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 multi-stage Dependent Eligibility Verification (DEV) project was launched in March 2012 to find out how many of the 730,000 health dependents were cheating. It was thought that as many as 29,000 ex-spouses and other ineligible dependents might be involved. Judge Albert Gilbert of the California Second District Court of Appeal, amon others, took it personally. "I am not a crook," he wrote CalPERS.   read more

Nearly 78% of surveyed almond farmers said they expected “a negative impact on tree health or harvest quantity/quality in 2014 due to the application of high saline groundwater.” Even as farmers overburden groundwater sources, they face heavy competition for surface water. For instance, they share water from the Klamath River up north with local tribes that rely on salmon runs for their livelihood.   read more

Stakeholders in California’s cap-and-trade program, which compels local companies that pollute the air to invest in enterprises worldwide that reduce pollution, expressed distress and fretted about the future of the innovative marketplace after state officials voided some carbon offset credits for the first time. At issue was an Arkansas facility that incinerated chlorofluorocarbons, which ran afoul of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),   read more

Who knew that decades of acrimony between the city of Los Angeles and Owens Valley might have been avoided by just plowing ditches in the Owens (Dry) Lake? The overseer of Owens Valley air quality and L.A. settled yet another lawsuit over the city’s legal commitment to contain the dust left behind after it sucked all the water out of the lake in the early part of the last century. They are hopeful, again, that this solution will end the fighting.   read more

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of California, has put together a guide for Making Smart Decisions about Surveillance and made it available to residents, community leaders and, based on special emphasis given questions in the introduction, law enforcement officials. As part of the guide, the ACLU included a model ordinance that cities and counties can use to ensure surveillance projects don’t do all the horrible things their proponents probably hope they will accomplish.   read more

LAUSD didn’t have a problem with attorney W. Keith Wyatt when he successfully defended them in a lawsuit by blaming a 14-year-old girl for having sex with a teacher. But they do have a problem now after he told public radio station KPCC, “She lied to her mother so she could have sex with her teacher. She went to a motel in which she engaged in voluntary consensual sex with her teacher. Why shouldn't she be responsible for that?” The district fired Wyatt on Friday.   read more

The contract, negotiated by California’s Department of General Services, smoothed out the volatility. But BP sold California gas at above-market prices, realizing a profit margin three times normal, according to the lawsuit filed in San Francisco County Superior Court. The lawsuit says BP charged the state 10 times what it was getting from other bulk purchasers.   read more

California students, on average, owe $20,340, compared to the national average of $28,400. Fifty-five percent of California students graduated with debt, which tied it for 36th place, according to the Project on Student Debt. No California schools made the Top 20 list of high-debt public colleges and universities, where student debt averaged between $33,950 and $48,850.   read more

Did the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) try to dump a professor because she blew the whistle on an Israeli spy in their midst or because she named her cat as a co-writer on a research paper? Those questions and more might be addressed in court after physics professor Sandra Troian sued Caltech for violating its whistleblower policy and allegedly harassing her the past four years.   read more

The three-judge panel ruled Attorney General Kamala Harris was too late to join the appeal and the case lacked a constitutional issue involving a state statute. Judge Sidney Thomas, the lone dissenter, said the ruling conflicts with the court’s precedents and “deprived one of the parties most affected by the panel’s decision the opportunity to even present an argument on an important constitutional question affecting millions of people.”   read more

The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) traced the sad history of the fumigants—and their champions in government and the chemical industry—that transformed the succulent fruit into a $2.6-billion-a-year business in just a few years and put more than 100 California communities at risk.   read more

The California Supreme Court unanimously declined to review a lower-court ruling that the S.F. ordinance’s broad requirements of public disclosure don’t apply to the Ethics Commission itself when it is consulting with the city attorney’s office. Ironically, the decision revolved around the commission’s refusal in 2012 to reveal 24 memos between it and the city attorney’s office over proposed Sunshine Ordinance regulations.   read more

Eight months ago, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously directed its Department of City Planning to develop an ordinance to prohibit oil and gas well stimulation techniques, such as hydraulic fracturing (fracking), within city limits. Last week, the planners said they couldn’t do it. The report to the council detailing why the requested ordinance would not be forthcoming noted that the City of Compton passed such an ordinance and got sued by the Western States Petroleum Association.   read more

Ken Buesseler, an oceanographer and project organizer at Woods Hole, said the levels detected were so low, a person swimming in the water there for six hours would encounter radiation equivalent to having a dental x-ray. Put another way, the contamination level is 1,000 times lower than acceptable drinking water standards. But it’s not nothing and could become more concentrated over time.   read more

Manteca (pop. 71,067), south of Stockton in the San Joaquin Valley, took a two-pronged approach to ridding the community of homeless people last week by denying them any kind of habitat, including a hammock, on public or private property, and augmenting state bans on public urination and defecation with a local one of their own. Manteca is obviously not the first city to try and cure a problem with the homeless by driving them into someone else’s backyard.   read more

The EIR argues that the nation’s largest organic farming industry wouldn’t be economically harmed by having to use pesticides because they could simply sell their product in the conventional food market. “Organic certification would not be lost, and the use of chemicals would not be expected to result in the conversion of farmland to non-agricultural use. Therefore, no impact would occur.”   read more