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

Los Angeles County Supervisor Don Knabe is pleased to announce that a baby girl was safely surrendered at a hospital in the City of Long Beach yesterday. (more…)

Authorities say a man has been killed in an El Monte fire and explosion being attributed to an attempt to pilfer copper wires.Los Angeles fire Inspector Frank Garrido says (more…)

The Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station conducted a D.U.I./Drivers License enforcement checkpoint Friday night.  The checkpoint, which began at 7:00 p.m. on Friday, March 28, 2008, and concluded at 3:00 a.m. Saturday morning, March 29, 2008, was conducted on (more…)

   Watching and discussing some of the local political potshots over the last several weeks has left me with an even more distasteful view of the City of Santa Clarita political process. It appears that I am not alone in feeling that way either as several people around town have similar views as well. (more…)

The Bush administration on Monday introduced the broadest overhaul of Wall Street regulation since the Great Depression, presenting a 218-page proposal that would, for the first time, create a set of federal regulators with authority over all players in the financial system. (more…)

The West Ranch Town Council will hold their monthly meeting on Wednesday, April 2nd, at the Tournament Player Club in West Ranch located at 26550 Heritage View Lane in Westridge at 6:30 PM. The meeting will include the regular updates from the Sheriff’s Department, the California Highway Patrol, Parks and Recreation and various County Departments. Also on the agenda is an update on the IFA and Options Comparison reports. (more…)

   In Babe Ruth’s final public appearance in 1948 – with Ruth ravaged to the bone by cancer, pushing words through a body that no longer wanted to hang around or do anything – the great Sultan of Swat turned into a kind of Nostradamus for a sold-out cheering crowd in Yankee Stadium.  Baseball is a great game, he told the crowd in a quivering voice, through amplifiers filling the stadium, BUT only as long as we remember that baseball must serve America’s children first. (more…)

A driver on a Los Angeles freeway was fatally shot in the head early Sunday, hours after another driver was shot in an attack about 30 miles away, the authorities said. The shootings were the latest in a string of attacks on Southern California freeways (more…)

A 2-year-old Palmdale boy was clinging to life after being severely beaten and his father remained in custody, authorities said. The boy was in critical but stable (more…)

Two widely prescribed cholesterol-lowering drugs, Vytorin and Zetia, may not work and should be used only as a last resort, a panel of four cardiologists told an (more…)

   When Bill Clinton was on the ropes over the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1999, Hillary Clinton famously alleged that her husband was the victim of a “vast rightwing conspiracy”. Yesterday Richard Mellon Scaife, whom many Clinton supporters see as the personification (more…)

   If ever the stars were aligned against a Republican winning the White House, 2008 is it. There’s war. And not just any war, but a war that a majority of the public firmly and consistently believes is not worth fighting and that has dragged on longer than World War II and (more…)

The California Department of Transportation will close all lanes of northbound Highway 23, from Tierra Rejada Road to Los Angeles Avenue, from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. today through (more…)

Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him (more…)

   The much-publicized idea that red wine can protect against cancer is given a boost this week through research that provides the notion with more scientific underpinning. Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown for the first time that resveratrol, a natural antioxidant found in grape skins and red wine, helps to destroy cancerous pancreatic cells by crippling (more…)

Need a chimney sweep, a paternity test or credit repair? It might get a little harder to find such businesses as Santa Clarita clamps down on illegal signs along its manicured roadways. (more…)

The plug-in hybrid cars that could help meet California’s global warming goals aren’t yet available in dealers’ showrooms. But the big automakers aren’t ignoring them, either. Ford Motor Co. announced Thursday that it will test a prototype plug-in SUV with the help of a Palo Alto research group. (more…)

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice. None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court (more…)