ICE agents have reportedly claimed to be police officers to gain consent to enter a person’s home – a tactic that is viewed as unethical, but within the powers granted to the officers. Civil rights groups supported Kalra’s bill, looking to stymie the Trump administration’s promise to use any and all available tools to deport undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes. Many groups fear Trump will expand deportations to include all undocumented immigrants, their families and relatives.   read more

“We were surprised at the amount of land being affected,” Michelle Sneed, a USGS hydrologist and the report's lead author, told the Sacramento Bee. “We were also surprised by the rapid rate of (sinking).” Anything that passes along the surface of the valley is at risk if sinking continues. It could be more than just a bump in the road for the high-speed rail project just getting up a head of steam. A rapidly evolving landscape could also damage roads, pipelines and railways.   read more

They were established in 2000 and 2002, meet in secret, have no oversight by the city or DWP and receive up to $4 million a year in funding. It is unclear what the two organizations actually do. The ordinances that established the two groups aren’t specific about how they should spend their money and city records merely identify vague intentions.   read more

ProPublica looked at the prescribing habits of 1.6 million practitioners and zeroed in on 913 who tacked on $300 million to the nation’s medical bill in 2011 alone by writing scripts for brand-name drugs when much cheaper generic alternatives would have been suitable. Nearly half of the 913 accepted promotional or consulting fees from drug companies of at least $1,000 since 2009, while 11 collected more than $100,000.   read more

Government entities around the world have been filing suits over the manipulation that cost them billions of dollars during the economic meltdown between 2007 and 2011. Eight California entities, including the counties of San Diego and San Mateo and the city of Riverside, filed suit in January. Sonoma County, the Regents of the University of California and San Diego Association of Governments sued in June.   read more

The town sat on what was, in effect, a 400,000-gallon toxic reservoir. The entire business district had to be eviscerated, along with six square blocks of homes. Unocal fought against calls for a settlement for a decade, before finally capitulating. Now it’s time for Chevron, which inherited some valuable beachfront property there when it swallowed up Unocal in 2005, to make some money.   read more

California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) will get $261 million and California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) will get most of the rest as compensation for losses the pension funds took on their investments between 2004 and 2008. The packaging of risky mortgages in exotic leveraged securities laid the groundwork for the financial meltdown that precipitated the ongoing Great Recession.   read more

The Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board levied a $60,000 penalty on Vintage Production California, LLC, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, for discharging the suspect, high-saline fracking fluids into an unlined pit near the city of Shafter in Kern County. Investigators said the discharge, over the 12-day period it knew of, posed a threat to nearby groundwater and the company had failed to get a permit to do it.   read more

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics does six separate calculations for determining various levels of distress in the labor market, and California fares poorly in all of them. The big jump comes when part-timers who want to be fulltime are counted; 18.3% of Californians, U-6, are not happy campers. The part-timers are often hired as “contractors,” don’t get employee health insurance, aren’t paid much and lack other benefits like vacations.   read more

A review by the newspaper of the Department of Toxic Substances Control’s (DTSC) procedures for tracking the material found that it can’t account for 1% of the material that has been shipped during the past year. That might not sound like much until you consider it adds up to 174,000 tons of waste, enough to fill 23,000 trucks.   read more

That set off a mini-panic among recipients who immediately inundated their low-cost clinics and doctor’s offices with anguished cries for help. A corrected version of the letter was sent out last week, but not before adding a new layer of confusion to an already-chaotic Affordable Care Act rollout.   read more

Last Friday, BART officials announced that they had mistakenly agreed to a provision in the four-year contract that they had no intention of including and wanted a do-over. They blamed a “temporary employee” for the error. The union said a deal is a deal and ridiculed the agency’s contention that it had made an honest mistake.   read more

A 10-month-old pilot program funded by the Department of Homeland Security uses facial recognition technology to search for matches in a growing database that includes 348,000 arrestees. The program was rolled out at the beginning of the year without public hearings and little media attention. The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) says officers have run 5,629 queries through the database as of November 1, with nearly 2,000 coming from the San Diego Police Department.   read more

“Facial recognition creates acute privacy concerns that fingerprints do not,” Senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota) said at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law. “Once someone has your faceprint, they can get your name, they can find your social networking account and they can find and track you in the street, in the stores you visit, the government buildings you enter, and the photos your friends post online.”   read more

Unfortunately, the process also pulls in around 90 million sea creatures a year with it. A commission staff report said the project would “discharge effluent with salinity concentrations that are harmful to marine life, and cause adverse direct and indirect effects on wetlands. . . . Additionally, the facility site is subject to a number of significant coastal and geologic hazards, including floods, tsunami, surface fault rupture, ground movement, liquefaction, lateral soil spread, and others.”   read more

David Lanier, who has worked extensively in the state Legislature since 1995, took over as Governor Jerry Brown’s chief labor negotiator earlier this month after Marty Morgenstern announced his retirement as secretary. Morgenstern is a 50-year veteran of labor and workplace issues who has served in key positions in Brown administrations new and old.   read more

California is the poorest state in the nation based on alternative figures provided by the U.S. Census Bureau that take into account a state’s cost of living among other factors. It also factors in income from existing government benefits and mandatory expenses like taxes and child support. SPM also changes basic poverty measure concepts about what constitutes income, a household and poverty thresholds.   read more