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

Sedway told airline personnel, when asked in the handicap section of the boarding area, that she would appreciate some extra time boarding the plane because she felt a bit weak. That triggered a phone call by the airline to medical personnel and a decision to require that Sedway have a note from her physician clearing her to fly. By that time, she was seated on the plane.   read more

The Department of Public Health released the documents in response to a lawsuit filed in 2012, but not before the case went to the California Supreme Court. The agency argued that the info was not public record and cited a 1967 law. The high court cited a newer, more specific law that said it was.   read more

Although workers who manage to prove they were ripped off by their employers rarely collect their money, the U.S. Labor Department had some successes to crow about. For example, the owners of Retirement Plus of San Carlos and four other Bay Area retirement facilities paid caregivers as little as $5 an hour. They were forced to pony up $630,000.   read more

Kern County is the worst. The council calculates that the Central Valley county will receive enough funding to meet just 52% of its needs. The $32.9-million shortfall will impact 10 facilities serving 873,092 people. The county is due a 5% increase in the budget, which will just cover its increased operating costs. One courthouse will remain closed indefinitely and another will stay open just one day a week.   read more

Seven officers are facing termination for recently revealed racist and homophobic text messages they sent in 2011 and 2012. An eighth has already resigned. The texts came to light last month when federal prosecutors filed a motion to keep former S.F. police Sergeant Ian Furminger in custody after his conviction in a department scandal that is still unfolding. He and another officer were convicted of taking money from the homes of drug dealers during arrests.   read more

Scientists at the University of California, Davis, have tracked 29,777 instances of roadkill on California roads over the past six years in an attempt to learn more about the animal movements and lessen the carnage. Volunteers file their reports online at the California Roadkill Observation System (CROS), which are entered into a database and mapped in an interactive graphic.   read more

A 1933 law defines felony lynching as simply, “The taking by means of a riot of any person from the lawful custody of any peace officer.” The law was passed to discourage vigilante mobs from seizing blacks detained by the police and hanging them. But since not a lot of that goes on in California these days and it’s a shame to waste a good law, police have taken to applying it to protesters.   read more

The U.S Department of Commerce called the system “severely behind schedule” and froze a $154-million grant, which paid for 80% of the system meant to link up 80 public safety agencies and 34,000 first-responders serving 10 million people across 4,060 square miles. Such a system has been talked about since September 11, 2001, and ardently pursued for the past six years.   read more

The wells were identified after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told state regulators last year that unpermitted drillers, and drillers with permits they shouldn’t have been given by the state, were plentiful. The state has already closed 23 of the most egregious wells and regulators admit they handed out 500 permits they shouldn’t have. But they are loath to close the 2,500 with improper or nonexistent permits.   read more

Judge Goethals kicked the DA's entire office off a mass-murder penalty-phase case last month over misconduct allegations. Prosecutors then requested that the judge be disqualified from 57 of their cases since February 2014, compared to just five in the three previous years. That is known in the trade as “papering a judge.”   read more

U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar ruled in San Francisco that refusing to pay for the surgery denied 51-year-old convicted killer Michelle-Lael Norsworthy (formerly Jeffrey Bryan Norsworthy) constitutionally adequate medical treatment. He issued an injunction compelling the state to provide the surgery, which could cost up to $100,000.   read more

Republican state Senator Ted Gaines was a big Tesla booster when he was trying to get the company to build a $5-billion battery "gigafactory" in his district. Tesla opted for Nevada. Two months later, Gaines introduced Senate Bill 40 to slash incentives for electric vehicles with a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $40,000 or more. That’s pretty much the market Tesla owns.   read more

In a mocking parody of the infamous Sodomite Suppression Act that Attorney General Kamala Harris is trying to have the courts kill, Joe Decker wrote in his proposed ballot initiative, “Shellfish are a monstrous evil that Almighty God, giver of freedom and liberty, commands us in Leviticus to suppress. They also smell bad.”   read more

Craig Wilson, former Delta watermaster at the Water Board, told the Sacramento Bee that Governor Brown was on the wrong track. “Ag is where the water is," he said. "Come up with a plan to cut their water use by 10%, 20%. I wouldn’t dictate to the farmers how to do it, but tell them to give us the plan that shows how you’re going to do it.”   read more

After fruitlessly looking through reams of legal submissions for any explanation of how the National Marine Fisheries Service reached its dubious decision that sonar testing by the Navy would have "negligible impact," the judge wrote: “This court feels like the sailor in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ who, trapped for days on a ship becalmed in the middle of the ocean, laments, ‘Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.’   read more

Last week, two state Senate committees held a hearing to have a discussion with oil industry executives about February's $1 spike in gasoline prices and the current 80-cent pump price difference with the rest of the country. But they declined to attend. The committee members could just as easily have pulled a copy of Attorney General Bill Lockyer’s 2000 report on gasoline pricing, because not a whole lot has changed.   read more