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- Written by: Lake County News Reports
UPPER LAKE, Calif. — Northshore Fire Protection District has presented a plaque to the Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake honoring the tribe’s outstanding partnership, generosity and continued support of fire protection and community safety initiatives.
The Northshore Fire Protection District Board of Directors recognized the tribe for its unwavering commitment to the community, including the tribe’s instrumental role in helping launch the fuels crew and its ongoing support for this initiative.
The Habematolel Pomo not only championed the creation of the program but also funded the crew’s wages during its first year, providing the foundation needed to reduce wildfire risk and improve community resilience.
“We are honored to receive this recognition from Northshore Fire Protection District,” said Danielle Cirelli, chairwoman of the Habematolel Pomo. “Our tribe believes deeply in supporting our neighbors and the protection of our community. Working in collaboration in support of the fuels crew and other fire prevention efforts reflects our shared commitment to safeguarding the community for future generations.”
“The Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake Tribe has been an extraordinary partner,” said Shannon Banks, Northshore Fire Protection District’s new fire chief. “Their early and ongoing support for our fuels crew and other initiatives have had a lasting impact on the safety of our communities. This recognition is a small token of our gratitude for their leadership, generosity and dedication to protecting our region.”
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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
CLEARLAKE, Calif. — Clearlake Animal Control has a big group of dogs ready for new homes.
The shelter has 59 adoptable dogs and puppies listed on its website.
This week’s dogs include “Scraps,” a 2 and a half year old female pit bull terrier mix with a black and white coat. She has been spayed.
The shelter is located at 6820 Old Highway 53. It’s open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
For more information, call the shelter at 707-762-6227, email
This week’s adoptable dogs are featured below.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
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- Written by: NASA Hubble Mission Team, Goddard Space Flight Center
A team using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a new type of astronomical object — a starless, gas-rich, dark-matter cloud considered a “relic” or remnant of early galaxy formation.
Nicknamed “Cloud-9,” this is the first confirmed detection of such an object in the universe — a finding that furthers the understanding of galaxy formation, the early universe, and the nature of dark matter itself.
“This is a tale of a failed galaxy,” said the program’s principal investigator, Alejandro Benitez-Llambay of the Milano-Bicocca University in Milan, Italy. “In science, we usually learn more from the failures than from the successes. In this case, seeing no stars is what proves the theory right. It tells us that we have found in the local universe a primordial building block of a galaxy that hasn't formed.”
The results, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, were presented at a press conference Monday at the 247th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix.
“This cloud is a window into the dark universe,” said team member Andrew Fox of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy/Space Telescope Science Institute (AURA/STScI) for the European Space Agency. “We know from theory that most of the mass in the universe is expected to be dark matter, but it’s difficult to detect this dark material because it doesn’t emit light. Cloud-9 gives us a rare look at a dark-matter-dominated cloud.”
A region of space mostly filled with background galaxies, with one prominent star at upper left. A large blob of purple haze occupies much of the field. Within the purple region, an unremarkable area is outlined with a dashed white circle.
The object is called a Reionization-Limited H I Cloud, or "RELHIC.” The term “H I” refers to neutral hydrogen, and “RELHIC” describes a natal hydrogen cloud from the universe’s early days, a fossil leftover that has not formed stars. For years, scientists have looked for evidence of such a theoretical phantom object. It wasn’t until they turned Hubble toward the cloud, confirming that it is indeed starless, that they found support for the theory.
“Before we used Hubble, you could argue that this is a faint dwarf galaxy that we could not see with ground-based telescopes. They just didn't go deep enough in sensitivity to uncover stars,” said lead author Gagandeep Anand of STScI. “But with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, we're able to nail down that there's nothing there.”
The discovery of this relic cloud was a surprise. “Among our galactic neighbors, there might be a few abandoned houses out there,” said STScI’s Rachael Beaton, who is also on the research team.
Astronomers think RELHICs are dark matter clouds that couldn’t accumulate enough gas to form stars. They represent a window into the early stages of galaxy formation.
Cloud-9 suggests the existence of many other small, dark matter-dominated structures in the universe — other failed galaxies. This discovery provides new insights into the dark components of the universe that are difficult to study through traditional observations, which focus on bright objects like stars and galaxies.
Scientists have studied hydrogen clouds near the Milky Way for many years, but these clouds tend to be much bigger and more irregular than Cloud-9. Compared with other observed hydrogen clouds, Cloud-9 is smaller, more compact, and highly spherical, making it look very different from the others.
The core of this object is composed of neutral hydrogen and is about 4,900 light-years in diameter. Researchers measured the hydrogen gas in Cloud-9 by the radio waves it emits, measuring it to be approximately one million times the mass of the Sun.
Assuming that the gas pressure is balancing the dark matter cloud’s gravity, which appears to be the case, researchers calculated Cloud-9’s dark matter must be about five billion solar masses.
Cloud-9 is an example of structures and mysteries that don't involve stars. Just looking at stars doesn’t give the full picture. Studying the gas and dark matter helps provide a more complete understanding of what's going on in these systems that would otherwise be unknown.
Observationally, identifying these failed galaxies is challenging because nearby objects outshine them. Such systems are also vulnerable to environmental effects like ram-pressure stripping, which can remove gas as the cloud moves through intergalactic space. These factors further reduce their expected numbers.
The starless relic was discovered three years ago as part of a radio survey by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in Guizhou, China, a finding later confirmed by the Green Bank Telescope and the Very Large Array facilities in the United States. But only with Hubble could researchers definitively determine that the failed galaxy contains no stars.
Cloud-9 was simply named sequentially, having been the ninth gas cloud identified on the outskirts of a nearby spiral galaxy, Messier 94 (M94). The cloud is close to M94 and appears to have a physical association with the galaxy. High-resolution radio data shows slight gas distortions, possibly indicating interaction between the cloud and galaxy.
The cloud may eventually form a galaxy in the future, provided it grows more massive — although how that would occur is under speculation. If it were much bigger, say, more than 5 billion times the mass of our Sun, it would have collapsed, formed stars, and become a galaxy that would be no different than any other galaxy we see. If it were much smaller than that, the gas could have been dispersed and ionized and there wouldn't be much left. But it’s in a sweet spot where it could remain as a RELHIC.
The lack of stars in this object provides a unique window into the intrinsic properties of dark matter clouds. The rarity of such objects and the potential for future surveys is expected to enhance the discovery of more of these “failed galaxies” or “relics,” resulting in insights into the early universe and the physics of dark matter.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for more than three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
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- Written by: Lingzi Chen
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — More than $10 billion in federal funding for social services programs serving children and families has been frozen this week in five Democratic-led states, including California.
Lake County’s Social Services Director Rachael Dillman Parsons on Thursday joined the County Welfare Directors Association of California, or CWDA — which represents the human services directors of all 58 California counties — in urging the immediate restoration of the funding.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, announced on Tuesday that it had frozen billions of federal child care and family assistance funds for California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York, citing “fraud concerns.”
Across the five states, the freeze includes nearly $2.4 billion from the Child Care and Development Fund, $7.35 billion in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — known in California as CalWORKs — and $869 million from the Social Services Block Grant, according to the HHS announcement.
HHS said it has identified funds being "improperly provided to individuals who are not eligible under federal law.” It also said that funds will remain frozen until the HHS “completes a review and determines that states are in compliance with federal requirements.”
However, it did not provide any specifics or timeline in the announcement, nor did it address the impact on the millions of American families and children who could lose coverage.
“If unresolved, we could see impacts as soon as February 2026,” Dillman Parsons said in a press release posted on the department’s Facebook page Thursday afternoon.
The county did not provide an immediate response to Lake County News’ request for details on how local recipients of the affected benefits may be impacted by the federal fund freeze.
CWDA criticized the freeze in a Wednesday press release, calling it “baseless” and saying the federal government had provided “zero evidence” for its actions.
The release said California is being subjected to “punitive paperwork and bureaucratic barriers” including requests for sensitive personal information that local providers such as child care centers are prohibited from collecting.
The association warned that the freeze will have immediate consequences for millions of families: parents may lose child care, struggle to stay in school or at work, and children could face hunger or homelessness.
“The consequences of this action will be immediate and dire for the millions of California families who rely on these programs to survive,” the CWDA said, noting that more than three quarters of all of California’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families recipients are children.“Children will suffer most.”
The funding freeze is the latest in a series of federal actions affecting social welfare programs.
A nationwide funding freeze in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, during the government shutdown in the fall was later reversed after multiple federal lawsuits, and cuts to homeless housing programs prompted a joint lawsuit by 20 states, including California.
The earlier SNAP freeze, which a quarter of Lake County residents rely on, worsened the local food crisis. The Board of Supervisors urgently allocated a total of $140,000 to support local food distribution for five weeks, and food banks reported “never-before-seen lengths” of food distribution lines.
The CWDA said the HHS action “continues this administration’s attack on programs proven to lift children and families out of poverty.”
“We call on HHS to immediately rescind this action and restore stability to these vital programs that help families meet their basic needs and create pathways out of poverty,” the association said.
Email staff writer Lingzi Chen at