Briefly

Proposal requires ethanol in gasoline

Boise One of Idaho’s most powerful lobbying groups is pressing for a law that would require 10 percent ethanol in all gasoline, but whether it would raise gas prices is unclear.

The Idaho Farm Bureau, a private organization of farmers and ranchers with strong ties to the controlling Republican Party, says its proposal will lead to cleaner air, a more robust agriculture economy and reduced dependence on foreign oil.

Opponents, however, say the requirement would create logistical problems that could increase the pump price.

If passed, the law would make Idaho the third state to require a minimum ethanol content, along with Minnesota and Hawaii.

Aryan Nations leader pleads guilty in threat

Reno, Nev. A self-proclaimed leader of the Aryan Nations says he meant to scare newspaper employees and government workers with a rambling e-mail laced with hatred and death threats, but never intended to follow through.

Steven Holten pleaded guilty Monday in U.S. District Court to one count of transmitting a threat in interstate commerce.

Holten, 40, with a shaved head and a black and red swastika tattooed on his neck, said he was sorry he sent the e-mail.

“It was intended to be a threat to make certain concepts known to them,” he said. “I had no intention or means by which to carry out those threats or harm anyone.”

Instead, he said, the purpose “was to express other viewpoints of the Aryan Nations or myself. Maybe to scare them into thinking or believing it was a threat.”

After determining that Holten’s decisions were not affected by the “drug cocktail” he said he was prescribed for AIDS or the Prozac he was taking “for stress and anxiety,” the judge accepted his guilty plea and set sentencing for March 7.

Holten sent the mass e-mail on Sept. 20 to about 100 people working for the Reno Gazette-Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, several state government agencies and others he felt did not support his white supremacist views, Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Pugliese said.

“We of Aryan Nations are angry, and we hate and we kill,” the message said. “Our violent terrorist actions will be a shock to the citizens of Reno and San Francisco. It will be gruesome, and something that has never been seen ever.”

Depending on how the judge evaluates the offense, Pugliese said, Holten could face 12 to 18 months in prison on the low end, or 3 1/2 to just more than 4 years on the high end.

Pedestrian hit by bus in downtown Spokane

A woman was injured Tuesday evening after she was hit by a Spokane Transit Authority bus in a downtown crosswalk.

The 74-year-old’s injuries did not appear life-threatening, said Spokane Police Sgt. Alan Arnzen. She was taken by ambulance to Sacred Heart Medical Center.

The bus was turning north about 5:30 p.m. on Washington Street from an eastbound lane of Riverside Avenue, Arnzen said. The woman was walking across Washington on the north side of the intersection. The bus, which was serving a North Side route via Hamilton Street, knocked her about 10 feet before she hit the pavement, Arnzen said.

Arnzen said the accident is under investigation, but it appears the bus driver was at fault. Witnesses told officers that the driver had a green light, but the pedestrian had a walk sign.

Mother held in deaths of boys pleads not guilty

Kent, Wash. A 36-year-old Kent woman accused of letting two of her children starve to death as she lay passed out drunk pleaded not guilty Tuesday.

Marie Genevieve Robinson entered the pleas at King County’s Regional Justice Center to charges of second-degree murder and criminal mistreatment in the deaths of her two youngest sons, 16-month-old Justice and 7-week-old Raiden.

She was passed out drunk, lying in bed with the covers over her head, when police entered her apartment and found the bodies Nov. 14, prosecutors said. A 2-year-old boy who survived by foraging in the kitchen helped police get the door open.

Her attorney, Colleen O’Connor, said after the hearing that Robinson “kind of understands” the charges against her, “but she’s still grieving.”

Bail remained set at $2 million.

Robinson’s 2-year-old was released to a grandmother’s custody after paramedics checked him out.

The deaths were discovered after Christopher Bone, Robinson’s boyfriend and the children’s father, was released from the Kitsap County Jail in Port Orchard, where he had been held for missing court dates.

Tamarack Resort plans Dec. 15 opening

Donnelly, Idaho The lift towers have been installed at the nation’s newest ski resort.

Now, Tamarack Resort in Donnelly, Idaho, is due to open December 15th.

The lifts arrived by helicopter two months ago. Since then, the towers have been aligned, the engines installed, and miles of cables put in place.

UI licenses vaccine targeting costly infection

Moscow, Idaho The University of Idaho has licensed a new vaccine that could boost dairy cattle immune systems to ward off bacterial infections costing dairymen billions of dollars a year.

Greg Bohach, who runs the Idaho Agricultural Experiment Station, said the vaccine is “turning the bacteria’s own processes against them.”

The target is bovine mastitis, a bacterial inflammation of the udder in dairy cows.

The infections cost the U.S. dairy industry alone more than $1.7 billion a year in lost production and lower milk quality.

Yong Ho Park, a professor at Seoul National University in South Korea, collaborated with Bohach on the vaccine.

“This is one of the most costly diseases in the dairy industry worldwide,” Park said. “Finally we’ve found a good way to treat bovine mastitis.”

Court upholds plea, orders new sentencing

Boise The Idaho Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the guilty plea of condemned double murderer Timothy Alan Dunlap but agreed with the district court that procedural mistakes after the plea was entered justified a new sentencing hearing.

The unanimous court found no justification in Dunlap’s claim that his attorneys failed to effectively represent him, especially in the negotiations on the plea agreement that left the death penalty as a possible sentence even if Dunlap admitted he killed bank teller Tonya Crane in 1991.

The new sentencing hearing would be the first under a 2003 law that shifted the responsibility for sentencing in capital murder cases from the judge to a jury. A provision of that law covers previously condemned murderers whose sentences are thrown out. It requires a jury to be impaneled to hear evidence of mitigating and aggravating factors on the death penalty before deciding whether Dunlap should again be condemned. The alternative is life in prison without parole.

The 36-year-old Sellersburg, Ind., man is still under a death sentence in Ohio, where he admitted killing girlfriend Belinda Bolanos with a crossbow in Cincinnati and dumping her body along the Ohio River.