NEWS ROUNDUP

Utah sentator to introduce federal property rights bill On the heels of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that paves the way for governments to seize people's homes and businesses _ even against their will _ for private economic development, U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch on Tuesday announced plans to introduce a bill giving land and homeowners more protections. The Utah Republican called the court's June 23 ruling in Kelo v. New London "alarming" because it gives the government unprecedented abilities, but intends to curb that with the EMPOWER Act, which Hatch said he will introduce next week. The act would force governments to fairly negotiate with property owners, including the payment of fair compensation. It would also establish a federal ombudsmen's office to inform property owners of their rights and order disputes into mediation, if needed. Hatch isn't the only one in Congress unhappy with the high court ruling. So far at least five other senators and representatives have announced plans for legislation to chip away at the court's decision. Hatch said his legislation is patterned after Utah's own property rights law. "It's a simple model, but it has been an outstanding success," Hatch said. "(It) doesn't change the rules of when eminent domain can be sought by a government agency, but it does provide a dramatic improvement for the property owner once that decision has been made."....
Fort Trumbull resident says she has not yet begun to fight The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against them, but a group of New London residents are not giving up the fight to save their homes from development. People living in the Fort Trumbull area say the fight has just begun. Late last month the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Kelo, ruled the city could take her home and others in this neighborhood, for development which it says would benefit the entire community. You might think a Supreme Court decision would be the final chapter. But Kelo doesn't think that way. "We're gonna go to the House of Representatives in Washington, we're gonna legislate in the legislature in the State of Connecticut, we're gonna continue to fight." In her letter to the editor today, Susette Kelo says when the developers come here, quote, “I will chase them from my property. We will not leave our homes. We have not yet begun to fight.” "It's pretty tough to do all this work, and continue with your life and work full-time jobs and everything else." But Kelo won't quit now, won't even think of it....
Cornyn pushes border security Dr. Mike Vickers is a rancher 10 miles south of Falfurrias and practices veterinary medicine in 10 counties here in South Texas. He was one of about 70 people who attended the roundtable and knows firsthand about the problems of lax border security. Vickers said large groups of illegal immigrants routinely cross his property to an adjacent roadside park in an effort to avoid the U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint about 4½ miles away on U.S. 281. Some of them break the floats on the water sources for his cattle and cause other types of property damage.“There’s no less than a hundred people coming through my side of the highway every night, coming to that park,” he said. “And the Border Patrol don’t have the resources to put 24-hour surveillance on it. Consequently, my cattle are on the highway, and my fences are being cut. I have a regular fence crew working every single day to repair my fences.” Cornyn and U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., are finalizing a bill tentatively titled the Comprehensive En-forcement and Immigration Reform Act of 2005. The bill provides for enhanced border security, en-hanced interior enforcement, an employer accountability program and a temporary worker program. It calls for, among other things, $5 billion to hire 10,000 new Border Patrol agents and 1,000 new immi-gration inspectors for ports of entry over the next five years....
Extradition ordered in ecoterror case A court yesterday ordered the extradition of suspected eco-terrorist Tre Arrow, one of the FBI's most-wanted fugitives, to face firebombing charges in the United States. Arrow, born Michael Scarpitti, is accused of participating in the 2001 firebombing of logging and cement trucks in Oregon. The FBI contends he is associated with the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), a group that has claimed responsibility for dozens of acts of destruction over the past few years. British Columbia Supreme Court Judge Kristi Gill ruled that there was enough evidence against Arrow to have him extradited to face federal charges. His lawyer said he would appeal, a process that could take months. Arrow -- who says the trees told him to change his name -- last week told the court that he was innocent of the charges and a target of a government conspiracy....
Incident reports remain light at Rainbow Family gathering The Rainbow Family's gathering in the name of peace, love and understanding was relatively peaceful - with the understanding that putting 10,000 campers on one site may not lead to a total love fest. The communal campout in the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia ended Thursday, according to the counterculture group's unofficial Web site. But about 3,000 people remained camped at the site Thursday afternoon, the Pocahontas County Sheriff's Office estimated. At least 10,000 Rainbow Family members converged in a large mountain meadow to pray for world peace July 4, an event that traditionally caps the family's annual gathering in a national forest. Through Monday, the U.S. Forest Service had issued 944 citations, mostly for minor offenses such as violating the terms of a group camping permit....
Hopi to sue Forest Service Late Tuesday evening, the Hopi Tribal Council authorized the tribe to pursue legal action against the U.S. Forest Service to protect the San Francisco Peaks in Flagstaff from the proposed Arizona Snowbowl expansion. On June 24, DNA People's Legal Services Inc. on behalf of the Hualapai Tribe, Navajo Medicine Man Norris Nez, and Hopi leader, Bill Bucky Preston, filed a complaint in U.S. District Court alleging three potential adverse impacts from Alternative 2 of the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS), chosen as the preferred alternative by the U.S. Forest Service. In addition, they claim the FEIS admitted that a portion of those impacts are irreversible; that all written communication to tribes and Native Americans was provided only in the English language and that "despite explicit requests to do so, those documents were never translated by the Forest Service into any Native American language, whether written or by audio- or videotape."....
The Great Alaskan Morel Rush of '05 Jay Southard waits just south of mile marker 1313 on the Alaska Highway. It's early June, and the temperature at 8 p.m. is in the 40s, with a raw wind running off the Alaska Range, which rises, iron-colored and veined with snow, in the near distance. Southard is not looking at the mountains, but at the highway running through the center of the town of Tok, keeping an eye out for a red Ford van carrying eight Mexican mushroom pickers. Just because they've been selling him their hauls of morels—450 pounds one day, a little more than 500 the next—doesn't mean they'll sell to him today. If the Weasel got to the Mexicans, Southard might as well pack up and go back home. With several tons of mushroom-drying equipment and $20,000 of setup here in Tok, this is something he really, really does not want to do. A former Oregon State fullback who raises and trains horses when he's not working the mushroom circuit, Southard appears to have a grip on his anxiety, but just barely. He and the other mushroom wranglers who've come to Tok are betting that the 2005 morel harvest will be the big score, the mother lode, that the elements that cause mushrooms to grow—wildfire, rain, sunlight—will continue to collude. But tonight, it's the human element that threatens to bring the enterprise crashing down. Has the Weasel upped his price per pound? Have the Mexicans turned fickle?....
State giving sage grouse room to grow A 12,000-acre tract in northwest Colorado owned by the State Land Board will become a pilot recovery project for sage grouse and other sage species, state officials said Thursday. The state Department of Natural Resources, the land board's parent, has committed $120,000 over five years to improve management of the Baker Peak property, a block of arid brush and grasses near Craig. On it, biologists have identified "leks," or the dancing grounds used by mating sage grouse, a chunky, ground-dwelling bird whose population declined dramatically in the 20th century....
Bridge raised for tall ships, stays up for birds As soon as the birds can go up, the bridge can go down. Last week, the city raised the 94-year-old Murray Morgan Bridge to allow high-masted vessels from the Tall Ships Festival to come and go from the city's Thea Foss Waterway. The rickety lift bridge, however, got stuck in the "up" position. It's a simple fix, repair crews say, but doing so would put them within arm's reach of a pair of fledgling peregrine falcons, and state Department of Transportation workers don't want to disturb the protected birds until they can fly. They figure waiting two weeks will give the falcons time to get airborne....
Sockeye run spawns mystery Two years ago, millions of ocean-bound juvenile sockeye passed the locks in Ballard. The numbers were promising -- delighting both anglers and biologists. This week, when the fish should be returning in force, observers were distressed. Tourists frequently outnumbered salmon passing through the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks. "We should be getting 10,000, 20,000 fish a day, and we're getting 1,000 to 2,000," said Mike Mahovlich, a fish biologist with the Muckleshoot Tribe. "We've lost 90 percent of our fish in the marine area." The situation is so dire the tribe is forgoing its usual harvest of about a thousand sockeye for ceremonial events and needy tribal members....
Column: Animal Rights and Animal Nuts An important trial began in New Jersey in early June. The defendants are the leaders and members of the U.S. chapter of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) who Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles McKenna described as a group of stalkers and criminal instigators who terrorized families through "a campaign of thuggery and intimidation." Both in England and here, Huntingdon, a company that undertakes animal-based research for pharmaceutical and other companies, has been targeted by SHAC. The six "activists", as one newspaper characterized them, are being prosecuted under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. "These defendants," McKenna told the jury, "were going to drive this company out of business at any cost and there was no end to what they were going to do." The tactics they used involved all kinds of intimidation such as making threatening phone calls and even included overturning cars belonging to Huntingdon executives and workers. Suffice it to say, most reasonable people would conclude that their tactics went way beyond "advocacy" and, as their lawyer postulated, their right to free speech....
Team begins bathing presidents Neglect washing your face for 65 years and you're likely to start seeing the effects - dirt, grime, lichen microbes. In an extreme makeover of monumental proportions, a team of rappelling pressure washers planned to start giving the four presidents atop Mount Rushmore National Memorial their first-ever facials. Thorsten Mowes, a technician with the German company leading the project, started the work shortly after 2 p.m. Thursday, hitting the left side of Thomas Jefferson's forehead with a stream of pressurized water....
Scientists to Study Ancient American After nearly a decade of court battles, scientists have finally been allowed to study Kennewick Man, one of the oldest and most complete skeletons ever found in North America. Ever since they were discovered in 1996 along the shores of the Columbia River in Washington state, the 9,200- to 9,500-year-old remains have been at the center of a bitter battle between scientists — who want to study the bones — and Native Americans, who claim Kennewick Man as an ancestor. The court battle began with a lawsuit filed against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers by eight scientists seeking access to study the bones. The agency had jurisdiction over the site where the skeleton was discovered and planned to honor the tribes' request to repatriate the bones under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. In February 2004, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the anthropologists, concluding that "a significant relationship of the tribal claimants with Kennewick Man" could not be proved....
Dinosaur Track Found in Alaskan Park A track from a three-toed dinosaur believed to be about 70 million years old has been discovered in Denali National Park, the first evidence that the animals roamed there, scientists said. The footprint was found June 27 by a University of Alaska Fairbanks student taking a geology field course. The fossil is 9 inches long and 6 inches wide, officials said. The discovery's importance was its location in Interior Alaska, far from the coastline where other tracks have been found, said Anthony Fiorillo, curator of earth sciences at the Dallas Museum of Natural History....
Editorial: Negotiation may resolve CBM impasse The stakes in the coalbed methane development litigation have come into sharper focus this summer with a series of court rulings. Several lawsuits have challenged the development of natural gas wells in the coal seams of Montana's Powder River Basin. Federal courts have decided that the Bureau of Land Management didn't comply with federal law in preparing the environmental impact statement needed before full-field development can commence and that some wells now in production under that EIS must be shut down. The Bush administration's push to open federal lands to oil and gas development seems to have collided with the provisions of the National Environmental Protection Act. What's at stake is millions of dollars invested by energy companies and millions of dollars in royalties and revenues for county, state and federal governments. On the other side of the battle, ranchers, irrigating farmers and other area residents contend that proposed development threatens the quality and quantity of underground and surface water sources they depend on for their homes and livelihoods....
A bit of black cowboy history comes to East Bay with rodeo For 21 years, the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo has celebrated the contributions of African Americans in the development of the American frontier in general and rodeos in particular. The ridin' and ropin' "Salute to Black Cowboys and Cowgirls," named after the creator of bulldogging — the forerunner of modern steer wrestling — began in Denver, soon adding the Rowell Ranch Rodeo Arena in Hayward to its list of competitive stops. Now the 10-city nationwide rodeo tour returns to the Rowell rodeo arena Saturday and Sunday. Pickett, billed as the "Dusky Demon" on Wild West show fliers and on rodeo circuit advertisements, died in 1932 at the age of 62. In 1971, he was the first African-American cowboy to be inducted into the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. The following year, he was named to the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs, Colo....
Team ropers enjoy a crackling Fourth The weather is getting hot, and so are team ropers Clay Tryan and Patrick Smith. Hotter than a Fourth of July firecracker, you could say. The two Midland cowboys first teamed up at the beginning of the year but have performed like they have been together forever. Their most recent accomplishment came Monday when they wrapped up their Cowboy Christmas (a.k.a the lucrative Fourth of July weekend) by winning the Greeley (Colo.) Independence Day Stampede. A 5.6-second run in the Wrangler ProRodeo Tour round sealed the title for the sport's hottest tandem, which won the Bob Feist Invitational and Pace Picante ProRodeo Chute-out during the past 30 days. Their aggregate victory in Greeley (18.1 seconds on three head) earned each $4,051 and elevated them to the top spots in the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association standings. Tryan, the header, and Smith, the heeler, have won $54,072 each this season....

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