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LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Several dogs await adoption this week at Lake County Animal Care and Control.
The dogs range in age from 1 year to 3 years, and range in size from Chihuahua and dachshund mixes to hound and pit bull terrier mixes.
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.
In addition to the animals featured here, all adoptable animals in Lake County can be seen here: http://bit.ly/Z6xHMb .
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 is of undetermined age.
She has a short gray coat, weighs nearly 44 pounds and has not yet been spayed.
She's in kennel No. 20, ID No. 37919.
Vizsla-hound mix
This female Vizsla-hound mix is 3 years old.
She has a short red coat and floppy ears, and has not yet been spayed.
She's in kennel No. 21, ID No. 37929.
Male dachshund mix
This male dachshund mix is one year old.
He has a short tan coat, weighs nearly 14 pounds and has been neutered.
He's in kennel No. 30a, ID No. 37728.
Female Chihuahua mix
This female Chihuahua mix is two years old.
She has a short tan coat and weighs nearly 10 pounds. Shelter staff did not report if she has yet been altered.
She's in kennel No. 32, ID No. 37808.
Male pit bull terrier mix
This male pit bull terrier mix is 1 year old.
He has a short blue brindle and white coat, and weighs 60 pounds. Shelter staff did not report if he had been altered.
He's in kennel No. 33, ID No. 37809.
'Bear'
“Bear” is a 1-year-old Labrador Retriever mix.
He has a short black coat, weighs 66 pounds and has been altered.
Shelter staff said Bear is very friendly, gentle and mellow, and would make a great family pet, as he's good with kids. He's also scared of cats.
He's currently in foster care, ID No. 37345.
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, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday. The shelter is open from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and on Saturday from 1 p.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
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – The effort to contain a wildland fire above Highland Springs Reservoir is continuing, as evening winds are kicking up and creating challenges for firefighters.
The fire was first dispatched just minutes before 2 p.m. Saturday, as Lake County News has reported.
Cal Fire Battalion Chief Greg Bertelli said the fire is located off of the Old Toll Road above Highland Springs on the Lake and Mendocino County line.
He said most of the fire is inside the Lake County boundary.
Shortly before 5 p.m. Bertelli said the fire was holding at about 100 acres with 10 percent containment. By nightfall containment was reported to have risen to 20 percent.
He said the evening winds were kicking up from the west and pushing the fire toward the east.
A hunting cabin and an outbuilding have been destroyed, Bertelli said, adding that protection has been put in place for other structures in the area.
“We're trying to be really aggressive on it,” said Bertelli.
He said the fire had moved from grass to brush to timber. In the trees, the fire began spotting when it hit knobcone pines.
Bertelli said 10 fire engines, six hand crews, six bulldozers, two helicopters and four air tankers were on scene just before 5 p.m.
Radio reports indicated tankers coming on scene were being assigned to work hot spots on the fire. The goal was to prevent the fire from crossing the retardant line tankers had laid down.
Additional details will be posted as they become available.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
This story is being updated as more information becomes available.
NORTH COAST, Calif. – Firefighters are on the scene of a wildland fire above the Highland Springs Reservoir.
The fire was first dispatched shortly before 2 p.m.
Radio reports put the fire on High Valley Ranch above Highland Springs, with firefighters accessing it from the 2200 block of Highland Springs Road.
Cal Fire's initial report put the fire just inside Mendocino County.
Just before 3 p.m. the fire was estimated to be 50 acres, with two structures destroyed, according to radio reports.
About an hour later, the fire's size was estimated to be 100 acres and 10 percent contained, based on radio traffic.
The fire was burning in grass and moving into timber, reports from the scene indicated.
Cal Fire tankers and helicopters are working the fire, with engines from Cal Fire, Lakeport Fire, Kelseyville Fire and Hopland Fire among those agencies on scene. Hand crews and dozers also are reported to be responding.
The fire was reported to be spotting, with the head of the fire very active. Radio reports indicated the copters were trying to get under the smoke to hit the head of the fire.
Radio traffic indicated that drift smoke was making its way across the lake to the Clearlake Oaks area.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
A competent settlor’s power to revoke a living trust and return the assets into his or her name is equal to ownership of the trust assets.
So long as the settlor is competent, the trustee owes his primary duty to the settlor and can follow the written instructions of the settlor.
What changes when the settlor becomes incompetent prior to death?
Last year, California’s Supreme Court decided the Estate of Giraldin. It held that once the incompetent settlor of a living trust died, the death beneficiaries gained legal standing to dispute the successor trustee’s alleged mismanagement of the trust, to the extent that the trustee’s mismanagement reduced what remained for them.
Now, building on Giraldin, California’s Third District Court of Appeals decided Drake v. Pinkham.
The Drake case holds that once a settlor of a living trust becomes incompetent – provided no other competent person has the right to revoke the trust (e.g., another settlor, or an agent under a power of attorney or a conservator) – the future death beneficiaries gain rights.
The beneficiaries can then request the successor trustee to provide an accounting and information regarding its administration and dispute the trustee’s administration in court.
Otherwise, barring the settlor’s incompetency prior to death, the future trust beneficiaries must wait till all persons with the power to revoke the trust die (usually only the settlor).
The Drake decision is a double-edged sword; it was in fact a defeat for the beneficiary who brought that case.
In Drake, a death beneficiary alleged that her mother, the settlor, was incompetent and had been subjected to undue influence when she signed two trust amendments to her living trust that disinherited one daughter and left everything to another.
She did not challenge these amendments while her mother was alive, even though she was aware of them. She waited until her mother died before she contested them.
The daughter’s contest was denied as being untimely because, said the court, she had gained standing to petition the court once the mother had become incompetent.
By not acting while the mother was still alive, she denied the court the opportunity to decide whether or not the mother was truly incompetent when she signed the trust amendments.
In Giraldin, the death beneficiaries also waited until the incompetent settlor died. They, however, were allowed to dispute the trustee’s investment actions, taken while the settlor was incompetent, on the grounds that the trustee had breached a duty owed to the then living settlor that reduced the size of the death beneficiaries’ inheritances.
Lessons are to be learned by trustees, settlors and persons engaging in their own estate planning.
First, future death beneficiaries of a living trust who believe that the living settlor is incompetent should request information from the trustee regarding the trust terms and its management (a court ruling of incapacity may be necessary should the trustee deny that the settlor’s incapacity).
Second, the trustee who manages the living trust of an incompetent settlor should be prepared to work with, and if necessary to defend his or her actions against any claims brought by, the death beneficiaries (a tightrope if ever there was one).
Third, a person engaging in estate planning may consider giving someone else the power to revoke the trust, in the event of the settlor’s incompetency, in order to prevent the death beneficiaries from becoming involved with, in and perhaps interfering with, the administration of the trust during the settlor’s lifetime should the settlor become incompetent.
Fourth, a person may wish to exclude certain persons as beneficiaries of a particular trust in order to prevent conflicts regarding that trust; that may entail providing for these excluded persons with other assets outside of the trust to buy peace.
Dennis A. Fordham, attorney (LL.M. tax studies), is a State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Probate and Trust Law. His office is at 55 First St., Lakeport, California. Dennis can be reached by e-mail at
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory and telescopes on the ground may have found the most crowded galaxy in our part of the universe.
The ultra-compact dwarf galaxy, known as M60-UCD1, may be the densest galaxy near to Earth, packed with an extraordinary number of stars. This galaxy is providing astronomers with clues to its intriguing past and its role in the galactic evolutionary chain.
M60-UCD1, estimated to be about 10 billion years old, is near the massive elliptical galaxy NGC 4649, also called M60, about 54 million light years from Earth. It is the most luminous known galaxy of its type and one of the most massive, weighing 200 million times more than our sun, based on observations with the Keck 10-meter telescope in Hawaii.
What makes M60-UCD1 so remarkable is that about half of this mass is found within a radius of only about 80 light years. The density of stars is about 15,000 times greater – meaning the stars are about 25 times closer to each other – than in Earth's neighborhood in the Milky Way galaxy.
“Traveling from one star to another would be a lot easier in M60-UCD1 than it is in our galaxy, but it would still take hundreds of years using present technology,” said Jay Strader of Michigan State University in Lansing. Strader is the lead author of a paper about the research, which was published Sept. 20 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The 6.5-meter Multiple Mirror Telescope in Arizona was used to study the amount of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium in stars in M60-UCD1. The values were found to be similar to our sun.
“The abundance of heavy elements in this galaxy makes it a fertile environment for planets and, potentially, for life to form,” said co-author Anil Seth of the University of Utah.
Another intriguing aspect of M60-UCD1 is the presence of a bright X-ray source in its center, revealed in Chandra data. One explanation for this source is a giant black hole weighing in at about 10 million times the mass of our sun.
Astronomers want to find out whether M60-UCD1 was born as a jam-packed star clusters or become more compact as stars were ripped away from it.
Large black holes are not found in star clusters, so if the X-ray source is in fact due to a massive black hole, it was likely produced by collisions between M60-UCD1 and one or more nearby galaxies.
M60-UCD1's great mass and the abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are also arguments for the theory it is the remnant of a much larger galaxy.
“We think nearly all of the stars have been pulled away from the exterior of what once was a much bigger galaxy,” said co-author Duncan Forbes of Swinburne University in Australia. “This leaves behind just the very dense nucleus of the former galaxy, and an overly massive black hole.”
If this stripping did occur, then the galaxy originally was 50 to 200 times more massive than it is now, and the mass of its black hole relative to the original mass of the galaxy would be more like that of the Milky Way and many other galaxies.
The stripping could have taken place long ago and M60-UCD1 may have been stalled at its current size for several billion years.
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra Program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.
LAKEPORT, Calif. – It's a duck, it's a Rambler, no, it's an Amphicar, one of several that will visit Lake County this weekend for the annual Clear Lake Splash-in.
The largest celebration of seaplanes – and aquatic cars – in the Western United States takes place through Sunday in Lakeport.
Planes and cars arrived Friday afternoon at the old Natural High School property, located in the 800 block of N. Main St. Some 30 seaplanes are expected to take part.
The automotive world is filled with quirky little bits of history. The Amphicar is one such example that is as curious as it is ingenious.
Built in Germany between 1961 and 1968, the Amphicar is, in fact a floating car, capable as the name suggests, of a land speed of 70 miles per hour and a water speed of seven miles per hour.
The Amphicar remains the only non-military amphibious car ever to be put into production. They're capable of long swims: Amphicars have traveled from San Diego to Catalina Island and Africa to Spain, as well as multiple trips across the English Channel.
The front wheels act as rudders when in the water, and two transmissions are featured in the car, a two speed for water use and a four speed for driving. The engine is a rear-mounted four-cylinder that produces 43 horse power.
After the Kelseyville Pear Festival on Saturday – where the cars are set to appear in the parade – the Amphicars will be on display for the Splash-In at Skylark Shores Resort for the largest Amphicar/seaplane meet in the Western U.S.
Amphicar owners are known for giving rides, so come on by. They guarantee that watching seaplanes take off over head in the lake from a Amphicar “is a blast.”
For more information about the event visit www.clearlakesplashin.com .
