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

Missouri thinks California is monkeying around with the flow of goods across state lines and its lawsuit says the “clear purpose [is] to protect California farmers from out-of-state competition.” The Humane Society, which was the leading proponent of Proposition 2 in 2008, says the California demands amount to leaving the birds enough space to reduce the incidence of salmonella, and make it easier to keep the cages clean of excrement, flies, rats and disease.   read more

The lawsuit alleges that Bowen erred in 2011 when she decided that the state’s new prison realignment, meant to relieve overcrowding in part by reclassifying some parolees as being under mandatory supervision or post-release community supervision, did not, in fact, change their status. She still considered them parolees and governed by laws that forbid their voting.   read more

The car, which did not resemble descriptions of the vehicle being sought, turned out to have two Hispanic women, 47-year-old Margi Carranza and her 71-year-old mother, delivering newspapers on their regular early-morning route, rather than a burly African-American ex-cop. The older woman was shot twice in the back and her daughter suffered superficial wounds.   read more

The last in a long line of parties involved in litigation over decades of chemical dumping—testers and manufacturers of munitions, rocket motors and fireworks—settled (pdf) a lawsuit brought by the nearby city of Colton but argued by the U.S. Department of Justice. At least 20 public drinking wells in the area were forced to close years before the source of contamination was formally identified.   read more

California, unlike most states, does not provide online access to its archives. So CIR decided to construct the database itself and began requesting copies of the public records that would make that possible. The CDSS estimated it would take two years, require 500 man hours and cost $20,500 to produce the documents. The department said it could only afford to devote four hours a week to the project.   read more

Six months after taking his seat at the beginning of 2013, Congressman David Valadao introduced legislation which would have effectively stalled completing segments of the project near his hometown of Hanford in the San Joaquin Valley. One month later, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed an ethics complaint against him because the rail route he was fighting skirted hundreds of acres owned by his family’s dairy farm.   read more

The confidential medical records of patients of Cottage Health System were a Google search away from discovery for months after being inadvertently exposed to the Internet last October.They included names, addresses and dates of birth, as well as information on medical procedures, lab tests and other personal medical notes. “Nobody bothered to encrypt the data,” attorney Brian Kabateck said. “It's just careless.”   read more

“Simply put, there’s not enough water in the system right now for customers to expect any water this season from the project,” California Department of Water Resources (DWR) Director Mark Cowin said in announcing the news. The cuts will mostly affect people in Southern California and the Central Valley.   read more

There may have been some merit to state Senate Bill 929, legislation introduced last week that would have changed some non-violent crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, but as Senate leader Darrell Steinberg’s spokesman, Rhys Williams, told the Associated Press, “Wrong senator, wrong time.” The wrong senator is Roderick Wright, a Los Angeles County Democrat who was convicted of eight felonies for voter fraud and perjury two days before introducing the legislation.   read more

California could have picked up $246 million in 2012 if it had closed an offshore corporate tax loophole recently sealed by Montana and Oregon, according to the California Public Interest Research Group (CalPIRG). California lost $3.3 billion to offshore tax havens in 2011—not surprisingly, the most lost by any state. Estimates are that the federal government loses $90 billion annually.   read more

An independent review (pdf) of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), ordered last year by the governor, found a “culture of risk aversion and even fear,” an “out-of-date” highway department that should be a “mobility department” and an agency “out of step with best practice in the transportation field.” It recommended what the Associated Press described as a “sweeping overhaul.”   read more

Police arrested 53-year-old Bill Buchman and charged him with felony animal cruelty after finding 182 live snakes and more than 240 dead ones in his home. Friends remembered the sixth-grade teacher mentioning that he bought a snake after his pet dog died. He was said to be devastated by the passing of his mother in 2011. He apparently became a hobbyist, and that morphed into hoarding.   read more

As a result of the banking restrictions, dispensary owners with piles of cash are robbery targets stuck with very inefficient ways to run a business. Paying employees and bills, making purchases and safely storing their loot are problematic. Attorney General Eric Holder said last week that the federal government will revisit regulations that make it way too dangerous for banks to accept deposits or make loans tied to medical marijuana because of fear they will be prosecuted.   read more

Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik thinks Freedom Newspapers, owner of the Register, is acting “ghoulish” by taking out insurance policies on its employees that don’t directly benefit them. Register publisher Aaron Kushner thinks Hiltzik should stuff it, and the Times is a, “reminder of the kind of newspaper and journalism of which we want no part.”   read more

The software boot camp companies say they are filling a desperate, immediate need in the tech industry for trained computer code writers. The state Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education (BPEE) wants to rein them in. Christina Farr at VentureBeat reported this week that the bureau sent cease-and-desist orders to a handful of the schools earlier this month and gave them two weeks to conform to standards it would have imposed if they had bothered to get licensed by the state.   read more

The small water systems serve communities in Central California that range in size from 39 to approximately 11,000 users. There are approximately 3,000 such systems, with at least 15 service connections each, providing water in California. Smaller communities are more vulnerable during droughts because they tend to have fewer alternatives when their primary water source dries up.   read more