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

An investigation turned up falsified wastewater lab analyses and other transgressions to disguise dangerous environmental situations. The Ventura County Grand Jury indicted nine people, including CEO William Mitzel. Until the blast, the facility sent supposedly treated, non-hazardous wastewater through a 12-mile pipeline to the city of Oxnard's sewage plant. Oxnard put a stop to that.   read more

SoCal Gas said Friday that 132 families accepted relocation assistance the company was ordered to offer by the county Department of Public Health a week ago, after news of the then-3-week-old leak gained broader attention. They reportedly spent Thanksgiving in cramped San Fernando Valley hotels. Other families are hitting the road using their own resources. As of Friday, 552 households had made inquiries about terms of the relocation.   read more

“UET has pleaded adequately a ‘pattern of racketeering’ because it credits at least ten different acts to the direction and supervision of each individual defendant, even if they were working together,” Judge Richard Seeborg wrote. UET supplies gas to 60,000 customers in PG&E’s territory, at times using an aggressive sales force that generates complaints.   read more

If the 30 worst highway bottlenecks in the country were fixed, the nation would save $39 billion in lost time and 830 million gallons of gasoline while preventing 211,000 accidents and stopping 17 billion pounds of greenhouse gas emissions over 20 years, according to a new study by the American Highway Users Alliance. Much of that savings would accrue to the Los Angeles area, where six of the top seven bottlenecks make driving hell,   read more

Chico, Monrovia and Ridgecrest got the light touch, but Hemet, Maywood and Richmond will be heavily scrutinized. The auditor made the determinations after reviewing 450 cities for the “potential of waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement, or . . . major challenges associated with their economy, efficiency, or effectiveness.”   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

An NBC Bay Area investigation found that 497 weapons have turned up missing at eight law enforcement agencies since 2010. That includes the California Highway Patrol (CHP), the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and six area police departments. Dozens of weapons were stolen from the homes and vehicles of officers. About one-third of the weapons, 166, were Tasers.   read more

Defense lawyers filed a motion this month in U.S. District Court to suppress more than 200 hours of warrantless recordings made outside the front of the San Mateo County courthouse in Redwood City. They also want tossed any evidence that might be related to information on the recordings. They argued their clients had a reasonable right to believe they were having private, unbugged conversations in public space, behavior protected by the Fourth Amendment.   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

Exam scores have been dropping across the country for years, along with the number of bar applicants and first-year law students. Law school enrollment numbers haven’t been this low since 1973. Despite there being fewer lawyers seeking employment, their declining placement rates after graduation indicate a glut of legal practitioners remain.   read more

More than one-third of the country’s chronically homeless people and 21% of all homeless folks live in California. Many of them are in the L.A. area, where chronic homelessness grew 55% since 2013, the report said. That’s the biggest jump in the nation. Much of the HUD data used in the report was extrapolated from a street count conducted over three days in January.   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

Metcalf replaces Claudia Cappio, who left in April to become Oakland assistant city administrator. He has worked for nonprofits and government agencies concerned about affordable housing. President Obama appointed Metcalf as deputy assistant director at HUD for Multifamily Housing Programs in 2013 and that’s where he was when Governor Brown brought him back West.   read more

On Friday, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) released a 3-page report that the methane being released from a Southern California Gas well’s 40-year-old broken pipe 8,750 feet below the ground is not only making San Fernando Valley residents at Porter Ranch nauseous, it’s making a mess of the air. An attempt to plug the month-old leak failed and a new well is being drilled to intercept the natural gas.   read more

USA Today and the Palm Springs Desert Sun reported that ex-Riverside County D.A. Paul Zellerbach, who left in January, told them he rarely signed off on the slew of wiretap requests from mostly federal agents, sloughing the job off on a subordinate. That could be a problem because federal law, which applies to the states in this case, clearly requires they be approved by a senior official. The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said in 2013, in the D.A.'s office, that means the D.A.   read more

Currently, admission requires they undergo an 18-month to two-year vetting process. It includes fingerprinting, database checks, involvement of several agencies and personal interviews. That is not enough for those lawmakers who say they fear a terrorist might slip through and want more scrutiny―and others who simply want to keep Muslims out of the country.   read more