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

UC received a record number of freshman applications for the 11th consecutive year. Of the 103,117 Californians who applied, 60% were accepted. That’s down from 63% last year and 79% in 1999. Out of 92,324 (67%) who were admitted for fall 2015, 61,834 were Californians. These are preliminary enrollment numbers because students with multiple school acceptances still have to make a choice this summer.   read more

"Lynching’ has such a painful history for African Americans that the law should only use it for what it is―murder by mob,” bill co-author state Senator Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles) said in a statement. Now that the phraseology of the law has been dealt with, there might be something to be said for revisiting its substance. Police have used the law, especially in recent years, to bust up political and social demonstrations.   read more

At stake are billions of dollars restored to school systems by the state in 2013-14 (post Great Recession) when the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) took effect. LCFF is a new initiative to get money to the neediest students, many of whom do not receive the kind of funding already directed at special education kids.   read more

So how are we doing? Just as the measure of health outcomes—not the growing number of insured—will be the metric Obamacare patients will care most about, thirsty Californians will want to know how the 25% residential goal translates into a more secure water supply. Are these “the sacrifices necessary?” Or is 29% just a good sign that people are willing to suffer, without questioning the basic premise? That isn’t clear yet.   read more

The FBI is calling 11 separate attacks on fiber-optic cables in the Bay Area since July 2014 vandalism, but they have no idea who the perpetrators are. Could be pranksters, jihadists or a government conspiracy. Cybersecurity expert Jonathan Thompson told USA Today, “When it’s situations that are scattered all in one geography, that raises the possibility that they are testing out capabilities, response times and impact.”   read more

The county shut down its Crisis Stabilization Unit (CSU) and cut in half the number of hospital beds available to mentally-ill patients. The decision was made when social services statewide and at local levels were eviscerated in the budget bloodbaths triggered by the Great Recession. Five years later, Sacramento County’s fiscal condition has improved, but the county’s attitude has not.   read more

The legislation will not reverse, overnight, the lax California policy on vaccination exemptions. It will almost certainly face legal challenges and could be subject to a referendum. The law doesn't take effect until 2016-17 school year and will only affect kindergartners and seventh-graders each year. Even if unchallenged, it would be half a dozen years before all K-12 students would be subject to the law.   read more

The city passed separate ordinances governing streets/sidewalks and parks that empower police to take down encampments and haul away stuff with 24-hour notice. Big stuff, like tents and mattresses, can go immediately. Homeless are subject to tickets and misdemeanor charges. The mayor supported the ordinances, then said he would delay implementation until amendments were passed.   read more

ForestEthics and Communities for a Better Environment (CBE), a couple of nonprofit groups, found that “while 60% of Californians live in environmental justice communities . . . 80% of the 5.5 million Californians with homes in the blast zone live” in them. About 75% of those in the blast zone are Hispanic-Latino, African-American or Asian. Twenty-two percent of the residents within the blast zone are white, compared to 45% outside the zone.   read more

Two U.S. Supreme Court rulings on Monday will have a lasting effect on California although the state was not a party to either one. The court fell one vote shy of eviscerating Arizona's anti-gerrymandering law, and by extension California's, when it upheld the creation of a redistricting commission by voters. The court, by the same 5-4 margin, voted to let Oklahoma execute prisoners with a lethal injection that could clear the way for California to do the same.   read more

Despite the respite from L.A.’s rapacious thirst, it’s hard to imagine much of a future for Mono Lake in the Age of Drought. It has been the subject of lengthy litigation over its decline, beginning with a Public Trust lawsuit in 1979, and is about to reach a new marker of devastation. The Los Angeles Times sketched out the very sketchy-looking future of California’s second-largest gull colony.   read more

It’s usually not a good thing when your foundation needs to be fixed, especially if problems have been evident for years and people are already being harmed. The state budget signed by Governor Jerry Brown last week took a stab at answering public demands for reform by funding an oversight panel to report on how the Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) is doing.   read more

San Francisco lost some of its rights to Tuolomne River along with farmers and Pacific Gas & Electric Company in the Central Valley that tapped into the upper San Joaquin and Merced rivers. A report from the water board last week indicated that only 31% of the 9,112 curtailment orders sent to junior and senior water rights holders have been acknowledged within the seven-day statutory limit.   read more

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Evelio M. Grillo ruled last week that patients must be notified when classified as incapacitated and given an opportunity to argue the case in court should they be so inclined. Anything less is a denial of constitutionally guaranteed due process of law.   read more

A new report from the National Park Service says sea level rise at 40 coastal national park sites, including eight in California, will cause problems. The 40 park units contain 10,000 assets, including roads, buildings, bridges, water systems, parking lots, tunnels, sea barriers, lighthouses, fortifications and archaeological sites. The report assumes that sea levels would rise 1 meter, or 3.28 feet, in the next 100 to 150 years.   read more

TURN’s turnaround was prompted by the revelation in February that then-commission President Michael Peevey met privately with Edison executive Stephen Pickett in Warsaw, Poland, in March 2013 to discuss a framework for settlement without the pesky public involved. Peevey is a former president of Edison. The meeting was detailed in some of the thousands of e-mails released last year that revealed an overly close, if not illegal, relationship between the regulator and the utilities it regulated.   read more