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

Akal Security, Inc., the largest provider of security services to the federal government—with a history of costly contractual lapses—has agreed to pay $1.9 million to settle allegations by the U.S. Department of Justice that it did a lousy job of training federal courthouse guards in Northern California.   read more

Perhaps taking a page from a National Football League playbook, a California Pop Warner youth football team has been accused of putting bounties on opposition players as a reward for knocking them out of games. Tustin Red Cobras coach Darren Crawford and association President Pat Galentine were suspended last week by the Pop Warner national office while investigators look into allegations that first surfaced in the pages of the Orange County Register.   read more

When Richard Sentz bought his new Stockton city bus card, he accidentally tossed it away instead of his old, expired card. At least, that’s what Sentz told the police when they boarded his bus and asked him and others for their cards. That’s a hefty ticket. But when Sentz received his fine in the mail two weeks later, he was flabbergasted. His fine was $1,050 for not having a $1.50 available on his bus card.   read more

In a report released Thursday titled “The Edge of Endurance,” the human rights organization took issue with California’s 3,000+ prisoners held in high-security isolation, two-thirds of whom are separated from the general prison population for an “indeterminate” period of time. “No other US state is believed to have held so many prisoners for such long periods in indefinite isolation,” the report says.   read more

Two months before voters will decide if the already-beleaguered state higher education system will absorb another budgetary body blow, Brice W. Harris has been selected to be the new chancellor of the 112-campus California Community Colleges.   read more

In one week, half a million Bay Area Catholics will have a new archbishop, one who believes a fair number of his flock shouldn’t receive the sacrament of Holy Communion, central to life as a Catholic, much less have the right to get married. Archbishop-designate Salvatore Cordileone, named to his new post by Pope Benedict XVI a month ago, was a prime mover behind the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 in 2008.   read more

The Orange County Fire Authority (OCFA) didn’t make more than half its 2011-12 scheduled inspections of businesses handling hazardous materials, but $360,000 for inspection fees was billed and apparently collected anyway.   read more

Republicans have made vote fraud an issue across the country, pushing through VoterID laws in more than half the states and toying with the idea of putting it on the ballot in California, although examples of such schemes are practically non-existent anywhere in the country. Well, almost anywhere. The Riverside County Registrar of Voters has been fielding complaints that Democrats are being tricked into re-registering as Republicans by petition circulators.   read more

The Chevron oil refinery in Richmond, crippled since August because of a fire, has been under federal criminal investigation since a discovery in 2009 by inspectors that a 100-foot pipe detoured gas around pollution monitors for four years and burned it off elsewhere. Chevron says it was a misunderstanding.   read more

Six years after the Bush administration announced that it would move all nuclear-weapons-grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium out of the Bay Area’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory by 2014, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced it had completed the task.   read more

Speculation abounds about why California’s outdoor marijuana crop seizures this year may be their lowest since 2004, but it’s no secret why medical pot is becoming more scarce. The U.S. Attorney’s Office kept up its assault on medical marijuana by taking legal action Tuesday against 71 dispensaries in Los Angeles County.   read more

Vision Service Plan (VSP), a 58-million-member benefit plan worth around $3.7 billion, is threatening to move its Sacramento headquarters out of state if California doesn’t retool the Health Benefit Exchange it’s rolling out next year as part of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.   read more

At its U.S. headquarters in Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz Biotechnology (SCB) rides herd on nearly 19,000 animals it uses for research. Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) filed a 10-page complaint against SCB, citing “willfull violation” of the Animal Welfare Act and listing six more inspections loaded with allegations stretching back to 2007.   read more

Thirty years after the infamous Dos Erres massacre in Guatemala, one of the men believed responsible for the slaughter of 250 villagers has been extradited from Canada to Los Angeles for lying on a U.S. citizenship application.   read more

Nearly three months after the U.S. government sued a reluctant JPMorgan Chase & Co. for documents during an investigation of allegations that it had manipulated California energy prices, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is threatening to suspend its energy trading unit from the state market.   read more

California State University (CSU) put meat on its bare-bones budget for handling a $250 million cut in its funding should Governor Jerry Brown’s Proposition 30 fail at the ballot box November 6—and it was a rather sickly display. The 23-campus system would raise tuition 5%, increase per-unit costs for non-resident students 7%, reduce enrollment (perhaps 20,000), axe 5,500 class sections, and reduce faculty and staff levels by 1,500.   read more