FLE
USDA Using Satellites to Monitor Farmers
Satellites have monitored crop conditions around the world for decades, helping traders predict futures prices in commodities markets and governments anticipate crop shortages. But those satellite images are now increasingly turning up in courtrooms across the nation as the Agriculture Department's Risk Management Agency cracks down on farmers involved in crop insurance fraud. The Agriculture Department's Farm Service Agency, which helps farmers get loans and payments from a number of its programs, also uses satellite imaging to monitor compliance. Across government and private industry alike, satellite imaging technology is being used in water rights litigation and in prosecution of environmental cases ranging from a hog confinement facility's violations of waste discharge regulations to injury damage lawsuits stemming from herbicide applications. The technology is also used to monitor the forestry and mining industries. "A lot of farmers would be shocked at the detail you can tell. What it does is keep honest folks honest," said G.A. "Art" Barnaby Jr., an agricultural economist at Kansas State University. Satellite technology, which takes images at roughly eight-day intervals, can be used to monitor when farmers plant their acreage, how they irrigate them and what crops they grow. If anomalies are found in a farm's insurance claim, investigators can search satellite photos dating back years to determine cropping practices on individual fields....
National uniform driver's license law is 'nightmare'
An anti-terrorism law creating a national standard for all driver's licenses by 2008 isn't upsetting just civil libertarians and immigration rights activists.
State motor vehicle officials nationwide who will have to carry out the Real ID Act say its authors grossly underestimated its logistical, technological and financial demands. In a comprehensive survey obtained by The Associated Press and in follow-up interviews, officials cast doubt on the states' ability to comply with the law on time and fretted that it will be a budget buster. "It is just flat out impossible and unrealistic to meet the prescriptive provisions of this law by 2008," Betty Serian, a deputy secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, said in an interview. Nebraska's motor vehicles director, responding to the survey by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, said that to comply with Real ID her state "may have to consider extreme measures and possibly a complete reorganization." And a record-sharing provision of Real ID was described by an Illinois official as "a nightmare for all states." The law also demands that states link their record-keeping systems to national databases so duplicate applications can be detected, illegal immigrants caught and driving histories shared. State licenses that fail to meet Real ID's standards will not be able to be used to board an airplane or enter a federal building. The law, which was attached to a funding measure for the Iraq war last May, has been criticized by civil libertarians who contend it will create a de facto national ID card and new centralized databases, inhibiting privacy....
Pentagon grilled over database on war critics
Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Thursday asked for answers on an obscure Pentagon agency that included reports on student anti-war protests and other peaceful civilian demonstrations in a database meant to detect terrorist activities. “Under what circumstances can peaceful protests at universities or by anti-war groups be monitored?” Feinstein, D-Calif., wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “What authorities, and under what regulations, do military counterintelligence units have to conduct investigations on U.S. persons?” she wrote. At issue is a classified database of information about suspicious people and activity inside the United States that’s maintained by a three-year-old Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, whose size and budget also are classified. The database, which a Pentagon fact sheet says is meant to capture information “indicative of possible terrorist pre-attack activity,” came to light a month ago when NBC News obtained details on its contents. The Pentagon acknowledged including information on anti-war activities and other meetings that should have been removed....
Bush Authorized Domestic Spying Before 9/11
The National Security Agency advised President Bush in early 2001 that it had been eavesdropping on Americans during the course of its work monitoring suspected terrorists and foreigners believed to have ties to terrorist groups, according to a declassified document. The NSA's vast data-mining activities began shortly after Bush was sworn in as president and the document contradicts his assertion that the 9/11 attacks prompted him to take the unprecedented step of signing a secret executive order authorizing the NSA to monitor a select number of American citizens thought to have ties to terrorist groups. In its "Transition 2001" report, the NSA said that the ever-changing world of global communication means that "American communication and targeted adversary communication will coexist." "Make no mistake, NSA can and will perform its missions consistent with the Fourth Amendment and all applicable laws," the document says. However, it adds that "senior leadership must understand that the NSA's mission will demand a 'powerful, permanent presence' on global telecommunications networks that host both 'protected' communications of Americans and the communications of adversaries the agency wants to target." What had long been understood to be protocol in the event that the NSA spied on average Americans was that the agency would black out the identities of those individuals or immediately destroy the information. But according to people who worked at the NSA as encryption specialists during this time, that's not what happened. On orders from Defense Department officials and President Bush, the agency kept a running list of the names of Americans in its system and made it readily available to a number of senior officials in the Bush administration, these sources said, which in essence meant the NSA was conducting a covert domestic surveillance operation in violation of the law....
Guantanamo lawyers criticise tribunals
US military officers ordered to defend accused war criminals at Guantanamo base in Cuba have joined the outcry of activists assailing the court system for human rights violations. “It was horrific to sit there and watch this happen,” said Army Major Tom Fleener, who represented a Yemeni prisoner in pretrial hearings at Guantanamo this week. The nine Guantanamo prisoners charged so far are accused of conspiring with the Al Qaeda group to kill Americans in the September 11 attacks and on the battlefield. “We live in a country where we’ve spent a couple hundred years putting together a good system of justice where people have rights to counsel (of their choosing), people have rights to confront accusers, people have rights to evidence,” Fleener said. “None of that stuff is present in these hearings.” The five military defence lawyers appointed so far have challenged every aspect of the tribunals. Navy Lt Cmdr Charles Swift, who represents another Yemeni prisoner, has asked the Supreme Court to rule that US President George W Bush lacked authority to create the new court system rather than try the prisoners under existing civilian or military law....
Friday, January 13, 2006
NEWS ROUNDUP
Wyoming rancher asks court to force BLM to reconsider penalty A Wyoming rancher embroiled in a decade-long feud with federal land managers asked an appeals court Thursday to force the Bureau of Land Management to reconsider a decision that he said cost him his grazing permits and his business. An attorney for Harvey Frank Robbins Jr., of Thermopolis, said the BLM had in effect unfairly seized Robbins' property when it revoked a 2003 agreement not to punish him for 16 alleged grazing violations. Robbins' grazing permits were canceled after the agreement was revoked. The BLM said it revoked agreement because Robbins had violated the permits again. The hearing was the latest step in the feud between the BLM and Robbins, who owns the High Island, HD and Owl Creek ranches. Earlier this week, a different panel of the 10th Circuit ruled that Robbins may pursue a separate lawsuit against the BLM. Robbins claims the agency stripped him of various land-use privileges and permits because he refused to reinstate a road-access agreement the BLM had with the High Island Ranch's previous owner. The case argued Thursday stems from the 16 citations for grazing violations. In the January 2003 agreement, the BLM agreed not to pursue action against Robbins if there were no further violations for two years. The BLM revoked the agreement after Robbins' cattle were found grazing in unauthorized areas for the third time in 2003. The agency said it issued warnings after the first two incidents. Robbins sued in February 2004, arguing the BLM denied him his right to dispute the violations. U.S. District Judge Alan Johnson of Cheyenne, Wyo., upheld the BLM's decision last year, and Robbins appealed to the 10th Circuit....
More Yellowstone bison captured as some sent to slaughter Authorities captured another 105 bison at Yellowstone National Park Thursday as officials shipped to slaughter two dozen animals captured a day earlier, a park spokesman said. Al Nash said about 290 bison still are being held inside the park's northern border at the Stephen's Creek capture site and that they all would go to slaughter without being tested for the disease brucellosis. Twenty-four bison were shipped off Thursday, he said. Meanwhile, at least two bison died after crashing through an icy lake just outside the park's western boundary, activists said. State wildlife officials temporarily suspended bison hunting in that area late Wednesday to allow for the hazing of bison that ventured too far into Montana. The state Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks said it also planned to temporarily halt the hunt north of Yellowstone to allow for hazing. The agency said the move, set to take effect late Thursday, was needed to keep stray bison away from livestock. Officials hoped to reopen that area to hunting Saturday....
Bison hazing goes awry: 14 animals fall through ice Fourteen bison from Yellowstone National Park fell through the ice on Hebgen Lake after being hazed by government agents on snowmobiles Thursday morning. Two drowned in the icy water, 10 were pulled out and two walked out on their own. "It was horrible," said Dan Brister of the Buffalo Field Campaign, a group that advocates for bison and monitors hunting and hazing operations. "I saw 12 buffalo in that little hole swimming around, pawing at the edges, trying to pull themselves up, but the physics wouldn't allow it," he said. The activity at the lake was part of a busy and controversial day for Yellowstone's bison and those trying to control their movements outside the park's boundary....
State officials say salt water spill is significant A salt water leak from a pipe carrying oil field waste in northwestern North Dakota has killed fish and forced ranchers to move their livestock, state officials say. "It's a significant salt water spill that's having an adverse effect on the environment," said Dave Glatt, the state Health Department's environmental chief. "Our major issue is finding where it is, where it isn't, and finding ways to clean it up." Glatt and other officials from the Health Department and the state Oil and Gas Division said Thursday that they did not know exactly how much spilled from the Zenergy Inc. salt water transfer line, but an initial estimate indicating 4,500 barrels was too low. "We know it's more than that," said Mark Bohrer, an Oil and Gas Division engineer. One barrel is about 42 gallons. Zenergy officials could not be reached for comment....
Column: Paying Ranchers to Ban Public Hunting Wyoming has the wrong idea when it comes to elk feedlots, but a couple of Cowboy State legislators certainly have it right on free access to hunting. They have a thoroughly reasonable plan that’s long overdue, but nonetheless, it stands a slim chance of becoming reality. Most western states have been able to resist pressure from ranching organizations to require the wildlife department to compensate landowners for damage done by wildlife—tearing down fences, eating haystacks, trampling crops, etc. Wyoming, on the other hand, made an unusual and controversial move to compensate ranchers for wildlife damage to their crops or facilities. There’s no established fee schedule. Instead, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department assesses each claim on a case-by-case basis. In 2005, the WGFD paid out $182,000 to satisfy these wildlife damage claims. The statute that allows these payments includes a clause preventing ranchers who receive wildlife damage money from closing their land to hunting. In reality, on the financial scale of things, some hunters wouldn’t consider this too bad of a deal because the statute was intended to keep all this land open to public hunting. But there’s a catch. There always is, it seems....
Colorado looks to RFID to protect elk herds The state of Colorado is testing radio frequency identification (RFID) tags as one way to help protect elk herds from contagious disease. Working with three ranchers and a vendor of animal-tracking systems, the state last month wrapped up a pilot test that involved tracking animals using passive RFID tags. Now the state is looking to launch another test with active RFID tags, which will hopefully extend the tracking range, said Scott Leach, a field investigator for the Colorado Department of Agriculture. Active RFID tags are battery powered and can send out a signal at predetermined intervals. Passive tags only transmit data when scanned and tend to have a smaller range. As part of his job, Leach tracks chronic wasting disease (CWD), a degenerative neurological illness endemic in Colorado and some other states. CWD is viewed as a very serious threat to both captive and wild cervids -- elk and deer -- and the state wants an automated system to track and isolate any CWD outbreaks to protect elk herds....
New Manager at Conservancy’s Red Canyon Ranch Bill Oakes keeps a framed picture on his desk that reminds him how deep his agricultural roots grow. The old black-and-white print shows his great-grandfather working the family’s north-central Washington ranch in the 1800s. Oakes carries on tradition as the new manager of The Nature Conservancy’s Red Canyon Ranch, a 35,000-acre slice of striking canyon walls and verdant hillsides outside Lander, Wyo. “With Wyoming’s high desert and mountain meadows, I feel right at home,” Oakes says of the similarities to the Okanogan County (Washington) ranchland his family has lived in for over five generations – since his great-great grandparents were homesteaders in the 1890’s. Oakes’ new position marks a return to the American West—he spent 14 years in Hawaii as a livestock and production manager for a large cattle and sheep ranch. With several different precipitation zones, the island ranch exposed Oakes to what he calls a “microcosm of the mainland U.S.”....
Collaborations Protect Wyoming Wildlife Habitat in 2005 The Wyoming Chapter of The Nature Conservancy announced the conservation of 6,864 acres in 2005, bringing the total amount of land protected by the Conservancy in Wyoming to more than 400,000 acres. Collaborations with private landowners wanting to maintain rich wildlife habitat on their properties steered this past year’s many projects. "One of the most important things we did in 2005 to conserve wildlife habitat was to help keep ranchers on the land," says Andrea Erickson, Wyoming State Director for The Nature Conservancy. “By working with willing landowners on voluntary land conservation agreements, biologically rich properties have been maintained for both agriculture and wildlife in a ‘win-win-win’ situation”, says Erickson....
Avalanche created: One side says skiers could have been caught; other says such danger was averted Some backcountry skiers and snowshoers have become alarmed in the wake of an avalanche last week in Big Cottonwood Canyon triggered when helicopter ski guides set off an explosive charge while testing for slope stability. Wasatch Powderbird Guides was testing along Cardiac Ridge on Jan. 5 when one of the charges set off a large slide that ran into Cardiff Fork. A group of cross-country skiers was making its way up toward another part of the ridge when the incident occurred. No one was injured, but some witnesses were shaken by the experience. Lisa Smith, executive director of Save Our Canyons, says the incident highlights what she calls a growing conflict between the heli-skiing company and backcountry users in the Cottonwood canyons. The environmental group has filed suit against the Forest Service, challenging the most recent operating permit the agency issued to Wasatch Powderbird Guides, which has been operating in the Wasatch Mountains for over three decades....
Review: Feds lost $9 million on Biscuit Fire logging The U.S. Forest Service lost more than $9 million logging trees burned by the massive 2002 Biscuit Fire in southwestern Oregon, a review coordinated by the World Wildlife Fund has found. The conclusion, derived from an analysis by a retired forest policy expert for the Congressional Research Service, comes on the heels of a study out of Oregon State University that found salvage logging on Biscuit killed most of the seedlings that had generated naturally and increased fire danger in the short term. “This is a lose-lose, economically and ecologically speaking,” said Dominick DellaSala, a forest ecologist for the World Wildlife Fund and lead author of the report, “The Facts and Myths of Post-Fire Management: A Case study of the Biscuit Fire, Southwest Oregon.” “If Congress continues to pursue salvage logging legislation we could see the Biscuit case played out in other places around the nation.”....
Public can comment on name changes The U.S. Forest Service is taking comments from the public on proposed name changes for Squaw Lake and Squaw Creek in the Powers Ranger District. The proposed name to replace the word “squaw” is “Sru” (pronounced shrew), which is the word for grandmother in local Indian language. The Coquille Indian Tribe proposed the name, since local tribes have deemed the word squaw as offensive. Any final proposal will go to the Oregon Board of Geographic Names, with a final decision to be made by the U.S. Board of Geographic Names....
Bush Administration refutes roadless charge The future of more than 4 million acres of Colorado roadless areas is still unknown after the Bush administration filed a brief this week denying allegations that it rescinded a rule protecting roadless areas without conducting necessary environmental studies. The administration lifted a nationwide rule for national forests, known as the “roadless rule,” last May. The rule, created in the final days of the Clinton administration in early 2001, banned development in 58 million acres of national forests. Attorneys general from California, New Mexico and Oregon, the governor of Oregon and 20 environmental groups filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Forest Service last August, charging the rule was improperly repealed because the agencies didn’t ask for public comment and didn’t conduct environmental studies required by law....
Choice habitat transferred to BLM About 2,000 acres in the Elkhorn Mountains south of here have been transferred to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management as part of a plan to conserve wildlife habitat in an area of brisk development. The transfer was announced Wednesday by the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, which last year joined another environmental nonprofit, The Conservation Fund, in acquiring 5,548 acres in the Elkhorns. The organizations said they would hold the land until federal funds to place it under government control became available. The 2,000-acre transfer completed with $1 million from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund is the first installment toward placing all the land under the BLM’s supervision. Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., led efforts to obtain the $1 million, the foundation said. ‘‘I am in favor of this project because it increases access to public lands and enhances elk habitat,’’ Burns said. ‘‘However, we always need to be careful when the federal government acquires more land to make sure that addition enhances the purposes of local users. I am happy to support cases like this one where the local sportsmen, landowners and county commissioners come together.’’....
Idaho seeks permission to kill 50 wolves to help elk Idaho wants to kill as many as 51 wolves in the north-central part of the state, according to a plan that state Department of Fish and Game managers say will help boost the region's elk herds. The killings would take place on the state's mountainous border with Montana, near State Highway 12. Biologists estimate there are between 43 and 69 wolves there, but too few elk for hunters. The plan is to initially kill 75 percent of the area's wolves. This would be one of the first actions taken by the state since assuming management control of about 600 federally protected wolves in Idaho last week. Since wolves are still under Endangered Species Act protections, the federal government has final say over whether they can be killed to help wildlife such as elk. State officials plan to give their proposal to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service by late February or early March, following public meetings in Boise and Lewiston. Federal officials say science, not politics, will govern whether it wins approval....
BLM called overeager to develop lands A national environmental group on Thursday accused the Bureau of Land Management of ignoring its own guidelines in a bid to expand oil and gas development on public lands. The Washington D.C.-based Wilderness Society surveyed 11 BLM land-use plans affecting more than 30 million acres in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Alaska, concluding they will more than triple the number of wells to be drilled. Two BLM land-use plans in Utah were part of the survey. The environmental group says that, based upon the current draft of its revised resource management plan, the Vernal office will expand drilling by 50 percent, to 8,787 wells. The office also will open 97 percent of its 1.9 million subsurface acres to energy development. The Price Field Office plan calls for 79 percent of its 2.8 million subsurface acres to be made available for oil and gas development, along with a 25 percent increase in the number of wells to 1,500. But Culver says those numbers do not include a recent proposal for 700 new wells on the West Tavaputs Plateau that is currently being studied....
BLM extends comment period on vegetation treatment proposal The Bureau of Land Management announced Monday that it is extending until Feb. 10, 2006, the public comment period on its proposed methods for treating and managing vegetation on BLM-managed public lands. The agency, which held public meetings on its vegetation treatment proposal from Nov. 28-Dec. 13, 2005, is extending the public comment period to ensure that all interested parties have an opportunity to express their views. The public comment period had originally been slated to close on Jan. 9, 2006. The public is invited to comment on the BLM's extensive environmental analysis of proposed vegetation treatments, which are aimed at controlling the spread of noxious and invasive plants on BLM-managed lands in the West....
Additional research needed on increased drilling, county says La Plata County wants scientists and industry experts to conduct more research to determine if increased drilling - through new 80-acre spacing orders - will aggravate potentially explosive methane seeps near the Fruitland Outcrop. On a trip to Denver on Monday, county commissioners Sheryl Ayers and Wally White jump-started talks with the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to reconvene a task force that will further study the potential dangers of drilling along the outcrop. A task force several years ago linked methane gas seeps to increased drilling, although industry executives disputed that conclusion. The outcrop is a 50-mile arc of shallow coal that juts above the ground. Extending like the rim of a bowl, it starts south of Durango and extends north of Bayfield and east, into Archuleta County. Ayers said the oil and gas commission was receptive to the idea of assembling a panel. The team will be similar to the one arranged in 1998 as part of the 3M Project - otherwise known as the San Juan Basin Monitoring, Mapping and Modeling Proposal....
Real cowboys and movie stars bought outfits at Wallace's Boots and saddles and everything in between. Dean Wallace sold it all, to everyone from ranchers to Hollywood folk — among them a lass by the name of Raquel Welch. "He said he never met a woman with bigger feet. He sold her a pair of men's boots,"says Mary-Jean Wallace, Wallace's daughter-in-law.
Wallace, 84, who died on Christmas Day, was one of the last in town to sell Western goods as a family enterprise. It all began in 1954 when Dean and his wife, Gloria, bought Buck Jones Cowboy Outfitters on Scott Street Downtown, where Gloria had been working for a couple of years. In 1957, they changed the name to Wallace's Cowboy Outfitters, a name that would stick for the next 33 years....
Wyoming rancher asks court to force BLM to reconsider penalty A Wyoming rancher embroiled in a decade-long feud with federal land managers asked an appeals court Thursday to force the Bureau of Land Management to reconsider a decision that he said cost him his grazing permits and his business. An attorney for Harvey Frank Robbins Jr., of Thermopolis, said the BLM had in effect unfairly seized Robbins' property when it revoked a 2003 agreement not to punish him for 16 alleged grazing violations. Robbins' grazing permits were canceled after the agreement was revoked. The BLM said it revoked agreement because Robbins had violated the permits again. The hearing was the latest step in the feud between the BLM and Robbins, who owns the High Island, HD and Owl Creek ranches. Earlier this week, a different panel of the 10th Circuit ruled that Robbins may pursue a separate lawsuit against the BLM. Robbins claims the agency stripped him of various land-use privileges and permits because he refused to reinstate a road-access agreement the BLM had with the High Island Ranch's previous owner. The case argued Thursday stems from the 16 citations for grazing violations. In the January 2003 agreement, the BLM agreed not to pursue action against Robbins if there were no further violations for two years. The BLM revoked the agreement after Robbins' cattle were found grazing in unauthorized areas for the third time in 2003. The agency said it issued warnings after the first two incidents. Robbins sued in February 2004, arguing the BLM denied him his right to dispute the violations. U.S. District Judge Alan Johnson of Cheyenne, Wyo., upheld the BLM's decision last year, and Robbins appealed to the 10th Circuit....
More Yellowstone bison captured as some sent to slaughter Authorities captured another 105 bison at Yellowstone National Park Thursday as officials shipped to slaughter two dozen animals captured a day earlier, a park spokesman said. Al Nash said about 290 bison still are being held inside the park's northern border at the Stephen's Creek capture site and that they all would go to slaughter without being tested for the disease brucellosis. Twenty-four bison were shipped off Thursday, he said. Meanwhile, at least two bison died after crashing through an icy lake just outside the park's western boundary, activists said. State wildlife officials temporarily suspended bison hunting in that area late Wednesday to allow for the hazing of bison that ventured too far into Montana. The state Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks said it also planned to temporarily halt the hunt north of Yellowstone to allow for hazing. The agency said the move, set to take effect late Thursday, was needed to keep stray bison away from livestock. Officials hoped to reopen that area to hunting Saturday....
Bison hazing goes awry: 14 animals fall through ice Fourteen bison from Yellowstone National Park fell through the ice on Hebgen Lake after being hazed by government agents on snowmobiles Thursday morning. Two drowned in the icy water, 10 were pulled out and two walked out on their own. "It was horrible," said Dan Brister of the Buffalo Field Campaign, a group that advocates for bison and monitors hunting and hazing operations. "I saw 12 buffalo in that little hole swimming around, pawing at the edges, trying to pull themselves up, but the physics wouldn't allow it," he said. The activity at the lake was part of a busy and controversial day for Yellowstone's bison and those trying to control their movements outside the park's boundary....
State officials say salt water spill is significant A salt water leak from a pipe carrying oil field waste in northwestern North Dakota has killed fish and forced ranchers to move their livestock, state officials say. "It's a significant salt water spill that's having an adverse effect on the environment," said Dave Glatt, the state Health Department's environmental chief. "Our major issue is finding where it is, where it isn't, and finding ways to clean it up." Glatt and other officials from the Health Department and the state Oil and Gas Division said Thursday that they did not know exactly how much spilled from the Zenergy Inc. salt water transfer line, but an initial estimate indicating 4,500 barrels was too low. "We know it's more than that," said Mark Bohrer, an Oil and Gas Division engineer. One barrel is about 42 gallons. Zenergy officials could not be reached for comment....
Column: Paying Ranchers to Ban Public Hunting Wyoming has the wrong idea when it comes to elk feedlots, but a couple of Cowboy State legislators certainly have it right on free access to hunting. They have a thoroughly reasonable plan that’s long overdue, but nonetheless, it stands a slim chance of becoming reality. Most western states have been able to resist pressure from ranching organizations to require the wildlife department to compensate landowners for damage done by wildlife—tearing down fences, eating haystacks, trampling crops, etc. Wyoming, on the other hand, made an unusual and controversial move to compensate ranchers for wildlife damage to their crops or facilities. There’s no established fee schedule. Instead, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department assesses each claim on a case-by-case basis. In 2005, the WGFD paid out $182,000 to satisfy these wildlife damage claims. The statute that allows these payments includes a clause preventing ranchers who receive wildlife damage money from closing their land to hunting. In reality, on the financial scale of things, some hunters wouldn’t consider this too bad of a deal because the statute was intended to keep all this land open to public hunting. But there’s a catch. There always is, it seems....
Colorado looks to RFID to protect elk herds The state of Colorado is testing radio frequency identification (RFID) tags as one way to help protect elk herds from contagious disease. Working with three ranchers and a vendor of animal-tracking systems, the state last month wrapped up a pilot test that involved tracking animals using passive RFID tags. Now the state is looking to launch another test with active RFID tags, which will hopefully extend the tracking range, said Scott Leach, a field investigator for the Colorado Department of Agriculture. Active RFID tags are battery powered and can send out a signal at predetermined intervals. Passive tags only transmit data when scanned and tend to have a smaller range. As part of his job, Leach tracks chronic wasting disease (CWD), a degenerative neurological illness endemic in Colorado and some other states. CWD is viewed as a very serious threat to both captive and wild cervids -- elk and deer -- and the state wants an automated system to track and isolate any CWD outbreaks to protect elk herds....
New Manager at Conservancy’s Red Canyon Ranch Bill Oakes keeps a framed picture on his desk that reminds him how deep his agricultural roots grow. The old black-and-white print shows his great-grandfather working the family’s north-central Washington ranch in the 1800s. Oakes carries on tradition as the new manager of The Nature Conservancy’s Red Canyon Ranch, a 35,000-acre slice of striking canyon walls and verdant hillsides outside Lander, Wyo. “With Wyoming’s high desert and mountain meadows, I feel right at home,” Oakes says of the similarities to the Okanogan County (Washington) ranchland his family has lived in for over five generations – since his great-great grandparents were homesteaders in the 1890’s. Oakes’ new position marks a return to the American West—he spent 14 years in Hawaii as a livestock and production manager for a large cattle and sheep ranch. With several different precipitation zones, the island ranch exposed Oakes to what he calls a “microcosm of the mainland U.S.”....
Collaborations Protect Wyoming Wildlife Habitat in 2005 The Wyoming Chapter of The Nature Conservancy announced the conservation of 6,864 acres in 2005, bringing the total amount of land protected by the Conservancy in Wyoming to more than 400,000 acres. Collaborations with private landowners wanting to maintain rich wildlife habitat on their properties steered this past year’s many projects. "One of the most important things we did in 2005 to conserve wildlife habitat was to help keep ranchers on the land," says Andrea Erickson, Wyoming State Director for The Nature Conservancy. “By working with willing landowners on voluntary land conservation agreements, biologically rich properties have been maintained for both agriculture and wildlife in a ‘win-win-win’ situation”, says Erickson....
Avalanche created: One side says skiers could have been caught; other says such danger was averted Some backcountry skiers and snowshoers have become alarmed in the wake of an avalanche last week in Big Cottonwood Canyon triggered when helicopter ski guides set off an explosive charge while testing for slope stability. Wasatch Powderbird Guides was testing along Cardiac Ridge on Jan. 5 when one of the charges set off a large slide that ran into Cardiff Fork. A group of cross-country skiers was making its way up toward another part of the ridge when the incident occurred. No one was injured, but some witnesses were shaken by the experience. Lisa Smith, executive director of Save Our Canyons, says the incident highlights what she calls a growing conflict between the heli-skiing company and backcountry users in the Cottonwood canyons. The environmental group has filed suit against the Forest Service, challenging the most recent operating permit the agency issued to Wasatch Powderbird Guides, which has been operating in the Wasatch Mountains for over three decades....
Review: Feds lost $9 million on Biscuit Fire logging The U.S. Forest Service lost more than $9 million logging trees burned by the massive 2002 Biscuit Fire in southwestern Oregon, a review coordinated by the World Wildlife Fund has found. The conclusion, derived from an analysis by a retired forest policy expert for the Congressional Research Service, comes on the heels of a study out of Oregon State University that found salvage logging on Biscuit killed most of the seedlings that had generated naturally and increased fire danger in the short term. “This is a lose-lose, economically and ecologically speaking,” said Dominick DellaSala, a forest ecologist for the World Wildlife Fund and lead author of the report, “The Facts and Myths of Post-Fire Management: A Case study of the Biscuit Fire, Southwest Oregon.” “If Congress continues to pursue salvage logging legislation we could see the Biscuit case played out in other places around the nation.”....
Public can comment on name changes The U.S. Forest Service is taking comments from the public on proposed name changes for Squaw Lake and Squaw Creek in the Powers Ranger District. The proposed name to replace the word “squaw” is “Sru” (pronounced shrew), which is the word for grandmother in local Indian language. The Coquille Indian Tribe proposed the name, since local tribes have deemed the word squaw as offensive. Any final proposal will go to the Oregon Board of Geographic Names, with a final decision to be made by the U.S. Board of Geographic Names....
Bush Administration refutes roadless charge The future of more than 4 million acres of Colorado roadless areas is still unknown after the Bush administration filed a brief this week denying allegations that it rescinded a rule protecting roadless areas without conducting necessary environmental studies. The administration lifted a nationwide rule for national forests, known as the “roadless rule,” last May. The rule, created in the final days of the Clinton administration in early 2001, banned development in 58 million acres of national forests. Attorneys general from California, New Mexico and Oregon, the governor of Oregon and 20 environmental groups filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Forest Service last August, charging the rule was improperly repealed because the agencies didn’t ask for public comment and didn’t conduct environmental studies required by law....
Choice habitat transferred to BLM About 2,000 acres in the Elkhorn Mountains south of here have been transferred to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management as part of a plan to conserve wildlife habitat in an area of brisk development. The transfer was announced Wednesday by the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, which last year joined another environmental nonprofit, The Conservation Fund, in acquiring 5,548 acres in the Elkhorns. The organizations said they would hold the land until federal funds to place it under government control became available. The 2,000-acre transfer completed with $1 million from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund is the first installment toward placing all the land under the BLM’s supervision. Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., led efforts to obtain the $1 million, the foundation said. ‘‘I am in favor of this project because it increases access to public lands and enhances elk habitat,’’ Burns said. ‘‘However, we always need to be careful when the federal government acquires more land to make sure that addition enhances the purposes of local users. I am happy to support cases like this one where the local sportsmen, landowners and county commissioners come together.’’....
Idaho seeks permission to kill 50 wolves to help elk Idaho wants to kill as many as 51 wolves in the north-central part of the state, according to a plan that state Department of Fish and Game managers say will help boost the region's elk herds. The killings would take place on the state's mountainous border with Montana, near State Highway 12. Biologists estimate there are between 43 and 69 wolves there, but too few elk for hunters. The plan is to initially kill 75 percent of the area's wolves. This would be one of the first actions taken by the state since assuming management control of about 600 federally protected wolves in Idaho last week. Since wolves are still under Endangered Species Act protections, the federal government has final say over whether they can be killed to help wildlife such as elk. State officials plan to give their proposal to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service by late February or early March, following public meetings in Boise and Lewiston. Federal officials say science, not politics, will govern whether it wins approval....
BLM called overeager to develop lands A national environmental group on Thursday accused the Bureau of Land Management of ignoring its own guidelines in a bid to expand oil and gas development on public lands. The Washington D.C.-based Wilderness Society surveyed 11 BLM land-use plans affecting more than 30 million acres in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Alaska, concluding they will more than triple the number of wells to be drilled. Two BLM land-use plans in Utah were part of the survey. The environmental group says that, based upon the current draft of its revised resource management plan, the Vernal office will expand drilling by 50 percent, to 8,787 wells. The office also will open 97 percent of its 1.9 million subsurface acres to energy development. The Price Field Office plan calls for 79 percent of its 2.8 million subsurface acres to be made available for oil and gas development, along with a 25 percent increase in the number of wells to 1,500. But Culver says those numbers do not include a recent proposal for 700 new wells on the West Tavaputs Plateau that is currently being studied....
BLM extends comment period on vegetation treatment proposal The Bureau of Land Management announced Monday that it is extending until Feb. 10, 2006, the public comment period on its proposed methods for treating and managing vegetation on BLM-managed public lands. The agency, which held public meetings on its vegetation treatment proposal from Nov. 28-Dec. 13, 2005, is extending the public comment period to ensure that all interested parties have an opportunity to express their views. The public comment period had originally been slated to close on Jan. 9, 2006. The public is invited to comment on the BLM's extensive environmental analysis of proposed vegetation treatments, which are aimed at controlling the spread of noxious and invasive plants on BLM-managed lands in the West....
Additional research needed on increased drilling, county says La Plata County wants scientists and industry experts to conduct more research to determine if increased drilling - through new 80-acre spacing orders - will aggravate potentially explosive methane seeps near the Fruitland Outcrop. On a trip to Denver on Monday, county commissioners Sheryl Ayers and Wally White jump-started talks with the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to reconvene a task force that will further study the potential dangers of drilling along the outcrop. A task force several years ago linked methane gas seeps to increased drilling, although industry executives disputed that conclusion. The outcrop is a 50-mile arc of shallow coal that juts above the ground. Extending like the rim of a bowl, it starts south of Durango and extends north of Bayfield and east, into Archuleta County. Ayers said the oil and gas commission was receptive to the idea of assembling a panel. The team will be similar to the one arranged in 1998 as part of the 3M Project - otherwise known as the San Juan Basin Monitoring, Mapping and Modeling Proposal....
Real cowboys and movie stars bought outfits at Wallace's Boots and saddles and everything in between. Dean Wallace sold it all, to everyone from ranchers to Hollywood folk — among them a lass by the name of Raquel Welch. "He said he never met a woman with bigger feet. He sold her a pair of men's boots,"says Mary-Jean Wallace, Wallace's daughter-in-law.
Wallace, 84, who died on Christmas Day, was one of the last in town to sell Western goods as a family enterprise. It all began in 1954 when Dean and his wife, Gloria, bought Buck Jones Cowboy Outfitters on Scott Street Downtown, where Gloria had been working for a couple of years. In 1957, they changed the name to Wallace's Cowboy Outfitters, a name that would stick for the next 33 years....
Thursday, January 12, 2006
NEWS ROUNDUP
Big Timber rancher shoots wolf A Big Timber area ranch manager shot and killed a 2-year old wolf on private property December 30. The wolf was reportedly chasing livestock. Federal rules in effect in most of southwestern Montana allow landowners or their employees to harass or kill a wolf that is seen actively attacking, chasing, or harassing livestock. “Clear guidance is provided by the rule which states that the wolf must be actively chasing or attacking livestock. This is the most effective way to target problem animals,” said Carolyn Sime, FWP's wolf program coordinator. By taking action during an actual depredation event, efforts are focused on the offending animal at the right time and the right place, she said. “Because gray wolves in Montana are still listed under the Endangered Species Act, interim federal regulations apply throughout Montana. In addition, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Law Enforcement officers lead all wolf mortality investigations,” Sime said. Under the 10j rule, which offers Montana more wolf management authority and flexibility, anyone who shoots or kills a wolf must report the incident within 24 hours. In addition, evidence of the actual wolf attack, or evidence that an attack was imminent, must be available for state and federal investigators to inspect....
Health officials investigating salt water spill Health officials are investigating a salt water spill from a pipeline leak in an oil drilling operation near here. One rancher worries that the spill threatens his pregnant cows. Mark Bohrer, a petroleum engineer for the state, said the leak occurred in a pipeline that delivered salt water, a waste product from oil drilling, to an injection well for disposal underground. The spill was southwest of Alexander near Charbonneau Creek, in McKenzie County. The salt water flowed over the ground to a dry drainage ditch and then into a dry stock dam, where it overflowed into a beaver dam, Bohrer said. The water eventually overflowed into Charbonneau Creek, which flows into the Yellowstone River. State and company officials are investigating how far downstream and to what degree the contamination exists. The drilling company, Zenergy, discovered the leak Jan 4, and immediately stopped the leak and began recovering the salt water, officials said....
Frog protection plan debated Since the 1920s, Michael Fischer's family has raised cattle on 240 acres near Valley Springs. Rarely, if ever, has it had to worry about frogs. Until now. Fischer and about 50 more Calaveras County residents and ranchers gathered yesterday at a forum in San Andreas to debate a plan that would mark up to 4,450 of acres in the Valley Springs area as critical habitat for the endangered California red-legged frog. The plan is part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's statewide effort to designate more than 700,000 acres of land in 23 counties as frog habitat....
Environmentalists want alternatives for killing weeds A plan by the U.S. Forest Service to use herbicides and other methods to kill weeds in the Santa Fe and Carson national forests has drawn fire from a coalition of environmentalists. The agency's Invasive Plant Control Project would incorporate herbicides as well as nontoxic methods to target more than 7,300 acres of nonnative plant populations over the next decade. Environmentalists acknowledge the importance of controlling weeds that push out native plants, increase erosion and degrade wildlife habitat, but they say herbicides pose health risks. "We all agree that invasive species are not great for the ecosystem and may need to be treated," said Joanie Berde, volunteer coordinator for Carson Forest Watch. "But there's so many alternatives that don't involve herbicide use."....
Court clears the way for upgrades, snow making at Snowbowl A federal judge's ruling Wednesday cleared the way for facility upgrades at the Arizona Snowbowl ski area, including snowmaking equipment. The ruling upheld an earlier Coconino National Forest decision to authorize the upgrades and allow for the artificial snowmaking from reclaimed wastewater. The treated effluent would arrive via pipeline from Flagstaff. Snowbowl officials claim the snowmaking equipment is necessary to ensure the ski area's survival. U.S. Forest Service officials said they would review the ruling over the next few days to determine steps toward implementing the project. There was no immediate reaction from several American Indian tribes and conservation groups who sought to bar the start of construction on the expansion project....
Decision delayed for use of copters to track wolves The U.S. Forest Service has put off a decision on Idaho's request to land helicopters in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness to attach radio collars on wolves, a delay that could prompt state wildlife managers to try to capture the animals in traps. Idaho officials, who only last week took over management responsibilities of the packs reintroduced into the state in 1995 by the federal government, said the Forest Service deferral announced Tuesday likely triggers a lengthy environmental impact examination. And by the time the study is completed, it will be harder for state officials to know how many wolves are roaming the rugged 2.4 million acres of wilderness in the middle of the state. "It really is an unfortunate turn of events," said Jim Caswell, administrator of the state's Office of Species Conservation. "It doesn't take away our ability to manage wolves, but it does make counting noses, determining den sites and keeping up with trends in the wilderness area more complicated."....
Groups file suit against heli-skiing A coalition of conservation groups and two individuals this week filed suit to stop Bridger-Teton National Forest officials from allowing helicopter skiing tours in a wilderness study area. The groups filed the complaint after the U.S. Forest Service in June decided to allow High Mountain Heli-Skiing of Jackson to offer one helicopter tour per day in the Palisades wilderness study area. The area spans the Idaho-Wyoming border south of Jackson, and spans the Bridger-Teton and Caribou-Targhee national forests. The company's permit expands to other areas in the Snake River Range and allows 1,200 skier days (one skier on one day). The company often uses the Palisades area because of its exceptional terrain and easy access. A day of helicopter skiing may entail several runs. Jon Shick, owner of High Mountain Heli, said in a statement the groups are trying to shut down heli-skiing....
Lion seen in Incline Village Wildlife officials here expressed surprise there have been recent mountain lion sightings in the North Shore area. At least three Incline Village residents have reported mountain lion sightings since November. "I was getting ready to close the drapes on the bay window, just at twilight, and I realized that there was a large animal down below me," said Jan Dyer, who lives above the Championship Golf Course. "I realized, that is not a coyote." Dyer said she was able to watch the mountain lion in her yard for about three minutes from her second-story window. "It left paw prints all over my yard (which) lasted for several weeks at my house. When it trotted off it headed into the village," Dyer said. Barbara Frederic, Dyer's neighbor, said she has seen evidence of the lion in her yard three times since Dec. 1....
Park grizzly delisting could be complicated by forest rule changes Bush administration changes to U.S. Forest Service rules last year may complicate efforts to remove the Yellowstone grizzly bear from the endangered species list. Part of the larger process of delisting the grizzly bear has been amending forest management plans for national forests around Yellowstone National Park. Those changes are intended, among other things, to protect habitat in those forests as the grizzly population continues to move and expand. But in early 2005, some of the Forest Service’s overall planning regulations changed, cutting out ’’standards’’ - which could be binding and enforceable - and replacing them with softer terms such as ’’desired conditions,’’ ’’objectives’’ and ’’guidelines.’’ Some worry the change may leave too much wiggle room and not enough assurances that the grizzly bear protections will be put in place....
Sweeping change reshapes Arctic The hunter rose each day last summer from his bunk in a condemned wildlife lab, down the hall from where Inupiat villagers carve whale meat on a band saw. He slipped on hip waders and a furry white parka, slung a rifle over his shoulders and trudged onto the Arctic tundra. Through icy fog beneath a never-setting summer sun, Eric Seykora set out to earn the nickname given him by Barrow scientists: "The Fox Killer." Arctic foxes had been eating the eggs of rare ducks because their usual supper, tiny, mouselike lemmings, were dwindling from the drying tundra. So the government flew this former South Dakota hunting guide 330 miles north of the Arctic Circle and paid him to spend his summer shooting foxes. Ecological change is so scrambling Alaska's Arctic that the government has hired gunslingers to recapture some balance....
Interior to allow NPR-A drilling The Interior Department on Wednesday announced it will open hundreds of thousands of acres of wildlife-rich North Slope tundra to oil and gas drillers. The land is just north of giant Teshekpuk Lake in the northeast corner of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, an Indiana-sized tract set aside in 1923 for its oil potential. The lake region is noted for some of the world's largest congregations of migratory geese, as well as caribou and other wildlife. But it also might harbor huge deposits of oil and gas. Naturalists fought hard to head off Wednesday's decision, which they say dismantles a long policy of government protection for the land....
Surge seen in oil, gas drilling A Bush administration program to accelerate the rezoning of public lands for energy development is expected to lead to more than 50,000 new wells in the West, according to an environmental group's study set for release today. About 43,000 of the new wells would be in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana, while fewer than 500 would be located on the Roan Plateau in Colorado, where earlier drilling proposals have faced strong opposition. There's no timetable for when the new wells might come online. The planning documents only make the new drilling sites possible, but the sites would be in addition to the nearly 70,000 wells already on federally owned lands. All the wells were accelerated under an initiative in which Bureau of Land Management administrators selected 21 resource-management plans already underway to be reclassified as "time-sensitive plans." Of those 21 plans, 11 involved oil and gas drilling. BLM administrators also ordered that environmental protections in those areas be applied in the "least restrictive" manner. About half of these plans are still in development, but once approved by the BLM, a resource-management plan cannot be appealed to another government agency, although they are sometimes challenged in court. Individual projects, however, are subject to environmental review. The 11 time-sensitive plans that include oil and gas development call for a total of 76,810 wells, which is more than three times the 24,145 wells that were expected to be drilled prior to the document revisions....
Off-road enthusiasts seek to reverse ban A coalition of Utah off-road enthusiasts seeking to reverse a Bureau of Land Management ban on motorized vehicles over hundreds of thousands of acres in Box Elder and Grand counties took their case before a federal appeals court Wednesday. The Utah Shared Access Alliance (USA-ALL) sued the BLM in 2001, claiming that the agency closed off 250,000 acres near Moab and 189,000 acres around the Grouse Creek Mountains to off-highway vehicle (OHV) use without conducting public hearings and a required environmental analysis. The group is asking the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a decision by U.S. District Judge Bruce Jenkins of Salt Lake City, who dismissed the group's lawsuit against the BLM in December 2004. In his decision, Jenkins ruled that the BLM had taken the mandated "hard look" at the environmental impacts before issuing the closures....
Road accord near; greens leery Utah and the Interior Department are close to finalizing an agreement that would provide counties increased flexibility - too much flexibility, critics say - to do maintenance and repairs on back roads that run across federal land, a state official said Tuesday. Under the proposed deal, counties would be allowed to perform "emergency" repairs to roads without permission from the Bureau of Land Management, and could proceed with road maintenance regardless of federal approval if the BLM fails to meet a strict deadline for responding to the counties' request. "This isn't about ownership of a road or changing a road. This is a working tool that will allow us to do necessary maintenance and repairs," Lynn Stevens, director of the state's Public Lands Coordination Office, said Tuesday. But environmental groups, which obtained several drafts of the agreement, say the maintenance pact could open federal lands to a new wave of road building that would devastate delicate natural resources and wilderness areas....
Warming Tied To Extinction Of Frog Species Rising temperatures are responsible for pushing dozens of frog species over the brink of extinction in the past three decades, according to findings being reported today by a team of Latin American and U.S. scientists. The study, published in the journal Nature, provides compelling evidence that climate change has already helped wipe out a slew of species and could spur more extinctions and the spread of diseases worldwide. It also helps solve the international mystery of why amphibians around the globe have been vanishing from their usual habitats over the past quarter-century -- as many as 112 species have disappeared since 1980. Scientists have speculated that rising temperatures and changing weather patterns could endanger the survival of many species, but the new study documents for the first time a direct correlation between global warming and the disappearance of around 65 amphibian species in Central and South America....
Drought resurges A year after storm-swollen rivers filled reservoirs and sent water gushing down the lower Salt and Gila rivers for the first time in decades, Arizona is drying up again. The state's mountains are virtually bare, with snowpack conditions worse than they were at the same time in 2002, a year that set records as one of the driest in five centuries. Warm weather is sucking moisture from forests and ranges, ratcheting up the risk of wildfire. Rural areas are bracing for water shortages by early summer if rains don't come. What the experts don't know yet is if winter is just late - very, very late - or if last year was a wet blip on a long-term drought entering its 11th year. But if winter is late, it will have a lot of catching up to do: January and February typically bring much of the snow needed to refill reservoirs and keep rivers and forests healthy. The culprit so far is a stubborn weather pattern that steers every storm north of Arizona. The Salt and Verde rivers' watersheds received just 0.14 of an inch of rain in November and December, and none has fallen in Phoenix since Oct. 18....
Ag Producers Struggling “Extremely tough.” Those are the words that Bill Botard, Gillespie County Agriculture Extension Agent, used yesterday to describe the drought conditions that continue to plague ag producers in the Fredericksburg area at the start of a new year. “Our hay stocks are dwindling; our stock tank water levels are dwindling,” he said, “and we’re not in very good shape with our small grains or our domestic livestock.” While rainfall amounts have varied around Gillespie County over the past five months, Fredericksburg’s situation is indicative of the overall situation. The city’s official rain gauge at Lady Bird Johnson Municipal Park has measured only 4.12 inches of moisture since the end of August -- falling 6.18 inches short of the 10.30 inches that are normally measured here during the September-mid-January period....
Texas Cattle Ranchers Hobbled by Drought, Fires Texas rancher Pete Bonds would like to add cattle to his 7,000-head herd but the lack of grazing and the lack of water prevent it. A drought in Texas and Oklahoma, one of the worst in nearly 100 years, has dried up creeks and ponds, depleted pastures, and fueled wildfires that have burned precious hay and grass. The conditions have ranchers selling off breeding stock at a time when they should be expanding herds. Current prices have been profitable for nearly every level of the cattle industry, and during profitable times producers normally expand. "We just don't have the grass to expand," said Bonds during a telephone interview this week....
Alaskan volcano erupts, sends ash plume skyward A volcano on an uninhabited Alaskan island erupted early Wednesday, spewing an ash plume about 5 miles into the sky. Meteorologists said the ash from Augustine Volcano was expected to steer clear of the state's most populous city, Anchorage, nearly 200 miles to the northeast. "Fortunately, it's not going to Anchorage this time," said Bob Hopkins, meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service office in Anchorage. Two early-morning explosions indicated an eruption at the volcano, said geologist Jennifer Adleman of the Alaska Volcano Observatory. Satellite images and radar later confirmed the eruption, Hopkins said....
More Cows Found Shot More dead cows have been found in Tooele County, and the reward is going up for information about whoever it was that shot them. A massacre of cows took place near the town of Vernon sometime shortly after Christmas. The offer of a reward has prompted numerous tips but, so far, no arrests. Seven dead ones, that was Dick Johnson's count a few days ago. His cows were shot just after Christmas by trespassers with a high-powered rifle. Last weekend, Johnson found two more. Dick Johnson, Rancher: "Must have been wounded enough that they just wandered off by themselves and died in the sagebrush." Then they found a tenth, with ghastly wounds, which they took to the vet. Dick Johnson: "This cow had suffered for a week and was still alive, and he had to put it down." The perpetrators shot the lock off a gate, probably at night. They apparently drove through the herd, shooting Black Anguses. All the shot cows were pregnant....
Denver parades its heritage It was high noon in the Mile High City when 5-year-old Anna Hawley had her first showdown with a real Texas longhorn. "They're coming. They're coming," the girl shouted as cowboys on horseback drove a couple of dozen longhorns down 17th Street through the heart of Denver's financial district Tuesday to kick off the 100th National Western Stock Show's parade. "Hi, cows. Hi, cows," chimed in 3-year-old Aliera Visconti, riding high on the shoulders of her father, Damon Visconti. "This is her first exposure to the West," the Denver dad said. "I wanted her to capture just a little bit of what it used to be like." The cavalcade of precision equestrian teams, collie-herded sheep and the parade grand marshal, former U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, riding atop a red stagecoach, drew whoops and hollers from the crowd....
Enid has had its share of bad guys In the center of the west wall of the Marquis James room in the Public Library of Enid and Garfield County there is a large photo of a dying man. He is lying on his back, on a bed, looking at the camera. His hair is shaggy, he has a full beard and the bedclothes look disheveled. There is no cover on the pillow beneath his head. In the background can be seen what looks like the corner of a window that has bars on it. The man in the photo was Nelson Ellsworth Wyatt, also known as “Zip” Wyatt, also known as Dick Yeager. Wyatt, was an early-day Enid badman. He was described as being tall, with red hair and blue eyes. They said he rolled his own Bull Durham cigarettes in brown paper, and like many of the infamous bad guys of that time he was described as uneducated, and angry. One of the main occupations of the bad guys in the Cherokee Outlet, especially before the 1893 race for land, was rustling horses....
Saddle Bronc world champ enjoying the ride The people of South Dakota have a deep appreciation for their own who compete in pro rodeo and a number of local fans recently got to show their appreciation for newly crowned world saddle bronc champ Jeffery Willert. Willert, a Belvidere native, took the title at this year's Wrangler National Finals Rodeo held in Las Vegas. This marked the third straight year Willert had qualified for the finals, but the 23-year-old had no idea he'd be wearing the gold buckle signifying the championship so soon. He managed to beat out his idol, Billy Etbauer, for the prize. "It's really been unbelievable," said Willert, who talked to anybody who approached him at a recent ceremony in Rapid City. "There's been a lot of parties and I've shaken a lot of hands. I'm really loving it." Willert claimed his first world title while winning a record $278,169 for the year. Approximately $118,630 came from his showing at the National Finals Rodeo....
Big Timber rancher shoots wolf A Big Timber area ranch manager shot and killed a 2-year old wolf on private property December 30. The wolf was reportedly chasing livestock. Federal rules in effect in most of southwestern Montana allow landowners or their employees to harass or kill a wolf that is seen actively attacking, chasing, or harassing livestock. “Clear guidance is provided by the rule which states that the wolf must be actively chasing or attacking livestock. This is the most effective way to target problem animals,” said Carolyn Sime, FWP's wolf program coordinator. By taking action during an actual depredation event, efforts are focused on the offending animal at the right time and the right place, she said. “Because gray wolves in Montana are still listed under the Endangered Species Act, interim federal regulations apply throughout Montana. In addition, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Law Enforcement officers lead all wolf mortality investigations,” Sime said. Under the 10j rule, which offers Montana more wolf management authority and flexibility, anyone who shoots or kills a wolf must report the incident within 24 hours. In addition, evidence of the actual wolf attack, or evidence that an attack was imminent, must be available for state and federal investigators to inspect....
Health officials investigating salt water spill Health officials are investigating a salt water spill from a pipeline leak in an oil drilling operation near here. One rancher worries that the spill threatens his pregnant cows. Mark Bohrer, a petroleum engineer for the state, said the leak occurred in a pipeline that delivered salt water, a waste product from oil drilling, to an injection well for disposal underground. The spill was southwest of Alexander near Charbonneau Creek, in McKenzie County. The salt water flowed over the ground to a dry drainage ditch and then into a dry stock dam, where it overflowed into a beaver dam, Bohrer said. The water eventually overflowed into Charbonneau Creek, which flows into the Yellowstone River. State and company officials are investigating how far downstream and to what degree the contamination exists. The drilling company, Zenergy, discovered the leak Jan 4, and immediately stopped the leak and began recovering the salt water, officials said....
Frog protection plan debated Since the 1920s, Michael Fischer's family has raised cattle on 240 acres near Valley Springs. Rarely, if ever, has it had to worry about frogs. Until now. Fischer and about 50 more Calaveras County residents and ranchers gathered yesterday at a forum in San Andreas to debate a plan that would mark up to 4,450 of acres in the Valley Springs area as critical habitat for the endangered California red-legged frog. The plan is part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's statewide effort to designate more than 700,000 acres of land in 23 counties as frog habitat....
Environmentalists want alternatives for killing weeds A plan by the U.S. Forest Service to use herbicides and other methods to kill weeds in the Santa Fe and Carson national forests has drawn fire from a coalition of environmentalists. The agency's Invasive Plant Control Project would incorporate herbicides as well as nontoxic methods to target more than 7,300 acres of nonnative plant populations over the next decade. Environmentalists acknowledge the importance of controlling weeds that push out native plants, increase erosion and degrade wildlife habitat, but they say herbicides pose health risks. "We all agree that invasive species are not great for the ecosystem and may need to be treated," said Joanie Berde, volunteer coordinator for Carson Forest Watch. "But there's so many alternatives that don't involve herbicide use."....
Court clears the way for upgrades, snow making at Snowbowl A federal judge's ruling Wednesday cleared the way for facility upgrades at the Arizona Snowbowl ski area, including snowmaking equipment. The ruling upheld an earlier Coconino National Forest decision to authorize the upgrades and allow for the artificial snowmaking from reclaimed wastewater. The treated effluent would arrive via pipeline from Flagstaff. Snowbowl officials claim the snowmaking equipment is necessary to ensure the ski area's survival. U.S. Forest Service officials said they would review the ruling over the next few days to determine steps toward implementing the project. There was no immediate reaction from several American Indian tribes and conservation groups who sought to bar the start of construction on the expansion project....
Decision delayed for use of copters to track wolves The U.S. Forest Service has put off a decision on Idaho's request to land helicopters in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness to attach radio collars on wolves, a delay that could prompt state wildlife managers to try to capture the animals in traps. Idaho officials, who only last week took over management responsibilities of the packs reintroduced into the state in 1995 by the federal government, said the Forest Service deferral announced Tuesday likely triggers a lengthy environmental impact examination. And by the time the study is completed, it will be harder for state officials to know how many wolves are roaming the rugged 2.4 million acres of wilderness in the middle of the state. "It really is an unfortunate turn of events," said Jim Caswell, administrator of the state's Office of Species Conservation. "It doesn't take away our ability to manage wolves, but it does make counting noses, determining den sites and keeping up with trends in the wilderness area more complicated."....
Groups file suit against heli-skiing A coalition of conservation groups and two individuals this week filed suit to stop Bridger-Teton National Forest officials from allowing helicopter skiing tours in a wilderness study area. The groups filed the complaint after the U.S. Forest Service in June decided to allow High Mountain Heli-Skiing of Jackson to offer one helicopter tour per day in the Palisades wilderness study area. The area spans the Idaho-Wyoming border south of Jackson, and spans the Bridger-Teton and Caribou-Targhee national forests. The company's permit expands to other areas in the Snake River Range and allows 1,200 skier days (one skier on one day). The company often uses the Palisades area because of its exceptional terrain and easy access. A day of helicopter skiing may entail several runs. Jon Shick, owner of High Mountain Heli, said in a statement the groups are trying to shut down heli-skiing....
Lion seen in Incline Village Wildlife officials here expressed surprise there have been recent mountain lion sightings in the North Shore area. At least three Incline Village residents have reported mountain lion sightings since November. "I was getting ready to close the drapes on the bay window, just at twilight, and I realized that there was a large animal down below me," said Jan Dyer, who lives above the Championship Golf Course. "I realized, that is not a coyote." Dyer said she was able to watch the mountain lion in her yard for about three minutes from her second-story window. "It left paw prints all over my yard (which) lasted for several weeks at my house. When it trotted off it headed into the village," Dyer said. Barbara Frederic, Dyer's neighbor, said she has seen evidence of the lion in her yard three times since Dec. 1....
Park grizzly delisting could be complicated by forest rule changes Bush administration changes to U.S. Forest Service rules last year may complicate efforts to remove the Yellowstone grizzly bear from the endangered species list. Part of the larger process of delisting the grizzly bear has been amending forest management plans for national forests around Yellowstone National Park. Those changes are intended, among other things, to protect habitat in those forests as the grizzly population continues to move and expand. But in early 2005, some of the Forest Service’s overall planning regulations changed, cutting out ’’standards’’ - which could be binding and enforceable - and replacing them with softer terms such as ’’desired conditions,’’ ’’objectives’’ and ’’guidelines.’’ Some worry the change may leave too much wiggle room and not enough assurances that the grizzly bear protections will be put in place....
Sweeping change reshapes Arctic The hunter rose each day last summer from his bunk in a condemned wildlife lab, down the hall from where Inupiat villagers carve whale meat on a band saw. He slipped on hip waders and a furry white parka, slung a rifle over his shoulders and trudged onto the Arctic tundra. Through icy fog beneath a never-setting summer sun, Eric Seykora set out to earn the nickname given him by Barrow scientists: "The Fox Killer." Arctic foxes had been eating the eggs of rare ducks because their usual supper, tiny, mouselike lemmings, were dwindling from the drying tundra. So the government flew this former South Dakota hunting guide 330 miles north of the Arctic Circle and paid him to spend his summer shooting foxes. Ecological change is so scrambling Alaska's Arctic that the government has hired gunslingers to recapture some balance....
Interior to allow NPR-A drilling The Interior Department on Wednesday announced it will open hundreds of thousands of acres of wildlife-rich North Slope tundra to oil and gas drillers. The land is just north of giant Teshekpuk Lake in the northeast corner of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, an Indiana-sized tract set aside in 1923 for its oil potential. The lake region is noted for some of the world's largest congregations of migratory geese, as well as caribou and other wildlife. But it also might harbor huge deposits of oil and gas. Naturalists fought hard to head off Wednesday's decision, which they say dismantles a long policy of government protection for the land....
Surge seen in oil, gas drilling A Bush administration program to accelerate the rezoning of public lands for energy development is expected to lead to more than 50,000 new wells in the West, according to an environmental group's study set for release today. About 43,000 of the new wells would be in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana, while fewer than 500 would be located on the Roan Plateau in Colorado, where earlier drilling proposals have faced strong opposition. There's no timetable for when the new wells might come online. The planning documents only make the new drilling sites possible, but the sites would be in addition to the nearly 70,000 wells already on federally owned lands. All the wells were accelerated under an initiative in which Bureau of Land Management administrators selected 21 resource-management plans already underway to be reclassified as "time-sensitive plans." Of those 21 plans, 11 involved oil and gas drilling. BLM administrators also ordered that environmental protections in those areas be applied in the "least restrictive" manner. About half of these plans are still in development, but once approved by the BLM, a resource-management plan cannot be appealed to another government agency, although they are sometimes challenged in court. Individual projects, however, are subject to environmental review. The 11 time-sensitive plans that include oil and gas development call for a total of 76,810 wells, which is more than three times the 24,145 wells that were expected to be drilled prior to the document revisions....
Off-road enthusiasts seek to reverse ban A coalition of Utah off-road enthusiasts seeking to reverse a Bureau of Land Management ban on motorized vehicles over hundreds of thousands of acres in Box Elder and Grand counties took their case before a federal appeals court Wednesday. The Utah Shared Access Alliance (USA-ALL) sued the BLM in 2001, claiming that the agency closed off 250,000 acres near Moab and 189,000 acres around the Grouse Creek Mountains to off-highway vehicle (OHV) use without conducting public hearings and a required environmental analysis. The group is asking the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a decision by U.S. District Judge Bruce Jenkins of Salt Lake City, who dismissed the group's lawsuit against the BLM in December 2004. In his decision, Jenkins ruled that the BLM had taken the mandated "hard look" at the environmental impacts before issuing the closures....
Road accord near; greens leery Utah and the Interior Department are close to finalizing an agreement that would provide counties increased flexibility - too much flexibility, critics say - to do maintenance and repairs on back roads that run across federal land, a state official said Tuesday. Under the proposed deal, counties would be allowed to perform "emergency" repairs to roads without permission from the Bureau of Land Management, and could proceed with road maintenance regardless of federal approval if the BLM fails to meet a strict deadline for responding to the counties' request. "This isn't about ownership of a road or changing a road. This is a working tool that will allow us to do necessary maintenance and repairs," Lynn Stevens, director of the state's Public Lands Coordination Office, said Tuesday. But environmental groups, which obtained several drafts of the agreement, say the maintenance pact could open federal lands to a new wave of road building that would devastate delicate natural resources and wilderness areas....
Warming Tied To Extinction Of Frog Species Rising temperatures are responsible for pushing dozens of frog species over the brink of extinction in the past three decades, according to findings being reported today by a team of Latin American and U.S. scientists. The study, published in the journal Nature, provides compelling evidence that climate change has already helped wipe out a slew of species and could spur more extinctions and the spread of diseases worldwide. It also helps solve the international mystery of why amphibians around the globe have been vanishing from their usual habitats over the past quarter-century -- as many as 112 species have disappeared since 1980. Scientists have speculated that rising temperatures and changing weather patterns could endanger the survival of many species, but the new study documents for the first time a direct correlation between global warming and the disappearance of around 65 amphibian species in Central and South America....
Drought resurges A year after storm-swollen rivers filled reservoirs and sent water gushing down the lower Salt and Gila rivers for the first time in decades, Arizona is drying up again. The state's mountains are virtually bare, with snowpack conditions worse than they were at the same time in 2002, a year that set records as one of the driest in five centuries. Warm weather is sucking moisture from forests and ranges, ratcheting up the risk of wildfire. Rural areas are bracing for water shortages by early summer if rains don't come. What the experts don't know yet is if winter is just late - very, very late - or if last year was a wet blip on a long-term drought entering its 11th year. But if winter is late, it will have a lot of catching up to do: January and February typically bring much of the snow needed to refill reservoirs and keep rivers and forests healthy. The culprit so far is a stubborn weather pattern that steers every storm north of Arizona. The Salt and Verde rivers' watersheds received just 0.14 of an inch of rain in November and December, and none has fallen in Phoenix since Oct. 18....
Ag Producers Struggling “Extremely tough.” Those are the words that Bill Botard, Gillespie County Agriculture Extension Agent, used yesterday to describe the drought conditions that continue to plague ag producers in the Fredericksburg area at the start of a new year. “Our hay stocks are dwindling; our stock tank water levels are dwindling,” he said, “and we’re not in very good shape with our small grains or our domestic livestock.” While rainfall amounts have varied around Gillespie County over the past five months, Fredericksburg’s situation is indicative of the overall situation. The city’s official rain gauge at Lady Bird Johnson Municipal Park has measured only 4.12 inches of moisture since the end of August -- falling 6.18 inches short of the 10.30 inches that are normally measured here during the September-mid-January period....
Texas Cattle Ranchers Hobbled by Drought, Fires Texas rancher Pete Bonds would like to add cattle to his 7,000-head herd but the lack of grazing and the lack of water prevent it. A drought in Texas and Oklahoma, one of the worst in nearly 100 years, has dried up creeks and ponds, depleted pastures, and fueled wildfires that have burned precious hay and grass. The conditions have ranchers selling off breeding stock at a time when they should be expanding herds. Current prices have been profitable for nearly every level of the cattle industry, and during profitable times producers normally expand. "We just don't have the grass to expand," said Bonds during a telephone interview this week....
Alaskan volcano erupts, sends ash plume skyward A volcano on an uninhabited Alaskan island erupted early Wednesday, spewing an ash plume about 5 miles into the sky. Meteorologists said the ash from Augustine Volcano was expected to steer clear of the state's most populous city, Anchorage, nearly 200 miles to the northeast. "Fortunately, it's not going to Anchorage this time," said Bob Hopkins, meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service office in Anchorage. Two early-morning explosions indicated an eruption at the volcano, said geologist Jennifer Adleman of the Alaska Volcano Observatory. Satellite images and radar later confirmed the eruption, Hopkins said....
More Cows Found Shot More dead cows have been found in Tooele County, and the reward is going up for information about whoever it was that shot them. A massacre of cows took place near the town of Vernon sometime shortly after Christmas. The offer of a reward has prompted numerous tips but, so far, no arrests. Seven dead ones, that was Dick Johnson's count a few days ago. His cows were shot just after Christmas by trespassers with a high-powered rifle. Last weekend, Johnson found two more. Dick Johnson, Rancher: "Must have been wounded enough that they just wandered off by themselves and died in the sagebrush." Then they found a tenth, with ghastly wounds, which they took to the vet. Dick Johnson: "This cow had suffered for a week and was still alive, and he had to put it down." The perpetrators shot the lock off a gate, probably at night. They apparently drove through the herd, shooting Black Anguses. All the shot cows were pregnant....
Denver parades its heritage It was high noon in the Mile High City when 5-year-old Anna Hawley had her first showdown with a real Texas longhorn. "They're coming. They're coming," the girl shouted as cowboys on horseback drove a couple of dozen longhorns down 17th Street through the heart of Denver's financial district Tuesday to kick off the 100th National Western Stock Show's parade. "Hi, cows. Hi, cows," chimed in 3-year-old Aliera Visconti, riding high on the shoulders of her father, Damon Visconti. "This is her first exposure to the West," the Denver dad said. "I wanted her to capture just a little bit of what it used to be like." The cavalcade of precision equestrian teams, collie-herded sheep and the parade grand marshal, former U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, riding atop a red stagecoach, drew whoops and hollers from the crowd....
Enid has had its share of bad guys In the center of the west wall of the Marquis James room in the Public Library of Enid and Garfield County there is a large photo of a dying man. He is lying on his back, on a bed, looking at the camera. His hair is shaggy, he has a full beard and the bedclothes look disheveled. There is no cover on the pillow beneath his head. In the background can be seen what looks like the corner of a window that has bars on it. The man in the photo was Nelson Ellsworth Wyatt, also known as “Zip” Wyatt, also known as Dick Yeager. Wyatt, was an early-day Enid badman. He was described as being tall, with red hair and blue eyes. They said he rolled his own Bull Durham cigarettes in brown paper, and like many of the infamous bad guys of that time he was described as uneducated, and angry. One of the main occupations of the bad guys in the Cherokee Outlet, especially before the 1893 race for land, was rustling horses....
Saddle Bronc world champ enjoying the ride The people of South Dakota have a deep appreciation for their own who compete in pro rodeo and a number of local fans recently got to show their appreciation for newly crowned world saddle bronc champ Jeffery Willert. Willert, a Belvidere native, took the title at this year's Wrangler National Finals Rodeo held in Las Vegas. This marked the third straight year Willert had qualified for the finals, but the 23-year-old had no idea he'd be wearing the gold buckle signifying the championship so soon. He managed to beat out his idol, Billy Etbauer, for the prize. "It's really been unbelievable," said Willert, who talked to anybody who approached him at a recent ceremony in Rapid City. "There's been a lot of parties and I've shaken a lot of hands. I'm really loving it." Willert claimed his first world title while winning a record $278,169 for the year. Approximately $118,630 came from his showing at the National Finals Rodeo....
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
FLE
National Security Agency mounted massive spy op on Baltimore peace group, documents show
The National Security Agency has been spying on a Baltimore anti-war group, according to documents released during litigation, going so far as to document the inflating of protesters' balloons, and intended to deploy units trained to detect weapons of mass destruction. According to the documents, the Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore, a Quaker-linked peace group, has been monitored by the NSA working with the Baltimore Intelligence Unit of the Baltimore City Police Department. The documents came as a result of litigation in the August 2003 trial of Marilyn Carlisle and Cindy Farquhar. An NSA security official provided the defendants with a redacted Action Plan and a redacted copy of a Joint Terrorism Task Force email about the activities of the Pledge of Resistance activities. Documents turned over by the NSA indicate that the group was closely monitored. In one instance, the agency filed reports approximately every 15 minutes from 9:30 AM to 3:18 PM on the day of a demonstration at the National Vigilance Airplane Memorial on the NSA Campus in Maryland. According to an NSA email dated July 4, 2004, the agency collected license numbers and descriptions and the number of people in each car and filed a report about them gathering in a church parking lot for the demonstration. NSA agents also logged their travel to the demonstration, including stopping as a gas station along the way. A canine dog unit was used to search a minivan when it was stopped on the way to the demonstration - nothing was found. NSA officials even reported on the balloons being inflated for the demonstration and the content of their signs. An entry made at 1300 hours on July 4. reads, "The Soc. was advised the protestors were proceeding to the airplane memorial with three helium balloons attached to a banner that stated, 'Those Who Exchange Freedom for Security Deserve Neither, Will Ultimately Lose Both.'"....
Guantanamo war crimes tribunals resume
Exactly four years after the first prisoners arrived at the Guantanamo prison camp, a Yemeni accused of being a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden will face a U.S. military tribunal on Wednesday to demand the right to act as his own attorney on war crimes charges. A separate tribunal of U.S. military officers was scheduled to convene later on Wednesday in the murder case against Canadian prisoner Omar Khadr, 19. He is accused of killing an Army medic with a grenade during a firefight at a suspected al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan when he was just 15. The tribunals get under way amid criticism that they leave the defendants at a major disadvantage. The first tribunal will convene in a courtroom at the remote U.S. military base in Cuba to hear pretrial arguments in the case against Ali Hamza al Bahlul, who is accused of being a bin Laden bodyguard and al Qaeda videographer. The Pentagon is proceeding with the two cases even though U.S. courts have halted the trials of three other Guantanamo prisoners pending a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on whether Bush had authority to establish the tribunals. The high court will hear arguments in the case in March....
Probe Set In NSA Bugging
The National Security Agency's inspector general has opened an investigation into eavesdropping without warrants in the United States by the agency authorized by President Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a letter released late yesterday. The Pentagon's acting inspector general, Thomas F. Gimble, wrote that his counterpart at the NSA "is already actively reviewing aspects of that program" and has "considerable expertise in the oversight of electronic surveillance," according to the letter sent to House Democrats who have requested official investigations of the NSA program. Gimble's letter appears to confirm that an internal investigation into the NSA's domestic eavesdropping program, authorized by Bush in a secret order revealed in recent weeks, is underway. The Justice Department has opened a separate criminal investigation into the leak of the highly classified program's existence. Officials in NSA Inspector General Joel Brenner's office could not be reached for comment last night. A group of 39 House Democrats wrote Gimble and other officials last month requesting investigations into the legality of the NSA program. Gimble responded that his office would decline to launch its own investigation because of the ongoing NSA probe....
Detainee Case Hits on Limits of Presidency
When the Supreme Court agreed two months ago to hear an appeal from a Yemeni detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, named Salim Ahmed Hamdan, it was evident that an important test of the limits of presidential authority to conduct the war on terror was under way. Now that the final briefs have begun to arrive at the court, in advance of a late March argument, the dimensions of that test appear greater than ever. Several of the two dozen briefs filed on Mr. Hamdan's behalf late Friday address an issue that was not even part of the case when the justices granted review on Nov. 7: whether the court has jurisdiction to proceed or whether Congress, in a measure that President Bush supported and signed into law on Dec. 30, has succeeded in shutting the federal courthouse doors on Mr. Hamdan and 150 other Guantánamo detainees whose cases are pending at various levels of the federal court system. If that proved to be the case, the result would be "a nightmare scenario," a group of prominent law professors told the Supreme Court in one of the briefs. "The keys to the courthouse will be placed in the exclusive control of the executive," the brief says, creating "the legal equivalent of incommunicado detention of Japanese aliens in a relocation camp in Idaho." The professors were Burt Neuborne and Norman Dorsen of New York University, Judith Resnik of Yale, and Frank Michelman and David Shapiro of Harvard. Another brief, filed by the Center for National Security Studies, a civil liberties group, and the Constitution Project, a bipartisan study group, asserts flatly that if the new law, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, does in fact strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction over the Hamdan case, then the law is unconstitutional. The Bush administration has not yet responded to such assertions; its brief is not due until early next month. But it appears both from the president's statement upon signing the measure, which originated as Section 1005 of a military spending bill, and from motions the administration has filed in the lower courts that government lawyers do take the view that the new law applies to pending cases and that the justices must dismiss the Hamdan appeal....
Expanding presidential powers
As Congress begins to look into the president's authorization of the NationalSecurity Agency's warrantless searches of e-mails and phone calls into -- and out of -- the United States, a question many Americans are asking was posed to the president at a Dec. 19 press conference by Peter Baker of The Washington Post: "If the global war on terrorism is to last for decades... does that mean we're going to see... a more or less permanent expansion of the unchecked power of the executive branch in American society?" The president had no direct answer, but he did say it was "shameful" of the New York Times to break this story. However, the more we know about the porous nature of the president's defense of his authorization of the NSA's bypassing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, it's becoming clearer that the New York Times should not have held the story for a year at the Bush administration's request. As the business publication Barron's Financial Weekly put it on its Dec. 26 front page: "The pursuit of terrorism does not authorize the president to make up new laws." And in the Dec. 21 Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security, cut to the core of why disclosure has led to the resignation, in protest, of federal District Judge James Robertson, a member of the FISA court, and why others on that secret court are concerned about the president's action. "This is not a partisan issue between Democrats and Republicans," Mr. Schneier writes, "it's a president unilaterally overriding the Fourth Amendment, Congress and the Supreme Court. Unchecked presidential power has nothing to do with how much you either love or hate George W. Bush. You have to imagine this power in the hands of the person you most don't want to see as president, whether it be Dick Cheney or Hillary Rodham Clinton."....
Gun Owners of America E-Mail Alert
8001 Forbes Place, Suite 102, Springfield, VA 22151
Phone: 703-321-8585 / FAX: 703-321-8408
http://www.gunowners.org
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
You told Congress you didn't want the BATFE, FBI and other federal
agencies to go on fishing expeditions through your gun records. It
appears that Congress may actually be listening!
By a vote of 52-47, the Senate failed to shut down the
liberal/conservative filibuster of H.R. 3199 -- including a provision
which would allow BATFE to goosestep through your gun records
(4473's, etc.) WITHOUT THE APPROVAL OF ANY COURT. Under the Senate
rules, 60 votes would have been needed to end the filibuster on this
PATRIOT Act reauthorization.
Instead, this so-called "terrorism" legislation -- some of which is
relatively non-controversial -- was extended until February 3 in
order to allow negotiations to continue.
You might remember that 16 provisions of the PATRIOT Act were set to
expire on New Year's Day. To prevent this, Congress extended the
deadline for five weeks, into early February. Even if these 16
provisions expire, the underlying PATRIOT Act will still remain in
force. GOA is second to none in its desire to protect this nation's
security and prevent terrorists from attacking American citizens.
But we believe the best way to do this is to abide by the
Constitution. Freedom works. The Second Amendment works. Guns in
the hands of airline pilots on 9-11 would have prevented the
terrorist hijackings that day. Restricting liberty only makes us
less safe... and letting the BATFE and other federal agencies to
conduct unlimited warrantless searches of firearms purchase records
is not going to make us safer.
Now, there've been some interesting developments over the last couple
of days.
At least one Senate office has suggested that negotiators may be
willing to "deal" in order to completely exempt 4473's and
other gun records from federal agents' warrantless search powers. Under this
deal -- which would be total victory for gun owners -- the provisions
of the pro-gun McClure-Volkmer Firearms Owners Protection Act would
govern what gun records BATFE can and can't see.
We will continue working to exempt gun records from the "snooping"
provisions of H.R. 3199. But we're asking you to strengthen our hand
by continuing to pressure Congress. Since Gun Owners of America is
fighting a lonely battle to exempt gun records from the clause of the
PATRIOT Act, your activism is crucial. While you might want to ask
the other groups what they're doing to fight these provisions, we
definitely need you to contact the Congress right now.
ACTION: Please write your senators. Urge them to insist that
pro-gun language be inserted into H.R. 3199 which ensures that BATFE
is prohibited from conducting unlimited warrantless searches of
firearms purchase records. The vote on this legislation will take
place in less than one month. Negotiations on this bill are
occurring right now. It's imperative that you contact your Senators
right away!
You can visit the Gun Owners Legislative Action Center at
http://www.gunowners.org/activism.htm to send your Senators a
pre-written e-mail message such as the one below.
Or, you can call your Senators toll-free at 877-762-8762.
National Security Agency mounted massive spy op on Baltimore peace group, documents show
The National Security Agency has been spying on a Baltimore anti-war group, according to documents released during litigation, going so far as to document the inflating of protesters' balloons, and intended to deploy units trained to detect weapons of mass destruction. According to the documents, the Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore, a Quaker-linked peace group, has been monitored by the NSA working with the Baltimore Intelligence Unit of the Baltimore City Police Department. The documents came as a result of litigation in the August 2003 trial of Marilyn Carlisle and Cindy Farquhar. An NSA security official provided the defendants with a redacted Action Plan and a redacted copy of a Joint Terrorism Task Force email about the activities of the Pledge of Resistance activities. Documents turned over by the NSA indicate that the group was closely monitored. In one instance, the agency filed reports approximately every 15 minutes from 9:30 AM to 3:18 PM on the day of a demonstration at the National Vigilance Airplane Memorial on the NSA Campus in Maryland. According to an NSA email dated July 4, 2004, the agency collected license numbers and descriptions and the number of people in each car and filed a report about them gathering in a church parking lot for the demonstration. NSA agents also logged their travel to the demonstration, including stopping as a gas station along the way. A canine dog unit was used to search a minivan when it was stopped on the way to the demonstration - nothing was found. NSA officials even reported on the balloons being inflated for the demonstration and the content of their signs. An entry made at 1300 hours on July 4. reads, "The Soc. was advised the protestors were proceeding to the airplane memorial with three helium balloons attached to a banner that stated, 'Those Who Exchange Freedom for Security Deserve Neither, Will Ultimately Lose Both.'"....
Guantanamo war crimes tribunals resume
Exactly four years after the first prisoners arrived at the Guantanamo prison camp, a Yemeni accused of being a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden will face a U.S. military tribunal on Wednesday to demand the right to act as his own attorney on war crimes charges. A separate tribunal of U.S. military officers was scheduled to convene later on Wednesday in the murder case against Canadian prisoner Omar Khadr, 19. He is accused of killing an Army medic with a grenade during a firefight at a suspected al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan when he was just 15. The tribunals get under way amid criticism that they leave the defendants at a major disadvantage. The first tribunal will convene in a courtroom at the remote U.S. military base in Cuba to hear pretrial arguments in the case against Ali Hamza al Bahlul, who is accused of being a bin Laden bodyguard and al Qaeda videographer. The Pentagon is proceeding with the two cases even though U.S. courts have halted the trials of three other Guantanamo prisoners pending a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on whether Bush had authority to establish the tribunals. The high court will hear arguments in the case in March....
Probe Set In NSA Bugging
The National Security Agency's inspector general has opened an investigation into eavesdropping without warrants in the United States by the agency authorized by President Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a letter released late yesterday. The Pentagon's acting inspector general, Thomas F. Gimble, wrote that his counterpart at the NSA "is already actively reviewing aspects of that program" and has "considerable expertise in the oversight of electronic surveillance," according to the letter sent to House Democrats who have requested official investigations of the NSA program. Gimble's letter appears to confirm that an internal investigation into the NSA's domestic eavesdropping program, authorized by Bush in a secret order revealed in recent weeks, is underway. The Justice Department has opened a separate criminal investigation into the leak of the highly classified program's existence. Officials in NSA Inspector General Joel Brenner's office could not be reached for comment last night. A group of 39 House Democrats wrote Gimble and other officials last month requesting investigations into the legality of the NSA program. Gimble responded that his office would decline to launch its own investigation because of the ongoing NSA probe....
Detainee Case Hits on Limits of Presidency
When the Supreme Court agreed two months ago to hear an appeal from a Yemeni detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, named Salim Ahmed Hamdan, it was evident that an important test of the limits of presidential authority to conduct the war on terror was under way. Now that the final briefs have begun to arrive at the court, in advance of a late March argument, the dimensions of that test appear greater than ever. Several of the two dozen briefs filed on Mr. Hamdan's behalf late Friday address an issue that was not even part of the case when the justices granted review on Nov. 7: whether the court has jurisdiction to proceed or whether Congress, in a measure that President Bush supported and signed into law on Dec. 30, has succeeded in shutting the federal courthouse doors on Mr. Hamdan and 150 other Guantánamo detainees whose cases are pending at various levels of the federal court system. If that proved to be the case, the result would be "a nightmare scenario," a group of prominent law professors told the Supreme Court in one of the briefs. "The keys to the courthouse will be placed in the exclusive control of the executive," the brief says, creating "the legal equivalent of incommunicado detention of Japanese aliens in a relocation camp in Idaho." The professors were Burt Neuborne and Norman Dorsen of New York University, Judith Resnik of Yale, and Frank Michelman and David Shapiro of Harvard. Another brief, filed by the Center for National Security Studies, a civil liberties group, and the Constitution Project, a bipartisan study group, asserts flatly that if the new law, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, does in fact strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction over the Hamdan case, then the law is unconstitutional. The Bush administration has not yet responded to such assertions; its brief is not due until early next month. But it appears both from the president's statement upon signing the measure, which originated as Section 1005 of a military spending bill, and from motions the administration has filed in the lower courts that government lawyers do take the view that the new law applies to pending cases and that the justices must dismiss the Hamdan appeal....
Expanding presidential powers
As Congress begins to look into the president's authorization of the NationalSecurity Agency's warrantless searches of e-mails and phone calls into -- and out of -- the United States, a question many Americans are asking was posed to the president at a Dec. 19 press conference by Peter Baker of The Washington Post: "If the global war on terrorism is to last for decades... does that mean we're going to see... a more or less permanent expansion of the unchecked power of the executive branch in American society?" The president had no direct answer, but he did say it was "shameful" of the New York Times to break this story. However, the more we know about the porous nature of the president's defense of his authorization of the NSA's bypassing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, it's becoming clearer that the New York Times should not have held the story for a year at the Bush administration's request. As the business publication Barron's Financial Weekly put it on its Dec. 26 front page: "The pursuit of terrorism does not authorize the president to make up new laws." And in the Dec. 21 Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security, cut to the core of why disclosure has led to the resignation, in protest, of federal District Judge James Robertson, a member of the FISA court, and why others on that secret court are concerned about the president's action. "This is not a partisan issue between Democrats and Republicans," Mr. Schneier writes, "it's a president unilaterally overriding the Fourth Amendment, Congress and the Supreme Court. Unchecked presidential power has nothing to do with how much you either love or hate George W. Bush. You have to imagine this power in the hands of the person you most don't want to see as president, whether it be Dick Cheney or Hillary Rodham Clinton."....
Gun Owners of America E-Mail Alert
8001 Forbes Place, Suite 102, Springfield, VA 22151
Phone: 703-321-8585 / FAX: 703-321-8408
http://www.gunowners.org
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
You told Congress you didn't want the BATFE, FBI and other federal
agencies to go on fishing expeditions through your gun records. It
appears that Congress may actually be listening!
By a vote of 52-47, the Senate failed to shut down the
liberal/conservative filibuster of H.R. 3199 -- including a provision
which would allow BATFE to goosestep through your gun records
(4473's, etc.) WITHOUT THE APPROVAL OF ANY COURT. Under the Senate
rules, 60 votes would have been needed to end the filibuster on this
PATRIOT Act reauthorization.
Instead, this so-called "terrorism" legislation -- some of which is
relatively non-controversial -- was extended until February 3 in
order to allow negotiations to continue.
You might remember that 16 provisions of the PATRIOT Act were set to
expire on New Year's Day. To prevent this, Congress extended the
deadline for five weeks, into early February. Even if these 16
provisions expire, the underlying PATRIOT Act will still remain in
force. GOA is second to none in its desire to protect this nation's
security and prevent terrorists from attacking American citizens.
But we believe the best way to do this is to abide by the
Constitution. Freedom works. The Second Amendment works. Guns in
the hands of airline pilots on 9-11 would have prevented the
terrorist hijackings that day. Restricting liberty only makes us
less safe... and letting the BATFE and other federal agencies to
conduct unlimited warrantless searches of firearms purchase records
is not going to make us safer.
Now, there've been some interesting developments over the last couple
of days.
At least one Senate office has suggested that negotiators may be
willing to "deal" in order to completely exempt 4473's and
other gun records from federal agents' warrantless search powers. Under this
deal -- which would be total victory for gun owners -- the provisions
of the pro-gun McClure-Volkmer Firearms Owners Protection Act would
govern what gun records BATFE can and can't see.
We will continue working to exempt gun records from the "snooping"
provisions of H.R. 3199. But we're asking you to strengthen our hand
by continuing to pressure Congress. Since Gun Owners of America is
fighting a lonely battle to exempt gun records from the clause of the
PATRIOT Act, your activism is crucial. While you might want to ask
the other groups what they're doing to fight these provisions, we
definitely need you to contact the Congress right now.
ACTION: Please write your senators. Urge them to insist that
pro-gun language be inserted into H.R. 3199 which ensures that BATFE
is prohibited from conducting unlimited warrantless searches of
firearms purchase records. The vote on this legislation will take
place in less than one month. Negotiations on this bill are
occurring right now. It's imperative that you contact your Senators
right away!
You can visit the Gun Owners Legislative Action Center at
http://www.gunowners.org/activism.htm to send your Senators a
pre-written e-mail message such as the one below.
Or, you can call your Senators toll-free at 877-762-8762.
NEWS ROUNDUP
In the West, a green ranch movement Capitalizing on growing public concern about food safety, some ranchers now specialize in grass-fed beef. Rather than spending their last months in feedlots shot full of antibiotics, these cattle live more like their 19th century ancestors. A recent tax-code provision (some call it a loophole) encourages ranchers to go organic, to keep grasslands free of herbicides and pesticides – and out of development. In the past, environmental groups have mostly opposed range grazing, a position that, ironically, has put them at odds with the organic, grass-fed beef proponents. But that predisposition may be moderating. In 1997, ranchers formed the nonprofit, rancher-run California Rangeland Trust, primarily to keep rangelands in agriculture. "As California's population continues to grow, ranchers should begin to recognize the value of undisturbed landscapes to those seeking experiences outside of their urban environment," according to a report by the University of California's Integrated Hardwood Range Management Program, which praises the trust – and then adds a twist: Much of the state's native grassland vegetation evolved in the presence of grazing animals – and may be genetically programmed for grazing. "To be sure, cattle are not the same as mastodons, camels, ancient horses and bison that once grazed here, but their use of the land may better reflect that historical use than if they are excluded entirely," according to the report....
Salazar, Reid take Democratic message to `red states' Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid was in Colorado Tuesday to spread the Democratic message to "red states," touring the state with fellow Democrat Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar who bucked the trend by winning last year on GOP turf. Salazar and Reid, from Nevada, made stops in Arizona before talking to reporters in Salazar's Denver office. Reid planned to travel without Salazar to Utah, Idaho and Nebraska in what he said will be a continuing effort to win back rural voters for his party. "Democrats lost around the county because we simply had forgotten about rural America," Reid said. "They thought they could win all the elections by campaigning in the big cities." "While the farmers and ranchers are dying on the vine, the Republicans are supporting the banks that are foreclosing on their mortgages," Reid said....
Bison hunt to be halted temporarily State wildlife officials said Tuesday they plan to temporarily halt the hunting of bison that leave Yellowstone National Park's western edge to allow for the hazing of animals that have ventured too far into Montana. The temporary closure is set to take effect after sunset Wednesday. Officials hope to have it lifted before Monday, when the second half of the bison hunting season starts, said Mel Frost, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. The closure would apply only to hunting near the park's western side, near West Yellowstone, Mont., where, as of early Tuesday, four bison had been killed as part of the hunt, she said. The hunt began Nov. 15. Hunting would continue uninterrupted near Yellowstone's northern boundary, where 15 bison had been killed in the hunt as of early Tuesday, Frost said. Terms of the hunt allow for a temporary closure if state and federal officials deem it necessary to haze wandering bison....
Idaho may kill wolves to help elk As explorers Lewis and Clark tramped across northcentral Idaho in mid-September 1805, game was so scarce they named one waterway "Hungery Creek" and another "Colt Killed Creek" for a foal they shot and devoured. This paucity of wildlife such as elk in the steep, forested Clearwater Basin persists today, and some are pinning their hopes on an Idaho Fish and Game proposal that could change things. The agency has proposed killing some wolves that hunters believe are devouring the herds at an unsustainable pace. Thirty-five wolves were reintroduced to central Idaho in 1995, and now there are about 600 in the state. An estimated 30 are believed to roam the Clearwater. Last week, Gov. Dirk Kempthorne took the wolf-management baton from U.S. Interior Secretary Gale Norton, giving the state more control over its growing population of predators that have federal protections under the 1973 Endangered Species Act....
Feds put Western oil shale back on front burner A hearing Tuesday on federal plans to unlock oil shale reserves in the Intermountain West was packed by small-time speculators, some of whom questioned whether today's technology would let them squeeze oil out of rock profitably. The Bureau of Land Management is expected within weeks to award experimental leases on 160-acre parcels for oil-shale development while it studies a broader program for commercial operations by late 2007. Tuesday's public hearing was the first in a series on the larger plan to unlock the world's largest oil shale reserves, which stretch across parts of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. But even among some people who applied for experimental leases there was skepticism that technology had advanced enough since 1982, when Exxon abandoned the last commercial effort....
Selling public land to private mining companies: Crested Butte mine goes before federal appeals court In a closely watched case that could affect similar claims throughout the West, local governments and an environmental group argued before an appellate court Monday that they have a right to challenge the sale of public land to a private mining company. The town of Crested Butte, Gunnison County and the High Country Citizens Alliance are trying to revive their lawsuit claiming the sale of 155 acres on Mount Emmons to the Phelps Dodge Corp. violates federal law. They say the Bureau of Land Management shouldn't have sold the land because Phelps Dodge can't show that the proposed molybdenum mine would be profitable as required by an 1872 mining law. Last year, a federal court sided with the BLM and Phelps Dodge, which said the law prevents third parties from challenging mining patents _ essentially deeds _ on public land. The court ruled that only people with a competing claim to ownership of the land can sue. A spokesman for Phelps Dodge said the company agrees with the ruling even though it is in negotiations to transfer the land to the previous owners....
After the fall On Dec. 19, 1913, the Hetch Hetchy Valley disappeared. With the stroke of a pen, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Congressional bill that authorized the construction of the O'Shaughnessy Dam. Ten years later, the Hetch Hetchy — 7 miles long and up to 1 mile wide, Yosemite's northern twin — started to flood. More than 90 years later, the decision still haunts. In 1987, Secretary of the Interior Donald Hodel proposed tearing the dam down, and similar rhetoric could be heard just last fall. Now the Schwarzenegger administration is studying the costs and benefits of restoring the valley. If studies prove correct, tearing down the dam is not complicated, but imagining the outcome is. Novelist Greg Sarris has studied the environmental reports and historical documents, looked at the computer-generated designs and read the journals of one of the valley's earliest chroniclers, John Muir. The result is a short story that takes us to an imagined future, Muir's cathedral, where the law of unintended consequences is slowly unfolding....
Bear Witness Grizzly Man, the most extraordinary documentary of 2005 (yes, better than the penguins), tells the story of a gifted man caught in the grip of a reckless certainty who ventures into a moral wilderness and almost loses sight of his humanity. I refer, of course, to the film's director, Werner Herzog. Though his film is ostensibly about Timothy Treadwell, who spent thirteen summers living among wild grizzlies in Alaska before being killed and eaten by one of them in the fall of 2003, in the end it is also about Herzog himself--something that will come as no surprise to those familiar with his work. In his indispensable The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson writes that the German-born filmmaker "is not the ideal documentarian. You feel he has made his mind up about so many things." This is particularly true of Grizzly Man, which treats Treadwell not only as a subject but as a kind of friendly philosophical adversary. At its most revealing moments, the film takes the form of an argument, between Treadwell's heedless conviction and Herzog's rationalist cynicism, over the nature of nature and the nature of man....
Salmon That Grow Up Fast Elliot Entis doesn't much like to think of himself as a pioneer. And aside from a single framed photo of a salmon hanging on the wall, Entis' tiny office in Waltham, Mass., offers barely a hint of what has been a labor of love since 1992. His company, Aqua Bounty Technologies, has created a breed of salmon that grows twice as fast as normal farmed salmon, because they carry part of the genetic code of another type of fish, the ocean pout. Aqua Bounty is in the final stages of a five-year battle to get the product approved by the Food & Drug Administration, which has yet to approve any transgenic animal for human consumption. If the company succeeds, Entis' salmon could become the first such product on the market. He hopes to achieve that milestone by 2008. Entis' salmon grow so fast because of a change made to one of the roughly 40,000 genes in their DNA. In normal salmon, the gene that controls the production of growth hormone is activated by light, so the fish generally grow only during the sunny summer months. But by attaching what's known as a "promoter sequence" -- part of a specific gene -- from the pout, Aqua Bounty ended up with salmon that make growth hormone all year round....
Sierra Pacific Resources Intends To Build $3 Billion Power Complex Sierra Pacific Resources announced its intention to move forward with development of a coal-fired power complex in White Pine County, located in eastern Nevada, and an approximately 250-mile transmission line that for the first time would provide an electric connection between the northern and southern parts of the state. The power facility, which would be the largest energy development project in the state since Hoover Dam, will serve customers of Sierra Pacific Power Company and Nevada Power Company in northern and southern Nevada, respectively. It initially calls for two 750 megawatt (MW) units utilizing the latest, state-of-the-art, fully-environmental compliant, clean pulverized coal technologies. The plans also provide for expansion with two 500 MW coal gasification units when the technology becomes commercially viable. The company said the facility's initial 750 MW operating unit is expected to become operational during 2011 with the second unit coming on stream within the following three years. The planned transmission line not only will provide the all-important tie between northern and southern Nevada, but also will address the company's and the state's emphasis on development of renewable energy resources....
Column: Corps of Engineers' plan for spring rise is bad for water conservation The Army Corps of Engineers is proposing a Missouri River management plan that includes drought water conservation measures, which is good for the state, as well as a spring rise supposedly to cue the endangered pallid sturgeon to spawn, which is harmful to the state. The spring rise is required by the Endangered Species Act and will be implemented if the storage in dams exceeds 36.5 million acre feet of water, which is likely. These two items are opposed in reference to water conservation. Oahe, Garrison and Fort Peck reservoirs are very low, resulting in water intakes being above the reservoir levels. Even the modest spring rise proposed will lower the water levels. Spring rises, like all flood pulses, increase streambed degradation and increase sedimentation in the reservoirs. The spring rise will make it harder to maintain water levels in the reservoirs during the spring fish spawning season. All of this is especially distasteful because no science has been presented to support the contention that the pallid sturgeons are cued to spawn by flow pulses. Studies on the Marias River in Nebraska, the Missouri River below Fort Peck Dam in Montana, the Yellowstone River in North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, and the Missouri River downstream of Gavins Point Dam all indicated that flow is not controlling spawning....
Immigration law changes will cost farmers Law changes growing out of homeland security issues could mean some hardships for U.S. farmers and ranchers, according to the nation’s largest general farm organization. American Farm Bureau Federation figures say that amendments to immigration laws could cost U.S. agriculture as much nine billion dollars a year. Farm Bureau economist Pat O’Brien says 50 percent of the cost of fruit and vegetable production is hired labor, about half of which is migrant. “You affect the supply of that labor available, you’re going to increase the cost of operating in that sector dramatically,” says O’Brien about the consequences of preventing migrant workers from entering the U.S. to work, “you’re going to displace American producers as more competitive production from abroad comes into the U.S.” If migrant workers are kept out, O’Brien says producers will have to draw labor from the higher paid janitorial and construction jobs. O’Brien says wages paid to migrant farm workers have more than doubled in the last twenty years.
In the West, a green ranch movement Capitalizing on growing public concern about food safety, some ranchers now specialize in grass-fed beef. Rather than spending their last months in feedlots shot full of antibiotics, these cattle live more like their 19th century ancestors. A recent tax-code provision (some call it a loophole) encourages ranchers to go organic, to keep grasslands free of herbicides and pesticides – and out of development. In the past, environmental groups have mostly opposed range grazing, a position that, ironically, has put them at odds with the organic, grass-fed beef proponents. But that predisposition may be moderating. In 1997, ranchers formed the nonprofit, rancher-run California Rangeland Trust, primarily to keep rangelands in agriculture. "As California's population continues to grow, ranchers should begin to recognize the value of undisturbed landscapes to those seeking experiences outside of their urban environment," according to a report by the University of California's Integrated Hardwood Range Management Program, which praises the trust – and then adds a twist: Much of the state's native grassland vegetation evolved in the presence of grazing animals – and may be genetically programmed for grazing. "To be sure, cattle are not the same as mastodons, camels, ancient horses and bison that once grazed here, but their use of the land may better reflect that historical use than if they are excluded entirely," according to the report....
Salazar, Reid take Democratic message to `red states' Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid was in Colorado Tuesday to spread the Democratic message to "red states," touring the state with fellow Democrat Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar who bucked the trend by winning last year on GOP turf. Salazar and Reid, from Nevada, made stops in Arizona before talking to reporters in Salazar's Denver office. Reid planned to travel without Salazar to Utah, Idaho and Nebraska in what he said will be a continuing effort to win back rural voters for his party. "Democrats lost around the county because we simply had forgotten about rural America," Reid said. "They thought they could win all the elections by campaigning in the big cities." "While the farmers and ranchers are dying on the vine, the Republicans are supporting the banks that are foreclosing on their mortgages," Reid said....
Bison hunt to be halted temporarily State wildlife officials said Tuesday they plan to temporarily halt the hunting of bison that leave Yellowstone National Park's western edge to allow for the hazing of animals that have ventured too far into Montana. The temporary closure is set to take effect after sunset Wednesday. Officials hope to have it lifted before Monday, when the second half of the bison hunting season starts, said Mel Frost, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. The closure would apply only to hunting near the park's western side, near West Yellowstone, Mont., where, as of early Tuesday, four bison had been killed as part of the hunt, she said. The hunt began Nov. 15. Hunting would continue uninterrupted near Yellowstone's northern boundary, where 15 bison had been killed in the hunt as of early Tuesday, Frost said. Terms of the hunt allow for a temporary closure if state and federal officials deem it necessary to haze wandering bison....
Idaho may kill wolves to help elk As explorers Lewis and Clark tramped across northcentral Idaho in mid-September 1805, game was so scarce they named one waterway "Hungery Creek" and another "Colt Killed Creek" for a foal they shot and devoured. This paucity of wildlife such as elk in the steep, forested Clearwater Basin persists today, and some are pinning their hopes on an Idaho Fish and Game proposal that could change things. The agency has proposed killing some wolves that hunters believe are devouring the herds at an unsustainable pace. Thirty-five wolves were reintroduced to central Idaho in 1995, and now there are about 600 in the state. An estimated 30 are believed to roam the Clearwater. Last week, Gov. Dirk Kempthorne took the wolf-management baton from U.S. Interior Secretary Gale Norton, giving the state more control over its growing population of predators that have federal protections under the 1973 Endangered Species Act....
Feds put Western oil shale back on front burner A hearing Tuesday on federal plans to unlock oil shale reserves in the Intermountain West was packed by small-time speculators, some of whom questioned whether today's technology would let them squeeze oil out of rock profitably. The Bureau of Land Management is expected within weeks to award experimental leases on 160-acre parcels for oil-shale development while it studies a broader program for commercial operations by late 2007. Tuesday's public hearing was the first in a series on the larger plan to unlock the world's largest oil shale reserves, which stretch across parts of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. But even among some people who applied for experimental leases there was skepticism that technology had advanced enough since 1982, when Exxon abandoned the last commercial effort....
Selling public land to private mining companies: Crested Butte mine goes before federal appeals court In a closely watched case that could affect similar claims throughout the West, local governments and an environmental group argued before an appellate court Monday that they have a right to challenge the sale of public land to a private mining company. The town of Crested Butte, Gunnison County and the High Country Citizens Alliance are trying to revive their lawsuit claiming the sale of 155 acres on Mount Emmons to the Phelps Dodge Corp. violates federal law. They say the Bureau of Land Management shouldn't have sold the land because Phelps Dodge can't show that the proposed molybdenum mine would be profitable as required by an 1872 mining law. Last year, a federal court sided with the BLM and Phelps Dodge, which said the law prevents third parties from challenging mining patents _ essentially deeds _ on public land. The court ruled that only people with a competing claim to ownership of the land can sue. A spokesman for Phelps Dodge said the company agrees with the ruling even though it is in negotiations to transfer the land to the previous owners....
After the fall On Dec. 19, 1913, the Hetch Hetchy Valley disappeared. With the stroke of a pen, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Congressional bill that authorized the construction of the O'Shaughnessy Dam. Ten years later, the Hetch Hetchy — 7 miles long and up to 1 mile wide, Yosemite's northern twin — started to flood. More than 90 years later, the decision still haunts. In 1987, Secretary of the Interior Donald Hodel proposed tearing the dam down, and similar rhetoric could be heard just last fall. Now the Schwarzenegger administration is studying the costs and benefits of restoring the valley. If studies prove correct, tearing down the dam is not complicated, but imagining the outcome is. Novelist Greg Sarris has studied the environmental reports and historical documents, looked at the computer-generated designs and read the journals of one of the valley's earliest chroniclers, John Muir. The result is a short story that takes us to an imagined future, Muir's cathedral, where the law of unintended consequences is slowly unfolding....
Bear Witness Grizzly Man, the most extraordinary documentary of 2005 (yes, better than the penguins), tells the story of a gifted man caught in the grip of a reckless certainty who ventures into a moral wilderness and almost loses sight of his humanity. I refer, of course, to the film's director, Werner Herzog. Though his film is ostensibly about Timothy Treadwell, who spent thirteen summers living among wild grizzlies in Alaska before being killed and eaten by one of them in the fall of 2003, in the end it is also about Herzog himself--something that will come as no surprise to those familiar with his work. In his indispensable The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson writes that the German-born filmmaker "is not the ideal documentarian. You feel he has made his mind up about so many things." This is particularly true of Grizzly Man, which treats Treadwell not only as a subject but as a kind of friendly philosophical adversary. At its most revealing moments, the film takes the form of an argument, between Treadwell's heedless conviction and Herzog's rationalist cynicism, over the nature of nature and the nature of man....
Salmon That Grow Up Fast Elliot Entis doesn't much like to think of himself as a pioneer. And aside from a single framed photo of a salmon hanging on the wall, Entis' tiny office in Waltham, Mass., offers barely a hint of what has been a labor of love since 1992. His company, Aqua Bounty Technologies, has created a breed of salmon that grows twice as fast as normal farmed salmon, because they carry part of the genetic code of another type of fish, the ocean pout. Aqua Bounty is in the final stages of a five-year battle to get the product approved by the Food & Drug Administration, which has yet to approve any transgenic animal for human consumption. If the company succeeds, Entis' salmon could become the first such product on the market. He hopes to achieve that milestone by 2008. Entis' salmon grow so fast because of a change made to one of the roughly 40,000 genes in their DNA. In normal salmon, the gene that controls the production of growth hormone is activated by light, so the fish generally grow only during the sunny summer months. But by attaching what's known as a "promoter sequence" -- part of a specific gene -- from the pout, Aqua Bounty ended up with salmon that make growth hormone all year round....
Sierra Pacific Resources Intends To Build $3 Billion Power Complex Sierra Pacific Resources announced its intention to move forward with development of a coal-fired power complex in White Pine County, located in eastern Nevada, and an approximately 250-mile transmission line that for the first time would provide an electric connection between the northern and southern parts of the state. The power facility, which would be the largest energy development project in the state since Hoover Dam, will serve customers of Sierra Pacific Power Company and Nevada Power Company in northern and southern Nevada, respectively. It initially calls for two 750 megawatt (MW) units utilizing the latest, state-of-the-art, fully-environmental compliant, clean pulverized coal technologies. The plans also provide for expansion with two 500 MW coal gasification units when the technology becomes commercially viable. The company said the facility's initial 750 MW operating unit is expected to become operational during 2011 with the second unit coming on stream within the following three years. The planned transmission line not only will provide the all-important tie between northern and southern Nevada, but also will address the company's and the state's emphasis on development of renewable energy resources....
Column: Corps of Engineers' plan for spring rise is bad for water conservation The Army Corps of Engineers is proposing a Missouri River management plan that includes drought water conservation measures, which is good for the state, as well as a spring rise supposedly to cue the endangered pallid sturgeon to spawn, which is harmful to the state. The spring rise is required by the Endangered Species Act and will be implemented if the storage in dams exceeds 36.5 million acre feet of water, which is likely. These two items are opposed in reference to water conservation. Oahe, Garrison and Fort Peck reservoirs are very low, resulting in water intakes being above the reservoir levels. Even the modest spring rise proposed will lower the water levels. Spring rises, like all flood pulses, increase streambed degradation and increase sedimentation in the reservoirs. The spring rise will make it harder to maintain water levels in the reservoirs during the spring fish spawning season. All of this is especially distasteful because no science has been presented to support the contention that the pallid sturgeons are cued to spawn by flow pulses. Studies on the Marias River in Nebraska, the Missouri River below Fort Peck Dam in Montana, the Yellowstone River in North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, and the Missouri River downstream of Gavins Point Dam all indicated that flow is not controlling spawning....
Immigration law changes will cost farmers Law changes growing out of homeland security issues could mean some hardships for U.S. farmers and ranchers, according to the nation’s largest general farm organization. American Farm Bureau Federation figures say that amendments to immigration laws could cost U.S. agriculture as much nine billion dollars a year. Farm Bureau economist Pat O’Brien says 50 percent of the cost of fruit and vegetable production is hired labor, about half of which is migrant. “You affect the supply of that labor available, you’re going to increase the cost of operating in that sector dramatically,” says O’Brien about the consequences of preventing migrant workers from entering the U.S. to work, “you’re going to displace American producers as more competitive production from abroad comes into the U.S.” If migrant workers are kept out, O’Brien says producers will have to draw labor from the higher paid janitorial and construction jobs. O’Brien says wages paid to migrant farm workers have more than doubled in the last twenty years.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
FLE
U.S. can open private mail in terrorism fight
U.S. officials can open personal mail arriving from abroad as part of the fight against terrorism, and do so when they deem it necessary to protect the country, a Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman said on Monday. News of the little-known practise follows revelations that the government approved eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without judicial oversight after the September 11 attacks, which sparked concern from civil liberties advocates and some lawmakers who called for congressional hearings. "Customs and Border Protection is charged with making sure that terrorists and terrorists' weapons don't enter the country," said Suzanne Trevino, a spokeswoman for the customs agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. "One of our areas of responsibility is to inspect international mail coming into our country," she said. "We respect privacy and always keep that at the forefront, but at the same time we need to make sure we do our job in keeping U.S. citizens safe." Customs and Border Protection's web site notes that "all mail originating outside United States Customs territory that is to be delivered inside U.S. Customs territory is subject to Customs examination." Grant Goodman, an 81-year-old retired University of Kansas history professor, drew attention to the policy after a letter he received from a colleague in the Philippines was opened and resealed by Customs and Border Protection, and only then sent on to him....
Judges Just Briefed on Surveillance Plans
The federal judges who were bypassed when the Bush administration ordered warrantless wiretaps in the United States received a secret briefing Monday on details of the surveillance. Separately, a former FBI director and other lawyers questioned whether the surveillance is legal. The classified briefing at the Justice Department had been requested by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, presiding judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. Established by Congress in the late 1970s, the court oversees the government's handling of espionage and terrorism investigations. U.S. District Judge James Robertson last month resigned from the FISA court and other judges voiced concerns about the National Security Agency's electronic surveillance program, which President Bush authorized after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. Gen. Michael Hayden, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, was among administration officials who attended the briefing. Hayden served as NSA director when the electronic surveillance program was launched and has since become the government's No. 2 intelligence official. Details of the program remain highly classified....
Report Rebuts Bush on Spying
A report by Congress's research arm concluded yesterday that the administration's justification for the warrantless eavesdropping authorized by President Bush conflicts with existing law and hinges on weak legal arguments. The Congressional Research Service's report rebuts the central assertions made recently by Bush and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales about the president's authority to order secret intercepts of telephone and e-mail exchanges between people inside the United States and their contacts abroad. The findings, the first nonpartisan assessment of the program's legality to date, prompted Democratic lawmakers and civil liberties advocates to repeat calls yesterday for Congress to conduct hearings on the monitoring program and attempt to halt it. The 44-page report said that Bush probably cannot claim the broad presidential powers he has relied upon as authority to order the secret monitoring of calls made by U.S. citizens since the fall of 2001. Congress expressly intended for the government to seek warrants from a special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before engaging in such surveillance when it passed legislation creating the court in 1978, the CRS report said. The report also concluded that Bush's assertion that Congress authorized such eavesdropping to detect and fight terrorists does not appear to be supported by the special resolution that Congress approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which focused on authorizing the president to use military force. "It appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the NSA electronic surveillance operations here," the authors of the CRS report wrote. The administration's legal justification "does not seem to be . . . well-grounded," they said....
Gonzales' testimony eyed for hearing on surveillance
The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday said he has asked Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to testify during open hearings on the legality of the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. Sen. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Republican and Judiciary chairman, said Mr. Gonzales' testimony is being sought for the hearings, scheduled for early February, because he is the principal spokesman for the administration's position. The attorney general was White House counsel when Mr. Bush initiated the program, a role that could raise issues of attorney-client privilege in seeking his testimony. A message left with the Justice Department yesterday was not immediately returned. Asked on CBS' "Face the Nation" whether Mr. Gonzales had agreed to appear, Mr. Specter said, "Well, I didn't ask him if he had agreed. I told him we were holding the hearings, and he didn't object. I don't think he has a whole lot of choice on testifying." Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, called for former Attorney General John Ashcroft and former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey to testify at the hearings. "It would render these hearings useless and prevent the American people from getting to the bottom of this if the administration invoked executive privilege," Mr. Schumer, a Judiciary Committee member, said in a statement. Academics and others will be asked to appear, part of a list of witnesses "who think the president was right and people who think the president was wrong," Mr. Specter said....
NSA chief not concerned by congressional inquiries
The head of the National Security Agency told employees last month that NSA officials had not violated U.S. law by participating in an agency program that eavesdrops on U.S. citizens without judicial oversight, newly released documents show. "Media coverage surmises that administration and agency officials may have acted unlawfully -- notions I reject, categorically!" NSA Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander assured agency employees in a December 22 message. He acknowledged that Congress may schedule hearings on the domestic spying program, which President George W. Bush authorized in 2002 to eavesdrop on Americans' telephone calls and e-mails without first obtaining warrants. "Overall, we are not concerned," the NSA director said. "Our operations are carefully deliberated and measured; they are within the law; and they are nobly executed with strict oversight." The December 22 message, and an earlier one in which Alexander cautioned staff not to comment to the media, were released by the NSA in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The New York Times, which first reported the program's existence last month....
The Wisdom in Wiretaps
The Bush Administration's use of warrantless wiretaps in the war on terrorism continues to generate controversy, and Congress is planning hearings. Some of the loopier elements of the Democratic Party have even suggested the wiretaps are grounds for impeachment. But the more we learn about the practice, the clearer it is that the White House has been right to employ and defend it. The issue is not about circumventing normal civilian Constitutional protections, after all. The debate concerns surveillance for military purposes during wartime. No one would suggest the President must get a warrant to listen to terrorist communications on the battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan. But what the critics are really insisting on here is that the President get a warrant the minute a terrorist communicates with an associate who may be inside in the U.S. That's a loophole only a terrorist could love. To the extent the President's critics are motivated by anything other than partisanship, their confusion seems to involve a 1978 law called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA provides a mechanism by which the executive can conduct warrant-approved surveillance under certain circumstances. But FISA covers only a limited number of intelligence-gathering scenarios. And no Administration -- Democrat or Republican -- has recognized FISA as a binding limit on executive power. Jimmy Carter's Attorney General, Griffin Bell, emphasized when FISA passed that the law "does not take away the power of the President under the Constitution." And in the 1980 case of United States v. Truong, the Carter Administration successfully argued its authority to have conducted entirely domestic, warrantless wiretaps of a U.S. citizen and a Vietnamese citizen who had been passing intelligence to the North Vietnamese during the 1970s Paris peace talks. In 1994, Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick also asserted an "inherent authority" not just to warrantless electronic surveillance but to "warrantless physical searches," too. The close associate of Hillary Rodham Clinton told Congress that much intelligence gathering couldn't be conducted within the limits placed on normal criminal investigations -- even if you wanted to for the sake of appearances. For example, she added, "it is usually impossible to describe the object of the search in advance with sufficient detail to satisfy the requirements of the criminal law."....
The FISA Farce
President Bush proudly announced last month that he is violating federal law. He declared that in 2002 he ordered the National Security Agency to begin conducting warrantless wiretaps and email intercepts on Americans. He asserted that the wiretaps would continue, regardless of the law. Bush claims that he must ignore the law because the secret federal court created to authorize such wiretaps moves too slowly to protect U.S. national security. Amazingly, his claim has been treated with respect, if not deference, by much of the nation’s media. Much of the media has groveled to his claim the same way that the special court grovels to federal agencies. In 1978, responding to scandals about political spying on Americans in the name of counterespionage, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA created a new “court” to oversee federal surveillance of foreign agents within the United States. The FISA court may be the biggest bunch of lapdogs in the federal government. The court approved almost every one of the 15,000 search warrant requests the feds submitted between 1978 and 2002, and it continues to approve more than 99 percent of requests. FISA provides a judicial process only in the sense that the room where the political appointees convene is called a “court.” As national security expert James Bamford observed, “Like a modern Star Chamber, the FISA court meets behind a cipher-locked door in a windowless, bug-proof, vault-like room guarded 24 hours a day on the top floor of the Justice Department building. The eleven judges (increased from seven by the Patriot Act) hear only the government’s side.” Federal agencies can submit retroactive search warrant requests up to 72 hours after they begin surveilling someone. In 2002, for instance, Attorney General John Ashcroft personally issued more than 170 emergency domestic spying warrants — permitting agents to carry out wiretaps and search homes and offices for as many as 72 hours before the feds requested a search warrant from the FISA court. He used such powers almost a 100 times as often as attorneys general did before 9/11....
Poll: Most Want Court OK for Gov't Taps
A majority of Americans want the Bush administration to get court approval before eavesdropping on people inside the United States, even if those calls might involve suspected terrorists, an AP-Ipsos poll shows. Over the past three weeks, President Bush and top aides have defended the electronic monitoring program they secretly launched shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, as a vital tool to protect the nation from al-Qaida and its affiliates. Yet 56 percent of respondents in an AP-Ipsos poll said the government should be required to first get a court warrant to eavesdrop on the overseas calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens when those communications are believed to be tied to terrorism. Agreeing with the White House, some 42 percent of those surveyed do not believe the court approval is necessary. "We're at war," Bush said during a New Year's Day visit to San Antonio. "And as commander in chief, I've got to use the resources at my disposal, within the law, to protect the American people. ... It's a vital, necessary program." According to the poll, age matters in how people view the monitoring. Nearly two-thirds of those between age 18 to 29 believe warrants should be required, while people 65 and older are evenly divided. Party affiliation is a factor, too. Almost three-fourths of Democrats and one-third of Republicans want to require court warrants....
Your phone records are for sale
The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone -- for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts. Criminals can use such records to expose a government informant who regularly calls a law enforcement official. Suspicious spouses can see if their husband or wife is calling a certain someone a bit too often. And employers can check whether a worker is regularly calling a psychologist -- or a competing company. The Chicago Police Department is looking into the sale of phone records, a source said. Late last month, the department sent a warning to officers about Locatecell.com, which sells lists of calls made on cell phones and land lines. "Officers should be aware of this information when giving out their personal cell phone numbers to the general public," the bulletin said. "Undercover officers should also be aware of this information if they occasionally call personal numbers such as home or the office, from their [undercover] ones." To test the service, the FBI paid Locatecell.com $160 to buy the records for an agent's cell phone and received the list within three hours, the police bulletin said. Representatives of Data Find Solutions Inc., the Tennessee-based operator of Locatecell.com, could not be reached for comment. Frank Bochte, a spokesman for the FBI in Chicago, said he was aware of the Web site. "Not only in Chicago, but nationwide, the FBI notified its field offices of this potential threat to the security of our agents, and especially our undercover agents," Bochte said. "We need to educate our personnel about the dangers posed by individuals using this site and others like it. We are stressing that they should be careful in their cellular use."....
U.S. can open private mail in terrorism fight
U.S. officials can open personal mail arriving from abroad as part of the fight against terrorism, and do so when they deem it necessary to protect the country, a Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman said on Monday. News of the little-known practise follows revelations that the government approved eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without judicial oversight after the September 11 attacks, which sparked concern from civil liberties advocates and some lawmakers who called for congressional hearings. "Customs and Border Protection is charged with making sure that terrorists and terrorists' weapons don't enter the country," said Suzanne Trevino, a spokeswoman for the customs agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. "One of our areas of responsibility is to inspect international mail coming into our country," she said. "We respect privacy and always keep that at the forefront, but at the same time we need to make sure we do our job in keeping U.S. citizens safe." Customs and Border Protection's web site notes that "all mail originating outside United States Customs territory that is to be delivered inside U.S. Customs territory is subject to Customs examination." Grant Goodman, an 81-year-old retired University of Kansas history professor, drew attention to the policy after a letter he received from a colleague in the Philippines was opened and resealed by Customs and Border Protection, and only then sent on to him....
Judges Just Briefed on Surveillance Plans
The federal judges who were bypassed when the Bush administration ordered warrantless wiretaps in the United States received a secret briefing Monday on details of the surveillance. Separately, a former FBI director and other lawyers questioned whether the surveillance is legal. The classified briefing at the Justice Department had been requested by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, presiding judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. Established by Congress in the late 1970s, the court oversees the government's handling of espionage and terrorism investigations. U.S. District Judge James Robertson last month resigned from the FISA court and other judges voiced concerns about the National Security Agency's electronic surveillance program, which President Bush authorized after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. Gen. Michael Hayden, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, was among administration officials who attended the briefing. Hayden served as NSA director when the electronic surveillance program was launched and has since become the government's No. 2 intelligence official. Details of the program remain highly classified....
Report Rebuts Bush on Spying
A report by Congress's research arm concluded yesterday that the administration's justification for the warrantless eavesdropping authorized by President Bush conflicts with existing law and hinges on weak legal arguments. The Congressional Research Service's report rebuts the central assertions made recently by Bush and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales about the president's authority to order secret intercepts of telephone and e-mail exchanges between people inside the United States and their contacts abroad. The findings, the first nonpartisan assessment of the program's legality to date, prompted Democratic lawmakers and civil liberties advocates to repeat calls yesterday for Congress to conduct hearings on the monitoring program and attempt to halt it. The 44-page report said that Bush probably cannot claim the broad presidential powers he has relied upon as authority to order the secret monitoring of calls made by U.S. citizens since the fall of 2001. Congress expressly intended for the government to seek warrants from a special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before engaging in such surveillance when it passed legislation creating the court in 1978, the CRS report said. The report also concluded that Bush's assertion that Congress authorized such eavesdropping to detect and fight terrorists does not appear to be supported by the special resolution that Congress approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which focused on authorizing the president to use military force. "It appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the NSA electronic surveillance operations here," the authors of the CRS report wrote. The administration's legal justification "does not seem to be . . . well-grounded," they said....
Gonzales' testimony eyed for hearing on surveillance
The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday said he has asked Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to testify during open hearings on the legality of the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. Sen. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Republican and Judiciary chairman, said Mr. Gonzales' testimony is being sought for the hearings, scheduled for early February, because he is the principal spokesman for the administration's position. The attorney general was White House counsel when Mr. Bush initiated the program, a role that could raise issues of attorney-client privilege in seeking his testimony. A message left with the Justice Department yesterday was not immediately returned. Asked on CBS' "Face the Nation" whether Mr. Gonzales had agreed to appear, Mr. Specter said, "Well, I didn't ask him if he had agreed. I told him we were holding the hearings, and he didn't object. I don't think he has a whole lot of choice on testifying." Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, called for former Attorney General John Ashcroft and former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey to testify at the hearings. "It would render these hearings useless and prevent the American people from getting to the bottom of this if the administration invoked executive privilege," Mr. Schumer, a Judiciary Committee member, said in a statement. Academics and others will be asked to appear, part of a list of witnesses "who think the president was right and people who think the president was wrong," Mr. Specter said....
NSA chief not concerned by congressional inquiries
The head of the National Security Agency told employees last month that NSA officials had not violated U.S. law by participating in an agency program that eavesdrops on U.S. citizens without judicial oversight, newly released documents show. "Media coverage surmises that administration and agency officials may have acted unlawfully -- notions I reject, categorically!" NSA Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander assured agency employees in a December 22 message. He acknowledged that Congress may schedule hearings on the domestic spying program, which President George W. Bush authorized in 2002 to eavesdrop on Americans' telephone calls and e-mails without first obtaining warrants. "Overall, we are not concerned," the NSA director said. "Our operations are carefully deliberated and measured; they are within the law; and they are nobly executed with strict oversight." The December 22 message, and an earlier one in which Alexander cautioned staff not to comment to the media, were released by the NSA in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The New York Times, which first reported the program's existence last month....
The Wisdom in Wiretaps
The Bush Administration's use of warrantless wiretaps in the war on terrorism continues to generate controversy, and Congress is planning hearings. Some of the loopier elements of the Democratic Party have even suggested the wiretaps are grounds for impeachment. But the more we learn about the practice, the clearer it is that the White House has been right to employ and defend it. The issue is not about circumventing normal civilian Constitutional protections, after all. The debate concerns surveillance for military purposes during wartime. No one would suggest the President must get a warrant to listen to terrorist communications on the battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan. But what the critics are really insisting on here is that the President get a warrant the minute a terrorist communicates with an associate who may be inside in the U.S. That's a loophole only a terrorist could love. To the extent the President's critics are motivated by anything other than partisanship, their confusion seems to involve a 1978 law called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA provides a mechanism by which the executive can conduct warrant-approved surveillance under certain circumstances. But FISA covers only a limited number of intelligence-gathering scenarios. And no Administration -- Democrat or Republican -- has recognized FISA as a binding limit on executive power. Jimmy Carter's Attorney General, Griffin Bell, emphasized when FISA passed that the law "does not take away the power of the President under the Constitution." And in the 1980 case of United States v. Truong, the Carter Administration successfully argued its authority to have conducted entirely domestic, warrantless wiretaps of a U.S. citizen and a Vietnamese citizen who had been passing intelligence to the North Vietnamese during the 1970s Paris peace talks. In 1994, Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick also asserted an "inherent authority" not just to warrantless electronic surveillance but to "warrantless physical searches," too. The close associate of Hillary Rodham Clinton told Congress that much intelligence gathering couldn't be conducted within the limits placed on normal criminal investigations -- even if you wanted to for the sake of appearances. For example, she added, "it is usually impossible to describe the object of the search in advance with sufficient detail to satisfy the requirements of the criminal law."....
The FISA Farce
President Bush proudly announced last month that he is violating federal law. He declared that in 2002 he ordered the National Security Agency to begin conducting warrantless wiretaps and email intercepts on Americans. He asserted that the wiretaps would continue, regardless of the law. Bush claims that he must ignore the law because the secret federal court created to authorize such wiretaps moves too slowly to protect U.S. national security. Amazingly, his claim has been treated with respect, if not deference, by much of the nation’s media. Much of the media has groveled to his claim the same way that the special court grovels to federal agencies. In 1978, responding to scandals about political spying on Americans in the name of counterespionage, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA created a new “court” to oversee federal surveillance of foreign agents within the United States. The FISA court may be the biggest bunch of lapdogs in the federal government. The court approved almost every one of the 15,000 search warrant requests the feds submitted between 1978 and 2002, and it continues to approve more than 99 percent of requests. FISA provides a judicial process only in the sense that the room where the political appointees convene is called a “court.” As national security expert James Bamford observed, “Like a modern Star Chamber, the FISA court meets behind a cipher-locked door in a windowless, bug-proof, vault-like room guarded 24 hours a day on the top floor of the Justice Department building. The eleven judges (increased from seven by the Patriot Act) hear only the government’s side.” Federal agencies can submit retroactive search warrant requests up to 72 hours after they begin surveilling someone. In 2002, for instance, Attorney General John Ashcroft personally issued more than 170 emergency domestic spying warrants — permitting agents to carry out wiretaps and search homes and offices for as many as 72 hours before the feds requested a search warrant from the FISA court. He used such powers almost a 100 times as often as attorneys general did before 9/11....
Poll: Most Want Court OK for Gov't Taps
A majority of Americans want the Bush administration to get court approval before eavesdropping on people inside the United States, even if those calls might involve suspected terrorists, an AP-Ipsos poll shows. Over the past three weeks, President Bush and top aides have defended the electronic monitoring program they secretly launched shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, as a vital tool to protect the nation from al-Qaida and its affiliates. Yet 56 percent of respondents in an AP-Ipsos poll said the government should be required to first get a court warrant to eavesdrop on the overseas calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens when those communications are believed to be tied to terrorism. Agreeing with the White House, some 42 percent of those surveyed do not believe the court approval is necessary. "We're at war," Bush said during a New Year's Day visit to San Antonio. "And as commander in chief, I've got to use the resources at my disposal, within the law, to protect the American people. ... It's a vital, necessary program." According to the poll, age matters in how people view the monitoring. Nearly two-thirds of those between age 18 to 29 believe warrants should be required, while people 65 and older are evenly divided. Party affiliation is a factor, too. Almost three-fourths of Democrats and one-third of Republicans want to require court warrants....
Your phone records are for sale
The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone -- for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts. Criminals can use such records to expose a government informant who regularly calls a law enforcement official. Suspicious spouses can see if their husband or wife is calling a certain someone a bit too often. And employers can check whether a worker is regularly calling a psychologist -- or a competing company. The Chicago Police Department is looking into the sale of phone records, a source said. Late last month, the department sent a warning to officers about Locatecell.com, which sells lists of calls made on cell phones and land lines. "Officers should be aware of this information when giving out their personal cell phone numbers to the general public," the bulletin said. "Undercover officers should also be aware of this information if they occasionally call personal numbers such as home or the office, from their [undercover] ones." To test the service, the FBI paid Locatecell.com $160 to buy the records for an agent's cell phone and received the list within three hours, the police bulletin said. Representatives of Data Find Solutions Inc., the Tennessee-based operator of Locatecell.com, could not be reached for comment. Frank Bochte, a spokesman for the FBI in Chicago, said he was aware of the Web site. "Not only in Chicago, but nationwide, the FBI notified its field offices of this potential threat to the security of our agents, and especially our undercover agents," Bochte said. "We need to educate our personnel about the dangers posed by individuals using this site and others like it. We are stressing that they should be careful in their cellular use."....
NEWS ROUNDUP
Surface-use compensation issue resurfaces in legislature In a surface use showdown, two coalitions are working on separate solutions to the problem of the landowner impacts of oil and gas development. State Rep. Kathleen Curry, D-Gunnison, is preparing to introduce new surface-use legislation following the failure of a bill she carried last year. The state legislature goes into session on Wednesday. Meanwhile, the energy industry is working with agriculture interests in hopes of pursuing their own legislation. “We’re I think getting close to some things but no bill has been finalized yet,” said Calvin Roberts, a rancher outside New Castle who sits on the Colorado Farm Bureau board of directors. The Colorado Livestock Association, Colorado Wool Growers Association, Colorado Cattlemen’s Association and Colorado Association of Wheat Growers are working with the Colorado Oil & Gas Association on a draft bill. Curry said she doesn’t think such a measure meets the needs of landowners, and she is committed to run her own bill. Her measure last year was defeated in the House Agriculture, Livestock and Natural Resources Committee, which Curry chairs. Her new measure has been drafted by a coalition that includes associations representing homebuilders and Realtors, and several environmental organizations, including the Grand Valley Citizens Alliance, based in Garfield County....
Gold's rise revives desire to mine Buckhorn Six years ago, plans to extract more than a million ounces of gold from Buckhorn Mountain — one of the biggest and most controversial mining proposals in state history — collapsed amid opposition by state regulators, environmental groups and neighbors. Now a Canadian firm is floating a new plan for mining the mountain, propelled in part by a worldwide gold rush that has pushed prices to more than $500 an ounce — the highest in almost 25 years. Kinross Gold, the seventh-largest gold producer in the world, is offering a very different — and it says, environmentally cleaner — plan than the earlier, contentious Crown Jewel mine. Instead of blasting away the top of the 5,500-foot-high mountain and leaving behind a vast open pit, Kinross says it will operate a smaller, underground mine....
Judge stops timber sales A federal judge in Seattle has halted more than 140 Northwest timber sales -- about half of them slated for increasingly rare mature or old-growth forests. Over the next two years, the order Monday by U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman could stop the cutting of up to 289 million board feet of timber. That represents more than half the annual cut coming out of the region's national forests, according to a lawyer for environmentalists. Pechman had previously rejected the Bush administration's policy that made it no longer necessary to look for rare plants and animals before letting loose the chain saws. The timber industry contends that the surveys for about 300 rare plants and animals were never required by law or authorized by regulation. The industry is now considering reinstating a lawsuit that aimed to have the requirement declared illegal, said Chris West of the American Forest Resources Council. "We're not surprised, but we're disappointed (that the judge) went as far as she did, because she didn't distinguish between the projects that have nothing to do with old growth" and those that do, West said. "She did a meat-ax approach."....
New Uses for Glut of Small Logs From Thinning of Forests Slowly, however, the small-diameter movement, helped along by federal grants and Forest Service research, is helping to find new uses for smaller trees, like heating schools and hospitals and construction materials, including particle board, flooring and laminated beams. Peter Stark of Missoula, a freelance writer, wanted to thin his 80 acres of forest clogged with downed timber and crowded trees to prevent a fire but could not afford to do it, since clearing usually costs $300 to $1,000 an acre. He eventually found someone to remove the trees, most six or seven inches across, and the money he was paid for them covered the cost of thinning. At the same time, he was building a dance floor for his wife, Amy Ragsdale, who teaches dance at the University of Montana. Shocked at the cost of hardwood, Mr. Stark realized that he might be able to turn the waste trees into flooring. Mr. Stark bought back 25 tons of the larch trees and found a custom sawmill that could handle small diameters to turn them into tongue-and-groove flooring. The floor turned out so well that Mr. Stark formed a company, North Slope Sustainable Wood, with two partners, to market small diameter larch, the hardest of the soft woods, from forests being thinned. He sees such activity as a solution to the controversy over logging in Western forests....
Conservation Groups Challenge Heliskiing Plan A coalition of concerned citizens and conservation groups today filed a lawsuit in Idaho federal court challenging the U.S. Forest Service’s issuance of a permit that would dramatically increase the amount of commercial helicopter skiing allowed in a Wilderness Study Area on the Caribou-Targhee and Bridger-Teton National Forests. “We are fortunate to live in a region where there are still wild places that allow people to get away from it all, and where wildlife that is extinct in the rest of the country still maintains a toehold,” said Mark Poe, an attorney for Earthjustice, the law firm representing the plaintiffs. “If the Forest Service plan is carried out, we will have one fewer such place.” The helicopter skiing, or “heliskiing,” activity would be centered in the Palisades portion of the Snake River Range that spans the Idaho-Wyoming border between Jackson Hole, Wyoming and the Swan Valley in Idaho. Congress has designated the majority of the Palisades a Wilderness Study Area. Under the permit, a single commercial heliskiing company based in Jackson Hole would have exclusive use of the Palisades for up to 1,200 skier-days of service every winter for the next decade....
Grizzly delisting divides greens People in and around Wyoming are staking their ground over the federal government's proposal to remove grizzly bears from Endangered Species Act protection. Even as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans public open houses this week to gather input, conservation groups are divided. The National Parks Conservation Association came forward with an opinion last week, allying itself with other conservation groups that contend the scientific and legal requirements have been met to merit delisting of the grizzly. Still, Tim Stevens, Yellowstone program manager for the association's regional northern Rockies office, said the group still believes there are "pervasive threats" to the recovery of the grizzly, primarily in the form of secure funding and habitat. The group also wants to make sure future management of the grizzly is driven by the most accurate science....
Supreme Court Rejects Challenge To Buffers Around Salmon Streams The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal of a ruling that banned the use of pesticides around Western salmon streams. "We're very happy," Patti Goldman, an attorney with the environmental law firm Earthjustice, said Monday. "There have been many attempts by the chemical industry and the growers to get rid of the buffers; we now know they will remain in place." In January 2004, two years after finding that the Environmental Protection Agency had failed to consider the effect of pesticides on protected salmon, U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour in Seattle imposed a 100-yard buffer for aerial spraying and a 20-yard buffer for ground application of three dozen pesticides, from agricultural sprays to household weed-killers. His injunction also required that stores selling pesticides in 500 communities in the West post warnings about the potential effect of seven common pesticides on salmon and steelhead. The signs read: "SALMON HAZARD. This product contains pesticides which may harm salmon and steelhead. Use of this product in urban areas can pollute salmon streams." The judge's conditions will remain in effect until the EPA comes up with rules governing the use of pesticides around the streams in question....
Group rips agency for Mojave policies An environmental watchdog group claims a federal agency has failed to protect such sensitive species as the desert tortoise in the Mojave Desert while focusing on off-road-vehicle activities. The Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Ariz., says federal rangers assigned to the Barstow office of the Bureau of Land Management are devoting excessive time to off-roaders at places like the Dumont Dunes north of Baker, Johnson and Stoddard valleys south of Barstow, and El Mirage dry lake near Adelanto. "(Meanwhile), sensitive areas with high natural-resource and wilderness values receive scant attention," said ecologist Daniel Patterson, the center's desert program director. "We believe BLM rangers . . . devote an inordinate amount of time and resources to patrol and enforcement activities within (these) designated off-road-vehicle open areas." He said rangers focus on vehicle registration, drug activity and public safety in the areas, which contain critical habitat for various endangered animals and plants....
Bone-dry winter is bad news Zeroes dominate the year's first report on Arizona's snowpack, a crucial element of the state's water supply. Except for the tippy top of the state's highest peaks, there's no snow to measure, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the federal agency that monitors 38 sites across Arizona's high country. In Flagstaff, only a trace of snow has fallen this winter. The city's first measurable snow has never occurred this late since record-keeping began in 1898, according to the National Weather Service. Over the past 15 years, there's always been at least some snow at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on Jan. 1, even during years of extreme drought. But as 2006 began, the ground there was bare. "It looks like we're going back into the drought," said Larry Martinez, a water supply specialist with the conservation service. Ranchers and farmers who depend on stream diversions will feel the effects of a dry winter this spring, he said....
Hunting for reasons more elusive every year Riding home from a deer hunting trip to Oregon's Ochoco Mountains, the teenage boy answered his ringing cell phone, paused, then said, "I've been at a family gathering in Eastern Oregon." After he clicked off his phone, the boy glanced at his dad, sighed and said, "It's just easier that way." So it is. Hunting and fishing are declining in Oregon because it's easier to skip the whole hassle -- the rising costs of licenses and tags, the phone-book-thick regulations, the blizzard of no-trespassing signs, even the arguments with your non-hunting friends. Ask the thousands of Oregonians who stop hunting every year why they gave up the sport, and many will answer that it just got too hard. Hard to justify the costs, which average more than $1,400 annually. Hard to navigate the complex regulations and limited-entry tag drawings, which break up hunting parties and keep many eager hunters at home every fall. Hard to find farmers, ranchers and other landowners who welcome hunters the way they used to....
Bolting from bovine bondage A curious drama played out in the wilderness two weeks ago when a helicopter rescue spared the lives of four heifers stranded near 12,000 feet in the high mountains near Aspen. The cattle were discovered by a backcountry skier who notified the owner. This set off a series of feeding forays where skiers carried flakes of hay bales on their backs and literally hand-fed the hungry bovines. These cattle were wild. There is no other word for it. They had evaded numerous roundup attempts by the rancher and his family, stubbornly and elusively sheltering in the rugged mountains that gave them their freedom, but which ironically assured their doom. The rancher who spent all fall searching for them said that the wild heifers were more evasive than the native elk herds he encountered. These heifers held a strain of wildness that came alive during a summer of grazing in the wilderness, removed from man and his barbed wire....
Cowboy country saying 'whoa!' to 'Brokeback' Ask one of the locals like Julie Greer how they feel in rural Wyoming about "Brokeback Mountain," the gay-cowboy movie, and you don't have to wait long to get a reaction. "Yeah, we're offended!" she shoots back. "Because they called those sheepherders cowboys." It doesn't get any worse than that. But a close second is to call a cowboy gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that (as Seinfeld says). Well, actually, they think there is, and they don't care if city slickers like it or not. If you want to see a cowboy get out of his saddle in a nanosecond, ask him if he is dating the guy on the next horse. "People are offended that nothing is sacred anymore," says Greer, who works at the Hyattville post office. "People are talking about it. They won't go to the theater to see it." You knew this movie wouldn't go over big in the Broken Back Mountain area of Wyoming, where the same families have worked the range for more than 100 years. "Almost everyone on the crick has been here for at least a couple of generations," says rancher Maurice Bush, whose grandfather arrived here in 1898. They are salt-of-the-earth people. They live quietly. They see more cattle than people. They scratch out a living in hard-bitten country. They are blue collar and Republican, and they mind their own business. So when "Brokeback Mountain" hit movie theaters around the United States, they wondered exactly how they got dragged into this thing....
‘Texas Ranch House’ saddles up in May Saddle up, we're headin' to the ranch! "Texas Ranch House" is the name of the upcoming edition of these addictive living-history reality shows. The cast will live as Texas settlers did in 1867. Some will be cowboys, some ranch foremen, some cooks, others family members. The show is set after the Civil War's end, so freed slaves may also play roles in the show. The show's official site says "our volunteers will be fully immersed in the inner workings of a ranch house: building corrals, rounding up and branding cattle, taming stallions, and preparing for a two week cattle drive -- all the while tending to the daily needs of themselves and their livestock." The site's FAQ also notes that children will be home-schooled, as was common on Texas ranches that were often far from formal schools. Interestingly, the FAQ also addresses guns, stating "Our participants will not be permitted to use guns. It is something of a myth that all cowboys carried guns, and in fact guns were banned from most early ranches because they terrified cattle and could cause stampedes. Our show is about living the life of real 1867 cowboys and ranchers, not movie gunslingers." "Texas Ranch House" was shot in the summer and fall of 2005, and will air beginning May 1. Check your local PBS stations for specifics....
It's All Trew: Canning remains popular throughout time As long as I can remember, my grandparents, parents and kinfolk gathered and canned fruit of all kinds. Whether wild-grown or tame, whether canned or frozen, special efforts were always made to save and preserve these crops. Fortunately, I married Ruth who has continued the practice as she was also raised with this tradition. One of my early growth accomplishments came when I was strong enough to carry a 10-pound sack of sugar from the car into our pantry. I felt like Tarzan as Superman had not been invented at the time. Boy, did we use the sugar during canning season. Another of my chores was taking a milk bucket to the cellar and fetching empty fruit jars back to the kitchen. That was how I learned the difference in pints, quarts and half-gallons. I just missed the era of green glass jars with glass or galvanized lids. Every jar we owned had Ball or Mason written across the bottom. I can remember when every burner on our stove was busy steaming jars or lids or heating bubbling pots of fruit....
Surface-use compensation issue resurfaces in legislature In a surface use showdown, two coalitions are working on separate solutions to the problem of the landowner impacts of oil and gas development. State Rep. Kathleen Curry, D-Gunnison, is preparing to introduce new surface-use legislation following the failure of a bill she carried last year. The state legislature goes into session on Wednesday. Meanwhile, the energy industry is working with agriculture interests in hopes of pursuing their own legislation. “We’re I think getting close to some things but no bill has been finalized yet,” said Calvin Roberts, a rancher outside New Castle who sits on the Colorado Farm Bureau board of directors. The Colorado Livestock Association, Colorado Wool Growers Association, Colorado Cattlemen’s Association and Colorado Association of Wheat Growers are working with the Colorado Oil & Gas Association on a draft bill. Curry said she doesn’t think such a measure meets the needs of landowners, and she is committed to run her own bill. Her measure last year was defeated in the House Agriculture, Livestock and Natural Resources Committee, which Curry chairs. Her new measure has been drafted by a coalition that includes associations representing homebuilders and Realtors, and several environmental organizations, including the Grand Valley Citizens Alliance, based in Garfield County....
Gold's rise revives desire to mine Buckhorn Six years ago, plans to extract more than a million ounces of gold from Buckhorn Mountain — one of the biggest and most controversial mining proposals in state history — collapsed amid opposition by state regulators, environmental groups and neighbors. Now a Canadian firm is floating a new plan for mining the mountain, propelled in part by a worldwide gold rush that has pushed prices to more than $500 an ounce — the highest in almost 25 years. Kinross Gold, the seventh-largest gold producer in the world, is offering a very different — and it says, environmentally cleaner — plan than the earlier, contentious Crown Jewel mine. Instead of blasting away the top of the 5,500-foot-high mountain and leaving behind a vast open pit, Kinross says it will operate a smaller, underground mine....
Judge stops timber sales A federal judge in Seattle has halted more than 140 Northwest timber sales -- about half of them slated for increasingly rare mature or old-growth forests. Over the next two years, the order Monday by U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman could stop the cutting of up to 289 million board feet of timber. That represents more than half the annual cut coming out of the region's national forests, according to a lawyer for environmentalists. Pechman had previously rejected the Bush administration's policy that made it no longer necessary to look for rare plants and animals before letting loose the chain saws. The timber industry contends that the surveys for about 300 rare plants and animals were never required by law or authorized by regulation. The industry is now considering reinstating a lawsuit that aimed to have the requirement declared illegal, said Chris West of the American Forest Resources Council. "We're not surprised, but we're disappointed (that the judge) went as far as she did, because she didn't distinguish between the projects that have nothing to do with old growth" and those that do, West said. "She did a meat-ax approach."....
New Uses for Glut of Small Logs From Thinning of Forests Slowly, however, the small-diameter movement, helped along by federal grants and Forest Service research, is helping to find new uses for smaller trees, like heating schools and hospitals and construction materials, including particle board, flooring and laminated beams. Peter Stark of Missoula, a freelance writer, wanted to thin his 80 acres of forest clogged with downed timber and crowded trees to prevent a fire but could not afford to do it, since clearing usually costs $300 to $1,000 an acre. He eventually found someone to remove the trees, most six or seven inches across, and the money he was paid for them covered the cost of thinning. At the same time, he was building a dance floor for his wife, Amy Ragsdale, who teaches dance at the University of Montana. Shocked at the cost of hardwood, Mr. Stark realized that he might be able to turn the waste trees into flooring. Mr. Stark bought back 25 tons of the larch trees and found a custom sawmill that could handle small diameters to turn them into tongue-and-groove flooring. The floor turned out so well that Mr. Stark formed a company, North Slope Sustainable Wood, with two partners, to market small diameter larch, the hardest of the soft woods, from forests being thinned. He sees such activity as a solution to the controversy over logging in Western forests....
Conservation Groups Challenge Heliskiing Plan A coalition of concerned citizens and conservation groups today filed a lawsuit in Idaho federal court challenging the U.S. Forest Service’s issuance of a permit that would dramatically increase the amount of commercial helicopter skiing allowed in a Wilderness Study Area on the Caribou-Targhee and Bridger-Teton National Forests. “We are fortunate to live in a region where there are still wild places that allow people to get away from it all, and where wildlife that is extinct in the rest of the country still maintains a toehold,” said Mark Poe, an attorney for Earthjustice, the law firm representing the plaintiffs. “If the Forest Service plan is carried out, we will have one fewer such place.” The helicopter skiing, or “heliskiing,” activity would be centered in the Palisades portion of the Snake River Range that spans the Idaho-Wyoming border between Jackson Hole, Wyoming and the Swan Valley in Idaho. Congress has designated the majority of the Palisades a Wilderness Study Area. Under the permit, a single commercial heliskiing company based in Jackson Hole would have exclusive use of the Palisades for up to 1,200 skier-days of service every winter for the next decade....
Grizzly delisting divides greens People in and around Wyoming are staking their ground over the federal government's proposal to remove grizzly bears from Endangered Species Act protection. Even as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans public open houses this week to gather input, conservation groups are divided. The National Parks Conservation Association came forward with an opinion last week, allying itself with other conservation groups that contend the scientific and legal requirements have been met to merit delisting of the grizzly. Still, Tim Stevens, Yellowstone program manager for the association's regional northern Rockies office, said the group still believes there are "pervasive threats" to the recovery of the grizzly, primarily in the form of secure funding and habitat. The group also wants to make sure future management of the grizzly is driven by the most accurate science....
Supreme Court Rejects Challenge To Buffers Around Salmon Streams The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal of a ruling that banned the use of pesticides around Western salmon streams. "We're very happy," Patti Goldman, an attorney with the environmental law firm Earthjustice, said Monday. "There have been many attempts by the chemical industry and the growers to get rid of the buffers; we now know they will remain in place." In January 2004, two years after finding that the Environmental Protection Agency had failed to consider the effect of pesticides on protected salmon, U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour in Seattle imposed a 100-yard buffer for aerial spraying and a 20-yard buffer for ground application of three dozen pesticides, from agricultural sprays to household weed-killers. His injunction also required that stores selling pesticides in 500 communities in the West post warnings about the potential effect of seven common pesticides on salmon and steelhead. The signs read: "SALMON HAZARD. This product contains pesticides which may harm salmon and steelhead. Use of this product in urban areas can pollute salmon streams." The judge's conditions will remain in effect until the EPA comes up with rules governing the use of pesticides around the streams in question....
Group rips agency for Mojave policies An environmental watchdog group claims a federal agency has failed to protect such sensitive species as the desert tortoise in the Mojave Desert while focusing on off-road-vehicle activities. The Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Ariz., says federal rangers assigned to the Barstow office of the Bureau of Land Management are devoting excessive time to off-roaders at places like the Dumont Dunes north of Baker, Johnson and Stoddard valleys south of Barstow, and El Mirage dry lake near Adelanto. "(Meanwhile), sensitive areas with high natural-resource and wilderness values receive scant attention," said ecologist Daniel Patterson, the center's desert program director. "We believe BLM rangers . . . devote an inordinate amount of time and resources to patrol and enforcement activities within (these) designated off-road-vehicle open areas." He said rangers focus on vehicle registration, drug activity and public safety in the areas, which contain critical habitat for various endangered animals and plants....
Bone-dry winter is bad news Zeroes dominate the year's first report on Arizona's snowpack, a crucial element of the state's water supply. Except for the tippy top of the state's highest peaks, there's no snow to measure, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the federal agency that monitors 38 sites across Arizona's high country. In Flagstaff, only a trace of snow has fallen this winter. The city's first measurable snow has never occurred this late since record-keeping began in 1898, according to the National Weather Service. Over the past 15 years, there's always been at least some snow at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on Jan. 1, even during years of extreme drought. But as 2006 began, the ground there was bare. "It looks like we're going back into the drought," said Larry Martinez, a water supply specialist with the conservation service. Ranchers and farmers who depend on stream diversions will feel the effects of a dry winter this spring, he said....
Hunting for reasons more elusive every year Riding home from a deer hunting trip to Oregon's Ochoco Mountains, the teenage boy answered his ringing cell phone, paused, then said, "I've been at a family gathering in Eastern Oregon." After he clicked off his phone, the boy glanced at his dad, sighed and said, "It's just easier that way." So it is. Hunting and fishing are declining in Oregon because it's easier to skip the whole hassle -- the rising costs of licenses and tags, the phone-book-thick regulations, the blizzard of no-trespassing signs, even the arguments with your non-hunting friends. Ask the thousands of Oregonians who stop hunting every year why they gave up the sport, and many will answer that it just got too hard. Hard to justify the costs, which average more than $1,400 annually. Hard to navigate the complex regulations and limited-entry tag drawings, which break up hunting parties and keep many eager hunters at home every fall. Hard to find farmers, ranchers and other landowners who welcome hunters the way they used to....
Bolting from bovine bondage A curious drama played out in the wilderness two weeks ago when a helicopter rescue spared the lives of four heifers stranded near 12,000 feet in the high mountains near Aspen. The cattle were discovered by a backcountry skier who notified the owner. This set off a series of feeding forays where skiers carried flakes of hay bales on their backs and literally hand-fed the hungry bovines. These cattle were wild. There is no other word for it. They had evaded numerous roundup attempts by the rancher and his family, stubbornly and elusively sheltering in the rugged mountains that gave them their freedom, but which ironically assured their doom. The rancher who spent all fall searching for them said that the wild heifers were more evasive than the native elk herds he encountered. These heifers held a strain of wildness that came alive during a summer of grazing in the wilderness, removed from man and his barbed wire....
Cowboy country saying 'whoa!' to 'Brokeback' Ask one of the locals like Julie Greer how they feel in rural Wyoming about "Brokeback Mountain," the gay-cowboy movie, and you don't have to wait long to get a reaction. "Yeah, we're offended!" she shoots back. "Because they called those sheepherders cowboys." It doesn't get any worse than that. But a close second is to call a cowboy gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that (as Seinfeld says). Well, actually, they think there is, and they don't care if city slickers like it or not. If you want to see a cowboy get out of his saddle in a nanosecond, ask him if he is dating the guy on the next horse. "People are offended that nothing is sacred anymore," says Greer, who works at the Hyattville post office. "People are talking about it. They won't go to the theater to see it." You knew this movie wouldn't go over big in the Broken Back Mountain area of Wyoming, where the same families have worked the range for more than 100 years. "Almost everyone on the crick has been here for at least a couple of generations," says rancher Maurice Bush, whose grandfather arrived here in 1898. They are salt-of-the-earth people. They live quietly. They see more cattle than people. They scratch out a living in hard-bitten country. They are blue collar and Republican, and they mind their own business. So when "Brokeback Mountain" hit movie theaters around the United States, they wondered exactly how they got dragged into this thing....
‘Texas Ranch House’ saddles up in May Saddle up, we're headin' to the ranch! "Texas Ranch House" is the name of the upcoming edition of these addictive living-history reality shows. The cast will live as Texas settlers did in 1867. Some will be cowboys, some ranch foremen, some cooks, others family members. The show is set after the Civil War's end, so freed slaves may also play roles in the show. The show's official site says "our volunteers will be fully immersed in the inner workings of a ranch house: building corrals, rounding up and branding cattle, taming stallions, and preparing for a two week cattle drive -- all the while tending to the daily needs of themselves and their livestock." The site's FAQ also notes that children will be home-schooled, as was common on Texas ranches that were often far from formal schools. Interestingly, the FAQ also addresses guns, stating "Our participants will not be permitted to use guns. It is something of a myth that all cowboys carried guns, and in fact guns were banned from most early ranches because they terrified cattle and could cause stampedes. Our show is about living the life of real 1867 cowboys and ranchers, not movie gunslingers." "Texas Ranch House" was shot in the summer and fall of 2005, and will air beginning May 1. Check your local PBS stations for specifics....
It's All Trew: Canning remains popular throughout time As long as I can remember, my grandparents, parents and kinfolk gathered and canned fruit of all kinds. Whether wild-grown or tame, whether canned or frozen, special efforts were always made to save and preserve these crops. Fortunately, I married Ruth who has continued the practice as she was also raised with this tradition. One of my early growth accomplishments came when I was strong enough to carry a 10-pound sack of sugar from the car into our pantry. I felt like Tarzan as Superman had not been invented at the time. Boy, did we use the sugar during canning season. Another of my chores was taking a milk bucket to the cellar and fetching empty fruit jars back to the kitchen. That was how I learned the difference in pints, quarts and half-gallons. I just missed the era of green glass jars with glass or galvanized lids. Every jar we owned had Ball or Mason written across the bottom. I can remember when every burner on our stove was busy steaming jars or lids or heating bubbling pots of fruit....
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