• Escapee John T. Long who was captured in Licking has a new home. He’s been relocated from the state prison at Licking, which was his hometown, to the Eastern Reception Diagnostic Correctional Center at Bonne Terre. On Tuesday, officers were looking for an inmate who walked away from a Mo-DOT detail in southeast Missouri.
• Odds and ends: Tom Salisbury, the Houston native recently named the director of four states of the Small Business Administration, is promising to travel more to his roots — in rural areas. In a press release, Salisbury says he senses a great need for business owners and local lenders to learn more about the SBA.
• This area’s congressman, Jason Smith, was a “no” in the middle of the night vote Friday to approve a two-year federal budget deal. It raises federal spending by an estimated $400 billion. Critics fought it as a reckless addition to already looming trillion-dollar deficits that some critics says are contributing to an unsettled stock market. Both of the state’s U.S. senators approved it, and President Trump signed it early Friday morning.
• A long-time employee of The Bank of Houston has retired. Bonnie McKinney’s career spanned 35 years upon her retirement on Feb. 3. Previously, she worked for the Smith family for 10 years at Pay Less, the Grand Avenue business that the family operated until 1972.
McKinney, who says she will miss her customers, looks forward to doing landscaping work, spending time with her nieces and nephews and traveling.
• The Missouri Department of Conservation is reminding hunters and anglers that annual hunting and fishing permits expire at the end of February, including 2017 permits for small game, fishing, trout fishing and combination hunting and fishing.
Annual permits purchased on or after Dec. 1, 2017, are good until the end of February 2019.