CHEYENNE -- A Laramie Junior High School girl cited by police in January for throwing french fries during lunchtime is out of hot water.

A municipal court judge on Tuesday dismissed the citation against the 13-year-old student for breaking a city ordinance that prohibits “hurling missiles,” court records show.

The charge -- an adult crime under city ordinance -- was dropped at the request of the Laramie city attorney, a court spokeswoman said.

Two other girls, including the daughter of school board chairwoman Sue Ibarra, were also cited under the same ordinance and paid $60 fines soon after the citations were filed, Laramie Police Chief Robert A. Deutsch said.

Deutsch said Friday he played no part in the decision to dismiss the case, but he can live with the outcome.

“I've been doing this for so long that I understand that we play one part in the criminal justice system,” he said. “If it gets dismissed we have to respect and appreciate that.”

VIENNA, Austria - Iran may be withholding information needed to establish whether it tried to make nuclear arms, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Monday in an unusually strongly worded report.

NEW YORK -- A man who was carrying a rusted pirate-style sword through Macy's flagship store in Manhattan is facing charges of criminal possession of a weapon.

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He told police he was carrying the sword because he is a member of a kickball team whose players often wear pirate-themed costumes. He maintains he was on his way to a game when he was arrested.

CasperStar -- Seven Wyoming counties were among the top 50 rural counties in terms of 2006 average personal income.

That's according to an analysis by the Web site dailyyonder.com. The analysis was based on data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The ranking of all rural counties in U.S. was headed by Teton County, with average personal income of $103,852.

Several energy boom counties made the list. Sublette County was ranked 13th at $49,077, followed by Sheridan County at 19th with $44,468, Sweetwater County at 21st with $43,463 and Campbell County at 24th with $42,538.


Washakie County ranked 37th with $39,082, and Weston County was 42nd at $38,749.

"Larry McGarvin of Ten Sleep in Washakie County said his property taxes went from $800 to $1,200 per year over the past two years, a 125 percent increase."

WASHINGTON -- The dispute over how quickly to allow oil shale development on Western public lands flared Thursday on Capitol Hill, where a Colorado senator just introduced legislation to slow the process.

Starkly different views on whether to speed or delay federal regulations allowing development of the potential new energy source in Wyoming, Colorado and Utah emerged at a hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Several senators, an Interior Department official and energy executives advocated for regulations to be finalized quickly in order to provide certainty for companies pursuing the energy source. But other senators, the governor of Colorado and an environmental activist said too little is known about the water and energy needs and environmental effects of development.

LANDER -- People who eat animals killed with lead bullets need to be concerned about lead poisoning, according to a conservation organization working to convince game hunters to switch to copper ammunition.

Opponents, however, argue that the group's agenda -- to get the lead out of commercial ammo -- rather than hard science, is the driving force behind the results of a recent study. Participating scientists say it provides proof that lead-based ammunition poses health risks not only for animals, but for people.

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The study sampled 30 whitetail deer shot near Sheridan with lead-core, copper-jacketed bullets, fired from a high-powered rifle. Each of the 30 carcasses was taken to a different commercial meat processor throughout the state for standard preparation of ground meat and boneless steaks in 2-pound packages, according to Susan Whaley, spokeswoman with the Peregrine Fund.

X-rays of the 30 deer showed "widespread dispersal of lead fragments" ranging from "smaller than a grain of table salt to as large as a sesame seed," Whaley wrote in a prepared statement.

"There was at least one lead particle in 24 of 30 deer killed, in the processed meat, so 80 percent of the deer actually produced lead in the processed meat," said Grainger Hunt, a biologist with the Peregrine Fund.

If you are iron-deficient, eating a few bolts is a poor remedy. Similarly, eating bullets won't raise your blood lead levels much. (The bioavailability of metallic lead is quite a bit lower than that of lead salts and (particularly) organic lead compounds.)

The reason I know anything about this is that the issue arose in the context of lead-alloy miniature figurines (toy soldiers and the like) about a decade ago. The state of NY tried to make a case based on using a masticating machine to chew miniatures for days at a time, but the resulting lead uptake was less significant than that from breathing or drinking water. FWIW, this finding is corroborated by the fact that workers casting lead for those figurines (whose blood was tested monthly, IIRC) showed no elevation of blood levels of lead. According to one of people involved in the case, the judge was not amused.

"Lower", however, is different from "zero", so I wouldn't recommend a light* snack of sinkers. 8-)

For more information than you'd probably want on lead exposure, see this document: Link

Note that lead uptake rises with decreasing particle size, with particles smaller than .2 mm apparently posing a particular risk. Anyone with any concept of how surface area rises with decreasing particle size would be shocked by a different finding, of course, though it sounds like smaller particles are also more likely to hang around in the GI tract than larger particles.

* Yes, I know, but I couldn't resist.

I've frequently observed that lead uptake in calibers over .33 also tends to be fatal :P

Thanks for writing on this. I've often wondered if those stories of waterfowl being killed by ingesting lead shot were true, most of the evidence back then appeared to be anecdotal. Whatever. I spent most of my young life rolling around on the floor in an indoor range, where everything was probably coated with lead dust. Didn't hurt me a bit!

Lead poisoning has been linked to learning disabilities, behavioral problems and, at very high levels, seizures, coma and death. There is no safe level of lead in blood.

CODY -- The greater Yellowstone ecosystem, often identified as “one of the last best places,” is at risk of being loved to death, according to a National Geographic study.

Efforts are under way to stem that tide and educate the public about responsible tourism and development in the state through a "Geotourism MapGuide" project.

The ecosystem -- one of the largest intact on earth in one of the fastest growing regions in the country -- faces serious threats to water and air quality, flora, fauna, and open spaces. It has increasingly become a popular place to live and play, and with the influx of residents and recreationists come a bevy of complex issues.

Perhaps the solution would be to point out that there are thousands of square miles of wilderness that aren't congressionally designated. Spreading the herd over a wider area would reduce impact. On the other hand, I rather enjoy being able to hike into an area where no one has been in months, on trails so faint they're a challenge to find. In a way, I view the designated wilderness areas, like parks, as sacrifice areas for the riffraff to go so they'll stay away from the truly untrammeled areas that haven't been 'discovered'.

TOKYO - Toyota's profit for the January-March quarter sank 28 percent from the previous year as a strengthening yen and lagging North American sales chipped away at the Japanese automaker's earnings.

RIVERDALE, Utah (AP) -- The police chief who shot himself in the ankle was waving a loaded pistol and being careless, according to two students who were attending his class to qualify for a concealed-weapons permit. "We were told the gun is the chief's personal sidearm, but it looked to me like he didn't know anything about the gun," Lewis Walker said.

The Bakken shale formation in North Dakota holds up to 167 billion barrels of oil but only about 1 percent of it can be recovered using current technology, a new North Dakota state Department of Mineral Resources study says.

Total violent crimes, classified as rapes, murders, robberies and aggravated assaults, rose to 153 last year from 130 in 2006. That equates to a one-year increase of 17.7 percent.

The majority of the violence, Pagel said, comes from disputes between intoxicated people, rather than criminal acts committed against strangers.

"Much of the violent crime is assaultive behavior between two or more people who have been drinking," he said. "That's the vast majority. It's not an unknown person."

In fact, permit seekers spend much of their mandatory class time learning how to avoid actually using a gun — a paradox that mirrors the contradictions and illusions dominating modern gun regulation in Colorado and across the nation.

No community in Wyoming has more practical experience with affordable housing issues than Jackson.

How to make homes available to middle-income workers has been on the agenda since long before the state's most recent energy boom. Jackson Hole is blessed with majestic mountains, world-class skiing and great fly fishing, which makes the area an easy sell, if not an inexpensive one.

LANDER -- Wyoming is receiving a great deal of scorn from wolf advocates throughout the United States, and even overseas, but state officials said Wednesday that most of the non-local critics don't have their facts straight about the state's wolf management plan.

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Gov. Dave Freudenthal's office received more than 800 phone calls Tuesday and Wednesday from members and supporters of Defenders of Wildlife, a Washington, D.C.-based conservation organization. The group urged people via mailings and through its Web site to call and ask the governor to get rid of "the shoot-on-sight policy that is now in effect for nearly 90 percent of the state."

What Defenders of Wildlife calls "talking points," the governor's office calls a "script." And those answering the phones in the State Capitol heard the wording repeated about 85 times an hour Tuesday, and 25 times an hour Wednesday, according to Cara Eastwood, the governor's press secretary.

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The governor's office had received almost 850 of these "scripted" calls as of 3 p.m. Wednesday, but only a handful came from Wyomingites, Eastwood said -- two on Tuesday and two or three Wednesday.

Eastwood spent a good portion of her morning helping answer the calls, she said, and she talked to people from Oklahoma, New Hampshire, Chicago and Minnesota, among other places. But the majority of the calls she answered came from California and New York.

"The governor will get a report on every single person who has called, but our constituents are in Wyoming, so he's most concerned about what local people have to say," Eastwood said. "Frankly, the views of people calling from New York or California may vary quite a bit from somebody calling from Dubois. And the concerns of people in this state weigh more heavily than the concerns of people calling from New York and California."