Businesses in Nevada will pay about $77 more per employee in state unemployment-insurance taxes next year in order to build up the state’s jobless benefits trust fund, which was depleted during the Great Recession as a record number of workers lost their jobs. Nevada has been borrowing money since late 2009 and as of October…

“I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program”—Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama, June 2003. “I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter”—President Obama, August 2009. “Leadership means that the buck stops here. . . . I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit”—Sen. Barack…

Officials have approved an alternative for NV Energy customers who don’t want the new smart meters. The Public Utilities Commission of Nevada says southern Nevada customers opting out can pay $98.75 to install an electric meter, plus $8.14 every month. Northern Nevada customers opting out will pay a $107.66 upfront cost, plus an $8.04 monthly…

Credit for the discovery of the Comstock Lode remains disputed. It is said to have been discovered, in 1857, by Ethan Allen Grosh and Hosea Ballou Grosh, sons of a Pennsylvania minister, trained mineralogists and veterans of the California gold fields. The Grosh brothers occupied a shack along with a Canadian named Richard Bucke, and…

My heartaches as I read from the Del Norte Triplicate about the passing of my friend Oscar Gensaw. He and I grew up a year apart in Klamath, attending grade school and high school together. He was born July 3, 1959, at Seaside Hospital in Crescent City, and passed away November 8, 2012. He was a lifelong resident…

Nevada has decided to repeal a state law that allows job discrimination against communists. A 12-member Legislative Commission agreed to introduce a bill at the 2013 session that would repeal a law passed in 1951 during the anti-communist fervor of the Cold War. The law allows employers to reject job applications from communists and their…

The Beaver’s moved into the old house at the end of the long dirt road as if overnight. The next day there were two more children in the neighborhood to play with. Bridget and Brett Beaver were both blonde and slight in build. Bridget was the younger of the two and had difficulty breathing at…

It was the day after President Ronald Reagan ordered a strike against Libyan Dictator Muammar Gaddafi. I was working for KROI/KPLY in Sparks at a remote for a home and garden show inside the Conventions Center. I was accompanied by the station’s program director. As I was prepping to do another sixty-second cut-in on the…

“Merry Christmas, Doc!” the gunnery sergeant barked as he spooned a heap of dressing on my tray. “Same to you, Guns,” I replied half-heartedly. Setting my tray at a the stand-up table where a few other Marines were wolfing down their Christmas Eve fare in the makeshift mess hall, I stared at my food not…

Even though a storm left several inches of new fallen snow in the Sierra Mountain this last week, I decided to use one of my days off to get out and enjoy the winter weather with a hike at Donner Lake.  Once in the parking lot of the interpretive center, I found I couldn’t visit…