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

This occurred 27,500 years ago in California, turning a sprawling region of pine trees and juniper, where mammoths roamed, into shrubs and chaparral. “This was happening during a glacial period when it was already cool and wet―cooler and wetter than it is now,” paleoecologist and co-author Jonathan Nichols said. “If we got a drought like this now, it would be putting a big drought on top of a time which is already warm and dry.”   read more

The drone legislation was among nine bills that Brown rejected in one fell swoop with the veto message, “Over the last several decades, California’s criminal code has grown to more than 5,000 separate provisions, covering almost every conceivable form of human misbehavior. During the same period, our jail and prison populations have exploded.”   read more

The mayor said in a statement he was told it was a “routine seizure.” But Fox News reported they were told by unnamed sources he was under joint investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Silva said he was not allowed to leave until he surrendered his passwords and was told he could not have an attorney present.   read more

Men's Health rated Fresno the drunkest city in American in March. So, how come Fresno doesn’t make the RoadSnacks list of 10 Drunkest Cities in California? Turns out RoadSnacks was less concerned with how badly people drove when intoxicated and focused more on how much alcohol everyone was drinking. Perhaps a combination of the two would yield the cities that drive best drunk.   read more

The new anti-smog rule lowers the ground-level ozone limit from 75 parts per billion (ppb) to 70. Health advocates and environmentalists pushed for 60 ppb. California already has pretty aggressive air pollution measures in place, but they have to. The air is still the worst in the nation and the state already gets a break on deadlines for achieving improvement. Southern California is still struggling to reach 80 ppb by 2023 and 75 by 2031.   read more

The bureau found that Westlake employed a number of illegal, and pretty despicable, tactics to collect money since at least 2010. They used a program called Skip Tracy on 137,000 accounts to fool telephone call-waiting systems with disguised aliases, pretending to be, among other things, a repo company demanding borrowers surrender their cars. They lied to borrowers about terms of loan extensions and changed due dates without consultation.   read more

New York City spends 12 times as much as Los Angeles per capita on domestic violence, according to the audit. That includes shelters, education and intervention. In real dollars, L.A. spent $3.2 million in 2013-14 and New York spent $107.2 million. The New York Police Department (NYPD) has a unit dedicated to domestic violence, staffed with officers trained to handle it. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) does not.   read more

The lengthy, detailed settlement between Shell and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) comes after years of negotiation and decades of health complaints. Around 17,600 people live within a mile of the site. It won’t cover all the costs or end the problem anytime soon. “The cleanup horizon for groundwater is well over 50 years,” John Lyons, acting director of the Region Nine Superfund Division, told KPCC.   read more

he settlement, which still must be approved by the Board of Education, only addresses payments the district made for Pearson software used by both companies as part of the contract. Apple’s share of the settlement costs is $4.2 million. The FBI is still investigating the bidding process that landed Apple the deal to supply the district’s administrators, teachers and 640,000 students with iPads and software to prepare for new Common Core teaching and testing.   read more

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) officially labeled record deaths of Guadalupe fur seals, washing up along California’s central coast, an unusual mortality event (UME). There have been 80 strandings of the emaciated creatures so far this year, 42 of them dead. That’s about eight times more than usual. Only 11 of the 38 live ones lived for very long.   read more

Economist Jerry Nickelsburg poses the question, “California Housing—Will It Ever Be Affordable?” and doesn’t seem to have a positive answer. “The economics are clear,” he wrote. “When affordable housing is provided, say by requiring developers to have a fixed percentage of their new units ‘affordable,’ then the demand for that housing will be in excess of the supply.” Nickelsburg suggests there is a better way: Target the housing.   read more

While the Bay Area and other NorCal metropolitan freeways have short specific times when HOV lanes are in effect, Los Angeles carpool lanes are 24/7. Governor Brown vetoed Assembly Bill 210, which would have eased the restrictions on short stretches of two L.A.-area freeways, indicating he didn’t really care what the arguments were in this specific case.   read more

Martinez and other senior bank officers began issuing the loans to their favorite borrowers, known as “Friends of the Bank,” or FOBs, in 2004. They used fraudulent application loans and ignored the borrowers’ credit unworthiness to get the ball rolling. And when the FOBs couldn’t make their payments, they received follow-up loans to delay the inevitable. Taxpayers eventually picked up the $1-billion tab.   read more

So far, the contamination is considered limited and under control. But the plume is spreading into the principal aquifer. Around 2.4 million people in 22 cities rely on that aquifer for drinking water. That's nearly one city for every site of contamination noted by the water district in its presentation to politicians in April. The district tried, and failed, to sue a bunch of them   read more

Delaware North of Buffalo, New York, didn’t get the contract in June and, true to its word, sued the government last week in U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The company alleged breach of contract, claiming the government wouldn’t compensate it for property it left behind—trademarks like the names of Ahwahnee Hotel, the Wawona Hotel, the Badger Pass ski area and Curry Village.   read more

“We don't think this is a threat to the public in any way,” East Bay Regional Park District spokeswoman Carolyn Jones told the San Francisco Chronicle, before adding an unsettling disclaimer: “But with climate change, anything is possible in the future.” Africanized bees do better in warmer climates. The Bay Area is cooler and moister than they like. But it remains to be seen how an extended drought and global warming will alter the calculation.   read more