Carp invasion; back hair art; murder-suicide at cemetery

ONTARIO, Calif. — Authorities say a shooting at a Southern California cemetery has left three people dead.

Ontario police Sgt. Jeff Higbee says detectives are investigating a possible murder-suicide after finding three people with gunshot wounds at Bellevue Memorial Park on Saturday.

He said the deceased knew each other.

A man who lives near the cemetery told the Ontario Daily Bulletin  he heard 20 shots before police arrived to the scene.

LOS ANGELES — Old-school cooling systems on the roofs of larger Los Angeles buildings may be wasting billions of gallons of water each year.

The Los Angeles Times reported Saturday that some of these "swamp coolers" are so inefficient they can use as much water as all the bathrooms, drinking fountains and kitchens in the buildings below.

As California's drought persists, officials are looking to supplement savings already won when property owners ripped out lawns or installed water-miserly appliances.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti last month encouraged building owners to upgrade cooling towers, with a hope of saving 100 million gallons annually.

That's still a drop in the bucket.

Across all Los Angeles County, an area much larger than the city, cooling towers waste more than 2.5 billion gallons each year, estimated David Hodgins of the Los Angeles Better Building Campaign, which promotes conservation. That would be enough to serve 15,000 households.

It's also a guess, because there is little data about the number of tower and their condition, Hodgins said.

Cooling towers as big as trucks dot many high-rise or other large commercial buildings because they're remove large amounts of heat better than compressors familiar in homes. Pipes carry in heated water, which trickles through a membrane and a giant fan pulls air through it. The process removes heat by evaporation. The cooled water then is recirculated to the building.

Systems that are old, as many are, are inefficient.

Evaporation raises the mineral content of the remaining water, which becomes corrosive enough that it has to be flushed.

Only about 10-20 percent of buildings have optimally efficient cooling systems, Hodgins said. And only about 300 are known to have been upgraded.

"There's a lot to do," he said.

BOISE, Idaho — A woman advocating for changing Idaho's marijuana laws at a rally in Boise is now facing misdemeanor charges.

The Idaho Statesman reports Serra Frank, who uses marijuana for medical reasons, had planned on smoking pot in public as a protest on Friday afternoon. But officers stopper her before she lit up.

Frank is director of the Mom Squad at Moms for Marijuana International.

Frank, who has interstitial cystitis, a painful bladder condition, says she wants Idaho to legalize medical marijuana. Frank chose to stay in Idaho and fight for legalization, while her stepdaughter and the girl's father moved to California, so the family could try cannabis-based treatments for an illness the girl has developed.

After the rally, Frank was cited with possession of marijuana and possession of paraphernalia, then released. She is scheduled to appear in court on Jan. 19.

GLENDALE, Ariz. — Glendale police say a man who drove from southern Arizona to see a woman he met online ended up getting robbed at gunpoint.

Sgt. David Vidaure says the man called police around 5:30 p.m. Friday and they located him at 59th Avenue and Missouri.

According to the victim, he met 23-year-old Maria Iraceli Ochoa-Garcia on Facebook earlier in the week.

He arrived Thursday and spent the night with her at an apartment.

He told police three armed men entered.

They allegedly took his wallet, phone and truck after tying him up.

The man says it took him several hours to get free.

Police say Ochoa-Garcia's whereabouts remain unknown and she is being considered as an endangered missing person.

The victim's car is described as a red 2013 Dodge Ram.

LAS VEGAS — Las Vegas police are searching for a suspect who fatally shot one man and wounded another after a fight turned physical.

Police say officers were called to a report about a shooting at a business on East Craig Road around 2:50 a.m. Saturday.

According to police, officers found two men with gunshot wounds.

They were transported to a hospital, where one succumbed to his injuries.

The other victim is in stable condition.

Investigators say the deceased victim had entered the business and initiated a confrontation with two men.

The fight escalated with the victim getting shot several times.

Police say possible suspects and a motive remain unclear.

The name of the victim has not been released.

This marks the first homicide of the year for police.

SALT LAKE CITY — The U.S. Forest Service is abandoning a plan to transfer certain water rights to the federal government and is instead requiring operators to demonstrate sufficient water access for skiing.

Operators need long-term water availability to obtain permits to operate on public land. This replaces a controversial proposal that opponents said would harm the value of ski areas, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

After the final directive was posted on the Federal Register Wednesday, National Ski Areas Association policy director Geraldine Link said that the new policy is an enlightened approach that is both practical and workable.

"That (water) sufficiency requirement protects their interest and our interest at the same time," she said.

Forest Service officials started working toward revised rules four years ago amid concerns that water rights supporting ski areas on public land would be bartered to downstream developers, harming recreation.

Link's group filed a successful lawsuit against the Forest Service over the water transfer rule in 2012, leading to a series of public sessions on the topic the following year.

The Forest Service acknowledged water rights should be left to states to administer and that ski area operators invest in the public land they use, unlike other permit holders for national forest land use.

Snowbasin Resort recently installed an 11.5 million-gallon pond that will support snowmaking.

"We want to be in business for the long haul," Link said. "When a permit is retired, the owner must offer (water rights) to a successor. The new clause says you offer them to a buyer of a ski area, and if they decline, the owner can pursue other options. They kept market flexibility. This brings more certainty. This encourages ski areas to invest in water rights and water infrastructure."

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Information from: The Salt Lake Tribune, http://www.sltrib.com

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — The Army Corps of Engineers is going ahead with plans to treat contaminated groundwater at a former nuclear missile site east of Cheyenne despite concerns from several residents and elected officials about safety.

Members of the Laramie County Commission and a former Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality regulator also are calling for the Corps of Engineers to form a citizen advisory panel to review the proposal.

The 1960s-era site is one of several local former F.E. Warren AFB launch sites where investigators have found trichloroethylene, a cancer-causing chemical, in the groundwater. The chemicals were used to clean missile launchers.

Officials say there is no immediate health threat, but there are concerns that the contamination could spread to residential and agricultural wells.

The Army Corps of Engineers wants to inject microorganisms into the water to break down the TCE over a 200-year period as part of a $26 million project to treat the contaminated groundwater, the Cheyenne Tribune Eagle reported (http://tinyurl.com/j3rq5d8).

Jane Francis, a recently retired Department of Environmental Quality supervisor who worked on the missile cleanup projects, sent Gov. Matt Mead and other elected officials a letter calling the "misguided."

"These technologies are the cheapest ones they could come up with," she said. "However, it should be noted that if they don't work, they are a waste of money."

Opponents want a citizen-led advisory panel. The Army Corps of Engineers responded in a Dec. 15 letter that only seven community members applied to be board members, which the agency said is not enough to form a committee.

Drew Reckmeyer, a section chief with the Corps' Environmental Remediation Branch, said the agency commissioned its own independent reviews for all of its formerly used defense sites.

He said the remediation plan relies on established scientific methods.

RENO, Nev. — Police are trying to identify a suspect who allegedly discharged pepper spray during a fight at a Reno casino on New Year's Day, causing several patrons to seek medical treatment.

Reno authorities say the incident happened around 1:35 a.m. Friday at the Peppermill Resort Spa/Casino.

According to police, a dispute erupted between a man and another person on the casino floor.

The man then emitted pepper spray.

No injuries were reported but people had symptoms such as a cough and runny nose, which are consistent with exposure to pepper spray.

Police say the suspect was las seen running north on Virginia Street from the resort property.

He is described as Hispanic and in his 20s.

Police recovered a canister of commercially-produced pepper spray meant to repel bears.

BURNS, Ore. — Biologists hope commercial fishing will end a carp invasion at Malheur Wildlife Refuge, years after the bottom-feeding fish completed a takeover of Malheur Lake.

The carp have created an ecosystem that no longer supports the plants and insect life that birds rely upon for food and habitat, The Oregonian reports.

Managers of the migratory bird sanctuary south of Burns have tried dynamite, poison, putting screens across the waterways and suffocating the fish by draining water from lakes and ponds.

"Every time, it would be two, three, maybe four years before they'd repopulate," refuge manager Chad Karges said. "They're the perfect invasive species. There's very little that will kill them."

Now they're going to try fishing the carp out of there, with help from the Oregon Wildlife Heritage Foundation and Tualatin-based Pacific Foods, best known for boxed soup and soymilk.

A five-year contract began this year, but drought kept lake waters too low to start fishing. But by spring 2016, the team hopes to begin removing thousands of fish from the water each day.

As many as 4 million pounds of carp could come out of the lake next year. The meat, which most Americans won't eat, will be used to fertilize Chuck Eggert's crops.

Eggert, who owns Pacific Foods, has formed a side company, Silver Sage Fisheries, to deal with the castaway carp. Once taken from the lake, the fish will be trucked to Burns for processing before being spread across alfalfa fields that feed Eggert's dairy cows.

"It's been enjoyable to get a broader partnership going to address what has become a longstanding issue, while putting the waste to use," said Tim Greseth, the executive director of Oregon Wildlife Heritage Foundation, who worked with Eggert to develop the fertilizer concept.

Unlike past carp control efforts, the goal this time isn't to eradicate the fish. Instead, workers hope to remove enough carp to trigger an "ecological tipping point," loosening their stranglehold so plants and insects can rebound and then provide enough food for the millions of birds that historically have rested here during their migrations.

Organizers hope a few years of intensive fishing will do the job. In subsequent years, lighter maintenance fishing should keep the fish at bay.

"We're trying for a more sustainable carp control, instead of the shotgun approach," said Linda Beck, the refuge's fish biologist.

LAS VEGAS — After years of delays, a former storefront church pastor and international fugitive is due for trial Monday in Las Vegas on allegations that he sexually assaulted girls in his congregation under the guise of counseling.

Otis Holland, 59, faces life in prison on charges he abused girls as young as 7. He has been in jail since his arrest in January 2012 in Tijuana, Mexico. Known to his United Faith Church congregation as "Reverend Otis," he was featured before his arrest on the television show "America's Most Wanted."

"He told my mother that he was going to take me for counseling," a 21-year-old woman testified during a preliminary hearing in February 2013. She said she was 14 when Holland first took her after Sunday church services to a limousine fitted with a back seat that reclined into a bed and used a sex toy on her.

The Associated Press typically does not identify people who say they have been hurt in sexual assault cases.

Holland's defense attorney, Carmine James Colucci, didn't respond to messages this week from AP.

The woman who testified in 2013 said that as Holland started to take off her pants in the limo, he told her he wanted to show her something that would relieve tension and frustration. Another time, she said, she saw a red flashing light and the lens of a video camera amid pillows on a futon in a bedroom at Holland's home.

Under questioning by Holland's defense attorney at the time, the girl conceded that she didn't tell anyone about the alleged sexual acts, including her mother who would drop her off every Sunday at Holland's house. The encounters stopped, and she finally told her biological father a year later, when he asked her why her school grades had fallen.

Holland also had sexual relationships with adult women in his congregation, according to police reports and pretrial testimony. Church members at first publicly supported him, but turned against him as other girls began making similar allegations.

Holland has pleaded not guilty to 17 felony charges, including child sexual assault, lewdness, and bribing a witness. Holland also faces two misdemeanor evidence tampering charges. He could face life in prison with or without the possibility of parole if he's convicted of the sex assault charges.

Jury selection could take days, due to the attention the case received.

Prosecutor Robert Langford said this week he expects that Holland will testify during trial, which is expected to take about a week in Clark County District Court in Las Vegas.

"The state is going to present overwhelming evidence," said Langford, a veteran Nevada attorney who is serving as special prosecutor because Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson was Holland's defense lawyer after Holland was first arrested by Henderson police. Wolfson became district attorney in February 2012.

Another woman, now 22, testified at an April 2013 preliminary hearing that she met Holland when she was younger than 8, and began having sex with him when she was 15. For more than a year while she was attending high school, Holland took her to a doctor in Las Vegas who gave her monthly birth control injections, she said.

Holland also shared a ship cabin with the teenage girl and her younger sister during a cruise vacation alone with them in August 2010, authorities said. She told police Holland bought diamond jewelry and clothes for her and told her that if she told others what was going on Holland would be sent to jail and the church would split up.

Holland also is accused of felony witness intimidation and misdemeanor evidence tampering. Authorities say he instructed a girl's mother and her ex-husband to destroy computer hard drives, sex toys and church counseling session paperwork.

SAN FRANCISCO — As the days get shorter, first grade teacher Esmeralda Jiménez watches the dimming afternoon sky outside her classroom window the way her pupils watch the clock at dismissal time.

The studio apartment Jiménez rents for $1,783 a month, or 43 percent of her salary, is located in one of San Francisco's sketchiest neighborhoods. Getting home involves running a gauntlet of feces-strewn sidewalks, popping crack pipes, discarded needles and menacing comments — daily irritants that become more daunting after dark.

"If I lived in a better area, I wouldn't feel so scared going home and I would be able to stay at school a little longer," Jiménez, 26, said. "You have so many things to do to prep for the next day, but it's gotten to the point where even if I leave at a decent time I will walk three blocks out of my way to avoid some streets."

It's a scenario that has Jiménez wondering if she should find a profession that pays more, and public officials here and in other cities looking at housing as a tool to prevent the exodus of young educators like her.

Inspired by the success in the heart of the Silicon Valley of a 70-unit teachers-only apartment complex, school districts in high cost-of-living areas and rural communities that have long struggled to staff classrooms are considering buying or building rent-subsidized apartments as a way to attract and retain teachers amid concerns of a looming shortage.

Housing costs especially have become a point of friction for teachers in expensive cities such as Seattle, where teachers who went on a one-week strike in September said they could not afford to live in the same city as they children they teach.

In San Francisco, where many of Jiménez's colleagues have roommates or long commutes, addressing the affordability crisis for teachers was one of the main selling points of a housing bond voters approved in November, the first to pass in a generation.

About $35 million of the $310 million to be raised has been earmarked for construction of up to 100 new apartments on surplus land owned by the San Francisco Unified School District. The units would be rented at below-market rates to the district's 3,500 teachers and 1,600 classroom aides, who also would be eligible for new rental housing allowances and home down payment loans aimed at reducing living costs for another 300 educators, Deputy Superintendent Nyong Leigh said.

"Each one of these ideas would reach some modest number, but in aggregate it would hopefully make a difference," Leigh said.

Officials in the Roaring Fork School District in western Colorado, which serves three mountain towns in the valley that houses Aspen's posh ski resorts, similarly leveraged a $122 million school construction bond on the November ballot to secure $15 million for subsidized teacher rentals.

The district hopes to acquire 15 to 20 apartments in each of the three towns, enough to house at least 10 percent of its 450 teachers, Assistant Superintendent Shannon Pelland said. In an area where the average home sells for $630,000 and the average teacher makes $47,000, housing costs are "without a doubt the number one reason we lose teachers and it's the number one reason people turn down jobs," Pelland said.

"Our typical pattern with teachers is they come to the valley, it's an absolutely beautiful place, it's a great lifestyle with wonderful recreational opportunities, and they are willing to live with roommates and do whatever they have to do to make it work for four or five years," she said. "And right at that 5-year mark we see a lot of them saying, 'This is great for a while, but I'll never be able to afford a home here or make it work here, I'm moving on.'"

School districts in Oakland, Milwaukee, Odessa, Texas, and Ashville, North Carolina, also have apartment projects for teachers in the works. The Los Angeles Unified School District this year opened its first apartment complex on school grounds for district employees and has two more under construction.

Stockton Williams, executive director of the Urban Land Institute's Terwilliger Center for Housing, said the concern over teachers being priced out of the communities they serve reflects an inadequate supply of new rental housing designed for middle-income workers instead of the high end of the market.

"It's not just a San Francisco-New York-Seattle story. It's in many cities, large and small, and in most parts of the country," Williams said.

Officials in Santa Clara, California, found a workable formula more than a decade ago that other school districts in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond still are trying to replicate. Working with a private developer under a tax-exempt financing scheme, the school district built 70 apartments between 2002 and 2009 that collectively are known as Casa del Maestros, Spanish for "house of the teachers."

When kindergarten teacher Katy Howser moved into a one-bedroom apartment there 6 ½ years ago, she was a 23-year-old living with her parents while she paid off her student college loans and credit card debt. The teachers-only complex was all she could afford, but having other educators as neighbors turned out to be more than a financial advantage.

"Everyone has the same common courtesy for each other," Howser said. "There are technically quiet hours, but it's not ever really loud. Everyone just wants to come home and be quiet because we have to be loud all day."

Now married and expecting her first child, Howser and her husband pay $1,700 a month for a two-bedroom apartment, at least $1,000 less than for a comparable place in the area. They will have to move out in June because tenants can only stay for seven years. Howser hopes they will have saved enough for a down payment on a house by then.

"The fact that our district sees enough value us in teachers to make a way for us to be here says a lot," Howser said. "It tends to be a relatively thankless job, and if you can't afford to live, you can't afford to stay."

PHOENIX — Donations to metropolitan Phoenix food banks will likely bear a lot less fruit this year because of a disease that has devastate citrus industries in other states.

The abundance of citrus trees in the Phoenix area typically leads to a surge in donations to food banks in the winter months as the fruit ripens and people donate boxes full of extra oranges, grapefruits and lemons that they can't use.

But St. Mary's Food Bank Alliance and Mesa-based United Food Bank — the main citrus donation charities in the Phoenix area — haven't been accepting drop-off donations of citrus because of a quarantine issued last month by the state Department of Agriculture. State officials are trying to stop the spread of the Asian citrus psyllid, a tiny bug that can transmit citrus greening disease, which can kill citrus trees. Also known as Huanglongbing, the bacterial disease does not hurt humans or animals.

Arizona agriculture officials have asked the public not to take or send citrus fruit, leaves or plants across county or state lines

St. Mary's Food Bank typically receives about 3 million pounds of citrus fruit each year. It's not unusual for people to show up with oranges or grapefruit by the truckload, according to St. Mary's spokesman Jerry Brown. But this current pest will likely cause a 30 to 35 percent drop, he said.

To be sure fruit doesn't come from a quarantined area, food banks have only one way to squeeze out more donated fruit — fetch it themselves.

At both St. Mary's and United Food Bank, interested donors can apply online to be added to a list of places where volunteer crews will come pick the citrus. It will cost the donor $10-$20 per tree for the service. Food banks, as a result, are in urgent need of more volunteers than usual.

"We have to establish a chain of custody," Brown said.

An army of volunteers will probably not be able to make up for all the missed drop-off opportunities. Between January and March, St. Mary's typically holds "Super Citrus Saturdays" where people drop off fruit at four different locations. One Saturday event can net up to 100,000 pounds.

"No matter how many volunteers we have, we're not going to be able to pick as much as fruit as the people who bring it to us," Brown said.

Sergio Paris, United Food Bank spokesman, said fruits are distributed to smaller food pantries or organizations such as the Boys & Girls Clubs. Some fruit is also squeezed for juice which is frozen and labeled for doling out later.

While following the quarantine is imperative, Paris said it isn't easy to think about all the fruit that will be left to rot on people's trees.

"The hard part is that in order to prevent this, we're essentially taking fruit away from people who need it," Paris said. "A 7-year-old boy won't be getting a piece of fruit and to supplement that, we will have to purchase fruit. But at the end of the day, if we don't stop this, it's something that could wipe out the entire citrus industry in the state."

Citrus greening disease makes fruit on an infected tree misshapen and bitter. The tree then dies within a few years. Arizona agriculture officials say the disease has already crippled the citrus industry in Florida and Texas, costing thousands of jobs and $1 billion.

The areas under quarantine include parts of Maricopa, Pima, Santa Cruz, Mohave, La Paz, Yavapai and Yuma counties. However, most food banks in the smaller counties are accepting citrus, according to April Bradham, of the Association of Arizona Food Banks. Unlike Maricopa, smaller counties do not distribute food to other parts of the state.

MOSCOW, Idaho — Around the turn of the 20th century, as early loggers put their sweat and blood into the harvest of timber and the Great Northern Railroad began winding its way west — supported by the timber industry — the Somers Sawmill was established along Flathead Lake in Montana.

The family-owned mill experienced a windfall from the burgeoning railway, which ordered railroad ties created from logs floated down the Flathead or Swan rivers to the lake that fed its saws.

Over the years, thousands of larch and pine logs sank, spending a century in the silt and mud on the lake bottom.

Until now.

After a battle between the family who owned Somers Sawmill and the State of Montana over which party the logs belonged to, Moscow's Northwest Management Inc. was hired by the victorious DeVoe family to find and recover the logs, which bear the Great Northern brand — a circle with an N in it.

"The DeVoe family hired us initially to do permitting to recover logs that had sunk in the lake after floating down the Flathead River around the turn of the century," project manager Mark Corrao said. "The family had kept the records so they knew how many logs they essentially paid for and never got."

While more than 100 years submerged would be detrimental to many things, not so for timber, which is essentially preserved by the cold lake-bottom water and lack of oxygen. They are also made, some say, more attractive by their stay beneath the waves, where they are slowly stained shades of black, green, violet, peach, charcoal and blue by the silt and minerals surrounding them.

If a rainbow of color isn't enough to make this lost-and-found timber distinctive, the sheer size and age of it must be — at least to those who dive for it.

"We have one that's 38 inches in diameter, 392 years old with a 1924 stamp on it," Corrao said. "Somewhere in the 1530s it started growing."

While the job began with permitting and water sampling, before long Northwest Management was tasked with raising the sunken treasures — and doing so in an environmentally friendly manner.

The beginning of the process found a great amount of resistance from environmental agencies that were concerned about how the disruption of sediment from the lake bottom would affect fish and other wildlife.

"We did all of these tests and found there was no harmful sediments, and the sediment settled quickly," Cancroft said.

Also, he said, the logs were not a natural part of Flathead Lake.

Log ponds in themselves are known not to be environmentally friendly, as the tannic acid leaching from the logs can raise the water's pH, so carefully extracting the sunken logs can be beneficial for bodies of water, if done correctly.

"We do it all by hand," Corrao said, using diving ropes and a pontoon boat. "We literally hand line them to the surface, tie them off on the boat and as you move the boat forward the log swings up under the boat, you put a chain under it to hold it there and float it over to a (submerged) flatbed trailer at the boat ramp."

After the logs sink onto the flatbed, they are tied down and transported to a storage facility to dry, a long process.

"It takes a good six months or so for them to dry," said Jim Cancroft, who works for Northwest Management on the Flathead River site.

And no one would want to be near them until they do.

"They have a pungent odor," Cancroft said.

Once dry, the logs are transported to a small sawmill as similar to the Somers Mill — which burned in 1957 — as possible.

"We take them to a third-generation owned sawmill that still uses the big 50-inch circular saw," Corrao said.

The results are formed into furniture, flooring, wall hangings and commemorative wooden boxes that are sold from Nantucket Island to Spokane - and beyond.