Latest news with #Quill
NZ Herald
22-05-2025
- Business
- NZ Herald
'Glorious views': Queenstown lakefront bare section sells for $6.8m
The 2673sq m site sold for nearly $7m. Photo / Supplied The auction opened at $4m and quickly climbed. 'It opened about four and then it cranked up from there, up to about just over $6.8 [million],' Quill said. 'It slowed down toward the end, a lot of different tactics and things, it was all good.' The property sold for $6.815m, nearly $2m above its $5m rateable value. Forty-five bids were placed during the auction, and two rival bidders traded offers in a final showdown. The buyer is a New Zealander with strong ties to the area, he said. Read More 'Obviously they've got a strong affinity with the area because they love it that much, you know.' While the buyer's identity remains undisclosed, Quill said the land had been held by the same family for almost 80 years. 'They weren't going to fulfil any building dreams themselves, so that was it.' Asked about the family's reaction to the sale, Quill said they were modest, 'low-key folk' choosing to keep a low profile. Ben Tomsett is a Multimedia Journalist for the New Zealand Herald, based in Dunedin.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Yahoo
Crime novelist explores MMIW in 'Where They Last Saw Her'
Frank ZufallWisconsin Examiner Marcie Rendon, author of 'Where They Last Saw Her,' spoke at the Muir Library in Winnebago in southern Minnesota last Tuesday, where a group of 15-20 white women from a conservative, Republican-leaning farming community came to hear the Native American author talk about her recently published book. The crime novel explores the theme of Native American women who are missing or murdered. Rendon is a member of the White Earth Nation in northwest Minnesota who now lives in Minneapolis. The story begins with the protagonist, Quill, a Native American wife and mother of two, who is jogging on the reservation when she hears a woman scream. That scream sends her into panic, which later leads to an investigation. Rendon told the admiring audience that she is a crime junkie who loves to create page-turners, and that her goal with the new book wasn't to provide a sociological study of Indigenous life, but to tell a good story. However, Rendon framed the book's accounts of missing Native American women taken from a reservation and an infant kidnapped from a Walmart to the movement recognizing the issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives (MMIW/R). Early on, Crow, Quill's husband, expresses concern about his wife risking her safety chasing down information on the possible identity of the woman she heard screaming: 'We've been hearing these horror stories of four thousand, maybe five thousand women missing across Canada. Missing down here. The stories of what has happened to women and children' – he emphasized children – 'in the man camps over the Dakotas. And they are here now.' He jabbed two fingers onto the table when he said the word now. 'Those same men are here now.' He jabbed the table again. 'I don't want anyone from my family to go missing. To end up dead in a ditch or a river. No. Not on my watch.' When the book club members had an opportunity to ask Rendon questions, they didn't focus on the plotline of the story but on the larger MMIW/R issue, what's behind it and what could be done to address it. In mainstream culture, Rendon responded, Native Americans are seen as invisible and their problems have not been taken as seriously. 'When I go out East to talk, most people out there think we're all dead; that we disappeared with, I don't know, the Black Hills gold rush, which also makes it easier for us to disappear if people don't think we exist,' she said. 'How can you disappear if you don't exist?' Although the MMIW/R issue has benefited from more public discussions, such as the May 5 MMIW/R Day of Awareness, Rendon said, when she was recently in Madison, she met a college professor who had never heard of the issue. 'Where They Last Saw Her' is an example of a work of fiction that raises awareness of a real crisis and provides insights into subcultures and their struggles. In 2018, as part of a statewide program called Wisconsin Reads, several book clubs around the state collectively read and discussed 'The Round House' by Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in North Dakota. That book also raised awareness of struggles on Native American reservations and, in particular, the complication of prosecuting a crime when there are competing jurisdictional authorities between a tribal nation and county and state authorities. Rendon is also the author of the 'Cash Blackbear' series, which involves a Native American 19-year-old woman who solves crimes in the Red River area of Minnesota/North Dakota in the 1970s. She said her editor at Bantam asked her about writing another book outside the series. 'She said, 'Well, what's the current issue in Indian Country?' and I said, 'missing and murdered Indian women.'' However, Rendon was initially reluctant to write a story around the MMIW/R issue. 'I said, 'there's no resolution. If somebody's missing or murdered, there's no happy ending,' she said. 'There's no resolution to the story. They're either dead or they're still missing.'' Rendon's story is set in Minnesota at a fictional tribe on the outskirts of Duluth, Minnesota, where in real life there had been a major pipeline project on a reservation in the area, like the one in her book — the replacement of Line 3 by Enbridge on the Fond du Lac Reservation, completed in 2021. Prior to the Line 3 permit being approved, there had been concerns by Native American groups about man camps and violence and harassment against Native women. A 2021 article by The Guardian, 'Sexual violence along pipeline route follows Indigenous women's warnings,' reported that a local crisis center for survivors of violence had 'received more than 40 reports about Line 3 workers harassing and assaulting women and girls who live in northwestern Minnesota.' Rene Ann Goodrich, a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, and a member of the Wisconsin MMIW/R Task Force is one of several Ojibwe women from Northern Wisconsin who have also expressed concern over Enbridge replacing a portion of Line 5, currently located on the Bad River Reservation, but Enbridge has filed for permits to build outside the reservation. Besides environmental concerns, the new project could result in a man camp in the area and possible assaults against Native women. Rendon said there is a strong relationship between the extractive industry and the MMIW/R issue, and she makes a strong correlation between the two in her book. 'Anytime you have an extractive industry, like the pipelines, gold mines, uranium mines, anytime you have an extractive industry where large groups of men are pulled in to do the extraction, there's no police force. They show up without their wives and families. They show up without ministers or priests. It's just like the Wild West,' she said. 'There has to be something done about the extractive industries and this use of men in large groups to actually go out and do these extractive industries. I don't know how you change this. But I think that awareness is a piece of it.' However, Rendon said she had heard that some oil companies have responded to concerns about man camps by putting men up in hotels with their families. 'Talk about the power of women, right? Bringing your wife and she'll make you go to church,' she said. Rendon said it was vital for her to portray Native American women in a community. In the story, three women, Quill and her friends Punk and Gaylyn, often travel together as they pursue information about missing women or help with searches. 'In Native communities, you almost never do anything alone,' she said. 'You know, if I'm going to go to the grocery store, somebody's with me. There's one family that, if you see them at the pow wow — if you see them at the grocery store, if you see them downtown, in the courthouse — it's the mom, the grandma, the kids, you know; it's like, it's a whole group,' she said. Regarding Native women and community, Rendon notes it was Indigenous/First Nation women in Canada who first gathered together and spoke out about the phenomenon of Indigenous women missing around the man camps of oil pipelines and mining operations. 'I knew that in this story about missing and murdered Indian women, what was important to me was a community of women, and so I knew that it wasn't going to be just one person,' she said. Rendon said she has received some criticism for including a male Native American who is abusive. 'We have bad people in our communities, too,' she said, 'and then there's the thing about domestic abuse, it happens in every community and in smaller communities. People know that it happens, but people don't talk about it, or there's this secrecy and stuff that happens around it.' In Minnesota, the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) reports there were 716 Indigenous persons missing in that state in 2024, 57% of whom were women. In Wisconsin the exact number of missing Indigenous persons is not published, in part because the state does not have a clearinghouse like Minnesota for gathering that data. Rendon praised efforts in Minnesota to create an MMIW/R office that tracks MMIW/R cases, works with families, and provides support and even rewards for information. And she noted that in Minneapolis, the Indigenous Protectors Movement, a branch of the American Indian Movement, is active in putting out flyers and organizing searches for missing persons. In researching the novel, Rendon said she was surprised by how often white women who went missing were blamed for causing their own victimization through their behavior, including having multiple sexual partners. In Native American communities, she said, there isn't that cloud of guilt over women. 'The Native community clearly has said, 'I don't care what our women were doing, nobody deserves to be trafficked. Nobody deserves to end up dead in a ditch or in a gunny sack in the Red River Valley,'' she said. 'So there's a difference, a cultural difference that I saw, which surprised me.'
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The American Dream Is Far From Over
My grandparents landed on Ellis Island in 1902 with their 1-year-old son, my father, in their arms. Twenty-seven years later, in 1929, I was born. They had fled what was taking place in Tsarist Russia, with the Cossacks and other government forces running wild, attacking, raping, and killing Jews. It wasnt until many years later that I really appreciated the great gift they gave me by coming to a country where everyone has the freedom to pursue ones own dreams, a country whose vision is that all should be judged as individuals - judged, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, "by the content of their character." I was in grade school and high school during the Second World War. In our first class every morning we pledged allegiance to the flag of our country. During many assemblies, we sang the National Anthem. On Saturday afternoons we watched the war unfold on the big screen in the local movie house. On Sunday evenings we crowded around the radio to hear Walter Winchell give us the latest news on the war in his fast, staccato manner. Patriotism was in the air, and we loved America. Fast forward to 1956 when I was 27 years old. I started my own business with the phone in my dads chicken store and $2,000 borrowed from my father-in-law and a wholesaler who would sell me goods to fill the orders I got. With that and some catalogs supplied by the wholesaler, where I could rubber stamp my company name, Quill, on the cover, I started out calling on businesses across Chicago, selling office supplies. A year and a half later my younger brother joined me, and 20 years after that our older brother joined. Then in 1998, 42 years after starting, we sold our company, Quill Corporation, to Staples. We had become one of the largest office products dealers in the country, with over 800,000 customers nationwide. I have lived the American Dream. Some say that dream is dead today, but I beg to differ. One of the great promises of this country is that an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 new businesses were started the year I started Quill. In 2024, there were 5.5 million applications for new businesses. The population in 1956 was about 175 million and about 340 million in 2024. So, there were 10 times as many new businesses started in 2024 as compared to 1956, in a nation where the population has only doubled. What these numbers show is that vast numbers of our citizens believe that they can fulfill their entrepreneurial aspirations, which gives lie to the claim that the American Dream is obsolete. Some are claiming that America is inherently a racist nation, that all white men are racists. Well, this old white man must also beg to differ with this canard. Our national motto is "E Pluribus Unum," out of many, one. The Declaration of Independence puts forth the American creed "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" - which is exactly opposite of the claim that we are an inherently racist nation. We haven't yet fully realized that vision, but a true reading of our history shows we have come a very long way toward achieving it. The fulfillment of that vision is what we must continue to work on. That should be the mission of the younger generations. And then, of course, there are ongoing efforts by some to break us down not only by race but also by sex, sexual orientation, and in other ways that are antithetical to American ideals. Again, this old white man must dissent. That goes against all that we stand for and all that we have been striving to achieve over these past 250 years. Decline in Patriotism When I was growing up and building my business, patriotism was in the air, and we loved America. Now, a 2023 Gallup poll shows that only 38% of young Americans ages 18 to 34 say they are extremely proud to be an American, while 67% of those 55 and older say they are. Traditional patriotism has declined among younger generations, being replaced with a lot of misinformation about America and about the progress we are making toward realizing our founding vision. Some are even advocating that we change our form of government. How did this happen? I realize that there are always some who are working to change us from being a nation based on meritocracy - in our "pursuit of happiness" - to a nation based on equal outcomes for all, an impossible dream that has failed every time it has been tried. How did we get to a place where so many other young people seem to be agreeing with them? The culprit, I believe, is our educational system. Some of the Vietnam War protesters in the 1960s and 70s became professors, and over the years as they gained seniority, they reshaped the faculty of our institutions of higher education in their own image. Like all those throughout history who wanted to take this country in a different direction, they knew they had to erase the history, the memory, of the country and supplant it with something different. And that is what has been happening over these past 60-plus years. The teaching of America's founding principles - the teaching of America's long history of working toward achieving that vision of the Declaration of Independence - has been downgraded, or even eliminated from, the curricula in most of our colleges and universities. And, more recently, realizing that they must start indoctrinating children at a younger age, the same has been happening at the K-12 level. Rebirth of Civic Education Realizing that fewer of our young people were proud to be Americans, 20 years ago I started the Jack Miller Center for Teaching Americas Founding Principles and History. We started at the university level and later expanded into the K-12 arena. We have had good success building a network of over 1,200 professors on more than 300 campuses. Belatedly made aware of what is happening inside our schools, Americans have become angry. They are demanding that our schools teach about America, its vision, its founding principles designed to achieve that vision, and its 250-year history of progress toward achieving that vision. So, the wind is at our back in this effort. Some states are passing laws requiring that their public universities must have a separate department to teach Americas founding principles and its history, as well as Western Civilization in general. Those departments will create their own masters and doctorate programs to further revitalize the teaching of these principles and of our history. The heads of these departments are hiring professors apart from the influence of other professors on campus who are opposed to such teaching. These departments will also reach out to K-12 teachers in their states so these teachers can better teach their students. At the Jack Miller Center, we are playing a major part in this effort. If those who want to tear us apart by race, color, sex, and sexual orientation succeed, it will destroy us as a nation. And, yes, this old white man begs to differ on all they are doing. This is not what my grandparents came to this country for. Many in this country fear the threat of China, North Korea, or even nuclear-equipped Russia. But I fear the threat that comes from within even more. Now, at the age of 96, 123 years after my grandparents came to this country with my one-year-old father in their arms, as I look back on my life, I am even more grateful to them for having the courage to make the trip. And I want to preserve the gift they gave me for my children, grandchildren, and seven - so far - great-grandchildren. Jack Miller is founder and chairman emeritus of the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America's Founding Principles & History.
Yahoo
17-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Quill & Expedia Group Announce Exciting New Partnership to Give Customers Exclusive Travel Benefit
Today, Quill announces the launch of Quill Travel powered by Expedia®, allowing customers to earn and redeem points on travel and more LINCOLNSHIRE, Ill., February 17, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Quill, a leading online supplier for business supplies and solutions, has partnered with Expedia Group to offer an exciting new way for customers to use Quill Rewards points on travel and adventures. "This partnership is a perfect fit with Quill's philosophy to reward every order with enhanced value," said Mark Roszkowski, President of Quill. "We are proud to launch this partnership with Expedia Group to give our customers more ways to earn and redeem their points." Quill Travel powered by Expedia® adds an exclusive travel benefit to Quill's existing portfolio of 1,200+ rewards including gifts, gift cards, coupons, QuillCASH™, and more. Quill customers can now use points to book more than 900,000 properties, 500+ airlines, 100+ car rental companies, and thousands of activities worldwide at How it works: Earn as you shop: Earn 1 point for every dollar you spend at and $1 = 1 point Get discounts: Redeem points for discounts on bookings, 100 points = $5 off Get rewarded: Redeem points for rewards and coupons in the Quill Rewards & Coupons Center "Expedia Group's mission is to power global travel for everyone, everywhere, and we're excited to be partnering with Quill to provide exceptional traveler experiences in the corporate sector," said Carolina Cabero, SVP of Private Label Solutions, Expedia Group's B2B arm. "Travel rewards are increasingly one of the most sought-after offerings to loyalty programs because they create powerful emotional connections and we're looking forward to creating more travel memories for those who use Quill Travel." You can learn more about Quill Travel powered by Expedia on or explore destinations at "At Quill, we pride ourselves on prioritizing a human-centric approach with our award-winning customer service and offering exclusive benefits for our customers through our rewards and loyalty programs," said Prerna Mamgain, Vice President of Digital, Marketing, and Loyalty at Quill. "Our Expedia Group partnership shows our commitment to our customers and that we will continue to seek new ways to help our customers save and get rewarded." About Quill Quill is a leading online supplier for business supplies and solutions. Headquartered in Lincolnshire, IL, Quill delivers the supplies organizations need to succeed, including paper, ink & toner, cleaning and breakroom supplies, furniture, technology, and custom print. With Quill, customers can earn rewards instantly, receive award-winning customer service, and take advantage of business tools and solutions such as Net 30 terms. For more information, please visit Why Quill, or follow @quill on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn and @quillcom on X. View source version on Contacts Prerna MamgainVice President of Digital, Marketing, and Loyalty at Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Crowder Quill earns national awards
Jan. 27—NEOSHO, Mo. — Crowder Quill, the literary/art magazine of Crowder College, recently won two national awards — most outstanding community college literary-art magazine and first place with special merit, a designation the publication has held since 2010. "The Crowder Quill shows the superior efforts of talented and creative editors, writers, artists, photographers, layout/graphic designers, staff members, and adviser," Richard Plass, chairman of the American Scholastic Press Association, said in a statement. The organization in College Point, New York, judges college and high school publications on the basis of content, organization, design, presentation and creativity. The Quill's national awards are based on the spring 2024 publication with the following students: Hannah Allen, of Joplin; Melody Burton, of Anderson; Diana Enamorado, of Carthage; Gavin Hollingshead, of Joplin; Stacy Kern, of Stotts City; Zackery Pierce, of Pineville; Jaelyn Swaffar, of Joplin; Saydee Wheeler, of Goodman; Terri White, of Joplin; and adviser Latonia Bailey, of Neosho. The Quill publication is made up of the winning entries of a free literary-art contest for area high school students, community members and Crowder College students. The current contest ends Feb. 1 for categories in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, photography, digital, 2D and 3D art. Entries should be sent as digital files. Individuals may submit up to four entries in each category; specific guidelines for each category and more information may be obtained from Winning entrants will be notified in April. The magazine and awards will be mailed by mid-May. High school students may also win a $500 scholarship for top placement in each category. The Crowder Quill class is part of the Digital Media Marketing certificate at Crowder College in which students gain skills in content creation, marketing strategies, social media, graphic design and communication. The Quill has been published since 1980 and is distributed free on campus and in the community with the mission of showcasing and encouraging artistic works of local writers, artists and photographers.
