Today's News

The Los Alamos County Council voted by a 4-3 margin to enter into a contract with Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems for the purpose of initiating the Carbon Free Power Project in a special session held Tuesday night.

Voting in favor of Resolution No. 18-09 were James Chrobocinski, Rick Reiss, David Izraelevitz and Pete Sheehey. Casting votes in opposition were Christine Chandler, Antonio Maggiore and Susan O’Leary.

The vote enters the county into the initial licensing phase of the project. The maximum cost exposure for the county, if it chooses to exit the project at the next decision point, which would be at the end of March of 2019, is $80,000.

If the county decides to continue in the project the fiscal impact would increase with a total share currently estimated to be approximately $56 million through construction completion.

That cost would be financed by the project and the county would be repaying it as part of the purchase price of the power generated by the project.

Before the vote on the resolution took place, Councilor Christine Chandler proposed a substitute motion with the purpose of amending the contract with regard to the modules that would be produced, the first of which would go online in 2026.

Pauline Schneider said it was just the right time. As someone who now has aging parents back home in Canada, it was time to move back.

After 17 years, Schneider announced Friday that she is leaving her post as executive director of the Los Alamos Retired and Senior Organization. Her last day will be sometime in June.

As she sat at her desk in her office at the Betty Ehart Center in Los Alamos, she said she was glad for the help she was able to give to two retirement centers her organization oversees and the people in them.

The ironic thing is that when she first started working with seniors in Los Alamos, those Los Alamos seniors first came to her when she was working in Santa Fe. Schneider was working at a Santa Fe retirement organization, then named

Rosemont, when the facility opened its doors to the seniors evacuating from Los Alamos during the 2000 Cerro Grande fire.

When she made the move to the Los Alamos Retired and Senior Organization in 2001 she was already involved in helping those same seniors rebuild their lives by helping the volunteers at the two senior centers try to recover computer equipment and other things the seniors lost to the fire.  

“Our volunteers were amazing,” Schneider said. “Just watching them interact with the seniors was amazing.”

By SARAH EL DEEB, Associated Press

BEIRUT (AP) — Loud explosions rocked Syria's capital and filled the sky with heavy smoke early Saturday after U.S. President Donald Trump announced airstrikes in retaliation for the country's alleged use of chemical weapons. Syrian television reported that air defenses responded to the attack.

Associated Press reporters saw smoke rising from east Damascus and the sky turned orange. A huge fire could be seen from a distance to the east. Syrian television reported that a scientific research center had been hit.

Syrian media reported that air defenses hit 13 rockets south of Damascus. After the attack ceased and the early morning skies went dark once more, vehicles with loudspeakers roamed the streets of Damascus blaring nationalist songs.

"Good souls will not be humiliated," Syria's presidency tweeted after airstrikes began.

Trump announced Friday night that the three allies had launched military strikes to punish President Bashar Assad for the alleged chemical weapons use and to prevent him from doing it again.

In my husband’s workplace, years ago, a woman who was clueless about appropriate professional attire showed up day after day in tube tops. Men in the office begged female co-workers to take her aside and ask her to stop wearing the clingy apparel because it was distracting. Maybe for the wearer, that was the point. Nobody worked up the courage to speak, so her daily display continued.

(Laugh if you want at Hillary’s pantsuits, but for women of a certain age, the pantsuit solved a lot of problems.)

The tube top episode shows that most men in the workplace are decent people, and men and women work together just fine as long as everybody observes common sense codes of behavior. It’s something to remember as we navigate the turbulent waters of #MeToo.

After taking down some big players in entertainment, politics and media, the MeToo movement has paused. I’m hearing two parallel debates. A few brave feminists are starting to question the treatment of men in some of these cases – not all piggish behavior is equal – and some men, especially older men, are feeling uncomfortable and unsure of themselves in workplace interactions.