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USPS Delivers Children’s Holiday Dreams Through Operation Santa Program With a little help from the U.S. Postal Service, neither rain, nor snow, nor heat, nor gloom of night will keep Santa Claus from delivering dreams this holiday season. Today marks the start of the Postal Service’s annual Operation Santa program, a campaign that has helped fulfill holiday wishes of children and their families for more than a century. Operation Santa is an annual letter-writing program for individuals, businesses and charitable organizations to respond to children’s letters addressed to Santa Claus, the North Pole and other seasonal characters. To mark the start of the letter adoption period, a ceremony was held today at New York City’s Operation
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 4 - DECEMBER 10, 2014
Southland gets continuous rain for two days
Monrovia residents brace for the storms with K-rails and sandbags near the Madison Fire area
rainfall in the foothill and mountain areas. However in San Gabriel Valley the rain has been steady but not terribly heavy at least for most of Tuesday when
Colby Fire Starters slapped with $9 Million Restitution Order
USC Eye Institute opens stateof-the-art Arcadia clinic
Three men convicted of setting the Colby Fire earlier this year have been ordered to pay $9 million in restitution. The three men, Clifford Eugene Henry Jr., Steven Robert Aguirre and Jonathan Carl Jarrell must pay $4.4 million to the United States Forest Service, $1.9 million to the Los Angeles County Fire Department, $1.1 million to the California FAIR Plan Association, as well as hundreds of thousands to the Glendora Police
VOLUME 2, NO. 48
Finally…Rains Come to Drought Stricken Southern California
As a strong storm system brought periods of heavy rain to the area through this week, the National Weather Service was projecting up to 8” of
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Department, Azusa Police Department, Los Angeles County Department of Public Works, and other government entities and private citizens. The court ordered that “restitution be paid first to the individual victims, second to the insurance companies and their insured’s, and as the last order of preference, to the government entities.” The 1,925-acre Colby fires on Jan. 16, destroyed five homes and 17 structures.
The University of Southern California (USC) Eye Institute, one of the nation’s Top 10 ophthalmology departments nationwide according to U.S. News & World Report, opened its latest community clinic during a special event there last night at 65 N. First Ave., Ste. 101, in Arcadia. As part of USC’s commitment to Southern California, the ophthalmology clinic has served the San Gabriel Valley community for 20 years. The new clinic, which moved two miles north from its previous location, expands its services in a Please see page 4
the heaviest rains were expected. Flash flooding possible in ventura and Los Angeles counties as well as the mountains and south coast
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Homeland Security Probe Leads to Arrest of 2 Brits Linked to Leak of The Expendables 3 on Internet
of Santa Barbara county according to NWS. The NWS advised “Strong and moist south-
Two men from northern England have been arrested by authorities in the United Kingdom after a probe initiated by Los Angeles-based special agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) linked the pair to last year’s prerelease leak of The Expendables 3. The suspects, a 36-yearold man from Upton, and a 33-year-old man from Dewsbury, were taken into custody Nov. 25 by detectives with the City of London Police Department’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU). The two men, who are being charged by authorities in the U.K. with conspiring
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–Photo by Terry Miller
Increasing the Use of Body Worn Cameras, and Improving Community Policing Top of Obama’s Priority List The President has proposed a three-year, $263 million investment package that will: • Increase police officers’ use of body worn cameras • Expand training for law enforcement agencies (LEAs) • Add more resources for police department reform • Multiply the number of cities where the Department of Justice facilitates community and local LEA engagement Part of the proposal is a new Body Worn Camera Partnership Program, which would provide a 50 percent match to states and localities that purchase body worn cameras and requisite storage. In
fact, the proposed $75 million, three-year investment could help purchase 50,000 body worn cameras. As noted in a recent
report released by Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) and the Police Executive Research Please see page 6
President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden meet with elected officials, community and faith leaders, and law enforcement officials to discuss how communities and law enforcement can work together to build trust to strengthen neighborhoods across the country. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)