Today's News

ALBUQUERQUE – Bruce Cottrell didn’t even pretend he didn’t know where his program stood historically.
“This is our eighth victory, one more than Academy,” he said immediately after watching his Los Alamos Hilltopper girls win the Class 4A state tennis title Saturday night.
But Cottrell, the longtime head coach of the team, had to sweat out its championship match against the four-time defending champion Farmington Scorpions.
Los Alamos seemed to have the match well in-hand after going 4-2 in the singles competition, but dropped two of the first three doubles contests to Farmington, leaving the No. 2 doubles teams to battle it out for the state title.
But in the late evening – the singles matches were interrupted by a rain delay of about 33 minutes – the team of Susanna Lucido/Colleen Fitzsimmons finished off Farmington’s Allie Linville/Sydney Schumacher in straight sets to upset the Scorpions and claim the Hilltoppers’ first team title since 2008.
Even though Los Alamos won the No. 2 doubles title in straight sets, even the second set win didn’t come easily.

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.

Los Alamos National Laboratory announced Monday that for the first time, irradiated uranium fuel has been recycled and reused for molybdenum-99 (Mo-99) production, with virtually no losses in Mo-99 yields or uranium recovery.

This demonstrates the viability of the separation process, as well as the potential for environmentally- and cost-friendly fuel recycling. Medical isotope production technology has advanced significantly now that scientists have made key advances in separating Mo-99 from an irradiated, low-enriched uranium (LEU) solution.

Low-Enriched Uranium as a Source of Mo-99

Technetium-99m (Tc-99m) is the most commonly used medical isotope today, accounting for about 50,000 medical imaging procedures daily in the United States. Tc-99m is derived from the parent isotope Mo-99, predominantly produced from the fission of uranium-235 in highly enriched uranium targets (HEU) in aging foreign reactors. The North American supply of Tc-99m was severely disrupted when the Chalk River nuclear reactor in Canada experienced an outage several years ago.

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.