A pickup worth of food and toys was gathered by LTVA. Photo/Provided

To the community,

The Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority recently conducted a weeklong “Food and Toy Drive and Drop for Christmas Cheer”. The result was a full pickup load of donated food and toys, as well as cash in excess of $1,800.

We were overwhelmed by the generous response from the Tahoe South community and want to thank the many individuals and business representatives who drove through the parking lot of the California visitor center and dropped goods into the barrels loaned to us by South Tahoe Refuse.

It was a heartwarming example of locals helping locals during the holidays.

Sue Barton, deputy director Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority

By Adam Satariano, Bloomberg

Diana Dawson has over the years bought her twin children digital cameras, e-book readers and media players as Christmas presents. This holiday season, she’s covering those bases with one device: a tablet computer.

“They do it all,” Dawson said outside an Apple Inc. store in Walnut Creek after buying iPads for her now 27-year-old daughters.

Dawson’s purchasing underscores the changes roiling the consumer-electronics market. While the industry once benefited from year-end sales in categories from cameras to printers to desktop personal computers, this holiday period brings the clearest signs yet that shoppers are focusing on fewer gadgets. Tablets and smartphones are now the Swiss Army knives of technology, tackling an array of tasks once performed by multiple gizmos.

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By KOLO-TV

INCLINE VILLAGE — The Washoe County sheriff’s deputies are investigating a series of residential and vehicle burglaries that have occurred during the last month in the Incline Village area.

According to investigators, there have been at least a dozen vehicle burglaries and eight residential burglaries in various areas of Incline Village since the beginning of November. The residences all appear to have been unoccupied at the time of the burglaries.

Investigators believe there is more than one burglar, or group of burglars, committing these crimes.

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By Laura Dattaro, Weather Channel

When it snows in Utah, Tim Garrett likes to watch the storm. He looks outside, watching the blurry mess of white fill the window, the Wasatch Mountains in the background. But he also looks at his computer screen, where he sees a live feed of photographs of tiny, individual snowflakes, each shot from three different angles as it makes its way to the ground.

Garrett is a University of Utah physicist who founded the Alta Project, an effort to photograph falling snowflakes in real-time to help improve models used to forecast winter storms. Along with a student at the university, Garrett developed the Multi-Angle Snowflake Camera (MASC), which, so far, has taken millions of photos of snowflakes at the Alta Ski Resort, along with data on how fast the flakes fall.

“This is an instrument that I think is revealing an aspect of nature in a way that it has not been seen before,” Garrett told weather.com. “I mean for me, what we’re seeing is astounding. I really did not appreciate the variety of what is out there until we actually started measuring it.”

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• The January issue of Travel + Leisure magazine has a story about Lake Tahoe ski resorts.

• Steve Robinson, the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources rep on the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency Governing Board, attended his last meeting Dec. 18. His replacement has not been named.

• Rachael Woods is now senior manager of communications at Northstar.

• The International Association of Firefighters Association Local No. 2139 North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District recently purchased pet oxygen masks. These specially designed masks can be used on conscious pets suffering from smoke inhalation and pets that need to be resuscitated after losing consciousness from exposure to toxic fumes.

• Truckee Transit has a new number — (530) 550.7451.

By Barbara Barte Osborn, Sacramento Bee

TRUCKEE — A Truckee juvenile was arrested Wednesday after allegedly confessing to more than a dozen mail thefts and four burglaries the day before.

On Tuesday, the Truckee Police Department received more than a dozen reports in the Glenshire subdivision related to mail tampering. Additionally, two businesses and two residences were burglarized.

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By Meagan Clark, International Business Times

U.S. infrastructure — roads, bridges, rail, drinking water, waste water, solid waste and more—is close to flunking according to a recent assessment from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Once every four years, America’s civil engineers assess the nation’s infrastructure with an A to F report card. The engineers grade eight major categories: capacity, condition, funding, future need, operation, maintenance, public safety, resilience and innovation. This year’s grade average of all eight categories is a modest improvement, but hardly one to cheer about — it’s a D+ compared to a D in 2009. The nation’s infrastructure GPA has averaged in the D’s since 1998 for delayed maintenance and underinvestment across most categories.

“While the modest progress is encouraging, it is clear that we have a significant backlog of overdue maintenance across our infrastructure systems, a pressing need for modernization, and an immense opportunity to create reliable, long-term funding sources to avoid wiping out our recent gains,” the report states.

Solid waste earned the highest grade, a B-.

City and state efforts to repair and update some of the nation’s most vulnerable bridges improved the bridge category, and short-term federal funding improved several categories. However, improvements are not all due to government. Increased private investment for efficiency and connectivity helped rail’s grade improve.

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By USSA

VAL GARDENA, Italy — Bode Miller (Franconia, N.H.) charged through difficult visibility on the upper half of the Saslong super G and made an incredibly athletic move at the final gate to lead the U.S. Ski Team with eighth in Val Gardena on Dec. 20.

Uncharacteristically warm temperatures in the Italian valley caused the fog to blanket the upper section of the course, creating problems for numerous skiers including Ted Ligety (Park City), who did not finish the race.

Norwegian Aksel Lund Svindal won for the third time since 2009 to further pad his Audi FIS Alpine World Cup overall lead.

Travis Ganong (Squaw Valley) jumped from the 41st start position to finish 16th for his career-best super G result.

“My super G is in a really, really good spot right now. In training it’s always fast. Today, I didn’t think about anything and kind of just skied,” Ganong said. “I didn’t push as hard as I could have, but I made it to the bottom and it was good, solid skiing.”

Andrew Weibrecht (Lake Placid, N.Y.) and Erik Fisher (Middleton, Idaho) also earned World Cup points with 21st and 28th, respectively.

The bear-people issue in Incline Village has gotten so bad that a couple filed a report with Washoe County sheriff’s investigators saying they have received death threats because they reported a problem bear to state officials.

According to the Reno Gazette-Journal, Nevada Department of Wildlife trapped a 263-pound male black bear outside Richard and Adrienne Evans’ house on Dec. 13 and later euthanized it.

A trap was set because the bear had tried multiple times this month to get into one of the Evans’ vehicles and finally did so last week. The bear had been captured and released earlier this fall.

 — Lake Tahoe News staff report

By Nick Zaccardi, NBC

Due to lack of snow, the third of five Olympic selection events in ski and snowboard halfpipe and slopestyle was moved from Northstar to Breckenridge, Colo.

Breckenridge, which hosted last week’s first selection event, will now host the Jan. 8-12 stop, too.

“While the snow conditions are great at Northstar and the region is now experiencing much colder temperatures, we all mutually felt that it was too great a risk for the resort given the massive amounts of snowmaking required to build the venue,” U.S. Ski and Snowboard Vice President Calum Clark said.

The second Olympic selection event is taking place in Copper Mountain, Colo., this weekend.