Oregon: Tree-sitting protester falls 150 feet to death

Beth O’Brien, a 22-year-old Portland woman who climbed 150 feet up a tree to protest a timber sale, fell and died from her injures before rescuers could reach the remote site in the Mount Hood National Forest.

The timber sale O’Brien and fellow tree sitters have protested for three years had been canceled three days before her death Friday, and the protesters expected to leave the area within a week.

O’Brien had unhooked herself from one platform and was trying to reach another by a rope ladder when she fell, authorities said.

ATLANTA: Lottery jackpot reaches $300 million

The jackpot for Tuesday night’s Big Game drawing is expected to grow to $300 million, after Friday night’s drawing for a $220 million jackpot failed to produce a winning ticket, lottery officials said.

The $300 million jackpot will be the second-largest in Big Game history. The biggest  and a U.S. record  was $363 million, split by two winners in May 2000.

The odds of winning the Big Game jackpot are 1 in 76 million.

MILWAUKEE: Archbishop OK’d transfer of pedophile

Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, who established a model program for handling sexual abuse by clergy, transferred a priest who was a known sex offender from one parish to another in 1979 and did not remove him until 1992, documents unsealed by a judge here show.

According to the documents, the Rev. William Effinger admitted to Weakland in 1979 that he had molested a 13-year-old altar boy at St. Francis de Sales Church in Lake Geneva, Wis.

That autumn, Weakland appointed Effinger associate pastor of Holy Name Parish in Sheboygan, Wis., where he had daily contact with children at a parochial school.

Weakland did not remove him until 1992, when a man who had been molested by Effinger as a teen taped the priest confessing the crime.

WASHINGTON: Pentagon expands queries of secretaries

The Pentagon’s investigation of Army Secretary Thomas White’s use of military jets has expanded to include trips taken by the Navy and Air Force secretaries, a Defense Department spokesman said Saturday.

The Pentagon’s inspector general, Joseph E. Schmitz, is investigating a trip White took on a military jet to Colorado in early March. White completed a house sale during the trip, raising questions about whether he used the plane for personal business.

Pentagon spokesman Jim Turner said the inspector general’s investigation has widened to include the examination of travels by Navy Secretary Gordon England and Air Force Secretary James Roche.

DETROIT: Editor, champion of diversity, dead at 60

Robert G. McGruder, executive editor of the Detroit Free Press and a champion of diversity who broke racial barriers, died Friday of cancer.

McGruder, 60, became the first black reporter for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland in 1963 and the first black executive editor of the Free Press in 1996.

In 1995, McGruder became the first black president of the Associated Press Managing Editors.

“I stand for diversity,” he said last year. “I represent the African Americans, Latinos, Arab Americans, Asians, Native Americans, gays and lesbians, women, and all the others we must see represented in our business offices, newsrooms and our newspapers if we truly want to meet the challenge of serving our communities.”