NEWS ROUNDUP

Western legislators bemoan firefighting budget A crust of snow still blankets parts of the West, but federal land agency leaders are already getting scorched by members of Congress nervous about the coming wildfire season. Western lawmakers have used recent Interior Department and Forest Service 2006 budget hearings to criticize proposed cuts to wildland firefighting funds and delays in removing insect-ravaged stands of tinder-dry timber. There's also bipartisan sentiment to get rid of the Bush administration's traditional method of determining wildfire suppression budgets. The federal agencies base funding requests to Congress on the average annual firefighting costs from the last 10 years, then later ask lawmakers for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of "emergency" supplemental funds if the account is drained by a busy fire season....
Fourteen years in making, Sierra plan still challenged In the thick timber just beyond this Gold Rush town lives a football-sized brown bird whose fate has been punted back and forth through 14 years of studies, debates, legal and bureaucratic wrangling - with no end in sight. The future of the white-mottled California spotted owl is entwined with 11.5 million acres of national forests running more than 400 miles the length of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Planning for the 11 national forests began 14 years ago with a three-paragraph memo seeking research on the reclusive owl. Planning documents now pile about three feet tall - not counting administrative appeals and the five lawsuits stacked against the most recent decision, still undergoing review by President Bush's top forestry official, Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey....
AZ: Judge Confirms $600,000 Libel Award and Finds Fault with Environmentalists Judge Richard Fields entered formal judgment on March 2, 2005 against the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental activist corporation, and found that they must pay $600,000 in actual and punitive damages to Arizona rancher Jim Chilton and the Chilton Ranch and Cattle Company. The formal judgment confirmed a Tucson jury’s verdict, delivered on January 21, 2005, finding the Center for Biological Diversity guilty of making “false, unfair, libelous and defamatory statements” against Jim Chilton, a fifth generation Arizona rancher whose pioneering ancestors drove cattle into Arizona in the 1880’s. The jury awarded Chilton $100,000 in actual damages and $500,000 in punitive damages because the Center for Biological Diversity defamed him and his family business in a two-page press release which included links to 21 photographs posted on the Center’s website, from July 2002 until July 2003....
Key Senator Defends ANWR Strategy The U.S. Senate Energy Committee chairman on Sunday defended Republican plans to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge through a provision in a pending budget bill, although critics say the strategy is underhanded. Sen. Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican, told a news conference that budget bills were not subject to parliamentary rules requiring 60 votes to break a filibuster, a hurdle environmentalists who oppose oil development in the Alaska refuge want to keep intact. "We say, 'Why not a majority?' It's going to turn out if they have 51 votes, they win. We don't have ANWR. If we have 51 votes, we win. We have ANWR," he said. "I think that's pretty American. I don't think we're denying anybody anything." Domenici was among five pro-drilling Republican senators, two Cabinet members and a White House official who traveled over the weekend to the North Slope to observe winter conditions and the oil industry's seasonal operations there....
Food at heart of tribe's dam dispute The tribe now is challenging a new operating license for four small hydroelectric dams on the Klamath owned by the Northwest utility PacifiCorp. The tribe wants the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to recognize that the high levels of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease can be blamed on the high-fat, high-sugar and high-sodium diet that replaced their lost salmon. "Government bureaucrats look at you a little bit sideways when you raise the issue of human rights," said Leaf Hillman, tribal vice chairman. "It's only credible when you raise the issue in Sudan or South America. "But whenever you deny or taint the food source for a people, it really is about human rights."....
City will push for EPA exemption By summer's end, new federal regulations could force Portland and its suburban water customers to spend at least $60 million to kill cryptosporidium, a nasty and occasionally lethal parasite that resists chlorine and medical treatment. You would think that would be a major victory for local public health officials. You would be wrong. For Dr. Gary Oxman, Multnomah County health officer, cryptosporidium is a blip on the radar screen of health risks. In the past six years and one month, 95 illnesses -- and no deaths -- have been attributed in the county to cryptosporidiosis, the gastrointestinal ailment associated with the fecal microbe. On Wednesday, Portland's City Council authorized an 11th-hour, long-shot lobbying effort to persuade the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to let the city skip building a plant to deal with cryptosporidium....
Texas is set to supersize highways Texans are known for doing things in a big way. But the state is planning a futuristic highway system that's gargantuan even by Texas standards: 4,000 miles of expressways, mostly toll lanes. The Trans-Texas Corridor, almost a quarter-mile wide, would carry cars, trucks, trains and pipelines for water, oil, natural gas, electricity and fiber optics. The roads would be built over the next 50 years at a cost of up to $185 billion, mostly with private money. The network eventually would crisscross the state, diverting long-distance traffic onto superhighways designed to skirt crowded urban centers. Trucks and trains carrying hazardous materials also would use the highways. But criticism is rolling in from farm groups, environmentalists and some local politicians, targeting the project's proposed route, width and financing — and even the need for it....
Column: Facts versus fears on biotechnology GM crops are created in laboratories, using highly precise techniques. They have been tested repeatedly, and they are regulated by the EPA, FDA, USDA and other agencies. Americans have collectively eaten over a trillion servings of food containing one or more GM ingredients, without a single case of harm. Indeed, as Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore and others have demonstrated, every single claim of risk to people or the environment -- from monarch butterfly deaths to destabilized insect ecology and diminished biodiversity -- has been refuted by scientific studies. And still Dr. John and his fellow radicals place ultra precaution against minor, distant, theoretical risks to healthy, well-fed Westerners above the very real, immediate, life-threatening risks faced by our Earth's poorest and most malnourished people....
Column: Bush's EPA pick comes with outsider insight Stephen Johnson may be an expert on toxic substances and hazardous wastes. But as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, this trained scientist can only hope that his 24 years as an EPA professional will have prepared him for the murky, gritty world of Washington politics. Over its 35-year history, the agency has become one of the tallest lightning rods in federal government. Environmentalists see it as their best official friend - when they're not suing it, that is. Some industrialists, builders, and farmers deride it as one of the greatest impediments to economic development and the free market. EPA bureaucrats - especially those who write the regulations meant to define and enforce such fundamental US environmental laws as the Clean Air and Clean Water acts - have been likened to the Gestapo. The current chair of the Senate environment committee has said the agency should be done away with. Into this political thicket comes Mr. Johnson, the first EPA administrator to rise from the ranks of agency professionals....
Local cowboy brings 'Deadwood' to life At the center of each stands one man, bringing the spirit of each to life: Gary Leffew, 1970 world bull riding champion, mentor to aspiring rodeo cowboys at his Nipomo ranch and muse to David Milch, creator of the award-winning HBO television series "Deadwood." The link between the two towns was forged more than three years ago in one of those typically unlikely Hollywood encounters. Milch was searching for inspiration for a script that kept falling flat to his ears. Leffew was searching for a master to sculpt his emerging talent for and love of writing. The rodeo king and screenwriter met through a mutual friend, a horse trainer who had worked with Milch in the past. The connection was instant; so was the birth of "Deadwood."....
TV's BIG guns Peering into the West, you can spot two approaching cowboy figures on the television horizon. The first is HBO's acclaimed Western series, "Deadwood," which begins its mud-soaked, blood-drenched, profanity-filled second season at 9 tonight. Farther off in the distance is the 50th anniversary of TV's longest-running drama, "Gunsmoke." It was on Sept. 10, 1955, that 6-foot-7 Marshal Matt Dillon started keeping the streets of Dodge City safe for CBS. "Gunsmoke" had been on the radio since 1952. Also saddling up and heading west is Steven Spielberg, an executive producer of a 12-hour cable miniseries, "Into the West," which TNT will air in June. The opening of the American West is told on an epic scale with a cast that includes Matthew Settle, Skeet Ulrich, Rachel Leigh Cook, Josh Brolin, Graham Greene, Zahn McClarnon, Simon Baker, Michael Spears, Sean Astin, Tom Berenger, Wes Studi, Beau Bridges, Gary Busey, Lance Henriksen, Russell Means, Matthew Modine, Keri Russell and Will Patton....
Whittet's Store and Cowboy Grill bids farewell It's headline news when any town loses half its businesses and all of its restaurants at the same time but, in the tiny town of Dacoma, Oklahoma that's exactly what's happening. The famous Whittet's Store and Cowboy Grill is closing after almost a half century of business. They hung on longer than a lot of folks thought they might. Billy and Floy Whittet ran a meat locker and cowboy grill for close to fifty years in the town of Dacoma, just south of Alva. Even in goodbye, there are still so many hellos. Billy Wayne Whittet, his wife Floy, his daughter, his son, his longtime waitress Lily and Nettie the cook, they've all been saying hello and goodbye for weeks now. Billy has decided it was time to close the store and cowboy grill....
Rodeo takes city back in time The nation's largest rodeo and livestock show blows into this city with a transformational wind, turning the cosmopolitan city into a cowboy town for three weeks every spring. As much spectacle as big business, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, running through March 20, makes hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, brings in as much money for the city as a Super Bowl and draws such diverse big-name entertainment as Alicia Keys and Brooks & Dunn to its nightly concerts. "It's pretty amazing how people embrace everything that is country during rodeo time," said Skip Wagner, the show's chief operating officer. "The whole city goes back to its Western roots." Despite its rural flavor, surveys show more than 80 percent of the event's visitors are from the greater Houston area and fewer than 1 percent live in rural, agricultural households....
On The Edge Of Common Sense: You say Tayassa tajacu, I say pig family "These are javelina," pointed out the zoo tour guide, "Tayassu tajacu, the collared peccary." "Pig family," I commented, in an effort to dazzle the 6th graders on the tour. "No," stated the guide, "A common mistake by the ill-informed unknowledgeable ranger groupies who cover up their ignorance of the species with self-important and completely wrong pompous pontifications." "Well, they look like a pig," I said defensively. "Only to amateur wildlife wannabes," he said with a sneer. "Okay, Bambi Buns," I challenged, "describe a javelina to me without using the word pig, pork, snout, oink, grunt, root, swine, University of Arkansas, boar blunt or BLT! He couldn't....