Friday, April 28, 2006
Three rodeo's, an invitational calf roping and a dance with presentations and the slack starting this morning at 9 am. Don't expect too many posts till Sunday evening.
Aggies hosting rodeo
SUN-NEWS REPORT
Apr 26, 2006, 05:37 am
After a 50-year absence, the Aggie rodeo team will get to host a regional competition right on the campus of New Mexico State University this weekend.
The NMSU rodeo team, one of the best in the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association, has invited seven other colleges and universities from New Mexico and Arizona to compete at the season's last Grand Canyon Region competition.
The two-day event will feature about 140 participants from NMSU, Cochise College, Central Arizona College, Crown Point Institute of Technology, Dine's College, New Mexico Highlands University and the University of Arizona.
The teams will compete in bull riding, bareback riding, tie-down roping and much more.
Currently, the NMSU women's and men's rodeo teams are in first and second place respectively in the region.
NMSU student athletes also lead in many of the rodeo events, including saddle bronc riding, bareback riding and others, according to the team's coach, Jim Dewey Brown.
NMSU hosts the event every year at the county fairgrounds, but this year will be different.
"We want to bring the rodeo to the campus and to the students so they can support us," said Brown. "We're putting the match on campus to get back to our rodeo roots."
The rodeo team has also invited Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association's Clown of the Year, Leon Coffee, who will entertain and amuse spectators with jokes and tricks, said Brown.
Former team members from the Aggie Rodeo Society, an affiliate of the NMSU Alumni Association, will also host an "Aggie Brawl" rodeo dance on Saturday night. Proceeds from the dance will benefit the rodeo team.
Rodeo alumni will also participate in some of Sunday's events.
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Aggies hosting rodeo
SUN-NEWS REPORT
Apr 26, 2006, 05:37 am
After a 50-year absence, the Aggie rodeo team will get to host a regional competition right on the campus of New Mexico State University this weekend.
The NMSU rodeo team, one of the best in the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association, has invited seven other colleges and universities from New Mexico and Arizona to compete at the season's last Grand Canyon Region competition.
The two-day event will feature about 140 participants from NMSU, Cochise College, Central Arizona College, Crown Point Institute of Technology, Dine's College, New Mexico Highlands University and the University of Arizona.
The teams will compete in bull riding, bareback riding, tie-down roping and much more.
Currently, the NMSU women's and men's rodeo teams are in first and second place respectively in the region.
NMSU student athletes also lead in many of the rodeo events, including saddle bronc riding, bareback riding and others, according to the team's coach, Jim Dewey Brown.
NMSU hosts the event every year at the county fairgrounds, but this year will be different.
"We want to bring the rodeo to the campus and to the students so they can support us," said Brown. "We're putting the match on campus to get back to our rodeo roots."
The rodeo team has also invited Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association's Clown of the Year, Leon Coffee, who will entertain and amuse spectators with jokes and tricks, said Brown.
Former team members from the Aggie Rodeo Society, an affiliate of the NMSU Alumni Association, will also host an "Aggie Brawl" rodeo dance on Saturday night. Proceeds from the dance will benefit the rodeo team.
Rodeo alumni will also participate in some of Sunday's events.
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NEWS ROUNDUP
Ranchers, farmers divided over coal bed methane development A controversy is brewing in southeastern Montana over a source of natural gas that could mean billions of dollars in revenue for the state. Coal bed methane (CBM) is at the center of a fight between landowners in the Powder River Basin. CBM is the purest natural gas there is. The cleanest burning source of natural gas, it is economically very efficient because it requires no refining. The only waste product is water - and that is the problem. Found in coal seams, CBM is held in the coal by water pressure. It is extracted by pumping water from the coal seam to reduce the water pressure that holds the gas in the seam. CBM easily separates in water as pressure decreases and can be piped out of the well separately from the water. Montana is in an area ripe with coal. In fact, according to the United States Geological Survey, the Rocky Mountain Region bears some 30 to 58 trillion cubic feet of recoverable CBM. Currently, there are more than 800 wells located in southeastern Montana. This is nothing compared to the nearly 20,000 wells in Wyoming. Extracting CBM involves pumping large volumes of water from the coal seam to release the gas. What should and can be done with this water is in question. The controversy over CBM extraction lies with the environmental concerns surrounding this procedure. In the Powder River Basin there may be up to three wells per 80 acres. Each of these wells is pumping five to 20 gallons of water per minute. That means each well pumps somewhere around 20,000 gallons of water out of the ground each day....
Fish-seeking Researcher Looks for Effects of Coalbed Methane in Montana, Wyoming Windy Davis slogged through hip-hugging mud and endured ferocious deer flies to find the fish of southeast Montana and northeast Wyoming. She crossed ranches on two-track roads, watched prairie thunderstorms flood dehydrated streams and had the simple pleasure of finding fish where ranchers and government officials thought there were none. "Sometimes a creek will be almost dry with a few pools. Then it will rain, and there will be a big blowout," Davis said, describing the flooded creeks she saw last summer. Davis is a Montana State University graduate student who spent May through August collecting information to see how coal bed methane development affects fish. Davis and technician Ryan White sampled about 6,500 fish in 19 tributaries of the Tongue River, Powder River and Little Powder River last summer. Davis plans to return this summer, possibly with two technicians, to the 54 sites she sampled in 2005 and 15 new sites on six more tributaries. All the streams are on private land. "The Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana is currently undergoing one of the world's largest coalbed natural gas developments with about 12,000 wells in place in 2003, 14,200 in 2005 and up to 70,000 projected over the next 20 to 30 years," Davis wrote in a project summary. "Because coalbed natural gas development involves production and disposal of large quantities of coalbed ground water that differs from surface waters, potential exists for substantial effects on aquatic ecosystems." High concentrations of dissolved solids, including sodium and bicarbonate ions, are typically found in water associated with coalbed methane, Davis said. Little is known about their effect on fish in the Powder River Basin, however....
Criticism over pace of federal oil and gas leasing heating up Federal land managers have backed off from allowing oil and gas leases next to a town's backup water supply, but critics say the fact the option was even considered shows there's a haphazard rush to open Colorado's federal lands to development. The Bureau of Land Management withdrew a 40-acre parcel in the Craig area from its May 11 auction, where about 170 parcels totaling nearly 197,000 acres will be up for bid. BLM spokeswoman Theresa Sauer said the agency will take another look at the site, where Craig wants to build boat ramps and develop a swim beach at the Elkhead Reservoir. The parcel could be offered at a later oil and gas sale. The Craig City Council is formally protesting the proposed lease. Environmentalists are protesting other leases, including a big swath of northwestern Colorado where 189 black-footed ferrets have been released since 2001 to restore the animal, one of the rarest in North America. The quarterly auctions, mandated by law, have produced a growing number of protests as the number of parcels up for bid has increased and the rate of natural gas drilling has shot up. The February auction, which generated a record $11.8 million, ignited a furor in the western Colorado communities of Grand Junction and Palisade because their watersheds are among the 134,582 acres that were leased....
Forest Guardians Report Falcon Sighting An endangered northern aplomado falcon has been spotted on Otero Mesa in southern New Mexico, according to an environmental group that has been trying to stop plans for oil and gas drilling in the area. The sighting was the eighth in just as many months, and environmentalists are calling on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to hold off on a reintroduction plan that would remove habitat protection for wild falcons in New Mexico, Arizona and Texas. "We are now seeing aplomado falcons year-round in New Mexico, yet the Fish and Wildlife Service is determined to strip away the vital safety net the Endangered Species Act provides these rare raptors," said Nicole Rosmarino, conservation director for Santa Fe-based Forest Guardians. The groups have said the falcon is being threatened by oil and gas drilling in its habitat — including Otero Mesa, site of a challenged Bureau of Land Management plan for drilling. The falcon was listed as endangered in 1986. The government said at that time that factors contributing to the listing included destruction and modification of the bird‘s habitat by overgrazing, use of pesticides, suppression of range fires and the failure to protect the habitat by regulations.
DNR receives permit for control of problem wolves The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources can now trap troublesome wolves using both lethal and non-lethal means. The received permit from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is for 2006 an allows the DNR to trap up to 46 wolves that are killing livestock and domestic animals. A preliminary count by the DNR of Wisconsin's gray wolf population for the winter of 2005-2006 shows that there are from 450 to 520 wolves in the state. Wisconsin has had authority from the federal government to trap and translocate or use lethal control on depredating wolves in the past, say wildlife officials, but temporarily lost that authority while the status of wolves across North America was examined in the courts. "The ability to remove depredating wolves is necessary in our efforts to address landowner problems," said Holtz. "The state will use this authority to reduce damages caused to owners of hunting dogs and livestock from depredating wolves." Wolves currently are listed as a federally endangered species in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Natural Resources Board reclassified wolves from endangered to threatened in 1999, and delisted wolves to protected wild animal status on August 1, 2004. However, the federal listing takes precedence....
Wildlife poop is scientist's treasure DNA comes in all kinds of packages. The boxes that fill Lisette Waits' work space contain stuff most people can't imagine saving: wild poop. But the test tubes of bear, fox and snow leopard scat may hold answers that help endangered animals. As genetic science has mushroomed, wildlife biologists like Waits are using newfangled genetics to learn more about rare and remote species. "When I was getting my Ph.D., I was really worried I wouldn't be able to find a job," said Waits, an associate professor of conservation biology and researcher at the University of Idaho. "A wildlife geneticist? Now everyone's saying, 'We need a geneticist."'A decade ago, scientists needed a piece of flesh or skin to really analyze the DNA of a wild creature making it difficult to do much genetic work on elusive and rare species. But recent advances make it possible to use the tiny amounts of DNA in droppings, hair and other things animals leave behind. The implications for learning about elusive and endangered species are huge....
Column: What The Owl Did In The Northwest, The Lynx Will Do To You The Canada Lynx Critical Habitat proposal deadline for comment is April 30th. The Canada Lynx is the spotted owl on steroids - and is a threat to our jobs, our recreation and our private property. It is the Endangered Species Act (ESA) run amok. We can and should save species but we need to do it by making allies out of landowners who have species on their property, not enemies. Landowners should be rewarded for having endangered species, not penalized. Throughout history this has always gotten better results. Up to now, the ESA has largely failed because it has only recovered 10 species out of 1,300. That?s less than one percent. 18,000 square miles of mostly private ground is at risk - and hundreds of millions of acres are in the proponents? long term plan for this effort. The Lynx ESA set aside could include parts of Oregon, Washington, Maine, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Minnesota, Colorado, Wisconsin, Vermont, New Hampshire, New York and Michigan. Even if you do not live in one of these states, your comments are critical. I've traveled the country for nearly twenty years asking that folks use one hour a week of their time to fight for our way of life. I'm asking you to use three of those minutes to comment on this issue. We've made it easy to comment. It takes literally a minute if you visit our website at www.lynxnothijinks.com. From the site you can quickly build a comment, send your comment to the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and send your comment to your congressional delegation. We also encourage you to send your comment to your local media - and send the link to your e-mail list of family and friends....
Dry Southwest, Uncertain Summer IT was a beautiful day in the Santa Fe National Forest. Mike and Kathy Serk, hikers from the suburbs of Santa Fe, N.M., were taking a break along the Raven's Ridge Trail, sitting on fallen logs in a pool of sunlight for a leisurely lunch of sandwiches and potato chips. Around them, towering spruce trees and pale green aspens swayed gently in a mountain breeze. Songbirds flitted among the branches. Nearby on the clear, dry trail, hikers and mountain bikers occasionally passed by. But something was out of kilter. These conditions were perfectly normal for mid-June, but this was the first week of March. The trail should have been buried beneath several feet of snow. This year snow and rain have largely passed the Southwest by. The period from November through March was the driest in Santa Fe and Albuquerque since record-keeping began in 1892. Statewide in New Mexico, this was one of the driest seasons on record. Arizona set new records for winter drought, with Phoenix recording no rainfall for a stretch of 143 days and some Tucson residents reduced to watering the cactuses in their gardens. A smattering of spring storms have done little to make up for the missing moisture. The Serks and New Mexico's other seasoned nature lovers know well what drought like this portends in a national forest, and they are getting their outdoor time while they can. "We really love it up here, and plan on coming up a couple of times a week," Mr. Serk said. "Until they shut it down."....
Feral pigs invading Oregon, pose risk Feral pigs, which are responsible for an estimated $800 million in annual damages to agriculture commodities nationwide, are rapidly expanding their range across Oregon, according to a recent risk assessment conducted by Oregon State University scientists. Also called wild boars or wild swine, omnivorous feral pigs vary in appearance, but most have hairy coats, thick necks and shoulders and wedge-shaped heads suitable for digging and rooting. "These animals have the capability to create incredible damage across a large area," said Bruce Coblentz, a fisheries and wildlife scientist in OSU's College of Agricultural Sciences. "One pig on one golf course in one night can cause $50,000 to $60,000 in damages. They are extreme generalists with a capacity for tremendous growth." The invasive pigs have been recorded in locations throughout southern and central Oregon, and their distribution may continue to spread as global climate change results in warmer temperatures farther north, said Coblentz, who authored the assessment with researcher Cassie Bouska. Feral pigs are most heavily concentrated in Florida, Hawaii, Texas and California. Despite not being native to the United States, their nationwide population is estimated at more than 4 million....
Editorial - A wrong road: Norton policy would open up lands to overuse As she departed her post as secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior last month, Gale Norton left behind a new policy for deciding what constitutes a road on public lands. It is, unfortunately, a policy that could seriously endanger fragile wilderness, wilderness study areas, wildlife refuges and even national parks and national monuments by allowing vehicles to roam over trails and dirt tracks into wild places across the country that have so far been protected by federal agencies. Because of the policy's national scope and destructive potential, Congress should hold the feet of Interior Secretary-designee Dirk Kempthorne to the fire during confirmation hearings and demand that, if confirmed, he reject this unnecessary and overly broad policy. Norton rationalized her lame-duck action as necessary in light of a 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision last fall. But the court ruling did not require any change in Interior policy and clearly stated that federal courts should decide road claims under a Civil War-era law giving local governments rights of way across federal lands....
A true Florida pioneer — Cracker Horses Holder breeds Florida cracker horses, which have been in Florida since before it was even a state. Their ancestry dates back to the 1500s when Spain was exploring newly discovered land. As they set sail back to Spain, they left behind horses, cows and pigs to make room for their findings. The pioneering horses evolved over time as free roamers, turning into the slender, intelligent-looking horses that they are today. Cracker horses got their name from cracker cow hunters, who in turn received their name for the loud cracking noise their whips would make as they herded cattle. In addition to cracker horse, the breed is sometimes called the Florida horse, Seminole pony and prairie pony, among others. They're a mixture of the North African barb, the Spanish garraro pony, the sorraia and other various Iberian Peninsula horses. They range between 13.5 "hands" and 15 "hands" in height (with "hands" referring to human hands). Their weight ranges from 750 pounds to more than 1,000 pounds. Sam Getzen, a cracker horse breeder and charter member of the Florida Cracker Horse Association, describes cracker horses, which were used by early settlers to herd cattle, as having "a lot of cow in them." "They know what cows are and they have an instinct," he said. When around cows, the horses pin their ears down and watch the cattle. In addition to excelling as herders, the horses are known for their endurance, strength and quickness. This allowed them to be used for pulling wagons, plows, buggies and more....
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Ranchers, farmers divided over coal bed methane development A controversy is brewing in southeastern Montana over a source of natural gas that could mean billions of dollars in revenue for the state. Coal bed methane (CBM) is at the center of a fight between landowners in the Powder River Basin. CBM is the purest natural gas there is. The cleanest burning source of natural gas, it is economically very efficient because it requires no refining. The only waste product is water - and that is the problem. Found in coal seams, CBM is held in the coal by water pressure. It is extracted by pumping water from the coal seam to reduce the water pressure that holds the gas in the seam. CBM easily separates in water as pressure decreases and can be piped out of the well separately from the water. Montana is in an area ripe with coal. In fact, according to the United States Geological Survey, the Rocky Mountain Region bears some 30 to 58 trillion cubic feet of recoverable CBM. Currently, there are more than 800 wells located in southeastern Montana. This is nothing compared to the nearly 20,000 wells in Wyoming. Extracting CBM involves pumping large volumes of water from the coal seam to release the gas. What should and can be done with this water is in question. The controversy over CBM extraction lies with the environmental concerns surrounding this procedure. In the Powder River Basin there may be up to three wells per 80 acres. Each of these wells is pumping five to 20 gallons of water per minute. That means each well pumps somewhere around 20,000 gallons of water out of the ground each day....
Fish-seeking Researcher Looks for Effects of Coalbed Methane in Montana, Wyoming Windy Davis slogged through hip-hugging mud and endured ferocious deer flies to find the fish of southeast Montana and northeast Wyoming. She crossed ranches on two-track roads, watched prairie thunderstorms flood dehydrated streams and had the simple pleasure of finding fish where ranchers and government officials thought there were none. "Sometimes a creek will be almost dry with a few pools. Then it will rain, and there will be a big blowout," Davis said, describing the flooded creeks she saw last summer. Davis is a Montana State University graduate student who spent May through August collecting information to see how coal bed methane development affects fish. Davis and technician Ryan White sampled about 6,500 fish in 19 tributaries of the Tongue River, Powder River and Little Powder River last summer. Davis plans to return this summer, possibly with two technicians, to the 54 sites she sampled in 2005 and 15 new sites on six more tributaries. All the streams are on private land. "The Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana is currently undergoing one of the world's largest coalbed natural gas developments with about 12,000 wells in place in 2003, 14,200 in 2005 and up to 70,000 projected over the next 20 to 30 years," Davis wrote in a project summary. "Because coalbed natural gas development involves production and disposal of large quantities of coalbed ground water that differs from surface waters, potential exists for substantial effects on aquatic ecosystems." High concentrations of dissolved solids, including sodium and bicarbonate ions, are typically found in water associated with coalbed methane, Davis said. Little is known about their effect on fish in the Powder River Basin, however....
Criticism over pace of federal oil and gas leasing heating up Federal land managers have backed off from allowing oil and gas leases next to a town's backup water supply, but critics say the fact the option was even considered shows there's a haphazard rush to open Colorado's federal lands to development. The Bureau of Land Management withdrew a 40-acre parcel in the Craig area from its May 11 auction, where about 170 parcels totaling nearly 197,000 acres will be up for bid. BLM spokeswoman Theresa Sauer said the agency will take another look at the site, where Craig wants to build boat ramps and develop a swim beach at the Elkhead Reservoir. The parcel could be offered at a later oil and gas sale. The Craig City Council is formally protesting the proposed lease. Environmentalists are protesting other leases, including a big swath of northwestern Colorado where 189 black-footed ferrets have been released since 2001 to restore the animal, one of the rarest in North America. The quarterly auctions, mandated by law, have produced a growing number of protests as the number of parcels up for bid has increased and the rate of natural gas drilling has shot up. The February auction, which generated a record $11.8 million, ignited a furor in the western Colorado communities of Grand Junction and Palisade because their watersheds are among the 134,582 acres that were leased....
Forest Guardians Report Falcon Sighting An endangered northern aplomado falcon has been spotted on Otero Mesa in southern New Mexico, according to an environmental group that has been trying to stop plans for oil and gas drilling in the area. The sighting was the eighth in just as many months, and environmentalists are calling on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to hold off on a reintroduction plan that would remove habitat protection for wild falcons in New Mexico, Arizona and Texas. "We are now seeing aplomado falcons year-round in New Mexico, yet the Fish and Wildlife Service is determined to strip away the vital safety net the Endangered Species Act provides these rare raptors," said Nicole Rosmarino, conservation director for Santa Fe-based Forest Guardians. The groups have said the falcon is being threatened by oil and gas drilling in its habitat — including Otero Mesa, site of a challenged Bureau of Land Management plan for drilling. The falcon was listed as endangered in 1986. The government said at that time that factors contributing to the listing included destruction and modification of the bird‘s habitat by overgrazing, use of pesticides, suppression of range fires and the failure to protect the habitat by regulations.
DNR receives permit for control of problem wolves The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources can now trap troublesome wolves using both lethal and non-lethal means. The received permit from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is for 2006 an allows the DNR to trap up to 46 wolves that are killing livestock and domestic animals. A preliminary count by the DNR of Wisconsin's gray wolf population for the winter of 2005-2006 shows that there are from 450 to 520 wolves in the state. Wisconsin has had authority from the federal government to trap and translocate or use lethal control on depredating wolves in the past, say wildlife officials, but temporarily lost that authority while the status of wolves across North America was examined in the courts. "The ability to remove depredating wolves is necessary in our efforts to address landowner problems," said Holtz. "The state will use this authority to reduce damages caused to owners of hunting dogs and livestock from depredating wolves." Wolves currently are listed as a federally endangered species in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Natural Resources Board reclassified wolves from endangered to threatened in 1999, and delisted wolves to protected wild animal status on August 1, 2004. However, the federal listing takes precedence....
Wildlife poop is scientist's treasure DNA comes in all kinds of packages. The boxes that fill Lisette Waits' work space contain stuff most people can't imagine saving: wild poop. But the test tubes of bear, fox and snow leopard scat may hold answers that help endangered animals. As genetic science has mushroomed, wildlife biologists like Waits are using newfangled genetics to learn more about rare and remote species. "When I was getting my Ph.D., I was really worried I wouldn't be able to find a job," said Waits, an associate professor of conservation biology and researcher at the University of Idaho. "A wildlife geneticist? Now everyone's saying, 'We need a geneticist."'A decade ago, scientists needed a piece of flesh or skin to really analyze the DNA of a wild creature making it difficult to do much genetic work on elusive and rare species. But recent advances make it possible to use the tiny amounts of DNA in droppings, hair and other things animals leave behind. The implications for learning about elusive and endangered species are huge....
Column: What The Owl Did In The Northwest, The Lynx Will Do To You The Canada Lynx Critical Habitat proposal deadline for comment is April 30th. The Canada Lynx is the spotted owl on steroids - and is a threat to our jobs, our recreation and our private property. It is the Endangered Species Act (ESA) run amok. We can and should save species but we need to do it by making allies out of landowners who have species on their property, not enemies. Landowners should be rewarded for having endangered species, not penalized. Throughout history this has always gotten better results. Up to now, the ESA has largely failed because it has only recovered 10 species out of 1,300. That?s less than one percent. 18,000 square miles of mostly private ground is at risk - and hundreds of millions of acres are in the proponents? long term plan for this effort. The Lynx ESA set aside could include parts of Oregon, Washington, Maine, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Minnesota, Colorado, Wisconsin, Vermont, New Hampshire, New York and Michigan. Even if you do not live in one of these states, your comments are critical. I've traveled the country for nearly twenty years asking that folks use one hour a week of their time to fight for our way of life. I'm asking you to use three of those minutes to comment on this issue. We've made it easy to comment. It takes literally a minute if you visit our website at www.lynxnothijinks.com. From the site you can quickly build a comment, send your comment to the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and send your comment to your congressional delegation. We also encourage you to send your comment to your local media - and send the link to your e-mail list of family and friends....
Dry Southwest, Uncertain Summer IT was a beautiful day in the Santa Fe National Forest. Mike and Kathy Serk, hikers from the suburbs of Santa Fe, N.M., were taking a break along the Raven's Ridge Trail, sitting on fallen logs in a pool of sunlight for a leisurely lunch of sandwiches and potato chips. Around them, towering spruce trees and pale green aspens swayed gently in a mountain breeze. Songbirds flitted among the branches. Nearby on the clear, dry trail, hikers and mountain bikers occasionally passed by. But something was out of kilter. These conditions were perfectly normal for mid-June, but this was the first week of March. The trail should have been buried beneath several feet of snow. This year snow and rain have largely passed the Southwest by. The period from November through March was the driest in Santa Fe and Albuquerque since record-keeping began in 1892. Statewide in New Mexico, this was one of the driest seasons on record. Arizona set new records for winter drought, with Phoenix recording no rainfall for a stretch of 143 days and some Tucson residents reduced to watering the cactuses in their gardens. A smattering of spring storms have done little to make up for the missing moisture. The Serks and New Mexico's other seasoned nature lovers know well what drought like this portends in a national forest, and they are getting their outdoor time while they can. "We really love it up here, and plan on coming up a couple of times a week," Mr. Serk said. "Until they shut it down."....
Feral pigs invading Oregon, pose risk Feral pigs, which are responsible for an estimated $800 million in annual damages to agriculture commodities nationwide, are rapidly expanding their range across Oregon, according to a recent risk assessment conducted by Oregon State University scientists. Also called wild boars or wild swine, omnivorous feral pigs vary in appearance, but most have hairy coats, thick necks and shoulders and wedge-shaped heads suitable for digging and rooting. "These animals have the capability to create incredible damage across a large area," said Bruce Coblentz, a fisheries and wildlife scientist in OSU's College of Agricultural Sciences. "One pig on one golf course in one night can cause $50,000 to $60,000 in damages. They are extreme generalists with a capacity for tremendous growth." The invasive pigs have been recorded in locations throughout southern and central Oregon, and their distribution may continue to spread as global climate change results in warmer temperatures farther north, said Coblentz, who authored the assessment with researcher Cassie Bouska. Feral pigs are most heavily concentrated in Florida, Hawaii, Texas and California. Despite not being native to the United States, their nationwide population is estimated at more than 4 million....
Editorial - A wrong road: Norton policy would open up lands to overuse As she departed her post as secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior last month, Gale Norton left behind a new policy for deciding what constitutes a road on public lands. It is, unfortunately, a policy that could seriously endanger fragile wilderness, wilderness study areas, wildlife refuges and even national parks and national monuments by allowing vehicles to roam over trails and dirt tracks into wild places across the country that have so far been protected by federal agencies. Because of the policy's national scope and destructive potential, Congress should hold the feet of Interior Secretary-designee Dirk Kempthorne to the fire during confirmation hearings and demand that, if confirmed, he reject this unnecessary and overly broad policy. Norton rationalized her lame-duck action as necessary in light of a 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision last fall. But the court ruling did not require any change in Interior policy and clearly stated that federal courts should decide road claims under a Civil War-era law giving local governments rights of way across federal lands....
A true Florida pioneer — Cracker Horses Holder breeds Florida cracker horses, which have been in Florida since before it was even a state. Their ancestry dates back to the 1500s when Spain was exploring newly discovered land. As they set sail back to Spain, they left behind horses, cows and pigs to make room for their findings. The pioneering horses evolved over time as free roamers, turning into the slender, intelligent-looking horses that they are today. Cracker horses got their name from cracker cow hunters, who in turn received their name for the loud cracking noise their whips would make as they herded cattle. In addition to cracker horse, the breed is sometimes called the Florida horse, Seminole pony and prairie pony, among others. They're a mixture of the North African barb, the Spanish garraro pony, the sorraia and other various Iberian Peninsula horses. They range between 13.5 "hands" and 15 "hands" in height (with "hands" referring to human hands). Their weight ranges from 750 pounds to more than 1,000 pounds. Sam Getzen, a cracker horse breeder and charter member of the Florida Cracker Horse Association, describes cracker horses, which were used by early settlers to herd cattle, as having "a lot of cow in them." "They know what cows are and they have an instinct," he said. When around cows, the horses pin their ears down and watch the cattle. In addition to excelling as herders, the horses are known for their endurance, strength and quickness. This allowed them to be used for pulling wagons, plows, buggies and more....
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EWG/FARM SUBSIDIES
Hi there. My group has a new report (and database) on the farm subsidy bonus in the emergency spending bill the Senate will act on this week. Since you blog on ag I thought you might be interested in hearing about the bottom line.
While we're unable to provide troops in Iraq with sufficient body armor, we're ready to give away $1.5 billion in subsidies, with 10% of the recipients raking in 60% of the money. Truly big operations will get bonuses of more than $100,000 apiece while 300,000 recipients will receive less than $100. And at least 9% of the bonus (hovering around $138 million) will go to "farmers" who own land but don't actually farm it themselves.
A list of the top recipients is here:
http://www.ewg.org/reports/agsupp2006/top_recips.php? fips=00000&progcode=total_dp
Our report is here:
http://www.ewg.org/reports/agsupp2006/
And we've got plenty of searchable database goodness here (scroll down):
http://www.ewg.org/reports/agsupp2006/region.php?fips=00000
Hope you find the information interesting!
Best wishes,
Carrie Gouldin
Environmental Working Group
1436 U Street NW, Suite 100
Washington, DC 20009
202-667-6982 Phone
202-232-2592 Fax
Sign up for our monthly newsletter:
http://www.ewg.org/newsletter/subscribe/
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Hi there. My group has a new report (and database) on the farm subsidy bonus in the emergency spending bill the Senate will act on this week. Since you blog on ag I thought you might be interested in hearing about the bottom line.
While we're unable to provide troops in Iraq with sufficient body armor, we're ready to give away $1.5 billion in subsidies, with 10% of the recipients raking in 60% of the money. Truly big operations will get bonuses of more than $100,000 apiece while 300,000 recipients will receive less than $100. And at least 9% of the bonus (hovering around $138 million) will go to "farmers" who own land but don't actually farm it themselves.
A list of the top recipients is here:
http://www.ewg.org/reports/agsupp2006/top_recips.php? fips=00000&progcode=total_dp
Our report is here:
http://www.ewg.org/reports/agsupp2006/
And we've got plenty of searchable database goodness here (scroll down):
http://www.ewg.org/reports/agsupp2006/region.php?fips=00000
Hope you find the information interesting!
Best wishes,
Carrie Gouldin
Environmental Working Group
1436 U Street NW, Suite 100
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Thursday, April 27, 2006
GAO
Yucca Mountain: DOE's Planned Nuclear Waste Repository Faces Quality Assurance and Management Challenges, by James E. Wells, Jr., director, natural resources and environment, before the Subcommittee on Federal Workforce and Agency Organization, House Committee on Government Reform. GAO-06-550T, April 25.
http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-06-550T
Highlights - http://www.gao.gov/highlights/d06550thigh.pdf
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Yucca Mountain: DOE's Planned Nuclear Waste Repository Faces Quality Assurance and Management Challenges, by James E. Wells, Jr., director, natural resources and environment, before the Subcommittee on Federal Workforce and Agency Organization, House Committee on Government Reform. GAO-06-550T, April 25.
http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-06-550T
Highlights - http://www.gao.gov/highlights/d06550thigh.pdf
Permalink 0 comments
NEWS ROUNDUP
Gas wells: Too close for comfort? Brandi Hughes first noticed a field of gravel taking shape just two houses away from her home northwest of Fort Worth. Then came the semi-trucks. Before she knew it, a hulking drilling rig climbed into the sky. "I knew what it was, but I couldn't believe that it was right there," she said, standing on the front lawn of her brick home, craning her neck to take in her giant new neighbor. The rig belongs to Devon Energy Corp., and soon it will begin drilling for natural gas on the grounds of Crossroads United Methodist Church. The landowner who sold the property to the church years ago retained the mineral rights and sold them to Devon for drilling. Ms. Hughes and other residents of the Avondale Ranch subdivision say they had no idea that they would someday live in the shadow of such a formidable drilling operation. Now they have questions about safety, noise and traffic. And they're not alone. Throughout North Texas, but particularly near Fort Worth, homebuilders, developers and natural gas companies jockey for any spare scrap of land....
Huge power rate hike hits Klamath farms Klamath Water Project farmers and ranchers have experienced many challenges over the years, most notably the federal government's shut-off of water to their farms and ranches in 2001. Now they face another major challenge. Farmers in the region are being hit with a ten-fold increase in the price they pay for electrical power following the expiration of a 50-year-old contract between the U.S. Department of the Interior and PacifiCorp, the utility company that provides power to the region. "If they can do it here, they can do it anywhere," said Scott Seus, a diversified farmer in Tulelake who chairs the power committee for the Klamath Water Users Association. "What is happening here is a significant measurement tool of what could possibly happen in the rest of California."....
Scientists check preserve's readiness A sensitive decision now depends on a final appraisal of range conditions at the Valles Caldera National Preserve. The question of cattle grazing on the preserve, what kind and how many, has occupied the preserve's governing trust for several months and drawn scrutiny from a deeply involved public. The question has now given way to whether or not to go ahead with the steer program that has been chosen and, if so, how many steers to run. The trust has notified ranchers that it is entertaining applications for up to 1,500 steers over a 120-day season this summer, beginning June 1. The preserve's chief scientist Bob Parmenter said forage conditions, combined with data on weather and moisture to be gathered this week would be available to inform a decision on Monday. Parmenter reported a number of discouraging omens. Recent stream run-off data came in most recently at 13 percent of normal. "And we've had zero rain since then," he said. Upland stock tanks were reported to be down to a foot of water, which meant they would be dry by early June, he added. The lack of moisture meant that the elk herd, estimated at about 3,000 head has hung around all winter, grazing grass from last year....
Sheep assume fire-prevention duties in Carson This weekend, the 1,500 sheep on a capital city hillside were hard at work doing what they do best - chomping on grass. But their mission is greater than just grazing. The animals are reducing fire fuels, said John McLain of Resource Concepts Inc., an engineering, surveying, resources and environmental services firm in Carson. Sheep tenders and herding dogs have their work cut out for them, however, as they need to keep the sheep eating, but not eating too much in one place. Removal of too much vegetation, for example, could result in soil erosion, McLain said. Rancher Ted Borda called the grazing plan a win-win situation. "It's good for us, good for the community," he said. Borda has taken a week's vacation from his day job at Galena High School to get the work started. He and his two sisters, all teachers, also run the third-generation family business, Borda Land & Sheep. "We wanted to do this because the community has treated us very well," Borda said....
Forest Service: No management-cost analyses on lands being sold The U.S. Forest Service has no specific documents supporting the argument that isolated parcels of land it wants to sell to maintain payments to rural schools are expensive to manage, according to the agency's response to a Freedom of Information Act request. "The Forest Service has undertaken no analyses of the management costs associated with each parcel of land proposed for sale in the Secure Rural Schools Bill," Gregory C. Smith, the agency's director of lands, wrote in an April 19 response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. "It's a scam," Andy Stahl of Eugene, director of the environmental group, said Wednesday from his office in Eugene. "In the main, these lands are less managed than the contiguous national forest lands, and therefore cheaper."....
Sheep grazing prevails A dispute over the potential conflict between bighorn sheep and domestic sheep in the Sierra Madre Mountains of southern Wyoming reached the upper peaks of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. To the consternation of some conservationists, the interests of domestic sheep producers have prevailed. U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary David Tenny last week overturned a decision that state officials say would have essentially eliminated domestic sheep grazing in the Sierra Madres. The earlier decision was made by U.S. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth, in response to an appeal of a portion of the Medicine Bow National Forest plan by the Laramie-based Biodiversity Conservation Alliance. Essentially, Tenny determined that questions about the long-term viability of the small Encampment bighorn sheep herd -- and the presence of two other bighorn sheep herds in the Medicine Bow -- meant that no special protection should be provided for the 50 or so Encampment animals. Game and Fish Department Director Terry Cleveland joined state Department of Agriculture Director John Etchepare in petitioning the USDA to overturn Bosworth's decision. The two directors argued that keeping domestic sheep away from the Encampment bighorns due to disease transmission concerns would have likely eliminated "long-standing and historic domestic sheep operations" in the Sierra Madres. Erik Molvar of the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance said Tenny's ruling could be a death sentence for the Encampment bighorns....
Lawsuit challenges forest-thinning project in Montana Environmental groups asked a federal judge Wednesday to stop the Forest Service from beginning a Montana forest-thinning project under a wildfire prevention law, contending it amounts to industrial logging. The project the Forest Service wants to undertake in the Bitterroot Valley this summer jeopardizes the environment, three groups said in the suit filed Wednesday against the Forest Service and two of its officials. Plans call for burning and logging on almost 5,000 acres near the East Fork of the Bitterroot River, where beetle infestations have killed many trees. The project was prepared under the Healthy Forest Restoration Act signed by President Bush in 2003....
BLM director hopes to speed up gas permits The director of the Bureau of Land Management said the nation's high demand for energy underscores the importance of speeding along natural gas permitting for producers in the Powder River Basin. During a visit to the Buffalo field office Tuesday, Kathleen Clark touted the creation of programs that bring together officials from several federal agencies in an effort to speed up gas permits. Among the agencies that will be involved are the Army Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency, Fish and Wildlife Service and the Forest Service. “We are really working to set up what can be a one-stop shopping center (for permits) ... all for the purpose of helping us meet demand.” In addition, Clark hoped the seven energy pilot BLM offices in five Western states would help to maintain air and water quality more effectively. There also will be a push to look at alternative energy sources such as wind, solar, oil shale, tar sands and geothermal energy, she said....
Federal Judge Validates Form Letters In his April 25 summary judgment, Chief U.S. District Court Judge Donald Molloy rejected Bush administration regulations that for three years have shielded Forest Service projects from public scrutiny and appeals. The ruling came out of a lawsuit filed by EarthJustice on behalf of the Wilderness Society, American Wildlands and Pacific Rivers Council. Molloy issued a nationwide injunction against the regulations. His judgment immediately replaces the illegal rules with the previous rule that governed the FS appeals process before the Bush administration revised it in 2003. This rule considers all public comments significant. A major impact of the ruling is the validation of form letters. The 2003 Bush administration rule revision declared that public comments must be “substantive” to be considered or give the sender a right to appeal the decision later. In essence, this revised rule gave the FS the right to disregard form letters or e-mails send in by groups opposing proposed actions on public lands such as timber sales....
Political Leaders Gather Friday to Oppose N-waste Utah political leaders will join community activists and business owners in Salt Lake City on Friday to speak out against nuclear waste storage in the state. Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. and U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, among other elected officials, will use the event to urge Utah residents to say "No Way" to proposed storage of 44,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste in the state's West Desert. Styled as a "rally," the public event is planned for noon at the State Office Building, in the Capitol Complex. The leaders will urge residents to write to the Bureau of Land Management to oppose a proposed transfer station on federal property to transport nuclear waste to the Scull Valley Goshute Reservation. "Utah is not a dumping ground for the country and I will not allow this to happen on my watch," Huntsman said in a statement. "We must join together and say 'No Way' to nuclear waste."....
With oil at $70 a barrel, firms try coal, shale, even turkeys At more than $70 a barrel, the price of oil is causing angst for millions of Americans. But for some others it's an opportunity to move the United States beyond conventional oil: • In Carthage, Mo., a company is turning the inedible parts of Butterball turkeys into up to 350 barrels of biodiesel per day. • In Gilberton, Pa., businessman John Rich is planning to convert huge piles of low-quality coal into diesel. The state has promised to buy the production of 5,000 barrels per day, once it starts. • In Utah and Colorado, four companies are preparing environmental assessments to show the feasibility of producing oil from shale. With gas now becoming as pricey as a gallon of milk in some places, the economics of energy production is changing. Processes that didn't make any sense in the good old days of $30-a-0barrel oil are now being pulled out of filing cabinets. From the tundra of Alaska to the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, energy dreamers are trying to tap into new frontiers....
Court Puts Teeth in 'Notice' Needed to Seize Property "An elementary and fundamental requirement of due process," the Supreme Court ruled many years ago, is that the government must provide "notice" and an opportunity to be heard before it seizes property. On Wednesday, the court added teeth to that requirement, ruling that Arkansas violated a homeowner's right to due process when it sold his house for nonpayment of taxes after sending him two certified letters that came back "unclaimed." Writing for a 5-to-3 majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said that "it is not too much to insist that the state do a bit more" before using its "extraordinary power" to take and sell a person's house. The Constitution does not require "actual notice" like personally handing the letter to the homeowner, the chief justice observed. But he said that once the state became aware, as in this case, that an effort at notice had failed, it must take "additional reasonable steps to attempt to provide notice to the property owner before selling his property, if it is practicable to do so." Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy dissented, the latter two signing a dissenting opinion by Justice Thomas. The state did all that was constitutionally required, Justice Thomas said, adding that it was the homeowner's responsibility to make sure that the authorities knew how to contact him. The court was imposing a "burdensome" and "impractical" requirement on the government, he said....
RFID 'Til the Cows Come Home The national ID system is going to the dogs -- and the pigs, and the sheep and the cows and the chickens. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns this month released a government road map that would see most farmers voluntarily tag their animals with wireless radio chips by 2008 as part of an ambitious electronic disease control system to prevent outbreaks of hoof and mouth disease and avian flu, among other things. The system will not address the spread of "mad cow" disease, as it is transmitted through feed rather than animal commingling. By 2007, the program will ask farms or households that house chickens, ducks, turkeys, cows, pigs, goats or horses to register with a database and obtain a 15-digit identification number and GPS coordinate. Beginning in 2008, animals under the proposal would carry a radio frequency identity, or RFID, tag. One part of the plan is not voluntary: By 2009, farmers will be required to report the movement of any animal from the registered premises that commingles with other animals. Those who do not comply within 24 hours will face fees as high as $1,000 a day. Industry officials say they understand the need for a system to stop the spread of disease, but they show little trust in the federal government's ability to carry out the task without burdensome requirements. An industry database already exists to record the animals' location from the farm to the slaughterhouse, and 30 percent of the nation's producers have already registered, said Jay Truitt, vice president of government affairs for the National Cattleman's Beef Association. The private database acts like a 911 system to get an instantaneous trace without the wait, and does not require RFID technology. Truitt worries the government will eventually mandate the use of RFID tags, a step that would benefit the producers of the technology and not consumers. He said RDIF technology is "a big scam." "The government has done a wonderful job of eradicating diseases, that's why we don't have outbreaks like they do in Europe," Truitt says. "But the government is looking at a purely electronic solution that fits into one box."....
Thousands of cattle, sheep killed in storm Thousands of cattle and sheep worth millions of dollars died on the plains north and west of the Black Hills during last week’s howling blizzard, agriculture officials say. In Harding County, ranchers lost an estimated 1,500 to 2,500 cattle and 5,000 to 6,000 sheep, according to Kelli Willey, county executive director for the U.S. Farm Service Agency in Buffalo. On the Roger and Penny Gunderson ranch west of Ladner in far northwestern Harding County, between 450 and 500 sheep piled up against a fence and suffocated. The loss amounted to about a third of his herd, Roger Gunderson said Wednesday evening. Gunderson also estimates they lost 40 calves and five or six cows. “I figure it’s about a $120,000 loss,” Gunderson said. The wind also took off about half the tin on the barn he built after the storms of 1997. In Carter County, Mont., preliminary estimates put losses at 4,000 cattle and 6,000 sheep, FSA county executive director Ronelia Parry said. Parry said her estimates were based on contacts with producers, who reported averages of 10 percent calf losses and 15 percent lamb losses. Many area ranchers were still lambing and calving when the storm smashed into the area with high winds and dropped as much as 24 inches of snow on the prairie April 18 and 19. Willey said most of the sheep that died were buried by the snow....
A whoopin', hollerin western-style rodeo IBOR Hommer's nom de plume is Dust Cloud. It has nothing to do with his character, but a lot to do with his passion for western America. The manager of Silverado, a western-style ranch (also called the Crazy Cowboys' Club), Hommer speaks limited English except when it comes to obscure horse terms like Appendix. (Appendix horses are quarterhorses, with thoroughbred breeding in their bloodlines. A quarterhorse, if you didn't know, is a full-sized horse known for its heavily-muscled physique, even disposition, athletic ability, and versatility. The American Quarterhorse Association is headquartered in Amarillo, Texas. Several of Silverado's horses are quarterhorses.) The 40-hectare (98-acre) ranchresort will be the venue for a whoopin', hollerin' American-western-style rodeo May 1, the first of four competitions to be held in Hungary this year. Starting at 10 in the morning, it will feature typical rodeo events, such as roping, racing, bronco and 700-kilogram (1,543 lbs) bull riding, and cattle herding techniques (ie, cutting and separating, calf roping). At 5pm, the competition stops and the festivities start - country music, line dancing, drinking, and a buffet featuring chili bableves. It may be the next morning before it all stops....
Tintypes of Texas cowboys show photographer's mettle The National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City has named Revealing Character: Texas Tintypes by Robb Kendrick its outstanding Western photography book for 2005. The award ceremony Saturday was emceed by retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Kendrick's book has also been honored by the Texas Association of Museums. It was called the best Western book of the year by Reader's Digest. The book's subjects -- tintypes of working cowboys from Texas ranches -- have been on display at the Witte Museum in San Antonio and the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum in Amarillo. The photos will continue to be exhibited throughout the state and will make a stop in Fort Worth at the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in October....
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Gas wells: Too close for comfort? Brandi Hughes first noticed a field of gravel taking shape just two houses away from her home northwest of Fort Worth. Then came the semi-trucks. Before she knew it, a hulking drilling rig climbed into the sky. "I knew what it was, but I couldn't believe that it was right there," she said, standing on the front lawn of her brick home, craning her neck to take in her giant new neighbor. The rig belongs to Devon Energy Corp., and soon it will begin drilling for natural gas on the grounds of Crossroads United Methodist Church. The landowner who sold the property to the church years ago retained the mineral rights and sold them to Devon for drilling. Ms. Hughes and other residents of the Avondale Ranch subdivision say they had no idea that they would someday live in the shadow of such a formidable drilling operation. Now they have questions about safety, noise and traffic. And they're not alone. Throughout North Texas, but particularly near Fort Worth, homebuilders, developers and natural gas companies jockey for any spare scrap of land....
Huge power rate hike hits Klamath farms Klamath Water Project farmers and ranchers have experienced many challenges over the years, most notably the federal government's shut-off of water to their farms and ranches in 2001. Now they face another major challenge. Farmers in the region are being hit with a ten-fold increase in the price they pay for electrical power following the expiration of a 50-year-old contract between the U.S. Department of the Interior and PacifiCorp, the utility company that provides power to the region. "If they can do it here, they can do it anywhere," said Scott Seus, a diversified farmer in Tulelake who chairs the power committee for the Klamath Water Users Association. "What is happening here is a significant measurement tool of what could possibly happen in the rest of California."....
Scientists check preserve's readiness A sensitive decision now depends on a final appraisal of range conditions at the Valles Caldera National Preserve. The question of cattle grazing on the preserve, what kind and how many, has occupied the preserve's governing trust for several months and drawn scrutiny from a deeply involved public. The question has now given way to whether or not to go ahead with the steer program that has been chosen and, if so, how many steers to run. The trust has notified ranchers that it is entertaining applications for up to 1,500 steers over a 120-day season this summer, beginning June 1. The preserve's chief scientist Bob Parmenter said forage conditions, combined with data on weather and moisture to be gathered this week would be available to inform a decision on Monday. Parmenter reported a number of discouraging omens. Recent stream run-off data came in most recently at 13 percent of normal. "And we've had zero rain since then," he said. Upland stock tanks were reported to be down to a foot of water, which meant they would be dry by early June, he added. The lack of moisture meant that the elk herd, estimated at about 3,000 head has hung around all winter, grazing grass from last year....
Sheep assume fire-prevention duties in Carson This weekend, the 1,500 sheep on a capital city hillside were hard at work doing what they do best - chomping on grass. But their mission is greater than just grazing. The animals are reducing fire fuels, said John McLain of Resource Concepts Inc., an engineering, surveying, resources and environmental services firm in Carson. Sheep tenders and herding dogs have their work cut out for them, however, as they need to keep the sheep eating, but not eating too much in one place. Removal of too much vegetation, for example, could result in soil erosion, McLain said. Rancher Ted Borda called the grazing plan a win-win situation. "It's good for us, good for the community," he said. Borda has taken a week's vacation from his day job at Galena High School to get the work started. He and his two sisters, all teachers, also run the third-generation family business, Borda Land & Sheep. "We wanted to do this because the community has treated us very well," Borda said....
Forest Service: No management-cost analyses on lands being sold The U.S. Forest Service has no specific documents supporting the argument that isolated parcels of land it wants to sell to maintain payments to rural schools are expensive to manage, according to the agency's response to a Freedom of Information Act request. "The Forest Service has undertaken no analyses of the management costs associated with each parcel of land proposed for sale in the Secure Rural Schools Bill," Gregory C. Smith, the agency's director of lands, wrote in an April 19 response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. "It's a scam," Andy Stahl of Eugene, director of the environmental group, said Wednesday from his office in Eugene. "In the main, these lands are less managed than the contiguous national forest lands, and therefore cheaper."....
Sheep grazing prevails A dispute over the potential conflict between bighorn sheep and domestic sheep in the Sierra Madre Mountains of southern Wyoming reached the upper peaks of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. To the consternation of some conservationists, the interests of domestic sheep producers have prevailed. U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary David Tenny last week overturned a decision that state officials say would have essentially eliminated domestic sheep grazing in the Sierra Madres. The earlier decision was made by U.S. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth, in response to an appeal of a portion of the Medicine Bow National Forest plan by the Laramie-based Biodiversity Conservation Alliance. Essentially, Tenny determined that questions about the long-term viability of the small Encampment bighorn sheep herd -- and the presence of two other bighorn sheep herds in the Medicine Bow -- meant that no special protection should be provided for the 50 or so Encampment animals. Game and Fish Department Director Terry Cleveland joined state Department of Agriculture Director John Etchepare in petitioning the USDA to overturn Bosworth's decision. The two directors argued that keeping domestic sheep away from the Encampment bighorns due to disease transmission concerns would have likely eliminated "long-standing and historic domestic sheep operations" in the Sierra Madres. Erik Molvar of the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance said Tenny's ruling could be a death sentence for the Encampment bighorns....
Lawsuit challenges forest-thinning project in Montana Environmental groups asked a federal judge Wednesday to stop the Forest Service from beginning a Montana forest-thinning project under a wildfire prevention law, contending it amounts to industrial logging. The project the Forest Service wants to undertake in the Bitterroot Valley this summer jeopardizes the environment, three groups said in the suit filed Wednesday against the Forest Service and two of its officials. Plans call for burning and logging on almost 5,000 acres near the East Fork of the Bitterroot River, where beetle infestations have killed many trees. The project was prepared under the Healthy Forest Restoration Act signed by President Bush in 2003....
BLM director hopes to speed up gas permits The director of the Bureau of Land Management said the nation's high demand for energy underscores the importance of speeding along natural gas permitting for producers in the Powder River Basin. During a visit to the Buffalo field office Tuesday, Kathleen Clark touted the creation of programs that bring together officials from several federal agencies in an effort to speed up gas permits. Among the agencies that will be involved are the Army Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency, Fish and Wildlife Service and the Forest Service. “We are really working to set up what can be a one-stop shopping center (for permits) ... all for the purpose of helping us meet demand.” In addition, Clark hoped the seven energy pilot BLM offices in five Western states would help to maintain air and water quality more effectively. There also will be a push to look at alternative energy sources such as wind, solar, oil shale, tar sands and geothermal energy, she said....
Federal Judge Validates Form Letters In his April 25 summary judgment, Chief U.S. District Court Judge Donald Molloy rejected Bush administration regulations that for three years have shielded Forest Service projects from public scrutiny and appeals. The ruling came out of a lawsuit filed by EarthJustice on behalf of the Wilderness Society, American Wildlands and Pacific Rivers Council. Molloy issued a nationwide injunction against the regulations. His judgment immediately replaces the illegal rules with the previous rule that governed the FS appeals process before the Bush administration revised it in 2003. This rule considers all public comments significant. A major impact of the ruling is the validation of form letters. The 2003 Bush administration rule revision declared that public comments must be “substantive” to be considered or give the sender a right to appeal the decision later. In essence, this revised rule gave the FS the right to disregard form letters or e-mails send in by groups opposing proposed actions on public lands such as timber sales....
Political Leaders Gather Friday to Oppose N-waste Utah political leaders will join community activists and business owners in Salt Lake City on Friday to speak out against nuclear waste storage in the state. Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. and U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, among other elected officials, will use the event to urge Utah residents to say "No Way" to proposed storage of 44,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste in the state's West Desert. Styled as a "rally," the public event is planned for noon at the State Office Building, in the Capitol Complex. The leaders will urge residents to write to the Bureau of Land Management to oppose a proposed transfer station on federal property to transport nuclear waste to the Scull Valley Goshute Reservation. "Utah is not a dumping ground for the country and I will not allow this to happen on my watch," Huntsman said in a statement. "We must join together and say 'No Way' to nuclear waste."....
With oil at $70 a barrel, firms try coal, shale, even turkeys At more than $70 a barrel, the price of oil is causing angst for millions of Americans. But for some others it's an opportunity to move the United States beyond conventional oil: • In Carthage, Mo., a company is turning the inedible parts of Butterball turkeys into up to 350 barrels of biodiesel per day. • In Gilberton, Pa., businessman John Rich is planning to convert huge piles of low-quality coal into diesel. The state has promised to buy the production of 5,000 barrels per day, once it starts. • In Utah and Colorado, four companies are preparing environmental assessments to show the feasibility of producing oil from shale. With gas now becoming as pricey as a gallon of milk in some places, the economics of energy production is changing. Processes that didn't make any sense in the good old days of $30-a-0barrel oil are now being pulled out of filing cabinets. From the tundra of Alaska to the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, energy dreamers are trying to tap into new frontiers....
Court Puts Teeth in 'Notice' Needed to Seize Property "An elementary and fundamental requirement of due process," the Supreme Court ruled many years ago, is that the government must provide "notice" and an opportunity to be heard before it seizes property. On Wednesday, the court added teeth to that requirement, ruling that Arkansas violated a homeowner's right to due process when it sold his house for nonpayment of taxes after sending him two certified letters that came back "unclaimed." Writing for a 5-to-3 majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said that "it is not too much to insist that the state do a bit more" before using its "extraordinary power" to take and sell a person's house. The Constitution does not require "actual notice" like personally handing the letter to the homeowner, the chief justice observed. But he said that once the state became aware, as in this case, that an effort at notice had failed, it must take "additional reasonable steps to attempt to provide notice to the property owner before selling his property, if it is practicable to do so." Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy dissented, the latter two signing a dissenting opinion by Justice Thomas. The state did all that was constitutionally required, Justice Thomas said, adding that it was the homeowner's responsibility to make sure that the authorities knew how to contact him. The court was imposing a "burdensome" and "impractical" requirement on the government, he said....
RFID 'Til the Cows Come Home The national ID system is going to the dogs -- and the pigs, and the sheep and the cows and the chickens. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns this month released a government road map that would see most farmers voluntarily tag their animals with wireless radio chips by 2008 as part of an ambitious electronic disease control system to prevent outbreaks of hoof and mouth disease and avian flu, among other things. The system will not address the spread of "mad cow" disease, as it is transmitted through feed rather than animal commingling. By 2007, the program will ask farms or households that house chickens, ducks, turkeys, cows, pigs, goats or horses to register with a database and obtain a 15-digit identification number and GPS coordinate. Beginning in 2008, animals under the proposal would carry a radio frequency identity, or RFID, tag. One part of the plan is not voluntary: By 2009, farmers will be required to report the movement of any animal from the registered premises that commingles with other animals. Those who do not comply within 24 hours will face fees as high as $1,000 a day. Industry officials say they understand the need for a system to stop the spread of disease, but they show little trust in the federal government's ability to carry out the task without burdensome requirements. An industry database already exists to record the animals' location from the farm to the slaughterhouse, and 30 percent of the nation's producers have already registered, said Jay Truitt, vice president of government affairs for the National Cattleman's Beef Association. The private database acts like a 911 system to get an instantaneous trace without the wait, and does not require RFID technology. Truitt worries the government will eventually mandate the use of RFID tags, a step that would benefit the producers of the technology and not consumers. He said RDIF technology is "a big scam." "The government has done a wonderful job of eradicating diseases, that's why we don't have outbreaks like they do in Europe," Truitt says. "But the government is looking at a purely electronic solution that fits into one box."....
Thousands of cattle, sheep killed in storm Thousands of cattle and sheep worth millions of dollars died on the plains north and west of the Black Hills during last week’s howling blizzard, agriculture officials say. In Harding County, ranchers lost an estimated 1,500 to 2,500 cattle and 5,000 to 6,000 sheep, according to Kelli Willey, county executive director for the U.S. Farm Service Agency in Buffalo. On the Roger and Penny Gunderson ranch west of Ladner in far northwestern Harding County, between 450 and 500 sheep piled up against a fence and suffocated. The loss amounted to about a third of his herd, Roger Gunderson said Wednesday evening. Gunderson also estimates they lost 40 calves and five or six cows. “I figure it’s about a $120,000 loss,” Gunderson said. The wind also took off about half the tin on the barn he built after the storms of 1997. In Carter County, Mont., preliminary estimates put losses at 4,000 cattle and 6,000 sheep, FSA county executive director Ronelia Parry said. Parry said her estimates were based on contacts with producers, who reported averages of 10 percent calf losses and 15 percent lamb losses. Many area ranchers were still lambing and calving when the storm smashed into the area with high winds and dropped as much as 24 inches of snow on the prairie April 18 and 19. Willey said most of the sheep that died were buried by the snow....
A whoopin', hollerin western-style rodeo IBOR Hommer's nom de plume is Dust Cloud. It has nothing to do with his character, but a lot to do with his passion for western America. The manager of Silverado, a western-style ranch (also called the Crazy Cowboys' Club), Hommer speaks limited English except when it comes to obscure horse terms like Appendix. (Appendix horses are quarterhorses, with thoroughbred breeding in their bloodlines. A quarterhorse, if you didn't know, is a full-sized horse known for its heavily-muscled physique, even disposition, athletic ability, and versatility. The American Quarterhorse Association is headquartered in Amarillo, Texas. Several of Silverado's horses are quarterhorses.) The 40-hectare (98-acre) ranchresort will be the venue for a whoopin', hollerin' American-western-style rodeo May 1, the first of four competitions to be held in Hungary this year. Starting at 10 in the morning, it will feature typical rodeo events, such as roping, racing, bronco and 700-kilogram (1,543 lbs) bull riding, and cattle herding techniques (ie, cutting and separating, calf roping). At 5pm, the competition stops and the festivities start - country music, line dancing, drinking, and a buffet featuring chili bableves. It may be the next morning before it all stops....
Tintypes of Texas cowboys show photographer's mettle The National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City has named Revealing Character: Texas Tintypes by Robb Kendrick its outstanding Western photography book for 2005. The award ceremony Saturday was emceed by retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Kendrick's book has also been honored by the Texas Association of Museums. It was called the best Western book of the year by Reader's Digest. The book's subjects -- tintypes of working cowboys from Texas ranches -- have been on display at the Witte Museum in San Antonio and the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum in Amarillo. The photos will continue to be exhibited throughout the state and will make a stop in Fort Worth at the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in October....
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N.H. Leads Revolt Against Federal ID Rules
New Hampshire has suddenly become a battleground in the fight over privacy rights versus homeland security, with state legislators voting against strict new federal standards for issuing driver's licenses. At issue is the federal Real ID Act, which is intended to keep terrorists from getting fake IDs. It requires states by 2008 to verify documents such as birth certificates, Social Security cards and passports when people apply for driver's licenses. State databases with driver information and photos will also be linked. Last month, the Republican-controlled New Hampshire House voted overwhelmingly to bar the state from participating in the program. A vote in the GOP-dominated Senate is expected in two weeks. Democratic Gov. John Lynch remains undecided. The move has won backing from the American Civil Liberties Union as well as conservative privacy advocates and Christian fundamentalists. "I think New Hampshire will set the dominoes falling in the states," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Program of the ACLU, who testified against Real ID at a recent state Senate hearing alongside a member of the conservative Cato Institute. "Who's going to say, `The emperor has no clothes?' New Hampshire's in a good position to do that." Legislation in other states would condemn Real ID, but New Hampshire's bill is the toughest measure making real progress anywhere, Steinhardt said. Republican state Rep. Neal Kurk, author of the bill against Real ID, gave a stirring speech during the debate. "I don't believe the people of New Hampshire elected us to help the federal government create a national identification card," Kurk told the House. "We care more for our liberties than to meekly hand over to the federal government the potential to ennumerate, track, identify and eventually control."....
Leaks of Military Files Resume
Just days after U.S. troops were ordered to plug a security breach at their base here, the black market trade in computer memory drives containing military documents was thriving again Monday. Documents on flash drives for sale at a bazaar across from the American military base over the weekend contained U.S. officers' names and cellphone numbers and instructions on using pain to control prisoners who put up resistance. A study guide on one of the drives describes tactics for interrogating and controlling detainees by pinching or striking nerve and pressure points on their face, neck, arms and legs. Traders at the bazaar near Bagram's main gate were openly displaying pilfered U.S. military memory drives in their shops Monday, two weeks after the Los Angeles Times reported on the black market in computer equipment, some of which contained American military documents marked "Secret." U.S. soldiers spent thousands of dollars later that week buying scores of flash memory drives from the bazaar. The soldiers walked through the black market with a box of money, purchasing all the computer equipment they could find. For several days afterward, no more memory drives were available. But an 18-year-old Afghan man who works on the base said that by Friday, memory drives were being smuggled off the base again. The devices are smaller than disposable lighters. Several shopkeepers have said in recent days that they are eager for the military to return to the market so they can sell their new stock for premium prices. Some of the memory drives for sale earlier this month listed the names, addresses and photographs of Afghan spies providing information to U.S. Special Forces. Others that were also marked "Secret" included American military officials' view that the Taliban and their allies were using bases in Pakistan to launch attacks in Afghanistan. One had maps dated Dec. 1, 2001, the day after U.S. and Afghan militia forces began their offensive at Tora Bora, that described possible escape routes of Osama bin Laden. The routes in the maps start not at Tora Bora, where many had thought Bin Laden was at the time, but in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar. Some of the drives contained sensitive documents that had been deleted but could be retrieved with software available on the Internet....
Cleric Wins Appeal Ruling Over Wiretaps
An appellate court on Tuesday directed a lower court to consider statements by a Muslim cleric in northern Virginia that he had been illegally wiretapped under the warrantless eavesdropping program that President Bush authorized. The ruling opened the door to what could be the first ruling by a federal court on whether information obtained under the program, operated by the National Security Agency, had been improperly used in a criminal prosecution. The cleric, Ali al-Timimi, who was sentenced to life in prison last year for inciting his Muslim followers to violence, is challenging his conviction because he says he suspects that the government failed to disclosed illegal wiretaps of his e-mail messages and telephone conversations. In an order released on Tuesday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit did not rule on the merits of Mr. Timimi's assertions about the N.S.A. program, but sent the case back to the federal trial court in Alexandria, Va., for a rehearing. The appellate court gave the trial judge in the case, Leonie M. Brinkema, broad latitude, saying the trial court could "order whatever relief or changes in the case, if any, that it considers appropriate." A number of defendants in terrorism cases around the country have sought to challenge their prosecutions on the ground that evidence against them may have been garnered from undisclosed wiretaps. Mr. Timimi's case is the first to result in a rehearing on the challenges....
European Inquiry Says C.I.A. Flew 1,000 Flights in Secret
Investigators for the European Parliament said Wednesday that data gathered from air safety regulators and others found that the Central Intelligence Agency had flown 1,000 undeclared flights over European territory since 2001. Sometimes the planes stopped to pick up terrorism suspects who had been kidnapped to take them to countries that use torture, the investigators added. The operation used the same American agents and the same planes over and over, they said, though they could not say how many flights involved the transport of suspects. The investigation, by a committee looking into C.I.A. counterterrorism activities in Europe, also concluded that European countries, including Italy, Sweden and Bosnia and Herzegovina, were aware of the abductions or transfers and therefore might have been complicit. The report, the first of several planned by the Parliament, grew out of three months of hearings, including testimony by human rights advocates and individuals who said they had been kidnapped by United States agents and flown to other countries, including Egypt and Afghanistan, where they were tortured. As for the question of secret C.I.A. detention centers in Europe, the new report offered no hard evidence....
Port Workers to Undergo Background Checks
Following months of criticism about security gaps at the nation's seaports, the Bush administration is requiring background checks for port workers to look for links to terrorism and ensure they are legal U.S. residents. The heightened scrutiny — which will begin immediately — drew praise Tuesday from some lawmakers and port associations that said the checks were long overdue. Others jeered the security measures as either too weak or too invasive of workers' privacy rights. Names of an estimated 400,000 employees who work in the most sensitive areas of ports will be matched against government terror watch lists and immigration databases, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said. They will be among roughly 750,000 workers — including truckers and rail employees — who have unrestricted access to ports and will be required to carry tamper-resistant identification cards by next year. "What this will do is it will elevate security at our ports themselves so that we can be sure that those who enter our ports to do business come for legitimate reasons and not in order to do us harm," Chertoff said. The background checks will not examine workers' criminal history, although Chertoff left open that possibility for the future. How much the background checks will cost was not immediately available. The Bush administration has been under fire for months for what critics call holes in security measures at ports, which were highlighted after a Dubai company's purchase of a British firm gave it control of six American ports. An outcry in Congress led the Dubai company, DP World, to decide to sell the U.S. operations to an American firm. Congress is considering port security legislation this week, prompting some to question the sincerity and timing of Chertoff's announcement....
Rumsfeld sued over Pentagon's recruiting database
Six New York teen-agers sued Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld on Monday, alleging the U.S. Department of Defense broke the law by keeping an extensive database on potential recruits. The suit in federal court in Manhattan follows a series of allegations last year of misconduct by recruiters, who have experienced difficulty meeting targets because of the war in Iraq. The Pentagon last year acknowledged it had created a database of 12 million Americans, full of personal data such as grades and Social Security numbers, to help find potential military recruits. The Pentagon has defended the practice as critical to the success of the all-volunteer U.S. military, and said it was sensitive to privacy concerns. But the suit alleges the Pentagon improperly collected data on people as young as 16 and kept it beyond a three-year limit, and said that the law does not allow for keeping records on race, ethnicity, gender or social security numbers. Although the database was created in 2003, before the U.S. military started missing recruiting targets, the Pentagon first revealed the program in the federal register last year just has it was hit by other recruiting scandals. The plaintiffs -- all 16- and 17-year-old students from the New York area -- were approached by military recruiters even after demanding that their information be stricken from the database, Lieberman said....
Federal Victory in Terror Case May Prove Brief, Experts Say
Despite predictions that their victory might not hold up on appeal, federal prosecutors on Wednesday savored their victory in a Sacramento courtroom, where a jury a day earlier convicted an American born in Pakistan of providing support to a terrorist group and lying to investigators. McGregor W. Scott, the United States attorney who oversaw the prosecution, said in a telephone interview Wednesday that the conviction of the man, Hamid Hayat, 23, showed that the government was capable of winning a jury trial on terrorism charges after a number of high-profile failures elsewhere. "In this post-9/11 context, those of us in law enforcement have been tasked with preventing new acts of terrorism, trying to stop something from happening, rather than after the fact trying to establish what happened," Mr. Scott said. "This is a difficult task and a new mission. We have shown in this case and this trial and conviction that we can succeed in that mission." But legal experts said the prosecution's celebration might be short-lived because a federal appeals court had twice ruled unconstitutional some aspects of the law on which Mr. Hayat was convicted. They also said Mr. Hayat's reported confessions to F.B.I. agents could be challenged on the ground they were coerced from a frightened suspect with a limited command of English. Professor Cole said the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which sits in San Francisco and covers the Sacramento federal court district, had twice ruled the material-support law unconstitutionally vague because it did not require proof of any overt act....
Airlines balk at epidemic safeguards
Concerned about bird flu, federal health officials want airlines to collect personal information about domestic and international passengers to help track a potential epidemic. Financially strapped airlines say creating such a database would impose staggering new costs. "What we're asking for is the authority to collect the information in the context of modern travel on airlines," Dr. Marty Cetron, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's director of global migration and quarantine, said Tuesday in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "There's just a number of conditions where acting quickly with electronic access to passenger information is going to make a lot of difference," Cetron said. The CDC wants to be able to easily find, notify and recommend treatment to airline passengers who have been exposed to bird flu as well as such diseases as plague, dengue fever or SARS — even if the travelers' symptoms don't appear while they're traveling. The CDC plan calls for airlines to ask passengers their full name and address, emergency contact numbers and detailed flight information. Airlines would have to keep the data for 60 days and, if asked, transmit it to the CDC within 12 hours. The Air Transport Association, which represents major airlines, said the plan "represents an unwarranted and insupportable burden on an industry sector that can ill afford it." ATA lawyer Katherine Andrus said in an interview that the CDC plan wouldn’t work because of cost, technological difficulty and the time needed to fill out the forms. “We don’t think that, as proposed, this is a workable approach,” Andrus said....
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N.H. Leads Revolt Against Federal ID Rules
New Hampshire has suddenly become a battleground in the fight over privacy rights versus homeland security, with state legislators voting against strict new federal standards for issuing driver's licenses. At issue is the federal Real ID Act, which is intended to keep terrorists from getting fake IDs. It requires states by 2008 to verify documents such as birth certificates, Social Security cards and passports when people apply for driver's licenses. State databases with driver information and photos will also be linked. Last month, the Republican-controlled New Hampshire House voted overwhelmingly to bar the state from participating in the program. A vote in the GOP-dominated Senate is expected in two weeks. Democratic Gov. John Lynch remains undecided. The move has won backing from the American Civil Liberties Union as well as conservative privacy advocates and Christian fundamentalists. "I think New Hampshire will set the dominoes falling in the states," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Program of the ACLU, who testified against Real ID at a recent state Senate hearing alongside a member of the conservative Cato Institute. "Who's going to say, `The emperor has no clothes?' New Hampshire's in a good position to do that." Legislation in other states would condemn Real ID, but New Hampshire's bill is the toughest measure making real progress anywhere, Steinhardt said. Republican state Rep. Neal Kurk, author of the bill against Real ID, gave a stirring speech during the debate. "I don't believe the people of New Hampshire elected us to help the federal government create a national identification card," Kurk told the House. "We care more for our liberties than to meekly hand over to the federal government the potential to ennumerate, track, identify and eventually control."....
Leaks of Military Files Resume
Just days after U.S. troops were ordered to plug a security breach at their base here, the black market trade in computer memory drives containing military documents was thriving again Monday. Documents on flash drives for sale at a bazaar across from the American military base over the weekend contained U.S. officers' names and cellphone numbers and instructions on using pain to control prisoners who put up resistance. A study guide on one of the drives describes tactics for interrogating and controlling detainees by pinching or striking nerve and pressure points on their face, neck, arms and legs. Traders at the bazaar near Bagram's main gate were openly displaying pilfered U.S. military memory drives in their shops Monday, two weeks after the Los Angeles Times reported on the black market in computer equipment, some of which contained American military documents marked "Secret." U.S. soldiers spent thousands of dollars later that week buying scores of flash memory drives from the bazaar. The soldiers walked through the black market with a box of money, purchasing all the computer equipment they could find. For several days afterward, no more memory drives were available. But an 18-year-old Afghan man who works on the base said that by Friday, memory drives were being smuggled off the base again. The devices are smaller than disposable lighters. Several shopkeepers have said in recent days that they are eager for the military to return to the market so they can sell their new stock for premium prices. Some of the memory drives for sale earlier this month listed the names, addresses and photographs of Afghan spies providing information to U.S. Special Forces. Others that were also marked "Secret" included American military officials' view that the Taliban and their allies were using bases in Pakistan to launch attacks in Afghanistan. One had maps dated Dec. 1, 2001, the day after U.S. and Afghan militia forces began their offensive at Tora Bora, that described possible escape routes of Osama bin Laden. The routes in the maps start not at Tora Bora, where many had thought Bin Laden was at the time, but in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar. Some of the drives contained sensitive documents that had been deleted but could be retrieved with software available on the Internet....
Cleric Wins Appeal Ruling Over Wiretaps
An appellate court on Tuesday directed a lower court to consider statements by a Muslim cleric in northern Virginia that he had been illegally wiretapped under the warrantless eavesdropping program that President Bush authorized. The ruling opened the door to what could be the first ruling by a federal court on whether information obtained under the program, operated by the National Security Agency, had been improperly used in a criminal prosecution. The cleric, Ali al-Timimi, who was sentenced to life in prison last year for inciting his Muslim followers to violence, is challenging his conviction because he says he suspects that the government failed to disclosed illegal wiretaps of his e-mail messages and telephone conversations. In an order released on Tuesday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit did not rule on the merits of Mr. Timimi's assertions about the N.S.A. program, but sent the case back to the federal trial court in Alexandria, Va., for a rehearing. The appellate court gave the trial judge in the case, Leonie M. Brinkema, broad latitude, saying the trial court could "order whatever relief or changes in the case, if any, that it considers appropriate." A number of defendants in terrorism cases around the country have sought to challenge their prosecutions on the ground that evidence against them may have been garnered from undisclosed wiretaps. Mr. Timimi's case is the first to result in a rehearing on the challenges....
European Inquiry Says C.I.A. Flew 1,000 Flights in Secret
Investigators for the European Parliament said Wednesday that data gathered from air safety regulators and others found that the Central Intelligence Agency had flown 1,000 undeclared flights over European territory since 2001. Sometimes the planes stopped to pick up terrorism suspects who had been kidnapped to take them to countries that use torture, the investigators added. The operation used the same American agents and the same planes over and over, they said, though they could not say how many flights involved the transport of suspects. The investigation, by a committee looking into C.I.A. counterterrorism activities in Europe, also concluded that European countries, including Italy, Sweden and Bosnia and Herzegovina, were aware of the abductions or transfers and therefore might have been complicit. The report, the first of several planned by the Parliament, grew out of three months of hearings, including testimony by human rights advocates and individuals who said they had been kidnapped by United States agents and flown to other countries, including Egypt and Afghanistan, where they were tortured. As for the question of secret C.I.A. detention centers in Europe, the new report offered no hard evidence....
Port Workers to Undergo Background Checks
Following months of criticism about security gaps at the nation's seaports, the Bush administration is requiring background checks for port workers to look for links to terrorism and ensure they are legal U.S. residents. The heightened scrutiny — which will begin immediately — drew praise Tuesday from some lawmakers and port associations that said the checks were long overdue. Others jeered the security measures as either too weak or too invasive of workers' privacy rights. Names of an estimated 400,000 employees who work in the most sensitive areas of ports will be matched against government terror watch lists and immigration databases, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said. They will be among roughly 750,000 workers — including truckers and rail employees — who have unrestricted access to ports and will be required to carry tamper-resistant identification cards by next year. "What this will do is it will elevate security at our ports themselves so that we can be sure that those who enter our ports to do business come for legitimate reasons and not in order to do us harm," Chertoff said. The background checks will not examine workers' criminal history, although Chertoff left open that possibility for the future. How much the background checks will cost was not immediately available. The Bush administration has been under fire for months for what critics call holes in security measures at ports, which were highlighted after a Dubai company's purchase of a British firm gave it control of six American ports. An outcry in Congress led the Dubai company, DP World, to decide to sell the U.S. operations to an American firm. Congress is considering port security legislation this week, prompting some to question the sincerity and timing of Chertoff's announcement....
Rumsfeld sued over Pentagon's recruiting database
Six New York teen-agers sued Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld on Monday, alleging the U.S. Department of Defense broke the law by keeping an extensive database on potential recruits. The suit in federal court in Manhattan follows a series of allegations last year of misconduct by recruiters, who have experienced difficulty meeting targets because of the war in Iraq. The Pentagon last year acknowledged it had created a database of 12 million Americans, full of personal data such as grades and Social Security numbers, to help find potential military recruits. The Pentagon has defended the practice as critical to the success of the all-volunteer U.S. military, and said it was sensitive to privacy concerns. But the suit alleges the Pentagon improperly collected data on people as young as 16 and kept it beyond a three-year limit, and said that the law does not allow for keeping records on race, ethnicity, gender or social security numbers. Although the database was created in 2003, before the U.S. military started missing recruiting targets, the Pentagon first revealed the program in the federal register last year just has it was hit by other recruiting scandals. The plaintiffs -- all 16- and 17-year-old students from the New York area -- were approached by military recruiters even after demanding that their information be stricken from the database, Lieberman said....
Federal Victory in Terror Case May Prove Brief, Experts Say
Despite predictions that their victory might not hold up on appeal, federal prosecutors on Wednesday savored their victory in a Sacramento courtroom, where a jury a day earlier convicted an American born in Pakistan of providing support to a terrorist group and lying to investigators. McGregor W. Scott, the United States attorney who oversaw the prosecution, said in a telephone interview Wednesday that the conviction of the man, Hamid Hayat, 23, showed that the government was capable of winning a jury trial on terrorism charges after a number of high-profile failures elsewhere. "In this post-9/11 context, those of us in law enforcement have been tasked with preventing new acts of terrorism, trying to stop something from happening, rather than after the fact trying to establish what happened," Mr. Scott said. "This is a difficult task and a new mission. We have shown in this case and this trial and conviction that we can succeed in that mission." But legal experts said the prosecution's celebration might be short-lived because a federal appeals court had twice ruled unconstitutional some aspects of the law on which Mr. Hayat was convicted. They also said Mr. Hayat's reported confessions to F.B.I. agents could be challenged on the ground they were coerced from a frightened suspect with a limited command of English. Professor Cole said the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which sits in San Francisco and covers the Sacramento federal court district, had twice ruled the material-support law unconstitutionally vague because it did not require proof of any overt act....
Airlines balk at epidemic safeguards
Concerned about bird flu, federal health officials want airlines to collect personal information about domestic and international passengers to help track a potential epidemic. Financially strapped airlines say creating such a database would impose staggering new costs. "What we're asking for is the authority to collect the information in the context of modern travel on airlines," Dr. Marty Cetron, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's director of global migration and quarantine, said Tuesday in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "There's just a number of conditions where acting quickly with electronic access to passenger information is going to make a lot of difference," Cetron said. The CDC wants to be able to easily find, notify and recommend treatment to airline passengers who have been exposed to bird flu as well as such diseases as plague, dengue fever or SARS — even if the travelers' symptoms don't appear while they're traveling. The CDC plan calls for airlines to ask passengers their full name and address, emergency contact numbers and detailed flight information. Airlines would have to keep the data for 60 days and, if asked, transmit it to the CDC within 12 hours. The Air Transport Association, which represents major airlines, said the plan "represents an unwarranted and insupportable burden on an industry sector that can ill afford it." ATA lawyer Katherine Andrus said in an interview that the CDC plan wouldn’t work because of cost, technological difficulty and the time needed to fill out the forms. “We don’t think that, as proposed, this is a workable approach,” Andrus said....
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Wednesday, April 26, 2006
NEWS ROUNDUP
White House loses in ruling on forests Three rules imposed by the Bush administration unlawfully limit the public's ability to influence U.S. Forest Service decisions on management of the nation's forests, a federal judge has ruled. U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy of Missoula issued an injunction Monday against a rule that requires people to specify objections to Forest Service projects while they are under consideration, or forfeit the right to challenge them later. The injunction applies nationwide. "The substantive comment requirement was a serious problem because under these rules, members of the public might not even know that a project threatened their interests until after the Forest Service deadline for public comment," lawyer Doug Honnold said Tuesday. "Whether you're a hunter, hiker or neighboring landowner, the Bush rule could cut you out of the process," said Honnold of Earthjustice, which represented The Wilderness Society, American Wildlands and Pacific Rivers Council in a lawsuit challenging rules issued in 2003. Named as defendants were Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, Undersecretary Mark Rey and Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth. A timber industry group Tuesday defended the requirement for substantive comment. Timber- sale protesters "should come in ahead of time and have real reasons, rather than this boilerplate language that so many of the groups or individuals use," said Ellen Engstedt, executive vice president of the Montana Wood Products Association. "You don't wait until the process is finished and then say, 'I don't like it.' " The Forest Service had said the rules would help hasten removal of trees from overgrown forests that pose a wildfire hazard. Forest Service spokesman Dan Jiron said agency officials had not read Molloy's decision and had no comment. "We'll comply with court orders and if something else needs to be done, we will work with our lawyers," Jiron said. Molloy also struck down a Forest Service rule that exempted some Forest Service projects from requirements for environmental analyses. The third rule allowed the government to bypass public involvement in national forest management by having the agriculture secretary or undersecretary sign decisions on agency projects....
Forest activists obtain access A U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., has sided with a Tri-State environmental group in its quest to gain access to U.S. Forest Service documents. The court ruled Friday that the forest service was wrong to deny a request by Heartwood for copies of scientific studies submitted to the agency. Heartwood, which often challenges policies at the Hoosier National Forest and Shawnee National Forest, believes the studies may have been biased in favor of active management of forestlands. By comparing the drafts with the agency's final ecological study, Heartwood believes it might be able to expose manipulation. The study was being used to shape long-term strategic plans for both Hoosier and Shawnee forests....
Siskiyou Mountains and Scott Bar Salamanders Illegally Denied Protection Under the Endangered Species Act The Center for Biological Diversity, Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, Environmental Protection Information Center and Oregon Natural Resources Council today filed an official 60-day notice to challenge in federal court the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to leave the Siskiyou Mountains and Scott Bar Salamanders off the list of endangered species. The Fish and Wildlife Service announced its decision today. “The Siskiyou and newly discovered Scott Bar Salamanders need the safety net of the Endangered Species Act to survive,” said Noah Greenwald, Conservation Biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity and primary author of the petition. “Today’s decision flies in the face of science and comes from an administration that has persistently showed disregard for the nation’s wildlife.” To date, the Bush administration has protected just 41 species, which is the fewest number in the history of the Endangered Species Act and hardly compares to the 512 species protected under the Clinton administration or 234 protected under Bush senior’s administration. The administration has denied or delayed protection for literally hundreds of imperiled species....
Column: Leopold the Hunter A GOOD friend who hunts and writes told me that he once gave a public lecture about hunting and conservation. At question time, a member of the audience stood and lectured my friend that Aldo Leopold, the great wildlife ecologist and conservationist, had opposed hunting and therefore hunting was immoral. My friend hadn't time to disabuse the "lecturer" of his belief--to tell him that Leopold had created the field of wildlife management, publishing its first textbook in 1933 (Game Management); that he had fashioned his own hunting bows; that he had bought his famous worn-out, soil-depleted Wisconsin "sand county" farm as a hunting camp as well as a land restoration project; or that he had based the Land Ethic on the sportsmanship philosophy his father had taught him. In fact, Leopold wrote lyrically and lovingly about hunting all his life. A reader of Leopold would have to work very hard to miss Leopold the hunter, because the hunter's signature is on virtually every page. I doubt my friend could have recounted Leopold's history as a hunter in a way that would have shaken the "lecturer's" belief, so rigid is the anti-hunting ideology, but it's important for hunters to understand how anti-hunters have press-ganged the long-dead, over-sanctified Leopold for their cause....
Questions remain in bear attack The United States Forest Service is awaiting tests from a euthanized black bear to determine if it was the same one that attacked a family in the Chilhowee Mountain Recreation Area, Mary Bell Lunsford, information officer, said. Elora Petrasek, 6 years old, was killed earlier this month by a black bear in the area. Her mother and 2-year-old brother were also injured in the attack, but are expected to recover. A necropsy, an autopsy on animals, was performed on the bear and the investigation is still waiting on results, according to Lunsford. She said the area is still closed off to the public with no timetable set for when it will reopen. A second bear has been captured in a trap near the site and is now being held alive. She said there are no indications as to why the bear attacked the family. Frank Van Manen, research ecologist for the Department of Forestry, Wildlife and Fisheries at the University of Tennessee called the incident “unsettling.”....
Two North Dakota Utilities Pay for New Source Review Violations Two utilities in North Dakota have agreed to reduce emissions of two harmful pollutants by more than 33,000 tons per year. The Department of Justice and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today announced settlement of a case alleging violations of the New Source Review (NSR) provisions of the Clean Air Act - the first NSR settlement with a power plant utility in the western United States. The case was brought against Minnkota Power Cooperative and Square Butte Electric Cooperative. These member owned rural utilities will reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2) by about 23,600 tons per year and nitrogen oxides (NOx) by more than 9,400 tons annually from the Milton R. Young Station, a coal fired power plant near Center, North Dakota. Sulfur dioxides and nitrogen oxides cause severe respiratory problems and contribute to childhood asthma. These pollutants are also contributors to acid rain, smog and haze, which impair visibility in national parks....
Court rejects appeals of Missouri River policy In a victory for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear challenges to a lower court ruling that favors the navigation industry over recreation and other interests on the Missouri River. The action, which involves several cases, let stand without comment a ruling last August by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That decision said recreation and environmental concerns along the river are of lesser value than maintaining barge traffic along the river's shipping channel. Monday's action is a blow to North Dakota, South Dakota and environmental groups that appealed the ruling. The states wanted a higher priority given to the multimillion-dollar fishing business upstream, which has suffered from a loss of water directed downstream....
Scientists seek clues to dying steelhead It was simple surgery, done in four minutes from a makeshift operating room floating on the Puyallup River. Biologist Andrew Berger sliced open a young steelhead and tucked a vitamin-sized transmitter into the folds of its belly. As a colleague pumped water into the fish's gasping mouth, Berger quickly stitched the wound closed so the 8-inch smolt could continue its journey out to sea. Berger and other biologists with the Puyallup Tribe of Indians hope the delicate operation on this and dozens of other young fish will yield answers to some pressing questions: Where, exactly, do steelhead go when they leave the rivers that flow to Puget Sound? And why are so many dying? Steelhead populations around Puget Sound have plummeted dramatically enough that the federal government has proposed listing them for protection under the Endangered Species Act. Steelhead, which are similar to rainbow trout but spend much of their lives in the ocean and return to rivers to spawn, have such complex life cycles that unraveling the mystery of their decline is difficult....
Column: Is God an environmentalist? It is hardly news that environmentalists are critical of the Bush administration's track record on issues ranging from climate change, to mineral exploration on public lands, to the gutting of the Endangered Species and Clean Water acts. What is new is that the latest chorus criticizing his environmental policies comes from deep within the president's political base. In the run-up to the last presidential election, the 30 million-member National Association of Evangelicals adopted a resolution affirming "that God-given dominion is a sacred responsibility to steward the earth and not a license to abuse the creation of which we are a part." A year ago, more than 1,000 church leaders signed a statement cautioning Bush that "there was no mandate, no majority, or no 'values' message in this past election for the president or Congress to roll back and oppose programs that care for God's creation." The idea that the Bible gives humanity "dominion" over the earth is nothing new to U.S. religion or politics. Early colonists brought the notion with them from England, christening this "New World" a second Eden, a vast garden there for the tilling. The agricultural/industrial complex was built on this fertile metaphorical foundation. So President Reagan's Secretary of the Interior James Watt could praise national parks as "cathedrals to the wonder of nature and to the glory of the Creator." This at the same time he was authorizing massive mineral and timber exploitation on public lands, and declining to set aside any more pristine wilderness for protection. Fittingly, critics dubbed Bush's recently resigned Interior secretary, Gale Norton, "James Watt in a skirt." But many evangelical Christians are profoundly uneasy with such an interpretation of the biblical injunction to "be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it." Calling themselves "Creation Care" activists rather than "environmentalists" (a designation they associate with liberals, secularists and Democrats), they represent the conservative wing of a broader movement within American Christianity that scholars refer to as "ecotheology."....
Drilling in rec area concerns Craig officials The city of Craig doesn’t want to see a natural-gas drilling rig in the middle of a new recreation area on the eastern shore of Elkhead Reservoir. But the potential exists if the Bureau of Land Management next month leases federal mineral rights under the city’s 40-acre parcel where a picnic area, boat ramps and other facilities are planned, City Manager Jim Ferree said Tuesday. “We don’t want a gas well drilled in the middle of our park,” Ferree said. Elkhead Reservoir, northeast of Craig on Elkhead Creek, also is a backup water supply for the city, Ferree said. Its main water source is the Yampa River. Ferree said the city has not had to use its Elkhead water supply, but could if growth calls for the extra water. He said the city’s immediate concern is what happens on the surface of city property....
Mineral-rights owners win changes to proposal Key provisions were cut Monday from a plan intended to give landowners more legal protections from damage caused by oil developers who own the mineral rights on their property. The oil industry, which sparred with lawmakers earlier in the day over the plan, welcomed a revamped version of the proposal. Originally, it would have given landowners the opportunity to force mineral rights owners to get a bond to pay for any potential damages. But an Environmental Quality Council subcommittee decided to strip tougher measures from the proposed law. In Montana, there is little a surface owner can do to stop someone who owns mineral rights on their property from developing the resource. Such ownership situations are called split estates because two different people own parts of the what is essentially the same property -- one owns the ground and the other owns the minerals or resources under it. Conservationists said there is still time to get the tougher provisions back into the proposed law, particularly an idea that would force the owners of mineral rights to enter into negotiations prior to drilling. The subcommittee's action left little protection under the measure for surface owners, said Julia Page, with the Northern Plains Resource Council. But the whole proposal faces a number of hearings, eventually needs to pass muster with the 2007 Legislature, and could be changed any number of ways. As it sits, the proposal would toughen the notification requirements of developers before they drill, and makes smaller modifications to current law....
BLM says arsenic of concern High levels of arsenic left over from a hundred years of mining near the northwest corner of San Bernardino County has federal officials worried about the potential health risk to residents and off-roaders. Soil samples in recent months showed "extremely" high arsenic concentrations near Red Mountain, Johannesburg and Randsburg, desert towns rooted in the area's gold and silver industry. About 500 people live in the remote communities, and the territory is an increasingly popular off-road recreation spot. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is considering closing dirt roads where motorcyclists and other off-roaders kick up potentially hazardous dust. People could be exposed by breathing the dust or by skin contact. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has asked the bureau to contain or clean up the arsenic from processed gold and silver ore, known as mine tailings....
Western senators blunt about 'flawed' road policy Six Democratic senators have asked the Interior Department to reconsider its policy on how to decide ownership of thousands of miles of roads around the West, voicing "deep concern" about what they call a "flawed" policy. Last month, the Interior Department issued new guidelines laying out how it will handle disputes with counties and states over road ownership, after a 2005 ruling by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a lawsuit over disputed Utah roads. The new Bureau of Land Management guidelines expanded the ways counties could claim ownership of roads, granting them permission to do routine maintenance and allow land managers to grant permission to expand or improve roads. "The new policy would risk significant harm to our national parks, wildlife refuges, national monuments, wilderness areas, wilderness study areas, proposed wilderness and other special public lands by paving the way for unprecedented road development and damaging off-road vehicle use," the senators said in a letter to acting Interior Secretary Lynn Scarlett. "We strongly urge you to reconsider this ill-advised policy," they wrote. The letter was signed by Sens. Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California; Ken Salazar of Colorado; Ron Wyden of Oregon; Richard Durbin of Illinois; and Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, who is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee....
Stolen from US history: its artifacts In Italy, they are called tombaroli - tomb raiders - and punished with decade-long jail sentences and million-dollar fines. In America, they plunder virtually unnoticed, stripping parks and historical sites of their cultural bounty without fear of getting caught. Indeed, US officials say the brazen looting of ancient native-American artifacts, Civil War mementos, and other valuable relics is reaching epidemic proportions. In any given year, cultural thieves make off with $500 million in relics, the FBI estimates. On National Park Service land alone, they strike on average once a day. "This is on a scale where it's radically affecting our ability to understand the past," says Martin McAllister, an independent archaeologist who has investigated over 200 damaged sites for state and federal departments. "We're talking a multimillion-dollar criminal enterprise here." Now, federal agencies, including the FBI's Art Crime Team, are beginning to score some victories against cultural theft. Last year, a dozen cases were successfully prosecuted under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, a 1979 law that bans the removal and sale of artifacts from public land. In Georgia, a judge sentenced Terry Crawford to 21 months in prison for stealing Civil War bullets from Chickamauga Battlefield. In Colorado, Robert Hanson, was sentenced to 24 months in prison for receiving and transporting Pueblo artifacts dating from 1200, including funeral objects, bowls, and tools....
Bear attacks hunter near Olympic National Park A black bear attacked and seriously injured a hunter on a road just outside Olympic National Park late Saturday, authorities said. A second hunter shot and killed the bear before summoning help, said Larry Evans, a shift supervisor for the Washington State Patrol's office in Bremerton, on the Kitsap Peninsula between Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula. The injured hunter was rushed to Forks Hospital with a compound fracture to the arm, a broken hand and several bite marks, Evans said. The man lost a significant amount of blood, but was expected to survive, Evans said. The attack was reported to the state patrol around 9 p.m., and aid workers arrived about 15 minutes later. The bear apparently had dragged the man away from the site of the attack before being shot, Evans said. Troopers said they receive occasional reports of cougar attacks in the area, but that bear attacks are relatively rare....
Eminent-domain measure euthanized The sponsor of a constitutional amendment to prevent governments from taking land for economic development killed his proposal Monday but said he is willing to work with the House speaker on a proposed compromise. Still, Republican Rep. Al White of Winter Park said the proposed deal being brokered by Democratic House Speaker Andrew Romanoff is "stopgap" because it is a statutory measure that would be much easier to change than a constitutional amendment. The new proposal, White said, "may slow the avaricious cities in concert with the greedy developers in taking the private property of the poor citizens of Colorado" until a constitutional amendment by citizens initiative can be passed in November. On Monday, White asked his colleagues to kill his proposed constitutional amendment, House Concurrent Resolution 1001, because it had been changed so drastically for the worse....
President Bush enjoys bike ride above Palm Springs President Bush woke up early and rode his mountain bike along the Clara Burgess Trail to the top of Murray Hill, which affords a spectacular view of the Coachella Valley and Little San Bernardino Mountains. The trail is considered strenuous for riding, with a 500-foot elevation gain. The total round-trip was a little more than 7 miles. “He said it was a pretty tough terrain, but he enjoyed it,” Press Secretary Scott McClellan said. Jim Foote, acting manager of the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument, said the Clara Burgess trail is also among those monument managers ask people to avoid part of the year to prevent disrupting endangered Peninsular bighorn sheep. The trail is one of about 10 in the monument under a “voluntary avoidance” program. People are asked to stay off the Clara Burgess trail from Jan. 1 to June 30 during the sheep lambing season, he said. It was uncertain Sunday night if White House organizers accompanying President Bush knew about the “voluntary avoidance” program.
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White House loses in ruling on forests Three rules imposed by the Bush administration unlawfully limit the public's ability to influence U.S. Forest Service decisions on management of the nation's forests, a federal judge has ruled. U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy of Missoula issued an injunction Monday against a rule that requires people to specify objections to Forest Service projects while they are under consideration, or forfeit the right to challenge them later. The injunction applies nationwide. "The substantive comment requirement was a serious problem because under these rules, members of the public might not even know that a project threatened their interests until after the Forest Service deadline for public comment," lawyer Doug Honnold said Tuesday. "Whether you're a hunter, hiker or neighboring landowner, the Bush rule could cut you out of the process," said Honnold of Earthjustice, which represented The Wilderness Society, American Wildlands and Pacific Rivers Council in a lawsuit challenging rules issued in 2003. Named as defendants were Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, Undersecretary Mark Rey and Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth. A timber industry group Tuesday defended the requirement for substantive comment. Timber- sale protesters "should come in ahead of time and have real reasons, rather than this boilerplate language that so many of the groups or individuals use," said Ellen Engstedt, executive vice president of the Montana Wood Products Association. "You don't wait until the process is finished and then say, 'I don't like it.' " The Forest Service had said the rules would help hasten removal of trees from overgrown forests that pose a wildfire hazard. Forest Service spokesman Dan Jiron said agency officials had not read Molloy's decision and had no comment. "We'll comply with court orders and if something else needs to be done, we will work with our lawyers," Jiron said. Molloy also struck down a Forest Service rule that exempted some Forest Service projects from requirements for environmental analyses. The third rule allowed the government to bypass public involvement in national forest management by having the agriculture secretary or undersecretary sign decisions on agency projects....
Forest activists obtain access A U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., has sided with a Tri-State environmental group in its quest to gain access to U.S. Forest Service documents. The court ruled Friday that the forest service was wrong to deny a request by Heartwood for copies of scientific studies submitted to the agency. Heartwood, which often challenges policies at the Hoosier National Forest and Shawnee National Forest, believes the studies may have been biased in favor of active management of forestlands. By comparing the drafts with the agency's final ecological study, Heartwood believes it might be able to expose manipulation. The study was being used to shape long-term strategic plans for both Hoosier and Shawnee forests....
Siskiyou Mountains and Scott Bar Salamanders Illegally Denied Protection Under the Endangered Species Act The Center for Biological Diversity, Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, Environmental Protection Information Center and Oregon Natural Resources Council today filed an official 60-day notice to challenge in federal court the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to leave the Siskiyou Mountains and Scott Bar Salamanders off the list of endangered species. The Fish and Wildlife Service announced its decision today. “The Siskiyou and newly discovered Scott Bar Salamanders need the safety net of the Endangered Species Act to survive,” said Noah Greenwald, Conservation Biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity and primary author of the petition. “Today’s decision flies in the face of science and comes from an administration that has persistently showed disregard for the nation’s wildlife.” To date, the Bush administration has protected just 41 species, which is the fewest number in the history of the Endangered Species Act and hardly compares to the 512 species protected under the Clinton administration or 234 protected under Bush senior’s administration. The administration has denied or delayed protection for literally hundreds of imperiled species....
Column: Leopold the Hunter A GOOD friend who hunts and writes told me that he once gave a public lecture about hunting and conservation. At question time, a member of the audience stood and lectured my friend that Aldo Leopold, the great wildlife ecologist and conservationist, had opposed hunting and therefore hunting was immoral. My friend hadn't time to disabuse the "lecturer" of his belief--to tell him that Leopold had created the field of wildlife management, publishing its first textbook in 1933 (Game Management); that he had fashioned his own hunting bows; that he had bought his famous worn-out, soil-depleted Wisconsin "sand county" farm as a hunting camp as well as a land restoration project; or that he had based the Land Ethic on the sportsmanship philosophy his father had taught him. In fact, Leopold wrote lyrically and lovingly about hunting all his life. A reader of Leopold would have to work very hard to miss Leopold the hunter, because the hunter's signature is on virtually every page. I doubt my friend could have recounted Leopold's history as a hunter in a way that would have shaken the "lecturer's" belief, so rigid is the anti-hunting ideology, but it's important for hunters to understand how anti-hunters have press-ganged the long-dead, over-sanctified Leopold for their cause....
Questions remain in bear attack The United States Forest Service is awaiting tests from a euthanized black bear to determine if it was the same one that attacked a family in the Chilhowee Mountain Recreation Area, Mary Bell Lunsford, information officer, said. Elora Petrasek, 6 years old, was killed earlier this month by a black bear in the area. Her mother and 2-year-old brother were also injured in the attack, but are expected to recover. A necropsy, an autopsy on animals, was performed on the bear and the investigation is still waiting on results, according to Lunsford. She said the area is still closed off to the public with no timetable set for when it will reopen. A second bear has been captured in a trap near the site and is now being held alive. She said there are no indications as to why the bear attacked the family. Frank Van Manen, research ecologist for the Department of Forestry, Wildlife and Fisheries at the University of Tennessee called the incident “unsettling.”....
Two North Dakota Utilities Pay for New Source Review Violations Two utilities in North Dakota have agreed to reduce emissions of two harmful pollutants by more than 33,000 tons per year. The Department of Justice and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today announced settlement of a case alleging violations of the New Source Review (NSR) provisions of the Clean Air Act - the first NSR settlement with a power plant utility in the western United States. The case was brought against Minnkota Power Cooperative and Square Butte Electric Cooperative. These member owned rural utilities will reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2) by about 23,600 tons per year and nitrogen oxides (NOx) by more than 9,400 tons annually from the Milton R. Young Station, a coal fired power plant near Center, North Dakota. Sulfur dioxides and nitrogen oxides cause severe respiratory problems and contribute to childhood asthma. These pollutants are also contributors to acid rain, smog and haze, which impair visibility in national parks....
Court rejects appeals of Missouri River policy In a victory for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear challenges to a lower court ruling that favors the navigation industry over recreation and other interests on the Missouri River. The action, which involves several cases, let stand without comment a ruling last August by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That decision said recreation and environmental concerns along the river are of lesser value than maintaining barge traffic along the river's shipping channel. Monday's action is a blow to North Dakota, South Dakota and environmental groups that appealed the ruling. The states wanted a higher priority given to the multimillion-dollar fishing business upstream, which has suffered from a loss of water directed downstream....
Scientists seek clues to dying steelhead It was simple surgery, done in four minutes from a makeshift operating room floating on the Puyallup River. Biologist Andrew Berger sliced open a young steelhead and tucked a vitamin-sized transmitter into the folds of its belly. As a colleague pumped water into the fish's gasping mouth, Berger quickly stitched the wound closed so the 8-inch smolt could continue its journey out to sea. Berger and other biologists with the Puyallup Tribe of Indians hope the delicate operation on this and dozens of other young fish will yield answers to some pressing questions: Where, exactly, do steelhead go when they leave the rivers that flow to Puget Sound? And why are so many dying? Steelhead populations around Puget Sound have plummeted dramatically enough that the federal government has proposed listing them for protection under the Endangered Species Act. Steelhead, which are similar to rainbow trout but spend much of their lives in the ocean and return to rivers to spawn, have such complex life cycles that unraveling the mystery of their decline is difficult....
Column: Is God an environmentalist? It is hardly news that environmentalists are critical of the Bush administration's track record on issues ranging from climate change, to mineral exploration on public lands, to the gutting of the Endangered Species and Clean Water acts. What is new is that the latest chorus criticizing his environmental policies comes from deep within the president's political base. In the run-up to the last presidential election, the 30 million-member National Association of Evangelicals adopted a resolution affirming "that God-given dominion is a sacred responsibility to steward the earth and not a license to abuse the creation of which we are a part." A year ago, more than 1,000 church leaders signed a statement cautioning Bush that "there was no mandate, no majority, or no 'values' message in this past election for the president or Congress to roll back and oppose programs that care for God's creation." The idea that the Bible gives humanity "dominion" over the earth is nothing new to U.S. religion or politics. Early colonists brought the notion with them from England, christening this "New World" a second Eden, a vast garden there for the tilling. The agricultural/industrial complex was built on this fertile metaphorical foundation. So President Reagan's Secretary of the Interior James Watt could praise national parks as "cathedrals to the wonder of nature and to the glory of the Creator." This at the same time he was authorizing massive mineral and timber exploitation on public lands, and declining to set aside any more pristine wilderness for protection. Fittingly, critics dubbed Bush's recently resigned Interior secretary, Gale Norton, "James Watt in a skirt." But many evangelical Christians are profoundly uneasy with such an interpretation of the biblical injunction to "be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it." Calling themselves "Creation Care" activists rather than "environmentalists" (a designation they associate with liberals, secularists and Democrats), they represent the conservative wing of a broader movement within American Christianity that scholars refer to as "ecotheology."....
Drilling in rec area concerns Craig officials The city of Craig doesn’t want to see a natural-gas drilling rig in the middle of a new recreation area on the eastern shore of Elkhead Reservoir. But the potential exists if the Bureau of Land Management next month leases federal mineral rights under the city’s 40-acre parcel where a picnic area, boat ramps and other facilities are planned, City Manager Jim Ferree said Tuesday. “We don’t want a gas well drilled in the middle of our park,” Ferree said. Elkhead Reservoir, northeast of Craig on Elkhead Creek, also is a backup water supply for the city, Ferree said. Its main water source is the Yampa River. Ferree said the city has not had to use its Elkhead water supply, but could if growth calls for the extra water. He said the city’s immediate concern is what happens on the surface of city property....
Mineral-rights owners win changes to proposal Key provisions were cut Monday from a plan intended to give landowners more legal protections from damage caused by oil developers who own the mineral rights on their property. The oil industry, which sparred with lawmakers earlier in the day over the plan, welcomed a revamped version of the proposal. Originally, it would have given landowners the opportunity to force mineral rights owners to get a bond to pay for any potential damages. But an Environmental Quality Council subcommittee decided to strip tougher measures from the proposed law. In Montana, there is little a surface owner can do to stop someone who owns mineral rights on their property from developing the resource. Such ownership situations are called split estates because two different people own parts of the what is essentially the same property -- one owns the ground and the other owns the minerals or resources under it. Conservationists said there is still time to get the tougher provisions back into the proposed law, particularly an idea that would force the owners of mineral rights to enter into negotiations prior to drilling. The subcommittee's action left little protection under the measure for surface owners, said Julia Page, with the Northern Plains Resource Council. But the whole proposal faces a number of hearings, eventually needs to pass muster with the 2007 Legislature, and could be changed any number of ways. As it sits, the proposal would toughen the notification requirements of developers before they drill, and makes smaller modifications to current law....
BLM says arsenic of concern High levels of arsenic left over from a hundred years of mining near the northwest corner of San Bernardino County has federal officials worried about the potential health risk to residents and off-roaders. Soil samples in recent months showed "extremely" high arsenic concentrations near Red Mountain, Johannesburg and Randsburg, desert towns rooted in the area's gold and silver industry. About 500 people live in the remote communities, and the territory is an increasingly popular off-road recreation spot. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is considering closing dirt roads where motorcyclists and other off-roaders kick up potentially hazardous dust. People could be exposed by breathing the dust or by skin contact. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has asked the bureau to contain or clean up the arsenic from processed gold and silver ore, known as mine tailings....
Western senators blunt about 'flawed' road policy Six Democratic senators have asked the Interior Department to reconsider its policy on how to decide ownership of thousands of miles of roads around the West, voicing "deep concern" about what they call a "flawed" policy. Last month, the Interior Department issued new guidelines laying out how it will handle disputes with counties and states over road ownership, after a 2005 ruling by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a lawsuit over disputed Utah roads. The new Bureau of Land Management guidelines expanded the ways counties could claim ownership of roads, granting them permission to do routine maintenance and allow land managers to grant permission to expand or improve roads. "The new policy would risk significant harm to our national parks, wildlife refuges, national monuments, wilderness areas, wilderness study areas, proposed wilderness and other special public lands by paving the way for unprecedented road development and damaging off-road vehicle use," the senators said in a letter to acting Interior Secretary Lynn Scarlett. "We strongly urge you to reconsider this ill-advised policy," they wrote. The letter was signed by Sens. Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California; Ken Salazar of Colorado; Ron Wyden of Oregon; Richard Durbin of Illinois; and Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, who is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee....
Stolen from US history: its artifacts In Italy, they are called tombaroli - tomb raiders - and punished with decade-long jail sentences and million-dollar fines. In America, they plunder virtually unnoticed, stripping parks and historical sites of their cultural bounty without fear of getting caught. Indeed, US officials say the brazen looting of ancient native-American artifacts, Civil War mementos, and other valuable relics is reaching epidemic proportions. In any given year, cultural thieves make off with $500 million in relics, the FBI estimates. On National Park Service land alone, they strike on average once a day. "This is on a scale where it's radically affecting our ability to understand the past," says Martin McAllister, an independent archaeologist who has investigated over 200 damaged sites for state and federal departments. "We're talking a multimillion-dollar criminal enterprise here." Now, federal agencies, including the FBI's Art Crime Team, are beginning to score some victories against cultural theft. Last year, a dozen cases were successfully prosecuted under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, a 1979 law that bans the removal and sale of artifacts from public land. In Georgia, a judge sentenced Terry Crawford to 21 months in prison for stealing Civil War bullets from Chickamauga Battlefield. In Colorado, Robert Hanson, was sentenced to 24 months in prison for receiving and transporting Pueblo artifacts dating from 1200, including funeral objects, bowls, and tools....
Bear attacks hunter near Olympic National Park A black bear attacked and seriously injured a hunter on a road just outside Olympic National Park late Saturday, authorities said. A second hunter shot and killed the bear before summoning help, said Larry Evans, a shift supervisor for the Washington State Patrol's office in Bremerton, on the Kitsap Peninsula between Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula. The injured hunter was rushed to Forks Hospital with a compound fracture to the arm, a broken hand and several bite marks, Evans said. The man lost a significant amount of blood, but was expected to survive, Evans said. The attack was reported to the state patrol around 9 p.m., and aid workers arrived about 15 minutes later. The bear apparently had dragged the man away from the site of the attack before being shot, Evans said. Troopers said they receive occasional reports of cougar attacks in the area, but that bear attacks are relatively rare....
Eminent-domain measure euthanized The sponsor of a constitutional amendment to prevent governments from taking land for economic development killed his proposal Monday but said he is willing to work with the House speaker on a proposed compromise. Still, Republican Rep. Al White of Winter Park said the proposed deal being brokered by Democratic House Speaker Andrew Romanoff is "stopgap" because it is a statutory measure that would be much easier to change than a constitutional amendment. The new proposal, White said, "may slow the avaricious cities in concert with the greedy developers in taking the private property of the poor citizens of Colorado" until a constitutional amendment by citizens initiative can be passed in November. On Monday, White asked his colleagues to kill his proposed constitutional amendment, House Concurrent Resolution 1001, because it had been changed so drastically for the worse....
President Bush enjoys bike ride above Palm Springs President Bush woke up early and rode his mountain bike along the Clara Burgess Trail to the top of Murray Hill, which affords a spectacular view of the Coachella Valley and Little San Bernardino Mountains. The trail is considered strenuous for riding, with a 500-foot elevation gain. The total round-trip was a little more than 7 miles. “He said it was a pretty tough terrain, but he enjoyed it,” Press Secretary Scott McClellan said. Jim Foote, acting manager of the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument, said the Clara Burgess trail is also among those monument managers ask people to avoid part of the year to prevent disrupting endangered Peninsular bighorn sheep. The trail is one of about 10 in the monument under a “voluntary avoidance” program. People are asked to stay off the Clara Burgess trail from Jan. 1 to June 30 during the sheep lambing season, he said. It was uncertain Sunday night if White House organizers accompanying President Bush knew about the “voluntary avoidance” program.
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Tuesday, April 25, 2006
NEWS ROUNDUP
Were Castro Valley Ranchers Targeted By Ecoterrorists? Ranchers in rural Castro Valley awoke this weekend to graffiti on horse trailers, a street sign and a for sale sign touting the 'ALF' -- the renegade Animal Liberation Front. Rancher Jim Grimes said the Alameda County Sheriff's Department and FBI were investigating whether or not the graffiti was actually the work of the eco-terrorist group. "We don't mistreat animals -- people wouldn't stand for that," said Grimes who boards horses. "I've been around animals all my life and you don't get anywhere with them by mistreating them…It either was kids who had nothing better to do or this outfit ought to move on." Graffiti was spray painted on one of Grimes horse trailers, a nearby street sign and a for sale sign on a nearby ranch. While the messages on Grimes property were simply the initials "Alf" the ranch for sale sign had an ominous "Burn It" painted on it. The FBI has intensified its efforts to curtail and arrest ALF members since January when 11 people were indicted in a series of arsons in five Western states....
Book Review: Collateral Damage Another sentimental wolf story? No. It's a wolf story intellectuals and activists of all persuasions ought to study. Michael J. Robinson's Predatory Bureaucracy. Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the West is a closely documented examination of human and animal encounters on this continent. From its double entendre title and the cover featuring a black wolf's relentless stare to the last index entry, we are given a meticulous account of one federal bureau's predator killing mission, a mission that embedded itself in the culture and mythology of wide open spaces west of the 100th meridian. From its very first days the Office of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy, later known as the Biological Survey, now the Fish and Wildlife Service, was caught in its own trap. One jaw serving the predator (bad animals) extermination mission and building close political relations with cattlemen and sheepmen; the other jaw, with a smaller share of the budget, devoted to study, using good science, the biology of birds and mammals. These scientists, a diverse and picturesque bunch, ranged from the Arctic to Mexican border lands. Eventually, they rebelled against the good animal/bad animal paradigm. By the time they had, oh so very slowly, learned from their own studies that extermination was a clumsy, dangerous policy, they found themselves up against a formidable alliance, the intimate collaboration between federal and state officials and economic power brokers. The book studies a braided flow of history where wolves and coyotes, cougars and prairie dogs, grizzlies and eagles and a host of other creatures including us humans, build, together and forever intertwined, western history. Predatory Bureaucracy moves through layers: political, economic, geographic, biological, mythological. This doesn't happen often enough, in the fields of nature and environmental writings....
National park proposes shooting elk to shrink herd The elk that thrill visitors with statuesque poses and haunting, bugle-like mating calls in Rocky Mountain National Park have become so numerous that park officials want hundreds of them shot and suggest wolves could help keep the herds in check. The recommended alternative in a draft elk management plan released Monday doesn’t suggest releasing wolves in the park 70 miles northwest of Denver. Still, park officials said wolves would best meet environmental objectives and do the least damage. ‘‘This is a 20-year plan and a lot can happen in 20 years. Wolves may come in on their own,’’ park spokeswoman Kyle Patterson said. There are between 2,200 and 3,000 elk roaming the park and the animals are frequent visitors to the adjacent town of Estes Park. The preferred alternative in the draft plan calls for park employees or contractors to shoot between 200 to 700 elk over four years and between 25 to 150 elk annually for the next 16 years. The goal is a population of 1,200 to 1,700 elk. Park officials say the solution must begin now because the herds are becoming a nuisance — to visitors who often sit in traffic as the animals cross the park’s winding mountain roads and to area’s flora. The elk chew up willows and aspen so important to other species, including songbirds and beavers. Predators such as wolves and grizzly bears would force the elk to move around more and lead to some culling. But they haven’t been in the park for years, and a ban on hunting in national parks has resulted in big herds....
Bush, environmentalists reach impasse on legislation Saturday was Earth Day, a time every year when Americans celebrate the environment and debate changes in the way to protect it. Yet on Earth Day 2006, the real news may have been what hasn't changed. Despite relentless rhetoric from environmentalists and industry that the Bush administration has shifted the balance from tight regulation toward a more business-friendly approach, in reality, the president and his supporters have been unable to significantly rewrite America's landmark environmental laws, even though Republicans have controlled all branches of government for more than five years. Neither side plays it up. But environmentalists have blocked the president's most far-reaching efforts in the Senate, in court and with public opinion. They can't get anything passed, but not much has gotten past them, experts say. "We're at a stalemate. It's like two male rams battling each other," said Sheldon Kamieniecki, a professor of political science at the University of Southern California. "It's gridlock on the environment."....
Oregon State University Researchers Examine Effect Of Livestock On Native Ecosystems Oregon State University researchers will spend four years investigating the effect of cattle on soils, plants, invertebrates and ground-nesting birds in the Zumwalt Prairie, one of the largest and last native prairies in the Pacific Northwest. Funded by a USDA National Research Initiative grant for $450,000, the OSU researchers will test different cattle stocking rates across about 1,600 acres of land in The Nature Conservancy's Zumwalt Prairie Preserve. Using four fenced blocks, each divided into four 100-acre pastures, they will analyze high, medium, low and zero stocking rates. They will look at how cattle affect the availability of resources for other organisms, how habitat for wildlife communities change as stocking rates change and the effect grazing has on vulnerability and predation of ground-nesting birds in the area. The researchers will also evaluate at which stocking rates the cattle are most successful. Due to population declines, the grassland birds that live among the Zumwalt's native bunch grass - the primary forage for cattle in the area - are of national conservation concern. These birds include horned larks, western meadowlarks and savannah sparrows....
Column: Grazing rights essential to protect livestock industry Tom Wharton's questioning of Kane County officials' understanding of free enterprise exposes a lack of understanding and bias. As the Grand Canyon Trust has moved to mothball historic livestock grazing rights guaranteed by the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act, local officials rightfully challenged the trust's "grazing retirement" agenda. The foundation principle Congress mandated in Taylor grazing is "safeguarding of livestock grazing rights." A legal challenge came after local Bureau of Land Management employees ignored federal law requiring grazing rights be allocated to legitimate ranching interests with private base property, water rights and livestock. Ranchers' applications were passed over by the BLM in favor of the Grand Canyon Trust with no land, no water and no livestock. Does violation of federal law complement free enterprise? Wharton's warped view of free enterprise allows tax-sheltered, anti-grazing environmental groups, using tax-deductible donations from across America to compete in Kane County against hard-working, tax-paying ranchers contributing to local schools, law enforcement and roads while creating jobs and new wealth. It's ironic that, in trying to gain broader appeal and soft-selling its controversial development of urban open spaces, Wal-Mart donated $1 million to buy out the Kane and Two Mile ranches. Historically, Kane Ranch with permits for 1,200 mother cows, annually contributed over $1 million to the local economy, paid taxes and provided jobs. The trust, upon acquisition of the ranch, said "we're going to run as few cows as we possibly can."....
UM Faculty Members Rally For Endangered Species Act Three University of Montana faculty members held a press conference in front of University Hall today, to rally support for the embattled Endangered Species Act. They drew a sparse crowd on a warm, rather-be-playing-frisbee Friday, but their message was clear: The ESA has been successful in rehabilitating many species, and can save more if it remains intact. Economist John Duffield presented probably the most interesting perspective on the value of the act – Duffield has been surveying the economics of wolf recovery in Yellowstone National Park since the reintroduction program began, and considers the grey wolf an example of how the ESA can be a boon for the economy as well as animals. Duffield said the money wolves bring to the park far outweighs the costs of lost livestock and hunting permits. “Wolves are what economists call a public good, millions of people can come and see them. Cattle and sheep, those are private goods,” Duffield said. He said 94 percent of Yellowstone visitors surveyed listed wildlife viewing as their main reason for coming. Grizzlies are still king (55 percent of visitors said they came to see the big bears specifically) but wolves are now the number-two attraction....
U.S. Forest Service sued over plans to cut fire risks Two environmental groups sued the U.S. Forest Service on Monday to stop its plans to reduce the risk of wildfire southwest of Big Timber. The Gallatin National Forest project, involving about 2,500 acres along the narrow corridor of the Boulder River, is meant to reduce the intensity of wildfires and the risk of anyone getting hurt if a fire starts. "The whole idea is to buy time to get people out," said Bill Avey, Gallatin district ranger in Big Timber. The contract is scheduled to be awarded in the coming months so work can begin in the winter. The Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council filed a lawsuit in federal court in Missoula opposing the project. The lawsuit names as defendants the Forest Service, Regional Forester Abigail Kimbell and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In the suit, the groups say the project violates federal laws and that proposals to log trees, apply herbicides and build temporary roads pose dangers to people and wildlife, including grizzly bears, Yellowstone cutthroat trout, wolverine and lynx. The groups also said the work would also create a barrier for wildlife in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness on both sides of the canyon....
Timber, conservation groups reach deal on Beaverhead-Deerlodge Forest plan Saying they're tired of the decades of fighting that's stalled everything from timber sales to new wilderness designations, a group of timber industry leaders and conservationists on Monday unveiled their vision for the future management of Montana's largest national forest. The accord - which they negotiated over the past four months - would create a stable supply of timber for local mills, set aside additional acreage for recommended wilderness and help fund projects that would benefit wildlife and fisheries on the 3.3-million-acre Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. The plan calls for setting aside 573,000 acres for proposed wilderness and designating 713,000 acres of land as suitable timber base. Both figures mark substantial increases over what's now proposed in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge draft land use plan. Members of three different conservation groups and two representatives of Montana's timber industry called the plan a “balanced proposal” that would protect both the resource and local economies at a press conference held at Sun Mountain Lumber in Deer Lodge....
Governor to take petition route in roadless dispute Gov. Ted Kulongoski says he will ask the Bush administration to restore safeguards for nearly 2 million acres of roadless national forests in Oregon. The Clinton administration prohibited logging and road building on 58.5 million acres nationally, but the Bush administration later abandoned that protection amid legal challenges. The Bush administration established a roadless policy requiring governors to submit petitions outlining the roadless, undeveloped forest lands they want to see protected. Kulongoski supported the original Clinton protections and took several steps to restore full safeguards for the roadless lands. He has joined a lawsuit with other Western states that seeks to reinstate the Clinton protections. But he said he would also submit the petition under the process created by the Bush administration, even though he disagrees with the administration's actions. "These lands are part of every Oregonian's natural heritage," Kulongoski said in a statement....
Working with energy firms a challenge As counties scramble to handle natural-gas development within their borders, questions about what activities can and cannot be regulated yield different responses from around Colorado. “The dilemma for counties is that the oil and gas industry is specifically exempted from a lot of our regulatory authority,” said Randy Russell, senior long-range planner for Garfield County. “Counties are fairly limited on what they can demand.” The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, the agency charged with the encouragement of resource exploitation in the state, has regulatory power over the majority of oil and gas-related activities. Mesa County officials have begun working on an energy master plan for Plateau Valley, the area most immediately affected by drilling, to help guide where and how the activities take place. “We’re in the infancy stage of gathering together the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, energy producers, gatherers and processors,” said Mesa County Commissioner Craig Meis. “We’re sharing the values we hold dear here in this county, like our view sheds and wildlife corridors.” Meis said the county was working on putting together a map of the area around Collbran, Mesa and Molina, establishing places that were “most appropriate” for certain types of development, such as pipelines, compressor stations and new roads....
Martin grad's future pivots on eco-terror case A former Martin County High School athlete — the face of environmental virtue to some and a symbol of domestic terrorism to others — expects to find out today whether he will be moved from a Canadian jail cell to the United States, where he faces a sentence that could keep him behind bars for the rest of his life. Tre Arrow, born Michael Scarpitti, has spent his 31st and 32nd birthdays in a Canadian prison since being arrested in March 2004 for walking out of a Victoria, British Columbia, hardware store with a pair of bolt cutters at his side. Arrow was found guilty of the theft and received one day in jail, but he remains incarcerated more than two years later as U.S. prosecutors attempt to convict him for allegedly blowing up four cement and logging trucks in an act of ecoterrorism. A Canadian court ruled in July that Arrow should be extradited, but the former congressional candidate appealed. "I am an innocent man being targeted, framed and persecuted not because I am guilty of arson, but because I am an activist," Arrow wrote in his appeal letter. "Under the guise of national security, economic gain, and the 'war on terror,' nonviolent activists like myself... are considered a serious threat to the status quo and are being treated like communists during the Cold War." The appeal letter is being considered by Canadian Justice Minister Vic Toews, who could issue a ruling today....
Clearcutting can be helpful, panelists say A conservation group campaigning to end timber clearcutting on national forests convened a panel to air differing views on the issue Friday, and got what it asked for. “It isn’t yes or no about clearcutting,” said Reg Rothwell of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s biological service. “It’s a matter of degree and of the nature of the cut.” Because of public and congressional opposition to allowing wildfires to burn, Rothwell said, “there is some utility to clearcutting.” He said some tree species, such as most aspens, do not regenerate by seed but by “catastrophic removal ... and that’s what fires do; what sustained aspens historically was fire.” "Clearcuts are probably the only decent substitute that we have right now” for the wildfires that once burned unchecked in the country’s forests and created open areas for grazing within the surrounding woods, said Rick Straw, a biologist with the Game and Fish Department. Straw said “the department isn’t seeing any ill effects at this time” from the practice. Straw said deer and elk still seemed to be doing well and bear and mountain lion populations had stayed level or increased.
It's All Trew: Being in hot water actually a luxury Today, we take hot water for granted, but not so long ago, plenty of hot water was considered a luxury. Memories about hot water, or the lack of it, crossed my mind. Some go way back to a teakettle sitting on the back of our kitchen stove, which was the only hot water we had available. At various times in the Trew house, we used a blue spatter porcelain, a white porcelain and an aluminum teakettle to heat water. The aluminum kettle was best because when you banged on the sides to knock the calcium deposits loose, porcelain vessels often chipped, causing rusty holes to appear. Down at the Parcell Ranch on the Canadian River, where mostly men (and little boys) hung out batching, we used two porcelain coffee pots. The light gray was for coffee and the big blue was for hot water. Our wood cook stove had a hot water reservoir but at some time it had frozen solid and cracked the tank, rendering it unusable. As long as I can remember, on bath nights we filled the galvanized milk buckets with water heating on either a wood, coal, kerosene or butane stove. Because of the expense, we had butane for the refrigerator and kitchen cook stove but used other fuels to heat our house. Later we acquired a butane tank, allowing us to install a floor furnace and hot water heater....
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Were Castro Valley Ranchers Targeted By Ecoterrorists? Ranchers in rural Castro Valley awoke this weekend to graffiti on horse trailers, a street sign and a for sale sign touting the 'ALF' -- the renegade Animal Liberation Front. Rancher Jim Grimes said the Alameda County Sheriff's Department and FBI were investigating whether or not the graffiti was actually the work of the eco-terrorist group. "We don't mistreat animals -- people wouldn't stand for that," said Grimes who boards horses. "I've been around animals all my life and you don't get anywhere with them by mistreating them…It either was kids who had nothing better to do or this outfit ought to move on." Graffiti was spray painted on one of Grimes horse trailers, a nearby street sign and a for sale sign on a nearby ranch. While the messages on Grimes property were simply the initials "Alf" the ranch for sale sign had an ominous "Burn It" painted on it. The FBI has intensified its efforts to curtail and arrest ALF members since January when 11 people were indicted in a series of arsons in five Western states....
Book Review: Collateral Damage Another sentimental wolf story? No. It's a wolf story intellectuals and activists of all persuasions ought to study. Michael J. Robinson's Predatory Bureaucracy. Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the West is a closely documented examination of human and animal encounters on this continent. From its double entendre title and the cover featuring a black wolf's relentless stare to the last index entry, we are given a meticulous account of one federal bureau's predator killing mission, a mission that embedded itself in the culture and mythology of wide open spaces west of the 100th meridian. From its very first days the Office of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy, later known as the Biological Survey, now the Fish and Wildlife Service, was caught in its own trap. One jaw serving the predator (bad animals) extermination mission and building close political relations with cattlemen and sheepmen; the other jaw, with a smaller share of the budget, devoted to study, using good science, the biology of birds and mammals. These scientists, a diverse and picturesque bunch, ranged from the Arctic to Mexican border lands. Eventually, they rebelled against the good animal/bad animal paradigm. By the time they had, oh so very slowly, learned from their own studies that extermination was a clumsy, dangerous policy, they found themselves up against a formidable alliance, the intimate collaboration between federal and state officials and economic power brokers. The book studies a braided flow of history where wolves and coyotes, cougars and prairie dogs, grizzlies and eagles and a host of other creatures including us humans, build, together and forever intertwined, western history. Predatory Bureaucracy moves through layers: political, economic, geographic, biological, mythological. This doesn't happen often enough, in the fields of nature and environmental writings....
National park proposes shooting elk to shrink herd The elk that thrill visitors with statuesque poses and haunting, bugle-like mating calls in Rocky Mountain National Park have become so numerous that park officials want hundreds of them shot and suggest wolves could help keep the herds in check. The recommended alternative in a draft elk management plan released Monday doesn’t suggest releasing wolves in the park 70 miles northwest of Denver. Still, park officials said wolves would best meet environmental objectives and do the least damage. ‘‘This is a 20-year plan and a lot can happen in 20 years. Wolves may come in on their own,’’ park spokeswoman Kyle Patterson said. There are between 2,200 and 3,000 elk roaming the park and the animals are frequent visitors to the adjacent town of Estes Park. The preferred alternative in the draft plan calls for park employees or contractors to shoot between 200 to 700 elk over four years and between 25 to 150 elk annually for the next 16 years. The goal is a population of 1,200 to 1,700 elk. Park officials say the solution must begin now because the herds are becoming a nuisance — to visitors who often sit in traffic as the animals cross the park’s winding mountain roads and to area’s flora. The elk chew up willows and aspen so important to other species, including songbirds and beavers. Predators such as wolves and grizzly bears would force the elk to move around more and lead to some culling. But they haven’t been in the park for years, and a ban on hunting in national parks has resulted in big herds....
Bush, environmentalists reach impasse on legislation Saturday was Earth Day, a time every year when Americans celebrate the environment and debate changes in the way to protect it. Yet on Earth Day 2006, the real news may have been what hasn't changed. Despite relentless rhetoric from environmentalists and industry that the Bush administration has shifted the balance from tight regulation toward a more business-friendly approach, in reality, the president and his supporters have been unable to significantly rewrite America's landmark environmental laws, even though Republicans have controlled all branches of government for more than five years. Neither side plays it up. But environmentalists have blocked the president's most far-reaching efforts in the Senate, in court and with public opinion. They can't get anything passed, but not much has gotten past them, experts say. "We're at a stalemate. It's like two male rams battling each other," said Sheldon Kamieniecki, a professor of political science at the University of Southern California. "It's gridlock on the environment."....
Oregon State University Researchers Examine Effect Of Livestock On Native Ecosystems Oregon State University researchers will spend four years investigating the effect of cattle on soils, plants, invertebrates and ground-nesting birds in the Zumwalt Prairie, one of the largest and last native prairies in the Pacific Northwest. Funded by a USDA National Research Initiative grant for $450,000, the OSU researchers will test different cattle stocking rates across about 1,600 acres of land in The Nature Conservancy's Zumwalt Prairie Preserve. Using four fenced blocks, each divided into four 100-acre pastures, they will analyze high, medium, low and zero stocking rates. They will look at how cattle affect the availability of resources for other organisms, how habitat for wildlife communities change as stocking rates change and the effect grazing has on vulnerability and predation of ground-nesting birds in the area. The researchers will also evaluate at which stocking rates the cattle are most successful. Due to population declines, the grassland birds that live among the Zumwalt's native bunch grass - the primary forage for cattle in the area - are of national conservation concern. These birds include horned larks, western meadowlarks and savannah sparrows....
Column: Grazing rights essential to protect livestock industry Tom Wharton's questioning of Kane County officials' understanding of free enterprise exposes a lack of understanding and bias. As the Grand Canyon Trust has moved to mothball historic livestock grazing rights guaranteed by the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act, local officials rightfully challenged the trust's "grazing retirement" agenda. The foundation principle Congress mandated in Taylor grazing is "safeguarding of livestock grazing rights." A legal challenge came after local Bureau of Land Management employees ignored federal law requiring grazing rights be allocated to legitimate ranching interests with private base property, water rights and livestock. Ranchers' applications were passed over by the BLM in favor of the Grand Canyon Trust with no land, no water and no livestock. Does violation of federal law complement free enterprise? Wharton's warped view of free enterprise allows tax-sheltered, anti-grazing environmental groups, using tax-deductible donations from across America to compete in Kane County against hard-working, tax-paying ranchers contributing to local schools, law enforcement and roads while creating jobs and new wealth. It's ironic that, in trying to gain broader appeal and soft-selling its controversial development of urban open spaces, Wal-Mart donated $1 million to buy out the Kane and Two Mile ranches. Historically, Kane Ranch with permits for 1,200 mother cows, annually contributed over $1 million to the local economy, paid taxes and provided jobs. The trust, upon acquisition of the ranch, said "we're going to run as few cows as we possibly can."....
UM Faculty Members Rally For Endangered Species Act Three University of Montana faculty members held a press conference in front of University Hall today, to rally support for the embattled Endangered Species Act. They drew a sparse crowd on a warm, rather-be-playing-frisbee Friday, but their message was clear: The ESA has been successful in rehabilitating many species, and can save more if it remains intact. Economist John Duffield presented probably the most interesting perspective on the value of the act – Duffield has been surveying the economics of wolf recovery in Yellowstone National Park since the reintroduction program began, and considers the grey wolf an example of how the ESA can be a boon for the economy as well as animals. Duffield said the money wolves bring to the park far outweighs the costs of lost livestock and hunting permits. “Wolves are what economists call a public good, millions of people can come and see them. Cattle and sheep, those are private goods,” Duffield said. He said 94 percent of Yellowstone visitors surveyed listed wildlife viewing as their main reason for coming. Grizzlies are still king (55 percent of visitors said they came to see the big bears specifically) but wolves are now the number-two attraction....
U.S. Forest Service sued over plans to cut fire risks Two environmental groups sued the U.S. Forest Service on Monday to stop its plans to reduce the risk of wildfire southwest of Big Timber. The Gallatin National Forest project, involving about 2,500 acres along the narrow corridor of the Boulder River, is meant to reduce the intensity of wildfires and the risk of anyone getting hurt if a fire starts. "The whole idea is to buy time to get people out," said Bill Avey, Gallatin district ranger in Big Timber. The contract is scheduled to be awarded in the coming months so work can begin in the winter. The Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council filed a lawsuit in federal court in Missoula opposing the project. The lawsuit names as defendants the Forest Service, Regional Forester Abigail Kimbell and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In the suit, the groups say the project violates federal laws and that proposals to log trees, apply herbicides and build temporary roads pose dangers to people and wildlife, including grizzly bears, Yellowstone cutthroat trout, wolverine and lynx. The groups also said the work would also create a barrier for wildlife in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness on both sides of the canyon....
Timber, conservation groups reach deal on Beaverhead-Deerlodge Forest plan Saying they're tired of the decades of fighting that's stalled everything from timber sales to new wilderness designations, a group of timber industry leaders and conservationists on Monday unveiled their vision for the future management of Montana's largest national forest. The accord - which they negotiated over the past four months - would create a stable supply of timber for local mills, set aside additional acreage for recommended wilderness and help fund projects that would benefit wildlife and fisheries on the 3.3-million-acre Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. The plan calls for setting aside 573,000 acres for proposed wilderness and designating 713,000 acres of land as suitable timber base. Both figures mark substantial increases over what's now proposed in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge draft land use plan. Members of three different conservation groups and two representatives of Montana's timber industry called the plan a “balanced proposal” that would protect both the resource and local economies at a press conference held at Sun Mountain Lumber in Deer Lodge....
Governor to take petition route in roadless dispute Gov. Ted Kulongoski says he will ask the Bush administration to restore safeguards for nearly 2 million acres of roadless national forests in Oregon. The Clinton administration prohibited logging and road building on 58.5 million acres nationally, but the Bush administration later abandoned that protection amid legal challenges. The Bush administration established a roadless policy requiring governors to submit petitions outlining the roadless, undeveloped forest lands they want to see protected. Kulongoski supported the original Clinton protections and took several steps to restore full safeguards for the roadless lands. He has joined a lawsuit with other Western states that seeks to reinstate the Clinton protections. But he said he would also submit the petition under the process created by the Bush administration, even though he disagrees with the administration's actions. "These lands are part of every Oregonian's natural heritage," Kulongoski said in a statement....
Working with energy firms a challenge As counties scramble to handle natural-gas development within their borders, questions about what activities can and cannot be regulated yield different responses from around Colorado. “The dilemma for counties is that the oil and gas industry is specifically exempted from a lot of our regulatory authority,” said Randy Russell, senior long-range planner for Garfield County. “Counties are fairly limited on what they can demand.” The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, the agency charged with the encouragement of resource exploitation in the state, has regulatory power over the majority of oil and gas-related activities. Mesa County officials have begun working on an energy master plan for Plateau Valley, the area most immediately affected by drilling, to help guide where and how the activities take place. “We’re in the infancy stage of gathering together the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, energy producers, gatherers and processors,” said Mesa County Commissioner Craig Meis. “We’re sharing the values we hold dear here in this county, like our view sheds and wildlife corridors.” Meis said the county was working on putting together a map of the area around Collbran, Mesa and Molina, establishing places that were “most appropriate” for certain types of development, such as pipelines, compressor stations and new roads....
Martin grad's future pivots on eco-terror case A former Martin County High School athlete — the face of environmental virtue to some and a symbol of domestic terrorism to others — expects to find out today whether he will be moved from a Canadian jail cell to the United States, where he faces a sentence that could keep him behind bars for the rest of his life. Tre Arrow, born Michael Scarpitti, has spent his 31st and 32nd birthdays in a Canadian prison since being arrested in March 2004 for walking out of a Victoria, British Columbia, hardware store with a pair of bolt cutters at his side. Arrow was found guilty of the theft and received one day in jail, but he remains incarcerated more than two years later as U.S. prosecutors attempt to convict him for allegedly blowing up four cement and logging trucks in an act of ecoterrorism. A Canadian court ruled in July that Arrow should be extradited, but the former congressional candidate appealed. "I am an innocent man being targeted, framed and persecuted not because I am guilty of arson, but because I am an activist," Arrow wrote in his appeal letter. "Under the guise of national security, economic gain, and the 'war on terror,' nonviolent activists like myself... are considered a serious threat to the status quo and are being treated like communists during the Cold War." The appeal letter is being considered by Canadian Justice Minister Vic Toews, who could issue a ruling today....
Clearcutting can be helpful, panelists say A conservation group campaigning to end timber clearcutting on national forests convened a panel to air differing views on the issue Friday, and got what it asked for. “It isn’t yes or no about clearcutting,” said Reg Rothwell of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s biological service. “It’s a matter of degree and of the nature of the cut.” Because of public and congressional opposition to allowing wildfires to burn, Rothwell said, “there is some utility to clearcutting.” He said some tree species, such as most aspens, do not regenerate by seed but by “catastrophic removal ... and that’s what fires do; what sustained aspens historically was fire.” "Clearcuts are probably the only decent substitute that we have right now” for the wildfires that once burned unchecked in the country’s forests and created open areas for grazing within the surrounding woods, said Rick Straw, a biologist with the Game and Fish Department. Straw said “the department isn’t seeing any ill effects at this time” from the practice. Straw said deer and elk still seemed to be doing well and bear and mountain lion populations had stayed level or increased.
It's All Trew: Being in hot water actually a luxury Today, we take hot water for granted, but not so long ago, plenty of hot water was considered a luxury. Memories about hot water, or the lack of it, crossed my mind. Some go way back to a teakettle sitting on the back of our kitchen stove, which was the only hot water we had available. At various times in the Trew house, we used a blue spatter porcelain, a white porcelain and an aluminum teakettle to heat water. The aluminum kettle was best because when you banged on the sides to knock the calcium deposits loose, porcelain vessels often chipped, causing rusty holes to appear. Down at the Parcell Ranch on the Canadian River, where mostly men (and little boys) hung out batching, we used two porcelain coffee pots. The light gray was for coffee and the big blue was for hot water. Our wood cook stove had a hot water reservoir but at some time it had frozen solid and cracked the tank, rendering it unusable. As long as I can remember, on bath nights we filled the galvanized milk buckets with water heating on either a wood, coal, kerosene or butane stove. Because of the expense, we had butane for the refrigerator and kitchen cook stove but used other fuels to heat our house. Later we acquired a butane tank, allowing us to install a floor furnace and hot water heater....
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Five wolves to be released in Gila forest area
Five endangered Mexican gray wolves will be released in the Gila National Forest over the next few months. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began releasing wolves into the wild on the Arizona-New Mexico border in 1998 to re-establish the species in part of its historic range. A male and a pregnant female are to be turned loose on the eastern side of the Blue Range Recovery Area in late April, just prior to the female giving birth. Program officials said that would increase the likelihood that the pair will remain in the area. The site was chosen because the owners of the closest private land and the grazing permit-holder said the release was acceptable. The area also is a considerable distance from the San Carlos Reservation. The wolves were removed from the reservation last year over boundary issues. Two females and one male will be released in June in one of four approved sites in the Gila Wilderness. The exact site will be determined after other wolf packs in the area have established dens, so the distance between the existing packs and the new wolves can be maximized. The female wolves were captured in the Gila National Forest in 2005 as pups when their pack was removed from the area because of livestock killings. The male was captured outside its boundary in 2005. The reintroduction program allows Mexican gray wolves to be released in New Mexico only if they previously were released in Arizona and have experience in the wild....
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Five endangered Mexican gray wolves will be released in the Gila National Forest over the next few months. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began releasing wolves into the wild on the Arizona-New Mexico border in 1998 to re-establish the species in part of its historic range. A male and a pregnant female are to be turned loose on the eastern side of the Blue Range Recovery Area in late April, just prior to the female giving birth. Program officials said that would increase the likelihood that the pair will remain in the area. The site was chosen because the owners of the closest private land and the grazing permit-holder said the release was acceptable. The area also is a considerable distance from the San Carlos Reservation. The wolves were removed from the reservation last year over boundary issues. Two females and one male will be released in June in one of four approved sites in the Gila Wilderness. The exact site will be determined after other wolf packs in the area have established dens, so the distance between the existing packs and the new wolves can be maximized. The female wolves were captured in the Gila National Forest in 2005 as pups when their pack was removed from the area because of livestock killings. The male was captured outside its boundary in 2005. The reintroduction program allows Mexican gray wolves to be released in New Mexico only if they previously were released in Arizona and have experience in the wild....
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FLE
Homeland Security grants spent on clowns and gyms
Fire departments are using Homeland Security grants to buy gym equipment, sponsor puppet and clown shows, and turn first responders into fitness trainers. The spending choices are allowable under the guidelines of the Assistance to Firefighters grant administered by the Homeland Security Department, which has awarded nearly 250 grants since February totaling more than $25 million out of the current spending pot of $545 million. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff vowed to redirect grant spending based on risk of a terrorist attack, but Congress has ignored his pleas, federal officials say. The Bush administration has specifically asked Congress not to allow funding for physical fitness, but the members who run Congress' appropriation committees keep inserting the language into the department's budget, officials say. The House last year passed the Faster and Smarter Funding for First Responders Act by a 409 to 10 vote to require several first responder grants be based on risk, however the firefighter grant was excluded from the legislation. In Florida, the Plantation City Council recently voted to use its $28,000 grant for treadmills, stationary bikes and training machines for police and firefighters. The Crawfordsville Fire Department in Indiana is using its $55,000 to buy gym equipment, provide nutritional counseling and instruct firefighters on how to become fitness trainers....
FBI Wants Access to Dead Writer's Papers
Not long after columnist Jack Anderson's funeral, FBI agents called his widow to say they wanted to search his papers. They were looking for confidential government information he might have acquired in a half-century of investigative reporting. The agents expressed interest in documents that would aid the government's case against two former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, who have been charged with disclosing classified information, said Kevin Anderson, the columnist's son. In addition, the agents told the family they planned to remove from the columnist's archive — which has yet to be catalogued — any document they came across that was stamped "secret" or "confidential," or was otherwise classified. "He would be rolling over in his grave to think that the FBI was going to go crawling through his papers willy-nilly," the younger Anderson told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday. His account is similar to conversations described by Mark Feldstein, a George Washington University journalism professor and Anderson biographer. Feldstein said he was visited by two agents at his Washington-area home in March. "They flashed their badges and said they needed access to the papers," said Feldstein, a former investigative reporter. Anderson donated his papers to the university, but the family has not yet formally signed them over. FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko, a spokesman in Washington, confirmed that the bureau wants to search the Anderson archive and remove classified materials before they are made available to the public....
CIA officer fired after admitting leak
In a rare occurrence, the CIA fired an officer who acknowledged giving classified information to a reporter, NBC News learned Friday. The officer flunked a polygraph exam before being fired on Thursday and is now under investigation by the Justice Department, NBC has learned. Intelligence sources tell NBC News the accused officer, Mary McCarthy, worked in the CIA's inspector general's office and had worked for the National Security Council under the Clinton and and George W. Bush administrations. The leak pertained to stories on the CIA’s rumored secret prisons in Eastern Europe, sources told NBC. The information was allegedly provided to Dana Priest of the Washington Post, who wrote about CIA prisons in November and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize on Monday for her reporting. Sources said the CIA believes McCarthy had more than a dozen unauthorized contacts with Priest. Information about subjects other than the prisons may have been leaked as well. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the firing. CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise confirmed the dismissal. Millerwise said she was unsure whether there had ever been a firing before at the agency for leaking to the media. Citing the Privacy Act, the CIA would not provide any details about the officer’s identity or assignments. All CIA employees are required to sign a secrecy agreement upon being hired stating they are prohibited from discussing classified information with anyone not cleared to receive the material....
GAO Faults Agencies' Sharing of Terror Data
Despite more than four years of legislation, executive orders and presidential directives, the Bush administration has yet to comprehensively improve sharing of counterterrorism information among dozens of federal agencies -- and between them and thousands of nonfederal partners, government investigators have concluded. Repeated deadlines set by both President Bush and Congress have not been met, according to a 34-page report issued late Monday by the Government Accountability Office. While acknowledging the "complexity of the task," the report notes that responsibility for the effort has shifted since late 2001 from the White House to the Office of Management and Budget to the Department of Homeland Security, and now resides with the director of national intelligence. "None has yet completed the task," the report noted. The GAO expressed "disappointment" that Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte declined to address its findings beyond a letter saying that "the review of intelligence activities is beyond GAO's purview." Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Susan Collins (R-Maine), who requested the investigation along with several House chairmen, issued a statement yesterday regretting the DNI response and noting that she co-sponsored the 2004 law that mandated the information-sharing and created Negroponte's job. The failure of intelligence and law enforcement agencies to share information that might have warned of a pending terrorist attack was cited by investigations that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Delays in developing a comprehensive system to link counterterrorism efforts and information among federal agencies have long been attributed to what Negroponte has called their individual "cultures" and a reluctance to cooperate with one another....The primary, publicly stated purpose and rationale for the PATRIOT Act was to allow this information sharing. It was one of the few sections in the Act that I supported. Funny how those sections allowing additional spying on U.S. citizens was immediatedly implemented, but here we are 4 years later and the agencies can't change their "cultures" and implement the information sharing. Asking individuals to lose rights and accept change to benefit the war on terrorism is ok, but for God's sake don't ask the Feds to change.
Questions of how far US crackdown can go
A new Homeland Security plan to crack down on employers who hire illegal immigrants is being billed by federal authorities as a sharp break from a longstanding policy of giving companies a slap on the wrist when they break the laws. But immigration analysts say that real enforcement of the Homeland Security Department plan would require far more resources than the Bush administration has committed to the new push, and more political spine than it has shown previously. As part of the program, announced Thursday by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the agency will dedicate 171 agents of its 2,500 nationwide to investigate and take action against employers who hire undocumented immigrants. But effectively combating what has become a widespread business practice would require the government to hire thousands of more investigators, to streamline methods for checking workers' legal status, and to show a new willingness to stand up to business interests, the analysts said. ''Nobody has bothered in 20 years to enforce these laws," said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. ''With the number of monitors they've got," Sum said, ''they can only monitor a tiny fraction of the employers." Nationwide, an estimated 7 million undocumented employees work for hundreds of thousands of firms, Sum said. The policy shift was announced as federal officials reported arresting 1,187 employees and seven managers of a national pallet manufacturing company. It signals a new era of immigration law enforcement, said David Palmatier, acting special agent in charge of the Boston office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of Homeland Security....
Canadian Claims Mistreatment by U.S Agents
Akhil Sachdeva, an accountant from India who emigrated to Canada, still wonders why he was seized at gunpoint by U.S. agents and held for months with hundreds of foreigners following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Chaining him to a bench at the FBI's Manhattan office on Dec. 20, 2001, federal agents demanded to know his religious and political beliefs, asked whether he had taken flying lessons and sought his personal views about the suicide hijackers, he said in an interview with The Associated Press. The 33-year-old is among eight foreign detainees who have sued U.S. officials, contending they were mistreated and terrorized by snarling dogs during four months at the Passaic County Jail in New Jersey. The class-action lawsuit is open to some 800 foreign-born detainees who were held for roughly the same amount of time. "Maybe because of my skin color? I am an Indian and I look like any person from Pakistan or an Arab country," Sachdeva, a Hindu native of New Delhi, said in an interview after completing depositions in Toronto taken by lawyers representing the U.S. government. Sachdeva, now a Canadian citizen, is seeking undisclosed financial compensation for his ordeal by joining the federal lawsuit filed in New York against senior U.S. officials, including FBI Director Robert Mueller and former Attorney General John Ashcroft. "First of all, I want an apology," Sachdeva said by telephone from his home in Brampton, Ontario. "One day I have everything, the next day they destroyed my life and I was not even charged for anything _ I had done no crime. I understand that there was a need of national security then, but how can they treat people that way?"....
New Orleans police giving back weapons confiscated post-Katrina
A handful of people showed up Monday to try to get back guns confiscated by the New Orleans Police Department after Hurricane Katrina — and not many of those walked away with a weapon. "They told me the police took them the first two weeks after the hurricane, after that it was the ATF," said Charles Clark, 62, a retired law officer, who had an antique gun taken from his house after the Aug. 29 storm. "It's very frustrating. I know we had a storm and all, but there should be a way to find out who has your property." Police, national guardsmen and military removed guns from houses during a search after the storm flooded the city, and they confiscated guns from some evacuees — leading to a lawsuit by gun-owner advocates including the National Rifle Association. "Natural disasters may destroy great cities, but they do not destroy civil rights," said Alan Gottlieb, founder of Second Amendment Foundation, which joined the NRA in the suit. Those seeking a weapon must bring either a bill of sale or an affidavit with the weapon's serial number. Police also are running a criminal background check on anyone claiming a weapon. "We were told 25 people went in to get their guns and eight left with their firearms," Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Rifle Association, said Monday afternoon. Percy Taplet, 73, said the national guard and state police confiscated his shotgun from his house when they evacuated him. He said he kept it for protection at his house and adjoining business. Police told him he would have to contact state police about the weapon. "I won't ever see that gun again believe me," Taplet said. "It's gone like everything else in that storm." Although a few people emerged from the police trailer with their weapons, many others were turned away....
Man accused of hitting officer shot, arrested
A man suspected of striking a U.S. Forest Service officer last month was shot and arrested by Riverside County Sheriff's Department deputies Tuesday afternoon when he opened fire on them, authorities said. Sgt. Earl Quinata said a bullet grazed the suspect's leg. Clinton J. Althizer, 28, of Pedley, was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer and doing willful harm to a child in connection with the March incident, as well as attempted homicide of a police officer, narcotics possession, grand theft auto and being a parolee in possession of a handgun, Quinata said. Deputies had been searching for Althizer because he is believed to have struck a U.S. Forest Service officer during a traffic stop March 20, Quinata said. The officer had stopped Althizer, who was riding a motorcycle with a child on the back, at 65th and Kennedy streets....Unless 65th and Kennedy streets are in a National Forest, what is a Forest Service "officer" doing making a traffic stop? At the same time we are seeing news articles about the lack of personnel to protect Federal lands, Forest service employees are making traffic stops off Federal lands? Why wasn't he on US property enforcing Federal lands law? I wonder how many Forest Service and BLM employees have been cross-commissioned by state and local authorities and how much of their time has been spent on non-federal lands activities and projects? Shouldn't the House and Senate Appropriation Committees request this type of information?
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Homeland Security grants spent on clowns and gyms
Fire departments are using Homeland Security grants to buy gym equipment, sponsor puppet and clown shows, and turn first responders into fitness trainers. The spending choices are allowable under the guidelines of the Assistance to Firefighters grant administered by the Homeland Security Department, which has awarded nearly 250 grants since February totaling more than $25 million out of the current spending pot of $545 million. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff vowed to redirect grant spending based on risk of a terrorist attack, but Congress has ignored his pleas, federal officials say. The Bush administration has specifically asked Congress not to allow funding for physical fitness, but the members who run Congress' appropriation committees keep inserting the language into the department's budget, officials say. The House last year passed the Faster and Smarter Funding for First Responders Act by a 409 to 10 vote to require several first responder grants be based on risk, however the firefighter grant was excluded from the legislation. In Florida, the Plantation City Council recently voted to use its $28,000 grant for treadmills, stationary bikes and training machines for police and firefighters. The Crawfordsville Fire Department in Indiana is using its $55,000 to buy gym equipment, provide nutritional counseling and instruct firefighters on how to become fitness trainers....
FBI Wants Access to Dead Writer's Papers
Not long after columnist Jack Anderson's funeral, FBI agents called his widow to say they wanted to search his papers. They were looking for confidential government information he might have acquired in a half-century of investigative reporting. The agents expressed interest in documents that would aid the government's case against two former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, who have been charged with disclosing classified information, said Kevin Anderson, the columnist's son. In addition, the agents told the family they planned to remove from the columnist's archive — which has yet to be catalogued — any document they came across that was stamped "secret" or "confidential," or was otherwise classified. "He would be rolling over in his grave to think that the FBI was going to go crawling through his papers willy-nilly," the younger Anderson told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday. His account is similar to conversations described by Mark Feldstein, a George Washington University journalism professor and Anderson biographer. Feldstein said he was visited by two agents at his Washington-area home in March. "They flashed their badges and said they needed access to the papers," said Feldstein, a former investigative reporter. Anderson donated his papers to the university, but the family has not yet formally signed them over. FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko, a spokesman in Washington, confirmed that the bureau wants to search the Anderson archive and remove classified materials before they are made available to the public....
CIA officer fired after admitting leak
In a rare occurrence, the CIA fired an officer who acknowledged giving classified information to a reporter, NBC News learned Friday. The officer flunked a polygraph exam before being fired on Thursday and is now under investigation by the Justice Department, NBC has learned. Intelligence sources tell NBC News the accused officer, Mary McCarthy, worked in the CIA's inspector general's office and had worked for the National Security Council under the Clinton and and George W. Bush administrations. The leak pertained to stories on the CIA’s rumored secret prisons in Eastern Europe, sources told NBC. The information was allegedly provided to Dana Priest of the Washington Post, who wrote about CIA prisons in November and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize on Monday for her reporting. Sources said the CIA believes McCarthy had more than a dozen unauthorized contacts with Priest. Information about subjects other than the prisons may have been leaked as well. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the firing. CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise confirmed the dismissal. Millerwise said she was unsure whether there had ever been a firing before at the agency for leaking to the media. Citing the Privacy Act, the CIA would not provide any details about the officer’s identity or assignments. All CIA employees are required to sign a secrecy agreement upon being hired stating they are prohibited from discussing classified information with anyone not cleared to receive the material....
GAO Faults Agencies' Sharing of Terror Data
Despite more than four years of legislation, executive orders and presidential directives, the Bush administration has yet to comprehensively improve sharing of counterterrorism information among dozens of federal agencies -- and between them and thousands of nonfederal partners, government investigators have concluded. Repeated deadlines set by both President Bush and Congress have not been met, according to a 34-page report issued late Monday by the Government Accountability Office. While acknowledging the "complexity of the task," the report notes that responsibility for the effort has shifted since late 2001 from the White House to the Office of Management and Budget to the Department of Homeland Security, and now resides with the director of national intelligence. "None has yet completed the task," the report noted. The GAO expressed "disappointment" that Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte declined to address its findings beyond a letter saying that "the review of intelligence activities is beyond GAO's purview." Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Susan Collins (R-Maine), who requested the investigation along with several House chairmen, issued a statement yesterday regretting the DNI response and noting that she co-sponsored the 2004 law that mandated the information-sharing and created Negroponte's job. The failure of intelligence and law enforcement agencies to share information that might have warned of a pending terrorist attack was cited by investigations that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Delays in developing a comprehensive system to link counterterrorism efforts and information among federal agencies have long been attributed to what Negroponte has called their individual "cultures" and a reluctance to cooperate with one another....The primary, publicly stated purpose and rationale for the PATRIOT Act was to allow this information sharing. It was one of the few sections in the Act that I supported. Funny how those sections allowing additional spying on U.S. citizens was immediatedly implemented, but here we are 4 years later and the agencies can't change their "cultures" and implement the information sharing. Asking individuals to lose rights and accept change to benefit the war on terrorism is ok, but for God's sake don't ask the Feds to change.
Questions of how far US crackdown can go
A new Homeland Security plan to crack down on employers who hire illegal immigrants is being billed by federal authorities as a sharp break from a longstanding policy of giving companies a slap on the wrist when they break the laws. But immigration analysts say that real enforcement of the Homeland Security Department plan would require far more resources than the Bush administration has committed to the new push, and more political spine than it has shown previously. As part of the program, announced Thursday by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the agency will dedicate 171 agents of its 2,500 nationwide to investigate and take action against employers who hire undocumented immigrants. But effectively combating what has become a widespread business practice would require the government to hire thousands of more investigators, to streamline methods for checking workers' legal status, and to show a new willingness to stand up to business interests, the analysts said. ''Nobody has bothered in 20 years to enforce these laws," said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. ''With the number of monitors they've got," Sum said, ''they can only monitor a tiny fraction of the employers." Nationwide, an estimated 7 million undocumented employees work for hundreds of thousands of firms, Sum said. The policy shift was announced as federal officials reported arresting 1,187 employees and seven managers of a national pallet manufacturing company. It signals a new era of immigration law enforcement, said David Palmatier, acting special agent in charge of the Boston office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of Homeland Security....
Canadian Claims Mistreatment by U.S Agents
Akhil Sachdeva, an accountant from India who emigrated to Canada, still wonders why he was seized at gunpoint by U.S. agents and held for months with hundreds of foreigners following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Chaining him to a bench at the FBI's Manhattan office on Dec. 20, 2001, federal agents demanded to know his religious and political beliefs, asked whether he had taken flying lessons and sought his personal views about the suicide hijackers, he said in an interview with The Associated Press. The 33-year-old is among eight foreign detainees who have sued U.S. officials, contending they were mistreated and terrorized by snarling dogs during four months at the Passaic County Jail in New Jersey. The class-action lawsuit is open to some 800 foreign-born detainees who were held for roughly the same amount of time. "Maybe because of my skin color? I am an Indian and I look like any person from Pakistan or an Arab country," Sachdeva, a Hindu native of New Delhi, said in an interview after completing depositions in Toronto taken by lawyers representing the U.S. government. Sachdeva, now a Canadian citizen, is seeking undisclosed financial compensation for his ordeal by joining the federal lawsuit filed in New York against senior U.S. officials, including FBI Director Robert Mueller and former Attorney General John Ashcroft. "First of all, I want an apology," Sachdeva said by telephone from his home in Brampton, Ontario. "One day I have everything, the next day they destroyed my life and I was not even charged for anything _ I had done no crime. I understand that there was a need of national security then, but how can they treat people that way?"....
New Orleans police giving back weapons confiscated post-Katrina
A handful of people showed up Monday to try to get back guns confiscated by the New Orleans Police Department after Hurricane Katrina — and not many of those walked away with a weapon. "They told me the police took them the first two weeks after the hurricane, after that it was the ATF," said Charles Clark, 62, a retired law officer, who had an antique gun taken from his house after the Aug. 29 storm. "It's very frustrating. I know we had a storm and all, but there should be a way to find out who has your property." Police, national guardsmen and military removed guns from houses during a search after the storm flooded the city, and they confiscated guns from some evacuees — leading to a lawsuit by gun-owner advocates including the National Rifle Association. "Natural disasters may destroy great cities, but they do not destroy civil rights," said Alan Gottlieb, founder of Second Amendment Foundation, which joined the NRA in the suit. Those seeking a weapon must bring either a bill of sale or an affidavit with the weapon's serial number. Police also are running a criminal background check on anyone claiming a weapon. "We were told 25 people went in to get their guns and eight left with their firearms," Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Rifle Association, said Monday afternoon. Percy Taplet, 73, said the national guard and state police confiscated his shotgun from his house when they evacuated him. He said he kept it for protection at his house and adjoining business. Police told him he would have to contact state police about the weapon. "I won't ever see that gun again believe me," Taplet said. "It's gone like everything else in that storm." Although a few people emerged from the police trailer with their weapons, many others were turned away....
Man accused of hitting officer shot, arrested
A man suspected of striking a U.S. Forest Service officer last month was shot and arrested by Riverside County Sheriff's Department deputies Tuesday afternoon when he opened fire on them, authorities said. Sgt. Earl Quinata said a bullet grazed the suspect's leg. Clinton J. Althizer, 28, of Pedley, was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer and doing willful harm to a child in connection with the March incident, as well as attempted homicide of a police officer, narcotics possession, grand theft auto and being a parolee in possession of a handgun, Quinata said. Deputies had been searching for Althizer because he is believed to have struck a U.S. Forest Service officer during a traffic stop March 20, Quinata said. The officer had stopped Althizer, who was riding a motorcycle with a child on the back, at 65th and Kennedy streets....Unless 65th and Kennedy streets are in a National Forest, what is a Forest Service "officer" doing making a traffic stop? At the same time we are seeing news articles about the lack of personnel to protect Federal lands, Forest service employees are making traffic stops off Federal lands? Why wasn't he on US property enforcing Federal lands law? I wonder how many Forest Service and BLM employees have been cross-commissioned by state and local authorities and how much of their time has been spent on non-federal lands activities and projects? Shouldn't the House and Senate Appropriation Committees request this type of information?
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