When Norman B. Smith went public in September 2011 with his story about being denied a liver transplant at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles because he legally smoked medical marijuana, he said he was hoping knowledge of his plight would help change the policy. It didn’t.   read more

Sergio C. Garcia wants to be a lawyer. He put himself through college and law school, passed the bar examination on his first try in 2009 and applied for admittance to the bar in 2011. There is only one thing standing between him and a promising legal career. Garcia is an illegal immigrant.   read more

There is a run on fancy duck liver at high-end restaurants in California—where prices are skyrocketing amid secretive gourmand gatherings—as the state’s July 1 ban on foie gras approaches.   read more

Spy plane? Weapons carrier? Troop transport? Nobody was quite sure what the unmanned X-37B was doing while it orbited the Earth for more than a year, and the speculation continued after it touched down at Vandenberg Air Force Base Saturday, 130 miles north of Los Angeles.   read more

U2 guitarist David Evans, known professionally as The Edge, called his plan to build five mansions on a rugged ridgeline above Malibu “Leaves of Wind.” Peter Douglas, Coastal Commission executive director at the time, called it “one of the three worst projects that I've seen in terms of environmental devastation” and in June 2011 the commission rejected the proposal, 8-4.   read more

One million Californians have a history of cancer and while the cancer rate for adults is going down, the rate for children is going up. In a report that tracks cancer in the state for two decades, between 1989 and 2009, the California HealthCare Foundation noted a 9% decrease in new cancer cases among adults—from 456 per 100,000 residents in 1989 to 413 per 100,000 in 2009—which epidemiologists largely attribute to a decline in California smokers.   read more

Fed up with state budget cuts to its university, UCLA’s business school has decided to forego public financing and become a privately-funded institution of higher education. The switch to private financing was all but certain after UCLA’s Academic Senate voted 53-46 last week in favor of the plan for the Anderson School of Management.   read more

Federal prosecutors indicted six people June 14 on drug conspiracy and possession charges for their connections to three medical marijuana dispensaries in Southern California that the government ordered shut down last year. Those indicted include the co-founders of G3 Holistic Stores in Upland, Colton and Moreno Valley.   read more

At his website, James E. Enstrom likens California Air Resources Board Chairman Mary Nichols to Soviet Union scientist Trofim Lysenko, who early in the 20th century doctored studies of plants to make a case for rejecting the groundbreaking theories of Gregor Mendel that underlie much of genetics. The embrace of Lysenko’s theories had a devastating effect on Soviet agriculture for decades. Enstrom calls actions of the board “draconian” and its research “bad science.”   read more

SB 1844 would make it illegal for employers and college administrators to ask job applicants and students for their social media account passwords.   read more