The West Ranch Beacon – News & Commentary for the Santa Clarita Valley

Los Angeles County Supervisor Don Knabe is pleased to announce that a baby boy was safely surrendered at a hospital in the City of Downey last week. The newborn Hispanic male was surrendered (more…)

 After you read the following article on improved hospital performance we couldn’t help but flag this mishap that appeared in the Los Angeles Times today: Untreated ER patient dies at Olive View; The 33-year-old man, reporting pain in his chest and left arm, waited more than three hours, then stepped outside and collapsed.

Los Angeles County Department of Health Services (DHS) hospitals rate “average” and “above average” in several key quality indicators and showed improvement in other areas according to the latest (more…)

In honor of Veterans Day, admission fees for the County Arboreta and Botanical Gardens are being waived as well as vehicle entrance fees to regional park facilities from November 9 through November (more…)

The Annual Fall Festival is tonight at the Dr. Richard H. Rioux Memorial Park. The annual festival, held on Halloween night, is co-Sponsored by Royal Oaks Foursquare Church and the Stevenson Ranch Community (more…)

Halloween’s origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom, and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold (more…)

     I spend time; some would assert too much time, listening to podcasts of public affairs/political talk shows.  I listen weekly to the podcast of “Left, Right and Center” produced by KCRW, and this past Friday, during a discussion regarding the California wildfires, Tony Blankley, former staffer for Newt (more…)

A fire that charred more than 38,000 acres and destroyed 21 homes in northern Los Angeles County last week was sparked by a boy playing with matches, sheriff’s officials said Tuesday. The disclosure about the Buckweed fire, initially blamed on downed power lines, came as firefighters continued to push forward in containing the (more…)

A magnitude 5.6 earthquake centered in the foothills east of San Jose rocked the Bay Area on Tuesday night, shaking up residents over a broad area but producing no immediate reports of (more…)

Moments before a Mississippi prisoner was scheduled to die by lethal injection, the Supreme Court granted him a stay of execution on Tuesday evening and thus gave a nearly indisputable (more…)

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a $50,000 reward today for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Emigdio Preciado, the primary suspect in the shooting (more…)

County of Los Angeles Department of Public Works announces a new service on the Public Works homepage (www.dpw.lacounty.gov) that uses a Geographic Information System (GIS) to retrieve (more…)

The County of Los Angeles Department of Animal Care & Control would like to call your attention to this important Halloween message to keep your pets safe and stress-free this time of the year.  Halloween (more…)

A 3,000-year-old burial site in Vanuatu containing 60 headless skeletons and skulls in pots is helping end the mystery over colonization of the Pacific and the first Polynesians, archaeologists said (more…)

(Note to reader: I have finally figured out why I was destined to own the initials “BS.”  It turns out that it is the perfect byline for covering the 2008 presidential election.  And nowhere is there more of this – more of “BS” – than in the current presidential (more…)

Please join Cameron Smyth Assemblyman, 38th District for “Politics & Pancakes”. The Assemblyman will provide an update from Sacramento as well as important information on Water Bonds and Healthcare. (more…)

Tonight, October 30th, at 7:00 p.m., the Santa Clarita City Council will, once again, have the expansion of the (more…)

Last week was an amazing week in Southern California. With an unprecedented number of fires breaking out in the region and locally in the Santa Clarita Valley, we at the West Ranch Beacon kicked it into high gear in order to keep the coverage as timely and relevant as humanly possible. It has been abundantly (more…)

By 6 p.m. Tuesday, when a Mississippi inmate is scheduled to die by lethal injection, the Supreme Court may give the clearest indication so far of whether it intends to call a halt to all such executions while a case from Kentucky (more…)

ExxonMobil on Monday won the chance to persuade the US Supreme Court that it should not have to pay $2.5bn in punitive damages to victims of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, the largest such award in (more…)

They discovered the corpse in the tidy backyard of a home near the corner of Washington and C streets. The dreaded threat. A farm community’s worst nightmare. A Medfly . On an otherwise peaceful weekday in early (more…)