Free Republic

Wildlife officials have killed a grizzly bear in Wyoming and a grizzly bear in Montana to head-off potential lawsuits. The Montana grizzly killed and partially consumed Kevin Kammer at a Gallatin National Forest campground near Cooke City, Mont. on July 29. The Wyoming grizzly killed 70 year-old botanist Erwin Evert on June 17 on the Shoshone National Forest near the East Entrance of Yellowstone National Park. The circumstances were quite different, but the decision to kill the bears was undoubtedly influenced by a 1996 court case over the terrible bear mauling of 16 year-old Anna Knochel at a U.S. Forest...

Sheep don't mix well with grizzly bears and wolves. Now they won't mix at all on more than 70,000 acres in the Absaroka-Beartooth wilderness. A 74,000-acre sheep grazing allotment south of Big Timber in the Gallatin National Forest has been permanently closed and the ranchers who used it for generations have been paid to move their sheep elsewhere... The agreement is the eighth -- and second-largest -- in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem in recent years that has led to the retirement of about 300,000 acres from grazing. The latest involves the Ash Mountain and Iron Mountain allotments used for generations...

HELENA -- Opponents of a proposal to issue death certificates for abortions accused Rep. Roger Koopman, R-Bozeman, on Thursday of wanting to psychologically harm women. "It is meant to create suffering and trauma, and maybe that is what (Koopman) believes women who get abortions deserve," said Kate Cholwea of NARAL, a pro-choice group. Koopman is sponsoring House Bill 617, which would require death certificates for any fetus that is aborted before it is 20 weeks old. A hearing on the bill was held Thursday, which drew a small but emotionally charged crowd. "It certainly is a life in a mother's...

Here's another major federal government scandal crying to get legs in the press. Under a law known as the Intergovernmental Personnel Act, the federal government "lends out" 1,200 to 1,500 well paid federal bureaucrats to left-wing non-profit organizations each year.(1) If anyone wonders how the United Nations Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) fit in with the federal government's regulatory agencies, there is a simple answer: They often trade employees back and forth -- most of whom are on the federal payroll. A while back, we reported that the relationship between eco-whacko groups and United Nations NGOs and federal agencies, like the EPA,...