Word: montana
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...smoke-free buffer zones--so people don't have to walk through a cloud of smoke to get into and out of school buildings--have had limited success. "We have a 25-ft. smoke-free boundary around campus buildings," says Julee Stearns, health-promotion specialist at the University of Montana's Curry Health Center. "But what's 25 ft. to some people isn't necessarily 25 ft. to others." An all-out campus ban, says Stearns, removes the need for guesstimating. The university is considering such a rule, which could take effect as early as fall...
...Montana Senator Max Baucus, the powerful chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and a key player in health-care reform, has been involved with his share of feisty women. His second wife Wanda Minge was arrested in 2004 for fighting with a woman at a suburban Virginia garden store. (Minge was reportedly upset that she was not being helped by the staff at a garden supplies shop with loading mulch on to her car; the charges were eventually lowered to misdemeanor assault and a plea deal avoided prosecution.) The 2007 holiday season was the last time in their quarter-century...
...then, Baucus, who turns 68 this Friday, had begun a relationship with the lawyer Melodee Hanes, 53. Early this year, he had nominated her to be U.S. Attorney for Montana, a Presidential appointment. The nomination was later withdrawn, he said, so that they could live together in D.C. There was much tittering in Washington circles (particularly among those opposed to health-care reform) when Reuters broke the news over the weekend. The Democratic Senator's office declared that the nomination was made on Hanes' merits and not because of the romantic relationship. (See 5 things the Democrats don't like...
Hanes was relatively new to Montana, having moved to Billings from Iowa in 1999 with her then husband, Dr. Paul Bennett. Bennett had been state medical examiner and she was an assistant county prosecutor in Polk County, Iowa. But a legal controversy pursued him into Montana. His testimony had help lead to the imprisonment of a young Iowa couple accused of shaking their baby to death in 1997. The couple was later freed after Bennett's autopsy report and his methods were discredited by peer-reviewing pathologists. The prosecution then moved for dismissal of charges. (Bennett's Iowa controversy...
...Bennett is now an associate Montana State medical examiner, who performs autopsies and testifies often in criminal cases. He and Hanes divorced in December 2008 for undisclosed reasons. Petite and bright-eyed, Hanes was a mover and shaker in Iowa political and social circles, and in Montana she soon charmed local Democratic party leaders and the boards of several non-profits. After a short stint with the county prosecutor's office in Billings, she joined Baucus' local field office staff in 2002. He made her his state director in 2005, overseeing seven field offices. In December 2008, she worked briefly...