Congressional candidate and former San Diego City Councilman Carl DeMaio released a report attacking 102 members of Congress, including the Democratic incumbent he is running against, for “double-dipping,” receiving a government pension while receiving a government salary. He could have saved some time by simply directing interested folks to the National Journal story that his staff plagiarized for its statistical content.   read more

The Yale-trained lawyer, denied admission to the State Bar by the California Supreme Court solely because he was Chinese, died 124 years ago. Now, law students at the University of California, Davis are trying to right an old wrong by making a spirited effort to have Chang licensed in the state posthumously.   read more

The Los Angeles County resident was convicted in December 2010 of raping a woman while attending a party by pretending to be her boyfriend while she slept in another room. But the California Court of Appeal for the Second District tossed the conviction because state law only applied to raped women who were tricked into thinking they were having sex with their husband. Boyfriend impersonators got to skate free, until the Legislature revised the 1872 statute last September.   read more

On Wednesday, the school board apologized to anyone who would listen for an eighth-grade writing assignment conjured up by teachers and the district's educational services division that asked 2,000 students in five middle schools to consider questions about the Holocaust, including, “Was the Holocaust an actual tragic historical event or a propaganda tool?”   read more

State agriculture officials responded to an invasion of aggressive big-headed ants from Africa—in the Orange County city of Costa Mesa—by beginning placement of 1,500 traps, loaded with the popular meat derivative as a lure. The ants aren't considered a threat to humans, unless one considers finding them storming your house or inundating your swimming pool a threat. But they could spell trouble for native ants, agriculture and ecological balance.   read more

Payne pleaded guilty to burglary and grand theft and will be under two years of mandatory supervision after she's released from county jail, a spokesperson for the Riverside County district attorney's office told the Los Angeles Times. Payne has promised in the past to try to go straight, but no one really buys it, including her. She told the makers of a documentary called “The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne” that “I don’t have any regrets about stealing jewelry. I regret getting caught.”   read more

He survived temperatures that theoretically could have reached 80 below zero, but were probably closer to minus 50. There was not enough oxygen to sustain consciousness. Most people die under those circumstances. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says only 25 out of 105 known stowaways since 1947 have survived that kind of trip.   read more

In late 2011, former cop Anthony Arevalos was convicted of sexual battery against 13 women over a period of months. Questions were raised then why Arevalos hadn't been confronted earlier about the string of complaints, but it wasn't until last week that information surfaced that knowledge of the officer's criminal behavior went much further back.   read more

The Los Angeles city attorney has told Realm of Caring it does not fit under the city’s year-old medical marijuana ordinance and must close. The group, cited last August for its cannabis treatment of child epilepsy by Gupta in a laudatory CNN documentary, has an outpost in the city. Most alleged dispensaries in the city are being shut down under Proposition D for various reasons, most prominently being they had to have been around since 2006. Realm of Caring is new.   read more

Eighty-year-old heart-attack patient Maria de Jesus Arroyo might not have been dead when Dr. John J. Posay III made the pronouncement at White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles on July 26, 2010, but she was definitely deceased after being locked in the icy cold morgue for a few days. Lawyers for Arroyo's family didn't know that when they sued the hospital over very obvious facial injuries suffered by the woman.   read more

Okun and her husband were stopped at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection checkpoint in Yuma County in January 2011 on their way to a gem show. Although she had a California medical marijuana card, which Arizona honors, the authorities confiscated three-quarters of an ounce of pot, some hashish and paraphernalia. Sheriff Leon Wilmot refused to return her pot.   read more

“It is a Herculean effort to avoid disaster in three years,” Andrew Hughan, spokesman for the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, told the Los Angeles Times. “By disaster, I mean . . . no commercial fishing and no recreational fishing.” At stake is a $1.5 billion industry that employs around 22,000 people and much more expensive fish.   read more

The Financial Aid Office of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles exposed the personal information of what may very well have been the school’s entire 395-member student body to 14 members of its 2014 graduating class. The email included the name, internal system ID number, Social Security number, graduation year, academic status and program (JD, LLM) of “some” students. The document also contained information on loans, and their amounts, taken out by some students graduating in spring 2014.   read more

Randall Lawrence found the penny among his father’s belongings after his death in 1980. For 33 years he never realized its value until he met coin dealer Michael McConnell. McConnell told Lawrence that the penny was part of a rare batch made of aluminum, instead of the traditional copper, and could be worth $250,000. The two men agreed to auction it off. But the Treasury Department contends it isn’t his to sell, claiming it's government property and should be returned.   read more

The researchers re-created the hot dry conditions in the laboratory, broke out the electron microscope and high-speed cameras, and then found that by striking a rock with titanium, they could produce sparks of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit that burn for more than second. “The common denominator was each golfer used a titanium club, and hit the ball just out of bounds next to dry vegetation where the ground was extremely rocky,” Captain Steve Concialdi said.   read more

Preservationists greeted the announcement that the tree would be whacked with horrific disbelief and rallied enough community and national support to win a short reprieve.The nearly 70-year-old, 52-foot-tall redwood is a genetic oddity. It carries two separate sets of DNA and is even rarer than the normal albino redwoods that number around 230 worldwide. The tree is a unique grouping of green leaves with white, albino sections of leaves mixed in.   read more