| Valley loses leader in Miriam Wilson
Miriam Wilson of Squirrel Valley, a very prominent member of the Kern Valley community for many years, passed away Oct. 25. She was 75. Wilson started the Century 21 Real Estate office locally in 1977, which later grew to three offices and dozens of agents. She sold the business and retired in 1997. Over the years Wilson was very active in the community and held many offices. She was founding president of the Kern Valley Hospital Found-ation. She was president of the Lake Isabella Chamber of Com-merce in 1981 and 1982 and was their Woman of the Year in 1986 and 1989. She also served on the Lake Isabella Community Services District and with the Kern C.H.I.C. to try to get the freeway through the canyon completed. Many prominent valley citizens worked with her.
Sacramento finds itself in yet another budget hole
Five years on from recalling a governor because of a $20 billion deficit, California is once again $14 billion in the red and in debt to boot.
In 2003, it was the telecom crash that got the blame for ending the fire hose of taxes that had been flowing for a few years into Sacramento.
In 2008, the real estate slowdown is getting the blame.
But the real culprit is Sacramentos refusal to deal with its spending.
As recently as the 2000-2001 fiscal year, Californias general fund expenditures stood at $99.4 billion. That was nearly double expenditures just a decade before, but stay with us.
In the current fiscal year, according to the State Senate Committee on Budget and Fiscal Review, general fund expenditures will total $142 billion, a 43 percent increase in five years.
Home buyer who overpaid sues real estate agent
Given the American obsession with litigation, it's somewhat amazing that legal experts could not recall a case of a home buyer who may have overpaid suing a real estate agent before Marty Ummel came along. Legal and real estate experts say that Ummel and her husband, Vernon Ummel, should have done their homework better before purchasing their four-bedroom home in a luxury development outside of San Diego in 2005 for $1.2 million, a price that the Ummels say was as much as $175,000 more than what similar houses in the development sold for. They contend it was not their fault. .
Branding Chinatown: Neighborhood transforms
Flocking from SoCal to Houston," trumpeted a Los Angeles Times headline in December. "Vietnamese Americans are lured to the Texas city by cheap real estate, a lower cost of living and a burgeoning cultural enclave." Sell your house in Los Angeles, Houston Realtors urge, then buy a bigger one here for a third the cost and invest the rest in your business. The gold rush appears to be on, and new settlers are setting up shop in the boomtown. But as much as I like that Wells Fargo sign, with its Wild West stagecoach, it doesn't entirely work as a symbol of its neighborhood. In this new Chinatown, the West isn't charging into the East. Really, it's the other way around. So what would work as a visual symbol for the new Chinatown? How could you depict a place that's pan-Asian, old and new, united mainly by entrepreneurial zeal? "I don't know," says William Kao, chair of the Asian American Business Council's beautification committee.
New treatment can clear brain clots
It's a tiny vacuum cleaner for the brain: A new treatment for stroke victims promises to suction out clogged arteries in hopes of stopping the brain attack before it does permanent harm.Called Penumbra, the newly approved device is the latest in a series of inside-the-artery attempts to boost recovery from stroke, the nation's No. 3 killer.Now the question is how to determine which patients are good candidates - because, illogical as it may sound, unclogging isn't always the best option."Is the patient at a stage of stroke where you're going to hurt them by pulling a clot out, or show benefit?" asks Dr. Walter Koroshetz of the National Institutes of Health. "It's good we have devices. Now we have to learn how to use them."More than 700,000 Americans suffer a stroke each year, and more than 150,000 of them die.
|
