Daily Report

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Americans Elect – the innovative effort to jolt the political system with a third-party presidential candidate – is facing a democratic uprising of its own.

A hastily organized contingent of Americans Elect activists is agitating to reverse the group's decision last week to pull the plug on its nomination process after failing to generate sufficient interest in its candidates. Complaining that the group’s leadership hasn't listened to the membership, the insurgents are pushing for Americans Elect to forge ahead. They don't want the $35 million the group raised to get on the ballot in 29 states, including California, to go to waste.

Involved in the effort is a Bay Area activist and filmmaker who ran for the Americans Elect nomination and came in third place, after former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer and former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson. Michealene Risley, a resident of Woodside in San Mateo County, said she was shocked when she heard – via press release – that Americans Elect was shutting down the nomination process.

"People feel really used and manipulated," said Risley, who ran on a platform of campaign finance reform...

Courtesy of Michael McClure Dr. Thomas Gill, shown in 2004

Dr. Thomas Gill’s forensic pathology career already was scarred by numerous autopsy mistakes before he started ruling on causes of death for the Solano County sheriff-coroner in 2007.

Gill examined 332 deaths for the county in three years. Following a series of news stories last year detailing Gill’s history of inaccurate autopsy findings, Solano County Sheriff Gary Stanton ordered an outside review of 32 of the cases. The results were alarming: A respected forensic pathologist determined Gill’s conclusions on eight of the deaths were “unreasonable” and more than half had “critical errors.”

The sheriff’s office, however, does not intend to continue checking Gill’s past autopsies, said Lt. Gary Faulkner, the chief deputy coroner. None of the other 300 cases is believed to have involved foul play or illegal activity.

“During the course of those other autopsies, there was no evidence uncovered that led the pathologist, or anyone from our office, to believe that a crime had been committed,” Faulkner said...

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After recently posting a bid for an executive compensation consultant for the first time in eight years, California State University officials decided late last week to cancel the request for proposals – citing budget concerns.

In bid documents posted in March for a three-year contract, the university estimated it would pay $200,000 for one survey of presidential pay, one survey of faculty pay and one larger, executive-level total compensation study – work that has been done in the past by human resources consultant Mercer. The smaller reports would be done once per year, and the larger study would be done less frequently. Mercer's contract is up in June.

University spokesman Michael Uhlenkamp told California Watch last week that the bid was on hold. Yesterday, he said CSU had decided not to move forward with the bid because the university does not have the money or need for an executive compensation study.

Uhlenkamp said the CSU human resources group initially posted the bid to do "due diligence" and see whether any cost savings could be achieved with potential vendors...

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A congressional committee is investigating California’s $68 billion bullet train project. The U.S. Government Accountability Office is investigating, too.

Meanwhile, this proposal for the largest public works project in California history is the target of a flurry of lawsuits filed by local governments and opposition groups.

All those investigators, lawyers and bullet train critics want to pore over the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s trove of documents, looking for evidence.

So it’s an unusual time to purge five years’ worth of bullet train project e-mails, critics say. Nevertheless, that’s what the agency is contemplating.

In February, the rail authority filed papers with the state saying it intended to enact a new policy to destroy its e-mails after 90 days.

Then, on May 1, in response to a request for information from a project critic, the rail authority said it could not produce e-mails that were older than 90 days, citing the new policy...

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When a scholarly journal published a study this week on the purported existence of "gaydar," the reaction ranged from "no duh" to offended.

Just how can someone accurately predict a person's sexuality based on a fleeting glimpse of a photograph?

But the new research from the University of Washington may shed some light. The researchers suggest that gaydar is a complex mental process that involves not only identifying particular facial features, but also those features’ configurations and relationships to one another.

The research appears in this week’s journal of the Public Library of Science.

We all make snap judgments several times a day, every day, when encountering strangers.

“We call it intuition,” said Nicholas Rule, a psychology researcher at the University of Toronto, who was not involved with this study. “When you get on a subway car and have only a split second to figure out who you’re going to sit next to, you’re using those first impressions.”

And according to scientists, we’re actually...

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With billions of dollars at stake, school district representatives charged with overseeing the shutdown of about 400 redevelopment agencies may be underprepared.

Seven-member local oversight boards consisting of representatives from K-14 districts, the county, the city and special districts are now responsible for vetting decisions about how the former agencies will be dismantled and how the property taxes that previously went to redevelopment will be spent.

But some observers are concerned that many school district representatives are not well-equipped to review the complex contracts and financial arrangements left in redevelopment’s wake...

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Gov. Jerry Brown announced a state budget yesterday that relies on hospitals and nursing homes to achieve nearly $400 million in savings – a week after a far smaller proposal prompted concerns about patient care.

The governor's revised budget is the starting point to closing a $15.7 billion deficit. He proposed making further cuts to human services, paring down hours of care provided to In-Home Supportive Services recipients, and limiting child care support provided by the CalWORKs program.

The revised budget poses a new set of challenges to care providers and patient advocates. Last week, groups representing doctors, nurses and nursing home residents decried a comparatively minor budget change that would have cut the mandate for hospital and nursing home inspectors to perform unannounced inspections to monitor compliance with state laws.

The budget proposal by the state Health and Human Services Agency would have eliminated 25 nurse-inspector positions and slashed fees paid by hospitals and nursing homes that go toward enforcing patient safety laws.

Health and Human Services Agency Director Diana Dooley said that the proposal to change facility inspections was unrelated to yesterday's budget cuts. Rather, it was meant to streamline state operations “where we...

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Officials at CSU Long Beach spent nearly $200,000 on extra pay for some business school faculty, tapping student fees that were supposed to be spent on recruiting professors, getting more research published and boosting enrollment.

The CSU Board of Trustees authorized a new fee for graduate business school students in 2009. At $254 per unit, it nearly doubles the price of a degree, adding $12,000 to the cost. CSU Long Beach projects it will have spent about $1.7 million in MBA fee revenues from 2009-10 through 2011-12, documents show.

Fee revenues were supposed to help universities boost enrollment and strengthen their accreditation. The accrediting agency requires schools to have a high number of tenure-track faculty who are consistently publishing peer-reviewed research.

While Long Beach officials say accreditation status has improved, the college has seen a drop in enrollment in its MBA programs. Meanwhile, the College of Business Administration has spent $191,000 of the fee revenues on stipends for existing faculty members in the last three years...

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Last year, California Attorney General Kamala Harris joined attorneys general across the country in declaring war against Backpage.com, a free classified website run by Village Voice Media. The officials threatened legal action if the site didn’t stop running ads for adult services, some of which have been linked to underage sex trafficking.

But while Harris took a confrontational tone with Backpage – which has since balked at shutting down its adult pages – a more cooperative dynamic has emerged this year between the attorney general and online companies.

Harris recently announced an agreement with mobile and tech companies that requires their apps to better display their privacy policies. While Harris said she will not rule out legal action against sites such as Backpage, her office has begun to build more alliances with online firms. And as companies such as Facebook have matured, they have become more willing to cooperate with government leaders and law enforcement. 

This week, representatives from Facebook and Microsoft will be among 50 law enforcement and nonprofit leaders who are meeting as part of a new Department of Justice task force on human trafficking in the state. By the end of the summer, the government task force plans to issue a report containing best-practice guidelines for law...