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LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Lake County Animal Care and Control this week has a variety of big adult dogs with a cute puppy, too.
Dogs available for adoption this week include American Staffordshire Terrier, collie, German Shepherd, Great Dane, Labrador Retriever, pit bull and shepherd.
Dogs that are adopted from Lake County Animal Care and Control are either neutered or spayed, microchipped and, if old enough, given a rabies shot and county license before being released to their new owner. License fees do not apply to residents of the cities of Lakeport or Clearlake.
If you're looking for a new companion, visit the shelter. There are many great pets hoping you'll choose them.
The following dogs at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption (additional dogs on the animal control Web site not listed are still “on hold”).
Pit bull terrier mix
This female pit bull terrier mix has a short black and white coat.
She's in kennel No. 5, ID No. 5378.
'Kush'
“Kush” is a female adult pit bull terrier mix.
She has a short tan coat and already is spayed.
She's in kennel No. 6, ID No. 5249.
Shepherd mix
This male shepherd mix has a short tan and black coat. He already is altered.
He's in kennel No. 13, ID No. 5299.
American Staffordshire Terrier
This male American Staffordshire Terrier has a short black and white coat and has already been neutered.
He's in kennel No. 14, ID No. 5194.
Pit bull terrier mix
This female pit bull terrier mix has a short blue and white coat.
Shelter staff said she is very sweet and just wants attention.
She's in kennel No. 15, ID No. 5456.
'Storm'
“Storm” is a female pit bull terrier mix with a brown and white coat.
She's in kennel No. 24, ID No. 5363.
'Cooper'
“Cooper” is a male shepherd mix with a black and tan coat and white markings.
He's in kennel No. 25, ID No. 5377.
Great Dane-Labrador Retriever mix
This male Great Dane-Labrador Retriever mix has a short black coat with white markings.
He's in kennel No. 26, ID No. 5104.
Collie mix
This adorable collie mix puppy has a soft tricolor coat.
He's in kennel No. 27, ID No. 5521.
Labrador Retriever mix
This male Labrador Retriever mix has short black coat.
He's in kennel No. 31, ID No. 5344.
Labrador Retriever mix
This male Labrador Retriever-shepherd mix has a short all-black coat.
He's in kennel No. 32, ID No. 5158.
To fill out an adoption application online visit http://www.co.lake.ca.us/Government/Directory/Animal_Care_And_Control/Adopt/Dog___Cat_Adoption_Application.htm .
Lake County Animal Care and Control is located at 4949 Helbush in Lakeport, next to the Hill Road Correctional Facility.
Office hours are Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday. The shelter is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Visit the shelter online at http://www.co.lake.ca.us/Government/Directory/Animal_Care_And_Control.htm .
For more information call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
KELSEYVILLE, Calif. – The Clear Lake Area California Highway Patrol will offer a free “Start Smart” traffic safety class for soon to-be-licensed, newly licensed, and teenage drivers and their parents or guardians on Wednesday, Aug 3.
The class will take place from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Clear Lake Area CHP office, located at 5700 Live Oak Drive in Kelseyville.
The leading cause of death for Americans 15 to 19 years old is motor vehicle collisions, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The CHP's goal is to reduce the death rate among young drivers as the result of these collisions.
“The CHP is committed to mitigating traffic collisions involving young, inexperienced drivers, because they are preventable,” said Lt. Hector Paredes, commander of the CHP's Clear Lake Area office. “Start Smart is an excellent program that promotes safe driving for young new drivers.”
The “Start Smart” program is aimed at helping newly licensed and future licensed teenage drivers understand the critical responsibilities of driving and to understand that accidents happen, but collisions are 100-percent preventable.
The program is designed to provide an interactive safe driving awareness class which will illustrate how poor choices behind the wheel of a car can affect the lives of numerous people.
“Start Smart” also focuses on responsibilities of newly licensed drivers, responsibilities of parents or guardians and collision avoidance techniques.
Space is limited for this class. For more information or reservations, call Officer Kory Reynolds at the CHP office, 707-279-0103.
Forty years ago, NASA's Viking mission made history when it became the first mission to successfully land a fully operational spacecraft on Mars.
This mission gave us our first real look at the Martian surface, as well as the fundamental science that has enabled continued missions to the Red Planet, laying the foundation for NASA's Journey to Mars.
The spacecraft, dubbed Viking 1, touched down on the Martian surface July 20, 1976 – its counterpart, Viking 2, followed suit and landed Sept. 3 of that same year.
The mission objectives were carefully laid out: Obtain high-resolution images of the Martian surface, characterize the composition of the Martian surface and its atmosphere, and search for life.
After years of imaging, measuring and experimenting, the Viking spacecraft ended communication with the team on Earth, leaving behind a multitude of data that scientists would study for the next several years.
As engineers and scientists planned for later missions to Mars, the rolls of microfilm containing the Viking data were stored away for safekeeping and potential later use. It would be another 20 years before someone looked at some of these data again.
NASA's deep archives
David Williams is the planetary curation scientist for the NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The archive houses much of NASA's planetary and lunar spacecraft data stored on microfilm and computer tapes, including the Viking data. Williams works to digitize all of the data so that it can be easily accessed from the web.
“At one time, microfilm was the archive thing of the future,” Williams said. “But people quickly turned to digitizing data when the web came to be. So now we are going through the microfilm and scanning every frame into our computer database so that anyone can access it online.”
In the early 2000s, Williams received a call from Joseph Miller, associate professor of cell and neurobiology at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles requesting data from the Viking biology experiments. But all that was left of the data was stored on microfilm.
“I remember getting to hold the microfilm in my hand for the first time and thinking, “We did this incredible experiment and this is it, this is all that's left,'” Williams said. “If something were to happen to it, we would lose it forever. I couldn't just give someone the microfilm to borrow because that's all there was.”
The archive team decided to tear open the boxes of microfilm and begin digitizing the data.
Lasting knowledge
Miller wanted to analyze the data from Viking's biology experiments to see if the Viking science team had missed something in the original analysis. He concluded that one of the Viking biology experiments did, indeed, offer proof that life may exist on Mars.
In one of the experiments, known as Labeled Release or LR, the Viking landers scooped up soil samples and applied a nutrient cocktail. If microbes were present in the soil, they would likely metabolize the nutrient and release carbon dioxide or methane.
The experiment did indicate metabolism, but the other two Viking experiments did not find any organic molecules in the soil.
The science team believed the LR data had been skewed by a non-biological property of Martian soil, resulting in a false positive. While arguments continue, this remains the consensus view.
This was not the first time scientists disagreed about the results of the Viking biology experiments. Since the very first data analysis, scientists argued about whether the experiments proved that Mars really was harboring life.
“The data were very controversial,” Williams said. “But, in a way, it helped push for continued Mars missions and landers. The very next missions were planned around what we found with Viking, and then the next group of missions built upon those. But even our most current Mars missions still refer back to Viking.”
One such mission is Curiosity, which landed on Mars Aug. 6, 2012. Equipped with an instrument suite known as Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM, the Curiosity rover is capable of searching for organic compounds on the Martian surface.
SAM is able to detect a lower concentration of a wider variety of organic molecules than any other instrument sent to Mars, including those on Viking.
“We built SAM based on a lot of experience and heritage from Viking,” said Danny Glavin, associate director for Strategic Science in the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA Goddard and former planetary protection lead for SAM. “The capabilities of the Viking landers and instruments were very advanced for the technology at the time. Just demonstrating that you could land a spacecraft on the Martian surface successfully was a huge feat.”
Unlike Viking at the time, data from Curiosity's experiments are uploaded to the Planetary Data System for easy accessibility.
“Viking data are still being utilized 40 years later,” Glavin said. “I know the same will be true for SAM. The point is for the community to have access to this data so that scientists 50 years from now can go back and look at it.”
In 2016, the Viking legacy continues.
Lessons learned from Viking technology blazed the trail for future Mars missions, which have vastly improved our understanding of the Red Planet.
Today NASA has a fleet of orbiters and rovers on and around Mars, making key discoveries such as evidence of liquid water near the surface of Mars and paving the way for future human-crew missions.
The Mars 2020 rover recently passed an important mission milestone toward launch in 2020, arriving on Mars in February of 2021.
Its mission is to seek signs of past life and demonstrate new technologies to help astronauts survive on Mars, with the goal of sending humans to the Red Planet in the 2030s.
For more information about NASA's Viking program, visit http://www.nasa.gov/viking .
JASON BOURNE (Rated R)
Matt Damon in the role of former lethal CIA operative Jason Bourne has a lot in common with Sean Connery in his iconic turn as suave, tough guy British secret agent James Bond.
These two fine actors so fully occupied their roles of spies that the thought of replacements was unthinkable. Connery skipped one film before returning for his last official 007 role in “Diamonds Are Forever.”
In similar fashion, Damon was not on hand for the fourth Bourne film, “The Bourne Legacy,” which focused on Jeremy Renner’s Aaron Cross, an agent jeopardized by his connection to Jason Bourne.
This brings us to the fifth film, “Jason Bourne,” which really feels like the fourth one, given that “The Bourne Legacy,” released back in 2012, is pretty much, probably in the minds of many, the forgotten chapter.
It’s hard to believe that Matt Damon hasn’t played the part since 2007’s “The Bourne Ultimatum.” The eagerness for his return is equal to the fervor of more than forty years ago for Connery to reclaim the 007 mantle after George Lazenby’s turn in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.”
Nearly a decade later, time has not slowed down Matt Damon’s fitness, both physically and mentally, for the grueling role of an elite-trained assassin who suffered amnesia and yet still attracted the sinister forces seeking his physical termination.
The new twist for “Jason Bourne,” other than the lack of returning characters except for field agent Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), is that Bourne has regained his memory, though it’s a bit foggy at times.
The story begins in Greece with Bourne apparently subsisting on bare-fisted boxing matches for rent money.
Meanwhile, Nicky, going underground in a hacking collective, has retrieved top secret files on a USB stick that may explain Bourne’s troubled past with the agency.
With the backdrop of the austerity riots taking place in Athens, “Jason Bourne” gets off to its fast-paced action start when Bourne and Nicky are chased by deadly black operatives and half of the Athens police force.
The shadowy figure of an assassin, known only as “The Asset” (Vincent Cassel), is in hot pursuit of Bourne upon the orders of CIA director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones, new to the series though it feels like he’s been around since the beginning).
The story ties into the growing importance of cyber intelligence, which is the motivating force behind Director Dewey’s partnership with the Mark Zuckerberg-like techie CEO whiz kid Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed), mastermind of a social media outfit known as Deep Dream.
Dismissing privacy concerns, the CIA chief wants access to a new system on the Internet that would give his agency access to computer records and communications of practically everybody in the world, and to achieve that goal he’s struck a bargain with a reluctant Kalloor.
Trust is an elusive concept in the ethereal world of espionage, as it becomes evident within the ranks of the CIA that nobody trusts anyone else, thereby adding another layer to the mystery and suspense.
Fitting nicely into this paradigm is a key member of Dewey’s team, the youthful analyst Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), once a classmate of Kalloor’s, who could have chosen the big bucks of the private sector but wanted to make her mark in vital government service.
Having analyzed the files on Jason Bourne, Heather believes she can bring the former spy back into the Agency, and she asks Dewey to make her the point person to return this high-value target.
Ambitious and smart, Heather’s proficiency in computer hacking and expert handling of counterinsurgency and drone strikes results in a relationship with Dewey that is one of spirited conflict.
Having the wily Heather in hot pursuit of the target, acting with complicated motives to entice a modicum of trust with the savvy Bourne, lends another element of suspenseful trepidation to a chase that goes from Athens to Iceland, and then Berlin to London.
Even more so than previous “Bourne” films, this installment is a globe-trotting travelogue to the world’s hotspots that also include Washington, D.C. and maybe places like Switzerland and Austria. The action is so fast one loses track of Bourne’s whereabouts.
But then, there’s Las Vegas, the land of mega-sized conventions held in fancy venues amidst the glitter of the Strip, the setting for the climactic showdown including a stunningly destructive car chase on the main thoroughfare.
The incredible chase scene on the Vegas Strip is likely familiar to anyone who’s seen the film’s trailer, but the full force of this exciting ride is a white-knuckle adventure that tops all previous Bourne chases.
Much like the best of the James Bond films, “Jason Bourne” faithfully hews to the super-charged action formula that was established with the initial offering of “The Bourne Identity,” and just so happens to deliver an incredibly grand product.
“Jason Bourne” moves fast during its two-hour running time, but there are satisfying reflective moments when Bourne learns more about his identity and the role his father once played in Operation Treadstone.
The bottom line for “Jason Bourne,” with an ending that leaves one hoping for yet another chapter, is that it is extremely exciting, and an argument could be made that it’s the best since the original. In short, this is a lively action movie worth seeing.
Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.
LAKEPORT, Calif. – A Northshore man convicted last year of the 2011 murder of an Upper Lake woman has been sentenced to life in prison.
On Friday, Judge Stephen Hedstrom sentenced Daniel Ray Loyd, 54, of Nice to life without the possibility of parole for the shooting death of 48-year-old Cindy Quiett.
Before beginning to serve his life sentence, Loyd must first serve 36 years and four months in state prison based on the other charges and allegations he was convicted of at trial, according to Senior Deputy District Attorney John DeChaine.
Authorities said Loyd drove to Lucerne in a borrowed van on the morning of Sept. 13, 2011, intending to rob Quiett's boyfriend, Patrick Ryden, who Loyd said owed him for methamphetamine he had fronted him to sell.
Loyd, using a loaded .357 pistol he had borrowed from the van's owner, confronted Ryden, sticking the pistol in his face. The men struggled, with the gun pushed in the direction of Quiett, who was standing across the street direction.
The gun went off, she was struck in the stomach and died a short time later.
Lake County Sheriff's Det. John Drewrey, the case's lead detective, arrested Loyd on the day of the murder. Loyd has remained in custody since then.
Jury selection began on April 15, 2015. DeChaine prosecuted the case, with David Markham serving as the Loyd’s trial counsel. Judge Hedstrom presided at the trial.
DeChaine credited thorough detective work for the prosecution's ability to present the evidence leading to Loyd's conviction.
Loyd took the stand in his trial, admitting to being a drug dealer and testifying that he had been high on meth at the time of the shooting, at which point he also hadn't slept for 10 days.
A jury member told Lake County News after the verdict was handed down that Loyd's testimony had hurt him, rather than helped him, at trial.
In finding Loyd guilty, DeChaine said the jury unanimously rejected the defense counsel’s argument that Loyd was not the legal cause of Quiett’s death.
At trial, the defense contended that Ryden’s act of swatting the gun from his face was an intervening act and Quiett's subsequent death was unforeseeable. However, by arguing that Quiett’s death was unforeseeable, the defense unsuccessfully argued that Loyd should be absolved of legal responsibility.
On June 5, 2015, the jury reached its verdict, convicting Loyd of Quiett's murder.
In addition, the jury handed down guilty verdicts for assault with a firearm on Ryden, attempting to rob Ryden, being a felon in possession of a firearm and being a felon in possession of ammunition.
The jury also determined that Loyd had personally used a firearm in the commission of the murder, attempted robbery and assault with a firearm.
In a separate proceeding, following the jury verdicts, the court ruled that the special allegations the prosecution had alleged against Loyd were true.
Specifically, the special allegations included that Loyd had a prior strike conviction for attempted robbery in the state of Indiana, and that Loyd had two prior prison terms.
Shortly after his conviction last year, Loyd filed a motion seeking a new trial. Attorney William Conwell represented Loyd for the purposes of the new trial motion and for his sentencing, which was allowed to go forward after Loyd's new trial motion was denied on July 1, DeChaine said.
At the conclusion of the Friday sentencing hearing, Judge Hedstrom ordered that Loyd be delivered to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to begin serving his sentence, DeChaine said.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
CLEARLAKE, Calif. – The Lake County Campus of Woodland Community College has a lot to offer to its community, with a wide variety of classes that can help students obtain a degree or a certificate of choice.
Professors Mickie Main, Jennifer Hanson, Tracy Williams, Tom Marquette and Jennifer Pyzer teach courses for some of the most in-demand employment opportunities in our local service area.
Accounting
Accounting affects all industries. Whether it is a small business or a larger corporation, accountants are needed to ensure that the business finances are running smoothly and above the rules of the law.
It is important to not just count your profits and losses, but it is also important to know and understand how to do inventory, taxes, and other essential accounting processes in order to obtain the profits and revenues a business deserves and to steer clear of any financial pitfalls.
“We have job offerings for accountants before they are even finished with their schooling,” said Hanson.
When you look at the board in the business lab, you will notice many Lake County Campus-trained accountants who have gained employment at many local businesses. For instance, the local Clearlake H&R Block currently has five employees who previously attended Hansen’s accounting classes.
Business applications
We all have experience with computers and most likely can get by in Word, Excel and possibly more. But the question is: Do you know how to best use these programs in your professional environment?
“In nearly every field employees need professional computer skills,” said Main.
This program, while linked closely to business degrees and certificates, is also a very useful program for all college majors.
Letters of intent, resume cover letters and business proposals can all make the cut if they look and feel professional with the appropriate graphics and charts embedded.
From word processing to spreadsheets, email applications to database design and management, learning how to expertly use these programs will greatly increase your ability to obtain employment, no matter what your field of work.
Administrative assistant
From schools, to hospitals, to government, all businesses need employees with administrative skills.
These positions are readily available and require vast knowledge and skills in a very fast paced and ever-changing world.
With the inclusion of social media, cloud computing and so many apps from which to choose, the job of an administrative assistant has rapidly evolved, requiring administrators to be prepared for all office contingencies.
“This is why the Administrative Assistant program is so interesting, because we need to keep up with the rest of the world and it’s changing so fast,” said Main.
Lake County Campus offers all the courses you need to be successful in the business world. Whether you want to start your own business, find employment opportunities, or just want to update and hone your skills in these specific fields, the Lake County Campus offers a great opportunity for you to reach your goals.
Executive Dean Annette Lee attended similar programs as a student, ran a very successful local business, taught in Lake County Campus’ Business Department and is now the top administrator of the Lake County Campus. Her name also appears on the wall of success.
Call the campus today at 707-995-7900 to find out how it can help you succeed.