Today's News

CARLSBAD (AP) — The U.S. Energy Department has awarded a contract worth up to $112 million to a Colorado company for transportation services at the nation's only underground nuclear waste repository.
The agency announced the contract with CAST Specialty Transportation, Inc. on Thursday. CAST already maintains a terminal in southern New Mexico to support transport operations for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
Under the new contract, CAST also will be responsible the shipment of waste to the repository from federal facilities across the nation as part of the Energy Department's multibillion-dollar cleanup program.
The waste includes gloves, tools, clothing and other materials from decades of bomb-making and research.
The repository recently began accepting shipments following a nearly three-year closure that resulted from a radiation release in one of the underground disposal rooms.
 

DENVER (AP) — Forecasters say Hawaii and pockets of the Southeastern and Southwestern United States could face above-normal danger of significant wildfires this summer.
The National Interagency Fire Center's summer outlook released Thursday shows the risk on the Big Island of Hawaii is expected to be above normal through September.
Forecasters say western Nevada faces above-normal fire danger from July through September. The risk will be high in inland Southern California in July and in parts of Northern California during August and September.
Southeastern Arizona and western New Mexico could have above-normal risk in June.
Forecasters say fire danger will be below normal through July in the Rocky Mountains and in a large swath of the Eastern U.S. from Texas to the Atlantic. The risk will return to normal in late summer.
 

Republicans are discouraged that instead of getting a gross receipts tax overhaul, we’re getting a $400,000 study. But realistically, their 430-page baby was way too much for a two-day special legislative session. The good news is that tax reform is on everybody’s radar, and I see the political will to get it done. What I don’t see, yet, is the necessary bipartisan cooperation.
Sitting through the long hearing for the bill, I heard strengths as well as unfinished business.
Rep. Jason Harper, R-Rio Rancho, deserves our thanks for taking on this monster. Harper told the House Labor and Economic Development Committee that he tried hard to be nonpartisan. “It’s not a far right solution or a far left solution,” he said. “We met in the middle of the road.”
The bill would have removed most GRT exemptions, deductions and credits and applied the savings to reduce the rate from 7 percent to 6 percent. It also remedied a host of other problems with the tax, including its name, which is scary to outside companies thinking about moving here.
“Names really mean something,” Harper said.
The bill would also have taxed internet sales, healthcare providers and nonprofits and increased the motor vehicle sales tax and the healthcare premium tax.

ALBUQUERQUE (AP) — A casino in New Mexico has scrapped a scheduled performance by comedian Kathy Griffin after she posted online a bloody image that resembled President Donald Trump.
Route 66 Casino, a casino operated by Laguna Pueblo, announced late Tuesday on social media that July 22 performance by Griffin was canceled.
Griffin, who helped with CNN's New Year's Eve coverage, has apologized, saying that the brief video was "too disturbing" and wasn't funny.
Griffin appears in a video posted online Tuesday holding what looks like President Donald Trump's bloody, severed head.
She described the project as an "artsy fartsy statement" on Instagram and says she does not condone causing harm to others.