LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The Lake County Department of Social Services has issued an update on the government shutdown’s impact on food benefits.

The agency said California received notice from the federal government that November CalFresh benefits will be disrupted due to the federal shutdown. 

Millions of Californians receiving CalFresh benefits will be impacted.

CalFresh benefits are funded for the month of October. November CalFresh benefits will be delayed. People can keep using their existing CalFresh benefits as usual. No action is required.

“We understand this is a difficult situation and will share more information about your November CalFresh benefits as soon as possible,” Social Services reported.

If you need food now, you can click here to find your local food bank. Lake County’s Food Distribution and Pantry List can be found pinned to the top of the agency’s Facebook page.

For more information on CalFresh benefits and impacts from the federal shutdown you may also visit the California Department of Social Services website at www.cdss.ca.gov. 

You can check your balance in the ebtEDGE app or by calling the number on the back of your EBT card.

At this time, CalWORKs benefits for the month of November 2025 are not impacted.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday announced the first graduating class of company officers at Cal Fire’s new Atwater Training Center. 

Thirty-eight firefighters completed the rigorous Company Officer Academy, earning promotion to company officer — Cal Fire’s frontline leaders in emergency response and crew development.

Located at the former Castle Air Force Base, the Atwater Training Center opened in July to meet growing training demands. 

The facility joins three other Training Centers in Ione, Redding, and Riverside, expanding the Cal Fire Training Program’s capacity to run concurrent Fire Control Academies and specialized leadership, aviation and equipment operations training. 

Officials said the expansion was essential to accommodate the growth in Cal Fire's permanent and seasonal staffing, prompted by the increasing intensity of fire activity in California.

“With every graduating class, California is expanding its world‑class firefighting force and preparing for the challenges of tomorrow,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom. "The new Atwater Training Center represents our state’s commitment to ensuring Cal Fire’s firefighters have the tools, training, and leadership to keep Californians safe in an era of evolving fire risk.”

Company officers play a critical role in Cal Fire’s mission. They lead crews during emergencies, assume initial Incident Command, and oversee readiness, training and fire prevention efforts during non-emergency periods. 

The academy prepares them for this leadership transition through standardized, statewide instruction.

With this graduating class, Cal Fire has trained over 500 new company officers in 2025 and expects to surpass 650 by year’s end.

The ceremony concluded with a badge-pinning and oath administered by Cal Fire Director and Fire Chief Joe Tyler, who delivered the keynote address.

“The successful graduation of Fire Control Class 25-15 at the Atwater Training Center is a testament to Cal Fire’s enduring commitment to leadership excellence,” said Chief Tyler. “These 38 new company officers have demonstrated the dedication, discipline, and skills required to lead in today’s dynamic emergency response environment.”

Following reports that the Trump Administration is considering invocation of the Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty military forces for domestic law enforcement, Rep. Mike Thompson (CA-04) led 42 Democratic colleagues on Thursday in calling on the president publicly to warn him against such unlawful action. 

After what the group called the president’s “ill-advised and overreaching deployment” of National Guard in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., the Democrats said they are fighting back on behalf of American citizens and military personnel.  

“We won’t be intimidated by the president’s attempts to militarize our streets,” said Thompson. “The law is clear: the president cannot invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy troops in a state that hasn’t requested the help. Let’s be clear: Californians don’t want American military personnel policing our streets. And Democratic members of Congress are not going to stand by and wait for this president to misuse our military to intimidate American civilians. We’ve got to put an end to this before it begins.” 

In a letter to the President, the lawmakers issued a stark warning:

“We write with grave concern regarding reports that your Administration is considering invocation of the Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty military forces for domestic law enforcement. Such an action would represent a profound departure from our constitutional traditions and limits established under the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the United States military, including National Guard troops called into federal service, in civilian law enforcement except in the narrowest and most extraordinary circumstances,” they wrote.

“We therefore urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to refrain from any action that would violate the Posse Comitatus Act or undermine the principle of civilian governance. We remind you that your oath of office requires you to ‘preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,’ not to disregard it,” the lawmakers continued.

The letter was signed by the following representatives: Mike Thompson, Ami Bera; André Carson; Gilbert Cisne
ros; Steve Cohen; Herbert Conaway; Jason Crow; Madeleine Dean; Christopher Deluzio; Mark DeSaulnier; Lloyd Doggett; Dwight Evans; John Garamendi; Al Green; Jahana Hayes; Jared Huffman; Jonathan Jackson; Sara Jacobs; Henry Johnson; Julie Johnson; Ro Khanna; Raja Krishnamoorthi; Sam Liccardo; Ted Lieu; Zoe Lofgren; Seth Magaziner; Doris Matsui; James McGovern; Dave Min; Seth Moulton; Kevin Mullin; Jerrold Nadler; Eleanor Holmes Norton; Jimmy Panetta; Mark Pocan; Mike Quigley; Robert Scott; Brad Sherman; Shri Thanedar; Dina Titus; Rashida Tlaib; Norma Torres; and Derek Tran.

Read the full letter here and below.

President Trump:

We write with grave concern regarding reports that your Administration is considering invocation of the Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty military forces for domestic law enforcement. Such an action would represent a profound departure from our constitutional traditions and limits established under the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the United States military, including National Guard troops called into federal service, in civilian law enforcement except in the narrowest and most extraordinary circumstances.

The Insurrection Act may only be invoked when a state requests federal assistance, when there is an active rebellion against the United States, or when inhabitants of a state are being deprived of constitutionally protected rights and the state is unable or unwilling to protect them. None of these conditions currently exist.

Threatening or preparing to use the military against the American people is both inappropriate and deeply irresponsible. Moreover, your Administration’s rhetoric and subsequent actions singling out communities and states led by elected officials of the opposing political party only deepens the perception that such actions would be politically motivated rather than grounded in law.

We therefore urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to refrain from any action that would violate the Posse Comitatus Act or undermine the principle of civilian governance. We remind you that your oath of office requires you to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” not to disregard it.

Thank you for your attention to this serious matter.

Amy Mainzer likes to quote a mentor who taught her the three basic steps to prevent asteroids from crashing into Earth: “Find them early, find them early, and find them early.”

“We can't do anything about an incoming asteroid if we don't know it’s there,” says Mainzer, a UCLA astronomer who leads planetary defense missions for NASA. “But if we have years, or ideally decades, before an object can make a close approach to the Earth, now we have the benefit of time.” 

Time to send probes up to study the object and learn what it’s made of. And maybe even time to shoot something at it that could break it up or knock it off course. (That was the goal of NASA’s successful DART mission, which rammed a spacecraft into an asteroid 6.8 million miles away from Earth in 2023.)

Mainzer’s goal is to give humanity that time. For over a decade, she led NASA’s NEOWISE mission (short for Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer), which repurposed a small space telescope to identify and study comets and asteroids in our celestial neighborhood. NEOWISE went offline in 2024 after spotting over a hundred thousand asteroids and comets in space, including several thousand whose orbits bring them to within 28 million miles of our planet’s path around the sun. Over 200 of these near-earth objects were new to science.

Now Mainzer is leading the design of NEOWISE’s successor, the first-ever space telescope designed specifically to spot objects that pose a threat to our planet. But as Congress is working to reopen the federal government and pass a budget that could slash funding for the federal agencies that have long propelled U.S. space science, Mainzer says the future of this critical work could be in jeopardy.

The high-stakes world of planetary defense science

Thanks in part to NEOWISE, astronomers reckon they’re tracking more than 95 percent of the near-earth asteroids that are at least a kilometer across. “That sounds great until you realize that’s about the size of the object that killed the dinosaurs,” Mainzer says. 

The consequences of such a collision are obviously “very bad,” Mainzer notes. But considering the last such asteroid struck 66 million years ago, scientists believe the likelihood of an extinction-level asteroid strike in the next century is (thankfully!) quite low.

On the other hand, we know that smaller asteroids do crash into our planet with unsettling regularity — and when something’s hurtling through the atmosphere at 40,000 miles per hour, it doesn’t have to be very big to cause a lot of trouble. 

In 2013, dash cams in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk captured the flaming trail of a meteorite streaking through the sky before it crashed down outside of town. Shock waves from the rock’s fiery passage through the atmosphere were strong enough to bring down the wall of a factory and shatter windows across the city, sending over a thousand people to the hospital. 

Before it broke up in the atmosphere, the Chelyabinsk meteorite was less than 20 meters across. (A baseball-sized fragment of that object eventually made its way to the UCLA Meteorite Museum, which is the largest such collection on the West Coast and the seventh largest on Earth.) It was the most powerful known impact since 1908, when a rock about 50 meters across struck Siberia, instantly flattening over 800 square miles of forest.

“So there are lots of smaller asteroids out there that are still capable of causing a lot of damage,” Mainzer says. “And as it turns out, we don't know where most of them are right now. That was a bit surprising to me. And I thought, wow, we should work on that.”

Now, she’s leading the not-so-small army of experts building NEOWISE’s successor, NEO Surveyor. “We're taking all the things we've learned from the first telescope and we're making its bigger, badder cousin,” Mainzer says — with a taller sun shield, a higher-resolution camera and an orbit that’s optimized for detecting incredibly small, dark objects hurtling through the vastness of space. NEO Surveyor is set to launch no earlier than September 2027.

“Yes, it's rocket science, but it's doable rocket science,” Mainzer says. “We can build better space telescopes that will better enable us to spot these objects. It's a problem we can absolutely solve.”

But to this point in human history, no other entity but the U.S. federal government has invested the resources, focus or ambition to pursue science at this scale. America’s history of robust government funding for science is why over 98 percent of known near-earth objects have been spotted by NASA-funded projects.

What it takes to keep eyes on the skies

For Mainzer’s current mission and for the future of planetary defense, the federal government must continue to invest in space science. Building a telescope like NEO Surveyor takes several years and lots of money. And that’s to say nothing of the thousands of people whose specialized skills equip them to actually do the work.

“It takes decades to train a scientist like me,” says Mainzer, whose graduate work and training were funded by both NASA and the National Science Foundation. Each agency faces a sizable budget cut in the Trump administration’s proposed budget for 2026. If passed by Congress, that could mean both less support for planetary defense, as well as fewer opportunities for America to train the astronomers and engineers who will carry this work into the future.

“If we lose that continuous supply of well-trained scientists and engineers, that loss will reverberate for decades afterwards,” Mainzer says. 

Julia Busiek writes for the University of California Newsroom.

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Despite legal setbacks that will require more environmental studies and Adventist Health backing out of a major clinic project, the city of Clearlake is forging ahead with plans for a major commercial project.

The project encompasses the former Pearce Field airport property, totaling about 40 acres along Highway 53.

At its Oct. 2 meeting, the Clearlake City Council voted unanimously to rescind environmental review and project entitlements for construction of the 18th Avenue Road Project and development of a hotel granted by the Clearlake Planning Commission in December 2022.

The Koi Nation appealed those project approvals to the City Council, which upheld the approvals. The tribe then filed a writ of mandate with the Lake County Superior Court, claiming a violation of required consultation with them.

The following December, Judge Michael Lunas of the Lake County Superior Court denied the Koi’s request. The Koi then appealed the ruling to the State Appellate Court, which eventually  ordered the city to set aside the project approvals and environmental review.

The council’s action on Oct. 2 adhered to the order in that ruling.

Despite that setback, as well as Adventist Health’s withdrawal of its plans for a $50 million clinic as an anchor tenant at the site, City Manager Alan Flora — when asked about what’s next for the commercial project — said the city is still moving ahead.

Flora said that, technically, the city has to redo its environmental and permit process for the hotel and 18th Avenue. 

“While this is the action required by the court now, we have expected this for some time. We have included the 18th Avenue and hotel projects into the environmental review and entitlement package for the overall airport redevelopment,” Flora said in an email.

He said the city’s environmental impact report, or EIR, is almost ready for public release. “The EIR and entitlements are designed in a way to allow significant flexibility of uses.”

Despite the lawsuit and the need to rework the EIR, Flora said the hotel developer “is aware of the plan and remains committed to the project.”

As for the withdrawal of Adventist Health, Flora said there remain several scenarios related to the medical clinic and the possibility of it still being built.

“We could find a developer to build a clinic that Adventist could lease rather than build, we could identify a different healthcare partner to build a clinic there, or we could develop the site entirely with retail uses,” Flora said. “All of these scenarios will be allowed through the entitlement process.”

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, and on Bluesky, @erlarson.bsky.social. Find Lake County News on the following platforms: Facebook, @LakeCoNews; X, @LakeCoNews; Threads, @lakeconews, and on Bluesky, @lakeconews.bsky.social.