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LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – A cold snap is in the forecast for the coming week, according to the National Weather Service.

The agency issued a freeze watch for Lake County that will be in effect from 2 a.m. Monday to 8 a.m. Wednesday.

The watch warns of overnight temperatures between 24 and 32 degrees.

The coldest temperatures in Lake County are expected on Monday morning, with widespread lows in the mid to upper 20s and several hours of subfreezing temperatures possible, the National Weather Service reported.

Daytime temperatures also are forecast to drop this week.

During the day on Sunday temperatures are forecast to be in the high 40s with wind gusts into the mid 20s, according to the forecast.

On Monday, with temperatures in the mid 40s, forecasters said there is a slight chance of rain and snow in the higher elevations.

From Tuesday through Friday, daytime temperatures are forecast to rise into the 50s, with nighttime temperatures into the high 30s.

Chances of rain also are predicted on Thursday, according to the forecast.

During the freeze, area residents are urged to check on the elderly and make sure animals have a warm shelter, protect plants and consider wrapping external pipes that may be vulnerable to freezing.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
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Susan Krones. Courtesy photo.


LAKEPORT, Calif. – Susan Krones has joined the race to become Lake County’s next district attorney.

Krones is currently a senior deputy district attorney and has 25 years of experience prosecuting criminal cases in Lake County.

Also in the race so far is local attorney Steven Brown, as Lake County News has reported.

Krones started out in the District Attorney’s Office Family Support Division in 1992 and then transferred to the Criminal Division in 1997 where she has prosecuted serious and violent felonies including murder, child sexual assault, domestic violence, vehicular homicide and animal abuse cases, to name just a few.

While assigned to the child sexual assault cases, Krones was instrumental in establishing the first child interview center in Lake County for victims of sexual assault.

Krones is a U.S. Army veteran, having served as a judge advocate general attorney for seven years reaching the rank of captain.

While in the military she served as a prosecutor and a Medical Board Advocate for soldiers.

When she was stationed in Germany during Operation Desert Shield, Krones served as a trial defense attorney and then the chief of the Civil Division in Stuttgart.

Krones received her law degree from UC Hastings College of the Law in 1984.

While in law school Krones worked part-time as a law clerk at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco. She received her undergraduate degree cum laude in history from UCLA.

Krones is involved in the local community and serves on the Lake County Arts Council Board, the Lake County Community Radio Board and is a member of 100 Women Strong and the Lake County Bar Association. She is also a member of the California District Attorney’s Association.

She pledges to work closely with local law enforcement agencies and community leaders to reduce crime in Lake County.

“Over my 25 years in prosecuting crime in Lake County I have forged the relationships and gained the experience required to lead the District Attorney’s Office,” Krones said. “I will maintain the highest degree of ethics in the office and will be responsive to the people of Lake County.”

For more information about Krones visit her Web site at www.susankronesforda.com.
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Three billion miles away on the farthest known major planet in our solar system, an ominous, dark storm – once big enough to stretch across the Atlantic Ocean from Boston to Portugal – is shrinking out of existence as seen in pictures of Neptune taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

Immense dark storms on Neptune were first discovered in the late 1980s by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft.

Since then, only Hubble has had the sharpness in blue light to track these elusive features that have played a game of peek-a-boo over the years.

Hubble found two dark storms that appeared in the mid-1990s and then vanished. This latest storm was first seen in 2015, but is now shrinking.

Like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot (GRS), the storm swirls in an anticyclonic direction and is dredging up material from deep inside the ice giant planet’s atmosphere. The elusive feature gives astronomers a unique opportunity to study Neptune’s deep winds, which can’t be directly measured.

The dark spot material may be hydrogen sulfide, with the pungent smell of rotten eggs. Joshua Tollefson from the University of California at Berkeley explained, “The particles themselves are still highly reflective; they are just slightly darker than the particles in the surrounding atmosphere.”

Unlike Jupiter’s GRS, which has been visible for at least 200 years, Neptune’s dark vortices only last a few years. This is the first one that actually has been photographed as it is dying.

“We have no evidence of how these vortices are formed or how fast they rotate,” said Agustín Sánchez-Lavega from the University of the Basque Country in Spain. “It is most likely that they arise from an instability in the sheared eastward and westward winds.”

The dark vortex is behaving differently from what planet-watchers predicted. “It looks like we’re capturing the demise of this dark vortex, and it’s different from what well-known studies led us to expect,” said Michael H. Wong of the University of California at Berkeley, referring to work by Ray LeBeau (now at St. Louis University) and Tim Dowling’s team at the University of Louisville. “Their dynamical simulations said that anticyclones under Neptune’s wind shear would probably drift toward the equator. We thought that once the vortex got too close to the equator, it would break up and perhaps create a spectacular outburst of cloud activity.”

But the dark spot, which was first seen at mid-southern latitudes, has apparently faded away rather than going out with a bang.

That may be related to the surprising direction of its measured drift: toward the south pole, instead of northward toward the equator.

Unlike Jupiter’s GRS, the Neptune spot is not as tightly constrained by numerous alternating wind jets (seen as bands in Jupiter’s atmosphere). Neptune seems to only have three broad jets: a westward one at the equator, and eastward ones around the north and south poles. The vortex should be free to change traffic lanes and cruise anywhere in between the jets.

“No facilities other than Hubble and Voyager have observed these vortices. For now, only Hubble can provide the data we need to understand how common or rare these fascinating neptunian weather systems may be,” said Wong.

The first images of the dark vortex are from the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, a long-term Hubble project that annually captures global maps of our solar system’s four outer planets.

Only Hubble has the unique capability to probe these worlds in ultraviolet light, which yields important information not available to other present-day telescopes.

Additional data, from a Hubble program targeting the dark vortex, are from an international team including Wong, Tollefson, Sánchez-Lavega, Andrew Hsu, Imke de Pater, Amy Simon, Ricardo Hueso, Lawrence Sromovsky, Patrick Fry, Statia Luszcz-Cook, Heidi Hammel, Marc Delcroix, Katherine de Kleer, Glenn Orton, and Christoph Baranec.

Wong’s paper appears online in the Astronomical Journal on Feb. 15, 2018.

The Hubble Space Telescope 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. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington, D.C.

For additional imagery, visit: http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2018-08. For NASA’s Hubble web page, visit www.nasa.gov/hubble.

Ray Villard works for the Space Telescope Science Institute of Baltimore, Maryland.
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Barbara Green is decked out in Seuss gear and ready to read stories at Lakeport Library in Lakeport, Calif., when all Lake County Library branches observe Read Across America Day with Dr. Seuss-themed storytimes in February and March 2018. Photo courtesy of the Lake County Library.

LAKEPORT, Calif. – Readers in Lake County will join millions of their peers across the country to celebrate the 21st annual National Education Association's Read Across America Day on March 2, 2018.

NEA's Read Across America Day, which celebrates Dr. Seuss's birthday and the joys of reading, expects more than 45 million readers, both young and old, to pick up a book and read.

To honor Dr. Seuss and celebrate the fun and value of reading, the Lake County Library is asking you to join NEA and many of America's leading literacy, youth, and civic groups in bringing a nation of readers together under one hat – the red and white stovepipe made famous by the Cat in the Hat – for a flurry of reading excitement.

All branches of the Lake County Library will present Dr. Seuss-themed storytimes during the week of Read Across America.

These very special events will feature games, prizes, and free books for all who attend. The dates and times for the storytimes are:

– Middletown Library, 21256 Washington St.: Tuesday, Feb. 27, 11:30 a.m.
– Redbud Library, 14785 Burns Valley Road in Clearlake: Thursday, March 1, 11 a.m.
– Upper Lake Library, 310 Second St.: Thursday, March 1, 2 p.m.
– Lakeport Library, 1425 N. High St.: Friday, March 2, 10:15 a.m. and 2:30 p.m.

The Lake County Library is working with Bloom, a program of the Lake County Office of Education, for these activities. Bloom is supplying the games and prizes. The Adult Literacy Families for Literacy program is supplying the books to be given away.

Bloom operates on a simple premise: the word “bloom” conjures up images of children blooming into the best they can be through engagement and interaction with the most important people in their lives – their parents and families. Talking, playing and reading with your children are the best ways to prepare them for success in school.

Bloom and the Lake County Library share the goal of showing America's children the joy of reading and building a nation of readers – on March 2 and every day.

For more information about NEA's Read Across America, visit www.nea.org/readacross and www.readacrossamerica.org and learn of other reading celebrations that are happening from coast to coast.

The Lake County Library is on the Internet at http://library.lakecountyca.gov and Facebook at www.facebook.com/LakeCountyLibrary.

You can find more about Lake County Bloom online at http://www.lakebloom.org.

Jan Cook is a technician with the Lake County Library.
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From left, Nicholas Troy Brooks and Timothy Lee Williams, both of Clearlake, Calif., were arrested in a human trafficking and prostitution case. Lake County Jail photos.

CLEARLAKE OAKS, Calif. – Two Clearlake men were arrested this week following a six-month investigation conducted by the Lake County District Attorney’s Office that focused on a human trafficking for prostitution operation.

Timothy Lee Williams, 52, was arrested for four counts of human trafficking, one count of pimping and a parole violation, and 38-year-old Nicholas Troy Brooks was arrested for human trafficking for prostitution, pimping, procuring a person for prostitution, inflicting traumatic injury on a person, threats to kill or produce great bodily injury and solicitation of perjury, according to District Attorney Don Anderson.

As part of the sting operation in Clearlake Oaks, on Thursday District Attorney’s Office investigators rented a room at a local motel and ordered a woman, whose name is not being released at this time, from an Internet service, according to Anderson.

Investigators had prior knowledge that the woman was working for Williams and possibly not of her free will, Anderson said.

Anderson said that when the woman arrived at the motel she agreed to have sex with two men, not knowing they were undercover agents, for a sum of $200 per hour.

She had been driven there by Williams who waited in the car while the woman was supposed to be transacting business, Anderson said.

Once the deal was made, District Attorney’s Office investigators – with the assistance of undercover agents from the Mendocino Task Force and officers from the Lake County Sheriff’s Office and Clearlake Police Department – arrested Williams, Anderson said.

Further investigation revealed that the woman was not selling herself of her own free will, but was doing so under force and fear of Williams. Due to the fact she was forced into prostitution, Anderson said she is being treated as a victim rather than a suspect of prostitution.

On Friday, as part of the same investigation, Anderson said his investigators arrested Brooks at the Lake County Jail, where he was being held on charges of transportation of controlled substances and possession of a stolen vehicle.

In both cases involving Williams and Brooks, Anderson said five of the women interviewed were forced into prostitution out of fear of being harmed and in some cases were actually beaten by the suspects. In one case, a developmental disabled young adult was forced into prostitution by Williams.

Brooks is being held on $1 million bail, while Williams is on a no-bail hold, according to jail booking records. Both men are scheduled to appear in court for arraignment next week.

Anderson said both Williams and Brooks have a history of pimping and pandering. If convicted both Williams and Brooks could be facing life sentences.

“Human trafficking is the fasted growing crime in the United States and California,” Anderson said. “It is estimated that human trafficking is a multi-billion dollar operation throughout the country. Often time the victims are minors and/or immigrants from other countries.”

He said that his office treats the cases as extremely serious. “We will make every effort to free these victims from those who force them into prostitution against their will and help give them a new start in life. It is anticipated as the investigation develops, further victims and suspects will be identified.”
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Lake County, Calif.’s top high school wrestlers at the North Coast Section Championships on Sunday, February 11, 2018. Shown, from left, are Bailey Huggins of Kelseyville, Adriana Lopez of Upper Lake, Lily Wetmore of Lower Lake, Kylie Marlin-Ambriz of Kelseyville, Christina Wilson of Upper Lake, Rebecca Harper of Upper Lake, Vanessa Gonzalez of Kelseyville and Jasmin Clarke of Kelseyville. Photo courtesy of Orlando Zarate.

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Lake County is home to many talented female high school wrestlers, with the group putting on strong performances in the weekend’s North Coast Section championships.

Wrestlers from Kelseyville, Lower Lake and Upper Lake had top placements at the event.

They included:

– 116-pound champion Bailey Huggins of Kelseyville;
– 121-pound champion Adriana Lopez of Upper Lake;
– 131-pound fourth-place finisher Lily Wetmore of Lower Lake;
– 101-pound eighth-place medalist Kylie Marlin-Ambriz of Kelseyville;
– 131-pound runner-up Christina Wilson of Upper Lake;
– 160-pound seventh-place medalist Rebecca Harper of Upper Lake;
– 143-pound eighth-place medalist Vanessa Gonzalez of Kelseyville;
– 189-pound champion Jasmin Clarke of Kelseyville.

Huggins, Lopez, Wilson and Clarke all advance to the state meet on Feb. 23 and 24 in Visalia.
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LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Lake County Animal Care and Control has a small group of dogs waiting to go to their new homes this week.

The dogs offered adoption this week include mixes of Chihuahua, golden retriever and pit bull.

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.

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”).

This male Chihuahua is in kennel No. 12, ID No. 9415. Photo courtesy of Lake County Animal Care and Control.

Male Chihuahua

This adult male Chihuahua has a short white coat.

He’s in kennel No. 12, ID No. 9415.

This male golden retriever is in quarantine kennel No. 19, ID No. 9302. Photo courtesy of Lake County Animal Care and Control.

Male golden retriever

This adult male golden retriever has a medium-length golden coat.

He already has been neutered.

He’s in quarantine kennel No. 19, ID No. 9302.

This young female pit bull is in kennel No. 26, ID No. 9465. Photo courtesy of Lake County Animal Care and Control.

Female pit bull

This young female pit bull has a short blue and fawn coat.

She is in kennel No. 26, ID No. 9465.

This male pit bull is in kennel No. 27, ID No. 9480. Photo courtesy of Lake County Animal Care and Control.

Male pit bull

This male pit bull has a short blue and white coat.

Shelter staff said he is super sweet and bubbly.

He’s in kennel No. 27, ID No. 9480.

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, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday. The shelter is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and on Saturday from 11 a.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 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
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A motorcycle was involved in a crash on Country Club Drive in Lucerne, Calif., on Friday, February 16, 2018. Photo by Elizabeth Larson/Lake County News.

LUCERNE, Calif. – A man was injured on Friday evening when his motorcycle went off a Lucerne roadway and hit a power pole.

The crash occurred shortly before 6 p.m. on Country Club Drive at 16th Avenue, according to the California Highway Patrol.

CHP Officer Ryan Erickson told Lake County News that the motorcyclist was traveling westbound on Country Club Drive at an unknown speed when he failed to negotiate a curve in the roadway at 17th Avenue.

The motorcycle went off the roadway and hit a small culvert. Erickson said witnesses reported that the motorcycle then became airborne.

Erickson said the motorcycle landed and hit a power pole on the side of the roadway between 15th and 16th avenues.

Initial reports indicated that the rider was trapped under the motorcycle.

He said the rider was conscious and talking after the wreck.

The rider was transported via Northshore Fire ambulance to a landing zone set up at Lucerne Harbor Park.

There, a REACH air ambulance picked up the injured man and transported him to an out-of-county trauma center.

Erickson remained on scene for some time afterward as he documented the crash site. The motorcycle appeared to have sustained major damage.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
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Javier Martinez Cachu, 22, of Clearlake Park, Calif., has pleaded guilty in a December 2015 homicide case. Lake County Jail photo.

LAKEPORT, Calif. – A Clearlake Park man has reached a plea agreement with the District Attorney’s Office for the December 2015 murder of a Middletown man and the nonfatal shooting of the man’s fiancée.

District Attorney Don Anderson said Javier Martinez Cachu, 22, has pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder of 25-year-old Luis Pimentel-Arroyo, the attempted murder of Pimentel-Arroyo’s fiancée, Eva Prado, and special allegations of being armed with a shotgun on the night of Dec. 30, 2015.

Anderson said the case involved drugs and insurance money.

Prado and Pimentel-Arroyo lost their Middletown home in the September 2015 Valley fire. Anderson said Martinez Cachu was able to get $40,000 in insurance money from Prado, which he then used to buy marijuana to sell.

However, Anderson said the marijuana was stolen, and Martinez Cachu wasn’t able to pay back Prado.

While Prado and Pimentel-Arroyo were in a vehicle on Butts Canyon Road in Middletown on the night of Dec. 30, Martinez Cachu shot and killed Pimentel-Arroyo. Prado was hit and injured by buckshot from the shotgun blast, according to the District Attorney’s Office.

Following the shooting, Martinez Cachu fled the scene in another vehicle before he turned himself in at the Clearlake Police Department about two hours later.

Martinez Cachu was arrested early on the morning of Dec. 31, according to case records. He has remained in custody ever since.

When Chief Deputy District Attorney Richard Hinchcliff originally charged Martinez Cachu in the case, he included two special allegations, murder for financial gain and murder by lying wait, which he said at the time made Martinez Cachu eligible for the death penalty or life without parole.

Under the plea agreement, Anderson said Martinez Cachu will serve 90 years to life in state prison.

Anderson said that, based on the law, someone who is under the age of 25 at the time of the crime – even one as serious as a homicide – may be eligible for parole. Martinez Cachu was 20 at the time of the murder.

Martinez Cachu is scheduled to be sentenced on April 3.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.


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Last year was a record-breaking one for Operation IceBridge, NASA’s aerial survey of the state of polar ice.

For the first time in its nine-year history, the mission, which aims to close the gap between two NASA satellite campaigns that study changes in the height of polar ice, carried out seven field campaigns in the Arctic and Antarctic in a single year.

In total, the IceBridge scientists and instruments flew over 214,000 miles, the equivalent of orbiting the Earth 8.6 times at the equator.

“A big highlight for 2017 is how we increased our reach with our new bases of operations and additional campaigns,” said Nathan Kurtz, IceBridge’s project scientist and a sea ice researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “In the Arctic, we flew out of Svalbard for the first time, expanding our coverage of the Eastern Arctic Ocean. And with our two Antarctic aircraft campaigns from Argentina and East Antarctica, we’ve flown over a large area of the Antarctic continent.”

The expanding sets of measurements collected by IceBridge will continue to be invaluable for researchers to advance their understanding of how the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are contributing to sea level rise and how the changing polar sea ice impacts weather and climate.

For example, in 2017, scientists worldwide published studies that had used IceBridge data to look at ways to improve forecasts of sea ice conditions and to use satellites to map the depth of the layer of snow on top of sea ice, a key measurement in determining sea ice volume.

Regarding research on ice sheets and glaciers, 2017 saw further integration of Operation IceBridge’s ice height measurements into decades-long records that combine airborne and satellite data, as well as the use of combinations of datasets from multiple IceBridge instruments, including its radars and laser altimeter, into products such as an improved map of the bedrock underneath Greenland’s ice sheet, and studies that looked at the evolution of glaciers.

Since 2009, IceBridge has carried at least two major campaigns per year, in the Arctic and Antarctica, plus two smaller yearly sets of flights in Alaska. In 2017 the team overcame several logistical challenges in order to nearly double the number of campaigns flown compared to previous years.

“Working in new locations and with different airplanes as we did this year always presents a challenge, but we took them on in order to continue expanding our knowledge of some little-explored areas of the Arctic and Antarctic," Kurtz said.

The first IceBridge campaign of the year was in the Arctic springtime. From Mar. 9 until May 12, the mission carried a total of 40 flights (14 over sea ice and 26 over land ice) from four sites: Thule Air Base and Kangerlussuaq in Greenland, Fairbanks in Alaska, and the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

This was the first time IceBridge explored the Eurasian half of the Arctic Basin to collect data on sea ice and snow in a scarcely measured section of the Arctic Ocean and surrounding seas, along with surveys of a few glaciers in the Svalbard archipelago.

The airborne mission also collaborated with international teams in collecting and comparing measurements of snow and ice; partners included CryoVEx – a campaign to validate data collected by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) CryoSat-2 satellite, a group of European adventurers taking snow depth data while en route to the North Pole, ESA’s Sentinel-3A satellite, and a GPS survey near Summit Station, Greenland, designed to help with instrument calibration on upcoming missions, such as Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), among others.

Next, the IceBridge scientists performed four sets of flights in the Arctic during the summer to measure how the melt season impacted Arctic sea and land ice.

In July, the mission carried six surveys out of Thule Air Base, in northwest Greenland, focusing on the older and thicker sea ice cover north of Greenland and in the Canadian Archipelago.

IceBridge also completed an experiment to determine how well the laser instrument could measure the depth of the aquamarine lakes of meltwater that form on the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet and Arctic sea ice every summer.

Preliminary results indicate that the laser could penetrate more than thirty feet through these lakes, a first step to gauge the depth of these ponds.

The second summer Arctic campaign, flown between Aug. 25 and Sept. 20, was launched from Kangerlussuaq, in central Greenland, and replicated land ice surveys that IceBridge had carried the previous spring. A total of 15 flights measured how much ice had melted since spring.

Meanwhile, in Alaska, a companion campaign that regularly monitors the state of the Alaskan mountain glaciers completed two sets of flights in May and August. Led by Chris Larsen of University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Operation IceBridge-Alaska carried a total of 10 aerial surveys.

“The main focus was repeated lines for laser altimetry, but we also expanded our radar coverage on the Bering and Malaspina glaciers,” Larsen said. “A highlight of the missions was flying the Harding and Sargent icefields on the Kenai Peninsula. Other areas included the Fairweather Range in Glacier Bay National Park, and the eastern Alaska Range.”

The last feat of 2017 for IceBridge was launching two consecutive sets of Antarctic flights from South America and Antarctica. The first Antarctic campaign, carried out from Oct. 29 to Nov. 25 from Ushuaia, Argentina, comprised 11 science flights over the Antarctic Peninsula and Weddell Sea that included gravity surveys of the Larsen C and Venable Ice Shelves, plus two flights under the tracks of the German TanDEM-X satellite to explore whether scientists can use the radar data from the spacecraft to detect a band of older and thicker sea ice that may exist near the northern edge of the ring of sea ice around Antarctica.

Finally, IceBridge scientists and instruments deployed to McMurdo Station, Antarctica, from where they completed 16 survey flights between Nov. 28 and Dec. 18.

“Our McMurdo campaign exceeded all expectations,” said Joe MacGregor, IceBridge’s deputy project scientist and a glaciologist at Goddard. “We covered lots of ground around the South Pole, the Transantarctic Mountains, the Ross Ice Shelf and Victoria Land. We surveyed all our highest priority targets and then some.”

The mission of Operation IceBridge, NASA’s longest-running airborne mission to monitor polar ice, is to collect data on changing polar land and sea ice and maintain continuity of measurements between ICESat missions.

The original ICESat mission launched in 2003 and ended in 2009, and its successor, ICESat-2, is scheduled for launch in the fall of 2018. Operation IceBridge began in 2009 and is currently funded until 2020. The planned overlap with ICESat-2 will help scientists connect with the satellite’s measurements.

For more about Operation IceBridge and to follow future campaigns, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/icebridge.

Maria-José Viñas is with NASA's Earth Science News Team.
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California law protects a spouse’s undivided one-half interest in Community Property assets from wrongful actions taken by their other spouse. The same rules apply to registered domestic partners.

What is community property? Property acquired while married and living together – excluding gifts and inheritances – is presumed to be community property and not either spouse’s separate property. Each spouse has an equal undivided one-half interest in community property assets.

Even when title is in one spouse’s name only, an asset remains community property. This can happen when one spouse uses marital earnings to purchase an asset. Only if the other spouse voluntarily and knowingly signs an express declaration to relinquish their community property interest does the asset become separate property of one spouse.

Generally speaking either spouse acting alone can control and manage community property assets. A spouse’s management and control of community property is subject to a fiduciary duty to act in the “highest good faith and fair dealing.” A spouse who takes any unfair advantage of the other spouse has breached the fiduciary duty.

Section 1101 of the Family Code allows a spouse to bring suit against the other spouse, or estate, for a breach of the fiduciary duty to not impair their spouse’s undivided one-half interest in community property assets.

A spouse cannot gift the couple’s community property assets without the written consent of the other spouse. Gifts by one spouse alone can be revoked by the nonconsenting spouse.

The nonconsenting spouse has three years from discovering the gift to bring legal action if pursued during the marriage while both spouses are alive.

However, as discussed below, the three year limitation does not apply when the nonconsenting spouse sues after the death of their spouse or in a marital dissolution proceeding.

In Francine S. Yeh v. Lie-Cheng Tai et. al. (December 2017), the California Second District Court of Appeal decided a case brought by a surviving wife against the trustees of her deceased husband’s trust estate for his breach of the fiduciary duty.

While alive the husband had persuaded his wife to transfer title to a residence they had purchased into his name only on the grounds that he could then obtain lower interests rates on the mortgage using his credit alone.

The husband promised that the wife would maintain her one-half interest in the residence and later be restored to title. The loan was paid-off using the couple’s community property money.

Three days prior to his death, the husband assured his wife that her name was on the title and that the property would be all hers.

In fact, however, Mr. Lie had secretly transferred title to the residence into a living trust naming other persons as beneficiaries. Thus the husband had taken away the wife’s one-half undivided community property interest.

The defendants claimed that the wife’s lawsuit was untimely because it was brought more than one-year after the husband’s death. Generally speaking most claims against a decedent’s estate must be filed within one year of the decedent’s death.

The court, however, instead agreed with the wife: The general rule did not apply because Section 1101 specifically allows a spouse to bring a claim for breach of the fiduciary duty either at the time of a dissolution proceeding or, as in this case, after the other spouse’s death. Only if the case was so delayed to cause an unfair prejudice to the defendants could the defendants object based on timeliness.

Furthermore, even a spouse who has silently suffered a wrong to his or her community property interest during the marriage – but has not voluntarily and knowingly signed an express written declaration to relinquish her rights – may still bring a timely action either after their spouse has died or during marital dissolution proceedings; provided that such delay is not unfair to the opposing side.

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 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and 707-263-3235. His Web site is www.DennisFordhamLaw.com.
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UPPER LAKE, Calif. – One person was injured in a single vehicle rollover crash on Highway 20 near Blue Lakes on Thursday afternoon.

The crash occurred just before 4:30 p.m. at Highway 20 and Blue Lakes Road, blocking the westbound lane, according to the California Highway Patrol.

The driver, the only person reported to be in the vehicle, was pinned when the crash occurred, and had to be extricated, a process that took more than a half-hour to complete, according to reports from the scene.

The air ambulance REACH 6 responded to transport the patient to a trauma center, scanner reports indicated.

The CHP said the driver suffered minor injuries.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.

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