NOTICE OF SALE OF VESSEL Notice is hereby given the undersigned will sell the following vessel and trailer at lien sale at said address below on: 02/17/2023 9:00 am VESSEL 9939RM 07 SEADOO YDV56810B707 CA TRAILER 1ZCB160167Z331321 07 ZIEM 331321X DATE OF SALE- 05/26/2023 TIME OF SALE-09:00 AM To be sold by JV MOTORSPORTS 1744 S WILLOW AVE RIALTO CA 92376 Said sale is for the purpose of satisfying lien for together with costs of advertising and expenses of sale. Published in the San Bernardino County Sentinel on 05/12/2023

Notice is hereby given pursuant to Sections 3071 of the Civil Code of the State of California the undersigned will sell the following vehicle(s) at lien sale at said address below on: 05/26/2023 09:00 AM Year of Car / Make of Car / Vehicle ID No. / License No. (State) 13 AUDI WA1LGAFE2DD013200 013200X CA To be sold by SERGIO QUEZADA 4238 MISSION BLVD MONTCLAIR CA 91763 Said sale is for the purpose of satisfying lien for together with costs of advertising and expenses of sale. Published in the San Bernardino County Sentinel on 5/12/2023

Notice is hereby given pursuant to Sections 3071 of the Civil Code of the State of California the undersigned will sell the following vehicle(s) at lien sale at said address below on: 05/26/2023 09:00 AM Year of Car / Make of Car / Vehicle ID No. / License No. (State) 13 AUDI 1JJV532D8NL334962 PA52119 IN To be sold by CONTINENTAL TOWING 14601 VALLEY BLVD FONTANA CA 92335 Said sale is for the purpose of satisfying lien for together with costs of advertising and expenses of sale. Published in the San Bernardino County Sentinel on 5/12/2023

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In what officials hope will be a “total and final” extortion payment, San Bernardino County and its sheriff’s department have delivered $1.1 million in cryptocurrency to a team of Russian and Belarusian hackers after they successfully perpetrated a cyberattack that commandeered virtually all of the sheriff’s department’s data files and compromised the department’s ability to freely access the data bases shared by other state and national law enforcement agencies.
The $1.1 million is the second largest known ransom payment by a governmental entity and the tenth largest acknowledged monetary exchange ever made to resolve a cybernetic interruption perpetrated by underworld computer system hijackers.
Typically in a ransomware attack, a criminal phantom uses stealth, beguilement, deception, misrepresentation, fraud or the remote pirating of a keyboard to enter a data storage and retrieval system to obtain unauthorized access to the data therein, thereafter commandeering it by downloading it, altering it, corrupting it or encrypting it. The latter leaves the legitimate owner and operator of the system unable to access the data. Such encryption is generally followed by an extortionary demand in the form of an offer to either unlock the data or provide the original owner of the data with a decryption key to allow the data to be accessed once again. Continue reading →

Upland city officials have once more triggered the distrust of a cross section of politically active residents in the City of Gracious Living by making preparations to lease for commercial/industrial purposes more than two acres of current open space/potential future park land that is adjacent to an existing residential subdivision in the northwest quadrant of the city.
Attending the controversy are questions about whether the full city council or a quorum of its members violated the Brown Act, California’s open public meeting law by signaling to city staff to proceed with the deal with Tesla, Inc. prior to taking any official action relating to the lease.
Reports are that the city’s highest ranking staff members complied with Mayor Bill Velto’s insistence that the city accommodate the management of the Upland Tesla dealership by clearing the way, both physically and procedurally, for the creation of what officials maintain will be a temporary parking lot for the overflow vehicles to be sold by the dealership. At present, the Upland Tesla dealership does not have a sufficiently large sales lot for the vehicles in its inventory.
The Sentinel is told that Councilwoman Shannan Maust, the elected representative of the First District in which the temporary parking lot has already been created, was bypassed in the decision-making process for preparing the permitting of the facility.
A potential issue at play, at least in the minds of some city residents, is that transforming the land in question into a makeshift parking lot might set the city on what was termed a slippery slope which would result in the land in question being rezoned from its current status as open space – where a park or other recreational amenity might conceivably be established – into some alternate land use that could prove inimical to the adjacent residential subdivisions.

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At a cost of $100,000, the City of San Bernardino has bailed on its contractual arrangement with Huntington Station, New York-based Renaissance Downtowns USA and Los Angeles-based ICO Real Estate Group for the redevelopment of the Carousel Mall.
That action comes not quite two months after the California Department of Housing and Community Development took public issue with the criteria by which the city arrived at a determination to give the joint Renaissance Downtowns/ICO venture the exclusive development rights to revitalize the downtown site, which has been in decline for more than two decades and which has been largely fallow for nearly ten years.
The mall, a portion of which includes the Harris’ building first established in 1927 and which has existed in the form of a modern shopping venue since 1972, is proximate to San Bernardino City Hall, which has itself been shuttered for seismic considerations since 2017.
In 1972, the two-floor Central City Mall opened with 52 stores and in 1973 an addition directly linked the mall to the Harris Company. Improvements to the mall were made, including a 36-foot colorful carousel near one of the entrances at the bottom floor, artistic façades and trendy interior decorations. At one point the number of stores and shops it contained grew to 117. By the late 1970s, the mall was facing the challenge of local gangs having settled upon it as a hangout, particularly during the peak shopping hours of Friday night until Sunday. Management of the mall twice changed hands over the next decade. Despite efforts by city officials, the mall’s owners, developers and outside investors that began in the late 1980s to maintain it as a major regional shopping draw, it was dealt what was ultimately a death blow in 1994 when the U.S. Department of Defense closed Norton Air Force Base, which severely hampered San Bernardino economically. Continue reading →

The move by Yucaipa municipal officials to close out the Yucaipa Mobile Home Rent Control Board is looming as a much larger political issue in the context of the recall movement against three of the 55,496-population city’s councilmen.
With some 4,200 mobile home spaces in the City of Yucaipa, mobile home residents were a force to be reckoned with in any event. The discontinuation of the rent control board likely in and of itself was going to force no major reckoning on the city council, though, to be sure, the change was not one welcomed by those living in those semi-permanent dwellings. In January, however, three members of the city council – Mayor Justin Beaver, Bobby Duncan and Matt Garner – forced the departure of City Manager Ray Casey and City Attorney David Snow.
It does not appear that the council majority appreciated the degree to which a cross section of the Yucaipa community had come to appreciate having what they considered to be Casey’s steady hand on the tiller of Yucaipa’s ship of state. Continue reading →

The National Safety Transportation Board and the Federal Aviation Administration are carrying out dual investigations of the fatal crash of a single-engine, fixed-wing, Beechcraft A36 with two seasoned pilots aboard that came down Monday afternoon in a populated area about a mile short of the Big Bear Airport.
Killed in the crash into a vacant lot near the area of Paradise Way and Maltby Boulevard in Big Bear City on May 1 were 60-year-old Stormie Seibold of Temecula, 62-year-old Jimmy Fitzpatrick of Perris and 79-year-old Robert Carty of Lake Havasu.
Reports are that a distress signal went out from the plane but that it was not received by the tower at Big Bear Airport.
Carty owned and was piloting the craft, which bore the serial number E-1376 and registration number N2038Y and was previously owned by Cynthia L. Brown of Sikeston, Missouri. He departed with Fitzpatrick from French Valley Airport at 11:22 a.m., making a short hop to Corona Municipal Airport, landing at 11:36 a.m., according to Flight Aware, an aviation website. There, they rendezvoused with Carty and had lunch. The trio were flying to Big Bear Airport to look over an airplane there that was for sale.
They left Corona airport at 1:32 p.m.
Seibold had been licensed as an aviator for 30 years and Fitzpatrick was also an experienced pilot.
Available flight data shows the plane hit the ground, at an elevation of roughly 6,750 feet, at 1:58 p.m.
According to the Big Bear Fire Department, a call to the dispatch center for it and the sheriff’s office came in at 2:02 p.m. Firefighters responded within three minutes to the scene of the crash, a field which is roughly a mile from the Big Bear Airport and in proximity to several houses. Responders noted no smoke or flames, but there was extensive damage to the aircraft, with its right wing entirely displaced.
All three men on board the plane were pronounced dead at the scene.
A National Transportation Safety Board investigation is underway, with one of its investigators having arrived in Big Bear on Monday and a Federal Aviation Administration investigator coming in on Tuesday. Both are making an effort to document the scene, examine the aircraft, request any air traffic communications, radar data, weather reports, obtain Siebold’s medical records and flight history along with N2038Y’s maintenance record and flight log and contact any witnesses.
-Mark Gutglueck

In the face of the overwhelming epidemic of fentanyl overdose deaths, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department has instituted a policy of outfitting all of its patrol units with Narcan.
Narcan is the brand name of an opioid counteractant known as Naloxone.
Taken in time, Nalaxone/Narcan will effectively reverse or reduce the effects of opioids. Most notably, the medication is used to counter decreased breathing that comes with opioid overdose. When given intravenously, the substance can go into effect within two minutes. Narcan also be injected into a muscle, but the effect in such cases can be delayed up to five minutes. The medicine can also be administered by aerosol spray, predominantly into an overdose victim’s nose.
Fentanyl was first synthesized in 1960 and made available for medical use in the United States in 1968. It is on the order of 50 times more potent than heroin by weight and 100 times more potent than morphine by weight. So powerful are its effect that Fentanyl can prove deadly in very minute quantities. The strict standardization applied by pharmaceutical companies in its processing into usable forms and protocols relating to its prescription by physicians was intended to prevent the substance from proving fatal. Continue reading →

By Mark Gutglueck
Using the pretext that Barstow will become host to a modernized rail yard as the consequence of a $1.5 billion commitment to make it the logical location of an intermodal facility to warehouse and transload freight brought by train coming into the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach onto trucks for distribution to the rest of the country, the Victorville City Council on Tuesday pulled the plug on its 16-year-long commitment to develop the Southern California Logistics Rail Authority’s Victorville Intermodal Facility.
In 2007, the City of Victorville entered into an agreement with the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Company to carry out the eventual development of an intermodal logistics facility at Southern California Logistics Airport.
While Victorville officials justify the termination of the agreement with Burlington Northern Santa Fe as one that is driven by market conditions and currently prevailing economic trends, those with a more in-depth understanding of the city’s and region’s history recognize that the Southern California Logistics Rail Authority was from its inception a dispensable element in the strategy formulated by Victorville city officials more than three decades ago to outmaneuver San Bernardino County and other High Desert municipalities to take over control of what was then George Air Force Base and is today Southern California Logistics Airport.
The base, originally named the Victorville Army Air Station when it was crash built in the summer and fall of 1941 as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States’ direct involvement in World War II fast approached, was located on the outskirts of Victorville and closer to Adelanto. In 1988, it was announced that George was to be shuttered by the Department of Defense in 1992.
Victorville city officials, led by Mayor Terry Caldwell and City Manager Jim Cox, were intent upon excluding other political and governmental entities in the region from controlling the facility following its civilian use reconversion. Correctly assessing that Adelanto likewise would be intent on asserting exclusive control of the aerodrome and understanding that the federal government would prioritize dealing and cooperating, during the base decommissioning process, with a regional governmental collective rather than a multitude of individual municipal entities, Caldwell and Cox formulated an approach by which they essentially feigned making a cooperative effort involving San Bernardino County, the City of Hesperia and the Town of Apple Valley under the aegis of the Victor Valley Economic Development Authority, known by its acronym VVEDA. Using VVEDA, Victorville put together a competing proposal for the inheritance of the Air Force Base property and its conversion into a civilian airport and logistics hub. Continue reading →