Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 36
PHOENIX (AP) — The first heat wave of the season is bringing triple-digit temperatures earlier than usual to much of the U.S. Southwest, where forecasters warned residents Tuesday to brace for dangerously hot conditions. By Wednesday much of an area stretching from southeast California to central Arizona will see "easily their hottest" weather since last September, and record daily highs will be in jeopardy, the National Weather Service said. Excessive heat warnings were issued for Wednesday morning through Friday evening for parts of s...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — An avalanche roared through a section of expert trails at a California ski resort near Lake Tahoe on Wednesday, killing one person and injuring another, as a major storm with snow and gusty winds moved into the region, authorities said. The avalanche prompted Palisades Tahoe to close 30 minutes after it opened, and search crews combed the area to see if anyone was injured or trapped. Sgt. David Smith, a spokesperson for the Placer County sheriff, said hours later that one person, a male, died and another person sustained n...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — Two veteran California pilots were killed over the weekend when their World War II-era planes collided in mid-air while preparing to land just after finishing first and second in a title race at the National Championship Air Races north of Reno. Officials identified the victims of Sunday's crash as Chris Rushing of Thousand Oaks and Nick Macy, 67, of Tulelake. Race officials said they were cooperating with the National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Aviation Administration and local authorities to determine the c...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — A tiny Nevada toad at the center of a legal battle over a geothermal power project has officially been declared an endangered species after U.S. wildlife officials temporarily listed it on a rarely-used emergency basis last spring. "This ruling makes final the listing of the Dixie Valley toad," the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in a formal rule published Friday in the Federal Register. The spectacled, quarter-sized amphibian "is currently at risk of extinction throughout its range primarily due to the approval and c...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — Free parking, as precious to some skiers as virgin mountain powder, has returned to one Lake Tahoe resort but not before its corporate owner waged an expensive year-long legal battle with two season-pass holders. An 80-year-old attorney and another man whose first job out of college was parking cars at the mountain now owned by Vail Resorts filed separate lawsuits when Northstar California replaced traditional free parking with $20 daily fees ($40 weekends) — after they'd purchased their passes. Unlike visitors from San Fra...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — A botanist hired by a company planning to mine one of the most promising deposits of lithium in the world believes a rare desert wildflower at the Nevada site should be protected under the Endangered Species Act, a move that could jeopardize the project, new documents show. The unusually candid disclosure is included in more than 500 pages of emails obtained by conservationists and reviewed by The Associated Press regarding Ioneer Ltd.'s plans to dig near the only population of Tiehm's buckwheat known to exist on earth. Six m...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — A sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court denied a rural Nevada church's request late Friday to strike down as unconstitutional a 50-person cap on worship services as part of the state's ongoing response to the coronavirus. In a 5-4 decision, the high court refused to grant the request from the Christian church east of Reno to be subjected to the same COVID-19 restrictions in Nevada that allow casinos, restaurants and other businesses to operate at 50% of capacity with proper social distancing. Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley a...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — A federal judge has upheld the U.S. Forest Service's authority to keep a 250-mile (400-kilometer) motorcycle race out of sage grouse habitat in Nevada's high desert, rejecting a lawsuit by off-road vehicle enthusiasts who argued the agency illegally short-circuited the environmental review process. The lawsuit filed in December 2018 challenged Forest Service rules barring off-road travel within 4-mile (6.5-km) buffers around bi-state grouse breeding grounds between March 1 and June 30 in the Mono Basin along the C...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — Conservationists say the Trump administration's approval of exploratory drilling for oil in sage grouse habitat on federal land in eastern Nevada violates its own protection guidelines and ignores concerns raised by scientists about potential harm to the bird imperiled across much of the West. Two groups are asking the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's state director to at least temporarily halt the Western Oil Exploration Co.'s plans to drill two oil wells on public lands about 40 miles (64 kilometers) west of Ely. "BLM can't...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — The Trump administration announced final approval Monday of the largest solar energy project in the U.S. and one of the biggest in the world despite objections from conservationists who say it will destroy thousands of acres of habitat critical to the survival of the threatened Mojave desert tortoise in Nevada. The $1 billion Gemini solar and battery storage project about 30 miles (48 kilometers) northeast of Las Vegas is expected to produce 690 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 260,000 households — and annua...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — What if a neighborhood precinct was voting in Nevada's presidential caucuses and nobody came? Democrats in one county were left scratching their heads about the possibility they had stumbled onto a phantom precinct during the party's third-in-the-nation presidential contest last week. Not only did no one cast a ballot during early voting in precinct No. 7321, but nobody from there showed up to participate at Saturday's caucus site at the University of Nevada, Reno, where hundreds gathered from six other precincts in Washoe Cou...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — An Australian mining company has agreed to a moratorium on new activities at a planned lithium mine in Nevada in exchange for conservationists dropping a lawsuit to protect a rare desert wildflower they say doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. The Center for Biological Diversity filed notice in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas on Friday that it was voluntarily withdrawing its lawsuit against the Trump administration seeking a ban on all drilling and road building at the site on federal land as a result of the newly r...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — President Donald Trump’s pick to become the next U.S. energy secretary pledged Thursday to uphold his predecessor’s promise to begin removing weapons-grade plutonium the government secretly shipped last year to a security site in southern Nevada. Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette also said under questioning from Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., at a committee hearing on his nomination in Washington D.C. that the department won’t take any action to restart efforts to build a nuclear waste repository at Nevada’s Yucca...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — Scientists are keeping a close eye on a swarm of dozens of small earthquakes that have been recorded in recent days in Sun Valley north of Reno, along with a larger quake earlier this month south of Reno. A sequence of 60 earthquakes that began in Sun Valley early Wednesday were too small to be felt, said Graham Kent, a geophysicist who directs the Nevada Seismological Lab at the University of Nevada, Reno. "These sequences like we are seeing in Sun Valley can either subside or escalate. We've seen it happen both ways in N...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — NASA has launched the final stage of a four-year effort to develop a national traffic management system for drones, testing them in cities for the first time beyond the operator's line of sight as businesses look in the future to unleash the unmanned devices in droves above busy streets and buildings. Multiple drones took to the air at the same time above downtown Reno this week in a series of simulations testing emerging technology that someday will be used to manage hundreds of thousands of small unmanned commercial a...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — Forensic genealogists followed a trail built on decades-old DNA evidence to help identify a woman whose body was found near a Lake Tahoe hiking trail in 1982 and her killer who confessed to three other murders, investigators said Tuesday. Washoe County Sheriff Darin Balaam announced he has closed the investigation into the shooting death of the victim identified for the first time publicly on Tuesday as Mary Silvani. She was born in Pontiac, Michigan, in 1948 and attended high school in Detroit before moving to California. B...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — The longtime director of the international center at the University of Nevada in Reno is the latest woman to accuse Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias of sexual misconduct. Carina Black said in interviews this week that Arias boxed her in against a wall inside an elevator at the university in 1998 and then tried to kiss her. She said it happened after she spent a day escorting Arias to meetings and an evening speaking engagement at the university. "I just smacked him in the face and pushed h...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — The U.S. Department of Energy revealed on Wednesday that it secretly shipped weapons-grade plutonium from South Carolina to a nuclear security site in Nevada months ago despite the state's protests. The Justice Department notified a federal judge in Reno that the government trucked in the radioactive material to store at the site 70 miles (113 kilometers) north of Las Vegas before Nevada first asked a court to block the move in November. Department lawyers said in a nine-page filing that the previously classified information a...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — The city of Reno confirmed the first successful deliveries by multiple drones steered by a single operator under a federal program fast-tracking regulatory approval for unmanned aerial vehicles nationwide. City officials announced Wednesday that Flirtey recently simulated the delivery of automated external defibrillators for cardiac arrest patients under the watch of the Federal Aviation Administration in conjunction with the administration's Drone Integration Pilot Program. The 3-year program is intended to accelerate the s...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — A federal judge has thrown out a defamation lawsuit a Western art collector filed against a prestigious auction house and the owner of a Reno gallery who claimed an early 20th century cowboy painting he sold for $750,000 was a fake. The judge in Reno dismissed the lawsuit last week against Peter Stremmel Galleries, the Coeur d'Alene Art Auction of Nevada and its partner Mark Overby of Hayden, Idaho. Gerald Peters, who owns galleries in New York City and Santa Fe, New Mexico, said in the lawsuit filed last year that the d...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — A former Tesla Inc. employee at the electric car maker's battery plant in Nevada is seeking at least $1 million in defamation damages after it accused him of sabotage, hacking into computers and stealing confidential information leaked to the media. Lawyers for Martin Tripp filed a counterclaim in federal court this week alleging any damages Tesla incurred were caused or contributed to by Tesla's "own negligence, acts or omissions." Tripp alleges that between $150 million and $200 million worth of battery module parts for T...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — Lighter winds brought some relief Wednesday to crews working to contain a wildfire in northern Nevada that is so big it can be seen from space. The flames were nearly halfway contained and no populated areas were threatened, the National Fire Interagency Center said. Investigators say they suspect Fourth of July campers started the blaze that has burned nearly 700 square miles (1,813 square kilometers) in a remote area about 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of the Idaho border. But the specific cause of the fire first reported o...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — It was an uncharacteristically urgent demand at a U.S. Superfund site where the cleanup of an abandoned World War II-era mine has dragged on for two decades and progress is measured, at best, in years. Atlantic Richfield, owner of the former Anaconda copper mine, was suddenly halting the free home delivery of bottled water it's provided since 2004 to about 100 residences on a neighboring Native American reservation in Nevada where scientists continue to track the movement of a poisonous plume of groundwater. "It is i...
SPARKS, Nev. (AP) — Southern Nevada rancher and state's rights activist Cliven Bundy said Friday a judge in Las Vegas did the U.S. government a favor last month when she threw out his criminal case stemming from an armed standoff with federal agents at his Bunkerville ranch in April 2014. Bundy, 71, told a gathering of the Independent American Party of Nevada's state convention in Sparks that he would have preferred the trial to continue because he knows he would have been acquitted of any crimes in a decades-old feud with the U.S. Bureau of La...
RENO, Nev. (AP) — Lindsay Weiss once lost her cellphone and got it back, so she and a friend knew what they had to do when they discovered a camera during the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert — even though it meant giving up their coveted shady seat for a musical performance. The friends snapped a quick selfie and took the device to lost-and-found, so the owner could claim it and the pair could "forever be a part of their journey," Weiss said. "Losing something out there on the playa makes its mark on your trip," she said of the sprawl...
