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Some of the most vulnerable and integral cable sections and rods on the new $6.5 billion San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge are rusting. The bridge suspension span and iconic tower rely on an unusual design: A single cable, comprising 137 steel strands, loops over the tower and under the bridge to hold it up. That cable is secured on the eastern edge of the span, inside chambers designed to keep out water and marine air to prevent corrosion. But a Sacramento Bee investigation found that inside one of the chambers, where the suspension cable is attached, the cable strands and rods...

While attorneys for a women's rights advocate and prominent Twitter engineer accused of raping her estranged wife say the accuser is "out for revenge," a friend who says she was present after the incident said Friday that the wife just wants to teach her children that criminals must face justice.

Coast Guard crews suspended their search Thursday afternoon for a 14-year-old boy swept to sea off San Francisco's Ocean Beach, after nearly 24 hours of looking for him in the Pacific Ocean. Crews had targeted efforts in an area that was 64 square miles between the Golden Gate Bridge and Lake Merced, with authorities scouring both shoreline and water for the teen. But they suspended their search about 1 p.m. "It's heartbreaking," San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White said from the beach Thursday morning during the height of the search, noting that she had talked with the teen's mother. "I'm...

NBC Bay Area's Stephanie Chuang shows why some are alarmed after a picture of the San Francisco International Airport was included in a publication run by Al Qaeda. A stock photo of San Francisco International Airport featured in an international publication – reportedly run by al Qaeda - is sounding off alarms on Capitol Hill, especially as the year anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings nears. At a Homeland Security hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Dublin, said he was first alerted by a top law enforcement official in the Bay area to the picture of what appears to be...

Photo Credit - (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group) Living in the Tarnished State is a gift that just keeps giving. A most amazing, but not terribly surprising event was reported in varying degrees of detail over the last 24 hours, about a California Democrat State Senator – a major gun-control advocate. The Los Angeles Times summarizes the headline: State Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) and a San Francisco figure known as "Shrimp Boy" were arrested Wednesday as part of a public corruption probe after a series of raids by federal and gang task force officials, the FBI confirmed. Yee,...

On April 1, Washington Mayor Vincent Gray was denied a second term, defeated in the primary by upstart city councilwoman Muriel Bowser. The beginning of the end came on March 10, when U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen struck a plea bargain with a wealthy businessman who confessed he'd spent $668,000 on an illegal "shadow campaign" to fund get-out-the-vote efforts that helped Gray win the mayoral office in 2010. So the corrupt mayor of America's most important city is thrown out. A political scandal? The same networks that were utterly breathless over the local story of Gov. Chris Christie's aides slowing traffic...

VIDEO AT LINKOn Tuesday, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted during a post-speech question-and-answer session at the Marketo Marketing Summit at San Francisco's Moscone Center that she's thinking about running for president in 2016...

Pink Brick Award Posted on April 7, 2014 by Pastor Scott Tonight I was informed by a writer at the Bay Area Reporter that I have been “awarded� the Pink Brick Award by the San Francisco LGBT Pride organization.From their website: “The Pink Brick is a symbol of the first brick hurled at the Stonewall Riots in 1969. This faux award is an opportunity to highlight an individual or organization that has done significant harm to the LGBT community. It is also an opportunity to educate the community and the Pink Brick recipient about relevant issues.� http://www.sfpride.org/pink-brick/Here is his...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Suspended state Sen. Leland Yee pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to bribery and gun charges two weeks after he was arrested as part of an FBI sting targeting political corruption and an alleged organized crime syndicate based in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Yee entered his pleas in federal court to one count of conspiracy to traffic in firearms without a license and illegally import firearms; one count of conspiring to defraud citizens of honest services; and six counts of engaging in a scheme to defraud citizens of honest services. The San Francisco Democrat is accused of conspiring...

July 12, 2002 Barriers Students Faced Count In University Admission Process By DANIEL GOLDEN Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL IRVINE, Calif. -- Stanley Park felt as if the University of California, Los Angeles, had revamped its admissions criteria just for him. UCLA was looking for students who had overcome "life challenges," such as family illness, being raised by a single parent or being the first in the family to go to college. After Mr. Park's parents, Korean immigrants of modest means, divorced three years ago, he lived with his mother. When she developed breast cancer, he began tutoring...

Some Asians' College Strategy: Don't Check 'Asian' JESSE WASHINGTON Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who immigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half Taiwanese and half Norwegian. But when applying to Harvard, Olmstead checked only one box for her race: white. "I didn't want to put 'Asian' down," Olmstead says, "because my mom told me there's discrimination against Asians in the application process." For years, many Asian-Americans have been convinced that it's harder for them to gain admission to the nation's top colleges. Studies show that Asian-Americans meet these...

Asian Americans Turn Democratic Their support for President Obama on Nov. 6 caught many political pundits by surprise. By Taeku Lee and Karthick Ramakrishnan November 23, 2012 As the dust settles on the presidential election, there seems to be a new theory daily as to why Mitt Romney lost and what it signals for the future of the Republican Party. Common to nearly all the speculation are the partisan implications of demographic change. The United States is shifting gradually toward a majority-minority electorate, with ever-growing numbers of Latino and Asian American voters. Notably, these groups are increasingly voting as Democrats....

Bill would allow state colleges to consider race By The Associated Press Thursday, June 3, 2010 at 4:16 p.m. SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The California Assembly has approved a bill that would allow the state's public universities to consider race, gender and other demographic characteristics when they admit students. The bill, AB2047, passed on a 44-24 vote Thursday and now moves to the Senate. It would apply to the University of California and California State University systems. Democratic Assemblyman Ed Hernandez, who introduced the bill, says the legislation is needed to address the education gap in California. Currently, the state's black...

DAVIS SIGNS ASSAULT ON PROPOSITION 209; PLF POISED TO POUNCE Proposition 209 is the voter-passed amendment to the California Constitution which forbids state and local governments from playing favorites by race in public hiring, contracting and education. The latest in a long line of assaults on Prop. 209 by proponents of racial spoils is Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally's bill that would play inventive word games with key mandates in the initiative. The Dymally legislation, A.B. 703, would require that the words "discriminate" and "preference" be interpreted not by the clear definitions that the California Supreme Court has used when applying Prop....

The world gets more competitive every day, so why would California's education elites want to dumb down their public university admissions standards? The answer is to serve the modern liberal piety known as "diversity" while potentially thwarting the will of the voters. The University of California Board of Admissions is proposing to lower to 2.8 from 3.0 the minimum grade point average for admission to a UC school. That 3.0 GPA standard has been in place for 40 years. Students would also no longer be required to take the SAT exams that test for knowledge of specific subjects, such as...

A professor who said he suspects UCLA is cheating to illegally admit black students resigned Thursday from its admissions committee, saying the university refused to provide him the data he needs to investigate his suspicions. "A growing body of evidence strongly suggests that UCLA is cheating on admissions," political science Professor Tim Groseclose wrote in a report he released Thursday. "Specifically, applicants often reveal their own race on the essay portion of the application."Students typically report their race on their applications, but the people who evaluate their files don't see names, race or ethnicity. If race does come up in...

A lot more young people will have a shot at getting into the University of California under new eligibility rules, approved by the UC Board of Regents today, that represent the most sweeping changes in admission standards in almost 50 years. "The bottom line is that it will be more diverse and more fair," said UC President Mark Yudof. The board approved these changes today: -- SAT subject tests will no longer be necessary. -- The pool of applicants who will be considered will widen, but the number guaranteed entry into one of the university's nine undergraduate campuses will shrink....

AP) SAN FRANCISCO — Backers of affirmative action asked a federal appeals court Monday to overturn California's 15-year-old ban on considering race in public college admissions, citing a steep drop in black, Latino and Native American students at the state's elite campuses. A three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeal heard arguments in the latest legal challenge to Proposition 209, the landmark voter initiative that barred racial, ethnic and gender preferences in public education, employment and contracting. The affirmative action ban has withstood multiple challenges since voters approved it in 1996, but advocates say their campaign to...

Affirmative action proponents took a hit Monday as a federal appeals court panel upheld California’s ban on using race, ethnicity and gender in admitting students to public colleges and universities. The ruling marked the second time the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals turned back a challenge to the state’s landmark voter initiative, Proposition 209, which was passed in 1996. 0 Comments Weigh In Corrections? Personal Post . Affirmative action proponents, who had requested that the court reconsider its 1997 decision after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that affirmative action could be used in college admissions, said they...

An historic ballot proposition passed by California voters in 1996 to end race-based admissions to the University of California may have led to more blacks being admitted to UC. “At present, by a wide range of metrics—including relative to state population share and changes in toal UC enrollment—black and Hispanic enrollments are higher than before Proposition 209,” Stuart Taylor, Jr. and Richard Sander write in an amicus brief they filed in a U. S. Supreme Court case. “UC black enrollment had returned to pre-209 levels by 2002 and averaged some 40% above pre-209 levels by 2007.” They filed a brief...

Stunned by an unexpected uprising within their party's minority base, Democratic lawmakers on Monday dropped a push to reverse California's 16-year-old ban on affirmative action in college admissions.

Until this month, supporters of racial preferences in California have enjoyed a cozy narrative. They were able to dismiss the 55 percent of voters who passed Proposition 209, which barred race and gender preferences in university admissions, hiring and public contracts in 1996, as over-entitled fear-obsessed white folks with little understanding of and sympathy for the obstacles that daunt minority students. That ended Monday when California state Sen. Ed Hernandez was forced to put a hold on a measure to allow voters in November to restore racial preferences in public education. It was a huge about-face. His Senate Constitutional...

The backlash by Chinese-American activists against a measure aimed at restoring affirmative action in the admissions process at California's public universities has set off political fisticuffs between ethnic groups accustomed to battling side-by-side.

Two recent events, one on the West Coast and one on the East Coast, demonstrate that after half a century, support for racial preferences in college admissions is getting more and more unsustainable — both politically and intellectually. In California, liberals have long deplored the 1996 passage of Proposition 209, which banned racial preferences at state universities. Its backers pointed out that the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which is often cited as the authority for mandating preferential treatment for racial minorities, actually forbids all racial discrimination. “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race,” Supreme Court chief...

Bowing to pressure from within their party, Democrats in the Legislature on Monday abandoned an attempt to repeal California’s voter-approved ban on affirmative action in the state’s higher education system. Assembly Speaker John Perez said he does not have enough support to place the constitutional amendment before voters in November. Instead, he said lawmakers will form a task force to study the issue of access in higher education. California voters passed Proposition 209 in 1996, banning the use of race and ethnicity in public university admissions, state hiring and contracting. The amendment, SCA5, was initiated to address the drop-off in...

SACRAMENTO -- A legislative push to permit California's public universities to once again consider race and ethnicity in admissions appears to be on life support after an intense backlash from Asian-American parents who fear it will make it harder for their children to get into good schools. :snip: A planned referendum sailed through the state Senate in January without fanfare on a party-line vote, but three Asian-American Democrats who initially backed the measure are now calling for it to be "tabled" before the state Assembly has a chance to vote on it -- a highly unusual move. And it seems...

April 6, 2014 Like a criminal wiping down a crime scene, the California State Senate has scrubbed its website and deleted the online archives of three Democratic state Senators that face criminal charges ranging from weapons trafficking to public corruption.

The only thing I can do with this Glenn Reynolds column is endorse every single word of it. It is absolutely right.....If he hadn’t been forced out of the race by being arrested, what would Leland Yee have done with the California secretary of state post? There’s a question that no one in the media will even think of pursuing.

Court documents allege a California state senator who authored gun control legislation asked for campaign donations in exchange for introducing an undercover FBI agent to an arms trafficker. The allegations against State Sen. Leland Yee were outlined in an FBI affidavit in support of a criminal complaint unsealed Wednesday. The affidavit accuses Yee of conspiracy to deal firearms without a license and to illegally import firearms, though it’s not clear the introduction to the trafficker ever took place.

Washington, D.C. - U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) today released the following statement on the indictment of California State Senator Leland Yee on public corruption and other charges: “I agree with State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg that Leland Yee should immediately step down. If these allegations are true, they are beyond outrageous.  “I support the Justice Department’s crackdown on corruption, which sends an unequivocal message that there is absolutely no place in public life for criminals who violate the public trust and demean public service.”  ###

Shocking enough are the allegations that a long-perceived unassuming state senator tried brokering an international arms deal with military-style rifles and rocket launchers, but Leland Yee may have narrowly escaped an even more ominous label: supporter of terrorism. Yee, whose arrest after an FBI undercover sting shook the California political world last week, would likely have been charged with aiding terrorists if not for a bureaucratic label missing from the militant Filipino group that he is accused of sourcing for an international arms deal, counterterrorism experts told this newspaper. His ties to the group, whose leader has said he personally...

CNN dismissed complaints that the network was not covering last week's shocking arrest of Democrat Leland Yee, the California state senator who was arrested for alleged arms trafficking and bribery, and falsely asserted that it does not give attention to state senators. That standard did not apply to Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis, whom CNN covered relentlessly. This was long before she even considered a gubernatorial run after filibustering a bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks and make those conducted before then safer. Viewers and readers on Friday complained that the network, just like Politico, was not reporting or...

DALY CITY (KPIX 5) — A Daly City dentist was among the 26 people indicted in a corruption scandal involving State Sen. Leland Yee. Dr. Wilson Lim is accused of setting up an arms deal that involved militants in the Philippines. **SNIP** Lim allegedly asked for a list of weapons the agent wanted, and said they would come from the Philippine military in Mindinao through his nephew. Lim also allegedly claimed he could hook the agent up with leadership from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a group well known to Lim’s Filipino patients.

California State Sen. Leland Yee and his campaign consultant Keith Jackson were arrested Wednesday alongside longtime criminal Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow during an FBI raid in San Francisco's Chinatown district that also netted several members of the Ghee Kung Tong gang. The Associated Press reported that the federal charges, which allege the California lawmaker accepted money and campaign donations in exchange for providing official favors and helping broker an arms deal, cast harsh light on Chinatown's tight-knit network of fraternal organizations and one of its most shadowy characters, Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow. Beneath the strings of red paper lanterns and...

FBI agents on Tuesday searched a legislative office belonging to state Sen. Leland Yee, a San Francisco Democrat who was arrested and charged last week as part of a wider federal investigation into criminal activity in San Francisco's Chinatown. The small office is on the fifth floor of the Legislative Office Building across the street from the state Capitol, said Mark Hedlund, a spokesman for Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg. Senate officials discovered that the office was assigned to Yee and informed the FBI, which obtained a warrant allowing the search. Agents had searched Yee's main office in the...

Someone's been vandalizing compact Smart cars in San Francisco, flipping the tiny vehicles on their front and rear ends in the city's streets. NBC Bay Area found four of the targeted Smart cars between Sunday night and Monday morning. Two were found in the Bernal Heights neighborhood on Anderson Street, and another was found a bit south on Sweeny and Bowdoin streets, closer to the Portola district. They were either sitting on their headlights, rear bumpers high in the air, or vice versa. A fourth Smart car -- a small white one with a faded "Obama-Biden" bumper sticker -- was...

The California Senate has erased the names and online archives of three suspended lawmakers entangled in criminal cases. The Senate removed pictures, video clips and legislative archives over the weekend involving Democratic Sens. Rod Wright of Los Angeles, Ron Calderon of Montebello and Leland Yee of San Francisco. All that remains on the websites is information about their Senate districts. The three men have lost the rights and privileges of a senator, which include having a Senate-maintained website, said Mark Hedlund, a spokesman for Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg.

KRASNOYARSK, April 3 (RIA Novosti) Andrei Marmyshev - Fragments of a US bomber that crashed near the Russian city Krasnoyarsk in southern Siberia during World War II have been delivered to San Francisco, where they will form part of a memorial commemorating pilots who lost their lives in the war, a historian in Krasnoyarsk told RIA Novosti. "San Francisco is planning to set up a memorial to pilots who died during the Second World War. The fragments of the Boston bomber will also be used," said Lt. Col. Vyacheslav Filippov, an aviation officer and historian. "For example, they are going...

Sean Penn endorsed Dennis Kucinich for President, after tipping off news agencies of a major political announcement earlier this week. While his choice of candidate may not suprise many, it should have surprised John Edwards. After all, Penn had already given him twice as many greenback endorsements as Kucinich (via the Political Machine): Academy Award-winning actor Sean Penn endorsed Dennis Kucinich for president in San Francisco Friday. Penn made what had been billed as a "major political statement" at San Francisco State University. Andy Juniewicz, National Press Secretary and senior advisor to Kucinich told NBC11 that Penn made the endorsement...

Pacific Gas and Electric was charged on Tuesday with federal felony counts involving safety violations linked to a 2010 natural gas pipeline explosion that killed eight people in the San Francisco Bay Area. The indictment charges the utility with 12 felonies and accuses it of violating numerous federal pipeline safety laws. Federal prosecutors allege that PG&E knowingly relied on erroneous and incomplete information when assessing the safety of the pipeline that eventually ruptured, sparked a fireball and leveled 38 homes in San Bruno.

The stunning arrest of veteran Democrat Leland Yee will erode, at least temporarily, Democratic dominance in the very blue Golden State. Yee, arrested after a five-year FBI sting operation, faces federal charges related to conspiracy to traffic in firearms without a license and accepting campaign funds in exchange for political favors. An LA Times headline read, “Even old hands are stunned by Yee allegations.” “If there ever has been a more nauseating corruption scandal in Sacramento, I’m not aware of it, writes one observer. “The notion of a legislator masquerading as a gun control crusader while offering to help a...

California is the lifestyle incubator of the nation. And now the trendy anti-Semitic thuggery that debuted at California’s public universities has metastasized across America, all the way to the elite halls of Vassar. Before we discuss the fashionable pogrom that just took place on the Vassar campus where Jackie Kennedy once strolled in pearls, let’s look back at May 7, 2002. On that day, Professor Laurie Zoloth, Director of the Jewish Studies program at San Francisco State University, attended a “Peace in the Middle East” campus rally, where they prayed for peace in Israel. Wrote Zoloth: “As soon as the...

Leland Yee should be making national headlines. A Democratic state senator from San Francisco, a statewide candidate until this week, and a rising member of Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein’s Democratic political machine, was arrested on Wednesday by the Justice Department for wire fraud, corruption, and his alleged involvement in illegal gun deal between Chinatown gangsters and Islamist militants. **SNIP** Yet four of the most prominent news outlets in America — CNN, USA Today, Politico and the Chicago Sun-Times — made no mention of the Leland Yee scandal within two days of the story breaking. When Politico finally ran a...

As state Sen. Leland Yee aggressively campaigned in the 2011 San Francisco mayor's race, he blasted interim Mayor Ed Lee as beholden to City Hall power brokers with "selfish interests" and vowed to "throw them out" if elected. At the same time, Yee was allegedly soliciting $10,000 from an undercover FBI agent posing as a real estate developer who had already illegally funneled $11,000 to Yee's campaign, telling the agent to "cover your tracks," and boasting that "there's tremendous opportunity in local levels ... because whoever's gonna be the mayor controls everything." **SNIP** Instead, it's of a man driven by...

Catherine Stefani has an article up over at the SacBee talking about how she became the head of the Kaliforniastan chapter of Moms Demand Action… Its not much more than a shameless plug and link bait for the civilian disarmament cult, but I thought it was pretty interesting for a couple of reasons… one, I had never heard of Catherine Stefani before this and two, I thought it was incredibly interesting how she talks about how she became involved in MDA:

When California first put the issue of building a high-speed bullet train between Los Angeles and San Francisco before voters, Gov. Jerry Brown made all sorts of nifty-sounding promises about how efficient, convenient, and fiscally sound a choice the rail line would be for Californians. All of those promises have more or less turned out to be a sham by now, as the train’s costs have exploded and its deadlines pushed way back, and now it appears that that less-than-three-hour ride Californians were originally promised… well, probably isn’t. ... who really considers a mounting “wall of debt” and a slew...

SAN FRANCISCO – A California state senator who authored gun control legislation asked for campaign donations in exchange for introducing an undercover FBI agent to an arms trafficker with links to separatist groups in the Philippines, court documents revealed Wednesday. Investigators said Sen. Leland Yee discussed helping the agent get weapons worth $500,000 to $2.5 million, including shoulder-fired missiles, and explained the entire process of acquiring them from a Philippine military captain and separatist groups to bringing them to the US, according to an affidavit by FBI agent Emmanuel Pascua....

Lawmakers pass bill to protect language freedom California would protect the freedom of a person to speak any language he or she chooses in a business establishment under a measure approved by the state Legislature today. The bill, authored by Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, is the lawmaker's response to a controversial proposal by the LPGA last fall requiring golfers to speak "effective English." The organization scuttled the proposal after loud objections by Yee and others, and the Democrat says this legislation will ensure it does not happen again. "No one in the state of California should be compelled to...

Democratic state Sen. Leland Yee wasn't officially running to be the next mayor of San Francisco when he spent an eye-popping $1.1 million in one year on his 2010 re-election bid - a race where he faced no primary battle and no serious general election competition. A Chronicle analysis of Yee's financial disclosure forms shows that he paid more than $471,000 in the 2010 election cycle to his San Francisco-based political consultant, Jim Stearns, now his strategist in the mayor's race. .. Yee also paid almost $121,000 to San Francisco pollster Ben Tulchin in 2010. That's nearly as much as...