Investigations

The State Bar Court has recommended disbarment of Del Norte County District Attorney Jon Alexander, forcing the county to replace him as its chief law enforcement officer.

The California Department of Transportation said Monday that it was reviewing whether the large bolts that broke last month on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge had failed quality-control tests by the agency's materials lab.

For nearly 17 years, Silvia Cata cared for elderly clients in her home on a dead-end street in Sacramento's Gardenland neighborhood, a residential enclave flanked by tire shops, lube and oil joints and a check-cashing store on the corner.

Assemblyman Richard Pan is required to live in the district he represents, but he apparently is spending little time in the residence he purchased to comply with the law, a Bee investigation shows.

They stood in the crisp morning air clutching Red Bulls and bearing arms: Bushmaster rifles poking from backpacks, HK pistols nestled in cases, Colt semi-automatics propped on shoulders.

Fraser West and his family are engaged in a legal battle with a multibillion-dollar company over plans to build a 278-acre rock quarry 50 feet behind his property line and construct an asphalt plant on 113 acres down the road from his ranch.

The consent form allowing UC Davis doctors to open Terri Bradley's skull and infect her with bowel bacteria was hand-delivered on a single page with a 300-word warning.

In the antiseptic language of government documents, she was identified only as Patient No. 2, a dying woman who agreed to undergo an experimental procedure at the UC Davis Medical Center.

An analysis from a team of California Department of Transportation experts, released Thursday after more than a year of preparation, confirmed data problems involving radiation-based tests of reinforced concrete foundations for nine bridges or other freeway structures, including the Benicia-Martinez Bridge.

State legislators billed taxpayers more than $450,000 for on-the-job driving in the last legislative year, but officials won't say where the lawmakers went.

CalPERS has suspended a program that allowed some salaried managers to moonlight in-house and take hourly pay, saying that the controversy surrounding the practice has become a "significant distraction" to its work.

For nearly two years, managers earning fixed salaries at California's massive public retirement system have been making extra money at second hourly-wage jobs at the agency.

Interest groups that spend the most money trying to influence policy in California's Capitol spend the bulk of it in secret, including hiring former politicians as consultants and launching ad campaigns to push their agenda with virtually no financial disclosure.

California has millions more guns than it did 10 years ago. It also has thousands fewer gun injuries and deaths each year.

Former California state parks leaders engaged in a "conscious and deliberate" effort to hide millions of dollars for as long as 13 years, according to an investigation by the state attorney general's office released Friday.

Nurses weren't told what was going on in the operating room. Top hospital leaders were kept in the dark, or avoided asking questions. Hospital policies and federal regulations were violated.

At the same time California state parks officials were hiding millions of dollars and secretly awarding vacation payouts, they also were routinely violating rules that control how long employees can work outside their job classification, according to a new audit.

A team of eight inspectors arrived unannounced Monday for a floor-by-floor survey of the UC Davis Medical Center, part of a widening probe of the hospital over untested surgical procedures performed by two neurosurgeons on three terminally ill patients who later died.

In a scathing review of three experimental surgeries at the UC Davis Medical Center, federal regulators found that deficiencies were so severe the 619-bed hospital "lacks the capacity to render adequate care to patients."

The UC Davis neurosurgeon at the center of a widening scandal over his experimental treatments of dying brain cancer patients is taking a leave of absence from the medical center staff, a university official announced Thursday.