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 California Fish and Game Commission voted 3-1 Wednesday to grant the gray wolf protected status under the California Endangered Species Act, despite opposition from the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. Ranchers and others have argued vehemently against reintroducing the wolf to California, where the iconic Western predator once roamed in large numbers. The animal has been largely absent from the state since 1924.   read more

The state’s new primary system lets the top two vote getters advance to the general election regardless of whether they are in the same party. This year, the four top vote getters received pretty equal support. By the end of the evening, with 99.4% of the vote counted, there were only a few hundred votes separating Republican Evans and Democrat Pérez for the second spot on the ballot to run against Republican Ashley Swearengin. No one was conceding defeat.   read more

A department loses money budgeted for a position if it has an unfilled vacancy for six months. To avoid losing the money, the department performs a lateral internal transfer of an employee to fill the vacancy, resetting the six-month clock to make another hire. For instance, Lindsay Rains, an environmental scientist in the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), transferred 14 times through nine different positions on fiscal year 2012-13.   read more

Keck Hospital of USC sued Kaiser Permanente two weeks ago after getting stuck with a $544,000 bill for surgery on a patient with insufficient insurance. The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, alleges that Kaiser sent a patient in its Los Angeles Medical Center’s Intensive Care Unit to Keck for open heart surgery last year knowing that he had exhausted his $75,000 annual insurance benefit limit.   read more

U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken allowed upward of 500 prisoners who have been in isolation there for more than 10 years, with no end in sight, to join the lawsuit. “We pose a fundamental question: Is it constitutional to hold someone in solitary confinement for over a decade,” Alexis Agathocleous, staff attorney for the center told the Los Angeles Times.   read more

The LAPD arranged to pick up a couple of drones from the Seattle Police Department as “gifts” when Washington city's aerial program was grounded—before it got airborne—by an irate public that complained about safety and privacy. But don’t call them drones. LAPD won’t. They are “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” UAV for short, which sounds more like a recreational vehicle than a pernicious surveillance device.   read more

Pacifica Hospital of the Valley in Sun Valley stopped short of admitting any wrongdoing, just as the 224-bed Beverly Hospital in Montebello did in January when it agreed to pay $250,000 in civil penalties and legal fees to make the issue go away. Dumping homeless patients is a widespread practice, crosses state lines and is not always discouraged by the courts.   read more

The complaint says: “JPMorgan has induced foreclosures since 2009 by failing to extend branch support to minority neighborhoods, pulling existing Bank support from minority neighborhoods, declining to offer refinancings or loan modifications to minority customers on fair terms, and otherwise denying minority borrowers equal access to fair credit.”   read more

Polls show that Californians don’t like fracking or unlabelled GMOs, but they are going to be stuck with both for awhile after the state Senate rejected bills last week that would have been tough on them. Republicans were helped by some Democrats who voted “No” and others who didn’t vote. In defense of those Democrats who didn’t vote, three of them are suspended from the Senate for various transgressions, alleged and otherwise.   read more

The ballot, which includes primaries for local and statewide offices, does not contain any marijuana-specific issues. But the local political battle over dispensaries has galvanized grass-roots activists, who are recommending that voters trot on over to the San Jose City Council meeting that night where they will be talking about some tough pot regulations.   read more

Four thousand corporate and agricultural holders of “senior rights” to more than half the water from the state’s rivers and streams have virtually no controls on them, according to data collected by the Associated Press. San Francisco and Los Angeles water departments are some of the biggest rights holders. AP went to the trouble of collecting data on where trillions of gallons of water go because the state does not, at least not very accurately or efficiently.   read more

The group wants the agency to treat salmonella the way it treats e.coli. It took a deadly e.coli outbreak in the 1990s, linked to Jack-in-the-Box ground meat, for the government to order that it be eradicated in the food plants and recalled if it showed up on people’s plates. Salmonella, on the other hand, is tolerated as an annoyance that can be avoided if food is properly prepared and cooked in the kitchen.   read more

The “Mendocino Model,” created three years ago by District Attorney David Eyster, is an innovative program that lets felony marijuana charges be reduced to misdemeanors in exchange for a pile of money from the accused. “To put it bluntly, it looks like a criminal defendant charged with serious conduct can simply buy a misdemeanor disposition if he gets caught and has the money set aside to cover for that contingency,” Judge Clay Brennan said a year ago.   read more

For those who are keeping count during the nation’s yearlong bout of multi-drug-resistant salmonella poisoning linked to Foster Farms, 574 people in 27 states and Puerto Rico have been sickened since March 1, 2013, and 50 new cases have been reported in the last two months. Most of the sick people (77%) are in California.   read more

The California Sex Offender Management Board told lawmakers it thinks the registry has grown too large and unwieldy to be effective. Building on recommendations it made in 2010, the board said the state Legislature should stop treating all sex offenders alike, regardless of the seriousness of their crimes. It proposed that only high-risk offenders be kept on the list for life, while others are removed over a period of years.   read more

Steiner, a 24-year veteran of the insurance industry, will oversee a "scandal-plagued" agency that has had three permanent bosses and two interim leaders since 2007, and was significantly downsized beginning in 2010. State Fund, as it is known, is California's largest workers' compensation provider. State employees manage a $20 billion fund, investing $1.2 billion in annual policyholder premiums.   read more