A previous version of this story reported the sheriff was cutting back on call monitoring. A spokeswoman has said this is not the case.
Just as an emotional community meeting over a Tenderloin homeless shelter was set to start at City Hall today, reporters were booted out -- and those are the facts.
Ron Case, the president of Lower Polk Neighbors, reportedly walked outside with an aide from Supervisor Jane Kim's office and conferred for a few minutes before coming back into the meeting room and telling reporters they had to leave.
Why would the press be kicked out of a community meeting, which was presumably open to the public? Supervisor David Chiu told SF Weekly that he got there late, so he hadn't witnessed reporters being asked to leave, and he wasn't entirely sure if it was a public meeting.
Case told us "it wasn't my call."
Then we got our answer.
The San Francisco Police Department said it would expand its review of alleged officer misconduct in several narcotics arrests after defense attorneys revealed more video footage today they say contradicts sworn statements made by officers in police reports.
It was the third instance of video footage -- all culled from surveillance cameras at the Henry Hotel, a residential hotel on Sixth Street's skid row -- appearing to contradict officers' accounts of how drug seizures unfolded. Public Defender Jeff Adachi, holding a press conference today with private defense attorney Scott Sugarman, whose client's arrest was captured on the latest tape, dubbed the widening scandal "Police, Lies, and Videotape."
Even on a culturally diverse campus like UC Berkeley, tensions between Israel and Palestinians run deep.
A 20-year-old Jewish student has hired San Francisco attorneys to defend her claim that another student belonging to the Students For Justice in Palestine assaulted her as she held a sign reading "Israel wants Peace" on campus last March.
According to the suit filed in San Francisco Superior Court, Jessica Felber was participating in a campus event dubbed "Israel Peace and Diversity Week," which is a series of sponsored by Tikvah, a sanctioned campus group. As part of the event, Felber was holding a card that read "Israel wants Peace."
Another UC Berkeley student, Husam Zakharia, who is the leader of the Students for Justice in Palestine "intentionally rammed a shopping cart into Jessica,"physically harming her.
San Francisco, as any local knows, is being besieged by an invasion force. The hordes' uniforms and accouterments are easy to spot: Horrible "Alcatraz Psycho Ward" T-shirts, ubiquitous maps, and guidebooks that lead them to Fourth and King when they're seeking Pier 39 with eerie regularity.
These international invaders are the lifeblood of the city. Much capital has been expended to look after then and keep them coming. More than a century ago, however, the government invested heavily in a project that would offer a different manner of welcome to foreigners. Specifically, it aimed to blow them up.
To this day, one of the most widely read blogs on SF Weekly is a July 2010 story on whether Steve Jobs knew the iPhone 4 antenna was a lemon all along. And for good reason -- people are still pissed.
But they might be somewhat delighted to hear that reports and rumors circulating the Internet today say the iPhone 5 will have a new antenna design, which means no more dropped calls.
We hope.
And some thought Public Defender Jeff Adachi has been crapping on San Francisco cops lately.
A well-known inebriate in the Upper Haight showed the fuzz just how he felt about them by depositing his feces on a parked patrol car last week.
At about 5 p.m. on Thursday, police returned to their patrol car at the corner of Masonic Avenue and Haight Street and found the heap of human excrement piled on the hood of their car.
So it seems that not all of former Mayor Gavin Newsom's "head-spinning" machinations have worked in his favor. Before leaving office, he was successful in lining City Hall with an administration that would deliver a Newsomesque agenda.
And his efforts paid off, except in one area. His hand-selected Health Department Chief, Barbara Garcia, isn't following orders; she hasn't implemented one of Newson's most beloved programs -- Daily Homeless Connect.
Last month, SF Weekly broke the story about the program falling by the wayside now that Newsom had left San Francisco politics.
At the time, nobody could give us a reason why the Daily Homeless Connect was now a disconnect. Yet Garcia is now telling reporters that she cannot see the logic in starting a new program when she's been asked to shutdown so many others due to budget cuts.
Just when you thought you had heard enough from actor Charlie Sheen and his questionable antics, he brings his new persona live... to San Francisco.
After his (fill in the blank)-induced rant led producers of CBS to cancel Sheen's television series Two and a Half Men, Sheen has picked up where he left off and launched his own show on San Francisco's Ustream, a live video streaming site.
And while Sheen's rants were initially viewed as curious and somewhat entertaining, now they are just tiresome.
His first episode aired Saturday afternoon, and has reportedly been viewed more than 1 million times.
