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

Censure is the toughest discipline the commission can impose short of removing the judge. It mostly consists of saying harsh things about the judge’s failure to conduct himself in an ethical fashion. Both jurists acknowledged their indiscretions and “expressed great remorse and contrition.”   read more

NBC Bay Area reported last week that the Napa County Sheriff’s Office lost an M-16 assault rifle and was suspended on May 6. The San Mateo County Sheriff's Department didn’t know where two M16A1 rifles were and was suspended in October 2013. Suspended agencies don’t have to return all their military equipment, but can’t order any new stuff. If an agency screws up bad enough, its status is downgraded to “terminated,” but that has only happened to seven of them.   read more

“This will be worse than anything seen during the last 2,000 years and would pose unprecedented challenges to water resources in the region,” lead researcher Toby Ault told the Cornell Chronicle. Ault wasn’t just talking about the 10-year drought. The study also projected a 20%-50% chance of a 35-year-plus megadrought in the next 100 years.   read more

The remains were discovered in 1976 at the Chancellor’s House at the University of California, San Diego by a university excavation team. UC San Diego had dragged its feet on giving up the remains, questioning which Native American group was the rightful owner. However, the university in 2012 agreed to return the remains to the Kumeyaay. But a lawsuit filed against the university by three scientists who wished to study the skeletons halted the repatriation.   read more

The site consists of two plumes of contaminated water at the base of the mountains, which have impacted more than 25% of the water supply for 175,000 San Bernardino residents. The EPA’s final cleanup plan circulated this month, indicates the agency will stay the course it has pursued since the contamination was discovered in the 1980s and expects to restore the aquifer to federal and state drinking water standards in 17 years, or perhaps a little later.   read more

One-fourth of the state’s 60,000 foster kids are receiving the powerful medications, about three and a half times more than children in general nationally. More than half of the kids in group homes were authorized to get the drugs, and those who refuse are often disciplined. Kids as young as 5 have been prescribed psychotropic drugs.   read more

Elan Filler, who was looking for a science fair project, embarked upon a quest to identify trees in the region with the fungus. Her father helped hook her up with Deborah Springer, a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University who studies C. gattii, according to NPR reporter Nancy Shute, and Filler shipped the researcher fungi she swabbed from trees and grew in Petri dishes. They matched fungus from the three trees to infections in people now and 10-12 years ago.   read more

The report said groundwater is not in danger of contamination when pressurized water, unknown chemicals, acid or other materials are injected deep into the Earth. Earthquakes, air pollution from greenhouse gas emissions, impacts on wildlife and vegetation—not a problem. Its assurances, taken by the BLM as sufficient cause to open the land up, did come with one large caveat: It didn’t have much current information.   read more

California has lost a lot of film and TV business in recent years, as production companies look for cheaper venues and government incentives. Most states and a lot of countries offer grants and tax credits. California, which still dominates film and TV production nationally, leapfrogs from fifth place to second among states in financial incentives, behind New York ($420 million annually) but ahead of Louisiana ($236 million), Georgia ($140 million) and Florida ($131 million).   read more

Google wants to build a car within five years that drivers won’t have to steer, brake or accelerate, but new California rules that go into effect next month require the Mountain View company’s test vehicles to, at least temporarily, have all those little extras. Google will simply tack on a steering wheel and pedals for the short-term.   read more

The U.S. Forest Service announced on Wednesday it had rejected environmentalist calls to let the 15,000 acres of ravaged terrain in question recover naturally and approved plans to log the area. Trees deemed a threat to the public will be cleared along another 17,706 square miles along roads. Chad Hanson, director of the John Muir Project of Earth Island Institute, called her decision an “ecological travesty.”   read more

The complexity of the law and competing judicial applications of it have facilitated a decades-long move to reclassify employees as independent contractors to avoid legal and social obligations. It’s a great corporate cost-cutter whose popularity continues to grow as the labor force is redefined.   read more

Glendale Adventist is said to have “illegally discharged and transported or caused to be transported homeless, mentally-ill, disabled, dependent adult patients who were unable to take care of themselves on Skid Row,” according to Courthouse News Service, which saw the 6-page lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The hospital settled with the city for $700,000 but denied everything.   read more

If a gun owner in California wants to buy a gun but is discouraged from doing so by having to wait 10 days for a background check to be completed, he has been denied his Second Amendment right to possess a weapon. At least that’s the interpretation of the Constitution by U.S. District Judge Anthony W. Ishii. The lawsuit did not challenge the 10-day wait for first-time buyers.   read more

When Dr. Michael Peck was the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) senior inspector at California’s Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant, he filed a report that said the facility should be shut down until its operators can prove it is able to withstand a strong earthquake. The document, written a year ago, wasn't made public by the environmental group Friends of the Earth until Monday after the Associated Press wrote about it.   read more

Charles Belk wrote on his Facebook page: “Within an evening, I was wrongly arrested, locked up, denied a phone call, denied explanation of charges against me, denied ever being read my rights, denied being able to speak to my lawyer for a lengthy time, and denied being told that my car had been impounded. . . . All because I was mis-indentified as the wrong ‘tall, bald head, black male,’ . . . fitting the description.”   read more