That update comes just moments ago from SF Weekly's Caroline Chen, who is tracking events for us at the Civic Center BART Station, where 100 or so protesters have succeeded in their mission to disrupt the evening commute. They are attempting to send a strong message to BART police over the recent shooting where two officers killed 45-year-old Charles Hill on July 3.
At 5:20 p.m., Chen reported that the Civic Center station had been shut down. Chen estimates that 100 protesters -- chanting "No justice! No peace! Disband the BART police!" -- had assembled on the Civic Center train platforms. There they were met by BART security officers, two or so at every train door.
Just last week, Public Defender Jeff Adachi told reporters there wasn't a chance he'd back down from his competing pension reform measure. And he meant it. Today, he turned in more than 72,600 signatures needed to put it on the November ballot -- far more than the 46,177 he needs.
Now he's got to wait for the San Francisco Elections Department to qualify the measure. In the meanwhile, he continues to sell his argument that pension reform is long overdue.
"We realized very early we needed to take action, and so we spent the last three months collecting signatures," Adachi told SF Weekly. "It's a challenge in San Francisco to even stop someone on the the street, let alone engage them and convince them to support a ballot initiative like pension reform."
Last week we outlined just how negative San Franciscans are, especially when it comes to trusting local government. Now the Grand Jury has released a report validating our bad attitudes.The city's Whistleblower Program -- which is one way to garner the public's trust -- is failing miserably.
So while "good government" has become a pleasant buzz phrase, the report says, it doesn't mean anything if we don't have a quality whistleblower program to alert the public of misconduct and abuse before it becomes endemic.
"Nearly eight years after its relaunch under a 2003 charter
amendment, the Jury finds that the San Francisco's Whistleblower Program
has failed in its mission to promote the identification of waste, fraud,
and abuse," according to the 32-page report.
If you're at all familiar with The Huffington Post, the above headline should sound odd. The website spawned by journalistic dilettante Arianna Huffington built its wild success, after all, largely on "aggregating" (read: rewriting without performing actual reporting) the news content of other publications.
So it is that HuffPo's decision to indefinitely suspend business writer Amy Lee for cribbing too directly from an AdAge article has some media types scratching their heads. Ryan Tate at Gawker puts a fine point on this puzzlement, scoring an interview with a former HuffPo employee who points to the hypocrisy evident in the handling of Lee's story.
When we read the news this morning that a California lawmaker is attempting to break the state in two (for the umpteenth time), we couldn't help but laugh ... and then dream.
How great would it be if we didn't have SoCal conservatives weighing us down? At least we know gay marriage would be legal. But in all seriousness, it got us thinking. What would we not miss about our military-loving, suburban-living, air-polluting friends in the south?
1. Minutemen: While we understand that Southern California has a visceral reaction to illegal immigration -- or to legal immigration for that matter -- this isn't the American Revolution, and this isn't Arizona. Having a bunch of tattletales with guns keep "a watch out" on the border feels more threatening than illegal immigration itself.
The news that Rachael Marie Smith -- the woman accused of fraudulently renting out the same Richmond District apartment to scores of fleeced tenants -- is on the lam comes as no surprise. What's odd is that it took so long.
Smith, who essentially re-created the scheme Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom launched in The Producers (but on Craigslist), actually bothered to show up for her first several hearings. Why she would head to court in October and get hit with 14 additional grand theft and fraud charges but skip out now is not entirely clear.
Medical authorities have identified the man who was shot to death in broad daylight this weekend as 23-year-old Karl Henderson.
Henderson, a San Francisco resident, was shot in the chest Holloway and Brighton avenues sometime around 11:15 a.m. on Saturday, according to police.
After Facebook launched the creepy facial recognition feature that had users freaking out, it's no wonder the social networking giant was voted the No. 10 most hated company in America.
To put this snub into context, the only companies that are more hated than Facebook are airlines and MySpace.
That's right. According to Business Insider, the Palo Alto-based company was despised only slightly less than the nearly obsolete MySpace, which has been in a downward spiral since the birth of Facebook. MySpace was No. 9 on the list, in part because of "bad interface," while Delta Airlines was No. 2 and Pepco scored the No. 1 spot as the most hated company in America.
One Southern California pol is sick and tired of the Democrats in Sacramento -- tired of the "pillaging" of local governments and, worse, the left-wing policies that dominate the blue state. That's why he's dusted off that tired proposal to let Southern California become its own state.
Yep, that historically failed attempt to break the state into two is being floated again, but this time by a riled-up Republican from the state's inland area. According to the Los Angeles Times, Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Stone has rolled out a plan for the 13 inland -- and strongly conservative -- counties to break away from the rest of the state and form their own union, called Southern California.
SF Weekly recently told readers about how taxi drivers and Muni operators were planning to team up in an Aug. 2 strike to defy their boss -- the San Francisco Transportation Agency.
It turns out Muni operators can't strike, technically. According to the most recent Muni contact agreement, which was forced on the union, they could get fired for striking.
But that won't stop some Muni drivers from joining the cabbies at City Hall for the 24-hour strike.
Walter Scott, secretary of TWU Local 250A , which represents more than
2,000 Muni workers, told us that, as a union, operators won't be taking any official action that day. What the union will do is look the other way if Muni drivers who are off that day decide to join the taxi protest.
