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LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Last weekend's Independence Day celebrations around Lake County were accompanied by a slight increase in drunk driving arrests and crashes, according to the California Highway Patrol.
The CHP ran one of its regular “maximum enforcement periods” from the evening of Friday, July 1, through the night of Monday, July 4, putting all available officers on area roadways to watch out for driving under the influence cases as well as speeding and distracted driving, the agency said.
Officer Kory Reynolds of the CHP's Clear Lake Area office said the statistics for the weekend showed DUI cases were up when compared with 2015.
Reynolds said this year's DUI arrests totaled eight, compared to seven in 2015.
In addition, there were two DUI collisions last weekend compared to one during the same weekend last year, Reynolds said.
He said the crashes both occurred on Sunday and were noninjury.
One occurred on North Shore Drive in Hidden Valley Lake, and involved one vehicle hitting a parked car, possibly backing into it, he said.
The other crash was on Soda Bay Road near Kelseyville Sunday afternoon and involved a vehicle into a pole, as Lake County News has reported. That crash resulted in extensive utility repairs that required the roadway to be closed until Monday morning.
Reynolds said both crashes resulted in arrests, but he did not report the names of the arrested drivers.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA – Officials at California State Prison-Sacramento are investigating the fatal Thursday stabbing of an inmate from Lake County who was serving a sentence for second-degree murder.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation identified the inmate who died as Humberto Torres, 33.
Torres was received from Lake County on Jan. 26, 2000, and was serving a 25-year-to-life sentence for second-degree murder with a firearm, authorities said.
Officials said Torres had been an inmate at California State Prison-Sacramento, also known as CSP-SAC, since June 18, 2015.
Prison officials have named inmates Rudy De Lossantos, 38, and Michael Robles, 33, as the suspects in Torres' killing.
Officials said Torres was on C Facility – one of three maximum security facilities at the prison – at 1:30 p.m. Thursday when he was attacked by De Lossantos and Robles, who stabbed him multiple times.
Torres was pronounced dead at 1:56 p.m. Thursday, officials said.
Prison officials used six rounds of 40 millimeter rubber bullets, two blast dispersion grenades and OC pepper spray to disrupt the attack, after which a stabbing instrument was discovered, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's report.
Three correctional officers were taken to an area hospital for minor injuries suffered during the incident, officials said.
De Lossantos is serving a 25-years-to-life sentence for first-degree murder and was received from Orange County on Nov. 1, 2006. He has been an inmate at CSP-SAC since May 27, 2015.
Robles is serving a 200-year-to-life sentence for second-degree murder and was received from Riverside County on Feb. 25, 2005. He has been an inmate at CSP- Sac since May 24, 2013.
Opened in 1986, CSP-SAC is located adjacent to Folsom State Prison. It was first known as New Folsom until its name was changed in 1992.
CSP-SAC is a Level IV maximum security prison that houses 1,204 inmates serving long sentences or who have been management problems at other prisons.
The prison also houses inmates requiring specialized mental health programming and inmates with high risk medical concerns.
NORTH COAST, Calif. – Law enforcement from Lake, Marin, Mendocino and Napa counties as well as state and federal agencies will take part in extended remote search training exercises next week.
The training will take place from 7 a.m. to midnight on Tuesday, July 12, and Wednesday, July 13, around Lake Mendocino and the Cal Fire Station at Howard Forest, according to Lt. Shannon Barney of the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office.
Barney said the agencies participating in the training will include the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office, the California National Guard, Cal Fire, Search and Rescue Teams from Lake, Napa, Marin, and Mendocino counties, and the US Army Corps of Engineers.
In recent years California State Wilderness Search and Rescue professionals have seen an increase in extended search and rescue missions in difficult-to-access, mountainous terrain across California. Many of these incidents have occurred in Mendocino County or in adjacent counties, Barney said.
These searches often require a large commitment of advanced search and rescue teams and significant logistical support that must be brought to the scene, according to Barney.
Barney said these search and rescue missions also are often dependent on aviation resources to insert and extract teams and to be available to provide rescue support in the event of injured searchers or lost persons.
As a result, California State Search and Rescue coordinators, with the assistance of California Office of Emergency Services, have drafted a plan or guideline to be presented to the California State Sheriff’s Association for adoption, according to Barney's report.
Part of this plan calls for a more formal plan involving air assets of cooperating agencies, such as the California National Guard and Cal Fire, to assist in deploying or extracting resources to remote areas and or to provide medical extractions (hoist) to injured subjects, either the missing/lost persons or searchers, Barney reported.
In addition to wilderness search and rescue missions the National Guard and Cal Fire can be called to assist other emergency response personnel, including law enforcement, during incidents involving emergencies or natural disasters and law enforcement missions, Barney said.
This assistance is provided as a mutual aid support system and can include: providing critical transportation of personnel, medical evacuation, general evacuation, logistical supply, and technical night search capabilities using forward looking infrared cameras, according to Barney.
Barney said this joint training effort will utilize helicopter resources and crews from the California National Guard and Cal Fire specifically to train law enforcement and search and rescue teams in the capabilities of and safe operations of their respective helicopter platforms.
These helicopters will include the National Guard CH47D Chinook, U/HH60 Blackhawk, UH72A Lakota and the Cal Fire UH1H Super Huey, Barney said.
Starting on Monday, July 11, the public will see an increase in helicopter operations regarding this training exercise in the area of Lake Mendocino, around the Ukiah Municipal Airport and on the Ridgewood Grade near the Cal Fire Station, Barney said.
For safety reasons during this training the US Army Corps of Engineers has closed the South Lake Mendocino Wildlife Area, including all hiking trails east of the Lake Mendocino Dam to the general public. These areas will reopen on Thursday, July 14, Barney said.
On June 27, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the SB 833 legislation sponsored by state Sen. Hernandez.
SB 833 will greatly reduce the future scope of California's Medi-Cal Estate Recovery against the estate of deceased Medi-Cal beneficiaries.
For Medi-Cal recipients who die on or after Jan. 1, 2017, claims by California Medi-Cal Estate Recovery will be reduced to what is minimally required under federal law.
Federal law requires the state to seek adjustment or recovery from an individual's estate for specified medical assistance, including nursing facility services regardless of age if the person was permanently institutionalized, home and community-based services, and related hospital and prescription drug services, if the individual was 55 years of age or older when he or she received the medical assistance.
Presently Medi-Cal Estate Recovery can, subject to limitations, seek recovery from the estate of the surviving spouse of a deceased Medi-Cal recipient if the surviving spouse's estate includes assets which the surviving spouse had received from the Medi-Cal recipient's estate (at death).
Under SB 833, Medi-Cal will no longer be able to recover from the surviving spouse's estate with respect to Medi-Cal recipients who die on or after Jan. 1, 2017.
The surviving spouse of such a person will not have to transfer any assets received from a deceased spouse's estate to safeguard them from recovery claims against the surviving spouse's own estate, when the surviving spouse later dies.
This is a major victory for those who advocated Medi-Cal Estate Recovery reform.
Under SB 833, Medi-Cal only will be able to proceed against assets that are part of the deceased Medi-Cal recipient's “probate estate.”
The probate estate is limited those assets that would be included in a probate were the deceased recipient's estate to be probated.
Presumably this applies regardless of whether or not the deceased recipient's estate is ever actually probated or not; that is, assets inside the estate of a decedent which is appraised at under the $150,000 probate threshold would presumably be considered to be a part of the decedent's probate estate for Medi-Cal Estate Recovery even though no probate is required.
This offers a planning opportunity: Effective Jan. 1, 2017, assets that transferred into a living trust prior to the deceased settlor's death are, therefore, not subject to Medi-Cal Estate Recovery claims against the deceased settlor.
The same is true for assets held as joint tenancy estates and or life estate assets; these pass automatically at death without becoming part of the decedent's probate estate.
Likewise, it would appear that the same outcome will also apply for real property transferred by means of the new transfer on death deed.
This will likely motivate persons who receive Medi-Cal to consider how best to keep their assets outside of their probate estate (one way or another) to avoid Medi-Cal recovery against their estates and so protect their loved ones.
That assets held in a decedent's revocable living trust will avoid both probate and Medi-Cal estate recovery simultaneously is important.
Living trusts can provide more protections to decedent's intended beneficiaries and offer more "what if contingency planning than is true of joint tenancy, life estate or TOD deeds.
In addition, SB 833 will also provide the following benefits: Persons will be able to request an itemized bill each year listing the cost of the Medi-Cal services received (for a $5 cost); interest to be charged against the probate estate of deceased Medi-Cal recipient will be at a lower rate; homesteads of "modest means” will be exempt from Medi-Cal recovery; and acupuncture will added as an approved Medi-Cal service (now effective).
The foregoing is great news. Of course, we do not have all the answers regarding the new legislation. More remains to be seen in 2017 once the legislation begins to be implemented.
Dennis A. Fordham, Attorney, is a State Bar-Certified Specialist in estate planning, probate and trust law. His office is at 870 S. Main St., Lakeport, Calif. He can be reached at
Dinosaurs were fearsome creatures. Some had thick scales, sharp teeth, and, in many cases, lightning-fast reflexes.
One thing they didn’t have: a planetary defense office.
When an asteroid targeted Earth 65 million years ago, it took those masters of Earth by complete surprise.
While we know of no large object that is on a collision course with Earth in the next 100 years, descendants of survivors from that catastrophic impact are determined not to make the same mistake.
In 2016, human astronomers now routinely scan the heavens for signs of potentially hazardous objects.
When one is discovered, alerts are issued to observers around the world so space rocks cannot easily disappear into the blackness of space.
NASA-funded survey projects have found 98 percent of the known catalogue of almost 15,000 near-Earth objects – asteroids and comets whose orbits periodically bring them within 30 million miles of Earth’s orbit. The list is growing at a rate of about 1,500 per year.
Meanwhile, researchers are giving serious thought to an even bigger problem: What would we do if a dangerous asteroid is discovered? How will we know if and when it will impact? Is it possible to deflect or destroy it before it reaches Earth?
All of this work – from discovery to tracking to potential mitigation – is being done by a sprawling network of government agencies, private and public universities, and both amateur and professional astronomers.
Helping them work together is the job of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
“Planetary Defense is a team sport,” said Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC.
This office was established at NASA Headquarters to coordinate the players in planetary defense related activities across NASA, other US government agencies, and with international efforts and projects to detect any asteroid impact hazard and plan the appropriate response.”
A recent real world example illustrates how this all works.
Paul Chodas, manager for NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, described what happened: “The object was first detected by the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Arizona on October 3rd, 2015, and tagged as detection WT1190F.”
Within a couple of days, astronomers suspected it was probably an artificial object: It was faint and small with its motion visibly altered by the gentle pressure of sunlight – a bit like a solar sail or perhaps a hollow rocket body.
As tracking data accumulated from multiple observers, astronomers realized that they would get a closer look. This would be a real world case to exercise the team’s skills.
WT1190F was predicted to hit Earth on Friday, Nov. 13, 2015. Orbit calculations by JPL analysts pinpointed the impact time and site: WT1190F would burn into the atmosphere off the coast of Sri Lanka.
For years, Peter Jenniskens of the SETI institute working with NASA’s Ames Research Center has been leading teams researching entry dynamics on airborne campaigns to observe objects ripping through Earth’s atmosphere.
In 2006, for instance, they recorded the return of NASA's Stardust Sample Return Capsule with its cargo of cometary dust. They’ve also observed a number of defunct spacecraft re-entries and a few natural meteor events.
Supported in part by the United Arab Emirates Space Agency and the International Astronomy Center, Jenniskens assembled a group of experts to witness the re-entry of WT1190F.
They flew to the Indian Ocean on a G450 aircraft armed with cameras and spectrometers. Exactly at the time and place predicted by NASA’s Near Earth Object Observations program, WT1190F produced a magnificent fireball in broad daylight.
“The spectra of one large fragment contained bands of titanium oxide and a line of hydrogen. So the object could have been a titanium-walled vessel containing residual fuel,” Jenniskens said.
Chodas, who had been attempting to reconstruct WT1190F’s past orbital motion, said, “My educated guess, is that it was Lunar Prospector’s trans-lunar injection module, which had a titanium case. Although we may never know for sure.”
One thing is certain: Astronomers supported by NASA found it, tracked it, and predicted where it would hit with pinpoint accuracy.
These are exacting skills that will come in handy the next time an actual asteroid comes to visit.
For more about asteroids and NASA’s planetary defense capabilities, go to www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense .
Researchers have developed an integrated, wearable system that monitors a user’s environment, heart rate and other physical attributes with the goal of predicting and preventing asthma attacks.
The researchers plan to begin testing the system on a larger subject population this summer.
The system, called the Health and Environmental Tracker (HET), is composed of a suite of new sensor devices and was developed by researchers from the National Science Foundation’s Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Advanced Self-Powered Systems of Integrated Sensors and Technologies (ASSIST) at North Carolina State University.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, asthma affects more than 24 million people in the United States. Asthma patients currently rely on inhalers to deal with their symptoms, which can include often-debilitating asthma attacks.
“Our goal was to design a wearable system that could track the wellness of the subjects and in particular provide the infrastructure to predict asthma attacks, so that the users could take steps to prevent them by changing their activities or environment,” said Alper Bozkurt, the principal investigator of a paper describing the work and an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State.
“Preventing an attack could be as simple as going indoors or taking a break from an exercise routine,” says James Dieffenderfer, lead author of the paper and a Ph.D. student in the joint biomedical engineering program at NC State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The HET system incorporates a host of novel sensing devices, which are incorporated into a wristband and a patch that adheres to the chest.
The patch includes sensors that track a patient’s movement, heart rate, respiratory rate, the amount of oxygen in the blood, skin impedance and wheezing in the lungs.
The wristband focuses largely on environmental factors, monitoring volatile organic compounds and ozone in the air, as well as ambient humidity and temperature. The wristband also includes additional sensors to monitor motion, heart rate and the amount of oxygen in the blood.
The system also has one nonwearable component: a spirometer, which patients breathe into several times a day to measure lung function.
“Right now, people with asthma are asked to use a peak flow meter to measure lung function on a day-to-day basis,” Dieffenderfer said. “That information is used to inform the dosage of prescription drugs used in their inhalers.
“For HET, we developed a customized self-powered spirometer, which collects more accurate information on lung function and feeds that data into the system,” Dieffenderfer added.
Data from all of these sensors is transmitted wirelessly to a computer, where custom software collects and records the data.
“The uniqueness of this work is not simply the integration of various sensors in wearable form factors,” said Veena Misra, co-author of the paper and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State. “The impact here is that we have been able to demonstrate power consumption levels that are in the sub-milliwatt levels by using nano-enabled novel sensor technologies. Comparable, existing devices have power consumption levels in the hundreds of milliwatts.
“This ultra-low power consumption is important because it gives the devices a long battery life, and will make them compatible with the power generated by the body – which is not a lot,” said Misra, who is also the director of the ASSIST Center. “It enables a pathway to realize the ASSIST Center’s vision of self-powered wearable sensors in the near future.”
Misra added, “We have tested the system in the benchtop and on a limited number of human subjects for proof of concept demonstration and have confirmed that all of the sensors work, and that the system accurately compiles the data. This summer, we plan to begin testing HET in a controlled environment with subjects suffering from asthma and a control group, in order to identify which environmental and physiological variables are effective at predicting asthma attacks.”
“Once we have that data, the center can begin developing software that will track user data automatically and give users advance warning of asthma attacks,” said Bozkurt, who as testbed leader of the ASSIST Center is overseeing HET system integration. “And that software will allow users to synch the HET to their smartphones so that they can monitor their health on the go. After these tests are completed, and the prediction software created, we are hoping that a fully functional HET system will be available”
The paper, “Low Power Wearable Systems for Continuous Monitoring of Environment and Health for Chronic Respiratory Disease,” is published in the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.
The paper was co-authored by Henry Goodell and Brinnae Bent of the joint biomedical engineering program; Steven Mills, Michael McKnight, Shanshan Yao, Feiyan Lin, Eric Beppler, Bongmook Lee, Veena Misra, Omer Oralkan, Jason Strohmaier, John Muth, and Alper Bozkurt of NC State; and Dr. David Peden of UNC-CH.
The work was done through the ASSIST Center at NC State, under NSF grant number EEC-1160483. The work was also supported by the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, under grant number 3R01-ES023349, and by the Environmental Protection Agency, under cooperative agreement number CR 83578501.