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• The agency has also said budget cuts this year will force it to let more fires burn -- a prospect Hanson said would benefit the woodpecker and a broad range of species.
• Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resources Council, a timber industry group, said the bird didn't need any Endangered Species Act protection, because it was already getting plenty of new habitat each year from millions of acres that burn but are not harvested as salvage. He added there is a major debate going on over the role of the Forest Service on the national forests.
• "Are they going to be a firefighting agency, or a land management agency?" he said. "Right now, half the budget is going to firefighting. A tenth of it is going to forest management."
• Hanson noted that major salvage logging is being planned for two areas that burned last year in prime black-backed woodpecker habitat, one on the Plumas National Forest in the Sierras, and another on the Winema-Fremont and Modoc national forests near Lakeview, Ore.
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SD Sen. Johnson says he now supports gay marriage
CHET BROKAW,Associated Press
• SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) -- South Dakota Sen. Tim Johnson, who announced his retirement last month, has reversed his position on gay marriage, saying Monday that he supports the legalization of same-sex unions.
• The 66-year-old Democrat has said for years that he doesn't support gay marriage, and he voted for the 1996 federal law that defined marriage as the union of a man and woman and provided that a state did not have to recognize same-sex marriages from other states.
• "After lengthy consideration, my views have evolved sufficiently to support marriage equality legislation," Johnson said in a written statement. "This position doesn't require any religious denomination to alter any of its tenets; it simply forbids government from discrimination regarding who can marry whom."
• His announcement leaves three Senate Democrats who have not come out in support of federal efforts to legalize gay marriage: Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Landrieu and Pryor are up for re-election next year in their Republican-leaning states.
• Johnson's position announced Monday is at odds with state laws passed in 1996 and 2000 banning gay marriage and saying South Dakota would not recognize same-sex marriages from other states. Voters passed a state constitutional amendment in 2006 saying only a marriage between a man and a woman is valid.
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