Free Republic

BY THE OREGONIAN/OREGONLIVE (Compiled from news accounts, court records, public notices) Last week's arrest of a long-sought accused eco-saboteur pushed the spotlight back on a tight-knit cell of radical environmentalists responsible for a $48 million run of firebombings and other crimes across the West in the 1990s and early 2000s. Six men and five women prosecuted in Oregon received sentences ranging from three years to 13 years. They were arrested starting in 2005 in what the FBI called "Operation Backfire," a task force that tracked down the suspects with the help of an informant deep within the underground group....

The wind schusses through the grove of tall trees, rustling their soft, bright green needles that, strangely enough, are the color of inchworms. The morning sun spills down through the branches, casting the glade in a pale green light, a hue unlike anything the visitors have ever seen. These metasequoia trees -- all 360 of them -- are living fossils, the lonely representatives of a species that once filled the forests of the Americas, Europe and Asia when dinosaurs roamed the Earth more than 60 million to 100 million years ago. The stand of trees, located on a Rutgers University...

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A federal grand jury in Eugene on Thursday indicted two more people in the 2001 arson at a Clatskanie tree farm, court officials said, bringing the number charged in the case to six. In all 14 people are charged in what government prosecutors describe as an arson conspiracy across several Western states over five years. Nathan Frazer Block, 24, and Joyanna L. Zacher, 28, were arrested Thursday in Olympia, Wash., after the 14-count indictments were handed up. Advertisement Government attorneys will seek their return to Eugene to face trial, said Karin Immergut, U.S. Attorney for Oregon....