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 interactive database―payroll data from state agencies, cities, counties, courts, education and some other entities―has big gaps and isn’t very transparent. The database does not identify entries by name. It uses job titles―obscure job titles that make it nearly impossible to identify top executives for purposes of comparison. Perhaps more important than not being able to stalk employees from a home computer is the inability to aggregate data because of information gaps.   read more

The consumer protection lawsuit accuses Uber of failing to do proper background checks on drivers, illegally operating at airports throughout California, charging passengers a $4 airport fee despite not paying for the privilege and using a method of calculating trip length not approved by the government. So far this week, Uber has been in the news because of legal problems in New Delhi, India, Toronto, Canada, Thailand, Spain, the Netherlands and Portland, Oregon.   read more

Only 48.6% of applicants in July were successful. Erica Moeser, president of the National Conference of Bar Examiners, suggested in a memo that those taking the exam were “less able” than their predecessors, sparking a heated controversy over bar exams and whose taking them. Brooklyn Law School Dean Nicholas Allard said “it is not the students, it’s the test” and called Moeser “offensive”:   read more

Bazar detailed the plight of the Wooleys, a couple who called Covered California August 1 to cancel their plans on September 1 and October 1 to begin their respective Medicare coverage. But the bills kept coming from their Kaiser Permanente plan. Kaiser said they couldn’t discontinue coverage until they heard from Covered California and Covered California said they had already done that. Stalemate ensued.   read more

An acellular vaccine phased in between 1992 and 1997 has proven to lose its effectiveness quicker than its whole-cell predecessor, which had been used since the 1940s. And researchers found that few mothers of infants suffering from pertussis now had received the vaccine during pregnancy, a recommended policy.   read more

Mallach ruled that locking the gate at Martins Beach near Half Moon Bay was considered property development under a broad definition used in the 1976 Coastal Act and that billionaire Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Inc., needed a coastal permit to do that. The law prohibits developments from blocking access to beaches.   read more

Although California has experienced 37 three-year periods of drought into the last millennium, the state did not suffer the same severe temperatures and low precipitation in the past. What we are experiencing is very different. The severity “was a surprise,” co-author Kevin J. Anchukaitis told the Los Angeles Times. “I don’t think we expected to see that at all.”   read more

The Environmental Defense Center lawsuit alleges that 51 applications to drill and make permit modifications for the purpose of using well stimulation were approved in the last 18 months without any public participation or adequate environmental review. The center wants two Interior Department bureaus to conduct the environmental reviews and permit oversight that lawmakers intended when they created them in 2011 after the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico the year before.   read more

A study produced for the U.S. Department of Labor found that 3.5% of California workers and 6.5% of New Yorkers were paid less than the minimum wage in 2011. That translates to 10.9% of low-wage earners in L.A. and 19.5% in N.Y. Using the Current Population Survey, the study, conducted by Eastern Research Group, concluded that 7,000 people in California were forced below the poverty line by minimum wage violations. The Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) put that number at 41,000.   read more

The complaint, filed on behalf of three plaintiffs from the counties of Alameda, Sacramento and Orange, alleges that debt collector CorrectiveSolutions pretends to be the DA and “uses false and misleading threats of criminal prosecution to intimidate Californians who have written checks that are dishonored by the bank. . . . The company pays county district attorneys for the use of their seal and letterhead, thereby disguising its ordinary civil debt collection as law enforcement.”   read more

Between 200 and 300 people were peacefully cleared out of the sprawling 68-acre shantytown. Many will end up on the street. They will join the estimated 7,630 homeless people in San Jose and Santa Clara County who camp out wherever they can. It’s said to be the largest percentage of nonsheltered homeless people in a big city.   read more

Streit made the mistake, at St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, when he chose to operate from memory and what turned out to be faulty paperwork after CT scans were mistakenly left in the offices of one of the surgical team’s doctors. The board said the goof was “an extreme departure from the standard of care.” That standard required a review of image scans before slicing open the patient.   read more

The judges ruled that a state policy―authorized by voter passage of Proposition 69 in 2004 and effective as of 2009―violated the California Constitution when it allowed authorities to collect and store in a database DNA information taken from people arrested for a felony, but not yet charged. The court cited data that 62% of people arrested in California on suspicion of a felony were never convicted of a crime. Around 20% weren’t even charged.   read more

Instead of asking, in a public venue, for county general funds and a U.S. Department of Homeland Security grant, he unilaterally took the entire $96,000 out of a separate source, the county’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Services. It was a surprise to groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), privacy advocates that were active in stopping the purchase in February 2013.   read more

The California Fish and Game Commission didn’t ban hunters from bagging as many coyotes as they please during the year, but made it illegal to turn the hunts into contests with prizes. The ban covers “nongame species and fur-bearing animals,” including beavers and bobcats. “Awarding prizes for wildlife killing contests is both unethical and inconsistent with our modern understanding of natural systems,” Commission President Michael Sutton said.   read more

Federal agents armed with a grand jury subpoena carted away 20 boxes of documents Monday having to do with the purchase of iPads and software in a controversial $1.3-billion program that is still being rolled out. The day after the FBI visit, Superintendent Ramon Cortines announced that he was reversing his earlier decision to immediately expand the project to 27 more schools, canceling the contract and putting it back out to bid.   read more