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 regulation, originally approved in 2009, aims for a 10% reduction in carbon generated by transportation fuels by 2020. Emission-reduction targets escalate every year. The regulation was contested in court by the oil and gas industry and wound up being kicked back to the board, with a freeze on the escalator, for mostly procedural reasons. It now has a few new features to satisfy unhappy stakeholders and producers.   read more

Critics had complained of racial profiling and the harm done to local crime fighting efforts by having sheriff’s deputies identified so closely with ICE. Agents can now check fingerprint records of all prisoners and have interviews with those that qualify for deportation. The county will let the feds know when the prisoners are being released and give detainees a chance to consult an immigration attorney before they are cut loose.   read more

PG&E said the water drained when workers doing routine maintenance removed some brush and materials from a clogged outlet valve. Not everyone was assured. “This makes me feel like they didn’t want to do a fish rescue and that it was easier to open that sucker up Saturday night,” resident Eddie Bauer told CBS Sacramento.   read more

ExxonMobil met resistance from regulators to its plan to replace the 12-story, state-of-the-art air pollution equipment it blew up while working on other equipment with a piece it had retired in 2009. That would produce “anywhere from two to six times the emissions of the newer unit that was destroyed in the explosion,” Southern California Air Quality Management District (AQMD) spokesman Sam Atwood said.   read more

Daryelle LaWanna Preston sued the city in 2014, claiming her supervisor, then-City Administrator Deanna Santana, retalitated against her for speaking out in contradiction of her boss on a union issue and on an action taken against a city council member. She alleged the city violated her First Amendment free speech rights and California law protecting whistleblowers.   read more

Vito Imbasciani, is a musicologist, LGBT activist, aspiring politician, former hospital administrator, surgeon and 27-year military veteran who deployed overseas four times in two wars. He speaks six languages: English, Spanish, German, Italian, French and Arabic.   read more

Deputies seized around 400 plants from an indoor location on tribal land north of Ukiah and dismantled a laboratory where highly concentrated honey oil, used in marijuana edibles, was manufactured. Tribal leaders made no secret of their plans to grow lots of marijuana after the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said last October that they would allow tribes to cultivate crops on their land.   read more

The report, from the San Francisco Estuary Institute, said the bay receives a fresh load of plastic, at least 3.9 million pieces daily, from eight sewage treatment plants examined out of 42 that discharge into the bay. Contamination is nine times worse than Lake Erie in the Midwest and 330 times worse than Lake Huron.   read more

The Metropolitan Water District (MWD) will pay around $45 million a year to receive 150,000 acre-feet of water, enough to supply 300,000 homes. That water will come via the Colorado River and is half of Nevada’s annual allotment. Technically, the water isn’t being sold to California. It’s being banked for future access. Meanwhile, Lake Mead is at around 38% capacity.   read more

The city of Oakland sued Wells Fargo this week in federal court, accusing the bank of predatory lending and discrimination, dating back to the bubble, in violation of the Fair Housing Act and California's Fair Employment and Housing Act. The city said the deplorable lending practices never stopped.   read more

The results, so far, appear to be useful. But even Doris Peter, director of Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center, said the website was a “first step.” She told Kaiser Health News, “When it comes to health care cost and quality, it's really a black box for consumers. They don't know how much they're going to pay.”   read more

The UFW sought to sit down at the bargaining table with Gerawan after a 20-year absence, but the Fresno-area company refused and tried to decertify the union. That set off a nasty battle for the hearts and souls and votes of around 5,000 farmworkers that ended in the ballots being locked up uncounted.Last week, a judge tossed out the election and the decertification effort because of unfair labor practices   read more

The main sticking point for the ACLU is that the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department does not explicitly say it will get a warrant to use the surveillance technology. But the department also displays a hearty appetite for secrecy about Stingray and the operations. The ACLU lawsuit wants to know out how the department is using technology that mimics cellphone towers to spy on people.   read more

California’s Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) toughened up its “Top 10 Contributors” regulation that requires nonprofit groups to reveal who funds them. In the past, those contributors could have generic names like “The Committee to Reform Reformers,” but now they have to name the two humans who contributed the most to that group.   read more

The 238 holders of pre-1914 senior rights in the Sacramento and Feather river watersheds got the green light last week to resume drawing water for the first time since drought restrictions took hold on June 12. The curtailment, part of a larger set of state restrictions ordered between April and July, had been the first-ever significant curb on century-old senior water rights.   read more

Volkswagen used a computer algorithm to fool emissions testing equipment on hundreds of thousands of cars since 2009, according to the California Air Resources Control Board (CARB) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The cars emit as much as 40 times the level of pollutants allowed under clean air rules when they are on the road.   read more