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

State officials began noticing the hair-deprived deer in 2009. They found 240 balding deer outside Yosemite National Park in a five-month period, and started a research project that is ongoing. Hair-challenged deer have been found in 15 counties, as far south as San Diego County. Deer in other Western states have reportedly been similarly afflicted.   read more

A consortium of Southern California garbage collection agencies dropped its plans to open the 4,000-acre dump two miles from the park after decades of legal battles that worked their way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Critics said traffic to and from the dump, hauling in up to 20,000 tons of garbage a day by train from Los Angeles 200 miles away, would ruin the delicate desert ecosystem while attracting scavengers to the site.   read more

According to Elon Musk, Tesla’s co-founder, the company had another five years to pay the government back (while the Energy Department claimed the number was actually nine years). Instead, it fully paid off the debt this month, thanks to a surge in its stock price. "Having accepted taxpayer money, I thought we had an obligation to repay it as soon as we reasonably could," Musk told The Wall Street Journal, “If economics were the only consideration, we would not have done this.”   read more

April was national “Distracted Driving Awareness Month” and 57,000 California drivers celebrated by earning a ticket for driving while handling a cellphone, according to the state Office of Traffic Safety (OTS). But while most of the warnings about distracted driving focus on cellphones—and are the overwhelming subject of “distracted” fines—they are far from the only distractions.   read more

One in eight bridges in California are rated “structurally deficient,” a fact of growing importance in light of last week’s bridge collapse in Washington state. Most bridges are designed to last 50 years; California’s average bridge is 44.4 years old. More than 8,300 state bridges are at least 50 years old, and by 2030 that number will double without a major effort to replace them.   read more

When Governor Jerry Brown led the charge to kill the state’s 400 redevelopment agencies in 2011, cities, counties and other entities scrambled to avoid transferring the assets to the state, as required by law. Oakland, already in financial crisis from the crash of 2008, looked to ease its $58 million deficit by selling eight properties, including the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center, to its own redevelopment agency for $32 million despite warnings that the strategy was illegal.   read more

On Friday, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced for the first time that it wouldn’t prosecute a wind farm developer if a condor dies in the blades of one its turbines. But it only gets to kill one condor, which is an endangered species, over the project’s expected 30-year life. Federal law prescribes a year in prison and a $100,000 fine for any individual that kills a condor, and a $200,000 fine for an organization that does it.   read more

Voters, by a 63%-37% margin, approved Measure D, capping the city’s wild and wooly medical marijuana marketplace at 135 dispensaries. The new law is expected to receive legal challenges. David Welch, an attorney with Angelenos for Safe Access (creators of Measure F), indicated his group would probably sue the city, on the theory that the 2007 cutoff is arbitrary and unfair. He said that many shops that opened after 2007 would stay open in defiance of the law.   read more

Women with breast cancer who live in the South San Francisco area are seven times more likely to undergo a lumpectomy with radiation than those in the South Lake Tahoe area. Men with prostate cancer are 18 times more likely to receive internal, localized brachytherapy radiation treatment than men in the Oceanside area.   read more

Parents of a 17-year-old high school senior with Asperger’s syndrome, bipolar disorder, Tourette’s syndrome and various anxiety disorders are suing the Temecula Valley Unified School District for trying to expel him after he was busted by an undercover cop for selling the officer a couple of marijuana joints.   read more

The NorCal Tea Party Patriots filed its lawsuit—and asked for class-action status—in Cincinnati, where staffers at an IRS office singled out for scrutiny groups applying for tax-exempt status whose names indicated a political affiliation. Like the Tea Party.   read more

The "one powerful newsroom" will not be covering the Bay Area much. CIR stories will now “transcend geography” and cover national and international issues that “actually make a difference in people’s lives,” so “it doesn’t matter if they are about San Francisco or Sacramento or Washington, D.C.” Instead of the 1,000 stories covered last year, they are aiming to publish 200 this year.   read more

Some folks in the Bay Area are livid over the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) plan to cut down 85,000 trees in the hills near Oakland and the University of California, Berkeley. The agency has scheduled three public hearings on the controversial proposal in May while students are studying for finals or going home for the summer.   read more

Using a web of overseas subsidiaries, particularly in Ireland, Apple went beyond the common multi-national corporation practice of stashing money in low-tax offshore havens to obtain, in the words of Senator Levin, “the Holy Grail of tax avoidance.” “It has created offshore entities holding tens of billions of dollars while claiming to be tax resident nowhere,” he said.   read more

Bottlenose dolphins stationed in San Diego and trained to find undersea objects located a torpedo in March near Coronado that was last used in the 19th century. The Howell torpedo, only one of 50 made between 1870 and 1889, was one of the world’s first self-propelled torpedoes. The Howell just found is only the second known to still exist.   read more

Westminster Police Detective Anthony Orban killed himself in jail last year after being convicted of kidnapping, beating and raping a waitress in 2010, but before his victim had the satisfaction of seeing him sentenced for his crimes. But last Friday, West Valley Superior Court Judge Shahla S. Shabet indicated that she was prepared to sentence a dead man because there were still legal issues that needed to be addressed.   read more