Curses, Foiled Again
Authorities charged Carolyn James, 55, with assaulting her 96-year-old mother in Dickson City, Pa., after a neighbor recorded James slapping the invalid woman on the back and neck, screaming obscenities and threatening to break her arm. Mark Gruss told investigators he was testing webcams when he picked up a live feed from a webcam in James’s living room. James had installed the webcam herself so she could keep an eye on her mother. (Scranton’s The Times-Tribune)

New Orleans police said surveillance video recorded an armed robbery that began when a man pointed a shotgun in the victim’s face and demanded money. The victim grabbed the shotgun from the robber and chased him off. Moments later, two men drove up, and the driver said, “Give me my gun back, and I’ll give you your phone that you dropped.” The victim declined and used the shotgun to knock out the rear windshield, sending the two suspects fleeing. (New Orleans’ WWL-Radio)

The Rockies Today, a project of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at The University of Montana that provides daily links to top news stories, will be on hiatus until Monday, June 3.

Top news links, courtesy of Mountain West News.

Wyoming gets a head's up on federal fracking rules
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell called Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead to give him a brief description of federal rules on hydraulic fracturing, rules Mead said are not needed given the state's regulations on the drilling process.
Casper Star-Tribune; May 17

Annual survey in Montana's Bitterroot Valley finds more elk
The annual spring aerial survey of Montana's Bitterroot Valley found 7,373 elk, up from the 6,238 elk counted last year, and the fourth highest number since the survey began 48 years ago.
Ravalli Republic; May 17

Top news links, courtesy of Mountain West News.

Montana county commission wants to talk water with USFS, DNRC
After learning that Ravalli County's objection to the U.S. Forest Service's attempt to gain in-stream water rights on two streams had been denied by the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, the county commission has invited Tom Tidwell, chief of the U.S. Forest Service, and the top officials of the DNRC to come and talk with them about the Forest Service's plan to pursue in-stream water rights on 11 streams in the Bitterroot National Forest.
Ravalli Republic; May 16

Top news links, courtesy of Mountain West News.

Find Rob Brezsny's "Free Will Astrology" online, every Wednesday, one day before it hits the Indy's printed pages.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): In the alternate universe created by Marvel comic books, there is a mutant superhero called Squirrel Girl. She has the magic power to summon hordes of cute, furry squirrels. Under her guidance, they swarm all over the bad guy she's battling and disable him with their thousands of tiny chomps and thrashing tails. She and her rodent allies have defeated such arch-villains as Dr. Doom, Deadpool, Baron Mordo, and Ego the Living Planet. Let's make her your role model for the coming weeks, Aries. The cumulative force of many small things will be the key to your victories. As in Squirrel Girl's case, your adversaries' overconfidence may also be a factor.

The Independent has been chronicling Beach’s legal struggles and a tenuous freedom that he’s enjoyed this past year and half. When we broke the news to him this afternoon, there was a long silence. “I don’t understand,” he said. “I have to make some phone calls.”

Peter Camiel, Beach’s Seattle-based attorney, said he wasn’t sure how quickly Beach will be returned to prison. “It could be right away,” he said.

Beach has maintained his innocence for decades. He said that police pressured him into providing a false confession in 1983. In Dec. 2011, a Montana district court judge freed Beach after finding that new evidence introduced by his legal team during an evidentiary hearing could alter the verdict if presented to a jury during a new trial.

The Supreme Court in its decision today found that the lower court erred when it ordered Beach free and granted him a new trial. The court opined that “Beach’s new evidence was not reliable.”

Camiel has said that if the Supreme Court reinstated Beach’s conviction, they’d appeal to the federal court system.

The Indy will have more on this story.

Since February, six Partnership Health Center staffers have filed lawsuits alleging a range of grievances against the Missoula clinic including harassment, wrongful discharge and that management required employees to perform tasks without pay.

“We consider this to be a serious and pervasive problem in this workplace and felt that we had a responsibility to file these lawsuits,” says Great Falls attorney Elizabeth Best, who represents the plaintiffs in six separate cases.

Partnership provides healthcare and dental services to roughly 10,000 repeat patients each year and more than half of those patients are uninsured. Missoula County helps facilitate Partnership services and is named as a codefendant in all six cases.

Among the most serious complaints against the clinic comes from Partnership dentist Adam Jensen, who alleges in his lawsuit that Executive Director Kim Mansch “has worked to establish and sanction a culture of fear and intimidation” by “screaming at employees, yelling obscenities, calling employees derogatory names.”

Mansch denies that she’s fostered a hostile workplace and declined to comment further about the lawsuits other than to say, “People at Partnership work really, really hard.”

Jensen also claims that the clinic is understaffed. That complaint is echoed by former Partnership receptionist Shawnel Trenary, who says she was required to carry a “crushing workload” and that management threatened her with discipline if she didn’t keep up. According to her lawsuit, “Almost 100 calls were being missed on a daily basis.”

One-time medical records coordinator Lisa Nelson and Partnership dental practice manager Patricia Morgan say in their respective lawsuits that the clinic forced them to work unpaid overtime. Both allege that they were subjected to a hostile work environment. Those complaints mirror ones brought by former Medical Director Alison Forney-Gorman and pharmacist Lorraine Rowe-Conlan, who also allege that they were unlawfully discharged from their positions.

• Chad Harder
• Former Partnership Health Center Medical Director Alison Forney-Gorman in 2009.

Missoula County Risk Manager Hal Luttschwager says the county hasn’t been served with the five most recent lawsuits, which were all filed May 3. (Rowe-Conlan filed suit February 27.) He adds that none of the claims have been substantiated. “It’s so easy to raise lots of allegations,” he says.

Top news links, courtesy of Mountain West News.

As Ag, Interior secretaries vow to find wildfire funds
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Interior Secretary Sally Jewell were the bearers of bad news in Boise on Monday, where they said Bureau of Land Management funds for fuels reduction may have to be diverted to fight wildfires.
Idaho Statesman; May 14

Late last week, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow took a deep look at a white supremacist think tank in the Flathead Valley and its ties to the nation's ongoing debate over immigration reform. Her May 9 segment called out a Whitefish-based nonprofit known as the National Policy Institute, a group that bills itself as "an independent research and educational foundation" working for "the people that bears the unique heritage of Europe, Christianity, cultural excellence, and the scientific awakening"—or, more concisely, "White Americans." Maddow tied the group not only to an online white supremacist forum that shares NPI's Whitefish post office box, but to the high-profile conservative Heritage Foundation and a controversial new report criticizing the U.S. Senate's immigration reform bill. The video, posted below, is worth a watch. The Montana portion starts around the two-minute mark.

NPI migrated to Whitefish from Washington, D.C., several years ago, shortly after Richard B. Spencer took over as executive director. But Spencer didn't react to Maddow's scathing expose in the way one might imagine. On the NPI blog, Spencer brushed off the Maddow segment as "'point and sputter' journalism," concluding that "no doubt...many found our message attractive and inspiring."

"NPI has a real chance to become the organization we want and deserve," Spencer wrote. "No more proxies, no more compromises, no more piggy-backing on the so-called 'conservative' movement, which has proven itself, once again, to be a gaggle of weaklings and traitors."

Interesting fact: Back in 2006, the Southern Poverty Law Center named NPI one of the four leaders in the world of "academic racism."

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