U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder sided with seven religious leaders in granting their motion for permanent injunction in her long-anticipated 55-page order keeping the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors from restoring a cross to the county seal. The lawsuit came after a 3-2 vote by the supervisors in January 2014 to include an image of a cross on the county seal. The cross would have been placed atop a depiction of the San Gabriel Mission featured in the center-right side of the seal.   read more

Representing Kings County and a group of farmers, attorney Stuart Flashman dogged the California High Speed Rail Authority for proposing major changes to the train’s operating system and for attempting to use bond money without going back to California voters for approval. Flashman repeatedly disagreed with the authority’s cost and ridership estimates, calling the studies “insane” while questioning the viability of the mammoth public works project.   read more

The award in the civil rights lawsuit is more than double San Jose’s previous largest payout. Lam has been a wheelchair-bound paraplegic since being shot in January 2014 during a domestic dispute at home with his boyfriend. Someone called the police and reported a man was acting as if he were having a mental breakdown. Lam was standing with a knife pointed at his own stomach and no one else around when an officer shot him in the back twice.   read more

After years of intractable acrimony over how to manage the Klamath River in Northern California and Southern Oregon, all the warring parties reached an accord last year to take down four dams. But last week, it was reported that legislation had been submitted by Representative Greg Walden (R-Oregon), a supporter of the agreement from the Upper Klamath Basin and the House’s third-most-powerful member, that would probably wreck it.   read more

The judge was removed from 46 of 49 cases between February 2014 and September 2015 in a practice known as “papering the judge.” O.C.’s Supervising Superior Court Judge Richard King is not fond of the practice and on December 3 rejected the request to disqualify Goethals from a murder case, People v. Tejeda, in a scathing 49-page ruling.   read more

The staff complaint process and inmate appeals system don't work, according to the report. The most vulnerable members of the population are regularly exposed to physical danger and inmates are pitted against each other. This dysfunctional system exists within an “entrenched culture of self-protection” among officers. “There is evidence that a perception of insularity and indifference to inmates exists at High Desert State Prison.”   read more

The good news is that 99.2% of seventh- and ninth-graders scored at the highest levels in at least one of six fitness standards. Fifth-graders weren’t far behind at 98.7%. But only 37.6% of ninth-graders were really fit, hitting their marks in all six categories. And they were far ahead of seventh-graders (32.5%) and fifth-graders (26.4%).   read more

California Coastal Commission’s then-Executive Director Peter Douglas called The Edge's proposal “one of the three worst projects that I've seen in terms of environmental devastation.” But after six years of negotiations, a tighter packing of the five mansions at a lower elevation on the pristine Malibu hillside, some environmental mitigation measures and a promise to preserve some property as open land, the commission voted unanimously to approve the project.   read more

A national online poll published by Bloomberg this week found 65% of likely Republican primary voters approve of presidential candidate Donald Trump’s statement that all Muslims should be barred from entering the country. A separate poll, conducted online by SurveyUSA, found even more San Diego Republicans, 71%, approved this message. Sixty-nine percent of Fresno-Visalia Republicans approved.   read more

The L.A. city attorney has a few bones to pick with the gas company. “The failure of the well should never have happened. The incredible duration of the crisis should have been avoided, and would have been avoided had So Cal Gas established and promptly implemented appropriate contingency plans for such an event, and pre-placed adequate mechanical and technical resources at the site to swiftly end the leak.” Instead, the gas company engaged in “unlawful and unfair business practices.”   read more

State regulators responded to public concerns by promising quick action on reforms for an industry whose new drilling processes, including acidization, were largely unregulated. Steam injection, largely shielded from scrutiny by a loophole in regulations, would have its regulations tightened up and enforced properly. That didn’t happen.   read more

After state lawmakers cut the CPUC budget by $5 million, the commission delayed implementation of a program pushed by state Senator Jerry Hill (D-San Mateo) to protect the nation's electric grid from terrorists and vandals. He is a CPUC critic and a representative of San Bruno, the city where a Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) pipeline explosion killed eight people and leveled a neighborhood in 2010.   read more

The 50-year-old Quemetco would like the state’s permission to ramp up its business 25% to take advantage of Exide’s poor fortune, but is running into a few snags. The company was recently ordered to start testing the neighborhoods around it for lead and is supposed to submit a schedule for the project, which will involve houses up to a mile away, by the end of the month.   read more

The suits all claim that the products are not safe and the industry knows it but doesn’t warn consumers. “The shape and construction of e-cigarettes can make them more likely than other products with lithium-ion batteries to behave like ‘flaming rockets’ when a battery fails,” according to the U.S. Fire Administration.   read more

Environmentalists argue that sand mining in the bay is ruining Ocean Beach to the south, affecting sand distribution all the way to Point San Pedro, and adversely affecting shellfish, bottom-dwelling invertebrates, juvenile Dungeness crab, sturgeon and other important Bay species. The judge said those things had to be considered in light of the state's public trust obligation, not just the narrow strictures of an environmental impact report.   read more

Some agencies have prioritized low-level crimes and others have gone in the opposite direction. As a result, the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department reported low-level arrests went up 77%, while the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department was down 43%. Los Angeles County was in between, up 10%. Harder to figure out were the 260 arrests for methamphetamine by the L.A. County Sheriff’s office in the first half of 2015, compared to seven in the first half of 2014.   read more