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 new platform substitutes "undocumented immigrant" for "illegal alien," drops calls for deportation and doesn't insist immigrants be biometrically tracked. It does, apparently, still call for English as the official language of government, but leaves out the old explanation that this means all election ballots and other government documents should only be printed in English.   read more

Around 74,774 Californians who paid Comcast for unlisted phone services—some for security reasons—won’t be able to get their privacy back, but they will each get $100 in compensation from the giant telecom for publishing their names, phone numbers and addresses. Two hundred and sixteen customers who were put at special safety risk—victims of domestic violence, law enforcement officers, and judges—will receive $432,000 in additional services, like home security.   read more

ExxonMobil and regulators, both state and federal, were already not seeing eye to eye over what changes and repairs were needed to meet safety standards when a small leak of modified hydrofluoric acid on September 6 complicated matters. This week, two members of California’s congressional delegation asked the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) to broaden its ongoing investigation of the refinery blast to include the acid incident.   read more

If the project actually gets going in September 2016, as planned, the joint venture with an American company would mark China’s entry into the barely-existent U.S. high-speed rail market. The country has built more than 10,565 miles of domestic high-speed rail, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. Bloomberg said federal records indicate that XpressWest has already secured approvals and permits from a number of federal agencies for the 185-mile leg to Victorville.   read more

For $2,925 a month, a renter can live in Ringuette, a 7-bedroom, 2-bath castle on 200 acres in Region Aquitaine. This low-end castle (available on the Castle Rental Network) has a walled garden covered with vines, a swimming pool, a lovely courtyard and a spacious kitchen sporting a wood stove. It has a 200-year-old Taxodium and a bamboo forest. Or, for just $75 a month more, one can have a 400-square-foot studio apartment with a Murphy bed in Lower Haight.   read more

“Such a hefty price tag will put these public records beyond the reach of most Californians, including journalists investigating possible instances of excessive force by police,” ACLU senior counsel Alan Schlosser said in a statement. The department charged $1 for the DVD disc and $2,937.58 for staff time, numbers to keep in mind when posting videos to Facebook and YouTube. Time is big money.   read more

Judge Richard H. Kirschner wrote, “The trial court instructed the jury that there is no age of consent and that a minor is capable of giving legal consent to sexual intercourse. This instruction was incorrect under the circumstances of this case, which involve the sexual abuse of a minor by an adult in a position of authority.”   read more

Ars Technica said that brings to 16 either the number of acts of vandalism, revenge or incipient terrorism, depending on one’s own gut feeling, over the past year. The fear among security-minded folk is that someone is probing the nation’s communications infrastructure with a mind toward perpetrating something considerably more devastating. Roger Entner of Recon Analytics says, “Our most critical infrastructure is basically unsecured.”   read more

The U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Department of the Interior and Westlands Water District announced settlement of a decade-long fight over managing drainage and already-tainted farmland to meet environmental standards. Details were not immediately available, but it was said to closely follow a preliminary agreement in 2013 that had, and still has, environmentalists howling.   read more

The Navy faced multiple lawsuits as it sought to protect its unchallenged authority to do anything, anywhere at sea without regard for ecological consequences. “This settlement proves what we’ve been saying all along,” said Marsha Green, president of Ocean Mammal Institute. “The Navy can meet its training and testing needs and, at the same time, provide significant protections to whales and dolphins by limiting the use of sonar and explosives in vital habitat.”   read more

Orthopedic surgeon Munir Marwan Uwaydah is currently awaiting extradition from Germany, according to the district attorney’s office, which announced two criminal grand jury indictments Tuesday, containing 132 felony counts, against Uwaydah and 14 associates. Twenty-one people were allegedly operated on by the physician’s assistant—without Uwaydah in the room—while they were under general anesthesia   read more

The badly-corroded Plains pipeline that burst four months ago spilled more than 140,000 gallons of oil, much of it ending up in coastal waters. Plains was issued warnings to keep better records and told to do something about documenting its emergency response training program. Plains did not notify the feds until three and a half hours after discovering the spill, although the law requires them to do it right away.   read more

Jake Soiffer, a junior and representative of Fossil Free UC, told the UC Berkeley Daily Californian that the decision to sell holdings was a “powerful victory” for the campaign. But coal and tar sands stocks were an easy sell for UC. They have been big money losers all year. Chief Investment Officer Jagdeep Bachher told Reuters that slowing demand for dirty coal and even dirtier tar sands, and growing hostility from regulators dims the prospects for improvement. So he bailed.   read more

Data from growth rings of trees in the area show the situation is much worse than back in April when snowpack was measured at 6% of normal and Governor Brown delivered the bad news from a barren Sierra Nevada meadow that hadn't been snowless in 75 years. The combination of low precipitation and high temperatures has ratcheted up dire assessments of future snowpack.   read more

Lawmakers scrambled on Friday to sign off on incarnations of legislation that have been kicking around for years, incorporating the governor’s version of the Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act proffered two weeks ago into the three bills. They seemed to have come up with something the governor approves of, but according to the East Bay Express, marijuana advocates “howled that they were being cut out” of the final deal.   read more

The EPA admitted that it was aware that sulfoxaflor was “very highly toxic” to bees, but reasoned that rules for its application could be devised that would mitigate any harm. The court said the EPA had no basis for saying that. Dow Agrosciences, maker of the insecticide, and the EPA argued to the court that although there were studies linking the product to bee deaths, they were not conclusive. Judge Schroeder wrote, “Neither logic nor precedent can sustain this position."   read more