Twenty-eight South Shore nonprofits will share $85,000 from funds raised during the annual celebrity golf tournament at Edgewood Tahoe.

Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority in partnership with NBC Sports and American Century Investments had already handed out $60,000 during tournament week to area high schools, Soroptimist International of South Lake Tahoe and others.

Local cancer support programs involving the Barton Foundation and the South Lake Tahoe Cancer League received $13,000 each. Tahoe Youth & Family Services and the Lake Tahoe Boys & Girls Club each received $8,000. Christmas Cheer and Live Violence Free each got $5,000. Grants of $4,000 went to Bijou PTA, Kahle Community Center and Tahoe Arts Project. Programs receiving $500-$3,500 include Lake Tahoe Education Foundation, Whittell Boosters, Assistance League, Kiwanis Club of Lake Tahoe, Lake Tahoe Community College, Suicide Prevention Network, Food Bank of El Dorado County, Tahoe Community Food Pantry, South Tahoe High School Performing Arts Booster Association, Carmel Senior Living/Kelly Ridge, Douglas County Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue, El Dorado County Search and Rescue, Leadership Lake Tahoe, Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care, Tahoe Douglas Rotary, Tahoe Magic Inc., Tahoe Senior Plaza, and Lake Tahoe Shining Stars.

The 25th annual American Century Championship will be July 15-20.

By Paul Rogers, San Jose Mercury News

Twenty of the nation’s top climate scientists have sent a letter to Gov. Jerry Brown, telling him that his plans supporting increased use of the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” will increase pollution and run counter to his efforts to cut California’s global warming emissions.

The letter is the latest example of the increased pressure that environmentalists and others concerned about climate change have been putting on Brown in recent months. Their argument: The governor can’t say he wants to reduce global warming while expanding fossil fuel development in California.

“If what we’re trying to do is stop using the sky as a waste dump for our carbon pollution, and if we’re trying to transform our energy system, the way to do that is not by expanding our fossil fuel infrastructure,” said Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University.

Caldeira signed the letter along with other prominent climate scientists, including James Hansen, the former head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Richard Houghton, acting president of Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts; and physicist Michael Mann, a professor of meteorology at Penn State University.

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El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office has been awarded a two-year $250,000 Justice and Mental Health Collaboration Program grant.

The money from the U.S. Department of Justice will be used to assist the Crisis Intervention Team.

The CIT was originally developed based upon the national recognition that law enforcement needed to take an alternate approach when dealing with the mentally ill. The approach was an attempt to try to reduce dangerous encounters with law enforcement and the non-productive housing of the mentally ill within jail facilities.

The CIT duties include: Assessing and identifying the needs of subjects with mental illness or special needs such as autism, dementia, brain trauma and addictions; identifying and referring subjects to resources not commonly known or used during the routine handling of calls for service; case management and follow-up; the maintenance of contacts; providing briefing training to co-workers; and attending monthly multi-disciplinary team meetings; along with their regular patrol duties.

The grant also includes providing training to all EDSO deputies, other first responders, and county employees who have frequent contact with the public in El Dorado and neighboring counties.

On Thursday, one bear was put down and another caught with the goal to release it on Friday.

Nevada Department of Wildlife officials said because of the extent of the injuries to the Incline Village bear it had to be euthanized. The animal could not use its back legs, which may have been the result of being hit by a vehicle.

In Reno on Nov. 14 a 3-year-old bear was trapped near the Truckee River on Livermore Drive. It will be released Nov. 15 near Spooner Summit with the full aversive conditioning treatment which consists of rubber buck shot fired at the bear and the use of Karelian bear dogs chasing and usually treeing the bears.

“We give the bears a bad experience in the hope that they do not come back,” NDOW biologist Carl Lackey said in a press release.

— Lake Tahoe News staff report

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Updated: Nov. 15 10:25am

By Kathryn Reed

All Lukins Brothers Water Company customers are on a “boil water” order because coliform was discovered at one of the test sites.

Coliform is found naturally in the environment.

According to the EPA, “Total coliforms are a group of closely related, mostly harmless bacteria that live in soil and water as well as the gut of animals.”

Each month Lukins runs tests on its wells and other sites within the system. Samples taken Tuesday and Wednesday both showed coliform at one of the sites. The results of the second test came back Nov. 14.

All of the 963 customers are receiving hand-delivered notices today.

“We are chlorinating the entire system right now,” Jennifer Lukins told Lake Tahoe News on Thursday afternoon. The process started within an hour of being notified of the results.

The chlorination program will run two to three weeks. If people smell chlorine, Lukins advises people to run their cold water to flush their individual water lines.

According to Danny Lukins, this is the first time the South Shore water system has had a positive coliform sample. This is why the company believes this is an isolated case.

Per California Department of Public Health regulations, the “boil water” order is in effect until Lukins has two tests that are negative. The water will be tested again Nov. 18 and Nov. 19. This means the soonest the “boil water” order would be lifted is Nov. 20.

More information will be available on Lukins website. Here is a link to Lukins’ service area.

By Louis Sahagun, Los Angeles Times

Horticulturists recently announced that they had successfully cloned a genetic replica of an ailing 130-year-old giant sequoia planted by conservationist John Muir in the 1880s on his ranch in Martinez.

And many more are apparently on the way, they say.

If all goes according to plan, the first clone nurtured in a Michigan laboratory will be shipped within a year to California for planting at Muir’s homestead in the East Bay, said David Milarch, co-founder of the nonprofit Archangel Ancient Tree Archive.

Muir, regarded as the father of the modern conservation movement, returned from a Sierra Nevada trip with the original seedling wrapped in a damp handkerchief.

Read the whole story

By Lyndsey Layton, Washington Post

When a student at Elliston Elementary in rural Montana logs onto her laptop for a remote lesson over the Internet, Tressa Graveley must ration the Web for the rest of her tiny school. The teacher tells other students to shut down their browsers and stop streaming video or there won’t be enough bandwidth for the eighth-grader’s lesson.

Elliston Elementary is on the wrong side of a new digital divide in this country. The school, decked out with laptops and whiteboards, hoped to harness the power of the Internet to break out of its isolation. But its connection is too slow to allow the 15 students and two teachers to fully use everything the digital world offers — videos, music, graphics, interactive programs.

But it’s not just rural school systems that are cut off from the digital world. An estimated 72 percent of public schools — in the countryside, suburbs and cities — lack the broadband speeds necessary to fully access the Internet, according to Education Superhighway, a nonprofit organization that wants to improve digital access in schools.

“Wiring schools has brought the Internet to the principal’s office or maybe a teacher’s desk,” said Evan Marwell, the chief executive of the group. “That’s five million administrators and teachers. But we need to move this technology into the learning process, and that means 55 million students.”

President Obama agrees, and proposed in June that all public schools receive high-speed broadband and wireless Internet service within five years. “In a country where we expect free WiFi with our coffee, why shouldn’t we have it in our schools?” Obama said when he announced the initiative at a school in North Carolina.

The plan, called ConnectED, calls for the Department of Education to train teachers in the best ways to use technology in classroom instruction, an area that many agree is weak.

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Retailers throughout the state are receiving letters from the California State Board of Equalization notifying them about upcoming visits from Statewide Compliance and Outreach Program teams.

Truckee is on that list.

SCOP visits are intended to educate retailers about properly reporting sales and use tax, increase compliance with tax laws, and maintain outreach efforts to assure taxpayers the state’s tax system is fair and equal for all Californians.

The BOE has found nearly 98 percent of the California businesses operate with the correct permits. However, noncompliance contributes to more than $2 billion in uncollected sales and use taxes.

• Nate Holland, seven-time X-Games champ and Olympic snowboarder, has signed on as Rahlves’ Banzai Tour snowboard ambassador.

• Grammy Award winning island music superstars Shaggy & Ravon and the legendary group Black Uhuru will headline separate shows at the Lake Tahoe Fall Harvest Reggae Jam at MontBleu in Stateline on Nov. 19 and Nov. 29.

• TransWorld Snowboarding magazine ranked Squaw Valley the sixth top resort in the country and No. 10 for top pipes.

• El Dorado County Deputy District Attorney Brandon Erickson received Veteran of the Year award. Erickson served as a sergeant in the Army National Guard and was awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

• Powder magazine is doing a four-part series on Tahoe starting in December. Check out this video for a tease:

By Amanda L. Chan, Huffington Post

If you’re trying to resist the mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese and bacon at the buffet, you might want to try filling your plate with fruits and vegetables first, a study suggests.

Researchers at Cornell University found that when people ate healthy foods first at a buffet, they consumed fewer high-calorie foods later on in the meal.

“The first three food items a person encountered in the buffet comprised 66 percent of their total plate, regardless of whether the items were high or low-calorie foods,” study researcher Brian Wansink, a behavioral economist and professor at the University, said in a statement.

The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, included 124 people who were eating at one of two breakfast buffets. In the first buffet, healthy foods like low-fat yogurt, low-fat granola and fruit were presented first. In the second, unhealthier foods such as cheesy eggs, bacon and fried potatoes were presented first. All the diners were told they could only make one trip to the buffet.

Researchers found that nearly all the participants offered the fruit first — 86 percent — took it. But when the fruit was offered last, only about half — 54 percent — took it.

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