Good morning; on the Beacon today, the Whitefish 1979 team is the only state football champion in school history. A 42-year-old Kalispell woman who was hit by a truck as she walked across Montana 35 in Evergreen has died. Glacier High’s Stormy Day is recovering from a broken back to become one of the top kick returners in the state as a junior. And Mick Holien recognizes the underrated greatness of the Griz 1969 and 1970 teams.
Sen. Max Baucus is confident when it comes time to vote, every Democrat in the Senate — and perhaps more than one Republican — will support legislation overhauling the nation’s health care system. Officials in the rural town of Hardin say they’ve received new interest in their empty, 464-bed jail in the wake of collapsed deal with a California company run by a man with a history of fraud. A Missoula accountant is suing Gov. Brian Schweitzer and state Revenue Director Dan Bucks in federal court in an attempt to stop the state from issuing property tax notices based on the latest reappraisal. Chuck Johnson reports that three times as many owners of Montana property have asked the Revenue Department to informally review their new values than did after the last reappraisal in 2003. The family of a woman who was killed in a natural-gas explosion in downtown Bozeman filed a wrongful death lawsuit against NorthWestern Energy on Thursday. A federal judge ruled that officers used unreasonable force when they arrested a retired physician on obstruction charges last year. Two more lawyers, Carlo Canty of Helena and Mike Wheat of Bozeman, have applied for a soon-to-be-vacant justice’s seat on the Montana Supreme Court. And Kahrin Deines of the Billings Gazette reports on the heart-breaking death of Adam Davis, the young man from Maine who was found dead in a Billings garbage truck last weekend, described as a talented poet with wanderlust.