Good morning. Happy birthday to the ice-cream cone! On this day in 1904, Charles E. Menches conceived the idea of filling a pastry cone with two scoops of ice-cream, inventing the ice-cream cone. I love this guy.
It’s Wednesday folks, and the new Beacon is out on the stands. After three years of legal wrangling, the lawsuit over the Kootenai Lodge Estates, a development at the northern tip of Swan Lake, appears to have been settled. The Westslope Cutthroat Trout Conservation Program – a plan to wipe out hybridized fish by treating 21 mountain lakes in Flathead’s South Fork watershed over the next 10 years with a toxin called Rotenone – will continue, despite criticism at last week’s FWP Commission meeting. And check out Myers Reece’s front page story on the history of wolf reintroduction online later this afternoon.
After a night of heavy rains, the Lindbergh Lake fire is 20 percent contained. The state of Wyoming will continue to compensate ranchers for livestock losses to wolves even though a federal judge has stripped the state of control over the predators. And here’s a link to one of several stories the Missoulian is running on rising use and abuse of opiate painkillers in Montana and the skyrocketing number of people dying from prescription drug overdoses.
And finally, Estelle Getty, who starred as the sarcastic octogenarian Sophia in The Golden Girls, died yesterday at the age of 84. Here, Sophia tells her story of her romance with Pablo Picasso.