ENCINITAS, CALIFORNIA – Three women killed when a Southern California sea cliff collapsed were members of a family gathered for a celebration on the beach, authorities and relatives said Saturday.  
  
Anne Clave, 35, and her mother, Julie Davis, 65, died at hospitals after tons of sandstone were unleashed Friday at Grandview Beach, the San Diego County medical examiner said. A family email obtained Saturday by KNSD-TV identified the third victim as Elizabeth Cox, Clave’s aunt.  
  
The victims were part of a family gathering celebrating Cox’s surviving breast cancer, the email said.  
  
Cox died instantly at the scene, the email said. Her age wasn’t given.  
  
Clave enriched the lives of all those around her with the joy and fun she brought to all,'' the email said, and Davis was anincredible grandmother.” ‘Incomprehensible’ loss
 
The three women leave behind spouses, children and many members of their extended families, the news station reported.  
  
The nature of the accident and the loss is incomprehensible to all of us, our children and those around us,'' the email said.  
  
Officials on Saturday reopened much of the popular surf beach that was closed following the tragedy.  
  
Encinitas Lifeguard Capt. Larry Giles said a lifeguard was posted near the collapse zone, which was still marked by yellow caution tape. Someone left a bouquet of flowers on a nearby rock.  
  
A 30-foot-long slab of the cliff plunged onto the sand Friday afternoon north of downtown San Diego.  
  
Geologists were on scene Saturday assessing the area around the collapse zone. Homes on top of the cliff were in no immediate danger, Giles said.  
  
A lifeguard reported feeling and hearing the thud as the dense dirt landed on the beach. 
 It just happened to take place outside his peripheral [vision],” Giles said, noting that the lifeguard had his eyes trained on the water. Rush to help
 
Lifeguards and beachgoers scrambled to the towering pile of debris — estimated to weigh tens of thousands of pounds — to help search for victims.  
  
I saw first responders, and I saw lifeguards frantically digging people out of the debris,'' Jim Pepperdine, who lives nearby, told the San Diego Union-Tribune. 
 
In addition to the three fatalities, one injured person was taken to a hospital, and another who had minor injuries was treated at the scene, officials said. 
 
Suburbs north of San Diego have long contended with rising water levels in the Pacific Ocean that pressure bluffs along the coast. Some are fortified with concrete walls to prevent multimillion-dollar homes from falling into the sea. 
 
Long stretches of beach in Encinitas are narrow strips of sand between stiff waves and towering rock walls. People lounging on beach chairs or blankets are sometimes surprised as waves roll past them and within a few feet of the walls. 
 
Grandview Beach can be reached by wooden stairs from a parking lot above. It is fairly narrow, with tides high this week. Surfers often lay their boards upright against the bluff. Not unusual
 
Cliffside collapses are not unusual as the ocean chews away at the base of the sandstone, authorities said. Some beach areas have been marked with signs warning of slide dangers. 
 
Several people have died or been injured over the years in bluff collapses.  
  
Bluffs give way four to eight times a year in Southern California, butnothing of this magnitude,” said Brian Ketterer, southern field division chief of California State Parks. 
 
This is a naturally eroding coastline,'' Giles said.There’s really no rhyme or reason, but that’s what it does naturally.” 
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The Senate of Puerto Rico is set to hold public hearings Monday on the nomination of veteran politician Pedro Pierluisi to replace embattled former governor Ricardo Rossello, who resigned as promised Friday.Rossello handpicked Pierluisi to succeed him, thrusting the U.S. territory into a new period of uncertainty after weeks of protests over Rossello’s mismanagement and leaked communications in which Rossello and his advisors disparaged a range of Puerto Ricans.Pierluisi was sworn in Friday but said at a news conference after taking an oath, his term as governor might be short-lived because there are no guarantees the Senate will confirm him.  Pierluisi vowed to serve as governor only until the Senate hearing on his confirmation.Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz joined other critics in denouncing the nomination and declaring the transition process “unethical and illegal.”
 
The House of Representatives approved Pierluisi’s nomination Friday as secretary of state, an office next in line to the governorship. Pierluisi’s nomination now goes to the Senate, which moved up the hearings from Wednesday to Monday.Schatz and other senators maintain until the nomination is confirmed by both chambers, the law states next in line for governor is Justice Secretary Wanda Vazquez, who tweeted last Sunday she has no interest in the position.But Pierluisi said Friday Vazquez told him she “is completely willing to take over the governorship.”Rossello maintains confirmation by both houses of the legislature was not needed for a recess appointment, a claim some political observers say may generate legal challenges.If the Senate does not confirm Pierluisi’s confirmation, he said he would step down and hand over the governorship to the justice secretary.  The uncertain transition process risks more political chaos and pessimism among Puerto Ricans about their island’s destiny, which has been clouded by years of bankruptcy and Hurricane Maria, a 2017 storm that was among the worst natural disasters in U.S. history. 
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Forty-eight insects are currently included on the U.S. Endangered Species List, and the only way any insect has ever come off the list is through extinction. This is especially troubling for the world’s butterfly populations, which have declined by 20% over the last decades. This time of year, Nate Fuller can often be found counting butterflies. The director of the Sarett Nature Center in Benton Harbor, Michigan, needs an accurate count of Mitchell’s satyr butterflies, to help preserve one of their last known habitats.“They’re very particular in the kind of habitat where they can live, which is part of what makes them so rare and amazing indicators for our water quality,” he said.Hard to spotEmerging into a vast wetland of soupy ground covered in shoulder-high grasses and sedges, dotted with poisonous sumac trees, it’s slow going, but a cell phone app helps keep track of where butterflies have been spotted as well as when and how many, all important data for better understanding Mitchell’s satyr populations.Finding the small brown butterflies with golden-ringed eyespots on their wings can be difficult. There just aren’t many around. They also rest with their wings closed to blend in with their surroundings.“We can step over this way, there’s a chance we might stir up a Mitchell’s satyr,” Fuller said.The Mitchell’s satyr was placed on the Endangered Species List in 1991. Initially it was thought that the loss of wetlands contributed to their decline.Why the decline?“We knew them to be where spring fed wetlands were,” Fuller said. “The assumption was it was a case of invasive plant species, humans destroying wetlands, draining them, dredging them.”But, as habitats were restored, the Mitchell’s satyr continued to decline. Fuller says environmentalists realized something more complicated was at work.“The clues seem to suggest that it’s not just habitat availability,” Fuller said. “It’s ground water and the amount and the quality of ground water coming into these wetlands seemed to be a challenge for the butterflies.”While the decline is likely the result of a combination of factors, the fact that water quality might contribute is unsettling because the wetlands are the headwaters for the Midwest’s rivers and streams.Toledo Zoo breeding programA captive breeding program was started four years ago at the Toledo Zoo to get to the bottom of the mystery. Ryan Walsh is its director.“We’re actually doing two things with these guys,” Walsh said. “We’re starting a captive colony. We’ll occasionally collect them to add new genetics to the captive population. We can really breed a large number of the butterflies. The rest of them, the ones that won’t be left back for captive breeding will be released out into the wild.”The caterpillars spend the winter in a special weather-controlled chamber. That helped determine the Mitchell’s satyrs don’t do well below 4.4 degrees Celsius, the temperature at which hard freezes in the fen wetlands will kill the insects.With that knowledge, the program produced 1,300 new eggs this year, something that may go a long way toward restoring the population. And may, one day, earn the butterflies a ticket off the Endangered Species List.Meanwhile, back at the Nature Center, our luck isn’t so great. In two hours, we’ve spotted only three Mitchell’s satyrs. But Fuller says if anything, that’s a good reason to continue to build the breeding program.“We should care because they’re indicators that there’s something wrong with our landscape, whether it’s water quality, water quantity or habitat? But sort of the bigger picture, do we care about creation? Do we care about the world we live in? It’s the idea of caring about the land, so that the land can care for us in return,” he said.
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Hopes by small aviation museum in southwestern Iowa that a stamp in its possession was rare enough to parlay into a fortune crashed Friday when experts told them it wasn’t real, and likely not even worth the paper it was glued upon.The Iowa Aviation Museum in Greenfield, Iowa, has had what it thought was a 1918 “Inverted Jenny” stamp on public display for some 20 years, dating back to when it was donated to the museum, glued to a board along with several other stamps. A notation from the donor attached to the board speculated then that it was worth about $73,000.Experts at the national stamp convention meeting in Omaha knew immediately the stamp wasn’t authentic, said Ken Martin with the American Philatelic Society that’s holding the show through Sunday.Likely cut from a catalog“It wasn’t the right size. It was too small,” Martin said. “This version was likely cut out of a postage stamp auction catalog.”An examination under a microscope confirmed experts’ initial doubt. A 100-year-old stamp would have been printed from an artist’s engraving, so the image under a microscope would appear as a series of lines. A reproduction for printed material decades later would have been comprised of a series of tiny dots, which is what appeared under the scope, Martin said.The news was disappointing for those at the museum, which also serves as the home of the Iowa Aviation Hall of Fame and had hoped to auction the stamp for hundreds of thousands of dollars and build a new museum hangar.“We really didn’t know what we had,” Larry Konz, a tour guide at the museum, said Friday. “When we were told that we might have the real deal, I thought, ‘My God, we might have something quite valuable here, and we’ve had it hanging on a wall all this time.”Had it been real, it would be worth between $300,000 and $400,000 at auction, Martin said. There were only 100 of the stamps printed in 1918, with the image of a JN-4-H “Jenny” biplane accidentally displayed upside-down on a 24-cent stamp.A slim chanceNorma Nielson, of Eugene, Oregon, was at the convention Friday to see for herself if the museum was in possession of one of the few rare and unaccounted stamps. Nielson is a stamp collector who grew up in the museum’s hometown of Greenfield, and had put museum officials in touch with the American Philatelic Society to check the stamp’s authenticity.“I knew it was probably a slim chance of it being genuine, given how rare that stamp is,” she said. “But, boy, it sure would have been exciting if it had been.”
 
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BOSTON — Authorities said Friday that they were looking to toxicology reports for clues to the death of Saoirse Kennedy Hill, a granddaughter of assassinated U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. 
 
The Kennedy family confirmed the death in a statement after police responded to a call Thursday afternoon about a possible drug overdose at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. The statement was issued by Brian Wright O’Connor, a spokesman for Saoirse Hill’s uncle, former U.S. Representative Joseph P. Kennedy II. 
 
Hill, 22, was the daughter of Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s fifth child, Courtney, and Paul Michael Hill, who was one of four people falsely convicted in the 1974 Irish Republican Army bombings of two pubs. The two are now divorced. 
 
She lit up our lives with her love, her peals of laughter and her generous spirit,'' the statement said, adding she was passionate about human rights and women's empowerment and worked with indigenous communities to build schools in Mexico. 'Gifted student'
 
Hill, whose first name is pronounced SIR-shuh, attended Boston College, where she was a member of the Class of 2020. The college issued a statement Friday saying she was a communications major anda gifted student.” 
 
She was also active in the College Democrats, and had many friends on the BC campus,'' spokesman Jack Dunn said. 
 
The Cape and Islands district attorney's office said Barnstable police responded to a homefor a reported unattended death.” Barnstable police and Massachusetts State Police detectives were investigating. The district attorney’s office said Friday that Hill was taken to Cape Cod Hospital, where she was pronounced dead. It said an autopsy showed no signs of trauma, and that toxicology reports would help determine the cause and manner of death. 
 American flags are lowered as people gather at the Kennedy compound on Friday, Aug. 2, 2019, in Hyannis Port, Mass. Saoirse Kennedy Hill, granddaughter of Ethel Kennedy and her late husband Robert F. Kennedy, died at the compound Thursday…The family statement did not include a cause of death, but audio of a Barnstable police scanner call obtained by The Associated Press said officers were responding to a report of a drug overdose at the compound. 
 
The world is a little less beautiful today,'' the Kennedy family statement quoted Hill's 91-year-old grandmother and RFK's widow, Ethel Kennedy, as saying. 
 
Hill had written frankly and publicly about her struggles with mental health and a suicide attempt while in high school.My depression took root in the beginning of my middle school years and will be with me for the rest of my life,” she wrote in a February 2016 column in The Deerfield Scroll, the student newspaper at Deerfield Academy, the private school in Massachusetts she attended. 
 
Hill wrote that she became depressed two weeks before her high school junior year started and she totally lost it after someone I knew and loved broke serious sexual boundaries with me.'' She wrote that she pretended it hadn't happened, and when it became too much,I attempted to take my own life.” 
 
She urged the school to be more open about mental illness. Other activism
 
Hill also helped found a group at the school called Deerfield Students Against Sexual Assault, according to a November 2016 story in the paper, and she attended a March for Our Lives gun violence prevention rally in Barnstable in March 2018, The Barnstable Patriot newspaper reported at the time. 
 
Robert F. Kennedy was fatally shot in Los Angeles in 1968 after winning California’s Democratic presidential primary. He had served as attorney general in the administration of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. He also served as a U.S. senator from New York. 
 
RFK’s family, like the rest of the Kennedy clan, has been touched by tragedy. 
 
One of his and Ethel Kennedy’s 11 children, Michael Kennedy, was killed in a skiing accident in Colorado on New Year’s Eve 1997 at age 39. And in 1984, another son, David Anthony Kennedy, died of a drug overdose in Florida at age 28. 
 
JFK’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr., was killed with his wife and sister-in-law when his small plane crashed off Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, in July 1999. 
 
One of Hill’s relatives, former U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy, who is now an advocate for substance abuse and mental health treatment, tweeted in tribute to her Friday. 
 
“Saoirse will always remain in our hearts. She is loved and will be deeply missed,” he wrote. 
 
Funeral plans were incomplete Friday. 
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