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

Attention, class. Today’s new word is “contumacious.” It means stubborn or willfully disobedient, recalcitrant and obstinate—and it’s how a panel of federal judges described Governor Jerry Brown and his refusal to further reduce overcrowding in California prisons. The three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threatened Brown with contempt of court if he kept it up and ordered his administration to come up with a plan within 21 days that deals with their concerns.   read more

The lawmakers want better coordination between board investigators and prosecutors, adoption of uniform physician substance abuse standards, adherence to legislation ordering greater oversight of surgical clinics, the filling of 18 vacant enforcement positions, and more effective use of interim suspension orders against “dangerous doctors.” They cited stories from the Los Angeles Times that detailed the board’s failure to hold physicians accountable for excessive prescribing of drugs.   read more

California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) engineers are trying to figure out why 32 anchoring bolts (9 to 24 feet long) popped out last month when 96 of the 288 steel rods were stress tested. Now Caltrans officials are being stress tested as they not only wrestle with finding a cause, but ponder what solutions might be available and at what cost.   read more

FERC said the gas traders and producers goosed indexes used for setting prices by giving incorrect information to the two trade magazines that published them. Gas Daily collected its information through telephone conversations with industry sources and Inside FERC went with unconfirmed spreadsheet submissions via email. FERC found that many of the companies would pass the spreadsheet around before turning it in and any trader could adjust the numbers.   read more

Thoroughbred horses, which rarely just fall over dead, have been doing just that at a surprising rate on California racetracks. Nineteen horses died suddenly of no apparent cause during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2012, according to the California Horse Racing Board (CHRB). Another 17 have similarly died in the months since. Only six such deaths occurred in 2010-11 and four the year before that.   read more

As for Harris, she received a personal apology from Obama. But the damage was already done, some analysts say. Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, told the San Francisco Chronicle that drawing attention to Harris’ looks was particularly unwelcome given that she holds “a traditionally-male position like attorney general, the top law enforcement officer in the state.”   read more

“The potential risk for contamination from fracking, while unknown, is not so remote or speculative to be completely ignored,” U.S. District Judge Paul Grewal wrote. It is the first time a federal agency has been told it had to analyze the environmental effect of fracking when considering lease agreements, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, which brought the lawsuit heard by Grewal.   read more

Disguised as legislation to hasten and facilitate crackdowns on animal cruelty of farm animals in slaughterhouses, a bill that would gag whistle-blowers is moving through the California state Assembly. AB 343 would make it illegal to record animal cruelty without turning the evidence over to local law enforcement within 48 hours.   read more

Last month, a Fresno County Superior Court three-judge panel upheld a court commissioner who ruled that Spriggs violated California Vehicle Code 23123 when he looked at his iPhone’s GPS map while driving. Spriggs, representing himself in court, argued that the law, which became operative in July 2011, applied only to texting and talking on the phone, not looking at maps.   read more

The parental effort was “assisted” by Parent Revolution, an L.A. advocacy group whose largest benefactor is the conservative Walton Family Foundation, according to journalist Gary Cohn. The Walton family is the richest in the world and owns Walmart. Family members and their foundations are major supporters of conservative causes, fund right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, and are among the largest donors to charter schools in the country.   read more

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB), an independent federal agency established to prevent chemical accidents, blamed the state’s “patchwork system” of oil industry regulation for contributing to the Chevron refinery fire in Richmond last August that sent more than 15,000 people to the hospital with respiratory problems. But the board is only an investigative agency with no power to assess fines or compel agencies and the industry to change their practices.   read more

Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones inked a one-year, $88,000 contract with Consumer Watchdog, an insurance industry critic, to review requests for rate increases. The industry was apoplectic. “Any review of health plan rates should be conducted by independent, impartial consumer groups that do not have political conflicts of interest and financial motivations,” Patrick Johnston, president of the insurance trade group California Assn. of Health Plans, told the Los Angeles Times.   read more

The new rules approved by the board require drillers to give notice when they are planning to commence fracking and let the public know what chemicals they will be pumping into the ground. The industry has fought doing either of those things and hinted they won’t abide by the ruling.   read more

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) might have successfully infiltrated a group of SmartMeter critics in the Bay Area if the executive in charge of the controversial program didn’t do a dumb thing. But when SmartMeter Director William Devereaux tried to infiltrate the group in 2010 by offering to join its discussion group online using the pseudonym “Ralph,” his real name was listed on the email next to his fake one.   read more

Babies born in California, Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington between one week and 16 weeks after the nuclear meltdown began in March 2011 were found to be 28% more likely to suffer from congenital hypothyroidism (CH) than children born in those states during the same period one year earlier.   read more

The state’s Toxic Hot Spots program, initiated under Assembly Bill 2588 in 1987, requires sources of pollution to notify the public if the calculated health risk to humans is 10 in 1 million or more. If the risk is 25 in 1 million or more, the facility has three years to come up with a solution. Exide’s calculated risk is 156 in 1 million.   read more