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Weekend: Animal Control Officers, BP Cap Working, $1 Million Embezzled

By Beacon Staff

Good morning; on the Beacon today, we spend a day with a Flathead County Animal Control officer as he travels from one corner of the valley to another. Mikie DiMuro is baking some of the best wedding cakes in the Flathead – an increasingly competitive business during nuptial season. Flathead High coach Paul Jorgensen has been named the national girls’ cross country coach of the year by the National High School Athletic Coaches Association. A Polson man is providing hyperbaric oxygen treatments. And Warren Miller recounts more insane experiences from his long life.

BP was encouraged early Friday by results from an experimental cap shutting in oil from its busted Gulf of Mexico well, saying everything was holding steady 17 hours into the effort. Congress on Thursday passed the stiffest restrictions on banks and Wall Street since the Great Depression, clamping down on lending practices and expanding consumer protections to prevent a repeat of the 2008 meltdown that knocked the economy to its knees. A plan to move more than 200 huge loads of oilfield equipment from the Port of Lewiston in Idaho and through northwestern Montana is being challenged in both states. Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., has eclipsed the $1 million mark in campaign contributions this cycle, and he has $600,000 more left in the bank than does his Democratic challenger Dennis McDonald, reports filed Thursday show. Two former Bureau of Indian Affairs employees admitted Thursday that they stole thousands of dollars from a Fort Peck tribal credit program they were supposed to help administer and then tried to cover up the thefts. Deputy Labor Commissioner Dore Schwinden is the new director of the state Commerce Department, Gov. Brian Schweitzer said Thursday. Come this fall, several of Montana’s hospitals will start benefitting financially from an obscure provision in the federal health reform bill that ups Medicare payments in “frontier states.”