Big Sky News

BILLINGS - The Gallatin National Forest has reopened the Beattie Gulch area north of Gardiner that was closed last month because grizzly bears were feeding on gut piles left by elk hunters.

WEST YELLOWSTONE - The U.S. Forest Service has called off a logging and prescribed burning project near West Yellowstone to further analyze its effects on Yellowstone grizzly bears.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - John Sinclair, the leader of Montana's Little Shell Tribe, will visit Capitol Hill this week to testify about how to reform the federal government's process for recognizing Indian tribes.

BILLINGS - Members of the Montana National Guard's 143rd Military Police Company are back in Montana after a yearlong tour in Iraq.

From The K-B-L-G News Center... IN COLLEGE FOOTBALL THIS WEEKEND, MONTANA STATE HOSTS WINLESS IDAHO STATE, WHILE UNBEATEN MONTANA CONTINUES ITS QUEST FOR ANOTHER BIG SKY CONFERENCE TITLE AS THEY HOST 5-AND-1 WEBER STATE.

BILLINGS - Yellowstone County Attorney Dennis Paxinos says a bus driver accused of hitting a teenager in a crosswalk while driving drunk may have fled the state.

Martin Rinard , a professor of computer science at MIT, is unabashed about the ultimate goal of his group's research: "delivering an immortal, invulnerable program." In work presented this month at the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in Big Sky, MT, his group has developed software that can find and fix certain types of software bugs ...

MISSOULA - A partially completed wildlife study has found that black bears enter yards in Missoula at night to feast on apples.

The Montana women's basketball team, which has won five of the last six regular-season Big Sky Conference championships, has been picked for a second-place finish in the 2009-10 preseason coaches' poll which the league announced on Thursday.

BILLINGS - Health officials confirmed that a 6-year-old Yellowstone County boy has died of complications related to swine flu.

HELENA - The Bureau of Land Management intends to spend nearly $100,000 for emergency stabilization at the Log Gulch Campground at Holter Lake , which was damaged by wildfire earlier this year.

HELENA - The attorneys for Sebastian Olivares-Coster, a Helena teen accused of fatally shooting one teen and seriously injuring two others, have canceled his trial and set a change of plea hearing for Nov.

HELENA - A man charged with crashing into and killing two people while drunk was jailed over the weekend with another drinking and driving charge.

From The K-B-L-G News Center... THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN COLLEGE FOOTBALL TEAM GOT SIX TOUCHDOWN PASSES FROM KASEY PETERS, TOPPING MONTANA STATE-NORTHERN 52-27 AT HERB KLINDT FIELD ON SATURDAY.

HELENA - Montana Lottery officials said a retired Missoula couple and a Bozeman woman have each claimed a $5,000 Wild Card prize, while a Billings man turned in a winning Big Bingo ticket worth $2,500. Les and Rita Marcum of Missoula claimed their $5,000 prize Friday after winning a Sept.

WINIFRED - The town of Winifred will receive federal stimulus money to improve its wastewater collection system.

WASHINGTON - Rep. Denny Rehberg, R.-Mont., announced funding Thursday to add security screening at Montana's seven Essential Air Service airports, as well as build emergency operations centers in Butte and Whitefish .

BILLINGS - Yellowstone County officials said two men were killed when their small plane crashed about 25 miles southeast of Billings .

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Intel Labs Pittsburgh have combined low-power, embedded processors typically used in netbooks with flash memory to create a server architecture that is fast, but far more energy efficient for data-intensive applications than the systems now used by major Internet services.

BOZEMAN - Eight white supremacists wore bandanas to mask their faces while protesting earlier this week at the Gallatin County Courthouse in Bozeman .