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

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) recently flipped the switch on 16 cameras in the northern San Fernando Valley suburbs that use wireless and face recognition technology to give officers and volunteers sitting in a control room miles away a birds-eye view of the unsuspecting subjects. The cameras, which zoom and tilt for maximum viewing, cost $680,000 and cover a 66-square-mile area that has 450,000 residents. They are not the first police surveillance cameras in the city.   read more

A human-rights focused technology group accused Blue Coat Systems of Sunnyvale of producing products that repressive regimes around the world are using to monitor and suppress internet activities. Hacktivists and researchers found that Syria used the appliances to crack down on the political opposition through monitoring and censorship.   read more

President Barack Obama, an admitted former pot smoker, told a national television audience last month that he had “bigger fish to fry” than going after marijuana users in states where it is legal. He did not mention Matthew R. Davies or Aaron Sandusky by name. The U.S. Department of Justice is going after Davies, a 34-year-old entrepreneur with no prior criminal record, for operating medical marijuana dispensaries in Sacramento and Stockton.   read more

Governor Jerry Brown officially got away with one last November when the Democratic Party managed to get his tax-hike Proposition 30 placed at the top of the ballot, a coveted spot that probably contributed to its success. Last Friday, the state Court of Appeal for the Third District released a ruling that took a dim view of the parliamentary maneuver used by the majority party in the Legislature.   read more

An audit of the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) budget process by the state’s Department of Finance found “general confusion and lack of knowledge” among management and staff. The result of expense and revenue miscues in seven fee-supported funds caused the commission to incorrectly project in 2011 that it had $422 million that didn’t actually exist. Most of the mistakes were “found to be unexplainable” by PUC staff.   read more

Around half of California’s 1 million children with special needs don’t receive “effective coordination” of their medical treatments, earning the state a national ranking of 46th, according to a report sponsored by the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health. That’s actually a tad better than the state’s 50th ranking in the percentage of children who have problems obtaining referrals for specialty care.   read more

The good news, according to the Los Angeles Times, was that Southern California housing prices were up 19.6% in December. The bad news? Prices might be up principally because of a rapid decline in housing inventory fueled by hedge funds and foreign money scooping up properties for cash and renting them out.   read more

Major industrial sectors in California released 10% more toxics into the air, water and land in 2011 than the year before, according to an annual report released by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), using data gathered from 1,265 state facilities, calculated that 38.3 million pounds of toxic chemicals were released on-site in 2011.   read more

Declining migration and California’s falling birthrate mean fewer children in the state’s immediate future, but beyond that, conclusions about what it means for the future are mixed. Some see it as a harbinger of socio-economic upheaval, others as a prelude to a healthier, less-stressed environment.   read more

The city of San Francisco has kept a secret list of buildings that are potentially unsafe, but haven't actually been classified that way and, in many cases, haven't been inspected. They say they keep it secret because they don't want to unnecessarily frighten people or unfairly point a finger at property owners. Wanna see the list?   read more

Southern California Edison (SCE) destroyed downed utility poles immediately after a ferocious windstorm at the end of 2011, making it impossible to conclusively assess claims by critics that the company’s improper maintenance contributed to the devastation. The California Public Utilities Commission expressed frustration at not having access to most of the 248 poles that blew down during a storm that cut power to 440,168 customers in the San Gabriel Valley.   read more

In a country where the leader of the lefter of the two major political parties—President Barack Obama, a Democrat—self-admittedly acts like a moderate Republican of the 1980s, California still keeps its antenna up for any signs of untoward communist influence. One area of eternal vigilance is in the state’s schools. California Education Code Section 44932 lists 11 things you can’t be or do and still teach. Two of the 11 are about communists.   read more

Stacie Halas, a former porn actress known as Tiffany Six, was told by a three-person board that she won’t be getting her job back as a science teacher at Richard B. Haydock Intermediate School in Oxnard. Although the Commission on Professional Competence unanimously concluded that Halas would not be able to overcome her notoriety as a porn actress, Judge Julie Cabos-Owen singled out Halas’ “propensity for dishonesty” as a primary reason not to let her back in the classroom.   read more

This is probably not the best way to plan for an earthquake. Expressing dissatisfaction with the questions being asked, around half of 200 Southern California hospitals surveyed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) about their ability to handle a catastrophic earthquake failed to respond, according to Deborah Schoch at the CHCF Center for Health Reporting.   read more

The Crossroads of the West gun show has been a fixture at the state-owned Cow Palace in Daly City for a quarter century. Despite years of opposition from local and state politicians who want it out of the building, and a series of national tragedies involving assault weapons, the gun show thrives. An estimated 10,000 people thronged to the show on Saturday, the first day of a two-day event.   read more

Bottled water provided by Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) to the town whose groundwater it famously poisoned in real life—and in the movie “Erin Brockovich”—has been found to contain high levels of the same toxin, chromium-6.   read more