Wyoming lawmakers will soon take up the thorny issue of whether to impose new taxes on wind energy development, a proposal that developers say could stunt the fledgling industry's growth in Wyoming.

Supporters of a new tax say it's only fair for wind projects to contribute to state and local governments equal to other energy industries. Opponents say Wyoming taxes are already high compared to surrounding states and any new tax would be premature.

The Joint Revenue Committee will consider two proposals to tax wind electricity generation at a Wednesday meeting in Cheyenne.

"I am hopeful that this legislative session will develop some means for there to be state and local revenues derived from the development of wind resources in the coming decades," Gov. Dave Freudenthal said recently. "You can pretty clearly demonstrate that (the wind industry) is not overly taxed and they certainly don't make the contribution that other forms of energy do."

The Wyoming Power Producers Coalition, representing 15 wind development companies, is fighting any new wind tax in the upcoming legislative session.

Executive Director Cheryl Riley said developers are willing to pay their fair share of taxes, but the state has time to come up with an appropriate tax because development is slowed down by a transmission bottleneck and ongoing land management issues related to the sage grouse, she said.

The Cleveland Rape Crisis Center is launching a special hot line in hopes of hearing from those who survived encounters at the house where remains of 11 women were found.

Police say the women were lured to the home of registered sex offender Anthony Sowell with the promise of alcohol or getting high. Authorities say Sowell then strangled them and left their bodies in his house or buried in the backyard.

Sowell remains in jail on $6 million bond on five preliminary charges of aggravated murder.

The hot line, opening Monday, will be staffed 24 hours a day by a licensed therapist.

Sowell pleaded not guilty on Friday to charges in an alleged attack on a woman at his home in September. That case led to the discovery of the bodies.

Here are some states where there have been recent high-profile challenges to the lethal-injection death penalty method:

California: A federal judge has suspended executions until prison officials fix the deficiencies he identified in the lethal-injection process.

Maryland: Executions were halted in June as new execution protocols submitted by Gov. Martin O'Malley are examined by a legislative panel. O'Malley, a death penalty opponent, waited to submit the new rules in a failed attempt to give the Legislature time to repeal the death penalty.

Missouri: The execution process resumed this year for the first time in nearly four years but was stalled in June when the state's chief justice said the court was unlikely to schedule any future executions until legal challenges were resolved over the training and competence of the state's execution team.

Arizona: Executions have been on hold since 2007 as the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed Kentucky's lethal-injection method. Kentucky's plan was approved, but the high court didn't rule on methods in other states. Federal public defenders in Phoenix then questioned Arizona's methods in state and federal court.

Tennessee: A federal appeals court delivered a victory for the state's lethal-injection method in July after executions had been held up for years by an inmate's lawsuit contending it inflicted unnecessary pain.

In courtrooms barred to the public, dozens of terror suspects are pleading for their freedom from the Guantanamo Bay prison, sometimes even testifying on their own behalf by video from the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

Complying with a Supreme Court ruling last year, 15 federal judges in the U.S. courthouse here are giving detainees their day in court after years behind bars half a world away from their homelands.

The judges have found the government's evidence against 30 detainees wanting and ordered their release. That number could rise significantly because the judges are on track to hear challenges from dozens more prisoners.

Scooped up along with hard-core terrorist suspects in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, these 30 detainees stand in stark contrast to the 10 prisoners whom the Obama administration targeted for prosecution Friday for plotting the Sept. 11 and other terrorist attacks. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of 9/11, and four of his alleged henchmen are headed for a federal civilian trial in New York; five others, including a top suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole, will be tried by a military commission.

For more than 15.4 million people, the Making Work Pay tax credit enacted as part of the $787-billion economic stimulus package could turn out to be a Making You Pay Back tax credit.

That's the finding of a government watchdog report out today about the credit, which provides as much as $400 for individuals and as much as $800 for joint filers. It is the signature tax cut that President Obama promised in his campaign and was delivered with much fanfare in February.

The problem: In order to maximize the credit's stimulative effect on the economy, withholding changes for taxpayers kicked in within days of Obama signing the legislation and taxpayers started seeing the changes in their paychecks in April. In essence, the credit was "advanced to taxpayers through their wages by a decrease in federal income tax withholding" for the 2009 and 2010 tax years, according to the report by the Treasury Department's Inspector General for Tax Administration.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2009/11/millions-may-have-to-repay-part-of-obama-tax-credit.html

A Massachusetts man accused of plotting to kill Americans was portrayed by federal prosecutors Thursday as a jihadist who is too dangerous to be released on bail, but the man's lawyer said he was charged only after he refused to become an FBI informant against Muslims.

Tarek Mehanna, 27, of Sudbury, was arrested a year ago and charged with lying to the FBI. New, more serious charges were added last month, when Mehanna was accused of conspiring with two other men to shoot shoppers at U.S. malls, to kill two unnamed prominent U.S. politicians and to kill American soldiers in Iraq.

Authorities said he and the other men never came close to pulling off an attack, but did seek training at terrorist camps in the Middle East. The men allegedly told friends they were turned down for terrorist training because of their nationality, ethnicity or inexperience, or that they were unable to make contact with people they hoped would get them into such camps.

The men abandoned plans to attack malls because their weapons contact said he could find only handguns, not automatic weapons, prosecutors allege.

During a detention hearing in federal court on Thursday, Magistrate Judge Leo Sorokin heard arguments from prosecutors and Mehanna's defense on whether he should be kept behind bars until his trial. Sorokin did not immediately rule.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Aloke Chakravarty urged the judge to hold Mehanna without bail, saying he poses a danger to the community and is likely to flee before his trial because he faces a possible sentence of life in prison.