Editorials

Drinking a can of soda looks very much like drinking a can of beer. But it’s not. Likewise, puffing on an electronic cigarette to sate one’s urge for nicotine looks very much like smoking a real cigarette. But it’s not.

When the subject of University of Nevada, Las Vegas athletics comes up, the consistent success of the men’s basketball program — the flagship sport for the school, and one that’s actually profitable — carries the conversation. The flip side of that dialogue, however, is the struggling football program. The Rebels have posted two-win seasons in seven of the past nine years, including the past three, and they’ve had just one winning season in the past 18 years. Football subsidizes every other sport at most major universities; at UNLV it’s a money-loser.

The next time Hollywood needs to film a scene of mass chaos for the latest end-of-the-world thriller — think epic traffic jams, desperate drivers and a crush of humanity — the Las Vegas Valley has hundreds of potential locations, no casting calls necessary.

The Clark County School District and its taxpayers have an old, unpopular problem: a lack of classroom space for a growing student population. As a result, a new school year began Monday with a return to an old, unpopular practice: year-round schedules.

If the state of Nevada and particularly the Las Vegas Valley hope to move past dismal unemployment numbers, more must be done to provide incentives to actually work. This issue was rightly pointed out in a study from the Cato Institute on welfare benefits, as reported Friday by the Review-Journal’s Sean Whaley. The study provided a state-by-state value of welfare benefits, in an effort to show that those rates can often act as a disincentive to going back to work.

As a new school year starts around the country, December’s atrocity at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., still haunts us. Adam Lanza took the lives of 20 children and six adults, mowing down innocents in a hail of gunfire. The attack was as emotionally devastating as any news event in recent memory.

As California goes, so goes Nevada and the country. That could be a very bad thing for Nevada’s medical community.

If you build it, they will come. At least until police start handing out citations that fly in the face of what Las Vegas nightlife is about.

Perhaps one day, a high-speed train will be built within projected costs and bring all the utopian benefits of mass transit that proponents promised.

Confidential government records are kept from the public. If a record is published in a public domain and is easily accessible, it is not confidential.