Suspicious clowns; skier fraud; poisoned lake recovers
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Odd and interesting news from around the West.
- By JONEL ALECCIA The Seattle Times
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SEATTLE (AP) — More than 1,500 former patients of Seattle Pain Centers have sought help in Washington emergency rooms since the chain of clinics was closed abruptly in July — and hundreds more have swamped local hospital programs.
Some providers say they're struggling to meet the void left when the center's medical director, Dr. Frank Li, was stripped of his medical license for practices that state regulators said possibly contributed to the deaths of at least 18 patients since 2010.
And some patients say they've been abandoned with no care for legitimate and agonizing pain, reported The Seattle Times (http://bit.ly/2d6UJVI).
"I am at my breaking point," said Eric Currie, 33, of Ocean Shores, Grays Harbor County, who had been treated at the pain clinic for nerve pain and scarring after surgeries and chemotherapy for abdominal cancer diagnosed in 2009. "I was forced to go through withdrawal symptoms and cannot function at any kind of normal level."
Currie said he's on a waiting list for care at the Swedish Medical Center pain clinic. Officials there estimated they'll be able to take outside referrals within three to four months.
Flooded with people such as Currie seeking care, pain clinics across western Washington have stepped up to absorb patients: about 800 so far at the University of Washington Medical Center, 600 at Swedish, 500 more at the Washington Center for Pain Management, officials at those sites said. Virginia Mason Medical Center and Group Health Cooperative have accepted patients, too.
But that's still not enough to handle the estimated 8,000 patients receiving opiate painkiller prescriptions from Li's clinics this year — and up to 25,000 treated since 2008 at Seattle Pain Centers' eight sites across Washington.
"As this rolls out and we have more and more patients who can't get care, this will be a crisis," said Dr. Steven Stanos, medical director for Swedish Pain Services.
Even before Seattle Pain Centers closed, there weren't enough resources to manage chronic pain, he added.
Officials said the real peak of patients may not be seen until prescriptions issued in mid-July begin to run out.
"A patient might not know until September or October that their medicine is out," Stanos said. "There might be a second and third wave."
There have been no reports of deaths or other serious consequences from abrupt opiate withdrawal, officials with the state Department of Health said. But neither the department nor the Washington Health Care Authority, which oversees Medicaid, is notified when such deaths occur, agency officials said.
Officials do know that more than 1,500 former Seattle Pain Centers patients have sought care in emergency departments across the state between Aug. 17, when tracking began, and Sept. 18. That's about 47 visits to ERs every day, a state report showed.
The visits have been clustered in many of the communities the centers served.
At least 143 former patients sought care during that period at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, with 88 showing up at Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia and 78 at St. Clare Hospital in Lakewood.
The tracking doesn't include information about diagnoses, so they could have come to the ERs for services unrelated to pain care, said Dr. Nathan Schlicher, president of the Washington chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians.
So far, the numbers appear stable, with no spike to prompt serious concerns, Schlicher said in an email.
"In the end, the rate is probably about the same as the overall Medicaid rate," he added.
'I am sitting here in excruciating pain'
In Everett, former Seattle Pain Centers patients who came to the Providence ER were told to go back to their primary-care providers, or PCPs, said Dr. Kevin Clay, ambulatory-division chief.
"If somebody didn't have a PCP, they were distributed equally around the community," he said.
Some have been on very high doses of opiates, well over the 90 milligrams of morphine-equivalent drugs per day suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the threshold of 120 milligrams morphine equivalent included in Washington state rules.
Those patients are being referred to private pain specialists, while others are sent to general practitioners, Clay said.
"This could have been a huge crisis here, but everybody's stepped up," he said.
Elsewhere in Washington, some patients said they remain very alarmed. Toni Beerbower, 42, of Hoquiam, said she went to the ER at Grays Harbor Community Hospital in August after Seattle Pain Centers closed.
"I am sitting here in excruciating pain," she said. "I have degenerative bone disease, osteoarthritis, fibromyalgia and severe migraines."
Doctors at Grays Harbor turned her away, she said. Hospital officials refused to comment on her claims, even with authorization to discuss her medical care.
"We never turn away a patient from the ER for any reason and would have given a patient who needed pain management a referral to a physician who would find them the most appropriate pain-management clinic in the area," hospital spokeswoman Nancee Long said in an email.
Beerbower said she has since found a primary-care provider who won't prescribe opiates.
"She absolutely refuses to do it, period," she said. The doctor did not return calls seeking comment on Beerbower's case.
Beerbower, who has an 11-year-old son, said she has trouble with daily tasks and can't sleep because of the pain. For the first time in her life, she said, she tried marijuana.
"I was totally relaxed and slept in until 6 a.m. without waking up and having massive anxiety," she said.
Seeking help from primary care
Despite pleas from state health officials to help treat the former Seattle Pain Centers patients, many in primary care have refused.
That concerns Dr. David Tauben, chief of pain medicine at UW Medicine.
"What's happened is opioid challenges frighten so many primary-care people into not providing care at all," he said.
Tauben, Stanos and others are working with the Washington State Medical Association to reach out to primary-care providers and specialists to urge them to follow state recommendations to help.
They're also working on other solutions, such as telemedicine sessions to walk providers through the toughest cases.
Helping the pain patients is the only compassionate stance, Tauben said.
"If the doors are slammed, if we say, 'We don't like you, we don't care about you,' it's going to be a real problem," Tauben said. "We don't turn diabetics out on the street. Why should we turn people with chronic pain on the street?"
It could take months to settle all of the patients into new medical homes, the experts said.
Meanwhile, Li, 48, has not yet responded to the statement of charges levied by the state Medical Commission. The agency alleged that Li failed to properly monitor prescription use of powerful opiates, possibly contributing to patient deaths.
His medical license remains suspended in Washington and in California, where he also practiced. Nor has he responded to Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officials seeking to formally revoke his ability to prescribe powerful narcotics. A hearing on his DEA registration is set for Nov. 8, an agency spokeswoman said.
A lawyer representing Li did not respond to a request for comment.
The Seattle Pain Centers closure sparked a "health-community emergency," said Dr. Patricia Read-Williams, chief of the UW Medicine Neighborhood Issaquah Clinic, which has seen several former clinic patients.
There have been exceptions, but most providers are doing their fair share, she said.
"No one had any warning or any time to actually plan for these patients," Read-Williams said. "For as short of a time period as it's been, most of the health community can be applauded for stepping up to the plate."
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Information from: The Seattle Times, http://www.seattletimes.com
- By JENNIFER SASSEEN The Herald
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EVERETT, Wash. (AP) — One week before Thanksgiving last year, Micha Ide lay awake in the pre-dawn hours mourning the loss of around 50 heritage turkeys.
"I didn't sleep," she said. "I pretty much cried the whole night."
Floodwaters inundated the small farm that Micha and her husband, Andrew Ide, run in Snohomish, reported The Herald (http://bit.ly/2d18ynv). The couple moved their 100 turkeys to high ground and kept the birds in a mobile hoop-house. They hoped roosting bars would keep the turkeys safe.
It didn't. The turkeys escaped their pen and flew straight into the floodwaters, Micha Ide said.
"This was at night," she said, "so we had to go out in the canoe and we were rescuing turkeys and we're like, hypothermic, you know?"
After a time, they couldn't see any more turkeys and they were too cold anyway. After they crawled into bed, Micha pondered the "huge devastation" of losing half the flock they'd been raising just before Thanksgiving. And she cried.
"But then, the next morning, I heard really hoarse-sounding turkeys, their voices were like gggghhhh," she gurgled. "And I looked out the window and the floodwaters had receded and I saw them all walking up to the house from different parts of the farm. We only lost one turkey."
Such is life at Bright Ide Acres, a 10-acre parcel on the 132-acre Chinook Farms in the Snohomish River Valley.
Had those turkeys been the broad-breasted bronze variety they'd grown their first two years on the farm, they would have all died, Micha said. "For sure. They would have just sunk to the bottom."
Broad-breasted bronze turkeys — and broad-breasted whites generally sold in grocery stores — grow exceptionally fast with very big breasts, to supply more of the white meat customers demand.
But a downside to all that fast growth is that sometimes the turkeys' legs give out and they need to be euthanized halfway through the season. And they can't forage because they're too heavy and tired so they end up sitting around a lot, Micha said.
Neither can they reproduce without artificial insemination, which got the Ides thinking.
"Do we really have business as a community, or as humanity," Andrew said, "to propagate something that really can't survive by itself, or naturally?"
Researching the topic, they realized they wanted to raise a heritage breed. They chose a breed called standard bronze — as opposed to broad-breasted bronze — that was popular in the U.S. up until the 1960s.
The standard bronze grow more slowly — the Ides raise them for seven months rather than the four to five months allotted the broad-breasted birds — and a lot more trouble. They can fly, for one thing.
"They also learned that if they mob the fence they can just kind of walk over it, it'll flatten down," Micha said.
"Like a zombie horde," Andrew said.
The Ides are college-educated urban professionals who are part of the "greenhorn" movement back to the land, a group of people who share a growing concern about knowing where the food we consume comes from.
Turkeys are a supplemental "crop" for the Ides, their main focus being chicken and pork, but a measure of their success is that by early August this year, their turkeys were sold out. Their customers love the more complex flavor that accompanies slow growth and a diet rich in grass, bugs and fresh-milled non-GMO grains.
The Ides might seem, at first, an unlikely choice for farming, but in some ways they're uniquely suited. Growing up in the Bay Area north of San Francisco, Micha, 32, always had a passion for animals, volunteering at animal sanctuaries and working at a private zoo. Her college degree was in anthropology with an emphasis in archaeology, but she went to work for a biotech company in San Diego.
"They taught me, really, everything I know about sales and marketing, which is very helpful," she said, "because you can farm all you want, but if can't sell your product, you might as well not farm."
Andrew, 30, graduated from a private college in Southern California with a degree in philosophy and theology, because "that's what spoke to me."
He and Micha met in 2010, on a fundraising trip for a San Diego nonprofit called Outdoor Outreach, which takes troubled inner-city kids rock climbing and backpacking.
Two years later, he and Micha were married where they met, in Joshua Tree National Park. That same weekend, Micha got the layoff notice she'd been expecting since the biotech company she worked at was sold to a bigger firm.
Soon the adventurous couple was on the road.
"We sold everything that we owned, pretty much," Micha said, "and bought a little teardrop trailer and traveled the U.S. and parts of Canada and Mexico for three months and we just spent most of our time outside, staying in campsites, national parks and whatever."
"Our road trip kind of had an extended-honeymoon feel to it," Andrew said. "It was kind of a good foot to start our marriage out on because we kind of confined ourselves; I mean, two people in a truck for three months . "
"It was good prep for living in a tiny house," said Micha, finishing his sentence.
They talked about wanting to work outside, perhaps as park rangers or farmers, though the only experience they had with farming was a backyard garden and a few chickens. Then a friend gave them a copy of the book, "You Can Farm" by Joel Salatin, a farmer featured in the New York Times best seller "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and the award-winning documentary "Food Inc."
They were hooked. (The road trip also inspired, indirectly, the name of their future farm. In a pun on their family name, Micha started a blog, Bright Ide and Bushy Tailed. It still exists. She still writes in it about life on Bright Ide Acres.)
It was in the fall of 2012 that the Ides started looking for a farming opportunity. In spring 2013, they arrived at Chinook Farms. That first year, they said, they had 300 meat chickens, 30 laying hens, five pigs, 25 turkeys and about 10 goats. They also managed a 30-member vegetable community-supported agriculture program, in which customers pay a set fee for a weekly box of farm wares.
Chinook Farms is owned by Eric Fritch, who lives less than 2 miles away and raises 80 grass-fed beef cattle. Fritch, 55, has an engineering degree and once worked at Boeing, but now owns Chinook Lumber stores and bought the Chinook Farms acreage in 2008, when it grew nothing but old poplar trees.
Fritch cleared most of the poplar trees from his 132 acres and set up Chinook Farms as an organic farm. He feels very strongly about keeping production agriculture thriving in Snohomish County, Fritch said, because he remembers when the Kent Valley was developed in the 1970s and '80s.
"That used to be the produce department for Seattle, was the Kent Valley," he said.
The Ides dropped raising vegetables two years ago to concentrate on ethically raised meat, which they feel is more difficult to come by than good organic vegetables. This year they're raising 1,400 meat chickens, 100 laying hens, 40 pigs and 100 turkeys. Andrew said he'll probably breed 20 ewes this year, so they'll have 40 sheep, which they started raising two years ago, and around 40 goats.
It's not an easy lifestyle. Besides hawking their wares at farmers markets in Edmonds, Carnation and Snohomish throughout the summer, and trading their meat at the markets for foods like fresh berries and halibut, Micha works on a friend's food truck and Andrew pours concrete to supplement their income. While they're not losing money on the farm, they're still not making much.
"Last year our net for the entire farm, for us, our whole net was 20 grand," Micha said. "So that means we each took in 10 grand income, which is really not much of a living wage."
Still, they have no plans to quit. Their dream is to find land above the floodplain that could act as their home base, with a store and freezer space for customers, and a barn to keep their animals out of the weather.
But even if their farming business doesn't work out, even if their dream doesn't come true, they will always raise their own food. "Always," Micha said. "Because gosh, I don't know, once you go down that rabbit hole, you can't go back. . We eat like kings. Poor as paupers, but we eat like kings."
"It's the truth," Andrew said.
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Information from: The Daily Herald, http://www.heraldnet.com
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PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The city of Portland has agreed to pay $89,000 to the 18-year-old son of a city police officer who was infected with Hepatitis C while working in the late 1990s.
The Oregonian/OregonLive reports (https://goo.gl/KVEVOp ) the teen is believed to have contracted Hepatitis C while his mother was pregnant with him.
City documents say the officer spent much of the 1990s working undercover posing as a prostitute and a drug buyer and that she was bitten, pricked by intravenous drug needles and exposed to the blood of suspects. Documents say at least three suspects said they had Hepatitis C.
A medical expert hired by the city "determined to a reasonable degree of medical certainty" that the officer was infected with Hepatitis C one of those times.
The payment is to cover related medical expenses.
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Information from: The Oregonian/OregonLive, http://www.oregonlive.com
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BOZEMAN, Mont. (AP) — A bugle used by the American Legion's honor guard that was stolen during a break-in has been returned.
Bozeman American Legion post commander Jim Howe says an unidentified man went to the American Legion bar and gave the bugle to a bartender.
The bugle was stolen during a burglary at the Bozeman American Legion post over the past weekend. Post officials said they wanted it back, no questions asked.
According to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle (http://tinyurl.com/zr3rpbc ), the bugle has been used to play Taps at about 80 military burials a year since 2009.
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Information from: Bozeman Daily Chronicle, http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com
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DENVER (AP) — Gov. John Hickenlooper says an independent monitor is being appointed after a federal report uncovered several abuses at a Pueblo center for people with severe intellectual disabilities.
Hickenlooper says federal officials requested the monitor in an August report, but he says the state already had plans to hire one.
According to the Denver Post (http://tinyurl.com/hx9l9jg ), federal investigators found one resident performed a sexual act in exchange for a soda and another was burned with a blow dryer to raise her body temperature. Several other residents had words scratched into their skin.
As recently as April, federal investigators found safety protocols lacking and serious incidents still occurring.
Federal investigators have asked the state to repay millions of dollars in Medicaid funding that supported the center.
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Information from: The Denver Post, http://www.denverpost.com
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TWIN FALLS, Idaho (AP) — Public health officials say a man in south-central Idaho is receiving treatment after being bitten by a bat that has tested positive for rabies.
Tanis Maxwell, an epidemiologist with South Central Public Health District, tells the Times-News (http://bit.ly/2cH3B56 ) that the man was bit in Twin Falls County on Monday. The man, whose name has not been released, is being treated at a local hospital.
Maxwell says that the bat was captured and sent to the Idaho Bureau of Laboratories for testing. Rabies can only be confirmed in a laboratory.
Nineteen animals have tested positive for rabies across the state since June.
Rabies can be fatal if left untreated. The disease is transmitted through an infected animal's saliva, often through a bite or scratch.
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Information from: The Times-News, http://www.magicvalley.com
- By EMILY HOARD The News-Review
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ROSEBURG, Ore. (AP) — Ten years ago, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife officials purposely poisoned Diamond Lake. They weren't acting out of pure evil, however, but as a way to eradicate the invasive species that had been destroying the lake's ecosystem, the tui chub fish.
The tui chub had been illegally introduced to the lake several years before and the population soon swelled to millions of fish, taking over the lake and causing toxic algae problems and poor water quality. Fishing was also very poor, as the chub had eaten most of the food that was usually eaten by the stocked rainbow trout, reported The News-Review (http://bit.ly/2dxhDUm).
"We went through a lot of different reviews and options of what was the best way to get Diamond Lake back to being a good fishery with a good water quality," said Dave Loomis, who had been the watershed district manager for the Umpqua at the time.
ODFW decided the best way was to pour rotenone, a naturally occurring compound from the pea family, into the lake to suffocate its gill-breathing inhabitants, ridding the lake of tui chub to give it a fresh start.
Almost 200 people were involved in the rotenone treatment, and in just a matter of days, the lake was fishless. After draining the lake to 8 feet deep, the crew let it refill and sit until the following spring, when all the rotenone had dissipated and it was safe to restock it with fish.
"So 2007 was very good fishing. People caught a lot of fish, anglers came back to the lake that hadn't been there in years, there were a lot of smiles on people's faces and the water quality had improved," Loomis said. "It was very enjoyable to see the lake rebound and come back to the way it had been before the chub were there."
Jerry Chartier, an avid fisherman at Diamond Lake, said the lake has been pivotal in his life. Since he was 12, he had wanted to be a game warden there, so at the age of 23 he accomplished his dream and became an Oregon state trooper for fish and game.
"Diamond Lake was always a great lake and a great fishery, then along came the tui chub which pretty much ruined the lake as far as fishing," Chartier said.
He said the lake came back very strongly until Loomis retired and another program was used to manage the lake. Chartier, who disagreed with this different method, said ODFW implemented a new stocking program with a catch limit of five fish.
"Most of the time you can catch your limit and have a wonderful day at a beautiful lake that is nothing but spectacular with the surrounding scenery," Chartier said, adding that the drive between Roseburg and the lake is one of the most beautiful drives in the country.
He recently fished there with his 89-year-old uncle, who caught his limit of rainbow trout.
"At that moment, when that day at Diamond Lake ended and he had his five fish, there was only one word to describe it and that's priceless," Chartier said. "That's what it's all about. It's all about family and having a great time."
Chartier said the people at the lodge are wonderful, stellar people who lend their good advice for catching fish.
"We were very excited to have it restored and the fishing came back very well and the water quality came back very well," said Stephen Koch, president and general manager at Diamond Lake Resort.
This wasn't the first time the lake had been treated with rotenone. It had experienced the same problems and had undergone the poisoning in 1954. Two years later, Koch's father bought and reopened the newly restored lake resort.
"We really appreciate the effort from everybody when they stepped up to prepare the lake. It was a disaster to the water quality and to the economy in southern Oregon, so we were really happy to have it back," Koch said.
If it gets cold enough this winter, the lake might also be open for ice fishing, Koch said.
Though there have been some ups and downs over the years and some tui chub have been put back in the lake illegally as bait, Loomis said the fishing has been good at Diamond Lake.
"It was actually very good fishing this year and it's the best fishing I've seen in Diamond Lake in probably 20 years," Loomis said. He called the lake a great fishery where families can rent boats and catch some fish.
"I just thank everybody after 10 years for helping Diamond Lake get back to being the gem of Cascades and I hope everybody enjoys it into the future," Loomis said.
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Information from: The News-Review, http://www.nrtoday.com
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OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — State wildlife managers say they shot and killed another gray wolf in northeastern Washington because wolves continue to attack livestock in the area.
The Department of Fish and Wildlife said Friday evening that the adult wolf was shot from a helicopter on Thursday. That brings to seven the number of wolves the agency has killed since the pack was targeted for removal in August.
Wolves are endangered species under state law, but a state plan allows them to be killed under certain conditions. Some groups have criticized the killings.
The wolves killed were part of the Profanity Peak pack that roams Ferry County.
WDFW wolf policy lead Donny Martorello said the pack continues to attack livestock with the most recent attack earlier in the week.
Martorello says the pack likely still has one adult female and three juveniles. He said removal efforts will continue but noted the challenges of eliminating the entire pack.
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ALPINE, Utah (AP) — Authorities in northern Utah say a hiker with autism has been found safe a day after his father's body was discovered on a trail.
Utah County Sheriff's Sgt. Spencer Cannon said in a tweet that 21-year-old Michael Laughlin appeared uninjured Saturday morning and would be reunited with his mother.
A search and rescue team had been looking for Laughlin since Friday evening.
Another hiker spotted 57-year-old Charles Laughlin's body earlier in the day a hiking area known as Jacob's Ladder near Alpine.
Cannon says it appears the elder Laughlin had suffered a medical episode before his death. Foul play is not suspected.
Authorities notified the man's family and were told that his son had been with him.
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REDMOND, Ore. (AP) — A Redmond 17-year-old and his girlfriend accused of conspiring to assault his mother have pleaded guilty.
The Bend Bulletin says (https://goo.gl/A7GF64 ) Dakota Ortwein pleaded guilty to assault in Deschutes County District Court Thursday in a deal that dropped more serious charges. He was sentenced to 70 months.
Reyanne West pleaded guilty to attempted assault in a separate hearing. She was sentenced to 20 months.
Prosecutors allege that the couple planned the attack on Dakota's mother, Shasta Ortwein, who reportedly had reservations about the teens' relationship.
Authorities say Dakota Ortwein attacked his mother at home May 19 and hit her with a baseball bat. Investigators contend he intended to beat his mother to death and burn down the house with her inside.
Judge Alta Brady said she will recommend the teens serve their time at an Oregon Youth Authority facility rather than an adult prison.
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Information from: The Bulletin, http://www.bendbulletin.com
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LAS VEGAS (AP) — Students at several Las Vegas area schools have been staying home or leaving early in the wake of social media threats involving clowns.
KSNV-TV reports (http://bit.ly/2dF7gBD) Clark County School District officials say rumors about creepy clowns terrorizing campuses, possibly with a firearm, are a hoax.
Despite the reassurances, some students skipped school Friday.
Clown threats have popped up in schools in other states.
Three Cincinnati, Ohio school districts canceled classes on the same day and two people were arrested amid a rash of similar threats.
In Reading, Ohio, police say a woman reported someone in a clown costume grabbed her by the throat and made threats toward the local schools.
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Information from: KSNV-TV, http://www.mynews3.com/index.php
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CASPER, Wyo. (AP) — Officials in Casper are raising the price of season passes at the Hogadon Ski Area for first-time buyers because of fraud.
Leisure Services Director Doug Follick said the ski area on Casper Mountain has no way to verify whether a customer is truly a first-time buyer and he said some people are abusing the system.
Follick said the original goal of the first-time discount was to entice young Casper residents to start skiing, but the ski area determined that almost 200 of the 300 reduced-cost passes sold annually were going to adults.
"Someone walks up to the counter at the rec center and says this year, 'My name's Mike,' the next year, 'My name is Michael' and the year after it could be Dave," Follick said.
People who bought the introductory passes paid $185, compared with $265 for a standard pre-season pass.
"What you're trying to do is lure kids, the younger generation," Follick said.
The current prices are $250 for children, $365 for youths ages 13 to 18 and $900 for two adult and two child passes, the Casper Star-Tribune reported (http://tinyurl.com/zrgqexm ).
Follick said rates will increase next season because the ski area is opening a new ski lodge. He said those rates won't be available until next spring.
"We're a hometown ski area and we try to keep skiing as economical as possible," Follick said.
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Information from: Casper (Wyo.) Star-Tribune, http://www.trib.com
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MARYSVILLE, Wash. (AP) — A city councilman has served a day in jail after pleading guilty to a DUI.
The Daily Herald reports (http://bit.ly/2dwZOU6) 35-year-old Marysville Councilman Rob Toyer was set to go to trial about a week before he entered his guilty plea.
Court records say another 363 days in jail are suspended on the condition that Toyer does not get into further trouble with the law.
Washington State Patrol says Toyer swerved on a highway and crossed a median before he was stopped in December.
A breath test put Toyer's blood alcohol content at .178.
The legal limit is .08 for drivers.
Toyer said in a statement that he's looking forward to moving on and continuing to serve his community.
He was elected to his council seat in 2011.
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Information from: The Daily Herald, http://www.heraldnet.com
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SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) — Southern California residents should remain on heightened alert until Tuesday for the increased possibility of a major earthquake, officials said.
The warning by the Governor's Office of Emergency Services follows a series of small temblors deep under the Salton Sea, which is located on the 800-mile-long San Andreas fault, the Orange County Register reported Saturday (http://bit.ly/2deTAxO).
Such warnings are typically issued once or twice a year, said Kelly Huston, the deputy director of crisis communications for the Governor's Office of Emergency Services.
The latest alert was issued after 142 temblors hit starting Monday near Bombay Beach at the southern end of the fault. Those quakes ranged from a magnitude of 1.4 to 4.3, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
Scientists estimate the probability of a quake with a magnitude of 7.0 or higher on the southern San Andreas fault being triggered is as high as 1 in 100 and as low as 1 in 3,000. The average chance for such an earthquake striking on any given week is 1 in 6,000. That heightened probability will last through Tuesday.
Earthquakes along the San Andreas typically occur every 300 years, said Morgan Page, a geophysicist with the USGS. Earthquake Science Center, but the southernmost end of the fault hasn't ruptured since 1690.
"There is significant stress stored on the southern end," Page said.
Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday signed legislation to develop a statewide warning system to inform Californians of impending earthquakes through their cellphones, radios and other devices.
"California is earthquake country," said Mark Ghilarducci, the director of the state's Office of Emergency Services. "We must always be prepared and not let our guard down."
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ALOHA, Ore. (AP) — A white privilege survey was assigned as homework for a group of Oregon high school seniors.
Parent Jason Schmidt provided KATU-TV (http://bit.ly/2cGKZm8) a photo of the survey his son was given. He says it's inappropriate to teach students about what he called the latest political fad.
Parent Sarah Rios-Lopez said she applauds teachers who give students information to form opinions.
The survey photo shows students were asked to assign numerical values to various statements based on how often it is true for them.
The first statement said that the student can be in the company of people of his or her own race most of the time.
Beaverton School District officials say the class is intended for students to have civil discussions on topics including race, sexuality and religion.
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Information from: KATU-TV, http://www.katu.com/
- By JONEL ALECCIA The Seattle Times
SEATTLE (AP) — More than 1,500 former patients of Seattle Pain Centers have sought help in Washington emergency rooms since the chain of clinics was closed abruptly in July — and hundreds more have swamped local hospital programs.
Some providers say they're struggling to meet the void left when the center's medical director, Dr. Frank Li, was stripped of his medical license for practices that state regulators said possibly contributed to the deaths of at least 18 patients since 2010.
And some patients say they've been abandoned with no care for legitimate and agonizing pain, reported The Seattle Times (http://bit.ly/2d6UJVI).
"I am at my breaking point," said Eric Currie, 33, of Ocean Shores, Grays Harbor County, who had been treated at the pain clinic for nerve pain and scarring after surgeries and chemotherapy for abdominal cancer diagnosed in 2009. "I was forced to go through withdrawal symptoms and cannot function at any kind of normal level."
Currie said he's on a waiting list for care at the Swedish Medical Center pain clinic. Officials there estimated they'll be able to take outside referrals within three to four months.
Flooded with people such as Currie seeking care, pain clinics across western Washington have stepped up to absorb patients: about 800 so far at the University of Washington Medical Center, 600 at Swedish, 500 more at the Washington Center for Pain Management, officials at those sites said. Virginia Mason Medical Center and Group Health Cooperative have accepted patients, too.
But that's still not enough to handle the estimated 8,000 patients receiving opiate painkiller prescriptions from Li's clinics this year — and up to 25,000 treated since 2008 at Seattle Pain Centers' eight sites across Washington.
"As this rolls out and we have more and more patients who can't get care, this will be a crisis," said Dr. Steven Stanos, medical director for Swedish Pain Services.
Even before Seattle Pain Centers closed, there weren't enough resources to manage chronic pain, he added.
Officials said the real peak of patients may not be seen until prescriptions issued in mid-July begin to run out.
"A patient might not know until September or October that their medicine is out," Stanos said. "There might be a second and third wave."
There have been no reports of deaths or other serious consequences from abrupt opiate withdrawal, officials with the state Department of Health said. But neither the department nor the Washington Health Care Authority, which oversees Medicaid, is notified when such deaths occur, agency officials said.
Officials do know that more than 1,500 former Seattle Pain Centers patients have sought care in emergency departments across the state between Aug. 17, when tracking began, and Sept. 18. That's about 47 visits to ERs every day, a state report showed.
The visits have been clustered in many of the communities the centers served.
At least 143 former patients sought care during that period at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, with 88 showing up at Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia and 78 at St. Clare Hospital in Lakewood.
The tracking doesn't include information about diagnoses, so they could have come to the ERs for services unrelated to pain care, said Dr. Nathan Schlicher, president of the Washington chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians.
So far, the numbers appear stable, with no spike to prompt serious concerns, Schlicher said in an email.
"In the end, the rate is probably about the same as the overall Medicaid rate," he added.
'I am sitting here in excruciating pain'
In Everett, former Seattle Pain Centers patients who came to the Providence ER were told to go back to their primary-care providers, or PCPs, said Dr. Kevin Clay, ambulatory-division chief.
"If somebody didn't have a PCP, they were distributed equally around the community," he said.
Some have been on very high doses of opiates, well over the 90 milligrams of morphine-equivalent drugs per day suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the threshold of 120 milligrams morphine equivalent included in Washington state rules.
Those patients are being referred to private pain specialists, while others are sent to general practitioners, Clay said.
"This could have been a huge crisis here, but everybody's stepped up," he said.
Elsewhere in Washington, some patients said they remain very alarmed. Toni Beerbower, 42, of Hoquiam, said she went to the ER at Grays Harbor Community Hospital in August after Seattle Pain Centers closed.
"I am sitting here in excruciating pain," she said. "I have degenerative bone disease, osteoarthritis, fibromyalgia and severe migraines."
Doctors at Grays Harbor turned her away, she said. Hospital officials refused to comment on her claims, even with authorization to discuss her medical care.
"We never turn away a patient from the ER for any reason and would have given a patient who needed pain management a referral to a physician who would find them the most appropriate pain-management clinic in the area," hospital spokeswoman Nancee Long said in an email.
Beerbower said she has since found a primary-care provider who won't prescribe opiates.
"She absolutely refuses to do it, period," she said. The doctor did not return calls seeking comment on Beerbower's case.
Beerbower, who has an 11-year-old son, said she has trouble with daily tasks and can't sleep because of the pain. For the first time in her life, she said, she tried marijuana.
"I was totally relaxed and slept in until 6 a.m. without waking up and having massive anxiety," she said.
Seeking help from primary care
Despite pleas from state health officials to help treat the former Seattle Pain Centers patients, many in primary care have refused.
That concerns Dr. David Tauben, chief of pain medicine at UW Medicine.
"What's happened is opioid challenges frighten so many primary-care people into not providing care at all," he said.
Tauben, Stanos and others are working with the Washington State Medical Association to reach out to primary-care providers and specialists to urge them to follow state recommendations to help.
They're also working on other solutions, such as telemedicine sessions to walk providers through the toughest cases.
Helping the pain patients is the only compassionate stance, Tauben said.
"If the doors are slammed, if we say, 'We don't like you, we don't care about you,' it's going to be a real problem," Tauben said. "We don't turn diabetics out on the street. Why should we turn people with chronic pain on the street?"
It could take months to settle all of the patients into new medical homes, the experts said.
Meanwhile, Li, 48, has not yet responded to the statement of charges levied by the state Medical Commission. The agency alleged that Li failed to properly monitor prescription use of powerful opiates, possibly contributing to patient deaths.
His medical license remains suspended in Washington and in California, where he also practiced. Nor has he responded to Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officials seeking to formally revoke his ability to prescribe powerful narcotics. A hearing on his DEA registration is set for Nov. 8, an agency spokeswoman said.
A lawyer representing Li did not respond to a request for comment.
The Seattle Pain Centers closure sparked a "health-community emergency," said Dr. Patricia Read-Williams, chief of the UW Medicine Neighborhood Issaquah Clinic, which has seen several former clinic patients.
There have been exceptions, but most providers are doing their fair share, she said.
"No one had any warning or any time to actually plan for these patients," Read-Williams said. "For as short of a time period as it's been, most of the health community can be applauded for stepping up to the plate."
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Information from: The Seattle Times, http://www.seattletimes.com
- By JENNIFER SASSEEN The Herald
EVERETT, Wash. (AP) — One week before Thanksgiving last year, Micha Ide lay awake in the pre-dawn hours mourning the loss of around 50 heritage turkeys.
"I didn't sleep," she said. "I pretty much cried the whole night."
Floodwaters inundated the small farm that Micha and her husband, Andrew Ide, run in Snohomish, reported The Herald (http://bit.ly/2d18ynv). The couple moved their 100 turkeys to high ground and kept the birds in a mobile hoop-house. They hoped roosting bars would keep the turkeys safe.
It didn't. The turkeys escaped their pen and flew straight into the floodwaters, Micha Ide said.
"This was at night," she said, "so we had to go out in the canoe and we were rescuing turkeys and we're like, hypothermic, you know?"
After a time, they couldn't see any more turkeys and they were too cold anyway. After they crawled into bed, Micha pondered the "huge devastation" of losing half the flock they'd been raising just before Thanksgiving. And she cried.
"But then, the next morning, I heard really hoarse-sounding turkeys, their voices were like gggghhhh," she gurgled. "And I looked out the window and the floodwaters had receded and I saw them all walking up to the house from different parts of the farm. We only lost one turkey."
Such is life at Bright Ide Acres, a 10-acre parcel on the 132-acre Chinook Farms in the Snohomish River Valley.
Had those turkeys been the broad-breasted bronze variety they'd grown their first two years on the farm, they would have all died, Micha said. "For sure. They would have just sunk to the bottom."
Broad-breasted bronze turkeys — and broad-breasted whites generally sold in grocery stores — grow exceptionally fast with very big breasts, to supply more of the white meat customers demand.
But a downside to all that fast growth is that sometimes the turkeys' legs give out and they need to be euthanized halfway through the season. And they can't forage because they're too heavy and tired so they end up sitting around a lot, Micha said.
Neither can they reproduce without artificial insemination, which got the Ides thinking.
"Do we really have business as a community, or as humanity," Andrew said, "to propagate something that really can't survive by itself, or naturally?"
Researching the topic, they realized they wanted to raise a heritage breed. They chose a breed called standard bronze — as opposed to broad-breasted bronze — that was popular in the U.S. up until the 1960s.
The standard bronze grow more slowly — the Ides raise them for seven months rather than the four to five months allotted the broad-breasted birds — and a lot more trouble. They can fly, for one thing.
"They also learned that if they mob the fence they can just kind of walk over it, it'll flatten down," Micha said.
"Like a zombie horde," Andrew said.
The Ides are college-educated urban professionals who are part of the "greenhorn" movement back to the land, a group of people who share a growing concern about knowing where the food we consume comes from.
Turkeys are a supplemental "crop" for the Ides, their main focus being chicken and pork, but a measure of their success is that by early August this year, their turkeys were sold out. Their customers love the more complex flavor that accompanies slow growth and a diet rich in grass, bugs and fresh-milled non-GMO grains.
The Ides might seem, at first, an unlikely choice for farming, but in some ways they're uniquely suited. Growing up in the Bay Area north of San Francisco, Micha, 32, always had a passion for animals, volunteering at animal sanctuaries and working at a private zoo. Her college degree was in anthropology with an emphasis in archaeology, but she went to work for a biotech company in San Diego.
"They taught me, really, everything I know about sales and marketing, which is very helpful," she said, "because you can farm all you want, but if can't sell your product, you might as well not farm."
Andrew, 30, graduated from a private college in Southern California with a degree in philosophy and theology, because "that's what spoke to me."
He and Micha met in 2010, on a fundraising trip for a San Diego nonprofit called Outdoor Outreach, which takes troubled inner-city kids rock climbing and backpacking.
Two years later, he and Micha were married where they met, in Joshua Tree National Park. That same weekend, Micha got the layoff notice she'd been expecting since the biotech company she worked at was sold to a bigger firm.
Soon the adventurous couple was on the road.
"We sold everything that we owned, pretty much," Micha said, "and bought a little teardrop trailer and traveled the U.S. and parts of Canada and Mexico for three months and we just spent most of our time outside, staying in campsites, national parks and whatever."
"Our road trip kind of had an extended-honeymoon feel to it," Andrew said. "It was kind of a good foot to start our marriage out on because we kind of confined ourselves; I mean, two people in a truck for three months . "
"It was good prep for living in a tiny house," said Micha, finishing his sentence.
They talked about wanting to work outside, perhaps as park rangers or farmers, though the only experience they had with farming was a backyard garden and a few chickens. Then a friend gave them a copy of the book, "You Can Farm" by Joel Salatin, a farmer featured in the New York Times best seller "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and the award-winning documentary "Food Inc."
They were hooked. (The road trip also inspired, indirectly, the name of their future farm. In a pun on their family name, Micha started a blog, Bright Ide and Bushy Tailed. It still exists. She still writes in it about life on Bright Ide Acres.)
It was in the fall of 2012 that the Ides started looking for a farming opportunity. In spring 2013, they arrived at Chinook Farms. That first year, they said, they had 300 meat chickens, 30 laying hens, five pigs, 25 turkeys and about 10 goats. They also managed a 30-member vegetable community-supported agriculture program, in which customers pay a set fee for a weekly box of farm wares.
Chinook Farms is owned by Eric Fritch, who lives less than 2 miles away and raises 80 grass-fed beef cattle. Fritch, 55, has an engineering degree and once worked at Boeing, but now owns Chinook Lumber stores and bought the Chinook Farms acreage in 2008, when it grew nothing but old poplar trees.
Fritch cleared most of the poplar trees from his 132 acres and set up Chinook Farms as an organic farm. He feels very strongly about keeping production agriculture thriving in Snohomish County, Fritch said, because he remembers when the Kent Valley was developed in the 1970s and '80s.
"That used to be the produce department for Seattle, was the Kent Valley," he said.
The Ides dropped raising vegetables two years ago to concentrate on ethically raised meat, which they feel is more difficult to come by than good organic vegetables. This year they're raising 1,400 meat chickens, 100 laying hens, 40 pigs and 100 turkeys. Andrew said he'll probably breed 20 ewes this year, so they'll have 40 sheep, which they started raising two years ago, and around 40 goats.
It's not an easy lifestyle. Besides hawking their wares at farmers markets in Edmonds, Carnation and Snohomish throughout the summer, and trading their meat at the markets for foods like fresh berries and halibut, Micha works on a friend's food truck and Andrew pours concrete to supplement their income. While they're not losing money on the farm, they're still not making much.
"Last year our net for the entire farm, for us, our whole net was 20 grand," Micha said. "So that means we each took in 10 grand income, which is really not much of a living wage."
Still, they have no plans to quit. Their dream is to find land above the floodplain that could act as their home base, with a store and freezer space for customers, and a barn to keep their animals out of the weather.
But even if their farming business doesn't work out, even if their dream doesn't come true, they will always raise their own food. "Always," Micha said. "Because gosh, I don't know, once you go down that rabbit hole, you can't go back. . We eat like kings. Poor as paupers, but we eat like kings."
"It's the truth," Andrew said.
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Information from: The Daily Herald, http://www.heraldnet.com
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The city of Portland has agreed to pay $89,000 to the 18-year-old son of a city police officer who was infected with Hepatitis C while working in the late 1990s.
The Oregonian/OregonLive reports (https://goo.gl/KVEVOp ) the teen is believed to have contracted Hepatitis C while his mother was pregnant with him.
City documents say the officer spent much of the 1990s working undercover posing as a prostitute and a drug buyer and that she was bitten, pricked by intravenous drug needles and exposed to the blood of suspects. Documents say at least three suspects said they had Hepatitis C.
A medical expert hired by the city "determined to a reasonable degree of medical certainty" that the officer was infected with Hepatitis C one of those times.
The payment is to cover related medical expenses.
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Information from: The Oregonian/OregonLive, http://www.oregonlive.com
BOZEMAN, Mont. (AP) — A bugle used by the American Legion's honor guard that was stolen during a break-in has been returned.
Bozeman American Legion post commander Jim Howe says an unidentified man went to the American Legion bar and gave the bugle to a bartender.
The bugle was stolen during a burglary at the Bozeman American Legion post over the past weekend. Post officials said they wanted it back, no questions asked.
According to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle (http://tinyurl.com/zr3rpbc ), the bugle has been used to play Taps at about 80 military burials a year since 2009.
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Information from: Bozeman Daily Chronicle, http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com
DENVER (AP) — Gov. John Hickenlooper says an independent monitor is being appointed after a federal report uncovered several abuses at a Pueblo center for people with severe intellectual disabilities.
Hickenlooper says federal officials requested the monitor in an August report, but he says the state already had plans to hire one.
According to the Denver Post (http://tinyurl.com/hx9l9jg ), federal investigators found one resident performed a sexual act in exchange for a soda and another was burned with a blow dryer to raise her body temperature. Several other residents had words scratched into their skin.
As recently as April, federal investigators found safety protocols lacking and serious incidents still occurring.
Federal investigators have asked the state to repay millions of dollars in Medicaid funding that supported the center.
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Information from: The Denver Post, http://www.denverpost.com
TWIN FALLS, Idaho (AP) — Public health officials say a man in south-central Idaho is receiving treatment after being bitten by a bat that has tested positive for rabies.
Tanis Maxwell, an epidemiologist with South Central Public Health District, tells the Times-News (http://bit.ly/2cH3B56 ) that the man was bit in Twin Falls County on Monday. The man, whose name has not been released, is being treated at a local hospital.
Maxwell says that the bat was captured and sent to the Idaho Bureau of Laboratories for testing. Rabies can only be confirmed in a laboratory.
Nineteen animals have tested positive for rabies across the state since June.
Rabies can be fatal if left untreated. The disease is transmitted through an infected animal's saliva, often through a bite or scratch.
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Information from: The Times-News, http://www.magicvalley.com
- By EMILY HOARD The News-Review
ROSEBURG, Ore. (AP) — Ten years ago, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife officials purposely poisoned Diamond Lake. They weren't acting out of pure evil, however, but as a way to eradicate the invasive species that had been destroying the lake's ecosystem, the tui chub fish.
The tui chub had been illegally introduced to the lake several years before and the population soon swelled to millions of fish, taking over the lake and causing toxic algae problems and poor water quality. Fishing was also very poor, as the chub had eaten most of the food that was usually eaten by the stocked rainbow trout, reported The News-Review (http://bit.ly/2dxhDUm).
"We went through a lot of different reviews and options of what was the best way to get Diamond Lake back to being a good fishery with a good water quality," said Dave Loomis, who had been the watershed district manager for the Umpqua at the time.
ODFW decided the best way was to pour rotenone, a naturally occurring compound from the pea family, into the lake to suffocate its gill-breathing inhabitants, ridding the lake of tui chub to give it a fresh start.
Almost 200 people were involved in the rotenone treatment, and in just a matter of days, the lake was fishless. After draining the lake to 8 feet deep, the crew let it refill and sit until the following spring, when all the rotenone had dissipated and it was safe to restock it with fish.
"So 2007 was very good fishing. People caught a lot of fish, anglers came back to the lake that hadn't been there in years, there were a lot of smiles on people's faces and the water quality had improved," Loomis said. "It was very enjoyable to see the lake rebound and come back to the way it had been before the chub were there."
Jerry Chartier, an avid fisherman at Diamond Lake, said the lake has been pivotal in his life. Since he was 12, he had wanted to be a game warden there, so at the age of 23 he accomplished his dream and became an Oregon state trooper for fish and game.
"Diamond Lake was always a great lake and a great fishery, then along came the tui chub which pretty much ruined the lake as far as fishing," Chartier said.
He said the lake came back very strongly until Loomis retired and another program was used to manage the lake. Chartier, who disagreed with this different method, said ODFW implemented a new stocking program with a catch limit of five fish.
"Most of the time you can catch your limit and have a wonderful day at a beautiful lake that is nothing but spectacular with the surrounding scenery," Chartier said, adding that the drive between Roseburg and the lake is one of the most beautiful drives in the country.
He recently fished there with his 89-year-old uncle, who caught his limit of rainbow trout.
"At that moment, when that day at Diamond Lake ended and he had his five fish, there was only one word to describe it and that's priceless," Chartier said. "That's what it's all about. It's all about family and having a great time."
Chartier said the people at the lodge are wonderful, stellar people who lend their good advice for catching fish.
"We were very excited to have it restored and the fishing came back very well and the water quality came back very well," said Stephen Koch, president and general manager at Diamond Lake Resort.
This wasn't the first time the lake had been treated with rotenone. It had experienced the same problems and had undergone the poisoning in 1954. Two years later, Koch's father bought and reopened the newly restored lake resort.
"We really appreciate the effort from everybody when they stepped up to prepare the lake. It was a disaster to the water quality and to the economy in southern Oregon, so we were really happy to have it back," Koch said.
If it gets cold enough this winter, the lake might also be open for ice fishing, Koch said.
Though there have been some ups and downs over the years and some tui chub have been put back in the lake illegally as bait, Loomis said the fishing has been good at Diamond Lake.
"It was actually very good fishing this year and it's the best fishing I've seen in Diamond Lake in probably 20 years," Loomis said. He called the lake a great fishery where families can rent boats and catch some fish.
"I just thank everybody after 10 years for helping Diamond Lake get back to being the gem of Cascades and I hope everybody enjoys it into the future," Loomis said.
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Information from: The News-Review, http://www.nrtoday.com
OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — State wildlife managers say they shot and killed another gray wolf in northeastern Washington because wolves continue to attack livestock in the area.
The Department of Fish and Wildlife said Friday evening that the adult wolf was shot from a helicopter on Thursday. That brings to seven the number of wolves the agency has killed since the pack was targeted for removal in August.
Wolves are endangered species under state law, but a state plan allows them to be killed under certain conditions. Some groups have criticized the killings.
The wolves killed were part of the Profanity Peak pack that roams Ferry County.
WDFW wolf policy lead Donny Martorello said the pack continues to attack livestock with the most recent attack earlier in the week.
Martorello says the pack likely still has one adult female and three juveniles. He said removal efforts will continue but noted the challenges of eliminating the entire pack.
ALPINE, Utah (AP) — Authorities in northern Utah say a hiker with autism has been found safe a day after his father's body was discovered on a trail.
Utah County Sheriff's Sgt. Spencer Cannon said in a tweet that 21-year-old Michael Laughlin appeared uninjured Saturday morning and would be reunited with his mother.
A search and rescue team had been looking for Laughlin since Friday evening.
Another hiker spotted 57-year-old Charles Laughlin's body earlier in the day a hiking area known as Jacob's Ladder near Alpine.
Cannon says it appears the elder Laughlin had suffered a medical episode before his death. Foul play is not suspected.
Authorities notified the man's family and were told that his son had been with him.
REDMOND, Ore. (AP) — A Redmond 17-year-old and his girlfriend accused of conspiring to assault his mother have pleaded guilty.
The Bend Bulletin says (https://goo.gl/A7GF64 ) Dakota Ortwein pleaded guilty to assault in Deschutes County District Court Thursday in a deal that dropped more serious charges. He was sentenced to 70 months.
Reyanne West pleaded guilty to attempted assault in a separate hearing. She was sentenced to 20 months.
Prosecutors allege that the couple planned the attack on Dakota's mother, Shasta Ortwein, who reportedly had reservations about the teens' relationship.
Authorities say Dakota Ortwein attacked his mother at home May 19 and hit her with a baseball bat. Investigators contend he intended to beat his mother to death and burn down the house with her inside.
Judge Alta Brady said she will recommend the teens serve their time at an Oregon Youth Authority facility rather than an adult prison.
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Information from: The Bulletin, http://www.bendbulletin.com
LAS VEGAS (AP) — Students at several Las Vegas area schools have been staying home or leaving early in the wake of social media threats involving clowns.
KSNV-TV reports (http://bit.ly/2dF7gBD) Clark County School District officials say rumors about creepy clowns terrorizing campuses, possibly with a firearm, are a hoax.
Despite the reassurances, some students skipped school Friday.
Clown threats have popped up in schools in other states.
Three Cincinnati, Ohio school districts canceled classes on the same day and two people were arrested amid a rash of similar threats.
In Reading, Ohio, police say a woman reported someone in a clown costume grabbed her by the throat and made threats toward the local schools.
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Information from: KSNV-TV, http://www.mynews3.com/index.php
CASPER, Wyo. (AP) — Officials in Casper are raising the price of season passes at the Hogadon Ski Area for first-time buyers because of fraud.
Leisure Services Director Doug Follick said the ski area on Casper Mountain has no way to verify whether a customer is truly a first-time buyer and he said some people are abusing the system.
Follick said the original goal of the first-time discount was to entice young Casper residents to start skiing, but the ski area determined that almost 200 of the 300 reduced-cost passes sold annually were going to adults.
"Someone walks up to the counter at the rec center and says this year, 'My name's Mike,' the next year, 'My name is Michael' and the year after it could be Dave," Follick said.
People who bought the introductory passes paid $185, compared with $265 for a standard pre-season pass.
"What you're trying to do is lure kids, the younger generation," Follick said.
The current prices are $250 for children, $365 for youths ages 13 to 18 and $900 for two adult and two child passes, the Casper Star-Tribune reported (http://tinyurl.com/zrgqexm ).
Follick said rates will increase next season because the ski area is opening a new ski lodge. He said those rates won't be available until next spring.
"We're a hometown ski area and we try to keep skiing as economical as possible," Follick said.
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Information from: Casper (Wyo.) Star-Tribune, http://www.trib.com
MARYSVILLE, Wash. (AP) — A city councilman has served a day in jail after pleading guilty to a DUI.
The Daily Herald reports (http://bit.ly/2dwZOU6) 35-year-old Marysville Councilman Rob Toyer was set to go to trial about a week before he entered his guilty plea.
Court records say another 363 days in jail are suspended on the condition that Toyer does not get into further trouble with the law.
Washington State Patrol says Toyer swerved on a highway and crossed a median before he was stopped in December.
A breath test put Toyer's blood alcohol content at .178.
The legal limit is .08 for drivers.
Toyer said in a statement that he's looking forward to moving on and continuing to serve his community.
He was elected to his council seat in 2011.
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Information from: The Daily Herald, http://www.heraldnet.com
SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) — Southern California residents should remain on heightened alert until Tuesday for the increased possibility of a major earthquake, officials said.
The warning by the Governor's Office of Emergency Services follows a series of small temblors deep under the Salton Sea, which is located on the 800-mile-long San Andreas fault, the Orange County Register reported Saturday (http://bit.ly/2deTAxO).
Such warnings are typically issued once or twice a year, said Kelly Huston, the deputy director of crisis communications for the Governor's Office of Emergency Services.
The latest alert was issued after 142 temblors hit starting Monday near Bombay Beach at the southern end of the fault. Those quakes ranged from a magnitude of 1.4 to 4.3, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
Scientists estimate the probability of a quake with a magnitude of 7.0 or higher on the southern San Andreas fault being triggered is as high as 1 in 100 and as low as 1 in 3,000. The average chance for such an earthquake striking on any given week is 1 in 6,000. That heightened probability will last through Tuesday.
Earthquakes along the San Andreas typically occur every 300 years, said Morgan Page, a geophysicist with the USGS. Earthquake Science Center, but the southernmost end of the fault hasn't ruptured since 1690.
"There is significant stress stored on the southern end," Page said.
Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday signed legislation to develop a statewide warning system to inform Californians of impending earthquakes through their cellphones, radios and other devices.
"California is earthquake country," said Mark Ghilarducci, the director of the state's Office of Emergency Services. "We must always be prepared and not let our guard down."
ALOHA, Ore. (AP) — A white privilege survey was assigned as homework for a group of Oregon high school seniors.
Parent Jason Schmidt provided KATU-TV (http://bit.ly/2cGKZm8) a photo of the survey his son was given. He says it's inappropriate to teach students about what he called the latest political fad.
Parent Sarah Rios-Lopez said she applauds teachers who give students information to form opinions.
The survey photo shows students were asked to assign numerical values to various statements based on how often it is true for them.
The first statement said that the student can be in the company of people of his or her own race most of the time.
Beaverton School District officials say the class is intended for students to have civil discussions on topics including race, sexuality and religion.
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Information from: KATU-TV, http://www.katu.com/
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