Pygmy rabbit

Thursday, April 17, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Quick and Dirty: A notebook of news and politics

Judgment day

Nevada's legal community is bracing for an onslaught. The word is that a national news organization has spent almost a year poring through courthouse records, looking for evidence that Nevada judges routinely funnel legal work to their friends, campaign contributors, and former law partners. Sources say the examination of the chummy relationships between local judges and their lawyer pals will result in a blistering expose that will likely reach to the highest levels of the legal profession in our state. Several judges have already been interviewed, as have dozens of lawyers. The probe will suggest that local judges have done tons of favors for the fat cat lawyers who send them campaign money, money that is often used for things other than campaign expenses.--GK

Straight to the top

Susi Snyder's hung up her trespassing shoes for a spell to climb the next rung of anti-nuclear activism.

The 26-year-old native New Yorker, who lived in Las Vegas and Pahrump in recent years while actively involved with the Shundahai Network, has moved back to New York City and is working at the United Nations' Office for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She's also returned to college full time. And, in late April, she'll travel to Geneva, Switzerland, to attend a U.N. committee meeting on the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Snyder has been hauled into Nye County Justice of the Peace Bill Sullivan's Beatty courtroom six times over the past seven years on charges related mostly to civil protest actions at the Nevada Test Site near Mercury. But one action, last October, involved an all-night hike with four others to the ridgetop of Yucca Mountain. Snyder's trial for that action took place at the end of March, and she was found guilty of trespassing. Snyder counters that there were no signs indicating they had crossed from BLM land onto Test Site property. But she adds that Judge Sullivan was "a lot friendlier" this time. He commended her for her dedication to the cause, then sentenced her to 100 hours of community service and told her to stay out of trouble for six months.

"I'm sure I'll be back in Nevada, probably in the fall," Snyder says.--HW

Plea for rabbitat

Set aside your southern aggression a moment and consider the plight of the pygmy rabbit, North America's smallest rabbit. Brachylagus idahoensis is a rare, epitome-of-cute, palm-sized leporid that rarely hops further than 60 feet from its burrow. It ekes out a living in the Intermountain and Great Basin regions of the West, including the northern two-thirds of Nevada. We say "ekes" because the pygmy rabbit's main food source and shelter, big sagebrush, is disappearing at an alarming rate. Livestock grazing, prescribed fires, road-building, off-road vehicles and oil, gas, methane and geothermal exploration have all cleared away old-growth sagebrush and encouraged cheatgrass invasions. Ninety percent of the pygmy rabbit's habitat is gone.

Katie Fite, a biologist with the Committee for the High Desert in Idaho, says the rabbits "are delectable little morsels for hawks and eagles" and other predators, who find handy perches on fences and powerlines from which to scan for the increasingly exposed creatures. "Pygmy rabbits were once described as common, as a characteristic mammal of sagebrush habitat," Fite says. Now they're "falling off the map."

On April 8, the project and five other groups petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list pygmy rabbits as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act, and to also designate critical habitat.--HW

Many ways to protest

Despite all the media footage of jubilant looting in Iraq, some people still don't think bombs are the best kind of diplomacy.

The UNLV Peace Coalition and the Committee for the Prevention of the Erosion of Human Rights continue to protest the war and suffering in Iraq--and to urge that the rebuilding of that country be done in a dignified way--from 7 to 9 p.m. every Monday and Wednesday in front of the New York-New York Hotel & Casino on the corner of Tropicana Avenue and South Las Vegas Boulevard.

If sidewalk activism isn't your style, Matt Taibbi, columnist for the New York Press, suggests another method: "CNN and Fox are making a killing waving a flag for the Pentagon. Why not start boycotting their advertisers one at a time until they pull their spots?" In fact, he adds: "Boycott everything. If even this minority of the population could go a month without over-consuming, it would give corporate America an aneurysm."--HW

No Al-Jazeera for us

The BBC News announced last week that Nevadans can now watch Al-Jazeera TV news on cable. But it isn't so--the British confused us with "Nebraska." But people there and in some other states do get to watch Al-Jazeera TV for 30-minutes twice a week, since the station finally struck a deal earlier this month to offer the limited programming free of charge to the non-profit organization Scola. Scola (Latin for "school") offers programs from 70 countries, and specializes in "less commonly taught languages," says spokesman Jim Kelly. Its primary audience is immigrants and foreign language students.

Kelly says Scola's been trying to get Al-Jazeera TV for more than a year, in response to a bombardment of requests since 9/11 that Scola carry Arabic language news. None of that bombardment came from Las Vegas, however, where Cox Communications spokeswoman Stephanie Stallworth says she hasn't heard of Scola. She says Cox-Las Vegas offers loads of educational and Hispanic programming. Kelly says he'd like Las Vegas to carry Scola.

"We believe that language is key to global learning and understanding," he says. "We're going to need Americans who speak the languages of other countries. I think foreign language skills are key to homeland security, and key for competitive business advantage. Foreign language skills are critical to promote peace."

Feeling left out, monoglot?--HW

Bookworm, brace yourself

Though it's more than six months away, this fall's Vegas Valley Book Festival is already boasting more top-drawer names in lit and pop culture than a caffeine-fueled browsing session at your friendly neighborhood chain book store. The latest coup: Book festival organizers have scored Rudolfo Anaya, professor emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico, as this year's keynote speaker. He's widely regarded as the founder of modern Chicano literature, and is the author of Bless Me, Ultima, Albuquerque and Zia Summer. Other notable names on the list of panelists and speakers include novelist Aimee Bender as well as political cartoonists Ted Rall and Dan Perkins (a.k.a. Tom Tomorrow).--AK

Un-American

Some people insist upon dwelling in the cesspools of their un-enlightened hearts, instead of crawling to the shore to breathe deep of the liberating airs of kindness, understanding and intellectual awareness. Witness the man driving his patriotic pickup out in Hendersticks Monday morning: fresh flags stuck on bumper and rear window, a live one fluttering big from the passenger's side of the cab, and another bumpkinsticker that says, "Kick their ass, steal their gas."

Big man, tell that to the faces of Iraq's 12 million war-pummeled children.--HW

Gov't

High art

For the third straight year, the city of Las Vegas has raised the standards of artists--literally. Last week, the city's cultural division hoisted 40 seven-foot vinyl street banners created by local artists onto light poles high over Las Vegas Boulevard, from Charleston Boulevard to Fremont Street. The Aerial Gallery will hang for a year, then a new round of art will go up.

To celebrate the new panels, about 50 contributors and well-wishers walked up Las Vegas Boulevard with curator Jerry Misko II last Friday evening. At each banner, Misko said a few words while a brigade of helpers shined flashlights up at the artwork as dusk took over, making the whole affair a sort of torchlight procession in honor of one of the city's most successful Downtown art projects. The walk wound up with a low-key party atop the Fremont Street Experience parking garage: A band played old surf tunes, a Mexican buffet offered up delights, a light breeze blew, and for a moment the vision of an urban core that can sustain more than slots and bail bondsmen was aloft, a banner in the neon twilight.--GC

Taxing death

They say only two things are certain in life--death and taxes. Well, now the county commission has found a way to pay more in taxes for death.

Clark County mortuaries have won a 4 percent increase in the cost of indigent adult and child burial services. The last increase for indigent burial services was in 2001. The mortuaries say they're paid the lowest fees in the region, and that their costs are rising.

Verlia Davis Hoggard, former director of Clark County Social Services who retired earlier this month, says her department processed almost 750 burials and cremations for indigent people in fiscal year 2001-2002, and that there was a 7 percent increase in the first seven months of this fiscal year. She predicts the number will rise even more next year.

The new rate schedule that went into effect April 1 pays $1,827 for adult burial service, $1,931 for adult oversize burial service, $507 for infant burial service, $425 for adult cremations, $175 for child cremations and keeps the charge at $50 for body bags.--FC