Good morning; on the Beacon today, Nate Thompson, a senior running back at Columbia Falls, has rushed for 1,357 yards on 163 carries through six games, an average of more than 226 yards per game on 8.3 yards each carry. Ladies, get out your checkbooks – the first Save a Sister bachelor auction is headed to the Flathead Valley and these guys are prepared to put it on the line to help bring awareness to women in the valley. An early morning fire gutted Glacier Bank in Eureka Thursday in what John Livingston, president of the Eureka Rural Volunteer Fire Department, characterized as a “total loss.” And Mick Holien assesses the prospect of UM adding sports to its athletic program.
An attorney for Smurfit-Stone Container says the company has a prospective buyer for its Frenchtown paper mill site. Montana lawmakers and others said Thursday they are skeptical about Gov. Brian Schweitzer’s plan to privatize Medicaid services, especially those who remember a disaster in the mid-1990s to contract out some of those services. Public Service Commissioner Brad Molnar has appealed an ethics ruling against him in which he was ordered to pay nearly $21,000 in fines and investigation costs. An oil company is denying an environmental group’s report that says huge loads of refinery equipment will be shipped over scenic U.S. 12 in the Rocky Mountains for the next decade. On Thursday, Mick Mee and his wife, along with two friends, sat in a courtroom here to watch a Missoula man plead guilty to taking the leash off his pit bull, which then charged into a campground and attacked a dog before clamping down on Mee’s face. In an unprecedented collaboration, state legislators from Wyoming, Montana and Idaho have formed a commission to find how the three states can get wolves removed from the federal endangered species list and put under state control. A speech by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin helped raise $130,000 for a Missoula shelter for young mothers with addictions to alcohol or drugs. After a two-and-a-half day trial, a Gallatin County jury Thursday found a 67-year-old man, John Brandon Lacey, guilty of raping a teenage boy twice in the mid-1990s.