Cowboy State Daily Video News: Monday, December 29, 2025

It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming for Monday, December 29th.  I’m Mac Watson. 

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A woman who fled Wyoming with her baby boy more than a month ago told authorities she “wasn’t fast enough” to kill herself before officers got to her in an RV park in New Mexico. Cowboy State Daily’s Greg Johnson reports that according to affidavits, Madeline Daly made it clear to authorities she was never going to give her baby back.

“She basically said that she felt she was saving the boy from her, from his father. She made some unsubstantiated allegations that he was abusive, and that no matter what, she wasn't going to allow him because they had a kind of a strained relationship with custody, where he lived in Nebraska and she was living in an RV park in 10 sleep. She mentioned that she was not going to allow the baby to go back and forth from Nebraska to Wyoming twice a month for visits. And when they asked her what she was running from, she responded, ‘Judges orders.’”

Daly’s first-degree murder charge is a capital offense and has been turned over to the local office of the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for New Mexico. She remains in the Grant County Detention Center on suspicion of first-degree murder and abandonment of a child resulting in death. She’s being held without bond.

Read the full story HERE.

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Montana and Montana State, two universities that compete in a tier below Wyoming, each spend $2.2 million on Name, Image, and Likeness, while Wyoming spends $1.4 million. Cowboy State Daily’s David Madison reports that one UW booster says that’s embarrassing because schools that don’t have a lot of money are still outspending the university.”

“What would it mean to drop down from big-time Division I college sports into something more affordable, essentially. And there's some really strong feelings around that, so strong that one of my sources, who lives in Laramie, raised a bunch of questions,  made the argument that should Wyoming really should drop out of Division I and do what schools like St Francis and Pennsylvania did, where they went from Division I to Division III.”

Other sources tell Cowboy State Daily that as it gets closer to the legislative session in February, football and basketball are going to be in the mix of conversations about the state helping the university come up with millions of dollars to keep Wyoming Cowboys football on the Division I level.

Read the full story HERE.

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Celia Easton of Thermopolis said being attacked by a grizzly last October while she was elk hunting alone in the Beartooth Mountains has left her absolutely shaken. Outdoors Reporter Mark Heinz reports that there is a certain mindset that is needed when hunters go out.

“I talked to three people who have tons of experience hunting in grizzly country, and they said, ‘You have to have an edge. You can't go in there whistling sunshine or thinking everything's hunky-dory.’ that I guess the best way to put it, a healthy fear is good. It's nothing to be paranoid about it, nothing to freak out about. One guy I talked to is a guy I've interviewed before who was actually involved in a bear attack couple years back, had to shoot a bear to death with this pistol to save him and his dad from getting mauled…An edge of respectful fear is a good thing, but there's no sense in letting your fear, you know, of the blood thirsty Grizzlies are coming to get me, that's not going to do you any good, you know, just prepare yourself.”

Celia tells Cowboy State Daily that she had a long career in law enforcement and was able to handle most of the bad things she went through in the line of duty. But being attacked by a grizzly has left her with post-traumatic stress disorder. 

Read the full story HERE.

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Pear and cherry trees in Utah are covered with blossoms while lilacs in Colorado are blooming like it's spring in late December. Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi reports that arborists are concerned that the warm, dry days are tricking trees and stressing them out.

“This is a typical survival strategy for fruiting trees. When they're thrown off by warm temperatures, their instinct is to survive and salvage what they can. So not only will they start blooming, you might notice the tops of these trees starting to die off as the trees shrink themselves in size, so there's less of themselves to maintain. Horticulturists aren't necessarily alarmed by this. This is a typical sort of response. It's a sign of how warm it's been. So it's not that they aren't completely without concern, but they're not worried about these trees dying off or anything like that. They're just confused, as many of us have been, by the temperatures we've experienced in December.”

In the meantime, many places around Wyoming saw their hottest Christmas Days ever, breaking 150-year-old records.

Read the full story HERE.

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I’ll be back with more news from Cowboy State Daily right after this.

 

Cowboy State Daily news returns now…

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Casper resident William McMillan turned 103 on Dec. 19th. Cowboy State Daily’s Dale Killingbeck reports that McMillan is one of America’s few remaining living World War II veterans who also served in the Korean War and held a top-secret assignment with the Atomic Energy Commission. 

“He was a gunner's mate in the Navy, and apparently he had a job where he accompanied these top secret, probably nuclear shipments across the country, whether it was in a railroad car or on a truck. And so he would be accompanying it with other guys with Thompson sub machine guns and other heavy weapons in case anybody tried to steal the uranium or whatever the nuclear material was.”

Bill tells Cowboy State Daily that he doesn’t have the secret to living longer, but he does say he’s eaten the same thing for breakfast for many years: scrambled eggs, sausage, and one banana.

Read the full story HERE.

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Researchers, many of whom are Trump supporters, say the president is getting bad advice about defunding Wyoming's NCAR supercomputer. Cowboy State Daily’s Renee Jean reports that they say NCAR is responsible for breakthroughs that have made many things safer.

“In 1985 they had this problem with planes just mysteriously crashing, and they didn't know why they were crashing. Nobody could figure it out…With the super computer, they were able to model the situation and figure out that it was caused by a down draft situation in certain types of weather scenarios…Wildfires. They make their own weather. And so with NCAR, they're able to model a wildfires weather pattern and figure out where would be the safest place for firefighters to stage so that the wildfire doesn't end up overtaking them…NCAR has been used to improve the modeling so that we know where the hurricane is going, we can tell people to get out of the way a little bit sooner, and that's thanks to the modeling thatNCAR has done.”

The  National Center for Atmospheric Research or NCAR was created in the 1960s as a national resource for atmospheric and Earth system research. 

Read the full story HERE.

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Back in the 1930s, an ill-advised plan was hatched to keep a living penguin at the Little America hotel in southwest Wyoming. Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi reports that the Emperor penguin started its journey from Antarctica alive but died during transport. 

“Little America was named after a base camp from one of the Antarctic expeditions of the early 1900s and so the decision was made to honor that name, to pluck an Emperor penguin, possibly two, off of the ice sheets of Antarctica, ship it to Boston and then ship it to Wyoming. So it could be an ambassador, an Antarctic ambassador, at this random hotel that sprung up in the middle of nowhere Wyoming. They had a little idea of what they were doing then, and it's hard enough to keep penguins, let alone Emperor penguins, in captivity now. So the Emperor penguin didn't stand a chance. It died in transit. They stuffed it in Boston, and that's how it ended up at Little America, where it remains to this day.”

S.M. Covey, the founder of Little America, felt he could relate to the brutally harsh conditions at the South Pole after enduring the fury of Wyoming's winters. Covey made Antarctica central to the branding of Little America, Wyoming when he opened the first themed hotel in 1934.

Read the full story HERE.

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French researchers have published a study claiming teddy bears are "too cute" and give children the wrong view of nature, especially wild animals. Outdoors Reporter Mark Heinz reports that bear experts say that if people act like idiots around grizzlies, it's not because they had teddy bears growing up.

“I talked to some bear experts, and they said that seems like a bridge too far. They said, ‘Yes, if a kid's only exposure is to stuff like that, plus just not very good parenting.’ They might grow up with a weird, weird view of bears or whatever. But generally speaking, when we see adults behaving stupidly around bears and Yellowstone, it wasn't because he had teddy bears when they were a kid. It's because they just weren't taught right as they were growing up.”

The French research paper, entitled “Too Cute to be Wild: What Teddy Bears Reveal About Our Disconnection From Nature,” was recently published in the journal BioScience.

Read the full story HERE.

 

And that’s today’s news. Get your free digital subscription to Wyoming's only statewide newspaper by hitting the Daily Newsletter button on Cowboy State Daily Dot Com - and you can watch this newscast every day by clicking Subscribe on our YouTube channel, or listen to us on your favorite podcast app.  Thanks for watching - I’m Mac Watson, for Cowboy State Daily.