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 appellate court said the jury was incorrectly led to believe that taking the phone for any length of time legally constituted theft, and that was wrong. “Taking a phone for temporary use is far more akin to joyriding or taking a bicycle with intent to return it the next day, which do not constitute theft,” the judge wrote.   read more

The engineer wrote: “It is thin wall pipe and now we have found external corrosion on it. Could the recent hydrotest [have] contributed to additional cracking on this pipe and essentially activated a threat? Are we sitting on a San Bruno situation? With fatigue crack growth over many years? Is the pipe cracked and near failure? I don’t want people to panic but seems like we should consider this and probably move this pipe up the PSEP priority for replacement.”   read more

State lawmakers and Governor Jerry Brown made it a little harder last week for the U.S. to deport undocumented immigrants in California and the military to place people it claims are terror-related suspects in indefinite detention without charges or trial.   read more

“There are no exigent circumstances in this case that would justify an order of the Court forcing furloughed attorneys to return to their desks," the judge wrote. "Moreover, while the vast majority of litigants who now must endure a delay in the progress of their matters do so due to circumstances beyond their control, that cannot be said of the House of Representatives, which has played a role in the shutdown that prompted the stay motion.”   read more

Health care exchanges across the country opened Tuesday and none were busier than in California, where the state’s aggressive planning couldn’t prevent its system from being overwhelmed by inquiries. Computers crashed, links didn’t work, wait periods were long and tempers were short. In other words, it was a typical rollout of a complicated technological system.   read more

The publication Wired says a nearly-completed draft of a curriculum being developed for California K-6 schools presents a one-sided view of intellectual property which, in the words of Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Mitch Stoltz, is “thinly disguised corporate propaganda” that is “inaccurate and inappropriate.”   read more

If it weren’t for Oklahoma, California would own all four of the top spots in a list of the nation’s worst roads (pdf) in large urban areas (pop. 500,000+) published by the national transportation research group TRIP. Still, roads in the Los Angeles–Long Beach–Santa Ana area ranked #1, with 64% of the transportation routes being rated “poor.”   read more

Senate Bill 556 only takes effect once the federal government quits enforcing the law that forbids growing, possessing and selling cannabis in any form. One stumbling block may be the federal law’s requirement that a state possess “strong and effective regulatory and enforcement systems.” The federal government was none too impressed with California’s effort at regulating medical marijuana.   read more

While the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) grapples with the disastrous rollout of its $1 billion program to equip every student with an iPad, more than 250,000 kids statewide are lacking a much older, more basic technology essential to learning: eyeglasses. Austin Beutner, founder of Vision to Learn, wrote in a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece that 95% of students entering public schools who need glasses don’t have them.   read more

It was a go-to destination for heroin, ecstasy, marijuana, fireworks, erotica, hacking assistance, forged documents and more. In 2011, not long after the website launched, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-New York) described it as “a certifiable one-stop shop for illegal drugs that represents the most brazen attempt to peddle drugs online that we have ever seen. It's more brazen than anything else by light years.”   read more

According to AirFair Watchdog, 33 out of 52 major airports nationally offer free wi-fi, with no strings attached, including California airports in Ontario, Orange County, San Diego, San Jose, Sacramento and San Francisco. But when Los Angeles International Airport debuted its $1.9 billion upgrade of the Tom Bradley International Terminal last week, it was still using the same slow, wi-fi system used throughout LAX, which is free for just the first 45 minutes.   read more

A study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics said that people who refused vaccinations for their children, largely for religious reasons, were 2.5 times more likely to be living in areas where whooping cough, also called pertussis, showed up. The disease is highly contagious and deadly, especially for infants, who cannot be vaccinated.   read more

Bush, who represented himself in the two-day trial, claimed the money came from his mother . . . his life savings . . . or maybe his Mexican ATM business—Paul Payne at the Santa Rose Press Democrat wrote that the story seemed to change—but didn’t have an explanation for the pot smell that officers said could be detected across the road. But there were no discernible quantities of marijuana larger than the nearly microscopic.   read more

Senate Bill 380 requires that court permission must be obtained by the authorities before cell phone service is cut unless there is an “extreme emergency situation” that involves immediate danger of death or great bodily injury. In that case, the authorities must get permission within six hours of having service carriers whack electronic communications, or 24 hours if the six-hour requirement proves inconvenient.   read more

By CIR’s count, the doctor has approved treatment for more than 1,550 patients while acting as medical director under private contract. As medical director, he is frequently the only medical attention his patients see and, for the most part, they don’t see him. He pops into the office, signs a stack of forms and hits the road.   read more

The proposal has sort of been around for a while. California NORML noted its presence in December 2011 when doing a roundup of five marijuana initiatives vying for signatures to get on the November 2012 ballot. It was described as “a sweeping measure by the late Jack Herer that has circulated but failed to qualify in repeated attempts over twenty years.”   read more