Good morning; on the Beacon today, legendary hunter instructor and mountain man Pat McVay, at 90, looks back on a life fully lived. After weathering the music industry’s battles for a decade, Kalispell-born musician Mike Ulvila and his band, Savannah Jack, signed on a with a record label last September and are set to release their first single in May. Glacier National Park has lost two more of its namesake moving icefields to climate change, which is shrinking the rivers of ice until they grind to a halt, a government researcher said Wednesday. Wild Bill Schneider stands up for the Northern Pike.
About 47 percent of U.S. households will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That’s according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization. An original member of the Montana Freemen — an anti-government group that conspired against the banking system in the 1990s and held an 81-day standoff with FBI agents — has been sentenced to 7½ years in prison for retaliating against three federal judges. The attorneys general for Utah and Wyoming said Wednesday that their states and South Dakota will join a federal lawsuit pending in Montana in which pro-gun groups are seeking to protect that state’s sovereign right to regulate guns. Gov. Brian Schweitzer said Wednesday that he has a new idea to get cheaper medicine for Montana — but it would require the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to directly undercut the pharmaceutical industry. Decades of litigation and disagreements were officially put aside Wednesday when a first-of-its-kind agreement regarding the future management and operation of the Flathead Indian Irrigation Project was signed in Washington, D.C. Michael Jamison reports on how the vanishing of glaciers in Glacier Park could adversely affect the Flathead’s tourism industry. Two climbers just completed the first winter ascent of the Bears Tooth. Tea Party and Republican activists rallied in Helena Wednesday against the new federal health reform law, demanding that Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock join a lawsuit to overturn it.