It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming for Tuesday, April 14th. I’m Mac Watson.
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A Cheyenne-based attorney is asking Wyoming authorities to investigate Secretary of State Chuck Gray for alleged election-related crimes. Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland reports that George Powers says Gray violated state election law by giving sensitive voter data to the U.S. Department of Justice.
“George Powers is a Cheyenne-based attorney who in 2024 won a transparency action. He had earlier sued the administration of Superintendent Public Instruction, Brian Schroeder, saying that the Department of Education had public records breaches, and he won that action in 2024 so now what he's doing is he's filed an official complaint with the Attorney General's Office, saying, ‘Please find a way to get a special prosecutor in here, because according to powers, there's proof of election law violations.’”
In a statement sent to Cowboy State Daily, Secretary Gray asserted that, “The radical Left and the media will stop at nothing to undermine our work to ensure election integrity and security, and this is nothing more than Trump Derangement Syndrome, clothed in an attempt to use lawfare and the leftwing media to attack my actions on election integrity.”
Read the full story HERE.
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A Cheyenne 14-year-old charged as an adult with first-degree murder, accused of shooting his mother in the head after she called him derogatory names, pleaded not guilty Monday. Cowboy State Daily’s Greg Johnson reports that the judge also denied an attempt to slash his bond from $500,000 to $50,000.
“The teen, Havoc Leone, was in court on Monday for his arraignment in District Court, which is basically a plea hearing. He did answer the judge in a clear voice when the judge asked him if he understood what he was pleading to, and understood the charges against him. He said yes. And asked if he wanted to plead not guilty. He said yes, and then she asked him, he needed to say the words, and he said not guilty. So then the judge also set a jury trial for August.”
Leone was led into the courtroom by a pair of Laramie County Sheriff’s Office deputies wearing the tan jumpsuit of a juvenile offender. Leone’s Monday arraignment was quick, happening in front of a handful of spectators in Courtroom A on the third floor of the Laramie County Governmental Complex.
Read the full story HERE.
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Families and entrepreneurs in Wyoming are fighting back against high grocery store prices by starting discount stores and co-ops. Cowboy State Daily’s Renee Jean reports that Down Home Discount in Powell and Cody, tries to sell goods at 20% below Walmart & 50% below when possible.
“He kind of figured out this business model, because one he himself needed to save money on groceries if he was going to give up his lucrative plumbing position, he needed a better option. He buys these things in huge pallets at a discount because they're close to those used by dates, and then he repackages them for sale at his discount grocery.”
In 2022, Wyoming Economics Analysis Division principal economist Amy Bittner told Cowboy State Daily that Wyoming food prices had jumped more than 15% year-over-year for the second quarter’s cost-of-living index.
That was, at the time, the highest inflation rate in almost 40 years.
Read the full story HERE
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The skull of a baby dinosaur found near Medicine Bow, Wyoming, is only the second of its kind ever found. Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi reports that the tiny fossil has been unveiled in a Swiss museum with its growing collection of Wyoming dinosaur discoveries.
“It belongs to a juvenile Camarasaurus. It's the most common of the big, long neck dinosaurs that lived during the Late Jurassic period, and it's only the second of its kind ever found. Finding anything from a young animal, let alone an articulated skull, where all the bones, or most of them, are connected as they would have been while the animal was alive. That's a pretty big deal.”
Camarasaurus is one of the most common dinosaurs in the Morrison Formation, known from thousands of partial fossils and several nearly complete skeletons. Many of the best Camarasaurus specimens ever found were excavated in Wyoming.
Read the full story HERE.
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I’ll be back with more news from Cowboy State Daily right after this.
Cowboy State Daily news continues now…
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A Teton County commissioner is concerned water from the Upper Hoback River Basin could be a potential target for diversion to make up for a severe Colorado River shortfall. Cowboy State Daily’s David Madison reports that the commission also approved a letter Monday asking the feds for more clear rules.
“In a side conversation around this letter, Commissioner Probst said, ‘We also should be worried about the chance of Hoback river water being diverted to the Green River.’ And that was the most provocative thing that came up during the discussion, this idea that the Colorado River Basin is in such bad shape that we need to actually divert water from one watershed, the Hoback into another, the Green. So I went and looked back at some old research and found that there had been this 1971 analysis that showed that, yeah, you could probably do this.”
In a November 1971 report, the Wyoming State Engineer's Office laid out five potential reservoir and pumping scenarios for moving Snake River water into the Green River Basin. Teton County Commissioner Luther Propst linked any future Hoback-to-Green response to a Flaming Gorge Reservoir drawdown he said is coming this summer, when roughly a third of Flaming Gorge could be drained to shore up dangerously low water levels at Lake Powell on the Utah-Arizona line.
Read the full story HERE.
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Wyoming lawmakers plan to reevaluate whether the Wyoming Business Council has a future, study the effect of artificial intelligence on education, and the prospect of taxing wind energy facilities. Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland reports that this is a list of interim topics released by the Wyoming Legislature on Friday.
“After the big lawmaking session, they pass all these laws, they take a little breather, and then the committee chairs usually bring what they want to study for the next several months to the Management Council, which is the top ranking lawmakers, and together, they finalize this agenda. And so even though it's not set in stone like these are the laws we're going to pass next year. This gives a framework for what they want to study, who they want to hear from, maybe even dictates a little where they hold their meetings.”
The legislative interim comprises the months between winter lawmaking sessions, and is reserved for research, listening to stakeholders and holding public meetings.
Read the full story HERE.
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Cheyenne lost its unofficial art ambassador Friday with the death of Dot, a 16-year-old Jack Russell terrier. Cowboy State Daily’s Dale Killingbeck reports that owner Harvey Deselms said she was a “big source of comfort for a lot of people.”
“It's tough when you lose a pet that's been with you for 16 years. Was part of the Cheyenne art scene. For many years, people would come and give french fries to dot, you know, on their lunch breaks because they had a few left over. So it wasn't like that was just a particular pet. It was a lot of people's pet in in Cheyenne and had her own little following in the community.”
Deselms said that while growing up on a ranch, his family had a lot of working dogs that lived outside. But Dot was his first inside dog, and the first he ever bought.
Read the full story HERE.
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A Wyoming motorcyclist is lucky he had an iPhone with emergency satellite service to text his wife for help after pinning himself under his own bike Sunday in rugged Lincoln County backcountry. Cowboy State Daily’s Kolby Fedore reports that it’s an area where cellphone service can be spotty.
“A 60 year old Evanston man found himself in a real jam when Sunday afternoon, his bike flipped onto his leg. He was pinned, and he couldn't get the bike up off of him. Luckily, he was able to get an Emergency SOS message out to his wife so that she could get a hold of some local authorities, several agencies actually responded, and it was the Kemmer search and rescue that was able to get to him first.”
Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Cory Stoof tells Cowboy State Daily that the unidentified man wasn’t severely injured after being pinned under his motorcycle. Just some bumps and bruises.
Read the full story HERE.
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And finally, on this day back in 1912, the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic after striking an iceberg. Cowboy State Daily’s Dale Killingbeck tells us about the two people on board who were headed to Wyoming and not only survived, one made it to Casper.
“One of them was an investor in a western exploration company, and his name was Hugh Woolner. He was 45, he was a former stock broker, and he was coming to Casper to check on his investments. And there was another man from Finland. His name was Johan Julian Sundman, 45 also, and he was headed to Cheyenne to visit a friend. He ended up getting on deck late because he was a third class passenger, and somehow there was a boat there, and there were no more women to get in the boat. And so people it was being lowered, and people said, 'Just jump!' And so he dived head first into the boat where there was another, some other crew members from the Titanic were in there. So he survived, and Woolner actually got in a boat too, one of the last boats, they told him to jump. He jumped into a boat, a guy grabbed him and hauled him in.”
When the passenger liner Carpathia arrived hours later and rescued Titanic survivors, Sundman recalled his boat was the third one rescued. Woolner, once in New York, was asked to testify before the U.S. Senate committee investigating the disaster.
Read the full story HERE.
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And that’s today’s news. Get your free digital subscription to Wyoming's only statewide newspaper by hitting the Daily Newsletter button on Cowboy State Daily Dot Com - and you can watch this newscast every day by clicking Subscribe on our YouTube channel, or listen to us on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for watching - I’m Mac Watson, for Cowboy State Daily.
