Local News

Lecture

The Los Alamos Historical Society will hold its annual meeting at 6 p.m. today. There will be pizza, ice cream and the annual experience auction, along with a lecture by former LANL director Robert Kuckuck.

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County Council

Los Alamos County Council will meet in a work session at 7 p.m. today at the White Rock Fire Station No. 3.

BPU meeting

The Board of Public Utilities will meet at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at the DPU Conference Room, 170 Central Park Square.

Farmers Market

The Los Alamos Farmers Market will be back beginning at 7 a.m. Thursday and running until noon in the parking lot of the Mesa Library.

After nearly six and a half hours of hearings and more than a half hour of closed session deliberation, council unanimously denied GEW’s protest of the award of a Smart Meter contract to Landis + Gyr. The hearing began during the April 30 council session and was completed during a special session Monday.
Despite the fact that the RFP was titled “Request for Proposals for Smart Meters” and the majority of the specifications described the technical requirements for 1,785 Smart electric meters or modules for adapting existing meters, GEW’s proposal did not include one Smart Meter.
The Department of Public Utilities review committee scored GEW’s bid “0” for that reason. Purchasing Manager Annalisa Miranda also determined that GEW’s appeal was without merit because it “included no provision of or pricing for meters, which is a core element of the requested services.”
GEW’s bid also included $10.5 million for the installation of gas and water meters, with no meters provided. The RFP requested pricing for1,568 gas meters or modules and 1,500 water meters or modules, but no pricing for installation.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — A 70-year-old woman whose mummified body was recently found in her Santa Fe apartment was identified as a Chicana activist, teacher and author.

Santa Fe police said the decomposed remains of Barbara Salinas-Norman were discovered last week and authorities say she may have been dead for more than a year.

The Santa Fe New Mexican reports that Salinas-Norman founded and ran a publishing company called Pinata Publications in the office of her then-husband, Sam Norman, an Oakland lawyer. She began writing, illustrating and publishing her own books designed to help Mexican American children identify with their culture. She gave up teaching to write full time in 1983.

She was the author of "Los Tres Cerdos: Nacho, Tito and Miguel" — her version of "The Three Little Pigs." In the book, the third pig, Miguel, builds a home-made of adobe bricks. The illustrations depict New Mexico-style furnishings, Indian pottery, kiva fireplaces, vigas and retablos.

She also was a bilingual teacher in the Oakland, Calif., public schools in the 1980s.