Kern County at the southern end of California’s great Central Valley will implement new voting districts and pay plaintiff $3 million in legal fees after disenfranchising Latino voters for nearly a decade.
Read moreIn a rare challenge of a California voting district, a federal judge sided with residents that Kern County “dilutes” Latino voters’ influence through discriminatory district lines drawn in 2011.
Read moreThree disabled Kern County, California, teens claim in a federal class action that juvenile-detention staffers abused them with pepper spray, prolonged solitary confinement, excessive force, painful prone restraint holds and denial of education.
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In an echo of the high-profile gay wedding cake case before the U.S. Supreme Court, California this week sued a Bakersfield bakery to stop it from discriminating against same-sex couples.
Read moreDisgruntled voters have not done enough to prove that a redistricting plan in California’s Kern County discriminates against Latinos, a federal judge ruled.
Read moreWhat do sports stars, cockroaches, Courthouse News Service reporters and the measles have in common? Jury duty!
Read moreA federal judge Monday sentenced a Bakersfield man to 15 years in federal prison for hate crimes: firing a sawed-off shotgun and yelling racist slurs at a Latino man.
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The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released a study this week calling for more transparency in the oil industry, and nominating California as the leader in the fight for clean air.
Read moreKern County and its sheriff’s officers have settled a 3-year old lawsuit accusing them of illegally arresting a man and seizing his cellphone after he recorded them beating another man to death.
Read moreA California law on wastewater injection that has drawn the ire of the oil industry now faces objections from environmentalists. The Center for Biological Diversity is accusing the state of actually shirking its duty.
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The oil industry sued California on Inauguration Day, calling its regulation of wastewater injection unconstitutional overreach that will shut down thousands of oil wells that do not threaten water supplies in 45 aquifers, as the state contends.
Read moreThe Center for Biological Diversity challenged Kern County’s approval of a enormous, long-planned community in the southern San Joaquin Valley, claiming it will cause a slew of environmental problems that the county’s studies failed to address.
Read moreClaims of excessive force and deaths in custody have spurred separate California Department of Justice investigations into potential civil rights violations by police in Kern County and Bakersfield.
Read moreOfficials said Thursday afternoon that the cause of this summer’s deadly Erskine fire in Southern California was an electrical arc from a worn out power line.
Read moreAfter 10 years of legal wars, a California state judge struck down a Kern County law prohibiting Los Angeles from dumping treated sludge on the agricultural county’s farmland.
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