Colorado

Attorney General victim of ID theft

A man and woman recently arrested on suspicion of stealing checks from a mailbox in Colorado Springs may have picked the wrong victim – the state’s top law enforcement official.

Laque Ivy, 22, and Matthew Mack, 42, are accused of taking credit card checks mailed to the home of Colorado Atty. Gen. John Suthers.

“Everyone has to be careful,” said Colorado Springs police spokesman Lt. Rafael Cintron.

The checks, a cash advance promotion from a credit card company, were stolen June 3. The pair allegedly tried to cash one at an ACE America’s Cash Express Store, Cintron said.

“Some red flags went up, and they refused to cash the checks and they called us,” Cintron said.

The two fled before police arrived, but an employee got a license plate number. Ivy was arrested on suspicion of forgery, and Mack was arrested on a parole violation.

Suthers said he didn’t know the checks were stolen until police contacted him June 3.

Utah

After drought, water alters Great Salt Lake

The water in the Great Salt Lake has begun rising again after years of drought, changing the landscape and starting to submerge one of Utah’s best-known artifacts: an enormous earth sculpture called the Spiral Jetty.

The six years of drought had allowed the curious to flock to the lakeside to see the 1,500-foot-long, salt-encrusted spiral that Robert Smithson built in 1970 using backhoes to pile up rock and earth.

For decades before the dry spell, the jetty had largely been just out of sight beneath the surface of the salty water.

Thanks to a winter of record snowfall, it’s not just the spiral Jetty that is changing.

“Change in lake levels can produce significantly more of a change than you’d expect,” said Maunsel Pearce, chairman of the Great Salt Lake Alliance, a consortium of conservation groups with interests in the lake. “You really need to see it to believe it.”

Sandbars exposed during the drought are now covered with water. Wetlands that had dried into sheets of cracked mud and thin dry grasses are now soggy marshes sprouting thick vegetation.

Florida

Republican suggests closing Guantanamo Bay

Sen. Mel Martinez said the Bush administration should consider closing the Guantanamo Bay prison for terrorism suspects – the first high-profile Republican to make the suggestion.

“It’s become an icon for bad stories and at some point you wonder the cost-benefit ratio,” Martinez said Friday. “How much do you get out of having that facility there? Is it serving all the purposes you thought it would serve when initially you began it, or can this be done some other way a little better?”

Martinez, who served in President Bush’s first cabinet and is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made his comments after Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden suggested earlier in the week that the prison in Cuba be shut down.

President Bush said Wednesday that his administration was “exploring all alternatives” for detaining the prisoners.

Amnesty International called the facility “the gulag of our time.”

Colorado

Appeals court grants stay for rape counselor

A federal appeals court has temporarily blocked the military from arresting a civilian counselor for refusing to turn over records of sessions with a former Air Force Academy cadet who said she was raped.

A lawyer for clinical social worker Jennifer Bier said there is a stay in place until Wednesday. The government has until then to file a brief, attorney Wendy Murphy said on Saturday.

Lawyers for 1st Lt. Joseph Harding, who is accused of raping two cadets while attending the academy, won a military court order requiring Bier to turn over her records in one of the cases.

U.S. District Court Judge Edward Nottingham earlier this week refused a request by Murphy to issue an order blocking her client’s arrest. Nottingham ruled that the right of Harding to confront his accusers outweighed the psychotherapist-patient privilege.

Bier, director of clinical services for the Colorado Springs rape and domestic violence crisis center TESSA, counseled one of the alleged victims in the Academy’s rape scandal. The alleged victim went to TESSA because she did not trust the military.

Washington

Senate to apologize for past stance on lynching

At one time, there was no federal law against lynching, and most states refused to prosecute white men for killing black people. The U.S. House of Representatives, responding to pleas from presidents and civil rights groups, three times agreed to make the crime a federal offense. Each time, though, the measure died in the Senate at the hands of powerful southern lawmakers using the filibuster.

The Senate is set to correct that wrong Monday, when its members will vote on a resolution to apologize for the failure to enact an anti-lynching law first proposed 105 years ago.

“The apology is long overdue,” said Sen. George Allen, R-Va., who is sponsoring the resolution with Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La. “Our history does include times when we failed to protect individual freedom and rights.”

The Senate’s action comes amid a series of conciliatory efforts nationwide that include reopening investigations and prosecutions in Mississippi. Advocates say the vote would mark the first time Congress has apologized for the nation’s treatment of African-Americans.

Allen’s involvement could help mend his rift with black Virginians who criticized him for hanging a noose outside his law office, displaying a Confederate flag in his home and proclaiming a Confederate History Month while governor.