The city council voted 11-0 Friday to let developer Geoffrey H. Palmer put a bridge across a main street to link two sections of his 526-unit Da Vinci apartment complex. His attorney argued that “the area surrounding the project site (and the tunnel under the 110 freeway) are often congregating places for homeless persons.” City planner Blake Lamb told the committee her department did not believe you deal with the homeless problem through “the physical segregation of people.”   read more

Terry Baynes at Reuters said the lawsuit, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court on behalf of John Harrington and Alex Talon, is seeking class-action status on behalf of all those who came away from the Obamacare website thinking it assured enrollees access to the entire network. Covered California has never provided the list it promised of participating doctors and hospitals, for various reasons, and doesn't seem likely to in the near future.   read more

The Latino numbers account in large part for California's abysmal integration numbers. While California is the third-worst state in the country in segregating African Americans, behind New York and Illinois, it earns the top spot among Latinos. In 1970, Latinos attended schools that were 54% white; that number is nearly 16% now.   read more

A report from the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) said the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) didn't inspect 2,100 of 3,702 “high-priority” wells drilled between 2009 and 2012. The finding was of particular concern because the oil and gas industry in recently years has embraced enhanced technology, like fracking and acidization, that pose a greater threat to groundwater and other water sources than conventional drilling techniques.   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

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

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

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

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

LEEDIR is leading the way in anonymous crowdsourcing surveillance of people not suspected or accused of criminal activity. Access to the system is free for law enforcement agencies. They are enthusiastic about the system; privacy advocates, not so much. "There's a reason we don't crowdsource photo lineups and the like—crowds aren't good at it,” civil liberties attorney Nate Cardozo told AP.   read more

The rolling recall of 8.7 million pounds of meat that culminated with the closure of Rancho Feeding Corporation of Petaluma in March ended with very little explanation of what went wrong and how it happened. Last week, CNN illuminated a portion of the story of how the company hid cancerous cow parts while an inspector for the USDA carried on an illicit affair with an assistant plant manager. Employees reportedly cut off heads and sliced off meat to avoid detection.   read more

Thirty-six percent of the 2,511 schools in 15 California counties with the highest use of “pesticides of public concern” were within one-quarter mile of the dangerous chemicals. The survey found that more than 118,000 students attend schools close to the heaviest use of pesticides. More than 140 of the most dangerous pesticides—linked to cancer, reproductive problems and nervous system damage—are used close to schools.   read more

TMZ publicized a tape it received of the married Sterling, who is white, telling his much younger bi-racial girlfriend on April 9 that she shouldn't be “broadcasting that you're associating with black people” although it was OK for her to sleep with them. Although Sterling hasn't had anything to say about the revelation, numerous people have identified his voice and that of his girlfriend, V. Stiviano.   read more

Two years of fine-tuning the CalEnviroScreen interactive map from the state's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) have proven what most everyone in the area, if not the state, already knew: It sucks to be in Fresno, environmentally speaking, of course. The original breakdown of areas by zip code missed pockets of devastation that were balanced out by less-afflicted neighbors. 2.0 fixes that and refocuses attention on Fresno, where eight of the state's 10 worst tracts are.   read more

“The system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the public,” L.A. County sheriff’s Sgt. Doug Iketani told the Center for Investigative Reporting, which publicized the endeavor in partnership with KQED. “A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so in order to mitigate any of those kinds of complaints, we basically kept it pretty hush-hush.”   read more

Admissions (pdf) of foreign students are up 18% since last year and 51% since 2012-2013. Out-of-state admissions are up 9% since last year and 25% since 2012-13. California students are pretty much flat-lined. Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said when the dust settles, he expects 100 more non-Californians to be admitted than last year. They will be worth an extra $2.2 million in school revenue.   read more