Three police officers charged with involuntary manslaughter in death of Mario Gonzalez, whom they held down on the ground

Three California police officers have been charged with involuntary manslaughter in the 2021 killing of a man they restrained in a prone position for five minutes until he lost consciousness.

Pamela Price, Alameda county district attorney, announced the charges on Thursday, three years after the asphyxia death of Mario Gonzalez, 26. The officers, Eric McKinley, James Fisher and Cameron Leahy, face up to four years in prison.

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Region near Tulare Lake has been put on ‘probation’ as overpumping of water has caused faster sinking of ground

Even after two back-to-back wet years, California’s water wars are far from over. On Tuesday, state water officials took an unprecedented step to intervene in the destructive pumping of depleted groundwater in the state’s sprawling agricultural heartland.

The decision puts a farming region known as the Tulare Lake groundwater subbasin, which includes roughly 837-sq-miles in the rural San Joaquin valley, on “probation” in accordance with a sustainable groundwater use law passed a decade ago. Large water users will face fees and state oversight of their pumping.

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The Piper PA-32, a single engine plane, crashed off the coast across from Trump’s LA golf club in Ranchos Palos Verdes

A pilot and his dog survived a plane crash off the California coast, swimming to shore where they were met by authorities responding to the incident.

A 911 call came in on Sunday afternoon at 5.22pm about a plane crashing into the ocean off the coast across from the Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles, in Ranchos Palos Verdes, the Los Angeles county sheriff’s department said on Tuesday.

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Public spending on private sweep contractors is soaring across the state – and unhoused people allege poor treatment

This story was produced in partnership with Type Investigations with support from the Wayne Barrett Project

On an October morning, a small army arrived to evict Rudy Ortega from his home in the Crash Zone, an encampment located near the end of the airport runway in San Jose, California, Silicon Valley’s largest city. As jets roared overhead, garbage trucks and police squad cars encircled Ortega’s hand-built shelter. Heavy machinery operators stood by for the signal to bulldoze Ortega’s camp.

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As the soundscape of the natural world began to disappear over 30 years, one man was listening and recording it all

Read more: World faces ‘deathly silence’ of nature as wildlife disappears, warn experts

The tale starts 30 years ago, when Bernie Krause made his first audio clip in Sugarloaf Ridge state park, 20 minutes’ drive from his house near San Francisco. He chose a spot near an old bigleaf maple. Many people loved this place: there was a creek and a scattering of picnic benches nearby.

As a soundscape recordist, Krause had travelled around the world listening to the planet. But in 1993 he turned his attention to what was happening on his doorstep. In his first recording, a stream of chortles, peeps and squeaks erupt from the animals that lived in the rich, scrubby habitat. His sensitive microphones captured the sounds of the creek, creatures rustling through undergrowth, and the songs of the spotted towhee, orange-crowned warbler, house wren and mourning dove.

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Since 2021, eight employees of Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California, charged with assaulting female prisoners

The US Bureau of Prisons (BoP) is closing a federal women’s prison in California that has been plagued by rampant staff sexual abuse of incarcerated residents.

Colette Peters, the BoP director, said in a statement to the Associated Press on Monday that Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Dublin is “not meeting expected standards and that the best course of action is to close the facility”.

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If the experience of robot-served fast food dining is any indication, the future of sex robots is going to be very unpleasant

On 1 April, the same day California’s new $20 hourly minimum wage for fast food workers went into effect, a new restaurant opened in north-east Los Angeles that was conspicuously light on human staff.

CaliExpress by Flippy claims to be the world’s first fully autonomous restaurant, using a system of AI-powered robots to churn out fast food burgers and fries. A small number of humans are still required to push the buttons on the machines and assemble the burgers and toppings, but the companies involved tout that using their technology could cut labor costs, perhaps dramatically. “Eat the future,” they offer.

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Indigenous groups see hope in the environmentally friendly process of bioremediation. But will cities pay attention?

It almost looked like a garden. In Taylor Yard, a former railyard near downtown Los Angeles, volunteers knelt down to tend to scrubby plants growing in neat rows under the sweltering sun.

But beneath the concrete of the 60-acre site overlooking the Los Angeles River, the soils were soaked with an assortment of hazardous heavy metals and petrochemicals like lead, cadmium, diesel, and benzene. As the volunteers worked to dig up entire plants for closer study – some with roots nearly 12ft deep – they wore protective gear and carefully avoided inhaling or touching the toxic soil. Even a brief exposure to the contaminants could cause serious health consequences.

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Tech giant is protesting proposed law that would require large online platforms to pay ‘journalism usage fee’

Google has temporarily blocked links from local news outlets in California from appearing in search results in response to the advancement of a bill that would require tech companies to pay publications for links that articles share. The change applies only to some people using Google in California, though it is not clear how many.

The California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA) would require large online platforms to pay a “journalism usage fee” for linking to news sites based in the Golden state. The bill cleared the California assembly in 2023. To become law, it would need to pass in the Senate before being signed by the governor, Gavin Newsom.

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