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Show 02 Sattaday, September 25, 2004 TATE &KEGI0N 2ait0$fterot& Five charged in contraband cigarette case ASSOCIATED PRESS THE Five YAKIMA,. Wash. people have been charged with felonies following an th investigation into sales of untaxed cigarettes and raids on a number of Indian smoke shops. Authorities said it apparently was the first time the Justice Department has brought criminal charges, at least in the Pacific Northwest, over contraband cigarettes intended for sale to non:Indians. In a indictment 238-cou- tion in Plummer, Idaho, as well as $22 million in cash that was seized at Indian smoke shops and from bank accounts in Fairfield and Fife and about $1 million worth of cigarettes taken in raids last year. Investigators said the cigarettes involved in the case cost Washington state about $7 million in tax revenue. Indians may legally buy untaxed cigarettes, but illegal sales of untaxed cigarettes to at reservation smoke shops has been a problem for state issued by a federal grand jury, the three north Idaho residents men and two Tacoma-are- a were charged Thursday with money laundering, conspiracy to launder money and conspiracy to traffic in contraband cigarettes. Money laundering, the most serious charge, carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in , prisoa The indictment also seeks forfeiture of The Warpath, a landmark Indian smoke shop and convenience store on the Coeur d'Alene Indian Reserva . non-India- and federal law enforcement and revenue officials. , "We're not at odds with the tribes, but individuals who allegedly have brci. i the law," said James A. cJevitt, U.S. attorney in Spokane. Named as defendants were Peter Mahoney, 51, and Peggy Mahoney, 35, both of Plummer; Mark Van't Hul, 41, of Worley, Idaho; LyleW. Con- - . way, 67, of Fife, operator of LykVs Smoke Shop; and Lyle Shawn Conway, 32, of Taco-moperator of Lyles II. None could be reached for . a, Man who comment Thursday, The of Spokesman-RevieSpokane and The News Tribune of Tacoma reported. According to the indict- -' ment, agents from the Internal Revenue Service, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Washington State Liquor Control Board' found a conspiracy to deal in contraband cigarettes ran from September 2002 until May 20, 2003, when raids were conducted on the Coeur d'Alene, the Yakama and Puyallup reservations. shook baby w gets time in prison THE Report: Spotted owl still declining in the Northwest THE ASSOCIATED PRKS Four- WASHINGTON habitat due to fire and the barred owl, as well as the lag effect" of previous logging, he said. "Even though timber harvests have stopped, it doesn't stop having an effect." The report suggests that overall, northern spotted owls declined by about 3.7 percent per year from 1985 to 2003. The decline was especially steep in Washington state, where the number of birds went down by about 7.3 percent per year. Reasons for the decline are not entirely clear, the report said, but barred owls seem to have an especially strong effect on spotted owls in that state. Catastrophic wildfires, particularly on the east side of the Cascade Range, also have blackened owl habitat, the den Oak Death, were not considered problems back thea Any effort to loosen federal protections for the owl as some in the timber industry "would clearly be advocate political and not made on (the basis of) the scientific report," " Matthew Daly teen years after coming under federal protection, the northern spotted owl continues to decline,, particularly in Washington state, a new study shows. The owl an Icon of the Northwest timber wars no longer faces the severe threat from logging it once did, but it faces new threats, including catastrophic wildfires that rage through overgrown forests and the barred owl, a relative that is rapidly taking over spotted owl habitat in the West, the report said. The study, conducted by a Portland firm on behalf of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, appears to be a blow to timber industry efforts to loosen restrictions on federal forest logging in Washington, Oregon and Northern California. "The main points are pretty clear," said Steven Courtney, vice president of Sustainable Ecosystems Institute and a lead author of the report. "The animal is under significant threats to, a level we think is comparable to those in 1990," when the owl was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. w nat s cnangea is tne cause of threats to the owl, Courtney said. "Whereas in 1990 it was primarily timber harvests on federal lands, now it is loss of - Owls declined by 2.8 percent per year in Oregon and 2.2 percent in Northern California, the report said. Environmentalists said the report showed that Bush administration efforts to increase logging of forests in the Pacific Northwest contradicted scientific findings on habitat needs for the owl. The bird has been the focus of bitter debate in the region since federal officials sharply reduced logging in the early 1990s to protect the spotted owl and other threatened species. "What this report says to Ash. said. But a timber industry repre- 1 Don RyanAssociated Press northern spotted owl perches in the Deschutes National Forest in Oregon on May 8. A new study reported Friday that after more than a decade of federal protection, this owl continues to decline. A ; me is the spotted owl is in crisis, especially so in Washington state," said Susan Ash, conservation director for the Audubon Society of Portland. The owl is even worse off it was first listed, Ash said, because the barred owl and other dangers, such as West Nile virus and Sud than when sentative said the report shows that trying to protect owls by limiting logging does not eliminate risks to the species. ' "What's encouraging is that all of the original reasons for listing the spotted owl (as threatened) have been found to be either invalid of not any problem anymore," said Ross Mickey, Western Oregon manager for the American Forest Resource Council, an industry group that sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reconsider protections for the bird. The Bush administration commissioned the $415,000 study last year to settle the lawsuit by the AFRC. The report was submitted Friday to the Fish and Wildlife Service, which will decide by Nov. 15 whether the owl should continue to be protected by the Endangered Species Act. The report is one of two by private groups that will help determine whether threatened birds should keep their federal protections. EDAW Inc. of Seattle is reviewing the marbled murrelet. . ASSOCIATED PRESS SALT LAKE UTX A man convicted of shaking a baby who died after 12 years in a vegetative oof o ii roc cAtif anat VrAar ir Via. tween five years and life in prison.. Warren Clifford Hales, who Luther shook then Deem in 1985, had said the boy was accidentally injured after Hales slammed on his brakes to avoid another car and the baby hit the dashboard. But prosecutors said Hales shook the boy hard enough to leave him blind, mute and unable to learn to care for himself. The boy lingered in a persistent vegetative state for 12 years before dying in 1997. Physicians, including the boy's pediatrician and a state medical examiner, testified that the boy's massive brain injuries were inflicted when he was violently shaken. The boy's mother, Michelle Westerman, told prosecutors that her son was sleeping peacefully when she left her Midvale apartment for 20 minutes to get groceries and left the infant in Hales' care. According to Hates' interview with police, he checked on the baby soon after the mother left and found that he was not breathing. Hospital physicians diagnosed shaken baby syndrome based on retinal bleeding, bleeding in the brain and severe brain swelling. Solar samples from crashed spacecraft sent to California THE ASSOCIATED PRESS The first SALT LAKE OTY samples recovered from the crashed Genesis space capsule solar-win- d have been sent to researchers in California. Mummy Lake's mystery is unraveled at Mesa Verde National Park handle. Electa Draper THE DENVER POST MESA VERDE NATIONAL Almost'a cenPARK, Colo. tury after these ancient Indian ruins became a national park in 1906, strange earthen formations near the cliff and mesa-todwellings continued to puzzle and divide scientists, until recently. One mysterious dirt mound, 200 feet across, rises 16 feet above the floor of Morefield. Canyon. A 1,400-fopath or channel extends from it, making it resemble an upside-dow- n frying pan with a long, flat And then there was the large depression in the park's heart on Chapin Mesa. It was labeled for years as either a prehistoric amphitheater or perhaps an impoundment of nicknamed Mummy water Lake with no known source of water. Now, scientists know the depression was part of an elaborate water storage system, and have dubbed it Far View Reservoir. And Morefield Canyon's elevated mound, which does not resemble a reservoir, was a storage facility that could have held 120,000 gallons of water,. A.D. 750 to 1180 to survive the After a decade of investigation just ended by a large team of private water engineers and government scientists, it is recognized that the Ancestral Puebloans who lived here until 1300 were remarkable water engineers. "They knew how to manage water," says Eric Bikis of Wright Water Engineers Inc. in Durango. "They were inge- devastating droughts of the Four Corners regioa The last of these works studied, a large mound dubbed Box Elder Reservoir, wasn't discovered until a 2002 wildfire burned off a dense, high carpet of sagebrush. But scientists had been confused for decades over how the giant mud pie in Morefield Canyon, high above the bed of a desert stream that rarely flows, could have served as a reservoir. Many guessed it was a terrace for ceremonial dances. In the late 1990s, Denver water engineer and author Ken neth Wright, known for his studies on ancient Incan waterworks in the Peruvian Andes, collaborated with engineers and government researchers to cut a deep trench through the Mesa Verde mound and finally solve the mystery. The Puebloans, the team concluded, had started with a shallow depression that was originally along the bottom of an intermittent stream. nious." The people of this high desert, without benefit of metals, wheels or written language, maintained at least four massive waterworks from CELEBRATING OUR NEW BOISE STORE AT ALL UPPER LIMIT LOCATIONS!! 9 Special manufacturer pricing for this event allows us to pass incredible savings on to you! They used the small impoundment, and others such as Far View, to capture water during rare big storms, which occur several years apart, Bikis says. These floods eventually ' filled the reservoirs with as much sediment as water, and ancient workers had to scoop them out In Morefield Canyon, the reservoir bottom slowly rose above the canyon floor despite some 350 years of scooping. The Puebloans compensated for the reservoir's growing height by creating a long canal to divert flood flows. It had the proper gradient to continue to fill the rising reservoir. A thousand years before this was a park, Wright says, Mesa Verde was an astounding collection of public construction projects, from the stone cliff dwellings to the newly appreciated water sys- tem Today, modern engineers will honor the Puebloans' Mesa Verde reservoirs by naming them a Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. Three years after it was launched, Genesis returned to Earth on Sept. 8 and crashed into the western Utah desert when its NASA scientists working in a clean room at Michael Army Air Field at Duewav Proving Ground have been extracting sample plates from the Genesis science capsule. The space agency announced Thursday that the first recovered ; samples have been sent to researcher Nishizumi Kunihiko at the University of California's Space Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley. This is the first batch in what we are growing more confident will be many more scientifically valuable samples," said Don Sweet-naGenesis project manager from Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif . The recovered material sent to California included three of the "lid foils' that were attached to the interior lid of the sample return capsule and were exposed to the solar wind throughout the voyage. Sweetnam said NASA may have been able to retrieve 75 percent to 80 percent of the lid foils. 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