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

Congressional candidate and former San Diego City Councilman Carl DeMaio released a report attacking 102 members of Congress, including the Democratic incumbent he is running against, for “double-dipping,” receiving a government pension while receiving a government salary. He could have saved some time by simply directing interested folks to the National Journal story that his staff plagiarized for its statistical content.   read more

A new study by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the University of California, Irvine, based on 40 years of data collection from the sea and the skies, has established that melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet is inevitable and moving faster than expected. “The collapse of this sector of West Antarctica appears to be unstoppable,” said glaciologist and lead author of the study Eric Rignot.   read more

Another 650 sea lion pups have washed up on the shores of California between San Diego and Ventura County in the last two months, emaciated and dehydrated, continuing a pattern of devastation from early last year. A new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) all but eliminates disease as a cause of the problem that saw another 1,600 pups stranded on beaches between January and April last year.   read more

The Yale-trained lawyer, denied admission to the State Bar by the California Supreme Court solely because he was Chinese, died 124 years ago. Now, law students at the University of California, Davis are trying to right an old wrong by making a spirited effort to have Chang licensed in the state posthumously.   read more

The federal government rejected the state's design for the licenses because they looked too much like those issued to citizens. A few days later new state rules for obtaining them were assailed as being too restrictive and threatening to those who feared the process would be used to identify and deport undocumented immigrants.   read more

Obama said, “This may look like a typical Walmart, but it's not” because of its solar panels, LED lighting and refrigeration systems. Former U.S. Labor Secretary and UC Berkeley professor Robert Reich said it looked like a typical Walmart to him: “Walmart is one of the nation's largest and worst employers—low wages, unreliable hours, few benefits, discrimination against women, and anti-union.”   read more

Known for its rich-and-famous residents, the city does have some experience with oil drilling. Venoco Inc. has operated a small cluster of oil wells on the campus of Beverly Hills High School for many years. The ban, which goes into effect June 6, applies not only to drilling operations within the city, but also those outside its jurisdiction that would extract oil or gas buried beneath Beverly Hills.   read more

A few weeks ago, the plane apparently brought all flight activity to a halt in the region when its data stream overwhelmed computers at the L.A. Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale. The U-2, which was flying way above commercial traffic at 60,000 feet, appeared to somehow be in the flight path of planes nowhere near it, authorities said.   read more

The draft is for students at Corona del Mar High School in Newport Beach who gather in traditional sports coats to flirt with Lady Luck and do a bit of bartering for a date on prom night. Boys draw random numbers for the draft but can pony up more money to get a better pick. “They probably believe it's not offensive or objectionable,” District board trustee Katrina Foley told the Times. “A lot of this stuff comes back to wealth and being responsible with that wealth.”   read more

The Los Angeles County resident was convicted in December 2010 of raping a woman while attending a party by pretending to be her boyfriend while she slept in another room. But the California Court of Appeal for the Second District tossed the conviction because state law only applied to raped women who were tricked into thinking they were having sex with their husband. Boyfriend impersonators got to skate free, until the Legislature revised the 1872 statute last September.   read more

On Wednesday, the judge ruled that Bowen erred in 2011 when she disenfranchised tens of thousands of felons who were reclassified by California's new prison realignment as being on probation from the county, not parole from the state system. She said at the time that their status does not change “just because the mandatory supervision that is a condition of their release from prison is labeled something other than ‘parole.’ ”   read more

The move came in response to pressure from environmentalists and students who think it is inappropriate for the school to invest in an energy source known to contribute mightily to global warming. The private university does not divulge details of its investments, but National Mining Association spokesman Luke Popovich said it doesn't matter how much money is involved, or whether other schools are inspired to follow Stanford's lead.   read more

On Wednesday, the school board apologized to anyone who would listen for an eighth-grade writing assignment conjured up by teachers and the district's educational services division that asked 2,000 students in five middle schools to consider questions about the Holocaust, including, “Was the Holocaust an actual tragic historical event or a propaganda tool?”   read more

Judge Gail Andler ruled last week that Cadiz Inc. can move forward on its plan to divert surplus water from the Colorado River to an aquifer beneath 35,000 acres of land it owns, augment that supply by capturing water otherwise lost to nature, pump 16 billion gallons of water a year out of the aquifer and ship it via a 43-mile pipeline that hasn’t been built yet to the Colorado River Aqueduct.   read more

The UN’s human rights office and an array of international human rights organizations vehemently oppose the new penal code and now so do Jay Leno, Ellen DeGeneres, Richard Branson, Sharon Osbourne, Stephen Fry and a host of other celebs. They are not crazy about spending time in a place owned by a guy whose country just legalized stoning adulterers and homosexuals to death.   read more

The drones can be seen and heard daily in the national park, soaring over pristine and otherwise quiet wilderness, snapping photographs, shooting videos, buzzing sensitive wildlife and otherwise entertaining their operators. With summer approaching and complaints mounting, the park service said it was invoking a regulation that makes the use of drones “illegal under all circumstances” within park boundaries. Critics say it doesn’t apply to drones at all.   read more