Here’s a look at today’s headlines:

The life and legacy of three high school students – Ella Kirk, Michael Mahl and Ella Myers, who died in a small airplane crash in May of 2014, just outside of Silver City – will be depicted in a new film on Thursday, December 15 at 7:00 p.m. in Parotti Hall on the WNMU campus.  The film is titled “A Heart, A Soul, A Voice” and was shot in Silver City and in the Gila Wilderness.  The film explores the meaning and impact of their passing and the inspiration they still offer to their families and community.

The New Mexico Central Arizona Project Entity listened to contract engineering firm AECOM Technical Service’s Phase Two kickoff presentation on Tuesday, Dec. 6, about its ongoing work to construct a diversion on the Gila River. The diversion plan is touted by its supporters as the answer to southwestern New Mexico’s current and future water needs, while opponents say that the millions of federal dollars would be better spent on smaller water conservation projects in the region.

On Nov. 18, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, working with its partner agencies, the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish and the U.S. Forest Service, released two age classes of Gila trout into Mineral Creek, ranging up to a foot long. The rare yellow trout were spawned, hatched and raised in captivity in 2015 and 2016 at the service’s Mora National Fish Hatchery.

Wednesday, U.S. Senator Tom Udall welcomed the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rule to ban uses of the toxic chemical tricholoethylene, or TCE, under the newly reformed bipartisan chemical safety law.  It is the EPA’s first effort to ban an existing chemical since it failed in its attempts to ban asbestos in the early 1990s.  Used as a degreaser and spot remover in dry cleaning, TCE is a neurotoxin linked to cancer, developmental impacts and liver toxicity.

Senators Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich joined the Senate in voting for a bill that includes critically needed new resources for New Mexico and other states struggling to treat and prevent the growing prescription opioid abuse epidemic.  The funding was included in the health care legislation called the 21st Century Cures Act and now will be sent to the president’s desk to be signed into law.