By USSA

PARK CITY — Dylan Ferguson of Amesbury, Mass., jumped his way through three finals rounds to come in second at the Visa Freestyle International at Deer Valley Resort on Friday, his first career FIS Freestyle World Cup podium. Zongyang Jia of China was the men’s winner. Mengtao Xu led a Chinese sweep of the women’s podium.

It was Ferguson’s first podium in 30 career World Cup aerials starts.

Teammate Scotty Bahrke of Squaw Valley finished sixth.

The Hurricane tow-rope was dedicated to Jeret “Speedy” Peterson prior to finals.

Dual moguls are on tap for Saturday night to finish off the Visa Freestyle International.

By USSA

GARMISCH-PARTENKIRCHEN, Germany — Olympic gold medalist Lindsey Vonn of Vail produced a stunning, on-edge downhill run in Garmisch to win the historic 50th Audi FIS Alpine World Cup of her career on Saturday.

The victory, Vonn’s 25th in downhill, came after trailing at the first four race intervals and surviving a near crash on a bumpy side hill called the Ice Hang. It was Vonn’s ninth win this season and places her soundly in the World Cup overall lead by nearly 500 points.

Vonn trailed at the first three intervals and survived a near crash at the midway point.

Subzero temperatures of minus 13 degrees forced racers to tape their faces to avoid frostbite.

Stacey Cook of Mammoth was ninth, Laurenne Ross of Bend, Ore., 10th, Julia Mancuso of Squaw Valley 13th.

The women’s U.S. Ski Team leads the nations standings for downhill by 433 points over Austria.

A super G is scheduled for Sunday to close the weekend in Garmisch.

By Kathryn Reed

What’s up with all this talk of chicken? My Cooking Light and Bon Appetit magazines arrived this week with chicken on the cover. An issue of Single Leaf Winery’s newsletter I picked up last weekend featured a chicken recipe.

Food photos can really sell a person on a recipe. Even though I don’t eat meat, photos of these dishes don’t bother me. I’ve had veggie pictures nearly make me nauseous. So, it really is what the cook and photographer come up with. Both are artists in their own right.

The Bon Appetit photo might have converted me to vegetarianism had I not already done so years ago. My goodness, the fried chicken was so horrible looking even Paula Dean might have winced. However, the image of pan-cooked chicken with wine and plums on the cover of Cooking Light almost (OK not really) made rethink the no-meat thing.

And what a difference in the topics. One magazine talks fried foods, the other has 25 healthy chicken dinners.

With the National Chicken Council reporting that 1.25 billion chicken wings will be consumed this weekend – maybe all on Super Bowl Sunday – I thought it appropriate to help you eat some chicken during the game.

I have not tried the recipe below. It is from Pam Miller at Single Leaf in Fair Play. She suggests pairing it with her winery’s 2009 Reserve Cabernet.

 Ginger Spiced “Legs”

24 chicken drumsticks

1 C soy sauce

1/3 C sesame oil

½ C sesame mustard

3 T fresh lemon juice

2C fresh bread crumbs

1 T chopped fresh ginger root

2 tsp chopped fresh garlic

Salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste

Marinate the drumsticks overnight in the soy sauce in the refrigerator.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Drain the chicken and place in rows on a large baking sheet. Using a pastry brush, brush each drumstick with a thin coating of sesame oil.

Whisk the mustard and lemon juice together and brush generously over each drumstick.

Combine the bread crumbs, ginger, and the garlic and sprinkle evenly over the top and the sides of each drumstick. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Bake 1 hour, covering with aluminum foil if the drumsticks get too brown. Serve warm or at room temperature.

By Emma Jacobs, NPR

A new casino set to open in Atlantic City, N.J., has announced it will set term limits for its front-line staff. When employees’ terms run out, they’ll have to go through the hiring process again. The casino says the policy will keep its service fresh. Others say the company is taking advantage of a tough job market.

From bellhops to dealers, employees of the new casino — called Revel — will be hired for terms from four to six years. After that, they have to reapply for their jobs and compete against other candidates.

Revel declined to make anyone available for an interview. In a written statement, the company asserts that its employment policy will help it “attract the most highly professional people who are inspired by a highly competitive work environment.”

But it’s an unusual way to go. Many who work in employment law or advocacy say they’ve never heard of anything like this before.

“What they’ve done here is set up a system that puts their good performers through a gauntlet of having to compete with people who have no record of performance,” says Alice Ballard, a prominent employment attorney who works out of Philadelphia.

Ballard says anyone can be fired from his or her job. But she thinks the casino’s policy is more problematic.

“Why would you take your good performers and put them through that competitive process,” she asks, “if you aren’t trying to get rid of a good performer for some other reason?”

Ballard thinks that “other reason” is probably age. To her, this reapplication process looks like a low-profile way for the casino to regularly weed out older employees.

Read the whole story

By Michelle Higgins, New York Times

While throngs of tailgaters chug Bud Light and devour Buffalo wings near the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, and millions of other football fans gather in front of their TVs to watch the Super Bowl this year, in-the-know travelers will be sitting down to meals at some of the hardest-to-get-into restaurants in the country, skiing down empty slopes and zipping through Disney World without the usual lines.

If you’re willing to skip the game, set for Sunday, here are areas where you aren’t likely to run into much competition.

Restaurants

Opentable.com, the restaurant reservation site, typically seats half the number of reservations on Super Bowl Sunday that it does on the Sundays before or after. That’s a bigger drop than on Oscars night.

“Super Bowl is without a doubt the single least-busy night of the year,” Mario Batali, whose restaurants include Del Posto in New York and Osteria Mozza in Los Angeles, said in an e-mail. With few exceptions, he added, “you can get into any of my restos with probably less than a week’s notice.” (It helps that the Super Bowl is scheduled to begin at 6:30pm Eastern time, just in time for dinner.)

Read the whole story

By Priya Guha

Around the world, nations are looking for ways to accelerate their recovery from the global recession. While the tactics may be different, the strategy is the same: encourage robust, sustainable growth.

In the United Kingdom, a central plank of our plan for growth is a reduction in the corporate tax rate. It is an approach that we believe will encourage entrepreneurship and attract foreign investment, without damaging our important social safety net.

As it stands now, our corporate tax rate – 26 percent – is already the lowest among the G7 nations. (The United States, at 35 percent, ranks second highest, after Japan.) Over the next three years, the government plans to reduce the rate even further, to 23 percent.

Our corporate tax scheme is one of the reasons that international analysts and publications have rated the United Kingdom among the world’s best places to start a business. Starting a business in the United Kingdom takes on average 13 days; in other countries of Europe, the average is more than a month. The combination of low taxes and streamlined regulations means an entrepreneur’s good idea can get to market and start creating jobs more quickly.

Entrepreneurship and innovation are our path back to the top. If we are at the cutting edge, the jobs lost in the global recession can be replaced by ones in entirely new industrial sectors. As one example, we are already one of the world’s largest players in clean energy: there were more offshore wind facilities installed in the United Kingdom last year than in all of Europe. Clean energy is an area where we have developed quite a bit of expertise, and we’re keen to share it with partners in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

Priya Guha is the United Kingdom consul general in San Francisco.

Read the whole story

• Packers QB Aaron Rodgers will make his debut at the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am next week. For the past two years he’s had throngs of followers when he played the American Century Championship in Stateline at Edgewood Tahoe.

• Bona Fide HQ (1069 Magua St., No. 4, Meyers) is hosting an evening of art, music, and community Feb. 4 from 5:30-7:30pm. New Work, Old Friends, Live Jazz is a reception for local artist Kit Night featuring more than 50 of her original oil paintings. The event is free.

• Here is next week’s El Dorado-Tahoe and Sierra roadwork schedules provided by Caltrans.

• The El Dorado County website will be down starting at noon Feb. 4. When it will be back up is not known.

• Tom Quinn, Tahoe Regional Planning Agency board member from 1992-95, was appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown to the Little Hoover Commission. It is not a paid position. The commission investigates government operations and makes recommendations to the Legislature and governor.

By Kathryn Reed

Lake Tahoe Airport’s new hangar in relation to the old one is like comparing a penthouse to an ordinary hotel room.

That’s how Michael Golden of Mountain West Aviation described the executive hangar that is on the north end of the property. While he wouldn’t disclose the exact cost of the building, it was several hundred thousand dollars.

Having such a facility in South Lake Tahoe means airplane owners who have bigger planes and want them stored out of the elements will be able to do so in Tahoe. In the past, passengers were dropped off and the flight crew would go to Reno to store the plane until called upon to pick up the people.

The executive hangar at Lake Tahoe Airport allows larger planes to be covered. Photo/Provided

“There are customers during celebrity golf who want their plane in a hangar, but this is more for the itinerant traveler who doesn’t want their plane out in the elements. Ice and snow do not mix well with plane travel,” Golden told Lake Tahoe News.

Summer sun and planes is not a good combo either. That’s why it’s expected the hangar is likely to be used year-round.

Size of planes would dictate how many the space could hold. It could fit one big executive jet, or a mix of turbo props – it all depends.

“We would prefer someone to rent it out year-round, but we also know there is a market for people who want their plane in a hangar while visiting,” Golden said. “And if it’s successful, we’ll build another one.”

The airport has other hangars that are owned by the city. If looking to the right of the runway from the deck of the terminal, those are the smaller, city hangars. Golden’s executive hangar is to the left, past his office.

When Golden took over the fixed base operations in December 2007, part of the lease agreement was to eventually build the hangar. What was there before was so poorly designed that the door opened in the back so a plane could never access it. Instead, it was rented out for storage. An adjacent building had been used for weapons training for South Lake Tahoe police officers.

Both those buildings are gone. The footprint is not identical, but the coverage is the same. Most of the scrap from the old building was recycled.

The new facility has high-intensity, low-voltage throughout. Each wall panel has solid foam as insulation between the metal and outside. The five heaters hanging from the ceiling act as thermal deicing units. Any water coming off the plane goes into a floor drain where there is a water-oil separator.

The whole point is the planes will be more than protected from Mother Nature. The warmth will keep all the parts in working order.

While Mountain West has a deicer, it’s expensive to use. But it is a tool Golden envisions will be useful if commercial service resumes.

Lake Tahoe Community College’s accreditation has been reaffirmed for another six years by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.

The accrediting commission was in South Lake Tahoe last October to evaluate the two-year school.

LTCC has until Oct. 15 to demonstrate that it has addressed the commission’s five recommendations. The recommendations include:continuing LTCC’s current planning effort using the Educational Master Plan to drive the technology, facility and human resources plans; adding more quantitative measurements to the college’s documents to help with assessment of how well the college is meeting its objectives; building on the work done in course student learning outcomes and accelerate the SLO assessment processes for programs and institution outcomes to meet the fall 2012 accreditation requirements; consistently and formally evaluate all of the college’s core systems and processes, including governance, budgeting, communication, planning, and decision-making; and analyze staffing in the administration area and make sure the president’s job does not include one-third of the vice president of Business responsibility.

The commission is also concerned about the loss of income resulting from the end of the Good Neighbor Policy between California and Nevada. The commission wants LTCC to provide information on the effect of this policy change.

On Feb. 5, the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office patrol division will have a DUI checkpoint in the Spanish Springs area of Sparks. This DUI checkpoint will be a multi-agency partnership with the Reno Police Department, Nevada Highway Patrol, Sparks Police Department, Washoe County School Police, University of Nevada Police Department, and the Storey County Sheriff’s Office.

The DUI campaign is made possible by grant funding received from the Nevada Department of Public Safety/Office of Traffic Safety.

Historically, Super Bowl Sunday brings an increase of impaired drivers to the nation’s roadways. This typically causes an increase in accidents involving DUI drivers.

The public is reminded to plan accordingly if they’ve had any alcoholic beverages. Never trust a person who says they drank the least. If a person consumes any amount of alcohol, they shouldn’t drive. Alcohol impairs a person’s judgment and attention. Be responsible and consider transportation options available to avoid driving while impaired. Some options are securing a designated sober driver, public transportation or a taxi service.