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GLENHAVEN, Calif. – A report of a disturbance early Sunday morning at the Glenhaven Beach Resort resulted in the arrest of two Glenhaven women.
Candy May Henderson, 45, and 25-year-old Theresa Anne Blakesley were taken into custody after they both fought with deputies, according to Capt. James Bauman of the Lake County Sheriff's Office.
Bauman said deputies responded to the trailer park at about 6:20 a.m. Dec. 12 when the park manager reported multiple complaints from other tenants of yelling and banging coming from Henderson's home.
On the deputies' arrival, one deputy was confronted by Henderson in the doorway of her trailer. Bauman said Henderson was highly agitated, reportedly yelling and cussing at the deputy with her hands clenched into fists, and pointing a large hunting knife at the deputy.
The deputy backed away from the woman and, at gunpoint, ordered her several times to drop the knife, Bauman said.
Henderson eventually dropped the knife but as the deputy started ordering her to her knees to be handcuffed, she suddenly stood up and charged the deputy, Bauman reported.
Bauman said Henderson was pushed to the ground and as another deputy arrived to help control her, she fought with both deputies, punching and kicking them until one deployed his Taser and she was taken into custody.
As Henderson was being taken to a patrol car, the other deputy checked the trailer for other occupants and found Blakesley pacing around inside, Bauman said.
Blakesley initially refused to exit the trailer and kept reaching into her purse for some reason. Bauman said she eventually was talked out of the trailer but then began fighting violently with the deputy as he tried to detain her.
Bauman said both deputies struggled with Blakesley as she fought to escape but after another Taser deployment, she too was taken into custody.
Both women were booked at the Lake County Jail, Bauman said.
Henderson was charged with felony brandishing of a weapon and misdemeanor charges of battery on a peace officer and resisting arrest, Bauman reported, while Blakesley was charged with misdemeanor resisting arrest.
Neither the suspects or the deputies involved in the incident were injured and there was no apparent explanation for the initial disturbance or the behavior of the two women when they were contacted by deputies, Bauman said.
Both women remained in custody Monday night, according to Lake County Jail records.
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The report came out earlier this month, just ahead of the Senate vote that determined “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” will remain in place, at least for the time being.
Will service members with same-sex partners qualify for the higher “with dependents” housing allowance rate? No.
Will same-sex partners qualify for military health coverage? No.
What if a gay couple is legally married in a state allowing such unions?
Still no, because the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act defines marriage, for federal program purposes, as “a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife” and defines “spouse” to mean “a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.”
Because this law bars the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages, it also that blocks spousal benefits for gay partners across hundreds of federal programs including many military benefits. There are, however, active court challenges.
Will service members with same-sex partners be eligible for on-base family housing? Legally, that could be allowed. It is already is for gay civilian employees working for some federal agencies. But the study advises against opening military base housing to such arrangements.
Will gay members be able to designate partners as beneficiaries of Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance and federal Thrift Savings Plans? Yes.
Will same-sex partners be eligible for base shopping, family support programs, legal assistance, space-available travel and relocation assistance when members move to new assignments?
Some of these benefits could be allowed. It will depend on how the Department of Defense and the services define “dependent” and “family member” for benefit eligibility. For now, if gays are allowed to serve openly, the report recommends that regulations not be revised to benefit same-sex partners, at least “for the time being.”
“Other federal agencies are managing this by establishing a domestic partner status for same-sex partners, through an affidavit or other evidence of the relationship,” the report says. “Within the military community, where benefits are much more prominent and visible…administering such a system distracts from the military’s core mission and runs counter to the Secretary of Defense’s basic direction that implementation of a repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell be done in a way that minimizes disruption to the force.”
Will members who identify themselves as gay have to use separate bathroom and shower facilities? Absolutely not, though the report acknowledges privacy concerns will become a bigger leadership challenge.
Gen. Carter Ham, commander of U.S. Army Europe, and DoD General Counsel Jeh Johnson, led the nine-month examination of the impact of repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the law that for 17 years has barred homosexuals from serving openly in U.S. armed forces.
In their 350-page, two-part report, Ham and Johnson conclude it can be repealed without endangering readiness, but it will require strong leadership and careful preparation.
Ham, Johnson and a 66-person team reviewed all regulations and policies likely to need revision including those on fraternization and misconduct discharges. They held 95 face-to-face forums at 51 bases. They conducted a survey to which 115,000 members and 44,000 spouses responded on how they, their units and families would react to this change.
Marines and Army soldiers – the ground forces doing most of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan – reacted most negatively, with 48 percent of ground combat Marines expecting unit performance to be harmed.
But the overall response from the military community was more positive. Seventy percent of members predicted that allowing gays to serve openly would have a positive, mixed or no effect on units.
The House passed its version of the 2011 defense authorization bill with language to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The Senate’s defense bill had similar language but Republicans opposed repeal in the lame duck session and will gain seats for the new Congress in January.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, testified for repeal in February saying gay Americans shouldn’t have to lie to serve their country.
That “personal opinion” then, Mullen said in an interview earlier this month, “is now my professional view – that this is a policy change that we can make. And we can do it in a relatively low-risk fashion, given the time and given the ability to mitigate whatever risk is out there through strong leadership.”
TFL TARGETED: Military retirees age 65 and older who rely on TRICARE for Life (TFL) as a golden insurance supplement to Medicare would face higher out-of-pocket costs, along with other older Americans, if Congress adopts the final plan of National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. The plan was released Dec. 1.
Gone are some controversial provisions, such as a three-year pay freeze on the military, that had been part of a draft plan released in early November by commission co-chairmen Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles.
But to encourage the elderly to use health care more efficiently, TFL and other Medigap plans would be barred from covering the first $500 of costs not paid by Medicare, and would cover only half of the next $5000. Thus elderly could pay up to $3000 more ($500 + $2500) annually to save $4 billion for Medicare and TRICARE through 2015.
Not found in this report are specific calls to raise TRICARE fees for working age military retirees or specific “reforms” to military retirement. But the panel wants a task force created to “re-evaluate” federal retirement plans which now are “out of line” with private sector pensions. The goal is $70 billion in federal retirement savings over 10 years.
A separate “process” should be set up to control federal health care spending including by TRICARE beneficiaries, the commission says.
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LUCERNE, Calif. – A vehicle collision knocked down a power pole in Lucerne Saturday night, resulting in a closed highway.
The California Highway Patrol reported that the vehicle hit the power pole at 14th Avenue and Highway 20 just before 9 p.m.
The CHP assisted Caltrans in closing Highway 20 at 13th and 15th avenues in order to keep motorists far from the downed lines. They routed vehicles around the area.
Fire line tape also was put up across the sidewalks to keep people from getting too close.
The downed pole was lying partially in the yard of a nearby residence.
Shortly before 11:30 p.m. a crew began working on the pole. The roadway remained closed into early Sunday morning.
A radio report indicated that Lake County Environmental Health was to be called to the scene.
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The Geminid meteor shower, which peaks this year on Dec. 13 and 14, is the most intense meteor shower of the year. It lasts for days, is rich in fireballs, and can be seen from almost any point on Earth.
It's also NASA astronomer Bill Cooke's favorite meteor shower—but not for any of the reasons listed above.
“The Geminids are my favorite,” he explains, “because they defy explanation.”
Most meteor showers come from comets, which spew ample meteoroids for a night of “shooting stars.” The Geminids are different. The parent is not a comet but a weird rocky object named 3200 Phaethon that sheds very little dusty debris – not nearly enough to explain the Geminids.
“Of all the debris streams Earth passes through every year, the Geminids' is by far the most massive,” says Cooke. “When we add up the amount of dust in the Geminid stream, it outweighs other streams by factors of 5 to 500.”
This makes the Geminids the 900-lb gorilla of meteor showers. Yet 3200 Phaethon is more of a 98-lb weakling.
In 1983, 3200 Phaethon was discovered by NASA's IRAS satellite and promptly classified as an asteroid.
What else could it be? It did not have a tail; its orbit intersected the main asteroid belt; and its colors strongly resembled that of other asteroids. Indeed, 3200 Phaethon resembles main belt asteroid Pallas so much, it might be a 5-kilometer chip off that 544 km block.
“If 3200 Phaethon broke apart from asteroid Pallas, as some researchers believe, then Geminid meteoroids might be debris from the breakup,” speculated Cooke. “But that doesn't agree with other things we know.”
Researchers have looked carefully at the orbits of Geminid meteoroids and concluded that they were ejected from 3200 Phaethon when Phaethon was close to the sun – not when it was out in the asteroid belt breaking up with Pallas.
The eccentric orbit of 3200 Phaethon brings it well inside the orbit of Mercury every 1.4 years. The rocky body thus receives a regular blast of solar heating that might boil jets of dust into the Geminid stream.
Could this be the answer?
To test the hypothesis, researchers turned to NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft, which are designed to study solar activity.
Coronagraphs onboard STEREO can detect sungrazing asteroids and comets, and in June 2009 they detected 3200 Phaethon only 15 solar diameters from the sun's surface.
What happened next surprised UCLA planetary scientists David Jewitt and Jing Li, who analyzed the data. “3200 Phaethon unexpectedly brightened by a factor of two,” they wrote. “The most likely explanation is that Phaethon ejected dust, perhaps in response to a break-down of surface rocks (through thermal fracture and decomposition cracking of hydrated minerals) in the intense heat of the Sun.”
Jewett and Li's “rock comet” hypothesis is compelling, but they point out a problem: The amount of dust 3200 Phaethon ejected during its 2009 sun-encounter added a mere 0.01 percent to the mass of the Geminid debris stream – not nearly enough to keep the stream replenished over time. Perhaps the rock comet was more active in the past …?
“We just don't know,” said Cooke. “Every new thing we learn about the Geminids seems to deepen the mystery.”
This month Earth will pass through the Geminid debris stream, producing as many as 120 meteors per hour over dark-sky sites. The best time to look is probably between local midnight and sunrise on Tuesday, Dec. 14, when the Moon is low and the constellation Gemini is high overhead, spitting bright Geminids across a sparkling starry sky.
Bundle up, go outside, and savor the mystery.
Dr. Tony Phillips works for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
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Despite improvements over the past 10 years that have lifted more than 350 million rural people out of extreme poverty, global poverty remains a massive and predominantly rural phenomenon – with 70 percent of the developing world’s 1.4 billion extremely poor people living in rural areas – according to a report released by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
IFAD’s Rural Poverty Report 2011 says that, during the past decade, the overall rate of extreme poverty in rural areas of developing countries – people living on less than US$1.25 a day – has dropped from 48 per cent to 34 per cent. Dramatic gains in East Asia, particularly China, account for much of the decline.
The report points to an alarming increase in the numbers of extremely poor people in rural areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, although the percentage living on less than the equivalent of US$1.25 a day – at 62 per cent – has actually dropped slightly since IFAD last issued a Rural Poverty Report in 2001.
It also notes the persistence of rural poverty on the South Asian subcontinent, which is home to half of the world’s 1 billion extremely poor rural people.
Increasingly volatile food prices, the uncertainties and effects of climate change, and a range of natural resource constraints will complicate further efforts to reduce rural poverty, the report says.
But the report also emphasizes that profound changes in agricultural markets are giving rise to new and promising opportunities for the developing world’s smallholder farmers to significantly boost their productivity, which will be necessary to ensure enough food for an increasingly urbanized global population estimated to reach at least 9 billion by 2050.
Accordingly, “there remains an urgent need … to invest more and better in agriculture and rural areas” based on “a new approach to smallholder agriculture that is both market-oriented and sustainable,” the report says.
“The report makes clear that it is time to look at poor smallholder farmers and rural entrepreneurs in a completely new way – not as charity cases but as people whose innovation, dynamism and hard work will bring prosperity to their communities and greater food security to the world in the decades ahead,” said Kanayo F. Nwanze, IFAD’s President.
“We need to focus on creating an enabling environment for rural women and men to overcome the risks and challenges they face as they work to make their farms and other businesses successful,” he said.
Significant gains in many areas
In addition to the overall decline of extreme poverty in rural areas of developing countries, the Rural Poverty Report 2011 points to other significant gains, most notably:
A drop in the overall poverty rate of US$2 a day in rural areas, from 79 per cent to 61 per cent over the past decade.
Remarkable progress in rural areas of East Asia – primarily China – where the number of extreme poor fell by about two-thirds over the past decade, from 365 million to 117 million, as did the rate of extreme poverty, which fell from 44 to 15 percent.
Improvements in other regions, with the extreme rural poverty rate falling by more than half in Latin America and by nearly half in the Middle East and North Africa. in both regions, the percentage of rural people who live in extreme poverty dropped significantly, as well.
Notwithstanding these gains, the report makes clear that rural poverty continues to be a massive phenomenon throughout much of the developing world, and that it is particularly acute in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia:
Sub-Saharan Africa is home to nearly a third of the world’s extremely poor rural people, whose numbers swelled from 268 million to 306 million over the past decade. While Sub-Saharan Africa’s rate of extreme poverty in rural areas declined from 65 to 62 per cent, it remains by far the highest of any region.
Rural poverty rates have dropped only slightly in the last decade in South Asia, which now has the largest number of poor rural people – about 500 million – of any region or sub-region. Four-fifths of all extremely poor people in South Asia live in rural areas.
The report cites the consequences of climate change – which will make agricultural production more difficult in many places – as complicating the challenges of addressing rural poverty in these regions and globally.
It also points to the key role of women farmers, who produce most of the food that is consumed locally in rural areas, and the need to address their inadequate access to land tenure, credit, equipment and market opportunities.
In addition, the report says “low levels of investment in agriculture, weak rural infrastructure, inadequate production and financial services, and a deteriorating natural resource base” – particularly land and water and growing competition for their use – are creating an environment which makes it too risky and unprofitable for most of the developing world’s smallholder farmers to participate in agricultural markets.
Opportunities for accelerating progress
Yet the report also indicates that momentous ongoing changes in agricultural markets, as well as emerging opportunities in the rural non-farm economy, offer new hope that major progress can be made in combating rural poverty. These include the rapid growth of urban centres and the accompanying rise in demand for higher value food, as well as the fact that agricultural markets are growing and becoming better organized in order to meet that demand.
“The world that rural people live in is changing very fast, and that is bringing a range of new opportunities,” said IFAD’s Ed Heinemann, who led the team that wrote the report. “In order to enable them to address the problems they face and make the most of the opportunities, governments and the donors who work with them have got to do much more to support rural areas, to invest in rural areas, to improve their infrastructure and governance, and to make rural areas better places to live and to do business.”
Essential to any rural poverty reduction strategy, said Heinemann, is understanding how to help poor rural people avoid and manage the risks they face – from longstanding risks related to ill-health and natural disasters to new and emerging challenges related to natural resource degradation, the effects of climate change, growing insecurity of access to land, and greater volatility of food prices.
“The food price shocks a few years ago were a wake up call that, with global population growth and the movement of more people into cities, higher and more uncertain food prices could become a fact of life,” said Nwanze. “But this also means that smallholder agriculture – if it is productive, commercially oriented and well linked to modern markets – can offer the developing world’s rural people a route out of poverty as they become part of the solution to global food security challenges.”
The Rural Poverty Report 2011 was made possible with funding from the Governments of Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland, and the Arab Center for the Studies of Arid Zones and Dry Lands.
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