The historic natural lake has undergone a major restoration but is still teeming with giant, alien, invasive fish species. Workers will dump 47 gallons of Rotenone in a 5% solution into the lake on a single day. Rotenone is a piscicide that suffocates gill breathers. It is mildly hazardous to humans and mammals and has been banned in the United States for use on land, coastal waters and lagoons. It has been banned entirely in Europe.   read more

The judge said the prosecutor’s office repeatedly engaged in misconduct and showed a “cavalier attitude toward the constitutionally-required Brady procedure” in the case of mass murderer Scott Evans Dekraai. That attitude was “patently inappropriate and legally inadequate.” Fallout from the Dekraai case was immediate.   read more

In two weeks, Lake County voters will decide if they want to loosen up, or even eliminate, the restrictive medical marijuana ordinance they passed in June. For now, the county sheriff will have to stop enforcing that ordinance illegally. Judge Henderson did not buy the county’s argument that the three-year drought constituted an emergency that warranted not seeking a warrant. Marijuana needs a lot of water.   read more

Eleven schools in the Ocean View school district have been undergoing remodeling work, and tests found trace amounts of asbestos fibers in three. Construction has been halted at all the schools, but parents and teachers wonder if asbestos removal was underway while students were in the classroom. That would be a common sense no-no and a violation of state law.   read more

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is not happy. “We are not going to roll over and risk watching Prime Healthcare cut services, raise prices and lay off caregivers like they've done in so many other communities in California and other states,” Dave Regan, president of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, said on the union’s website.   read more

Around 10 armed members of the Tex McDonald tribal council took over the Chukchansi gaming commission office in the casino complex, controlled for the past month by the Reggie Lewis/Nancy Ayala faction. The McDonald faction said they were looking for, but did not find, critical audits of the gaming operation. At its core is a fight over who truly deserves to be considered a member of the tribe and share in its investments.   read more

“Put bluntly, the harms already suffered are severe and pervasive; there is no evidence of an imminent solution; defendants disclaim their constitutional responsibilities, and the harm to students (who are among the State’s most challenged)) is compounding daily,” the judge wrote. He ordered the school district to figure out what it would take to put all the students at Jefferson in meaningful classes, and he put state officials on notice they better figure out a way to pay for it, if necessary.   read more

The consortium that was planning to build the Palen Solar Electric Generating System in the eastern Chuckwalla Valley, west of Blythe, formally withdrew the project shortly after a hailstorm of abuse over reports of birds being fried as they flew over Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, a similar facility in the Mojave Desert. But the decision could have been influenced by lost tax credits.   read more

Each of the Top Ten water users in the sampling used more than three times as much water as the average California single-family home, which is 361 gallons a day. Fresno City Councilman Oliver Baines was the worst offender in 2013, using 9.5 times the average amount of water.   read more

After years of stories about vendors selling falsely-advertised products at farmers markets around the state, legislators passed Assembly Bill 1871 in the last session, tightening up enforcement of rules, increasing fines and setting up a funding mechanism to pay for regular inspections. Vendors are bringing stuff in from as far away as Mexico, selling misadvertised pesticide-laden food and blatantly lying about what they were doing.   read more

The Student Online Personal Information Protection Act prohibits K-12 online education sites, cloud services and applications from using personal student information for any purpose other than school. As much as a future employer (or prospective mate) might want to mine the voluminous data being gathered early in the rapidly digitizing education sector, Senate Bill 1177 restricts peeking at disciplinary records, learning disabilities or other sensitive information.   read more

Keith Carls at KCOY wrote that opponents have raised $1,950,000, compared to $95,000 by supporters, but didn’t provide a breakdown on the figures. It’s safe to say that the oil and gas industry is a significant contributor to the “No on P” campaign. Backers of the measure want to limit oil extraction techniques that employ hydraulic fracturing, steam injection and well acidization in unincorporated county areas.   read more

It looked for awhile like California might be able to patch up its differences with the Sacramento-area-based company and include its Vision Service Plan (VSP) in the state’s federally-subsidized health care exchange. But Governor Jerry Brown vetoed Assembly Bill 1877 last week, upsetting VSP President and Chief Executive Rob Lynch, who thought he had a deal after threatening to move a part of his operations elsewhere. “We are surprised and shocked,” Lynch said.   read more

California regularly sterilized women in institutions for much of the 20th Century before deciding that having a eugenics program that inspired Nazis in Germany probably wasn’t a good thing and essentially banned the practice. Or so the public was led to believe. Now, presumably, it has. Governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 1135 a year after the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) revealed that dozens of female inmates had been sterilized in recent years and the practice had not ended.   read more

The companies were told not to offer services that provide individuals with a shared ride, like a shuttle bus. Real ride sharing, not the "shared economy" kind, is a regulated transportation activity, which the cities say hasn’t been approved for the new kids on the block. Sidecar was defiant. “We’re going to continue to operate Shared Ride,” CEO Sunil Paul told the San Francisco Chronicle.   read more

The judge said he needed to apply to the California Coastal Commission for a permit before making a change in the property’s development. That change doesn’t have to be physical, Judge Mallach said, encouraging public access advocates up and down the coast. It can simply be a change in access to the Pacific Ocean.   read more