Investigations

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.

As founder of one of the nation's largest urban wildlife damage control companies, Kevin Clark is no stranger to competition.

A UC Davis professor exploring the mysteries of the inner ear is under investigation for his handling of lab animals, the third faculty member accused in recent months of "serious" violations involving research subjects.

While missing children's cases often spiral into national news, with breathless updates and live video footage, the strange story of Dwight Stalling's disappearance has largely stayed off that grid.

Over and again, budget officials at the California Department of Parks and Recreation struggled to understand why every fiscal year ended with millions of dollars in surplus cash on hand.

California's Senate Select Committee on International Business Trade is staffed with three employees whose combined salaries cost taxpayers more than $170,000 a year.

A special team within Caltrans has uncovered problems with safety testing far broader than previously known.

A prominent UC Davis neurosurgeon was banned from performing medical research on humans after he and an underling were accused of experimenting on dying brain cancer patients without university permission, The Bee has learned.

In 2010 – the same year Dr. J. Paul Muizelaar first performed an experimental treatment on a dying brain cancer patient at UC Davis Medical Center – the neurosurgeon made more money than 99.9 percent of all employees in the University of California system.

Besides the University of California, Davis, other major universities and hospitals have undergone scrutiny – and have been penalized – for research activities involving human subjects. Cases include: