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

Despite recent high-profile police shootings in places such as Chicago, St. Louis and Baltimore, it’s not a big city that leads the U.S. in killings by police. Kern County is where America’s deadliest police forces patrol the streets. A new study shows that officers in the county, including Bakersfield, kill more people per capita than in any other U.S. jurisdiction.   read more

The good news is that 99.2% of seventh- and ninth-graders scored at the highest levels in at least one of six fitness standards. Fifth-graders weren’t far behind at 98.7%. But only 37.6% of ninth-graders were really fit, hitting their marks in all six categories. And they were far ahead of seventh-graders (32.5%) and fifth-graders (26.4%).   read more

In a 6-3 ruling Monday, the justices reiterated that when a corporation says it will only settle disputes via arbitration, thousands of mutually-aggrieved customers cannot file a class-action lawsuit. They must individually, and expensively, engage with the company, before an arbitrator not of their choosing. That's the way the high court has ruled for years in rulings that critics say make it harder to pursue cases against companies for fraud and defective products.   read more

The executives who ran Countrywide Financial when it crashed and burned were not punished and now run large nonbank companies in Southern California that specialize in the low end of the housing market, like Countrywide did, according to the Los Angeles Times. They have an even larger share of the housing-loan market than pre-crash.   read more

When Superior Court Judge James McBride dismissed the case in March 2014, he discounted the testimony of Wolf’s key expert witness, Dr. Jonathan Rutchik. “He offered no opinion as to the duration of the exposure that caused this damage nor did he offer any opinion as to the latency period between exposure and symptoms,” the judge wrote. “He offered no opinion as to how such damage would cause priapism in general.”   read more

Last week, a coalition of environmental and social justice groups sued the county (pdf) in Superior Court to block the zoning amendment approved unanimously by the county supervisors that authorizes “the development of up to 3,647 new oil and gas wells and extensive associated construction and operational activities, each year for 20 to 25 or more years, without any further, site-specific assessment of those activities’ health and other environmental impacts.”   read more

Last week, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson reduced the ceiling on the penalty prosecutors can seek at trial by half, to $565 million. The judge found PG&E’s argument compelling that it wasn’t legally appropriate for the utility to pay for a category of fines related to “gross losses” suffered by victims of the explosion. Penalties related to money PG&E made by not maintaining their pipelines remain part of the case.   read more

California Coastal Commission’s then-Executive Director Peter Douglas called The Edge's proposal “one of the three worst projects that I've seen in terms of environmental devastation.” But after six years of negotiations, a tighter packing of the five mansions at a lower elevation on the pristine Malibu hillside, some environmental mitigation measures and a promise to preserve some property as open land, the commission voted unanimously to approve the project.   read more

The report held the scandal-ridden district’s elected five-member board responsible for hiring six different general managers between 2010 and 2015, losing their insurance, failing to address the district’s long-term financial viability, setting up a secret $2.75-million trust fund and awarding no-bid contracts.The state auditor suggested that the Legislature revamp the district and have the board selected by the district’s customers, 48 entities that include utilities, rather than the public.   read more

A national online poll published by Bloomberg this week found 65% of likely Republican primary voters approve of presidential candidate Donald Trump’s statement that all Muslims should be barred from entering the country. A separate poll, conducted online by SurveyUSA, found even more San Diego Republicans, 71%, approved this message. Sixty-nine percent of Fresno-Visalia Republicans approved.   read more

The contracts stipulated that the carriers were supposed to review customer usage numbers quarterly—to determine, for instance, if they were signed up for too few or too many minutes—and automatically shift the customers into proper-fitting plans. The complaint says the companies “did not in fact provide this important and bargained for cost-cutting service as promised. Instead, they continued to falsely bill for their services as if they had optimized.”   read more

The L.A. city attorney has a few bones to pick with the gas company. “The failure of the well should never have happened. The incredible duration of the crisis should have been avoided, and would have been avoided had So Cal Gas established and promptly implemented appropriate contingency plans for such an event, and pre-placed adequate mechanical and technical resources at the site to swiftly end the leak.” Instead, the gas company engaged in “unlawful and unfair business practices.”   read more

On a 7-5 vote, the AQMD board rejected a staff recommendation to cut nitrogen oxide emissions by more than half over the next seven years and opted for a less-exacting standard favored by industry groups. Around 25% of the region’s smog comes from the stationary sources overseen by the AQMD.   read more

State regulators responded to public concerns by promising quick action on reforms for an industry whose new drilling processes, including acidization, were largely unregulated. Steam injection, largely shielded from scrutiny by a loophole in regulations, would have its regulations tightened up and enforced properly. That didn’t happen.   read more

Bohlen told the Chronicle the agency had “turned a corner” and the “future looks very bright.” Hollin Kretzmann, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, did not agree. He said in a statement that DOGGR was still “far too close to the industry it is supposed to regulate. . . . The next supervisor must address Californians’ concerns about water contamination and safety risks from drilling and fracking.”   read more

Federal law (and common decency, perhaps) requires that people receiving Section 8 housing subsidies be given one-year notice of impending disaster. The notice sent to 20,000 low-income tenants telling them of a potential $104-a-month rent increase didn't mention an amount or "inform its intended recipients of the changes to the payment standard, the meaning of those changes, or, most important, their effect upon the recipient,” according to the court.   read more