University of Nevada, Reno director of police Adam Garcia is one of five finalists for the vacant Clark County School District police chief post, a CCSD official said Friday.

“He was a competitive applicant; the fact is we’re right on the threshold of making the decision,” said Craig Kadlub, chief of staff for CCSD Superintendent Walt Rulffes.

Democrats gathered in the Joe Crowley Student Union Jan. 19 to caucus for their preferred candidate. Presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama swept the precincts at UNR, but lost to Sen. Hillary Clinton in the state-wide race by about 5 percent.

Republicans gather at McQueen High School in Reno, Nev., on Jan. 19 to help nominate a presidential candidate. Mitt Romney won the Nevada caucus by a landslide

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., addressed nearly 2,000 people at a campaign rally in the Grand Sierra Resort on Friday evening, a day before Nevada’s earliest presidential caucus in state history.

Clinton detailed many of her policy changes – from expanding health care to all Americans to a plan for withdrawing troops from Iraq within 60 days of her inauguration.

Presidential hopeful John Edwards, the “underdog” in the race for the Democratic nomination, told a crowd of about 700 people at the Grand Sierra Resort Wednesday to caucus for him on Saturday. In a speech mainly about the economy, the former North Carolina senator said he would put a cap on greenhouse gas emissions and invest in renewable energy, expand federal aid for college students and raise the minimum wage to $9.50 by 2012.

He said he would mandate universal health care, ban insurance companies from excluding “pre-existing conditions” and create a patient’s bill of rights.

With just five days left until the Nevada caucus, Presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., rallied a crowd of more than 1,000 people at Reno Events Center Monday.

Obama’s campaign theme of “change” was evident throughout the event. A sign behind the candidate read: “Change we can believe in.”

The senator told the crowd that he would create universal health care coverage, push for energy independence and rescind the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind act among many other policy changes.

Former President Clinton stumped for his wife Hillary Clinton at Truckee Meadows Community College Sunday.

About 500 people attended the rally where Clinton made the case for his wife to be elected president saying she would take the country on a “U-turn” from the policies of the Bush administration.

Six students from Western Nevada College and one from the University of Nevada, Reno braved a snowstorm to picket on the state capital Friday, calling on Gov. Jim Gibbons to spare higher education an 8 percent budget cut.

Until last week, the Center for Cultural Student Diversity was in the basement of Juniper Hall. Now it’s the heart of the Joe Crowley Student Union, smack-dab in the middle of the $63 million building that has its grand opening Nov. 15. “What we’re excited about is all the students who were never on that end of campus who just wouldn’t know to check the bottom level of a dorm,” said the center’s director Reg Stewart. The Joe revolves around a simple theory, said student union director Chuck Price: Give students what they need in one place to keep them on campus. That means more retail. More amenities. And more lounge space. And The Joe has – or will have – all of the above, Price said.

Newman remembers pages of notebooks fluttering in the air and blood-soaked hair ribbons in the street. Twelve Iraqi children were dead in a flash of violence and all the American soldiers could do was keep driving. A year and a half later in the fall of 2005, Newman was trying to pass a calculus class at Truckee Meadows Community College while coping with the aftereffects of war.

A University of Nevada, Reno employee reported a missing portable flash drive containing the names and Social Security numbers of about 16,000 current and former UNR students on Oct. 19, officials said Monday. The tiny, one-gigabyte flash drive also contained the GPAs and SAT/ACT test scores for any student who enrolled in UNR as an incoming freshman in the fall semesters from 2001 to 2007, university spokeswoman Jane Tors said.

Chancellor Jim Rogers said Monday that the Nevada System of Higher Education will not plan for potential statewide budget cuts despite Gov. Jim Gibbons’ request for state agencies to do so by Oct. 29.

Chancellor Jim Rogers, head of all Nevada colleges, hates seeing the numbers 49 and 50 next to Nevada in national higher education rankings. In his State of the System speech last week, Rogers said Nevada ranks 49th in population enrolled in college, the number of citizens with a degree and in the chance a high school freshman will eventually earn a bachelor’s degree. And it ranks last in the United States for the level of education among young workers.

Mike Pietrzak still remembers the time when he took his 5-year-old son, Mikey, to a community swimming pool. As he lounged near the pool, he noticed a line leading to the high dive. His eyes scanned the children waiting to climb the ladder until he noticed a gap.

Steven Thomas Stefani, a University of Nevada, Reno graduate student who was in Afghanistan helping with the country’s reconstruction, was killed Thursday by a roadside bomb near Ghazni province. He was 28.