesday has been formally charged.

51-year-old Laurie Garcia is charged with homicide by negligent operation of a vehicle after appearing in court Thursday morning. A judge set her bond at $25,000 cash.

Garcia was passing a line of cars on Highway 23 east of Fond du Lac and 53-year-old Kathleen Fee who was in the oncoming lane went onto the shoulder of the road to avoid her. Fee lost control of her car and crossed over the centerline hitting a car driven by 41-year-old Mark Feldner of St. Cloud.

Fee wasn’t wearing a seat belt, was thrown from her car and died at the scene.

Feldner suffered non-life threatening injuries.

Garcia was pulled over on Highway 151 near Waupun. Witnesses reported she was passing cars both before and after the accident.

A preliminary hearing is scheduled for September 12th.

(Additional reporting by KFIZ reporter Bob Nelson)

GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) - The newest and among the largest VA clinics in the nation is set to open in Green Bay on Monday. 

A ribbon cutting ceremony was held Thusday for hundreds of veterans. 

The new $60 million Milo C. Huempfner VA Outpatient Clinic is more than 20 times the size of the old clinic in Green Bay. 

Around 95% of care for veterans can be done on site, eliminating the need for thousands of veterans to travel down to Milwaukee.

The clinic has been a long time coming, with the VA department looked at over 50 sites for a new clinic.

Around 20,000 veterans are expected to visit the clinic annually. 

The new VA clinic is located at 2851 University Avenue.

GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) - The Bay of Green Bay has a growing “dead zone” where virtually all fish, worms, and insects cannot survive because there’s not enough oxygen in the water.

In a public Web seminar Thursday, Tracy Valenta of the Green Bay Metro Sewerage District said the dead zone starts about 8 miles northeast of the city – and it can go for up to 30 miles from there.

Wave and weather patterns are blamed, along with phosphorus runoff from the Fox River which feeds into the bay.

The dead zone is similar to others found in Lake Erie and the Gulf of Mexico.

Valenta said the Green Bay dead zone could cover as much as 40 percent of that waterway. The lack of oxygen has been a concern for many years, but Valenta says it appears to be getting worse.

Back in 1990, there were only four summer days when the bay’s oxygen was measured at below life-sustaining levels. In 2011, there were 43 such days.

It’s not clear how many fish have been affected. Officials said thousands of round gobies floated ashore in 2005 and 2011 as they desperately searched for air.

Lyman Welch of the Alliance for the Great Lakes says the Green Bay dead zone shows a need to limit phosphorus runoff from farms and other sources. He says agriculture is a bigger contributor to the problem, but all sectors work together to get it solved.

WAUPACA, WI (WTAQ) - An Oklahoma prison inmate has been sentenced for a cold case rape in Iola.

Earlier this year, investigators say DNA evidence reviewed in 2011 linked Glendon Gouker to the 1990 attack.

After pleading guilty, Gouker was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the Iola rape, on top of the four life sentences plus 70 years he is already serving.

“I’m thankful for all of the outstanding investigators who work to solve cold cases and work to understand how to employ the current technologies," says Waupaca County Sheriff Brad Hardel in a statement. "The Waupaca County Sheriff’s Office will continue to work with its partners in law enforcement to ensure justice is served for the benefit of all victims.” 

“Cases like this one ought to send a message to criminals who may think they’ve escaped justice with the passage of time,” according to Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen. “Through ongoing advancements in investigative technologies, such as DNA analysis, law enforcement is solving cold cases and holding violent offenders accountable. I congratulate the many investigators who’ve worked relentlessly to solve this horrific crime.”

Authorities are also looking into whether he was involved in a 1992 double murder that happened in Weyauwega.

NEENAH, WI (WTAQ) - Police in Neenah said Friday that the suspect in a workplace shooting this week legally carried her firearm.

In a release by the Neenah Police Department, 46-year-old Justine Boyd was in possession of a legally obtained permit to carry a concealed weapon when she was arrested Wednesday.

Boyd is accused of shooting fellow Wal-Mart cashier Sharon Goffard inside the liquor department at the store on Winneconne Avenue.

Police say a motive in the crime remains a mystery, but Chief Kevin Wilkinson says it does appear to have arisen from a personal dispute. Wilkinson ruled out any other criminal motive, such as a robbery.

Also Friday police say while Boyd did not violate a state law or local ordinance, she did break a Wal-Mart policy against employees being armed while working at the store.

Meantime, the 56-year-old Goffard remains in critical condition at Theda Clark Medical Center after she was shot in the stomach. 

Goffard's family has established a fund for her:

The Sharon Goffard Recovery Fund at Capital Credit Union

People can stop at or call any area Capital Credit Union to donate.

OSHKOSH, WI (WTAQ) - Oshkosh police say they need the public's help in locating a missing and endangered woman.

37-year-old Julie McCauley, who is cognitively disabled, was last seen by a family member Tuesday. McCauley was last heard from Thursday at 7 a.m. when she contacted work in Oshkosh by phone and said she wouldn't be coming in.

Police say according to Julie's cell phone records, she may have been in the area of Hillwind Road in Plymouth on Thursday.

She's described as 5'7", 215 pounds with green eyes and brown hair. 

Anyone who knows of Julie's whereabouts should contact the Oshkosh Police Department at (920) 236-5700 or call your local police department.

SHAWANO, WI (WTAQ) - More than 50 animals were found dead at a foreclosed Shawano home on Wednesday. 

It’s being called one of the worst animal hording cases ever seen. 

A contractor was sent out to change the locks on the property that was foreclosed on in July. 

They smelled a strong foul odor, and heard a dog barking.  So they made a call to the Shawano County Humane Society. 

Assistant Director Shelly Hansen thought they were dealing with only a couple of dogs, but after getting inside they found a cage with dead animals, which led to even more dead animals.  “This is the worst thing I have ever seen,” Hansen said. 

Hansen says two dogs, five chinchillas, five birds, two lizards and a 12 foot python were rescued, however they were in bad health. The lizards have since been sent to a sanctuary in Ashwaubenon. 

Police are investigating and will likely seek animal neglect charges against the home owner. 

The home is owned by 39-year-old Andrew Janz.  He was found roaming the streets and was likely living out of his car. 

HOWARD, WI (WTAQ) - Brown County Sheriff's Department confirms a man is dead and a woman in custody, following a domestic disturbance. 

It happened at the Northern Pines Apartment Complex on the 2000 block of Memorial Drive in Howard just after 4 a.m. Saturday. 

Deputies say this was an isolated incident, and no one in the surrounding area is in any danger.

The State Crime Lab is assisting in the investigation.

DE PERE, WI (WTAQ) - Police in De Pere say a failed attempt to pull over a driver early Sunday led to a high speed chase and eventually a crash.

It happened around 3 a.m. on Reid Street and 5th.

Police say the male driver had several traffic violations. The driver didn't pull over for the officer and a high speed chase began.

Authorities say the chase lasted for just a couple of minutes before the driver lost control of the car.

The car rolled several times near County Highway PP and Deer Point Lane just south of De Pere.

The driver was taken to the hospital with unknown injuries. Cops say alcohol is believed to be a factor.

More information should be released Monday morning.

APPLETON, WI (WTAQ) - The Outagamie County public safety committee have recommended several emergency officials be disciplined or even fired for last week’s storms that came with no warning.

Emergency Management Director Julie Loeffelholz and several other officials are on the hot seat, accused of failing to sound emergency sirens during storms on August 7.

The powerful storms across Northwest Wisconsin knocked-out power to over 60,000 customers and is blamed for one death and several injuries.

The committee also accuses the sheriff’s department for failing to maintain the county’s main communication tower near Black Creek.

ST. LOUIS (WTAQ) - For the first time this preseason, the Green Bay Packers were able to put points on the board – beating the St. Louis Rams 19-7.

Second-round draft pick and running back Eddie Lacy had a solid debut for the Packers, carrying the ball 8 times for 40 yards and one reception for 11 yards.

Quarterback Aaron Rodgers was 10-of-12 for 134 yards and lead the team to a couple field goals.

Packers finally scored the first touchdown of the preseason in the 4th quarter, when quarterback B.J. Coleman connected on a nine-yard pass to rookie Andy Mulumba.