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 proposal split the state’s Democratic Party. Republican legislative leaders and Democratic Assembly leader John Pérez appeared with Brown at a press conference announcing his plan to shift inmates to private prisons in and out of state and local jails, while Democratic Senate President pro tem Darrell Steinberg expressed opposition.   read more

Exide appealed to the Los Angeles County Superior Court—arguing the arsenic stuff was already taken care of and other accusations were just political posturing—and was allowed to stay open pending a hearing on the claims. A state spokesman said, “We want to bring assurance to the community that if contaminants from the facility are in their yard, Exide will clean them up.”   read more

Biologists will dump poison in an 11-mile stretch of Silver King Creek south of Lake Tahoe in an effort to kill off invasive hybrid trout that helped land the Paiute cutthroat trout on the federal Endangered Species List in 1967. The plan has been hotly contested and was the subject of three lawsuits. Fishing enthusiasts support the plan and environmental groups have tended to oppose it.   read more

The federal government and the city of Anaheim—deploying a strategy used throughout the state—are trying to take a $1.5 million commercial building away from its owner because he allowed a legal medical marijuana dispensary to operate within its premises. The irony of this duplicity is that last month Anaheim Convention Center hosted Kush Expo, billed as the “World’s Biggest Marijuana Festival.”   read more

“[T]he results from the first 12 months [were] striking. Even with only half of the 54 uniformed police officers wearing cameras on any given day, the department overall had an 88 percent decline in the number of complaints filed against officers, compared with the 12 months before the study,” according to the New York Times. Perhaps not surprisingly, the study found that officers with cameras used force 60% less often.   read more

Dodgers controlling owner Mark Walter is reportedly exploring a bid for the beleaguered newspaper, which is about to be cut loose by parent Tribune Corporation. His interest comes just days after the ultra-conservative billionaire Koch brothers indicated that they considered Tribune newspapers a hopeless business investment and were no longer contemplating buying the Times or a package of Tribune-owned publications.   read more

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) announced that its three-month amnesty, which ended June 30, removed 6,700 ineligible dependents from the insurance rolls. Now CalPERS has launched a series of audits to scrub thousands more of them from the insurance rolls of the nation’s second-largest purchaser of health insurance with little regard for what fate awaits them.   read more

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) Board of Commissioners is scheduled to vote Tuesday on a settlement of a dispute that has pitted thirsty urban inhabitants against conservationists since L.A. routed water to the aqueduct from tributaries feeding the lake in the early 1940s, according to the Los Angeles Times.   read more

Hazle told WestCare California, Inc., a private company that contracts with the state to provide substance abuse coordination services, that he was an atheist, and requested assignment to a non-religious treatment program. They sent him to Empire Recovery Center, where he found they used a 12-step program modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous, including references to “God” and a “higher power.” Hazle refused to attend and was thrown back in prison for 125 days.   read more

Environmentalists were as horrified by the decision as water treatment officials were gratified. Fourteen years after the state began a process to set standards for the known chemical carcinogen chromium-6—made infamous by the movie Erin Brockovitch—it finally settled on one 500 times more lenient than the safe, non-enforceable level determined by the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA).   read more

Exuberance among progressives in San Diego over the election of a Democratic mayor in the Republican stronghold last year was short-lived, as Bob Filner quickly came under fire for allegedly groping women before and during his tenure. On Thursday, he reportedly cleaned out his office and sources close to him said he would resign.   read more

Lester Chambers was attacked at the Hayward/Russell City Blues Festival in July, the day after Martin’s attacker, George Zimmerman, was found not guilty of committing a crime. Police arrested Barstow resident Dinalynn Andrews, aka Dinalynn Andrews-Potter, and charged her with misdemeanor assault and battery, according to The Guardian, but later added elder abuse to the list and refiled the misdemeanors as felonies.   read more

Although state officials are hopeful that the numbers are a worst-case scenario, the latest information from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is that 5,611 children will be lopped off the school rolls this fall. In addition to cuts in Head Start enrollment, various services are also being whacked. Besides feeding the kids two meals a day, Head Start provides a range of services including day care, social workers, health care and special help for children with disabilities.   read more

The Navy says its plan to detonate 50,000 explosions during more than 10,000 hours of high-intensity sonar testing off the Southern California coast will cause the deaths of only 130 marine animals and impair the hearing of perhaps another 1,600. The Navy characterized the impact as “negligible.” “We’re talking about a staggering and unprecedented amount of harm to more than 40 species of marine mammals,” said Zak Smith, an attorney with NRDC’s marine mammal project.   read more

Half of California voters say they are having a tough time paying for health care, but three-fourths of them under the age of 65 don’t know about the health care exchange that opens in October as part of the Affordable Health Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, according to two new Field Polls.   read more

The auditor took note that the range of programs, many innovative in nature, drew media attention and raised questions about whether funding yoga classes, acupuncture treatments, anti-bullying programs and the like was a good idea while more traditional mental health care was being eviscerated by a decade of brutal budget cuts. That’s why it was essential to measure the efficacy of programs in a way that could be independently checked.   read more