Across the Nation

WASHINGTON — Senators from both parties on Tuesday challenged a Bush administration plan to sell more than 300,000 acres of national forest to help pay for rural schools in 41 states.

Lawmakers said the short-term gains would be offset by the permanent loss of public lands. They also said profits from the proposed sales would fall far short of what’s needed to help rural governments pay for schools and other basic services.

"I just don’t think we can play Russian roulette with these local communities,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who vowed to "do everything I can” to stop the plan.

Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, had a more visceral reaction: "No, heck no,” he told Bush administration officials at a Senate hearing Tuesday.

Wyden and Craig were co-sponsors of a 2000 law that has pumped more than $2 billion into rural counties hurt by logging cutbacks on federal land. The so-called "county payments” law has helped offset sharp declines in timber sales in Oregon and other Western states in the wake of federal forest policy that restricts logging to protect endangered species such as the spotted owl.

The law is set to expire Sept. 30. The land-sale plan would reauthorize the law for five years, but calls for a phased reduction in funding to zero by 2011.

Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who directs U.S. forest policy, called the proposed cutbacks painful but necessary. The law was never intended to be permanent, he said, but was a way to help rural counties make the transition from dependence on timber receipts to a more broad-based economy.

House Oks coin to honor Louis Braille

WASHINGTON — Louis Braille, the inventor of the most widely used reading and writing method for the blind, would be featured on a commemorative U.S. silver dollar under a bill approved by the House on Tuesday.

Under the bill, the U.S. Mint would issue 400,000 silver dollars commemorating Braille in 2009, the bicentennial of his birth. Funds raised from a $10 surcharge would go to the National Federation of the Blind to promote Braille literacy.

"Blind people today would be far less likely to achieve the goals of independence and productive living without the positive contribution of Louis Braille,” said Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, a co-sponsor of the bill, which passed by voice vote.

The front of the coin would depict Braille, and the reverse would include the word "Braille” written in Braille code.

Braille, born outside Paris on Jan. 4, 1809, lost his sight in a childhood accident. He later built on a nighttime code used by the French Army to create the pattern of raised dots that is named after him.

Similar legislation introduced in the Senate earlier this month has 23 co-sponsors. This type of legislation requires 67 Senate co-sponsors, according to Senate Banking Committee spokesman Andrew Gray.<