Good morning; on the Beacon today, a Glacier High School student has been suspended for allegedly bringing a knife to school and threatening another student. The Beacon Staff went shopping all over the valley to bring you our third annual Holiday Gift Guide. A mostly civil meeting on proposed improvements at the Kalispell City Airport drew more than 100 residents. Yahoo! Whitefish Mountain Resort opens this weekend. The man responsible for a 1979 murder in Polebridge, J.R. Fletcher, has been denied parole.
President Barack Obama is sending 30,000 extra U.S. troops to Afghanistan on an accelerated timetable that will have the first Marines there as early as Christmas and all forces in place by summer. Oversight of the nuclear missile operators, maintainers and other personnel at Malmstrom Air Force Base has been transferred to the new Global Strike Command. Millworkers at Smurfit-Stone Container Corp.’s Frenchtown plant say they are relieved after the paper products company announced their pensions will remain intact during bankruptcy proceedings. Ranchers in Montana on Tuesday asked a state agency to stop giving away water use rights for tens of thousands of new homes being built in areas once dominated by agriculture. Snowpack in Western Montana is below average so far, with dry forecasts ahead. A new UM journalism school project is attempting to gauge student apathy following the 2008 elections. State land officials on Tuesday approved siting for part of a proposed 79-megawatt wind farm west of Big Timber, essentially giving developers the go-ahead to place eight of the project’s 44 turbines on state land. Sen. Christine Kaufmann, D-Helena, began work this week as a policy adviser to state Auditor Monica Lindeen and will help the office implement the anticipated passage of federal health care reform over the next 13 months. A Bozeman anti-war group that stopped its weekly protests on Main Street last January in hopes that the new administration marked a in shift foreign policy plans to take the streets again following the news that more troops will be sent to Afghanistan.