Stuff you need to know, 8.8.22

Today’s post will be my last for the week. My husband Tom Hinson and I are taking our golden retriever Allie and going camping in the Wild River section of the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument near our home in Questa, New Mexico.

I’d like to thank Citizen colleague John Johanek for alerting me to the Dow article linked below and Avid Reader Dan Warren for pointing me toward the Virgin Galactic update also featured here.

Avid Readers, I invite you to join John and Dan in contributing leads for this column. Please email me at dstchester@gmail.com with the headline and publisher of important stories that you would like me to share with the Sierra County community.

Finally, a note of explanation about the occasional glitches that Avid Readers may encounter with the story links I provide.

Please be advised that, in no case, do I link to stories from publications that lead immediately to a paywall.

Most of the reporting I highlight is to be found in free online publications, such as New Mexico in Depth, NM Political Report, Searchlight New Mexico, Source NM and The Paper, for which there are no access issues.

I also link to for-profit publications, such as the Albuquerque Journal cited below, that allow non-subscribers to read a number of free articles each month. Others, like the Taos News, ask non-subscribers to fill out brief marketing surveys before they can gain access to a particular story.

I personally subscribe to my go-to national newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and my subscriptions allow me to “gift” up to 10 free-access articles each month to my dear readers. Alas, my Citizen colleague Kathleen Sloan identified a glitch in this system. Because, as a non-subscriber to the Times, she had exceeded her own 10-free-article-per-month limit, she recently was unable to open and read a gift article I had featured.

I want to repeat that I do everything possible to provide workarounds to paywalls, but my system is not foolproof, and I apologize for any frustrations my dear readers may have encountered in trying to access the linked articles in my SYNTK posts.

“Settlement adopted in Rebecca Dow ethics case”
by Dan McKay, Albuquerque Journal
August 5, 2022

The Governmental Conduct Act prohibits state lawmakers from representing a person before a state agency unless the lawmaker is unpaid or working on behalf of a constituent, among other exceptions. The violations centered on state representative Rebecca Dow’s work for AppleTree, a nonprofit organization she founded in Truth or Consequences that is funded mostly by state contracts and grants.

Click on the above link to read the free-access article.

“Virgin Galactic again delays start of commercial suborbital flights”
by Jeff Foust, spacenews.com|
August 5, 2022

Virgin Galactic has once again pushed back the start of commercial flights of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane, saying upgrades of its carrier aircraft are taking longer than expected.

In its release of its second quarter earnings Aug. 4, the company said it is now expecting to start commercial flights of its single SpaceShipTwo vehicle, VSS Unity, in the second quarter of 2023. In its previous earnings release in May, the company had delayed the start of such flights from the fourth quarter of 2022 to the first quarter of 2023.

Click on the above link to read the free-access article