Several events are taking place around Las Vegas this week in remembrance of the mass shooting on Oct. 1, 2017, which left 58 people dead and hundreds more injured.
A reading-of-names ceremony will take place at 7 p.m. Oct. 1 at the Las Vegas Community Healing Garden.
Meanwhile, the Vegas Golden Knights are hosting a memorial blood drive at City National Arena.
Then on Oct. 2, the Vegas Strong Fund will break ground on the Forever One Memorial.
Construction of the permanent tribute will take place on 2 acres of land at the corner of Reno Avenue and Giles Street. That's where the shooting occurred.
The memorial is expected to be completed by Oct. 1, 2027, in time to mark the 10th anniversary of the deadly attack.
During lessons about federal Indian boarding schools, Josh Bonde asks his kids a question: Does your school have a cemetery? Bonde is a citizen of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone and director of the Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum.
He says boarding schools had cemeteries because kids didn't get to go home. Some never went home and never got the opportunity to see their families again.
That includes students like Della Tuscarora Atkins, a 17-year-old Shoshone girl. She died 126 years ago, on Dec. 25, at the Carlisle Indian Industrial Boarding School in Pennsylvania, some 2,000 miles away from home.
Her grave was one of 190 discovered near the school by the Office of Army Cemeteries, in an ongoing effort to repatriate students. The Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Reservation have spent two years on the process.
The tribe's public affairs officer, Marco Ovando, worked on Della's repatriation.
It was Della's seventh generation — seven being a sacred number to many tribes — that returned her from Pennsylvania to the Duck Valley Reservation.
Tribal members waited for Della at the reservation's northern entrance. As they brought her through, songs, prayer and the warmth of the Sho-Pai tribal community welcomed her.
They then transported her to Owyhee, Nevada. She was reburied the next day in the family plot at the cemetery, surrounded by family and community members looking to begin the healing from generational trauma.
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The Trump administration has held up millions of dollars in funding for outside partner groups to do stewardship projects in national parks. That's according to reporting from the Mountain West News Bureau's Rachel Cohen. The blocked agreements would have paid organizations leading environmental and cultural resource work in parks.
The Washington Post reported there were more than 130 projects affected, according to internal National Park Service data. An agency spokesperson told the paper that the organizations were working against administration priorities.
Peter Woodruff, the CEO of the Great Basin Institute in Reno, found that bewildering. He emphasized that the nonprofit, which supports environmental research and conservation work on public lands, is nonpartisan.
Still, his group learned indirectly that it had 78 upcoming projects disapproved or in limbo — the most of any organization affected, according to the Post. The Great Basin Institute's projects totaled $12.7 million.
Other work that appears to have been held up includes a $3.5 million effort by the Desert Research Institute to identify locations for new roads and recreational opportunities at Lake Mead National Recreation Area.
In response to questions about the park projects, a spokesperson for the Interior Department wrote that the agency is ensuring taxpayer dollars are being used to make life more affordable for Americans and to expand access to public lands.
Read the full story here.
Nonresidential water customers in the Las Vegas Valley are getting their first look at the penalties they could face if they continue watering nonfunctional turf after the new year begins.
KNPR's Paul Boger reports that the business impact statement issued by Las Vegas Valley water officials last week looks to clarify property owner responsibilities before the controversial conservation law takes effect.
The proposed fines vary by the size of the customer's water meter, ranging from $80 for a first offense on meters 1 inch or smaller to more than $5,100 for the fifth offense on the largest water meter size.
However, the water district's board of directors must first approve the fines. They're slated to vote on the proposal in early December.
Colby Pellegrino, deputy manager of the Las Vegas Valley Water District, says the fines are in line with the agency's other water waste penalties.
The proposed penalties come as a group of plaintiffs seeks to challenge the Southern Nevada Water Authority and Las Vegas Valley Water District's ability to implement Assembly Bill 356, the state law banning nonresidential ornamental grass.
The law does not apply to single-family homes.
When Ron Husband was a football scholarship student at UNLV in the early 1970s, he was simply trying to get good enough at art to make a living.
He later got into a Disney animator trainee program and quietly made history as Disney's first Black animator — and later, supervising animator. He would go on to draw some of Disney's most iconic characters, especially during the company's late-20th-century run of animation blockbusters, starting with 1989's "The Little Mermaid."
Ron Husband's story is told in a documentary released earlier this year called "Huz: Drawn to Life." The film will be shown at 6 p.m. Oct. 1 at UNLV's Dolby Atmos Theatre. Husband will be in conversation with director Don Hahn after the screening.
Read the full story here.
