Flagstaff Today - News and Photos

Northern Arizona University’s graduate physical therapy program ranks among the best in the nation, according to U.S.News & World Report’s annual ranking of America’s Best Graduate Schools released today.

NAU is tied with six other universities that rank 16th in the nation. The rankings are based on the results of peer assessment surveys sent to deans, other administrators and faculty at degree programs or schools accredited by the American Physical Therapy Association.

“We are excited by this positive recognition,” said Liz Grobsmith, provost and vice president for Academic Affairs. “It’s satisfying to know that the leaders of physical therapy education around the country respect the quality of our program.”

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PHOENIX — The Navajo Supreme Court will hear oral arguments tomorrow at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law in an effort to raise awareness of tribal courts.

The hearing is open to the public and will examine whether the Navajo Housing Authority should pay a claim for a wrongful termination through the Navajo Nation Labor Commission.The authority says it should not have to pay the judgment, claiming sovereign immunity as a federal agency and a tribal entity.

KVOA

Applying techniques used to scope out caves on Earth to probe the possibility of caves on Mars is paying off.

NAU researchers Glen Cushing and J. Judson Wynne, working at the U.S. Geological Survey, propose that photos from the Mars Odyssey mission reveal football-field size holes that could be entrances to caves.

“If there is life on Mars, there is a good chance you’d find it in caves,” said Wynne, an NAU graduate student in biological sciences and project leader for the USGS Earth-Mars Cave Detection Program.

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The National Park Service is soliciting public comments and ideas for improvements and projects for the coming decade, in conjunction with a plan to raise $3 billion nationally for parks.

Flagstaff’s national monuments and the Grand Canyon are seeking comments Monday about what should be improved or added over the next decade. There is an open house Monday from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Museum of Northern Arizona, 3101 N. Fort Valley Road. Local park superintendents will be present.

If you prefer to give comments via the Internet instead, go to www.nps.gov/2016.

Masseur gets 6 years for sex assault
A Flagstaff masseur who admitted to fondling female clients was sentenced on three felony counts involving sexual misconduct Thursday, netting him 6 years in prison.

General surgeon is top doc
As one of eight general surgeons around Flagstaff, Andrew Aldridge sees all kinds of cases at Flagstaff Medical Center.

Rape charge for city firefighter
Flagstaff police have arrested a Flagstaff firefighter on one charge each of sexual assault and sexual abuse.

azdailysun.com

FREDONIA, Ariz. After a 15 year hiatus, uranium mining is set to resume in northern Arizona.

Denison Mines of Canada, the owner of the nearest uranium processing mill in southern Utah, announced plans to reopen a uranium mine southwest of Fredonia on the Arizona Strip.

The Bureau of Land Management says the number of uranium claims on the Strip has doubled over the past two years, increasing to about four-thousand.

But no mines have opened yet.

Meanwhile, another company has plans to conduct exploratory uranium drilling in the Kaibab (KEYE’-bab) National Forest south of the Grand Canyon.

Uranium prices are up from a low of about seven dollars a pound in 1990 to 95 dollars per pound last week.

KOLD

Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl has announced that the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University will receive $2 million in 2007 to support its efforts to restore forest health.

In addition to the ERI funding, Kyl announced that the U.S. Forest Service approved another $2.3 million for forest thinning projects to restore forest health and reduce the risk of wildfire to 17 communities in Gila County.

“Proactive management of our forests not only is the best tool in combating wildfires, it is critical to restoring forest health and improving habitat for diverse species,” said Kyl, who has led the effort to secure the funding for these projects.

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In coordination with the National Association of Development Organizations, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will participate in a two-day public workshop from this Thursday to Friday at the Northern Arizona campus in Flagstaff, Ariz.

The EPA hopes to educate cities, towns, redevelopment agencies and community members along the Route 66 corridor and northeastern Arizona on how to reuse and redevelop brownfields, abandoned or unused industrial sites with environmental contamination.

Nationally renowned and local speakers on Brownfields redevelopment will discuss how to identify, assess, fund, clean up and redevelop key Brownfields sites that will support community development goals.

The workshop is sponsored by the city of Flagstaff, Northern Arizona Council of Governments, Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, National Association of Development Organizations Research Foundation, and EPA.

For more information and to register, please visit: http://www.nado.org/conferences/brownfields.php?con_id=65

The Flagstaff City Council has learned that keeping the noise from trains down is going to cost nearly $4 million dollars.

The council is looking at establishing true “quiet zones” at the city’s five railroad crossings.

During tonight’s City Council work session, city staffers will present five scenarios for the council to consider.

The proposals range from installing directional horns, called wayside horns, at each of the city’s five street-level railroad crossings, to installing gates designed to act as physical barriers.

azfamily.com

Northern Arizona is likely to see drought, higher-than-average temperatures and a big fire season that could start early, fire forecasters predicted late last week.

The monsoon is expected to arrive on time in early or mid July, but drought is expected to intensify across the Southwest in the weeks beforehand, an advisory released by the U.S. Forest Service stated.

This is after an El Nino weather pattern didn’t deliver anticipated moisture to the Southwest. A La Nina is now predicted to cause drier weather for the Southwest.

Flagstaff is about 66 percent behind on rain for the year and 43 inches below average on snowfall, according to the National Weather Service.

The big question now is when fire season and fire restrictions or forest closures might start.

azdailysun.com

DURANGO, Colo. — Lori Alvord would not look conspicuous in her hometown of Crownpoint. Her story, however, is certainly quite unique.

The first female Navajo surgeon, she expected to become a teacher, and corralled her younger sisters at desks to lecture them. Alvord returned to the Four Corners recently, saying it felt good to be home when she spoke in front of nearly 100 people at Fort Lewis College.

“The future I could see as a child is not the future I have today … but in some ways I have fulfilled that particular dream,” she said.

Alvord serves on the faculty at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire as an assistant professor of surgery and the associate dean for student and minority affairs. She practices medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Hanover, N.H., and has written a book detailing her experiences. The book is titled “The Scalpel and the Silver Bear.”

The Navajo people she knew as a child were assistants to people who held more prestigious jobs, such as surgeons, Alvord said. But by chance, she met a Navajo man who attended Princeton University and he encouraged her to apply there. Alvord, however, refused to attend a school without a native population and instead turned to Dartmouth College.

Farmington Daily Times

Two weeks after Arizona U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton was ordered to give up his post, he sent an e-mail to a top Justice Department official asking how to handle questions that his ouster was connected to his investigation of Rep. Rick Renzi, R-Ariz.

Charlton, one of eight federal prosecutors forced to resign last year, never received a written response.

His December e-mail was among more than 3,000 pages of records the Bush administration turned over to Congress late Monday as part of an ongoing congressional investigation into the ousters. Democrats released the documents Tuesday.

Charlton’s ouster is emerging as another red flag in the prosecutor purge, with congressional investigators and others trying to figure out if he was scuttled by partisan politics. Administration critics say the dismissals of at least two prosecutors, David Iglesias of New Mexico and Carol Lam of San Diego, have been linked to political investigations by their offices.

“Obviously, there needs to be an investigation,” said Rep. Harry Mitchell, D-Ariz. “You need to find out the facts. It shouldn’t be partisan at all.”

Tucson Citizen

NAU student drowns at Navajo Falls
The Coconino County Sheriff’s Department is investigating the death of a Northern Arizona University student who drowned Wednesday at Navajo Falls, located near Havasupai Village.

Guns stolen from cruisers
Two law enforcement vehicles were broken into outside the officers’ homes this week, with the suspect or suspects making off with guns and other expensive specialized gear.

Flagstaff Pulliam Airport runway extension work begins
Construction of the runway extension project at Flagstaff Pulliam Airport is under way. The project consists of an 1,800-foot extension to the northeast of the runway and parallel taxiway and construction of a new safety area 1,000 feet in length.

Leaner theme park planned
WILLIAMS — A leaner version of a proposed theme park on the outskirts of the city, which has undergone many versions, was presented to residents Thursday evening in front of the Williams City Council.

azdailysun.com

Today, on the fourth anniversary of her death, friends and relatives will gather in Phoenix to remember Lori Piestewa beneath the mountain that bears her name.

Piestewa died in an ambush in the opening days of the Iraq war, becoming the first Native American woman to die in combat for the U.S.

“The Hopi believe that once you go on your journey, you don’t look back,” says her father, Terry Piestewa. But with Lori, “she’s always in the news, there’s always people talking about her.” And so, four years later, they tell of Lori’s story and spirit.

Arizona Republic

Sundt Construction’s Interstate 40-Holbrook Highway project in Flagstaff was among seven winners of the 2007 Marvin M. Black Excellence in Partnering Awards.

The Associated General Contractors of America program recognizes construction companies that best exemplify the spirit of partnering with contractors, owners and other stakeholders.

“Partnering promotes innovation and provides best practices among all team members for the achievement of mutual goals and objectives helping projects finish on time and within budget,” the AGC said in a release announcing winners.

The project by Tempe-based Sundt was the only Arizona winner.

The Business Journal of Phoenix

Food banks across Arizona received a massive donation of eggs this week from a farm in Buckeye, just in time for Easter egg hunts.

Community food banks in Yuma, Tucson, Phoenix, Mesa and Flagstaff each will get a shipment of 3,000 dozen eggs from Hickman’s Family Farms.

That’s 36,000 eggs each, 180,000 in all.

“This is a lot of eggs,” Dianne Borgard, development manager for Yuma’s food bank, said Wednesday as the shipment was unloaded.

The Yuma food bank will keep about half the shipment and split the other half among 40 agencies in Yuma County, to be used for food and egg hunts. They can be refrigerated for about four weeks.

KVOA

A company that runs McDonald’s restaurants in Arizona and California will pay $550,000 to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by the federal agency that oversees workplace civil rights.Flagstaff-based GLC Restaurants, Inc. will pay the money to eight young women who were sexually harassed by a male manager at a McDonald’s restaurant in Cordes Junction, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced Thursday. McDonald’s Corp. was not named in the suit.

The manager allegedly grabbed the teens around the waist, touched their breasts, put his hands in their pockets and rubbed up against them in 2001 and 2002, according to the EEOC lawsuit filed in federal court in 2005….

….Amanda Henry, a junior at Northern Arizona University who was one of the victims, said young women and girls need to know that can report inappropriate behavior to their employers, parents and if needed, the EEOC.

Houston Chronicle

HUALAPAI INDIAN RESERVATION, Ariz. (AP) — Walking gingerly across the translucent surface, visitors hear the glass layers creak. Far below, they see the Colorado River as a pea-green ribbon.

“It felt wonderful; not exactly like floating on air,” said former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who once traipsed the surface of the moon and on Tuesday became one of the first to stroll onto the Grand Canyon Skywalk, a massive glass-bottom observation deck perched 4,000 feet above the canyon’s floor.

The Hualapai Indian tribe invited Aldrin, fellow former astronaut John Herrington, and others to the unveiling of the horseshoe-shaped deck Tuesday in advance of a public opening planned for March 28.

Tour packages with deck access will range in price from $49.95 to $199. The deck, which juts 70 feet beyond the canyon’s edge, will accommodate up to 120 guests at a time and offer a bone-chilling vantage point more than twice as high as the world’s tallest buildings.

San Francisco Chronicle

Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff has received $5 million toward a new telescope.

The John and Maureen Hendricks family donated the money on top of an earlier $1 million donation toward the Discovery Channel Telescope, which is under construction.

The telescope is expected to be the fifth-largest in the continental United States and is scheduled to be fully operational in 2010.

Arizona Republic

Warmer temperatures means a Flagstaff homeless shelter on the southside of town is closed.

However, the Southside facility will remain a day drop-in center for the homeless.

The temporary homeless shelter for men is designed to keep them from freezing to death during the winter.

It closed last Tuesday to overnight stays with the return of warm weather. But daytime drop-in services will continue.

KVOA