The Daily Rundown - March 18, 2026
Correction (03/18): The audio podcast for the March 18 episode incorrectly stated that Yellowstone National Park was the fourth most visited national park in 2025. Yellowstone National Park was the third most visited national park in 2025, followed by Grand Canyon National Park.
🌡️ An extreme heat warning for Southern Nevada and Northern Arizona goes into effect at 11 a.m. Wednesday and runs through 8 p.m. Sunday. The National Weather Service anticipates high temperatures ranging from 95 to 100 degrees across the Las Vegas Valley, in Pahrump and in Kingman.
Highs will range from 98 to 103 degrees in southern Mohave County. Daily record high temperatures will likely be broken Wednesday through Sunday. The earliest 100-degree temperature reading in Las Vegas was May 1, 1947. The average first 100-degree day is May 24.
⚖️ Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford is part of a bipartisan group of 13 attorneys general suing financial company OneMain Financial. The suit says OneMain placed unwanted additional products and other hidden costs on loans, leading to higher costs for borrowers.
The lawsuit, filed in New York on Monday, says the company’s employees steered borrowers into purchasing credit insurance and other loan-related products while making deceptive claims about whether the products were required and how they could be canceled. The suit says OneMain violated state consumer protection laws and that tens of thousands of borrowers were affected.
In its defense, OneMain said the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reviewed the practices in 2023. The company agreed to repay $10 million to consumers and pay $10 million in fines and penalties. The lawsuit seeks additional money.
⛽ The Trump administration has issued a 60-day waiver of the Jones Act in an attempt to lower gasoline prices that have surged since the U.S. and Israel launched a war against Iran, according to NPR’s Alana Wise. The Jones Act is a century-old maritime law requiring that goods shipped between U.S. ports be transported on U.S.-built and flagged vessels. Temporarily waiving the act opens up domestic shipping routes to foreign-flagged vessels, possibly reducing shipping costs and speeding up deliveries.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted to X: “President Trump’s decision to issue a 60-day Jones Act waiver is just another step to mitigate the short-term disruptions to the oil market as the U.S. military continues meeting the objectives of Operation Epic Fury. This action will allow vital resources like oil, natural gas, fertilizer and coal to flow freely to U.S. ports for 60 days, and the administration remains committed to continuing to strengthen our critical supply chains.”
However, experts say waiving the act will do little to dramatically lower gas prices. Prices at the pump are currently averaging $3.842 a gallon, according to the latest data from the American Automobile Association. That’s up about 80 cents from a month ago.
🏞️ Visits to national parks dipped slightly in 2025 after a record-breaking year. The National Park Service recorded 323 million visits in 2025 at parks, historic sites, monuments and recreation areas, about a 3% decline from 2024’s all-time high of 331.9 million. Still, visitation stayed historically high, even with a 43-day government shutdown, when parks remained mostly open but with limited staffing and services.
Among the changes: Yellowstone, ranked the third-most-visited park in 2025, flipped spots with the Grand Canyon, ranked fourth-most-visited in 2025. That’s after the Dragon Bravo fire last summer destroyed the historic Grand Canyon Lodge and forced closures.
Grand Teton saw one of the biggest increases, with about 170,000 additional visits last year, while Rocky Mountain held steady in visitation but slipped one spot in the rankings.
The National Parks Conservation Association raised concerns about the new visitation data amid staffing cuts at the agency and the federal government’s attempts to change the display of history across the park system.
“The enduring popularity of America’s national parks is not surprising,” said Emily Douce, deputy vice president for government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association. “What’s shocking is this administration’s relentless attacks on these places and their caretakers, which threatens their future.”
The organization estimated that nearly a quarter of staff have been fired or resigned since the beginning of the administration.
Read the full story by the Mountain West News Bureau’s Rachel Cohen.
🏠 It’s not news that homeowners' insurance is getting more expensive, but new research finds there’s an underappreciated factor at play: credit scores. Growing, climate change-fueled disaster risk. Increasing rebuilding and reinsurance costs. These are some of the commonly cited explanations for those rising premiums. But using a massive data set detailing some 70 million policies, researchers found that “credit scores impact homeowners insurance premiums as much as disaster risk.”
“One of the implications of this is that two households side by side that have the same disaster risk, homes built at the same time, you can have the homeowners paying dramatically different premiums and in some cases more than double,” said Benjamin Keys, a real estate and finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and co-author of a new working paper on the phenomenon published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Based on these and other findings, The New York Times recently reported on a Minnesota case where the lower-score neighbor was paying more than twice as much.
On average nationwide, customers with low credit pay 24% more than their high-credit neighbors for identical coverage. But according to the paper, those gaps are even wider in Mountain West and Pacific Northwest states.
Hear the full story by the Mountain West News Bureau’s Murphy Woodhouse.
🏛️ The Las Vegas City Council recognized former Sen. Richard Bryan after Wednesday morning’s meeting. The recognition is for Bryan’s championing of the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act. The act, which became law in 1998, continues to shape the future of Southern Nevada. It provides critical funding for parks, trails, conservation projects and public infrastructure, with the funds coming from the sale of public lands.
Part of these stories are taken from KNPR's daily newscast segment. To hear more daily updates like these, tune in to 88.9 KNPR FM.
