NEWS ROUNDUP
Column: "Fixing" the Endangered Species Act There was some speculation that he wouldn't actually appear, but there, in a polo shirt, sat House Natural Resources Chairman Richard Pombo (R-CA), just inches away from Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope. The setting was the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) conference, held this year in Austin, Texas, and surely the belly of the beast as far as Pombo is concerned. Though SEJ journalists come from all political perspectives, there's a natural tendency to think that anyone covering the environment is inherently sympathetic to a green viewpoint. Not surprising, then, that there was controversy when Robert Kennedy, Jr. got a standing ovation at last year's conference. (Bill Moyers was similarly received this year, with somewhat less controversy.) One expects fireworks at events like this. The Iraq War debate between two seasoned British orators, MP George Galloway and writer Christopher Hitchens, certainly contained enough firepower to fuel a dozen conflicts. (Hitchens was the clear winner, in my view, but others may have warmed to Galloway's fruity bombast.) As it happened, politeness ruled. Washington Post reporter Juliet Eilperin was the soul of impartiality, praising Pombo's service as the youngest committee chairman ever, and offering him kudos for his 229-193 House win on Endangered Species Act (ESA) revisions. She even praised Pombo's press secretary, Brian Kennedy, for actually returning her calls. Pope failed to go for the jugular and instead agreed with a point Pombo made in his opening remarks. Pombo similarly held his fire, and the pair mostly talked around each other....
Column: Endangered Species Act fails test of time After three decades, the Endangered Species Act has given us very little to cheer about. Since its inception, nearly 1,300 species have been listed as threatened or endangered. Yet, not one species has recovered as a result of the act alone. In fact, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, approximately 77 percent of listed species have only achieved less than 25 percent of their recovery objectives. More than half are classified as either "declining" or in "unknown" status. Sadly, that is the history of the Endangered Species Act. Born of the best intentions, it has failed to live up to its promise, and species are more threatened today because of its serious limitations. The cornerstone of the ESA is the "listing" of species and the designation of "critical habitat" — habitat necessary for species to recover. These processes are ambiguous and open to arbitrary personal judgment, and they lack sound science or peer-reviewed research. These key elements of the act are responsible for the misclassification of species as endangered or threatened and the application of a one-size-fits-all solution....
A growing regional divide over species act The Endangered Species Act - the nation's premier environmental law affecting thousands of plants and animals and many times that many landowners - is poised to undergo its greatest shake-up since Richard Nixon signed it 32 years ago. The House has passed legislation that changes several fundamental elements of the law, including protection of critical wildlife habitat and the financial rights of property owners. Whether similar legislation passes in the Senate - a large question at this point - it illustrates a deep and growing regional divide over fundamental environmental protections. In general, ranchers, farmers, and others in the rural West (and their champions in Congress) want to make laws like those protecting endangered species far less restrictive. Eastern lawmakers, whether Republican or Democrat, are more likely to support sanctions on development and other land use in the name of protecting plants and animals threatened with extinction. Protected under the ESA are 1,268 species....
Mexican wolf subject of program at MPEC Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity will talk about restoration efforts and show slides at 7 p.m. The center, a wildlife advocacy organization based in Tucson, Ariz., has been involved in the movement to return the Mexican gray wolf to a portion of its native range in New Mexico and Arizona. The effort was begun in 1998. Robinson, who lives in Pinos Altos, N.M., said status of the restoration project is "a mixed bag." "There are 50 wolves in the wild now - probably the last time there were that many was at the beginning of the 20th century, 100 or so years ago. But the bad news is the numbers aren't as high as predicted in the environmental impact statement. The number of breeding pairs is six - only half of the 12 pairs predicted."....
Thomas to Norton: Delist grizzlies People looking to hunt grizzly bears in Wyoming got a round-about boost from U.S. Sen. Craig Thomas this week, as he urged Interior Secretary Gale Norton to move forward with a petition to remove the grizzly from Endangered Species Act protection. With delisting, which has languished in recent months in part because of a Washington slow-down due to the Gulf Coast hurricanes, hunters in the greater Yellowstone area would have a limited season on the grizzly to keep numbers in check. "Interior has been sitting on this proposal, and Wyoming deserves to know about the timing," Thomas, R-Wyo., said in a news release after his Monday conversation with Norton. "The bear is a good example of what's wrong with the Endangered Species Act. If it's recovered, then let's get a deadline set to sign the delisting rule. I told her that I understood that the Fish and Wildlife Service had put forth a very good plan, but that it seems to be stuck in the pipe."....
House Resources chairman weighs Idaho wilderness bill The political maneuverings have begun over the future of the Boulder and White Cloud mountains, and the powerful chairman of the U.S. House Resources Committee appears amenable to a far-reaching bill that would legislate solutions to an array of Central Idaho's outstanding land-use and economic conundrums. "It is possible" that Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson's wilderness and economic development bill, called the Central Idaho Economic Development and Recreation Act, is the right bill at the right time, said U.S. Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., in an interview Saturday in Austin, Texas. As chairman of the Resources Committee, where the bill will begin its legislative journey later this month, Pombo has the power to kill the legislative review before it ever begins. The chairman said he would prefer to see a more comprehensive bill encompassing far more of Idaho's unresolved land-use debates, but added that CIEDRA is the kind of consent-building legislation that could work....
Groups sue feds to bar forest development A coalition of 20 environmental groups sued the Bush administration Thursday to block road construction, logging and industrial development on more than 90,000 square miles of the nation's last untouched forests. In the lawsuit, the Sierra Club, National Audubon Society, Greenpeace and other groups challenge the U.S. Forest Service decision earlier this year to repeal President Clinton's 2001 "roadless rule" that protected 58.5 million acres of undeveloped national forest. The federal lawsuit comes about a month after the attorneys general for California, New Mexico and Oregon brought a similar legal challenge. Both lawsuits allege the Bush administration violated federal law by not studying the environmental impacts of repealing the Clinton rule....
Cock and Bull on the Bitterroot The sad and sorry saga of mismanagement and public process failures on the Bitterroot National Forest in western Montana has taken a few more turns for the worst since Jeffrey St. Clair provided Counterpunch readers with a thorough account on September 21 (W Marks the Spot: Bait and Switch in the Bitterroot). Tuesday, local Bitterroot Valley residents and Friends of the Bitterroot, a grassroots conservation group with 670 members in the area, held a press conference at the Hamilton Public Library to lay out in detail what they describe as "a series of anti-democratic actions by the Bitterroot National Forest under the leadership of Supervisor Dave Bull." They also announced "We are requesting the Montana congressional delegation to investigate the unethical, and possibly illegal, actions of Supervisor Bull and Forest Service staff under his direction regarding his blatantly biased public processes in public land management on the Bitterroot National Forest."....
Udall: Logging could control beetle A Democratic congressman with a reputation as an environmentalist said Wednesday the West’s tree-killing bark beetle infestation is so bad that some logging rules should be streamlined to help combat the pest. “The problem isn’t coming. The problem is on top of us,” Colorado Rep. Mark Udall said. Udall met with about 150 elected officials, federal land managers, timber industry employees and western Colorado residents at this ski resort, one of the beetle’s hot spots. He said he will introduce legislation to expand the federal Healthy Forest Act to give states and communities more leeway in attacking the insect infestations raging throughout the West. The beetles burrow under bark and leave stands of rusty brown pines in swaths across some of the West’s most scenic vistas....
Friends of Wild Swan defeated in district court A recent court order from the U.S. District Court of Missoula upheld the Flathead National Forest in litigation regarding the Meadow Smith Project. The order states that all aspects of the plaintiff's--Friends of the Wild Swan --motion are denied. The Swan Lake District of the forest completed a record of decision for the Meadow Smith Project in 2003. The Meadow Smith Project area is about 10 miles north of Condon and includes 1,300 acres of national forest system lands in Lake and Missoula Counties. Project actions include thinning and prescribed fire to maintain the presence of and protect the unique characteristics of open-grown, large-tree ponderosa pine and western larch forests, return fire through prescribed fire as a process of succession, and lower the risks of loss of mature large-tree forests from insects, disease and lethal fire....
To Save Trees, Fighting One Alien Insect With Others The evergreen trees, a hallmark of southern Appalachia's national parks, are under attack by an invasive insect barely visible to the eye but potent enough to fell the giants of the eastern United States' old-growth forests. Already the tiny bug from Japan, known as the hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA), has killed upward of 95 percent of the hemlocks in Virginia's Shenandoah National Park. Now they are making their way through the half-million-plus-acre (200,000-plus-hectare) Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee. The hemlocks shade streams, keeping water temperatures just right for brook trout and other fish. They also house birds such as the black-throated green warbler, solitary vireo, and northern goshawk, all three of which mainly shelter in stands of hemlock trees....
Lost timber may mean more expensive homes A staggering number of trees ruined by hurricanes Katrina and Rita along the Gulf Coast could lead to a strain on the pulp and paper industry, the loss of privately held timberland and, eventually, higher prices for home construction. Winds and storm surge waters knocked down billions of board feet of hardwoods, pine and other species used for building homes and making paper. Estimated timber losses from Katrina total 15 billion to 19 billion board feet from 5 million acres of damaged forestland in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service. Katrina's high winds damaged an average of 20 percent of the timber that was standing before the storm. Near coastal areas, damage rates reached as high as 40 percent, the USDA said....
Balancing energy and nature Fish and wildlife might have already taken notice of improved living conditions in or near the North Umpqua River as new hydropower projects get under way from a relicensing agreement. Soda Springs Dam — the lowest and most contentious piece of PacifiCorp’s eight-dam hydroelectric project on the North Umpqua — isn’t the only big makeover in the energy company’s relicensing agreement. On Thursday, members of the public were shown improvements to different areas of the hydropower project’s wildlife habitat in a free tour provided by the settlement agreement’s resource coordination committee. The committee included representatives from PacifiCorp, U.S. Forest Service, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, Bureau of Land Management and other agencies in the eight-party agreement....
'Grizzly Man' avoids debate At first, it seems like a very odd choice. Werner Herzog, one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, the director of such humanistic epics as "Fitzcarraldo" and "Aguirre: The Wrath of God," decided to make a documentary about an eco-freak who lived alone among Alaskan grizzly bears. But as "Grizzly Man" unfolds, subject Timothy Treadwell reveals himself as a classic Herzog figure: obsessed, enigmatic, egotistical and defiant; perhaps heroic, perhaps self-destructive; and almost certainly not completely sane. "Grizzly Man" consists largely of footage shot by Treadwell himself, a tousle-haired misfit who, every summer through the 1990s and into the first few years of this decade, camped illegally in the Alaskan wilderness so he could study and (in his own mind at least) protect the grizzly bears from encroaching civilization....
`Victims of Communism Memorial' planned Officials gave initial approval Thursday to a memorial for victims of communist regimes that would be located within sight of one of the icons of democracy - the Capitol. The 90-square-foot monument would be built on National Park Service land one block west of the Capitol. A central feature will be a bronze Goddess of Democracy statue similar to the papier-mache and Styrofoam statue erected by pro-democracy students in Beijing's Tiananmen Square during 1989 demonstrations. The National Capital Planning Commission voted unanimously to give preliminary approval to the "Victims of Communism Memorial." "Its location, with views of the U.S. Capitol, a world-renowned symbol of democracy, is an appropriate setting in which to remember the victims of tyranny," said John V. Cogbill, chairman of the federal agency that oversees planning in the District of Columbia and nearby Maryland and Virginia suburbs. The memorial will honor an estimated 100 million people killed or tortured under communist rule....
Fugitive family patriarch found in Alaska A man accused of molesting one of his 15 children while his family lived inside a national park was captured Wednesday more than 200 miles from his home. Robert Hale - known as Papa Pilgrim - had been on the run for nearly two weeks after being indicted on 30 felony counts, including sexual assault, kidnapping and incest, state troopers said. The indictment listed just one victim. Hale, 64, was taken into custody in Eagle River, an Anchorage suburb, telling officers he knew he was being sought and would not cause any trouble, trooper spokesman Greg Wilkinson said. Hale gained notoriety for his feud with the National Park Service involving access to the family's remote homestead within the 13.2 million-acre national park....
Keeping tabs on lions Up to 20 mountain lions will be fitted with electronic collars and tracked with global positioning satellite technology near Tucson and Payson in an effort to help people and predators coexist. As more people construct homes in or near the cats' territory, Arizona Game & Fish Department officials are getting deeply concerned about the safety and well-being of humans and wildlife. So the agency charged by the state with managing wildlife in Arizona is teaming up with the University of Arizona to study mountain lion behavior, said Bob Miles, a spokesman for Game & Fish....
Fort burns to ground Fort Clatsop, a popular tourist attraction and replica of where the Lewis and Clark expedition spent the soggy winter of 1805-1806 after reaching the Pacific, has been destroyed by fire, officials said Tuesday. Volunteer firefighters worked for hours Monday night to try to save the fort at the Lewis and Clark National Historic Park. But "half of the fort was burned up, and the other half is essentially a loss," said park superintendent Chip Jenkins. The site is being treated as a crime scene, he said. Investigators said Tuesday afternoon that they were looking for a truck seen leaving the area when firefighters arrived on scene. The vehicle is a dark-colored, newer Chevrolet truck, with the letters Z-7-1 on the rear fender, National Park Service officials said. The fire happened just 40 days before a Lewis and Clark Bicentennial event was scheduled to be held at the fort, the culmination of a two-year, national celebration of the explorers' journey to the West....
Environmental groups stake mining claims Environmentalists used an 1872 mining law assailed by critics as a giveaway to industry to stake claims in six Western states Thursday, hoping to protect land from development and prompt an overhaul in rules for hard-rock mining. About 50 claims totaling 1,000 acres were staked by the Citizens Mining Co., a coalition of industry watchdog groups. Amy Jiron of Denver and Bonnie Gestring of Missoula, Mont., were among those who drove stakes into the ground and filed paperwork with the Bureau of Land Management, in charge of minerals on federal ground. The group does not plan to mine gold, uranium or anything else; they intend to hold the claims until the law is changed....
Wheels in motion for land purchase The Bureau of Land Management is beginning its process to acquire 5,548 acres in the Elkhorn Mountains known as the Iron Mask property. The BLM’s Butte field office announced Wednesday that it is undertaking an Environmental Assessment to consider the potential impacts of the acquisition, which would be done using federal Land and Water Conservation money. The Iron Mask property is about five miles northwest of Townsend on the east side of the Elkhorn Mountains, and is considered a critical winter range for elk. As part of the EA, the BLM is asking individuals or groups to help identify any potential issues and concerns. “But it also helps if people make positive comments,” said Dave Barney, a realty specialist with the BLM in Butte. “If people who see something good in this don’t respond, that can be a shortcoming in some of those processes.” Earlier this year, the parcel was purchased by The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and The Conservation Fund, with both of those non-profit conservation groups wanting to keep the land from being subdivided. They anticipate managing the property until it can be sold to the BLM....
Freudenthal, Cubin square off over drilling regs Gov. Dave Freudenthal is taking issue with a proposal in the U.S. House to lift seasonal wildlife restrictions on gas drilling in western Wyoming. In a letter to Rep. Barbara Cubin, R-Wyo., Freudenthal said a better way to speed up drilling would be to increase the number of U.S. Bureau of Land Management staff overseeing gas pipelines, permits and environmental analysis. "By shifting the dialogue to address these needs, our state's wildlife will be protected and development can be achieved at an increased pace," he wrote. Cubin is a member of both the House Committee on Resources and the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. She has supported recent measures to ease regulations and environmental rules that are perceived to slow energy production. Drilling and related activity is prohibited in many parts of western Wyoming during the winter to lessen stress on big-game animals such as antelope and elk. The National Energy Supply Diversification and Disruption Prevention Act, introduced by House Resources Committee Chairman Richard W. Pombo, R-Calif., would also lift long-standing moratoriums on offshore drilling along the East Coast and West Coast....
Column: The erosion of environmental policy THE BUSH administration and Congress have been chipping away at the National Environmental Policy Act, the law that requires federal agencies, such as the Forest Service and the Army Corps of Engineers, to do environmental impact reviews of their actions and programs. Now the House is about to consider how to "modernize" the act, but based on what the White House and Congress have already done, it's clear that the agenda isn't so much updating the law as gutting it. Like other recent campaigns that have hidden environmental assaults under euphemisms — such as the Clear Skies Initiative, which aimed to roll back air pollution controls — the attack on NEPA is being sold as something it isn't: cooperative conservation. Review after review, including a 2003 study by the White House's Council on Environmental Quality, have shown the act to be an effective planning tool and a critical element of open and accountable government....
States vs. Feds Over Environment This mini-mutiny by itself might seem minor, but it's only one of the latest bubbles in a national groundswell of state-led lawsuits and environmental initiatives that some say represents what could be the start of a long-term shift in U.S. environmental regulation and enforcement from the federal government to states. Dozens of states, frustrated over federal actions or inaction on the environment, are trying to fill the gap with their own green initiatives — or are filing lawsuits to block federal changes they say would weaken existing environmental regulations. In the past two years some 27 states have participated in at least a dozen major environmental initiatives — often lawsuits — in opposition to federal environmental policies, a Monitor analysis shows. Examples range from states ganging up to sue the nation's five largest power companies directly for their carbon emissions, to suing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over regulatory changes concerning mercury emissions to developing a Kyoto-like global warming pact....
Column: In Defense of the Cowboy Most people who denigrate George W. Bush as a “cowboy” aren’t trying to compliment the label either, but linking him to a western coda is about as far as they want to take the argument against what’s come to be known as “the cowboy myth.” There are a few out there, however, who’ve been hunting the myth itself, or what they believed or wanted the myth to be, ostensibly because it has been used as a justification for public lands ranching. Take the late Edward Abbey, who knew a few cowboys and ranchers. As he put it, with characteristic bluntness, “It’s not easy to argue that we should do away with cattle ranching. The cowboy myth gets in the way. But if all of our 31,000 public land ranchers quit tomorrow, we’d never miss them.” Those who took up Abbey’s cause to end public land ranching went after the cowboys on an economic front, reasoning that cowboying on public lands could be made less feasible if grazing fees were raised, but cheap imported beef was already making public lands ranching less appealing. It should be common knowledge that even in a market favorable to the domestic rangeland production of beef, those who become involved in ranching for profit will eventually lose any fortune they might have started with as well as their credit, their health, their sunny disposition, their future, their dignity and eventually their land and all their other possessions—including their horse. What’s more, while they are committing economic suicide by running cattle, their neighbors will be selling off their land and grazing rights to developers and environmental organizations at exorbitant prices and retiring on the earnings....
PETA exhibit provokes anger from blacks One panel features a 1930s photograph of a lynching of a black man in Indiana offset by an Angus cow hanging by its feet at a slaughterhouse. Next to it, another installment drops the mouths of onlookers as their eyes move from a picture of a burning black corpse from a 1919 race riot to the corresponding image, that of a rooster set on fire. Continuing along the Animal Liberation Project, an exhibition recently launched by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), there are pictures of black men and women being branded, bloodied and burned, contrasting with shots of various domesticated animals in similar positions. One of the most provocative images, however, is that of an African-American's chained foot opposite the equally shackled limb of a circus elephant....
Sex and the single cow Sex in the barnyard may never be the same. A new process that appears to allow farmers to choose the sex of their cows and pigs in artificial insemination has the potential to revolutionize commercial agriculture. But these aren't mad scientists using genetic technology to manipulate a species, stresses Dr. Peter Blecher, whose father Stan developed the process at the University of Guelph. “We're just removing the sperm of the sex we don't want,” said Dr. Blecher, founder of Sequent Biotechnologies, whose sperm-sexing technology inspired a recent friendly takeover by Microbix Biosystems Inc....
From Test Tube To Table: FDA May OK Cloned Food The Food and Drug Administration is expected to rule soon that milk from cloned animals and meat from their offspring are safe to eat, raising the question of whether Americans are ready to welcome one of modern biology's most controversial achievements to the dinner table. Hundreds of cloned pigs, cows and other animals are already living on farms around the country, as companies and livestock producers experiment and await a decision from the FDA. The agricultural industry has observed a voluntary FDA moratorium on using the products of clones, but it has recently become clear that a few offspring of cloned pigs and cows are already trickling into the food supply. Many in agriculture believe such genetic copies are the next logical step in improving the nation's livestock. Consumer groups counter that many Americans are likely to be revolted by the idea of serving clone milk to their children or tossing meat from the progeny of clones onto the backyard grill....
Verses From the Boonies Voice of the Borderlands, by Drum Hadley. Rio Nuevo Publishers, $29.95. Hadley's new book, Voice of the Borderlands, is a gentle book full of grace, quiet humor, love and "cowboy zen," if you will. In some ways, it is a glorious requiem for a way of life rapidly fading into oblivion. It is also a rich celebration of life. This is not cowboy poetry, though it is poetry with a herd of cowboys riding through it. Cowboy poetry has a certain level of innate hokeyness to it. Don't get me wrong--I love the stuff. But it's about mythology and stereotypes and white hats vs. black hats, that sort of thing. Voice of the Borderlands is an entirely different animal. Hadley paints lyrical pictures of life as it was, and amazingly still is, in the remote corners of Southeastern Arizona. The poet is the medium, and through him move the words and lives of real people, their joys, their hurts, their loves and their faults. He doesn't shy away from the loneliness of loss, either: the loss of friends, lovers, partners and a way of life. You see, this is the real life of the cowboys, not some dreary, overwrought, cheesy dime-store crap....
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Friday, October 07, 2005
Thursday, October 06, 2005
DNR confirms Montcalm County deer found with encephalitis
The Michigan Department of Natural Resources has confirmed that a deer found in Montcalm County's Fairplain Township, which is east of Greenville, tested positive for Eastern equine encephalitis. With the addition of this case announced Wednesday, five deer in Michigan recently have tested positive for the deadly disease, which also poses a health risk to humans. Four infected deer were found late last month in neighboring Kent County's Cannon and Plainfield townships. Michigan is only the third state where the disease has turned up in free-ranging white-tailed deer, the DNR said earlier. Georgia and Wisconsin both reported cases in 2001....
York horse dies from EEE; first in Maine
The Maine Department of Health and Human Services has announced that the first mammal in Maine, a horse found in York, has died as a result of contracting the Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE) virus. Officials would not say where the horse contracted the virus or where it was when it died. According to statistics provided on the Maine Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) website, and confirmed by MDHHS officials, the horse testing positive for EEE was identified by officials in York on Sept. 26. A second horse that tested positive for EEE in Lebanon was identified on Sept. 27. EEE is a viral disease born of birds. The disease is transmitted to humans via mosquito bites from mosquitoes who have become infected by such birds. In humans, the virus can lead to encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain, which can lead to coma and death. Humans cannot contract the disease via contact with mammals that have it. Mosquito bites are the only way the disease can be transmitted to humans....
State testing moose for chronic wasting disease
Moose in North Dakota are now being tested in for chronic wasting disease, wildlife officials say. Randy Kreil, wildlife chief for the state Game and Fish Department, said the testing was prompted by a moose killed in northern Colorado that tested positive for chronic wasting disease last month. It was the first of its species known to have contracted the disease in the wild, officials said. The fatal brain-wasting disease afflicts members of the deer family. Kreil said the state has tested "two or three" moose over the years for the disease. He said the testing was done on the animals because they were either emaciated or displayed unusual behavior. Kreil said results of tests for chronic wasting disease in those moose all have come back negative....
Avian Flu Virus
If a virulent strain of avian influenza ever struck the U.S. poultry industry, this country probably would fare better than many other nations due to careful biosecurity procedures in force. But if the virus develops an ability to pass from one human to another, the United States would have far less protection as the world possibly faces one of the worst flu pandemics in history. Among the U.S. health officials watching the progress of this extraordinarily active virus (known as H5N1) as it infects chickens in Asia and waterfowl in Russia, is Alfonso Torres, director of the Animal Health Diagnostic Center and associate dean for veterinary public policy at Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine. "The fear is that if the virus changes or recombines with a regular human flu, the virus may acquire the ability to be effectively transmitted from human to human, then it could become the big pandemic that everyone is very concerned about," he says. As a consultant, Torres has held high-level policy discussions on avian flu with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and NATO, among others. For now, the United States, like the rest of the Western world, can only watch and prepare. Since January 2004, the known human cases of avian flu have all struck in Southeast Asia -- out of 120 patients requiring treatment, about half have died. All of these infections were contracted from chickens, with the exception of a few cases in Vietnam where the source is unclear. A natural reservoir for the avian flu virus is migratory waterfowl, and infected birds have been found in Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Russia, raising concern in the U.S. as the disease moves west. Although waterfowl do not appear to be playing a big role in poultry and human transmissions right now, they are being closely monitored....
Asian Bird Flu Bears Likeness to 1918 Pandemic Virus
The Asian bird flu feared for its potential to start a worldwide health catastrophe shares some key genetic features with the 1918 Spanish flu that killed as many as 50 million people worldwide, according to research in this week's issue of the journals Nature and Science. A reconstruction of the chemical makeup of the deadly Spanish flu virus suggests that some samples of the bird flu have developed genetic changes that may allow it to spread from person to person, said Jeffery Taubenberger, a microbiologist at the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, Maryland. The avian flu has killed 59 people in Asia who contracted the virus from contact with domestic or wild fowl. Health officials fear a global epidemic may arise if the virus becomes contagious among people. That's because humans don't have a natural immunity to the so-called H5NI virus, health officials have said. The virus ``might be going down a similar path to 1918,'' Taubenberger said in a briefing with reporters yesterday. His research is being published in Nature. Three worldwide outbreaks of flu occurred in 1918, 1957 and 1968. While all three may have been caused at least partially by viruses from animals, the 1918 flu, by far the most deadly, may have started when a bird virus acquired genetic changes allowing for human-to-human spread, Taubenberger said. By contrast, the 1957 pandemic that killed about 70,000 Americans and the 1968 ``swine flu'' that killed about 34,000 probably emerged when a human and bird virus exchanged genes. The presence of genes from the human virus gave the human immune system some ability to recognize the flu and fight it off, he said....
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The Michigan Department of Natural Resources has confirmed that a deer found in Montcalm County's Fairplain Township, which is east of Greenville, tested positive for Eastern equine encephalitis. With the addition of this case announced Wednesday, five deer in Michigan recently have tested positive for the deadly disease, which also poses a health risk to humans. Four infected deer were found late last month in neighboring Kent County's Cannon and Plainfield townships. Michigan is only the third state where the disease has turned up in free-ranging white-tailed deer, the DNR said earlier. Georgia and Wisconsin both reported cases in 2001....
York horse dies from EEE; first in Maine
The Maine Department of Health and Human Services has announced that the first mammal in Maine, a horse found in York, has died as a result of contracting the Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE) virus. Officials would not say where the horse contracted the virus or where it was when it died. According to statistics provided on the Maine Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) website, and confirmed by MDHHS officials, the horse testing positive for EEE was identified by officials in York on Sept. 26. A second horse that tested positive for EEE in Lebanon was identified on Sept. 27. EEE is a viral disease born of birds. The disease is transmitted to humans via mosquito bites from mosquitoes who have become infected by such birds. In humans, the virus can lead to encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain, which can lead to coma and death. Humans cannot contract the disease via contact with mammals that have it. Mosquito bites are the only way the disease can be transmitted to humans....
State testing moose for chronic wasting disease
Moose in North Dakota are now being tested in for chronic wasting disease, wildlife officials say. Randy Kreil, wildlife chief for the state Game and Fish Department, said the testing was prompted by a moose killed in northern Colorado that tested positive for chronic wasting disease last month. It was the first of its species known to have contracted the disease in the wild, officials said. The fatal brain-wasting disease afflicts members of the deer family. Kreil said the state has tested "two or three" moose over the years for the disease. He said the testing was done on the animals because they were either emaciated or displayed unusual behavior. Kreil said results of tests for chronic wasting disease in those moose all have come back negative....
Avian Flu Virus
If a virulent strain of avian influenza ever struck the U.S. poultry industry, this country probably would fare better than many other nations due to careful biosecurity procedures in force. But if the virus develops an ability to pass from one human to another, the United States would have far less protection as the world possibly faces one of the worst flu pandemics in history. Among the U.S. health officials watching the progress of this extraordinarily active virus (known as H5N1) as it infects chickens in Asia and waterfowl in Russia, is Alfonso Torres, director of the Animal Health Diagnostic Center and associate dean for veterinary public policy at Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine. "The fear is that if the virus changes or recombines with a regular human flu, the virus may acquire the ability to be effectively transmitted from human to human, then it could become the big pandemic that everyone is very concerned about," he says. As a consultant, Torres has held high-level policy discussions on avian flu with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and NATO, among others. For now, the United States, like the rest of the Western world, can only watch and prepare. Since January 2004, the known human cases of avian flu have all struck in Southeast Asia -- out of 120 patients requiring treatment, about half have died. All of these infections were contracted from chickens, with the exception of a few cases in Vietnam where the source is unclear. A natural reservoir for the avian flu virus is migratory waterfowl, and infected birds have been found in Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Russia, raising concern in the U.S. as the disease moves west. Although waterfowl do not appear to be playing a big role in poultry and human transmissions right now, they are being closely monitored....
Asian Bird Flu Bears Likeness to 1918 Pandemic Virus
The Asian bird flu feared for its potential to start a worldwide health catastrophe shares some key genetic features with the 1918 Spanish flu that killed as many as 50 million people worldwide, according to research in this week's issue of the journals Nature and Science. A reconstruction of the chemical makeup of the deadly Spanish flu virus suggests that some samples of the bird flu have developed genetic changes that may allow it to spread from person to person, said Jeffery Taubenberger, a microbiologist at the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, Maryland. The avian flu has killed 59 people in Asia who contracted the virus from contact with domestic or wild fowl. Health officials fear a global epidemic may arise if the virus becomes contagious among people. That's because humans don't have a natural immunity to the so-called H5NI virus, health officials have said. The virus ``might be going down a similar path to 1918,'' Taubenberger said in a briefing with reporters yesterday. His research is being published in Nature. Three worldwide outbreaks of flu occurred in 1918, 1957 and 1968. While all three may have been caused at least partially by viruses from animals, the 1918 flu, by far the most deadly, may have started when a bird virus acquired genetic changes allowing for human-to-human spread, Taubenberger said. By contrast, the 1957 pandemic that killed about 70,000 Americans and the 1968 ``swine flu'' that killed about 34,000 probably emerged when a human and bird virus exchanged genes. The presence of genes from the human virus gave the human immune system some ability to recognize the flu and fight it off, he said....
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Wednesday, October 05, 2005
FLE
Park shooting ruled justified
A National Park Service ranger who shot and killed a camper July 27 at Crater Lake was justified in using deadly force, federal prosecutors have concluded. Ronn Ward, 38, of Sunnyvale, Calif., was shot and killed after he charged two rangers while brandishing a large wooden club, the Park Service said. The U.S. attorney's office in Medford conducted an investigation and released the results on Thursday. "It was reasonable for the officer to believe that deadly physical force was necessary under the circumstances to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself from the imminent use of unlawful deadly force by Ward," the investigators said in a prepared statement. Investigators said one ranger used pepper spray in an attempt to stop Ward, and a second ranger shot Ward twice in the chest at a range of six feet. The report said Ward was closing in on the rangers. From the time the rangers arrived until Ward was shot, less than two minutes elapsed, after dark, the investigators said. "This was an incredibly fast-paced, rapidly-evolving, moving situation," said Dave Brennan, the park's chief ranger. Autopsy results indicated Ward's blood alcohol level was 0.27 percent, more than three times the legal limit for driving. There was no evidence of other drugs in his system....
Phone tip leads to sixth pot farm on national forest
It began when a hiker in the Prescott National Forest stumbled across some interesting-looking plants Wednesday and notified authorities. It ended on Thursday, after a stakeout, with the arrest of a Mexican national from Los Angeles charged with marijuana production. Authorities say that so far at least 1,000 pot plants have been pulled from a field near Paulden, marking the sixth pot farm found in an Arizona national forest this year. Four marijuana plots have been found on the Tonto National Forest and one on the Coconino, said Jim Payne, Southwest regional spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service. Those earlier busts netted about 100,000 marijuana plants, he said. Wilderness areas used for marijuana farms across the West are often protected by forest canopies or situated in canyons where they are hard to spot and hard to access, Payne said. The Prescott discovery "wasn't unexpected," said Lt. James Jarrell, who heads the Yavapai County Sheriff's special crimes section. "This is generally known as the general harvest time for this part of the state." Deputies arrested Acejo Rodriguez-Martinez, 28, of Los Angeles at the site....
In 4-Year Anthrax Hunt, F.B.I. Finds Itself Stymied, and Sued
Richard L. Lambert, the F.B.I. inspector in charge of the investigation of the deadly anthrax letters of 2001, testified under oath for five hours last month about the case. But Mr. Lambert was not testifying in a criminal trial. He and his teams of F.B.I. agents and postal inspectors have not found the culprit. Instead, he and six other F.B.I. and Justice Department officials have been forced to give depositions in a suit over news media leaks filed by Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, the former Army biodefense expert who was under intensive scrutiny for months. Four years after an unknown bioterrorist dropped letters containing a couple of teaspoons of powder in a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., what began as the largest criminal investigation in American history appears to be stalled, say scientists and former law enforcement officials who have spoken with investigators. The failure to solve the case that the authorities call "Amerithrax" is a grave disappointment for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Postal Inspection Service, the investigative arm of the Postal Service. The letters were the first major bioterrorist attack in American history and killed five people, sickened 17 others, temporarily crippled mail service and forced the evacuation of federal buildings, including Senate offices and the Supreme Court. A former law enforcement official who keeps up with several investigators said, "From the people I've talked to, it's going nowhere." The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of sensitivity over leaks in the case, said some agents still formally assigned to the investigation were mostly working on other cases, because "there's nothing for them to do."....
Military May Play Bigger Relief Role
President Bush's push to give the military a bigger role in responding to major disasters like Hurricane Katrina could lead to a loosening of legal limits on the use of federal troops on U.S. soil. Pentagon officials are reviewing that possibility, and some in Congress agree it needs to be considered. Bush did not define the wider role he envisions for the military. But in his speech to the nation from New Orleans on Thursday, he alluded to the unmatched ability of federal troops to provide supplies, equipment, communications, transportation and other assets the military lumps under the label of "logistics." The president called the military "the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice." At question, however, is how far to push the military role, which by law may not include actions that can be defined as law enforcement _ stopping traffic, searching people, seizing property or making arrests. That prohibition is spelled out in the Posse Comitatus Act of enacted after the Civil War mainly to prevent federal troops from supervising elections in former Confederate states. Speaking on the Senate floor Thursday, Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said, "I believe the time has come that we reflect on the Posse Comitatus Act." He advocated giving the president and the secretary of defense "correct standby authorities" to manage disasters. Presidents have long been reluctant to deploy U.S. troops domestically, leery of the image of federal troops patrolling in their own country or of embarrassing state and local officials....
Bush Wants to Consider Broadening of Military's Powers During Natural Disasters
President Bush said Monday that he and Congress should immediately begin discussing whether to amend federal law so the military could take responsibility right away in natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina. While Mr. Bush had raised the idea before, his comments, at an appearance at the Energy Department, were his first explicit remarks about changing the 127-year-old law that restricts the role of federal troops when they act on American soil. His proposal would also appear to take considerable responsibility away from the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is part of the department. "I don't want to prejudge the Congress's discussion on this issue because it may require change of law," Mr. Bush said, apparently referring to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, written in response to the huge federal military presence in the South during Reconstruction. It prohibits the military from engaging in law enforcement, but many exceptions have been carved out. Many Pentagon officials have expressed concern about broadening the military's responsibilities to include what would, in effect, be police work, along with its combat role. They argue that it would require very different training, equipment and force levels. Earlier this month, Paul McHale, the assistant secretary of defense for homeland security, said in an interview about the military's response to Hurricane Katrina that "what we ought not do is convert D.O.D. into a department of first responders."....
Bill Would Permit DNA Collection From All Those Arrested
Suspects arrested or detained by federal authorities could be forced to provide samples of their DNA that would be recorded in a central database under a provision of a Senate bill to expand government collection of personal data. The controversial measure was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee last week and is supported by the White House, but has not gone to the floor for a vote. It goes beyond current law, which allows federal authorities to collect and record samples of DNA only from those convicted of crimes. The data are stored in an FBI-maintained national registry that law enforcement officials use to aid investigations, by comparing DNA from criminals with evidence found at crime scenes. Sponsors insist that adding DNA from people arrested or detained would lead to prevention of some crimes, and help solve others more quickly. "When police retrace the history of a serial predator after he is finally caught, they often find that he never had a prior criminal conviction, but did have a prior arrest," Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said in a statement. "That means the only way they are likely to catch such a perpetrator after his first crime -- rather than his 10th -- is if authorities can maintain a comprehensive database of all those who are arrested, just as we do with fingerprints." Privacy advocates across the political spectrum say the proposal is another step in expanding government intrusion. "DNA is not like fingerprinting," said Jesselyn McCurdy, a legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "It contains genetic information and information about diseases." She added that the ACLU questions whether it is constitutional to put data from those who have not been convicted into a database of convicted criminals. The provision, co-sponsored by Kyl and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), does not require the government to automatically remove the DNA data of people who are never convicted. Instead, those arrested or detained would have to petition to have their information removed from the database after their cases were resolved....
National Security Agency gets fix on Internet users
Internet users hoping to protect their privacy by using anti-virus software, Web anonymizers, false identities and disabled cookies on their computer's Web browser have something new to worry about – a patent filed by the National Security Agency (NSA) for technology that will identify the physical location of any Web surfer. Patent 6,947,978, granted this week, describes a process based on latency, or time lag between computers exchanging data, of "numerous" known locations on the Internet to build a "network latency topology map" for all users. Identifying the physical location of an individual user, reports CNET News.com, could then be accomplished by measuring how long it takes to connect to an unknown computer from numerous known machines, and using the latency response to display location on a map. The rate at which data travels over the Internet constantly varies due to the amount of traffic, the size of data files, the constant changing of hardware and software by millions of users. Sometimes the system is slow, sometimes it is fast. Because of this variation, knowing how long it takes for a signal to travel to a location and back is not sufficient to identify it's location. But knowing the latency of the entire system at a given moment and the latency for a specific computer provides a means of knowing relative locations, however fast or slow the Internet is operating. While most users are unaware of it, their computers are able to "ping" website addresses to trace the route their connection took and how much time was required to complete the operation. Likewise other computer users – hackers, for example – can ping their computer as well when connected to the Internet. It is this feature that the NSA's patent seeks to exploit. The NSA patent does not describe the intended use of the technology by the agency, noting only general uses like measuring the "effectiveness of advertising across geographic regions" or flagging a password that "could be noted or disabled if not used from or near the appropriate location," according to CNET News. But given NSA's status as the nation's premier cryptologic organization, it's unlikely the technology will be used to improve advertising....
Federal Judge Halts New Orleans Gun Seizures
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana this afternoon issued a temporary restraining order on behalf of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and National Rifle Association (NRA), bringing an end to firearm seizures from citizens living in and around New Orleans. District Judge Jay Zaney issued the restraining order against all parties named in a lawsuit filed Thursday by SAF and NRA. Defendants in the lawsuit include New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Police Chief Edwin Compass III. "This is a great victory, not just for the NRA and SAF, but primarily for law-abiding gun owners everywhere," said SAF founder Alan M. Gottlieb. "We are proud to have joined forces with the NRA to put an end to what has amounted to a warrantless gun grab by authorities in New Orleans and surrounding jurisdictions. "Over the past three weeks," he continued, "residents who had lost virtually everything in the devastation following Hurricane Katrina had also essentially been stripped of something even more precious, their civil rights, and their right of self-defense, because of these gun seizures. "SAF and NRA had no alternative but to take action," Gottlieb added. "If these gun confiscations had been allowed to continue without challenge, it would have set a dangerous precedent that would have encouraged authorities in other jurisdictions to believe they also could suspend the civil rights of citizens in the event of some other emergency. "What must happen now, and quickly," said Gottlieb, "is for authorities in the New Orleans area to explain how they will return all of those firearms to their rightful owners, and do it promptly. What this ruling affirms is that even in the face of great natural disasters, governments cannot arbitrarily deprive citizens of their rights. Thanks to some great teamwork between SAF and the NRA, this sort of thing will hopefully never happen again."....
===
Park shooting ruled justified
A National Park Service ranger who shot and killed a camper July 27 at Crater Lake was justified in using deadly force, federal prosecutors have concluded. Ronn Ward, 38, of Sunnyvale, Calif., was shot and killed after he charged two rangers while brandishing a large wooden club, the Park Service said. The U.S. attorney's office in Medford conducted an investigation and released the results on Thursday. "It was reasonable for the officer to believe that deadly physical force was necessary under the circumstances to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself from the imminent use of unlawful deadly force by Ward," the investigators said in a prepared statement. Investigators said one ranger used pepper spray in an attempt to stop Ward, and a second ranger shot Ward twice in the chest at a range of six feet. The report said Ward was closing in on the rangers. From the time the rangers arrived until Ward was shot, less than two minutes elapsed, after dark, the investigators said. "This was an incredibly fast-paced, rapidly-evolving, moving situation," said Dave Brennan, the park's chief ranger. Autopsy results indicated Ward's blood alcohol level was 0.27 percent, more than three times the legal limit for driving. There was no evidence of other drugs in his system....
Phone tip leads to sixth pot farm on national forest
It began when a hiker in the Prescott National Forest stumbled across some interesting-looking plants Wednesday and notified authorities. It ended on Thursday, after a stakeout, with the arrest of a Mexican national from Los Angeles charged with marijuana production. Authorities say that so far at least 1,000 pot plants have been pulled from a field near Paulden, marking the sixth pot farm found in an Arizona national forest this year. Four marijuana plots have been found on the Tonto National Forest and one on the Coconino, said Jim Payne, Southwest regional spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service. Those earlier busts netted about 100,000 marijuana plants, he said. Wilderness areas used for marijuana farms across the West are often protected by forest canopies or situated in canyons where they are hard to spot and hard to access, Payne said. The Prescott discovery "wasn't unexpected," said Lt. James Jarrell, who heads the Yavapai County Sheriff's special crimes section. "This is generally known as the general harvest time for this part of the state." Deputies arrested Acejo Rodriguez-Martinez, 28, of Los Angeles at the site....
In 4-Year Anthrax Hunt, F.B.I. Finds Itself Stymied, and Sued
Richard L. Lambert, the F.B.I. inspector in charge of the investigation of the deadly anthrax letters of 2001, testified under oath for five hours last month about the case. But Mr. Lambert was not testifying in a criminal trial. He and his teams of F.B.I. agents and postal inspectors have not found the culprit. Instead, he and six other F.B.I. and Justice Department officials have been forced to give depositions in a suit over news media leaks filed by Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, the former Army biodefense expert who was under intensive scrutiny for months. Four years after an unknown bioterrorist dropped letters containing a couple of teaspoons of powder in a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., what began as the largest criminal investigation in American history appears to be stalled, say scientists and former law enforcement officials who have spoken with investigators. The failure to solve the case that the authorities call "Amerithrax" is a grave disappointment for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Postal Inspection Service, the investigative arm of the Postal Service. The letters were the first major bioterrorist attack in American history and killed five people, sickened 17 others, temporarily crippled mail service and forced the evacuation of federal buildings, including Senate offices and the Supreme Court. A former law enforcement official who keeps up with several investigators said, "From the people I've talked to, it's going nowhere." The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of sensitivity over leaks in the case, said some agents still formally assigned to the investigation were mostly working on other cases, because "there's nothing for them to do."....
Military May Play Bigger Relief Role
President Bush's push to give the military a bigger role in responding to major disasters like Hurricane Katrina could lead to a loosening of legal limits on the use of federal troops on U.S. soil. Pentagon officials are reviewing that possibility, and some in Congress agree it needs to be considered. Bush did not define the wider role he envisions for the military. But in his speech to the nation from New Orleans on Thursday, he alluded to the unmatched ability of federal troops to provide supplies, equipment, communications, transportation and other assets the military lumps under the label of "logistics." The president called the military "the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice." At question, however, is how far to push the military role, which by law may not include actions that can be defined as law enforcement _ stopping traffic, searching people, seizing property or making arrests. That prohibition is spelled out in the Posse Comitatus Act of enacted after the Civil War mainly to prevent federal troops from supervising elections in former Confederate states. Speaking on the Senate floor Thursday, Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said, "I believe the time has come that we reflect on the Posse Comitatus Act." He advocated giving the president and the secretary of defense "correct standby authorities" to manage disasters. Presidents have long been reluctant to deploy U.S. troops domestically, leery of the image of federal troops patrolling in their own country or of embarrassing state and local officials....
Bush Wants to Consider Broadening of Military's Powers During Natural Disasters
President Bush said Monday that he and Congress should immediately begin discussing whether to amend federal law so the military could take responsibility right away in natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina. While Mr. Bush had raised the idea before, his comments, at an appearance at the Energy Department, were his first explicit remarks about changing the 127-year-old law that restricts the role of federal troops when they act on American soil. His proposal would also appear to take considerable responsibility away from the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is part of the department. "I don't want to prejudge the Congress's discussion on this issue because it may require change of law," Mr. Bush said, apparently referring to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, written in response to the huge federal military presence in the South during Reconstruction. It prohibits the military from engaging in law enforcement, but many exceptions have been carved out. Many Pentagon officials have expressed concern about broadening the military's responsibilities to include what would, in effect, be police work, along with its combat role. They argue that it would require very different training, equipment and force levels. Earlier this month, Paul McHale, the assistant secretary of defense for homeland security, said in an interview about the military's response to Hurricane Katrina that "what we ought not do is convert D.O.D. into a department of first responders."....
Bill Would Permit DNA Collection From All Those Arrested
Suspects arrested or detained by federal authorities could be forced to provide samples of their DNA that would be recorded in a central database under a provision of a Senate bill to expand government collection of personal data. The controversial measure was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee last week and is supported by the White House, but has not gone to the floor for a vote. It goes beyond current law, which allows federal authorities to collect and record samples of DNA only from those convicted of crimes. The data are stored in an FBI-maintained national registry that law enforcement officials use to aid investigations, by comparing DNA from criminals with evidence found at crime scenes. Sponsors insist that adding DNA from people arrested or detained would lead to prevention of some crimes, and help solve others more quickly. "When police retrace the history of a serial predator after he is finally caught, they often find that he never had a prior criminal conviction, but did have a prior arrest," Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said in a statement. "That means the only way they are likely to catch such a perpetrator after his first crime -- rather than his 10th -- is if authorities can maintain a comprehensive database of all those who are arrested, just as we do with fingerprints." Privacy advocates across the political spectrum say the proposal is another step in expanding government intrusion. "DNA is not like fingerprinting," said Jesselyn McCurdy, a legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "It contains genetic information and information about diseases." She added that the ACLU questions whether it is constitutional to put data from those who have not been convicted into a database of convicted criminals. The provision, co-sponsored by Kyl and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), does not require the government to automatically remove the DNA data of people who are never convicted. Instead, those arrested or detained would have to petition to have their information removed from the database after their cases were resolved....
National Security Agency gets fix on Internet users
Internet users hoping to protect their privacy by using anti-virus software, Web anonymizers, false identities and disabled cookies on their computer's Web browser have something new to worry about – a patent filed by the National Security Agency (NSA) for technology that will identify the physical location of any Web surfer. Patent 6,947,978, granted this week, describes a process based on latency, or time lag between computers exchanging data, of "numerous" known locations on the Internet to build a "network latency topology map" for all users. Identifying the physical location of an individual user, reports CNET News.com, could then be accomplished by measuring how long it takes to connect to an unknown computer from numerous known machines, and using the latency response to display location on a map. The rate at which data travels over the Internet constantly varies due to the amount of traffic, the size of data files, the constant changing of hardware and software by millions of users. Sometimes the system is slow, sometimes it is fast. Because of this variation, knowing how long it takes for a signal to travel to a location and back is not sufficient to identify it's location. But knowing the latency of the entire system at a given moment and the latency for a specific computer provides a means of knowing relative locations, however fast or slow the Internet is operating. While most users are unaware of it, their computers are able to "ping" website addresses to trace the route their connection took and how much time was required to complete the operation. Likewise other computer users – hackers, for example – can ping their computer as well when connected to the Internet. It is this feature that the NSA's patent seeks to exploit. The NSA patent does not describe the intended use of the technology by the agency, noting only general uses like measuring the "effectiveness of advertising across geographic regions" or flagging a password that "could be noted or disabled if not used from or near the appropriate location," according to CNET News. But given NSA's status as the nation's premier cryptologic organization, it's unlikely the technology will be used to improve advertising....
Federal Judge Halts New Orleans Gun Seizures
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana this afternoon issued a temporary restraining order on behalf of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and National Rifle Association (NRA), bringing an end to firearm seizures from citizens living in and around New Orleans. District Judge Jay Zaney issued the restraining order against all parties named in a lawsuit filed Thursday by SAF and NRA. Defendants in the lawsuit include New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Police Chief Edwin Compass III. "This is a great victory, not just for the NRA and SAF, but primarily for law-abiding gun owners everywhere," said SAF founder Alan M. Gottlieb. "We are proud to have joined forces with the NRA to put an end to what has amounted to a warrantless gun grab by authorities in New Orleans and surrounding jurisdictions. "Over the past three weeks," he continued, "residents who had lost virtually everything in the devastation following Hurricane Katrina had also essentially been stripped of something even more precious, their civil rights, and their right of self-defense, because of these gun seizures. "SAF and NRA had no alternative but to take action," Gottlieb added. "If these gun confiscations had been allowed to continue without challenge, it would have set a dangerous precedent that would have encouraged authorities in other jurisdictions to believe they also could suspend the civil rights of citizens in the event of some other emergency. "What must happen now, and quickly," said Gottlieb, "is for authorities in the New Orleans area to explain how they will return all of those firearms to their rightful owners, and do it promptly. What this ruling affirms is that even in the face of great natural disasters, governments cannot arbitrarily deprive citizens of their rights. Thanks to some great teamwork between SAF and the NRA, this sort of thing will hopefully never happen again."....
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MAD COW DISEASE
U.S. Regulators to Widen Mad-Cow Animal Feed Rules
A ban on cattle parts suspected in the transmission of mad-cow disease will be extended beyond cattle feed to all animal feed, according to rules proposed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Animal-feed makers will have to eliminate the brains and spinal cords of cows older than 30 months from their products under the FDA's proposal, released today. The plan falls short of an earlier proposal to ban use of tissue from all mammals and poultry as sources of animal feed. Under the proposal announced today, makers of feed for all animals, including pets, cannot use the brains and spinal cords of older cattle in their products. Since 1997, the FDA has banned the direct feeding of cattle remnants from animals of any age to other cattle. The FDA has allowed exceptions for table scraps for restaurants, poultry litter and cows' blood. Producers will be allowed to continue using these materials in feed under today's proposal. If the most infectious tissues -- brains and spinal cords -- are kept out of chicken feed and other animal food, then it is safe use poultry litter and table scraps in animal feed, the FDA said....
Japan Moves Closer to Lifting U.S. Beef Ban
Japan moved a step closer to lifting its ban on U.S. beef imports after a food safety panel said there was little risk of mad cow disease from American beef if appropriate precautions are taken, the government's top spokesman said Wednesday. Japan's food safety panel, charged with reviewing the ban, released a preliminary report late Tuesday saying that the risk of mad cow disease entering Japan in American beef is extremely low if proper precautions are followed. "It is not that we've reached a full agreement, but it gave us direction," Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda said during a news conference. "Yesterday's discussions gave us a bright outlook." The Japanese food safety panel is expected to finish its report and make a recommendation about the ban later this year. Hosoda said Wednesday that it was too early to say when imports might resume and added that a verdict on trade should be based on sound science. Domestic press reports have said imports may resume as early as December....
T-bone steaks to make triumphant return to EU menus
The European Union agreed on Wednesday to allow T-bone steaks, including Italy's famous Fiorentina, back into Europe's restaurants, lifting a four-year ban imposed over mad cow disease fears, the EU executive said. Sales of beef containing the backbone of animals aged over 12 months were banned in 2001 in many European countries to reduce the risk of catching the human equivalent of BSE, mad cow disease. This low age limit effectively outlawed T-bone steaks. EU veterinary experts meeting in Brussels have now raised that limit to 24 months, meaning that T-bones are likely be back on sale in butchers' shops across Europe by the end of the year. The decision will delight lovers of Italy's phonebook-thick Tuscan Fiorentina steak, traditionally cut from cattle aged between 17 and 22 months and including a big piece of backbone, believed to harbour the agent causing the brain-wasting disease....
Mad cow crusader
Janet Skarbek's life was forever altered when she read the obituary of an acquaintance in June 2003. A 56-year-old woman who had worked with Skarbek's mother at the Garden State Park racetrack near Philadelphia had died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob brain disease, the human version of mad cow disease. Barely three years earlier, a 29-year-old accountant at the Cherry Hill track had died of the same rare, always fatal disease. Skarbek wondered: How could two of just 100 administrative employees at the track be felled by a neurological disease health officials say kills just one in a million people each year, usually after age 60? "That's the day it started," she recalled. Almost overnight, Skarbek changed from suburban mother of two, tax manager and Sunday school teacher into an Erin Brockovich-like crusader fighting to keep mad cow disease from spreading through the U.S. food supply. Skarbek, 37, began combing obituaries and over time identified 18 people she believes died of CJD from 1993 to 2004 and had eaten regularly at the same restaurant at the now-closed racetrack. She also spotted possible clusters elsewhere or learned of them from loved ones of people whose deaths were classified as sporadic CJD. Sporadic, or naturally occurring, cases of CJD have no known cause but are not due to eating mad-cow-tainted beef - which has killed at least 180 people in the United Kingdom and continental Europe since the 1990s. Beef-related cases are classified as variant CJD....
Biology professor may have chronic wasting puzzle licked
The mystery of how deer and elk spread chronic wasting disease from one animal to another may be solved: Their tongues are infectious. When the animals lick or slobber on each other — a fairly common occurrence, especially among elk — the agent that causes the fatal disease may be shed from their tongues via saliva. When they graze, leaving sloughed-off tongue cells and saliva in grass and soil, the disease could be widely transmitted. Richard Bessen, an associate professor of veterinary molecular biology at Montana State University in Bozeman, discovered the infectious agent, called a prion, in deer and elk tongues. Details of disease transmission still need to be worked out, he said, but he believes the prions in saliva are significant in the growing national epidemic of the disease. A leading expert in Colorado, however, thinks that the jury is still out on how the deadly disease is spread. Mo Salman, a professor of epidemiology at Colorado State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, said Monday that Bessen injected prions into the brain of a test animal and later found they had traveled to the tongue. That, he said, suggests the agent that causes chronic wasting disease can spread from brain to tongue — but nothing more....
U.S. Regulators to Widen Mad-Cow Animal Feed Rules
A ban on cattle parts suspected in the transmission of mad-cow disease will be extended beyond cattle feed to all animal feed, according to rules proposed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Animal-feed makers will have to eliminate the brains and spinal cords of cows older than 30 months from their products under the FDA's proposal, released today. The plan falls short of an earlier proposal to ban use of tissue from all mammals and poultry as sources of animal feed. Under the proposal announced today, makers of feed for all animals, including pets, cannot use the brains and spinal cords of older cattle in their products. Since 1997, the FDA has banned the direct feeding of cattle remnants from animals of any age to other cattle. The FDA has allowed exceptions for table scraps for restaurants, poultry litter and cows' blood. Producers will be allowed to continue using these materials in feed under today's proposal. If the most infectious tissues -- brains and spinal cords -- are kept out of chicken feed and other animal food, then it is safe use poultry litter and table scraps in animal feed, the FDA said....
Japan Moves Closer to Lifting U.S. Beef Ban
Japan moved a step closer to lifting its ban on U.S. beef imports after a food safety panel said there was little risk of mad cow disease from American beef if appropriate precautions are taken, the government's top spokesman said Wednesday. Japan's food safety panel, charged with reviewing the ban, released a preliminary report late Tuesday saying that the risk of mad cow disease entering Japan in American beef is extremely low if proper precautions are followed. "It is not that we've reached a full agreement, but it gave us direction," Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda said during a news conference. "Yesterday's discussions gave us a bright outlook." The Japanese food safety panel is expected to finish its report and make a recommendation about the ban later this year. Hosoda said Wednesday that it was too early to say when imports might resume and added that a verdict on trade should be based on sound science. Domestic press reports have said imports may resume as early as December....
T-bone steaks to make triumphant return to EU menus
The European Union agreed on Wednesday to allow T-bone steaks, including Italy's famous Fiorentina, back into Europe's restaurants, lifting a four-year ban imposed over mad cow disease fears, the EU executive said. Sales of beef containing the backbone of animals aged over 12 months were banned in 2001 in many European countries to reduce the risk of catching the human equivalent of BSE, mad cow disease. This low age limit effectively outlawed T-bone steaks. EU veterinary experts meeting in Brussels have now raised that limit to 24 months, meaning that T-bones are likely be back on sale in butchers' shops across Europe by the end of the year. The decision will delight lovers of Italy's phonebook-thick Tuscan Fiorentina steak, traditionally cut from cattle aged between 17 and 22 months and including a big piece of backbone, believed to harbour the agent causing the brain-wasting disease....
Mad cow crusader
Janet Skarbek's life was forever altered when she read the obituary of an acquaintance in June 2003. A 56-year-old woman who had worked with Skarbek's mother at the Garden State Park racetrack near Philadelphia had died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob brain disease, the human version of mad cow disease. Barely three years earlier, a 29-year-old accountant at the Cherry Hill track had died of the same rare, always fatal disease. Skarbek wondered: How could two of just 100 administrative employees at the track be felled by a neurological disease health officials say kills just one in a million people each year, usually after age 60? "That's the day it started," she recalled. Almost overnight, Skarbek changed from suburban mother of two, tax manager and Sunday school teacher into an Erin Brockovich-like crusader fighting to keep mad cow disease from spreading through the U.S. food supply. Skarbek, 37, began combing obituaries and over time identified 18 people she believes died of CJD from 1993 to 2004 and had eaten regularly at the same restaurant at the now-closed racetrack. She also spotted possible clusters elsewhere or learned of them from loved ones of people whose deaths were classified as sporadic CJD. Sporadic, or naturally occurring, cases of CJD have no known cause but are not due to eating mad-cow-tainted beef - which has killed at least 180 people in the United Kingdom and continental Europe since the 1990s. Beef-related cases are classified as variant CJD....
Biology professor may have chronic wasting puzzle licked
The mystery of how deer and elk spread chronic wasting disease from one animal to another may be solved: Their tongues are infectious. When the animals lick or slobber on each other — a fairly common occurrence, especially among elk — the agent that causes the fatal disease may be shed from their tongues via saliva. When they graze, leaving sloughed-off tongue cells and saliva in grass and soil, the disease could be widely transmitted. Richard Bessen, an associate professor of veterinary molecular biology at Montana State University in Bozeman, discovered the infectious agent, called a prion, in deer and elk tongues. Details of disease transmission still need to be worked out, he said, but he believes the prions in saliva are significant in the growing national epidemic of the disease. A leading expert in Colorado, however, thinks that the jury is still out on how the deadly disease is spread. Mo Salman, a professor of epidemiology at Colorado State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, said Monday that Bessen injected prions into the brain of a test animal and later found they had traveled to the tongue. That, he said, suggests the agent that causes chronic wasting disease can spread from brain to tongue — but nothing more....
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
NEWS ROUNDUP
Thousands apply for 24 Montana bison hunting licenses Nearly 6,200 people, most of them Montana residents, have applied for the 24 licenses still available for Montana's first bison hunt in 15 years, state wildlife officials said today. Tom Palmer, a spokesman for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, believes the level of interest has to do with the hunt's design. "It's a real hunt. I think hunters recognize that and are interested in participating," he said. As of early afternoon, there were 6,177 applications, he said. Of those, 5,992 were Montana residents. Last month, wildlife commissioners approved a three-month hunt of bison that leave Yellowstone National Park and enter southern Montana. Friday marked the deadline to apply for a license. Palmer said a drawing would be held next week....
Survivor of bear attack considers himself lucky Anderson resident James Davis said the image of a bear leaping over a dead tree and charging toward him with what he assumed was a definite intent to kill will forever be burned in his memory. Three weeks has passed since the 50-year-old businessman was mauled by a grizzly bear while hunting in the Wyoming wilderness, and Davis, whose wounds still are healing, said he counts himself more than just a little lucky to be alive. "Not many people get the opportunity to tell this story," he said, detailing the events that led to the attack. Hunting season had just started Sept. 10 on the edge of Yellowstone National Park when Davis and a group of friends - Jeff Sullivan of Anderson, Jon Irish of New Waverly and Dean Brown, Erin Brown and Dan Staid, all of Pinedale, Wyo. - set out to look for elk and deer. They shot a deer late in the day and were forced to leave it overnight, Davis said. Trouble came the next day when he and Irish went to retrieve the animal....
Species act backers pin hopes on Senate Critics of the U.S. House- approved changes in the 1973 federal Endangered Species Act are counting on the Senate to derail the bill. Left in place, the bill that passed the House 229-193 last week could unravel protections of old-growth forests in the Northwest that are home to the ESA-listed northern spotted owl, said Joe Scott, international programs director for Conservation Northwest, a Bellingham-based conservation group. Scott based his comments on a provision in the bill championed by Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif. It eliminates critical habitat designations for threatened and endangered species. The bill calls for recovery plans for imperiled species and protection of areas of special value but does nothing to guarantee how much habitat would be protected, Scott said. Most observers in Washington state and Washington, D.C., said the bill has little chance of passing the Senate and becoming law....
BLM rules cut protest period A new Bureau of Land Management policy means citizens have 30 days instead of 45 to protest oil- and gas-lease sales. Under the new rules, which went into effect in June, protests must be filed 15 days before the date of a sale. BLM's old policy allowed protests until the day of the sale. Sales notices will continue to be posted 45 days before lease sales. BLM holds oil and gas lease sales quarterly. The Nov. 10 sale, which was announced Sept. 26, will be the first one in Colorado since the rules changed. Citizens have until Oct. 26 to protest the sale of any of the 73,263 acres being offered. BLM officials say the old policy didn't give the bureau enough time to review protests before making a sale. As a result, some sales were made but weren't finalized until after the protests were investigated. Duane Spencer, branch chief of fluid minerals for the Colorado BLM, said late protests were not the norm, but they happened enough to be a problem for the bureau....
Blaze spotter is one of dwindling breed U.S Forest Service fire lookout Eric Olson was as happy as a bear in a berry patch. Not only is the wraparound view from his 40-foot- high steel tower atop Mount Elizabeth stupendous, but the excited chatter on the radio flashed quicker than greased lightning. The night before, a mighty thunderstorm had pushed through this part of the Stanislaus National Forest, using lightning strikes as legs and leaving behind smoldering forest litter and snags as foot- prints. Olson, who earns $11.43 an hour, is in his third year as a fire lookout. He plans to return next year. "Once you start working in public safety," he explained, "it's hard to let go." He is, however, one of a dwindling breed as fire lookouts across the country have been gradually replaced by modern technology, including comput- erized lightning detection sys- tems, satellites and air patrols....
It's All Trew: Trips to five and dime store 'fondest memories' Mr. Woolworth was born on a farm in Utica, N.Y., in 1852. He hated farm chores but looked forward to the visits of a local peddler who brought his wares to the farm. Equally fascinating were trips to the big general store in town where he eventually worked for free just to learn how the business operated. He went on to become a multi-millionaire with a chain of Woolworth stores located all over the world. As I remember, the store in Amarillo sported a bright red awning above the windows and - miracle of miracles - the clerks allowed little boys to examine the merchandise. All prices were prominently displayed so you could determine how far your allowance would go. Woolworth's was famous for its food counter, serving sandwiches and cold drinks. Once mother found out how cheap and quick a grilled cheese sandwich could be obtained, we always took this option at lunch. I can see it like yesterday. Sit on the red stool, push against the counter and you could make two full spins before stopping. The store employees must have greased the stools every night after closing. It was just like going to a carnival with rides....
===
Thousands apply for 24 Montana bison hunting licenses Nearly 6,200 people, most of them Montana residents, have applied for the 24 licenses still available for Montana's first bison hunt in 15 years, state wildlife officials said today. Tom Palmer, a spokesman for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, believes the level of interest has to do with the hunt's design. "It's a real hunt. I think hunters recognize that and are interested in participating," he said. As of early afternoon, there were 6,177 applications, he said. Of those, 5,992 were Montana residents. Last month, wildlife commissioners approved a three-month hunt of bison that leave Yellowstone National Park and enter southern Montana. Friday marked the deadline to apply for a license. Palmer said a drawing would be held next week....
Survivor of bear attack considers himself lucky Anderson resident James Davis said the image of a bear leaping over a dead tree and charging toward him with what he assumed was a definite intent to kill will forever be burned in his memory. Three weeks has passed since the 50-year-old businessman was mauled by a grizzly bear while hunting in the Wyoming wilderness, and Davis, whose wounds still are healing, said he counts himself more than just a little lucky to be alive. "Not many people get the opportunity to tell this story," he said, detailing the events that led to the attack. Hunting season had just started Sept. 10 on the edge of Yellowstone National Park when Davis and a group of friends - Jeff Sullivan of Anderson, Jon Irish of New Waverly and Dean Brown, Erin Brown and Dan Staid, all of Pinedale, Wyo. - set out to look for elk and deer. They shot a deer late in the day and were forced to leave it overnight, Davis said. Trouble came the next day when he and Irish went to retrieve the animal....
Species act backers pin hopes on Senate Critics of the U.S. House- approved changes in the 1973 federal Endangered Species Act are counting on the Senate to derail the bill. Left in place, the bill that passed the House 229-193 last week could unravel protections of old-growth forests in the Northwest that are home to the ESA-listed northern spotted owl, said Joe Scott, international programs director for Conservation Northwest, a Bellingham-based conservation group. Scott based his comments on a provision in the bill championed by Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif. It eliminates critical habitat designations for threatened and endangered species. The bill calls for recovery plans for imperiled species and protection of areas of special value but does nothing to guarantee how much habitat would be protected, Scott said. Most observers in Washington state and Washington, D.C., said the bill has little chance of passing the Senate and becoming law....
BLM rules cut protest period A new Bureau of Land Management policy means citizens have 30 days instead of 45 to protest oil- and gas-lease sales. Under the new rules, which went into effect in June, protests must be filed 15 days before the date of a sale. BLM's old policy allowed protests until the day of the sale. Sales notices will continue to be posted 45 days before lease sales. BLM holds oil and gas lease sales quarterly. The Nov. 10 sale, which was announced Sept. 26, will be the first one in Colorado since the rules changed. Citizens have until Oct. 26 to protest the sale of any of the 73,263 acres being offered. BLM officials say the old policy didn't give the bureau enough time to review protests before making a sale. As a result, some sales were made but weren't finalized until after the protests were investigated. Duane Spencer, branch chief of fluid minerals for the Colorado BLM, said late protests were not the norm, but they happened enough to be a problem for the bureau....
Blaze spotter is one of dwindling breed U.S Forest Service fire lookout Eric Olson was as happy as a bear in a berry patch. Not only is the wraparound view from his 40-foot- high steel tower atop Mount Elizabeth stupendous, but the excited chatter on the radio flashed quicker than greased lightning. The night before, a mighty thunderstorm had pushed through this part of the Stanislaus National Forest, using lightning strikes as legs and leaving behind smoldering forest litter and snags as foot- prints. Olson, who earns $11.43 an hour, is in his third year as a fire lookout. He plans to return next year. "Once you start working in public safety," he explained, "it's hard to let go." He is, however, one of a dwindling breed as fire lookouts across the country have been gradually replaced by modern technology, including comput- erized lightning detection sys- tems, satellites and air patrols....
It's All Trew: Trips to five and dime store 'fondest memories' Mr. Woolworth was born on a farm in Utica, N.Y., in 1852. He hated farm chores but looked forward to the visits of a local peddler who brought his wares to the farm. Equally fascinating were trips to the big general store in town where he eventually worked for free just to learn how the business operated. He went on to become a multi-millionaire with a chain of Woolworth stores located all over the world. As I remember, the store in Amarillo sported a bright red awning above the windows and - miracle of miracles - the clerks allowed little boys to examine the merchandise. All prices were prominently displayed so you could determine how far your allowance would go. Woolworth's was famous for its food counter, serving sandwiches and cold drinks. Once mother found out how cheap and quick a grilled cheese sandwich could be obtained, we always took this option at lunch. I can see it like yesterday. Sit on the red stool, push against the counter and you could make two full spins before stopping. The store employees must have greased the stools every night after closing. It was just like going to a carnival with rides....
===
Monday, October 03, 2005
Florida city considers eminent domain
Florida's Riviera Beach is a poor, predominantly black, coastal community that intends to revitalize its economy by using eminent domain, if necessary, to displace about 6,000 local residents and build a billion-dollar waterfront yachting and housing complex. "This is a community that's in dire need of jobs, which has a median income of less than $19,000 a year," said Riviera Beach Mayor Michael Brown. He defends the use of eminent domain by saying the city is "using tools that have been available to governments for years to bring communities like ours out of the economic doldrums and the trauma centers." Mr. Brown said Riviera Beach is doing what the city of New London, Conn., is trying to do and what the U.S. Supreme Court said is proper in its ruling June 23 in Kelo v. City of New London. That decision upheld the right of government to seize private properties for use by private developers for projects designed to generate jobs and increase the tax base. Last week, the Riviera Beach City Council tapped the New Jersey-based Viking Inlet Harbor Properties LLC to oversee the mammoth 400-acre redevelopment project. "More than 2,000 homes could be eligible for confiscation," said H. Adams Weaver, a local lawyer who is assisting protesting homeowners....
===
Florida's Riviera Beach is a poor, predominantly black, coastal community that intends to revitalize its economy by using eminent domain, if necessary, to displace about 6,000 local residents and build a billion-dollar waterfront yachting and housing complex. "This is a community that's in dire need of jobs, which has a median income of less than $19,000 a year," said Riviera Beach Mayor Michael Brown. He defends the use of eminent domain by saying the city is "using tools that have been available to governments for years to bring communities like ours out of the economic doldrums and the trauma centers." Mr. Brown said Riviera Beach is doing what the city of New London, Conn., is trying to do and what the U.S. Supreme Court said is proper in its ruling June 23 in Kelo v. City of New London. That decision upheld the right of government to seize private properties for use by private developers for projects designed to generate jobs and increase the tax base. Last week, the Riviera Beach City Council tapped the New Jersey-based Viking Inlet Harbor Properties LLC to oversee the mammoth 400-acre redevelopment project. "More than 2,000 homes could be eligible for confiscation," said H. Adams Weaver, a local lawyer who is assisting protesting homeowners....
===
YOUR FOREST SERVICE AT WORK
September 20, 2005 (Volume 70, Number 181)]
[Notices]
[Page 55102]
Rangeland Management Direction Regarding Grazing Permit Administration
AGENCY: Forest Service, USDA.
ACTION: Notice.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
SUMMARY: On July 19, 2005, the Forest Service published a notice in the
Federal Register with request for comment on the issuance of two (2)
interim directives (IDs) to Forest Service Handbook (FSH) 2209.13,
chapter 10--Term Grazing Permits and chapter 20--Grazing Agreements.
These IDs established procedures and responsibilities for administering
term grazing permits and grazing agreements (FR 70 41370). On that same
day, several other amendments to FSH 2209.13, as well as amendments to
several chapters of Forest Service Manual (FSM) 2200 on Range
Management were issued. On August 19, 2005, the Forest Service
published a notice in the Federal Register notifying the public that
the IDs had been rescinded and a revised ID had been reissued on August
16, 2005. In addition, the Forest Service announced that proposed
directives containing the direction removed from the two chapters had
been prepared and were available for public comment (70 FR 48663). On
September 2, 2005, a third Federal Register notice was published to
correct the World Wide Web/Internet address and proposed direction that
included incorrect restrictions of the base property and livestock
ownership requirements (70 FR 52362). The Forest Service rescinded all
of the direction referred to in these three Federal Register notices on
September 9, 2005, and replaced it with the direction that was in place
prior to July 19, 2005.
DATES: Rangeland Management direction in effect prior to July 19, 2005,
in the Forest Service Manual 2200 contents, the zero code chapter,
chapters 2210, 2230, 2240, 2250, and 2270; and direction in the Forest
Service Handbook contents, zero code chapter, and chapters 30, 40, 50,
60, 70, 80, and 90 were reinstated on September 9, 2005.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Ralph Giffen, Rangeland Management Staff, USDA Forest Service, (202) 205-1455.
....now, you've got that, right?....
===
September 20, 2005 (Volume 70, Number 181)]
[Notices]
[Page 55102]
Rangeland Management Direction Regarding Grazing Permit Administration
AGENCY: Forest Service, USDA.
ACTION: Notice.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
SUMMARY: On July 19, 2005, the Forest Service published a notice in the
Federal Register with request for comment on the issuance of two (2)
interim directives (IDs) to Forest Service Handbook (FSH) 2209.13,
chapter 10--Term Grazing Permits and chapter 20--Grazing Agreements.
These IDs established procedures and responsibilities for administering
term grazing permits and grazing agreements (FR 70 41370). On that same
day, several other amendments to FSH 2209.13, as well as amendments to
several chapters of Forest Service Manual (FSM) 2200 on Range
Management were issued. On August 19, 2005, the Forest Service
published a notice in the Federal Register notifying the public that
the IDs had been rescinded and a revised ID had been reissued on August
16, 2005. In addition, the Forest Service announced that proposed
directives containing the direction removed from the two chapters had
been prepared and were available for public comment (70 FR 48663). On
September 2, 2005, a third Federal Register notice was published to
correct the World Wide Web/Internet address and proposed direction that
included incorrect restrictions of the base property and livestock
ownership requirements (70 FR 52362). The Forest Service rescinded all
of the direction referred to in these three Federal Register notices on
September 9, 2005, and replaced it with the direction that was in place
prior to July 19, 2005.
DATES: Rangeland Management direction in effect prior to July 19, 2005,
in the Forest Service Manual 2200 contents, the zero code chapter,
chapters 2210, 2230, 2240, 2250, and 2270; and direction in the Forest
Service Handbook contents, zero code chapter, and chapters 30, 40, 50,
60, 70, 80, and 90 were reinstated on September 9, 2005.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Ralph Giffen, Rangeland Management Staff, USDA Forest Service, (202) 205-1455.
....now, you've got that, right?....
===
NEWS ROUNDUP
Ranchers, environmentalists, BLM come to terms It's not often that livestock producers, environmentalists and federal agency officials can agree on anything. Least of all policies for public lands grazing. But, Friday evening, that's just what happened in a lawsuit that could have brought an end to livestock grazing on 800,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management grounds in the Jarbidge area. Still, the Hailey-based Western Watersheds, the BLM, and affected ranchers, including J.R. Simplot, signed a settlement agreement on a suit filed in April by the environmental group. If approved by the district court judge, the settlement allows grazing to continue, at reduced levels, over the next four to five years while the BLM conducts a comprehensive study of the ecological health of the sagebrush landscape. The settlement outlines an eight year process that includes developing a new management plant and environmental impact statement and issuing new grazing permits, Lucas said. The interim grazing plan grants tighter protections for native habitat, he said....
Ranch road has rocky past, changing future A four-mile stretch of rocky, rolling road that runs through this spread is used mainly as a cow trail, or as a spot for sunning rattlesnakes. Yet it's been fussed over by folks for years. Soon, this road in North Dakota's western Badlands may be smoothed into a thoroughfare, linking two state highways, cutting commute times for locals and allowing better access to the region's oil fields. "Theodore Roosevelt used to run his cows through this land," said Norma Eberts, one of the owners of a 5,298-acre ranch. "He gained his conservation principles and ethics from the time he spent out here. I think he'd be really disturbed about what's happening now." The ranch, shrouded by towering buttes next to Roosevelt's Elkhorn Ranch site, is owned by brothers Kenneth, Allan and Dennis Eberts and their families. They have been trying unsuccessfully to sell the picturesque property to the state or the National Park Service for public use and preservation. Billings County wants to use the road north of Medora to connect state Highways 16 and 85. It would cut as much as 100 miles off the commutes of many who live in the area and encourage economic development in the region, county officials say. The state Supreme Court in May ruled in the county's favor, reversing a temporary injunction granted by a judge and ordering the dismissal of the Ebertses' lawsuit seeking to permanently halt the road....
Feds authorize wolf kill The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has authorized the killing of the remaining adult gray wolves in the Chesimia Pack near Dworshak Reservoir. The pack has repeatedly preyed on livestock and hunting dogs in the region, officials said, and investigators believe the pack may be responsible for the recent death of an adult cow. Investigators with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services agency have confirmed that the pack killed a calf recently. Rancher Tom Beale of Pomeroy said he thinks the cow was killed at the same time or a little earlier than the calf, but the carcass was found later. Wolves in most of Idaho are protected under the Endangered Species Act but their special designation allows animals that prey on livestock to be killed....
Plan puts water back underground Forget running it down the draw. Forget spilling it into half-sliced-tire tanks for the cows. Forget infiltration ponds, in-channel reservoirs, "atomizers," zeolite treatment, Higgins loop ion exchange or gypsum applications. Anadarko Petroleum Corp. is spending more than $50 million to do what many Powder River Basin residents hoped would have been the industry standard from the beginning: Re-inject coal-bed methane water back into the ground. "It eliminates a lot of problems," said Anadarko spokesman Rick Robitaille. Construction is set to begin on a 48-mile water pipeline from Anadarko's County Line field in eastern Johnson County to injection wells at the company's property near Midwest. The 24-inch diameter pipeline will flow as much as 400,000 barrels of coal-bed methane water per day to the Salt Creek Field area where it will be injected into the Madison aquifer....
Ringed by wolves In wild areas to the north and to the south of Colorado, the sound of howling wolves pierces the night air. Wolves haven’t moved into Colorado yet, but they are making plenty of noise here already. Wolves, gone from the mountains and valleys of Colorado for most of a century, are the subject of intensive studies of wildlife management, court cases and debates among such diverse groups as environmentalists and ranchers. And they are the stars of a symposium that runs through Tuesday at the Antlers Hilton in Colorado Springs. “Frontiers of Wolf Recovery” is the title of the fourth international wolf conference, sponsored by the International Wolf Center in collaboration with Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. The conference seeks to raise awareness of wolves and their place in the natural environment, said Walter Medwid, executive director of the sponsoring organization that is based in Minnesota....
Managers determine grizzly's mortality threshold Earlier this year, the Wyoming Legislature passed a bill mandating the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to notify the county sheriff and local media of the county to which a grizzly bear has been relocated. The point, supporters argued, was to warn local residents that a known "problem" bear -- it likely had killed livestock but wasn't a safety threat to people -- was in their area. Opponents of the bill feared it would generate more anti-grizzly sentiment, and might even draw grizzly hunters to a relocation area to kill it. But supporters, including Jim Magagna and all but two legislators who voted for the bill, say it simply helps people be aware of potential grizzly risks. "These are problem bears, at least with livestock, which are more like to be problems with people," Magagna said. He said he had not heard of anyone having a problem in the past after a bear was relocated and a rancher had not known....
Property rights gain traction in overhaul of Endangered Species Act Missourians in Congress bedeviled by a homely fish and two skittish shorebirds exacted revenge last week by voting to strip the Endangered Species Act of protections on the books since 1973. The new version of the law approved by the House is unlikely to pass muster in the Senate, at least right away. Critics worry especially about a murky provision that could pay landowners tens of millions of dollars in damages for property devalued by restrictions due to rare critters or plants. Nonetheless, sponsors' success in getting this far and winning bipartisan backing shows widespread recognition of problems in one of the nation's most venerable environmental laws. In a barometer of emotions flowing on the issue, no fewer than four Old Testament books (Genesis, Psalms, Ecclesiastes and Isaiah) were quoted during the daylong debate on the House floor. Members pointed fingers at one another as they spoke with passion about their core beliefs, whether they be saving "God's creatures" or protecting private property....
Juniper gobbling up Oregon wilderness Seventy-five years ago, about 1.5 million acres of Oregon's wilderness was covered in Western juniper. Now it has grown to 6.5 million acres, or about 10 percent of the state's surface — and the plant is spreading fast. A new survey by the U.S. Forest Service shows that juniper is taking over grassland, alarming biologists who see it as a threat to native habitats. "Some juniper is a good thing,'' said Rick Miller, a professor at Oregon State University. "But you can have too much of a good thing.'' Junipers send their roots deep beneath the surface, soaking up water before it reaches any other plants. "Eventually as they dominate, then you lose the shrubs, the grass and then you get bare ground,'' Miller said. Water runs off, gullying the landscape. Too little food or open range remains to support much wildlife....
Oil riches just out of reach Out in sagebrush country, Kenneth Brown is standing over part of the world's most concentrated energy resource, land that holds up to 1 million barrels of oil per acre. Too bad it's locked up in layers of rock in some places hundreds of feet underground. Such is the dilemma presented by the West's oil shale reserves, believed to contain more than 1 trillion barrels of oil - four times the holdings of Saudi Arabia, according to government and industry estimates. The problem is extraction: Underground layers of shale are as thick as 1,000 feet and were deposited over millions of years by an algae-producing sea. The Green River formation is potentially the world's most bountiful energy source - enough in theory to meet U.S. energy needs for a century - but it is an expensive nut to crack for energy companies. Plus, it could use up a lot of water in an arid region....
Overrun by elk Colorado is struggling with too much of a good thing - elk. The state's most majestic animals are denuding vegetation in national parks, gobbling shrubbery in Estes Park, threatening to contaminate valuable potato crops in the San Luis Valley and destroying livestock feed on Western Slope ranchlands. Some of the conflict lies in sheer numbers. About 338,000 elk were in Colorado before last year's hunting season, in which 63,336 were killed. That still left Colorado with 275,000 - more elk than any other state or Canadian province. It also was 86,000 above the state Division of Wildlife's objective of 189,000 animals....
Conata Basin recovery disputed Conata Basin is at the center of a long-running, multi-sided argument over prairie dogs, grazing, black-footed ferrets and conservation. After years of drought and a proliferating prairie-dog population, much of the vegetation had disappeared from parts of the basin on Buffalo Gap National Grassland. Now, after a season with more rainfall, the basin has recovered — to a degree. To what degree it has recovered is also in dispute among principals in the long-running debate over the proper role of prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets and cattle in the basin, which lies south of Badlands National Park. In 2004 and before, ranchers said prairie dogs — and, to a lesser degree, drought — had denuded the basin of most vegetation and ruined it for grazing. A handful of ranchers lease federal pastures for their cattle in the basin....
Grazing regulations won’t be reintroduced The U.S. Forest Service does not plan to reintroduce new grazing management proposals that drew the ire of North Dakota ranchers this summer, the state’s congressional delegation said Friday. The new policies, including one that barred ranchers who lease land or livestock in the national grasslands from obtaining grazing permits, were withdrawn for more public comment after ranchers and North Dakota politicians protested. Sens. Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad and Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., said U.S. Department of Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey told them the agency will not move forward with the controversial changes....
Playing and paying The teeth-jarring dirt road to Leon Creek turns into a snarl of ATVs on some summer and fall days when off-road enthusiasts head out to enjoy the far reaches of this 53-square-mile flattop mesa. The growling machines, loaded with coolers, kids, cameras and dogs, veer off from here on the many trails unfurling over rises and into the trees. It has been a little more than 25 years since the first little 50cc ATV - a miniature Honda farm implement - putt-putted up a Jeep road in the Grand Mesa National Forest. Now, at any given time, hundreds of the machines - with engines packing up to 700 cubic centimeters and sporting double seats and megashocks - regularly roam the Engelmann spruce and aspen woods. As the nation's public forests turn 100, there are many such playgrounds. All-terrain-vehicle riders account for more than 5 percent of all visits to the nation's forests and grasslands. In Colorado, an estimated 11,000 ATVs were prowling the backcountry a dozen years ago. Now, there are more than 90,000 of them registered in the state....
Column: Forest Service Mocks Public Involvement The concept of public involvement is not hard to understand, but many agencies, most recently the Forest Service, don’t get it—and definitely don’t like it. Instead, agencies all-too-often purposely thwart the legally mandated public involvement process to implement internal plans decided in advance, regardless of what the majority of their customers think should happen. Witness the news this week from the Bitterroot National Forest. The Forest Service had proposed a hazardous fuel timber sale near Sula in the southernmost Bitterroot Valley, Montana’s first project under the provisos of the 2003 Healthy Forest Restoration Act. The merits of this project are somewhat irrelevant to the point of this column. Good or bad, no matter. What matters is how the FS shammed the public involvement process—and gave us the proof of it, sort of like a bank robber dropping his business card during his getaway....
Forest Service applying letter of the law From cutting the Capitol Christmas tree to minor forest thinning, the U.S. Forest Service has put hundreds of small projects across the country on hold while it reviews a judge's ruling throwing out limits on the public's right to participate in forest decisions. However, a forest protection group that won the ruling contended Friday that the Forest Service has gone far beyond the intent of the ruling and appears to be intentionally holding up trivial projects. Among the projects the Forest Service put on hold is cutting an 80-foot spruce in New Mexico to serve as a holiday tree on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol. As long as no substantive objections are raised during a 30-day public comment period starting Monday, the tree could be cut and shipped to Washington in time, said James Payne, Forest Service southwest regional spokesman, from Phoenix. Matt Kenna, an attorney for the Western Environmental Law Center, said the plaintiffs have offered to work with the Forest Service to clarify what sorts of projects are covered by the ruling, but the Forest Service has refused....
Do You Remember the Last Time You Saw a Porcupine? One of the icons of our forests seems to be slipping away, virtually unnoticed, while wildlife managers scramble to find out what’s happening. Wildlife biologists know the porcupine population over most of the northern Rockies (USA and Canada) has declined sharply, but they don’t know why or how serious it is. Some wildlife biologists fear we might be witnessing a major extinction event—or I should say not witnessing it. “We know the porcupine population is declining, but we don’t know what’s going on,” notes Kerry Foresman, a professor of wildlife biology at the University of Montana and renown small mammal expert, “but we’re trying to get funding to find out.”....
Fish & Wildlife faces possible lawsuit on blue butterfly petition More than 17 months after submitting a petition to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to name the Sand Mountain blue butterfly an endangered species, the Center for Biological Diversity is tired of waiting for an answer. The Center, in accordance with the Xerces Society, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and the Nevada Outdoor Recreation Association, intend to file suit against the USFWS for violating the Endangered Species Act. Specifically, the Nevada division of the USFWS has taken longer than the required 90 days to answer a petition in favor of naming the blue butterfly an endangered species....
Groups defend relocating bears Nine grizzly bears have been relocated from the Upper Green River Valley this year after conflicts with livestock. But environmentalists and bear biologists defend the relocations, saying they're usually an effective way to prevent future run-ins. A case in point is a bear that was killed in a car crash near Moran this year - 12 years after it was tranquilized, captured and relocated because of conflicts with livestock. Louisa Willcox, wild bears project director with the Natural Resources Defense Council based in Livingston, Mont., said the bear had never again threatened livestock. That's typical, said Mark Bruscino, a bear management officer for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, who estimated that 70 percent of relocated bears never get in trouble with wildlife managers again. "Moving bears is an effective management tool the majority of the time," Bruscino said. "If we move them real quick, a lot of times they will go back to acting like a wild bear," he said....
Judge gives feds 1 year to create salmon plan Warning that threatened and endangered salmon are running out of time, a federal judge Friday gave federal agencies one year to come up with a new plan for protecting them from being killed by federal hydroelectric dams in the Columbia Basin. U.S. District Judge James Redden cut in half the time sought by NOAA Fisheries, the Bonneville Power Administration, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to revise a plan, known as a biological opinion, that the judge had ruled in violation of the Endangered Species Act in May. He said he will keep a close watch over the process and, if he sees substantial progress, could grant a little more time. The latest biological opinion will be the fifth since the federal government took over efforts to save dwindling runs of Columbia Basin salmon from extinction. The fish have suffered from the combined effects of dams, overfishing, logging, grazing, water withdrawals for irrigation and urban development....
Gas boom's effect on wildlife unknown Outfitter Jeff Mead feels a lot more comfortable with his feet in a set of stirrups, steering his horse into the rugged Colorado forest, than on an airplane 11,000 feet over his stomping grounds. Mead soon forgot his unease during a recent tour over his backcountry haven as he pointed to the natural gas wells springing up across the land where he has taken hunters for 15 years. "Elk and deer move out when rigs move in," said Mead, a lanky, mustachioed 50-year-old. "Up on the mountain during hunting season, if you sneeze, you can hear the elk running. So, don't tell me they like eating by a drilling rig." The debate over what energy development is doing to wildlife is raging throughout the Rockies, where some of the nation's richest gas deposits lie under prime wildlife habitat....
A Quest for Oil Collides With Nature in Alaska The 217,000 acres of windblown water and mottled tundra here on the North Slope of Alaska, separating Teshekpuk Lake from the Beaufort Sea, are home in summer to 50,000 to 90,000 migratory birds. This corner of Alaska's National Petroleum Reserve is also thought to be brimming with oil. From the presidencies of Ronald Reagan through Bill Clinton, federal officials put the bird habitat off limits to oil development. But after federal geologists in 2002 quadrupled their estimate of the oil available here in the northeast quadrant of the reserve, the Bush administration proposed putting the whole area up for lease to oil and gas companies. The move has touched off a fierce debate over whether new technologies can allow wildlife to coexist easily with oil exploration. Here, among the crazy-quilt pattern of land and water, the question is particularly keen, because this is where Pacific black brant, snow geese and other migratory birds annually shed their feathers, and for six flightless weeks have minimal disturbance and a clear line of sight against predators. How the dynamic of exploration, leasing and protest at Teshekpuk (pronounced teh-SHEK-puhk) and other parts of the oil patch plays out is seen by both sides in the debate as a harbinger of what awaits the Arctic shoreline - particularly as Congress prepares to vote this fall on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, east of Teshekpuk....
Column: R.S. 2477 means excess, not access, for Utah's public lands On Sept. 8, a federal appeals court overturned a Utah federal judge's decision that had, for four years, reined in a secretive, abusive and overreaching effort by Utah and county officials to claim that long-ignored dirt trails and other paths across federal public lands are actually "highways" under an 1866 law known as R.S. 2477. The new rule is that an R.S. 2477 claim is valid if the claimant can show 10 years of continuous use. The unfortunate response from Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.'s administration, which has partnered with long-time wilderness foes from certain county commissions, is a reinvigorated campaign to claim that faint tracks and hiking paths across federal public lands - lands cherished for their increasingly rare peace and quiet - are actually highways....
Column: Sell federal land The only thing about which Democrats and Republicans can agree these days, is the astronomical cost of rebuilding the storm-ravaged Gulf coast. Estimates, on either side of the political aisle, reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars. How to pay these costs is a question fueling heated debate inside both parties. Rep. Tom Tancredo has the best idea to date: sell excess federal land. Why should the federal government own more than 700 million acres - more than 30 per cent of the total land area? Even after exempting all the military bases, and the lands that contain "other needful buildings," and all the national parks, the federal government still owns nearly 600 million acres, for no legitimate reason. American taxpayers are shelling out money every year so the federal government can make "payments in lieu of taxes" to the state and local governments that have limited political jurisdiction over these lands. American taxpayers are shelling out money every year so armies of federal employees can make an effort to "manage" these lands. Why?....
Column: Bruce Babbitt's new vision for American land use My purpose, instead, is to show how we can prevent the loss of natural and cultural landscapes and watersheds through stronger federal leadership in land-use planning. It may come as something of a surprise to learn there is such a thing as "federal land-use planning." The notion that land use is a local matter has come to dominate the political rhetoric of our age, obscuring the historical reality that the national government has been involved in land-use planning since the early days of the republic. In fact, there is, by whatever name, a considerable body of law that can and, in my view, should be used toward enhanced federal leadership in land-use planning and preservation. After eight years of intense participation in these battles as secretary of the Interior and subsequent years of observing from the sidelines, I believe the time has come for an armistice followed by a peace conference to which not just Westerners, but all Americans, are invited. The outcome should be a new constitution for public lands, in the form of federal legislation that subordinates (but does not eliminate) mining, grazing and logging to an overriding public mandate for long-term biological diversity, abundant wildlife and fisheries, and the ecological integrity of our streams and watersheds....
Rio Grande water debt finally is paid in full A long-standing Rio Grande water debt that pitted drought-stricken South Texas farmers against Mexico appears resolved with Gov. Rick Perry announcing the debt has been paid in full. "Our farmers, ranchers and cities will have 100 percent of the water they are entitled to, not just for the rest of this year, but for all of 2006," Perry said in a statement. "Now that the debt is paid, both countries must continue to work in good faith to meet the water demands of citizens on both sides of the Rio Grande for years to come." A 1944 treaty dictates that Mexico allow a certain amount of water from the Rio Grande and its Mexican tributaries to reach South Texas. In return, the U.S. releases Colorado River water to Mexico. Mexico fell behind on its obligations in the 1990s, and at the height of a mutual drought owed the U.S. enough water to cover 1.5 million acres a foot deep. By 2002, some South Texas farmers were going under, seething as satellite photos showed lush green spots suggesting healthy Rio Grande irrigation in Mexico....
Erasing ‘squaw' names moves slowly After five years of work, only about 10 of the place names in Oregon containing the word "squaw" in them have been changed, with far more to go. The number of changed names could triple this month when the Oregon Geographic Names Board meets to consider new names for 18 more land features. The word, derived from the Algonquin word for "woman," is now considered a derogatory way to refer to an American Indian woman — and Oregon tribes have pushed to have the word changed. Under a state law passed in 2001, all of the roughly 150 peaks, rivers, buttes, meadows and other land formations in Oregon containing the word were meant to be rechristened by this year. But even if all 18 of the most recent recommendations are accepted by the Oregon board and then approved by a national board, less than 20 percent of the names will have been changed by the law's deadline....
Program helps disabled hunters Brock was among 14 sportsmen and women from across the country at this year's Helluva Hunt, an annual event pairing disabled hunters with volunteer guides on more than 30,000 acres of private land offered by a handful of ranchers. Hunters leave Wyoming with more than a cooler full of meat and a trophy head mount to look forward to; they are empowered in their ability to hunt, which for many, was a way of life before tragic accidents or illnesses left them disabled. In 1984, Outdoor Life magazine editor Jim Zumbo received a letter from a disabled reader wondering why there weren't more opportunities out there for people like him. Zumbo, in turn, wondered why a disabled person should have to stop hunting and found like-minded attitudes in Jane and Gary Stearns of Douglas. The Helluva Hunt was born, and the rest is 21 years of friendships that last like family, an amazing mountain of memories and laughs, and of course, the record books: the longest shot, the biggest horns, even the biggest hunt lie (after all, it is a hunt)....
In outlying communities change is marked in subtle differences Harold Veltkamp's lament sounds much like those escaping the lips of a lot of long-time Gallatin Valley residents. "It's not going to be a valley like we've seen it if all this development happens," Veltkamp said recently. The 80-year-old rancher has raised cattle, wheat and barley on the same 320-acre plot north of Penwell Bridge Road for 46 years. In that time, he has watched as sweeping changes have transformed Southwest Montana. Subdivisions of new homes have drawn people and cars to his neck of the woods in increasing numbers, he said. Now, he said, a new challenge threatens his agricultural way of life. It sits kitty-corner from his property just north of Belgrade's city limits: the proposed 170-acre Ryen Glenn Estates subdivision....
US Congress Fails To Extend Livestock Price Reports System A government program requiring packers to report prices they pay for cattle, hogs and lambs, will expire Friday because the U.S. Congress has failed to extend it. Although packers won't be mandated to file the reports to the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Monday, most will do so anyway, Agriculture Marketing Service Administrator Lloyd Day said Friday. Day said the USDA has reached out to packers and gotten good responses. "It's looking like it's going to be okay," he said. The Senate and House of Representatives each approved an extension earlier this month, but disagreements in how long the LMPR program should be extended resulted in a stalemate that won't be resolved this week now that the House has adjourned. On Sept. 13, the Senate approved a one-year extension for the program that has been helping livestock producers decide how to set their prices for six years. The next day, on Sept. 14, the House approved a five-year extension. Beyond the length of the extension, the two bodies of Congress also differed on whether or not to expand reporting on swine purchased by packers....
Phony beef cattle sales are alleged Federal regulators on Thursday charged that an Ohio broker created profits topping $1 million by conspiring with two large Nebraska feedlots to manipulate futures trading through sham sales of 4,500 beef cattle two years ago. The purportedly phony transactions were used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's closely watched weekly cash market report, causing futures contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to increase by $2.85 per hundredweight, said Gregory Mocek, director of enforcement at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Todd J. Delay of Columbus turned profits of $1.1 million for himself and his co-conspirators, Mocek contends. Of this, about $250,000 was received directly by Delay and relatives, Mocek asserted....
John Wesley Hardin meets his end while shooting a game of dice The dice tumbled across the top of the bar, and the player growled out an invective directed at either the uncooperative cubes or the grocer named Brown with whom he was matching for drinks. "Shake again," said the grocer. "You've got four sixes to beat," said the player as the dice spilled out of the cup. Those were the last words John Wesley Hardin would utter before an explosion from behind sent a lead slug into the back of his brain. The bullet came out through his left eye, leaving a neat hole in the lid, and then smashed into the mirror behind the bar. Shards of broken glass powdered the air and fell tinkling to the floor. Twisting as he fell, Hardin lay face up as Old John Selman quickly stepped up to the body and fired three more times into its chest, one of the shots tearing off the tip of the little finger on the left hand. A man with a badge, Young John Selman, ran into the saloon and grabbed his father's arm. "Don't shoot anymore! He's dead!"....
On the Edge of Common Sense: Toby Keith's dishrag hat is a good fit for frequent flier When I'm in the airport, I always wave at a cowboy hat ... a real cowboy hat. Somehow you can spot 'em. They inevitably turn out to be some bull rider on the way to a rodeo, a state cattlemen's association representative on the way to Washington, D.C., or a consultant of some kind or farmer or rancher on the way to a funeral or a graduation. Hats take a pretty good beating in the overhead storage on the airplanes. I got off the plane in southern Colorado, grabbed my hat from above and it had been smashed by a suitcase. It looked like it had been rained on, then put in a lunchbox to dry! I drove into town and found a Western store and asked if I could borrow their steamer. "Of course," they said, "have at it." Junior ambled over to visit. He occupied the job of "old-timer" in the store. He looked at my hat and asked if I'd backed over it with a D-8 Cat. It reminded him of one time when he and his pardner were out lookin' for some cows....
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Ranchers, environmentalists, BLM come to terms It's not often that livestock producers, environmentalists and federal agency officials can agree on anything. Least of all policies for public lands grazing. But, Friday evening, that's just what happened in a lawsuit that could have brought an end to livestock grazing on 800,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management grounds in the Jarbidge area. Still, the Hailey-based Western Watersheds, the BLM, and affected ranchers, including J.R. Simplot, signed a settlement agreement on a suit filed in April by the environmental group. If approved by the district court judge, the settlement allows grazing to continue, at reduced levels, over the next four to five years while the BLM conducts a comprehensive study of the ecological health of the sagebrush landscape. The settlement outlines an eight year process that includes developing a new management plant and environmental impact statement and issuing new grazing permits, Lucas said. The interim grazing plan grants tighter protections for native habitat, he said....
Ranch road has rocky past, changing future A four-mile stretch of rocky, rolling road that runs through this spread is used mainly as a cow trail, or as a spot for sunning rattlesnakes. Yet it's been fussed over by folks for years. Soon, this road in North Dakota's western Badlands may be smoothed into a thoroughfare, linking two state highways, cutting commute times for locals and allowing better access to the region's oil fields. "Theodore Roosevelt used to run his cows through this land," said Norma Eberts, one of the owners of a 5,298-acre ranch. "He gained his conservation principles and ethics from the time he spent out here. I think he'd be really disturbed about what's happening now." The ranch, shrouded by towering buttes next to Roosevelt's Elkhorn Ranch site, is owned by brothers Kenneth, Allan and Dennis Eberts and their families. They have been trying unsuccessfully to sell the picturesque property to the state or the National Park Service for public use and preservation. Billings County wants to use the road north of Medora to connect state Highways 16 and 85. It would cut as much as 100 miles off the commutes of many who live in the area and encourage economic development in the region, county officials say. The state Supreme Court in May ruled in the county's favor, reversing a temporary injunction granted by a judge and ordering the dismissal of the Ebertses' lawsuit seeking to permanently halt the road....
Feds authorize wolf kill The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has authorized the killing of the remaining adult gray wolves in the Chesimia Pack near Dworshak Reservoir. The pack has repeatedly preyed on livestock and hunting dogs in the region, officials said, and investigators believe the pack may be responsible for the recent death of an adult cow. Investigators with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services agency have confirmed that the pack killed a calf recently. Rancher Tom Beale of Pomeroy said he thinks the cow was killed at the same time or a little earlier than the calf, but the carcass was found later. Wolves in most of Idaho are protected under the Endangered Species Act but their special designation allows animals that prey on livestock to be killed....
Plan puts water back underground Forget running it down the draw. Forget spilling it into half-sliced-tire tanks for the cows. Forget infiltration ponds, in-channel reservoirs, "atomizers," zeolite treatment, Higgins loop ion exchange or gypsum applications. Anadarko Petroleum Corp. is spending more than $50 million to do what many Powder River Basin residents hoped would have been the industry standard from the beginning: Re-inject coal-bed methane water back into the ground. "It eliminates a lot of problems," said Anadarko spokesman Rick Robitaille. Construction is set to begin on a 48-mile water pipeline from Anadarko's County Line field in eastern Johnson County to injection wells at the company's property near Midwest. The 24-inch diameter pipeline will flow as much as 400,000 barrels of coal-bed methane water per day to the Salt Creek Field area where it will be injected into the Madison aquifer....
Ringed by wolves In wild areas to the north and to the south of Colorado, the sound of howling wolves pierces the night air. Wolves haven’t moved into Colorado yet, but they are making plenty of noise here already. Wolves, gone from the mountains and valleys of Colorado for most of a century, are the subject of intensive studies of wildlife management, court cases and debates among such diverse groups as environmentalists and ranchers. And they are the stars of a symposium that runs through Tuesday at the Antlers Hilton in Colorado Springs. “Frontiers of Wolf Recovery” is the title of the fourth international wolf conference, sponsored by the International Wolf Center in collaboration with Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. The conference seeks to raise awareness of wolves and their place in the natural environment, said Walter Medwid, executive director of the sponsoring organization that is based in Minnesota....
Managers determine grizzly's mortality threshold Earlier this year, the Wyoming Legislature passed a bill mandating the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to notify the county sheriff and local media of the county to which a grizzly bear has been relocated. The point, supporters argued, was to warn local residents that a known "problem" bear -- it likely had killed livestock but wasn't a safety threat to people -- was in their area. Opponents of the bill feared it would generate more anti-grizzly sentiment, and might even draw grizzly hunters to a relocation area to kill it. But supporters, including Jim Magagna and all but two legislators who voted for the bill, say it simply helps people be aware of potential grizzly risks. "These are problem bears, at least with livestock, which are more like to be problems with people," Magagna said. He said he had not heard of anyone having a problem in the past after a bear was relocated and a rancher had not known....
Property rights gain traction in overhaul of Endangered Species Act Missourians in Congress bedeviled by a homely fish and two skittish shorebirds exacted revenge last week by voting to strip the Endangered Species Act of protections on the books since 1973. The new version of the law approved by the House is unlikely to pass muster in the Senate, at least right away. Critics worry especially about a murky provision that could pay landowners tens of millions of dollars in damages for property devalued by restrictions due to rare critters or plants. Nonetheless, sponsors' success in getting this far and winning bipartisan backing shows widespread recognition of problems in one of the nation's most venerable environmental laws. In a barometer of emotions flowing on the issue, no fewer than four Old Testament books (Genesis, Psalms, Ecclesiastes and Isaiah) were quoted during the daylong debate on the House floor. Members pointed fingers at one another as they spoke with passion about their core beliefs, whether they be saving "God's creatures" or protecting private property....
Juniper gobbling up Oregon wilderness Seventy-five years ago, about 1.5 million acres of Oregon's wilderness was covered in Western juniper. Now it has grown to 6.5 million acres, or about 10 percent of the state's surface — and the plant is spreading fast. A new survey by the U.S. Forest Service shows that juniper is taking over grassland, alarming biologists who see it as a threat to native habitats. "Some juniper is a good thing,'' said Rick Miller, a professor at Oregon State University. "But you can have too much of a good thing.'' Junipers send their roots deep beneath the surface, soaking up water before it reaches any other plants. "Eventually as they dominate, then you lose the shrubs, the grass and then you get bare ground,'' Miller said. Water runs off, gullying the landscape. Too little food or open range remains to support much wildlife....
Oil riches just out of reach Out in sagebrush country, Kenneth Brown is standing over part of the world's most concentrated energy resource, land that holds up to 1 million barrels of oil per acre. Too bad it's locked up in layers of rock in some places hundreds of feet underground. Such is the dilemma presented by the West's oil shale reserves, believed to contain more than 1 trillion barrels of oil - four times the holdings of Saudi Arabia, according to government and industry estimates. The problem is extraction: Underground layers of shale are as thick as 1,000 feet and were deposited over millions of years by an algae-producing sea. The Green River formation is potentially the world's most bountiful energy source - enough in theory to meet U.S. energy needs for a century - but it is an expensive nut to crack for energy companies. Plus, it could use up a lot of water in an arid region....
Overrun by elk Colorado is struggling with too much of a good thing - elk. The state's most majestic animals are denuding vegetation in national parks, gobbling shrubbery in Estes Park, threatening to contaminate valuable potato crops in the San Luis Valley and destroying livestock feed on Western Slope ranchlands. Some of the conflict lies in sheer numbers. About 338,000 elk were in Colorado before last year's hunting season, in which 63,336 were killed. That still left Colorado with 275,000 - more elk than any other state or Canadian province. It also was 86,000 above the state Division of Wildlife's objective of 189,000 animals....
Conata Basin recovery disputed Conata Basin is at the center of a long-running, multi-sided argument over prairie dogs, grazing, black-footed ferrets and conservation. After years of drought and a proliferating prairie-dog population, much of the vegetation had disappeared from parts of the basin on Buffalo Gap National Grassland. Now, after a season with more rainfall, the basin has recovered — to a degree. To what degree it has recovered is also in dispute among principals in the long-running debate over the proper role of prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets and cattle in the basin, which lies south of Badlands National Park. In 2004 and before, ranchers said prairie dogs — and, to a lesser degree, drought — had denuded the basin of most vegetation and ruined it for grazing. A handful of ranchers lease federal pastures for their cattle in the basin....
Grazing regulations won’t be reintroduced The U.S. Forest Service does not plan to reintroduce new grazing management proposals that drew the ire of North Dakota ranchers this summer, the state’s congressional delegation said Friday. The new policies, including one that barred ranchers who lease land or livestock in the national grasslands from obtaining grazing permits, were withdrawn for more public comment after ranchers and North Dakota politicians protested. Sens. Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad and Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., said U.S. Department of Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey told them the agency will not move forward with the controversial changes....
Playing and paying The teeth-jarring dirt road to Leon Creek turns into a snarl of ATVs on some summer and fall days when off-road enthusiasts head out to enjoy the far reaches of this 53-square-mile flattop mesa. The growling machines, loaded with coolers, kids, cameras and dogs, veer off from here on the many trails unfurling over rises and into the trees. It has been a little more than 25 years since the first little 50cc ATV - a miniature Honda farm implement - putt-putted up a Jeep road in the Grand Mesa National Forest. Now, at any given time, hundreds of the machines - with engines packing up to 700 cubic centimeters and sporting double seats and megashocks - regularly roam the Engelmann spruce and aspen woods. As the nation's public forests turn 100, there are many such playgrounds. All-terrain-vehicle riders account for more than 5 percent of all visits to the nation's forests and grasslands. In Colorado, an estimated 11,000 ATVs were prowling the backcountry a dozen years ago. Now, there are more than 90,000 of them registered in the state....
Column: Forest Service Mocks Public Involvement The concept of public involvement is not hard to understand, but many agencies, most recently the Forest Service, don’t get it—and definitely don’t like it. Instead, agencies all-too-often purposely thwart the legally mandated public involvement process to implement internal plans decided in advance, regardless of what the majority of their customers think should happen. Witness the news this week from the Bitterroot National Forest. The Forest Service had proposed a hazardous fuel timber sale near Sula in the southernmost Bitterroot Valley, Montana’s first project under the provisos of the 2003 Healthy Forest Restoration Act. The merits of this project are somewhat irrelevant to the point of this column. Good or bad, no matter. What matters is how the FS shammed the public involvement process—and gave us the proof of it, sort of like a bank robber dropping his business card during his getaway....
Forest Service applying letter of the law From cutting the Capitol Christmas tree to minor forest thinning, the U.S. Forest Service has put hundreds of small projects across the country on hold while it reviews a judge's ruling throwing out limits on the public's right to participate in forest decisions. However, a forest protection group that won the ruling contended Friday that the Forest Service has gone far beyond the intent of the ruling and appears to be intentionally holding up trivial projects. Among the projects the Forest Service put on hold is cutting an 80-foot spruce in New Mexico to serve as a holiday tree on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol. As long as no substantive objections are raised during a 30-day public comment period starting Monday, the tree could be cut and shipped to Washington in time, said James Payne, Forest Service southwest regional spokesman, from Phoenix. Matt Kenna, an attorney for the Western Environmental Law Center, said the plaintiffs have offered to work with the Forest Service to clarify what sorts of projects are covered by the ruling, but the Forest Service has refused....
Do You Remember the Last Time You Saw a Porcupine? One of the icons of our forests seems to be slipping away, virtually unnoticed, while wildlife managers scramble to find out what’s happening. Wildlife biologists know the porcupine population over most of the northern Rockies (USA and Canada) has declined sharply, but they don’t know why or how serious it is. Some wildlife biologists fear we might be witnessing a major extinction event—or I should say not witnessing it. “We know the porcupine population is declining, but we don’t know what’s going on,” notes Kerry Foresman, a professor of wildlife biology at the University of Montana and renown small mammal expert, “but we’re trying to get funding to find out.”....
Fish & Wildlife faces possible lawsuit on blue butterfly petition More than 17 months after submitting a petition to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to name the Sand Mountain blue butterfly an endangered species, the Center for Biological Diversity is tired of waiting for an answer. The Center, in accordance with the Xerces Society, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and the Nevada Outdoor Recreation Association, intend to file suit against the USFWS for violating the Endangered Species Act. Specifically, the Nevada division of the USFWS has taken longer than the required 90 days to answer a petition in favor of naming the blue butterfly an endangered species....
Groups defend relocating bears Nine grizzly bears have been relocated from the Upper Green River Valley this year after conflicts with livestock. But environmentalists and bear biologists defend the relocations, saying they're usually an effective way to prevent future run-ins. A case in point is a bear that was killed in a car crash near Moran this year - 12 years after it was tranquilized, captured and relocated because of conflicts with livestock. Louisa Willcox, wild bears project director with the Natural Resources Defense Council based in Livingston, Mont., said the bear had never again threatened livestock. That's typical, said Mark Bruscino, a bear management officer for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, who estimated that 70 percent of relocated bears never get in trouble with wildlife managers again. "Moving bears is an effective management tool the majority of the time," Bruscino said. "If we move them real quick, a lot of times they will go back to acting like a wild bear," he said....
Judge gives feds 1 year to create salmon plan Warning that threatened and endangered salmon are running out of time, a federal judge Friday gave federal agencies one year to come up with a new plan for protecting them from being killed by federal hydroelectric dams in the Columbia Basin. U.S. District Judge James Redden cut in half the time sought by NOAA Fisheries, the Bonneville Power Administration, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to revise a plan, known as a biological opinion, that the judge had ruled in violation of the Endangered Species Act in May. He said he will keep a close watch over the process and, if he sees substantial progress, could grant a little more time. The latest biological opinion will be the fifth since the federal government took over efforts to save dwindling runs of Columbia Basin salmon from extinction. The fish have suffered from the combined effects of dams, overfishing, logging, grazing, water withdrawals for irrigation and urban development....
Gas boom's effect on wildlife unknown Outfitter Jeff Mead feels a lot more comfortable with his feet in a set of stirrups, steering his horse into the rugged Colorado forest, than on an airplane 11,000 feet over his stomping grounds. Mead soon forgot his unease during a recent tour over his backcountry haven as he pointed to the natural gas wells springing up across the land where he has taken hunters for 15 years. "Elk and deer move out when rigs move in," said Mead, a lanky, mustachioed 50-year-old. "Up on the mountain during hunting season, if you sneeze, you can hear the elk running. So, don't tell me they like eating by a drilling rig." The debate over what energy development is doing to wildlife is raging throughout the Rockies, where some of the nation's richest gas deposits lie under prime wildlife habitat....
A Quest for Oil Collides With Nature in Alaska The 217,000 acres of windblown water and mottled tundra here on the North Slope of Alaska, separating Teshekpuk Lake from the Beaufort Sea, are home in summer to 50,000 to 90,000 migratory birds. This corner of Alaska's National Petroleum Reserve is also thought to be brimming with oil. From the presidencies of Ronald Reagan through Bill Clinton, federal officials put the bird habitat off limits to oil development. But after federal geologists in 2002 quadrupled their estimate of the oil available here in the northeast quadrant of the reserve, the Bush administration proposed putting the whole area up for lease to oil and gas companies. The move has touched off a fierce debate over whether new technologies can allow wildlife to coexist easily with oil exploration. Here, among the crazy-quilt pattern of land and water, the question is particularly keen, because this is where Pacific black brant, snow geese and other migratory birds annually shed their feathers, and for six flightless weeks have minimal disturbance and a clear line of sight against predators. How the dynamic of exploration, leasing and protest at Teshekpuk (pronounced teh-SHEK-puhk) and other parts of the oil patch plays out is seen by both sides in the debate as a harbinger of what awaits the Arctic shoreline - particularly as Congress prepares to vote this fall on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, east of Teshekpuk....
Column: R.S. 2477 means excess, not access, for Utah's public lands On Sept. 8, a federal appeals court overturned a Utah federal judge's decision that had, for four years, reined in a secretive, abusive and overreaching effort by Utah and county officials to claim that long-ignored dirt trails and other paths across federal public lands are actually "highways" under an 1866 law known as R.S. 2477. The new rule is that an R.S. 2477 claim is valid if the claimant can show 10 years of continuous use. The unfortunate response from Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.'s administration, which has partnered with long-time wilderness foes from certain county commissions, is a reinvigorated campaign to claim that faint tracks and hiking paths across federal public lands - lands cherished for their increasingly rare peace and quiet - are actually highways....
Column: Sell federal land The only thing about which Democrats and Republicans can agree these days, is the astronomical cost of rebuilding the storm-ravaged Gulf coast. Estimates, on either side of the political aisle, reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars. How to pay these costs is a question fueling heated debate inside both parties. Rep. Tom Tancredo has the best idea to date: sell excess federal land. Why should the federal government own more than 700 million acres - more than 30 per cent of the total land area? Even after exempting all the military bases, and the lands that contain "other needful buildings," and all the national parks, the federal government still owns nearly 600 million acres, for no legitimate reason. American taxpayers are shelling out money every year so the federal government can make "payments in lieu of taxes" to the state and local governments that have limited political jurisdiction over these lands. American taxpayers are shelling out money every year so armies of federal employees can make an effort to "manage" these lands. Why?....
Column: Bruce Babbitt's new vision for American land use My purpose, instead, is to show how we can prevent the loss of natural and cultural landscapes and watersheds through stronger federal leadership in land-use planning. It may come as something of a surprise to learn there is such a thing as "federal land-use planning." The notion that land use is a local matter has come to dominate the political rhetoric of our age, obscuring the historical reality that the national government has been involved in land-use planning since the early days of the republic. In fact, there is, by whatever name, a considerable body of law that can and, in my view, should be used toward enhanced federal leadership in land-use planning and preservation. After eight years of intense participation in these battles as secretary of the Interior and subsequent years of observing from the sidelines, I believe the time has come for an armistice followed by a peace conference to which not just Westerners, but all Americans, are invited. The outcome should be a new constitution for public lands, in the form of federal legislation that subordinates (but does not eliminate) mining, grazing and logging to an overriding public mandate for long-term biological diversity, abundant wildlife and fisheries, and the ecological integrity of our streams and watersheds....
Rio Grande water debt finally is paid in full A long-standing Rio Grande water debt that pitted drought-stricken South Texas farmers against Mexico appears resolved with Gov. Rick Perry announcing the debt has been paid in full. "Our farmers, ranchers and cities will have 100 percent of the water they are entitled to, not just for the rest of this year, but for all of 2006," Perry said in a statement. "Now that the debt is paid, both countries must continue to work in good faith to meet the water demands of citizens on both sides of the Rio Grande for years to come." A 1944 treaty dictates that Mexico allow a certain amount of water from the Rio Grande and its Mexican tributaries to reach South Texas. In return, the U.S. releases Colorado River water to Mexico. Mexico fell behind on its obligations in the 1990s, and at the height of a mutual drought owed the U.S. enough water to cover 1.5 million acres a foot deep. By 2002, some South Texas farmers were going under, seething as satellite photos showed lush green spots suggesting healthy Rio Grande irrigation in Mexico....
Erasing ‘squaw' names moves slowly After five years of work, only about 10 of the place names in Oregon containing the word "squaw" in them have been changed, with far more to go. The number of changed names could triple this month when the Oregon Geographic Names Board meets to consider new names for 18 more land features. The word, derived from the Algonquin word for "woman," is now considered a derogatory way to refer to an American Indian woman — and Oregon tribes have pushed to have the word changed. Under a state law passed in 2001, all of the roughly 150 peaks, rivers, buttes, meadows and other land formations in Oregon containing the word were meant to be rechristened by this year. But even if all 18 of the most recent recommendations are accepted by the Oregon board and then approved by a national board, less than 20 percent of the names will have been changed by the law's deadline....
Program helps disabled hunters Brock was among 14 sportsmen and women from across the country at this year's Helluva Hunt, an annual event pairing disabled hunters with volunteer guides on more than 30,000 acres of private land offered by a handful of ranchers. Hunters leave Wyoming with more than a cooler full of meat and a trophy head mount to look forward to; they are empowered in their ability to hunt, which for many, was a way of life before tragic accidents or illnesses left them disabled. In 1984, Outdoor Life magazine editor Jim Zumbo received a letter from a disabled reader wondering why there weren't more opportunities out there for people like him. Zumbo, in turn, wondered why a disabled person should have to stop hunting and found like-minded attitudes in Jane and Gary Stearns of Douglas. The Helluva Hunt was born, and the rest is 21 years of friendships that last like family, an amazing mountain of memories and laughs, and of course, the record books: the longest shot, the biggest horns, even the biggest hunt lie (after all, it is a hunt)....
In outlying communities change is marked in subtle differences Harold Veltkamp's lament sounds much like those escaping the lips of a lot of long-time Gallatin Valley residents. "It's not going to be a valley like we've seen it if all this development happens," Veltkamp said recently. The 80-year-old rancher has raised cattle, wheat and barley on the same 320-acre plot north of Penwell Bridge Road for 46 years. In that time, he has watched as sweeping changes have transformed Southwest Montana. Subdivisions of new homes have drawn people and cars to his neck of the woods in increasing numbers, he said. Now, he said, a new challenge threatens his agricultural way of life. It sits kitty-corner from his property just north of Belgrade's city limits: the proposed 170-acre Ryen Glenn Estates subdivision....
US Congress Fails To Extend Livestock Price Reports System A government program requiring packers to report prices they pay for cattle, hogs and lambs, will expire Friday because the U.S. Congress has failed to extend it. Although packers won't be mandated to file the reports to the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Monday, most will do so anyway, Agriculture Marketing Service Administrator Lloyd Day said Friday. Day said the USDA has reached out to packers and gotten good responses. "It's looking like it's going to be okay," he said. The Senate and House of Representatives each approved an extension earlier this month, but disagreements in how long the LMPR program should be extended resulted in a stalemate that won't be resolved this week now that the House has adjourned. On Sept. 13, the Senate approved a one-year extension for the program that has been helping livestock producers decide how to set their prices for six years. The next day, on Sept. 14, the House approved a five-year extension. Beyond the length of the extension, the two bodies of Congress also differed on whether or not to expand reporting on swine purchased by packers....
Phony beef cattle sales are alleged Federal regulators on Thursday charged that an Ohio broker created profits topping $1 million by conspiring with two large Nebraska feedlots to manipulate futures trading through sham sales of 4,500 beef cattle two years ago. The purportedly phony transactions were used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's closely watched weekly cash market report, causing futures contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to increase by $2.85 per hundredweight, said Gregory Mocek, director of enforcement at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Todd J. Delay of Columbus turned profits of $1.1 million for himself and his co-conspirators, Mocek contends. Of this, about $250,000 was received directly by Delay and relatives, Mocek asserted....
John Wesley Hardin meets his end while shooting a game of dice The dice tumbled across the top of the bar, and the player growled out an invective directed at either the uncooperative cubes or the grocer named Brown with whom he was matching for drinks. "Shake again," said the grocer. "You've got four sixes to beat," said the player as the dice spilled out of the cup. Those were the last words John Wesley Hardin would utter before an explosion from behind sent a lead slug into the back of his brain. The bullet came out through his left eye, leaving a neat hole in the lid, and then smashed into the mirror behind the bar. Shards of broken glass powdered the air and fell tinkling to the floor. Twisting as he fell, Hardin lay face up as Old John Selman quickly stepped up to the body and fired three more times into its chest, one of the shots tearing off the tip of the little finger on the left hand. A man with a badge, Young John Selman, ran into the saloon and grabbed his father's arm. "Don't shoot anymore! He's dead!"....
On the Edge of Common Sense: Toby Keith's dishrag hat is a good fit for frequent flier When I'm in the airport, I always wave at a cowboy hat ... a real cowboy hat. Somehow you can spot 'em. They inevitably turn out to be some bull rider on the way to a rodeo, a state cattlemen's association representative on the way to Washington, D.C., or a consultant of some kind or farmer or rancher on the way to a funeral or a graduation. Hats take a pretty good beating in the overhead storage on the airplanes. I got off the plane in southern Colorado, grabbed my hat from above and it had been smashed by a suitcase. It looked like it had been rained on, then put in a lunchbox to dry! I drove into town and found a Western store and asked if I could borrow their steamer. "Of course," they said, "have at it." Junior ambled over to visit. He occupied the job of "old-timer" in the store. He looked at my hat and asked if I'd backed over it with a D-8 Cat. It reminded him of one time when he and his pardner were out lookin' for some cows....
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