By Ian Whitaker, Las Vegas Sun

John L. Smith

Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist John L. Smith announced his resignation Tuesday, days after the newspaper’s new editor said publicly that Smith had been barred from writing about the R-J‘s new owner, Sheldon Adelson.

On Saturday, editor Keith Moyer told a meeting of the Society of Professional Journalists at UNLV that Smith would no longer be allowed to write about Adelson “as long as I’m editor,” according to an R-J reporter who tweeted details of the event. Smith had written numerous times about Adelson, including in a December 2015 R-J column following the revelation that the billionaire Las Vegas casino magnate and his family had purchased the paper.

In that column, Smith called Adelson “precisely the wrong person to own this or any newspaper.”

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A 22-year-old Truckee man was arrested early Wednesday on a felony weapons charge.

Mitchell Hunt

Officers got a call early April 27 from someone who said there was a suspicious person in the doorway of a building in the Gateway area of Truckee.

Officers said they found Mitchell Hunt, 22, a large hunting knife concealed inside his jacket. An approximate 10-inch fixed blade hunting knife was booked as evidence.

Sgt. Bob Womack said finding weapons on suspects is not unusual. He said this is the second person in a week who had a knife.

“While both were cooperative, there is always the concern they may have mental health or other issues that present officer safety risks,” Womack said in a statement.

— Lake Tahoe News staff report

By Scott Sonner, AP

RENO – Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval is considering legal action to force the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to pony up some money to pay for roundups of wild horses in the state that have been put on hold because of federal budgetary constraints.

BLM State Director John Ruhs asked agency leaders in Washington, D.C., earlier this month to approve funding for a series of gathers in northeast Nevada’s Elko County where ranchers are being asked to curtail livestock grazing due to lingering drought.

The federal agency currently plans no large-scale roundups in Nevada this year because of budget shortfalls driven largely by the cost of housing more than 45,000 mustangs now in government holding facilities across the country.

Sandoval says if BLM’s parent Interior Department refuses to provide the necessary funding, he’ll “pursue all legal options” to protect Nevada’s ranchers and rural communities.

The Republican governor in a statement Tuesday said the BLM has “underfunded the wild horse program for years.”

“For too long, Nevada has been forced to compensate for the federal government’s inability to manage these growing populations without the appropriate resources,” Sandoval said.

Nevada is home to nearly 28,000 wild horses — more than half of the 47,000 estimated in 10 western states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming.

BLM argues the range can sustain less than half that many — about 12,000 in Nevada and 26,000 nationally.

Sandoval said BLM’s latest estimates indicate there are more than 5,000 wild horses in a series of herd management areas in southern Elko County alone — three times more than BLM maintains is appropriate for that region.

Nevada Department of Agriculture Director Jim Barbee said ranchers could face anywhere from a 25 percent reduction to elimination of grazing altogether on federal lands in Elko County where they have permits to graze their cattle through the end of the year. He said those restrictions could have as much as a $1.8 million negative impact on Elko County’s economy.

Nevada Department of Wildlife Director Tony Wasley said many of the areas with the horses contain habitat critical to the greater sage grouse at risk of being degraded.

Deniz Bolbol of the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign said private livestock grazing on public land far outweighs the negative impacts mustangs have on sage grouse habitat.

A severe thunderstorm warning has been issued for the West Slope of El Dorado County and part of Amador County through 4:15pm April 27.

The National Weather Service in Sacramento says the storm could produce quarter-size hail and damaging winds in excess of 60 mph. Funnel clouds may be possible with this storm.

Deadly lightning and heavy rain are also forecast.

“Intense thunderstorm lines can occasionally produce brief tornadoes and widespread significant wind damage,” the Weather Service said in a statement.

In the basin, expect rain, snow and snow pellet showers.

“Weather will remain relatively unsettled through the weekend as systems continue to drop into the Sierra and western Nevada. The storm moving into the area on Friday and Saturday will bring breezy and cold conditions. More thunderstorms and showers are possible with snow levels around 7,000-7,500 feet,” the Reno NWS said.

— Lake Tahoe News staff report

Improvements to Highway 28 near Incline Village are designed to have multiple benefits – get cyclists and pedestrians off the road, add parking, make it safer for motorists, and improve Lake Tahoe’s clarity.

It all started as a bike path. Construction of the three-plus mile shared-use path from the south end of Incline Village to Sand Harbor State Park is part of the larger Stateline-to-Stateline bike path that will link the Nevada side of the lake. The Incline section starts this summer and will take two to three years to build.

An underpass will be constructed near the Flume Trail. Two parking areas will be put in near the Ponderosa Ranch and Tunnel Creek Café. Centerline rumble strips and emergency roadside turnouts will also be added to Highway 28 for safety reasons.

Water quality improvements include enhanced roadside drainage inlets, sediment filtration systems and erosion control measures.

More than 2½  million vehicles a year travel on Highway 28, mixing with as many as 2,000 pedestrian and bicyclists who park and recreate near the side of the road. This creates safety and accessibility concerns. Between 2006 and 2013,107 crashes occurred in the area; accounting for approximately 25 percent of crashes Highway 28, according to the Nevada Department of Transportation.

About 1 million a year visit this section of Lake Tahoe.

The project will be paid for with federal, state and local dollars.

— Lake Tahoe News staff report

By Nathan Halverson, Reveal

If the rest of the world ate like Americans, the planet would have run out of freshwater 15 years ago, according to the world’s largest food company.

In private, Nestle executives told U.S. officials that the world is on a collision course with doom because Americans eat too much meat, and now, other countries are following suit, according to a secret U.S. report titled “Tour D’Horizon with Nestle: Forget the Global Financial Crisis, the World Is Running Out of Fresh Water.”

Producing a pound of meat requires a tremendous amount of water because farmers use tons of crops such as corn and soy to feed each animal, which require tens of thousands of gallons of water to grow. It is far more efficient when people eat the corn or soy directly.

The planet is a on a “potentially catastrophic” course as billions of people in countries such as India and China begin eating more beef, chicken and pork like their counterparts in Western countries, according to the 2009 report released by WikiLeaks and first reported by Reveal at the Center for Investigative Reporting in a cache of water-related classified documents. The Chinese now eat about half as much meat as Americans, Australians and Europeans, a figure that continues to rapidly rise as more Chinese are lifted out of poverty and into the middle class.

And Nestle – which makes Gerber baby food, Nescafe, Hot Pockets, DiGiorno pizza, Lean Cuisine, Stouffer’s, Nestea, Dreyer’s and Haagen-Dazs ice cream– is deeply concerned.

Here are some of the takeaways, with key quotes from the secret report:

Global water shortages are just around the corner.

“Nestle thinks one-third of the world’s population will be affected by fresh water scarcity by 2025, with the situation only becoming more dire thereafter and potentially catastrophic by 2050.”

Major regions, including in the United States, are being drained of their underground aquifers.

“Problems with be severest in the Middle East, northern India, northern China, and the western United States.”

Excessive meat-eating is driving water depletion.

“Nestle starts by pointing out that a calorie of meat requires 10 times as much water to produce as a calorie of food crops. As the world’s growing middle classes eat more meat, the earth’s water resources will be dangerously squeezed.”

There’s plenty of water to feed everyone a diet that’s not so meat-centric.

“Nestle reckons that the Earth’s maximum sustainable freshwater withdrawals are about 12,500 cubic kilometers per year. In 2008, global freshwater withdrawals reached 6,000 cubic kilometers, or almost half of the potentially available supply. This was sufficient to provide an average 2500 calories per day to the world’s 6.7 billion people, with little per capita meat consumption.”

The American diet is eating the world dry.

“The current U.S. diet provides about 3600 calories per day with substantial meat consumption. If the whole world were to move to this standard, global fresh water resources would be exhausted at a population level of 6 billion, which the world reached in the year 2000.”

This is an even bigger problem now that other countries are eating like America and the global population’s set to grow by 2 billion by 2050.

“There is not nearly enough fresh water available to provide this standard to a global population expected to exceed 9 billion by mid-century.”

So what’s Nestle’s prediction for the future? Think “Mad Max” …

“It is clear that current developed country meat-based diets and patterns of water usage do not provide a blueprint for the planet’s future. Based on present trends, Nestle believes that the world will face a cereals shortfall of as much as 30 percent by 2025. (Nestle) stated it will take a combination of strategies to avert a crisis.”

Why is this the first time you’re hearing this from the world’s largest food company?

“Sensitive to its public image, Nestle has maintained a low profile in discussing solutions and tries not to preach … the firm scrupulously avoids confrontation and polemics, preferring to influence its audience discretely by example.”

By Associated Press

Authorities in Northern California are looking for information in a 35-year-old case involving a woman’s disappearance and death.

The El Dorado County District Attorney’s Office says 28-year-old Debney Lynn Lobanoff was last seen by her husband in December 1981 in their Placerville home. Authorities say they were having marital troubles and her husband said Lobanoff left home with two “biker-type” men.

Fishermen found a woman’s body in July 1982 in Slab Creek Reservoir near Placerville. It was identified as Lobanoff two years later.

The initial investigation ruled out Lobanoff’s husband as a murder suspect.

Authorities say her body was found about 7.5 miles upstream of the bodies of two other women found in June and July 1982.

By Scott Sonner, AP

GARDNERVILLE — Residents of a rural Northern Nevada town are volunteering in the first public-private partnership of its kind providing water for wild horses on the range and shooting the mares with contraceptive darts to help shrink the size of the herd.

Leaders of the Pine Nut Wild Horse Advocates in Gardnerville say their goal is to keep the mustangs off neighborhood lawns and out of government holding pens.

Working with the Bureau of Land Management, the nonprofit group is using the contraceptive vaccine PZP with the help of the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign to try to reduce the herd’s population and eliminate nuisance complaints that could lead to more roundups 50 miles southeast of Reno.

Board member Robin Havens says it’s a commonsense approach that’s much cheaper than housing tens of thousands of mustangs in government corals.

By Kathryn Reed

Millennials are not something to be feared, laughed at or ignored. They are merely the next generation.

These 18- to 34-year-olds are here and they aren’t going anywhere. What they are doing, though, is changing how those in the tourism industry think. And if people aren’t changing their thinking, they are bound to lose out on this burgeoning segment of the population that is hitting the road.

That was part of the message delivered to a packed room at Lake Tahoe Resort Hotel on April 26. Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority and Lake Tahoe South Shore Chamber of Commerce put on the annual three-hour tourism confab.

Millennials are all about the experience and then sharing it – usually via a mobile device on social media. They want authenticity.

“A connected village is the heart of the new economy,” Jason Broadwater said. “The defining characteristic of millennials is digital and social connectivity. Millennials are digital natives. They don’t know a world without it.”

Broadwater is founder and president of the Internet marketing company RevenFlo, which is based in Rock Hill, S.C. He spoke Tuesday about millennials and the new economy.

He said this generation’s priorities when traveling are:

·      Experiencing new culture – 86 percent

·      Local food – 69 percent

·      Partying – 44 percent

·      Shopping – 28 percent.

About 72.2 million millennials live in the United States. California is home to 6 million of them, while baby boomers account for 4 million. California is the No. 1 state for millennials to visit.

Their adolescence has also been extended, with 36 percent of them still living at home. What is different compared to prior generations, according to Broadwater, is that this is not seen as a social failure.

Often their parents are baby boomers. This extension of the familial circle means that generation is redefining what it means to be older.

Millennials also see themselves as being part of a local culture and a global citizen at the same time. They are collaborators who share information and resources. They don’t buy into institutionalized hierarchy.

This also ties into their work lives where many are entrepreneurs and not part of the traditional 9 to 5, Monday-Friday world.

Connectivity is their motto – in terms of work, play and travel.

“They are less territorial. They share everything,” Broadwater said.

To attract them to the South Shore, Broadwater said, “Let the locals tell their stories in an authentic conversational platform.”

By Lindsay Holmes and Anna Almendrala, Huffington Post

If you need any more proof that mental health disorders are a public health issue, look no further than rising suicide rates over the last decade and a half.

Deaths from suicide have increased 24 percent from 1999 to 2014, according to an analysis of Americans aged 5 and up conducted by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While the CDC researchers can’t definitively pin down why the rates are increasing (there are multifarious factors that contribute to mental illness and self-harm), the study’s results are a huge wakeup call: Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S.

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