POPLAR BLUFF, Mo. – The SEMO Times, a name already familiar to many Southeast Missouri readers, is set to re-launch on July 31 in an effort to provide in-depth news and feature articles with online and print products aimed at filling a gap in news coverage that has existed in the region for years. A launch party to unveil the new web site and first edition of the new newspaper has been set for 6 p.m., July 31 at Las Margaritas in Poplar Bluff. The announcement comes on the heels of the completion of a merger between the SEMO Times, which is owned and published by former Poplar Bluff Mayor Scott Faughn, and SEMO.net, operated by C.E.O Brian Becker. Faughn

During his State of the Union speech in January, President Obama said he hoped 2014 could be "a year of action." Six months have passed since the President issued his challenge, but leaders in the Senate are still refusing to even hold a vote on common sense bills passed by the House. National news personalities like to refer to Congress as a "do-nothing" body. The truth is, Senate leaders have refused to take up 148 of the 189 bills the House has passed. These are bills that would ease burdensome regulations on small businesses and families, establish America's energy independence and stop ObamaCare.   Like you, I am concerned about federal regulations imposed by the Obama Administration. In the House

Across America, thousands of people will be traveling this summer. Some of them for vacation, some for business, and some of them for family reunions. My family is one of those families gathering this weekend in Doniphan. But attendance will be down a bit this summer, for a lot of reasons. First, Mitcheners are now scattered across the United States. They will be traveling from the East Coast, from the West Coast, and from many dots on a map in between. Travel is expensive. Almost everyone has a year where their family budget is too tight to allow for such a trip, even if the reunions are held just every other year. And then there is the problem of scheduling,

PropTalk.com - Italian angler Dino Ferrari caught an eight-foot, 260-lb catfish on the River Po in Italy. While the catfish is one of the biggest in European record books, it’s certainly not an anomaly. The record currently stands at 297lbs, 9 oz for anyone looking to break into Guinness… Source: http://proptalk.com/260-lb-wels-catfish-caught-italy/

This week the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency spent two days in Missouri pushing the agency’s latest attempt to regulate our rural way of life. In the last few years the EPA has attempted to regulate everything from how we meet our energy needs to prohibiting young people from working on the family farm. Just when I thought the EPA could not get any more extreme, now they are trying to place new intrusive and ineffective rules on every body of water in the United States.   In April, the EPA announced it would attempt to expand the regulatory reach of the Clean Water Act through a new “Waters of the United States” plan. The proposed new rule would

Astronomy Central - The vast majority of objects out there in the universe are pretty big…moons, planets, stars, galaxies, so it can be difficult sometimes to get your head round their actual size. Here you’ll see how some space stuff out there compares to Earth stuff down here. http://astronomycentral.co.uk/astronomy-the-size-of-stuff/