Friday,  October 26, 2012 • Vol. 13--No. 101 • 29 of 41 •  Other Editions

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• "The medical risks of using it without appropriate reason are essentially zero," Downing said.
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MN man says McGovern has rare courage

• SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) -- A Minnesota man who worked to elect George McGovern in the historic 1972 presidential campaign says the former US senator had courage that few politicians have today.
• Fifty-five-year-old Todd Hong was just 15 when he started working for the McGovern presidential campaign in 1972 in Sioux Falls. Hong was among the people who streamed past the casket holding McGovern during a public viewing Thursday at First United Methodist Church.
• McGovern died Sunday at age 90. McGovern, a staunch liberal, lost in a historic landslide to Republican Richard Nixon in the 1972 race.

• Hong, of Eden Prairie, Minn., says he was at McGovern headquarters election night in Sioux Falls in 1972. He says he and other campaign workers were devastated when they saw McGovern lost and started screaming at the television.
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Drought holds its grip as growers pivot to wheat
JIM SUHR,AP Business Writer

• ST. LOUIS (AP) -- The worst U.S. drought in decades showed little sign of easing last week as farmers closed out their corn and soybean harvests and turned their attention to winter wheat, which has been struggling to break through the moisture-starved soil in some states, according to a weekly report.
• The latest U.S. Drought Monitor update Thursday showed that just over 62 percent of the lower 48 states still was in some form of drought as of Tuesday, which was about the same as in the previous seven-day period. Nineteen percent of that land remained in extreme or exceptional drought, the two worst categories.
• Recent thunderstorms helped slightly relax the drought's grip in portions of the nation's midsection, where the U.S. Department of Agriculture said 87 percent of the corn and 80 percent of the soybean crops now have been brought in from the fields, weeks ahead of scheduled because of an earlier planting season.
• In Iowa, the nation's biggest corn producer, 93 percent of the corn had been reaped as nearly 63 percent of the state still was mired in extreme or exceptional drought, an improvement in severity of only less than 1 percentage point from a week earlier.

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