Free Republic

Isis supporters have threatened Twitter employees, including co-founder Jack Dorsey specifically, with death over the social network’s practice of blocking accounts associated with the group. In an Arabic post uploaded to the image-sharing site JustPaste.it, the group told Twitter that “your virtual war on us will cause a real war on you”. It warned that Jack Dorsey and Twitter employees have “become a target for the soldiers of the Caliphate and supporters scattered among your midst!” “You started this failed war … We told you from the beginning it’s not your war, but you didn’t get it and kept closing...

Someone in San Francisco is missing a leg, and the cops have it. It’s worth $7,000, and probably a lot more to the person it belongs to. It’s a prosthetic right leg, and it comes with a man’s brown shoe, in good repair. Officer Julio Bandoni found the leg last week at Eighth and Market streets. It was leaning against a tree trunk, in front of a mobile-phone store.

SAN FRANCISCO — Under pressure from his Catholic schools community, the archbishop of the San Francisco archdiocese is peeling back strict guidelines he proposed for teachers that would require them to reject homosexuality, use of contraception, and other “evil” behavior. Most significantly, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone said he is dropping an effort to designate high school teachers as “ministers,” which, under a 2012 US Supreme Court ruling, would have eliminated them from government-mandated employee protections by placing them solely under Church control. In an hour-long meeting with The San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board, Cordileone said he is forming a committee of...

It was, the mayor of San Francisco said, a “shocking start” to the year for a city amid a technology boom with soaring rents and construction cranes, fashionable restaurants and gentrifying neighborhoods. In January, four young men sitting in a stolen car were gunned down in a trendy neighborhood near City Hall. Ten days later, a mother was shot dead outside her home in front of her three children. In another, a blood-spattered woman staggered into a restaurant seeking help for bullet wounds, and a man was found shot dead in an SUV outside. With the homicide count climbing to...

SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) – Students and parents from schools controlled by the Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco protested at Saint Mary’s Cathedral on Ash Wednesday, saying the church should stay out of teachers’ bedrooms and drop proposed morality clauses in teacher contracts. On Ash Wednesday, one of the holiest days on the Catholic calendar, the students and parents are hoping Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone will change his mind on the clauses, as the church heads into 40 days of Lenten reflection. "We’re here because if Jesus were alive today, he’d be standing right next to us,” Mairead Ahlbach, a student...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The nation's top labor official flew Monday to California in an attempt to resolve a damaging contract dispute between West Coast dockworkers and their employers. U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez headed for San Francisco, where months-long negotiations between the dockworkers union and a maritime association of companies have come to a halt. So, too, has the movement of billions of dollars of cargo that is supposed to pass through 29 seaports from Southern California to Seattle. The ports are a critical trade link with Asia and the gateway not just for imports such as electronics,...

Shortly after 2 a.m. on April 6, 2010, a guard at Salinas Valley State Prison noticed Alan Ager's cellmate trying to stuff something under a mattress. It was Ager, blood trickling from his mouth and a cloth noose tied around his neck. The convicted child molester died 10 days later without regaining consciousness, his death earning his cellmate a second life sentence. California state prisoners are killed at a rate that is double the national average — and sex offenders like Ager account for a disproportionate number of victims, according to an Associated Press analysis of corrections records.

**SNIP** The charges against most defendants, including Chow, remain the same as in a previous indictment, but the new document added two money laundering conspiracy counts against Yee and Jackson. All of the defendants are being re-arraigned on the revised 230-count indictment, known as the second superseding indictment, last week and this week. Chow, 54, of San Francisco, is accused of conspiring to racketeer, or to operate a continuing criminal enterprise that allegedly included selling drugs and stolen property and money laundering. He is also charged with conspiring to receive and transport stolen liquor, conspiring to traffic in stolen and...

Being a San Francisco liberal means never having to say you're sorry. Or wrong. Take Nancy Pelosi, please. Five years ago, California's genius Bay Area Democrat declared that government unemployment checks generate job growth. Yes, really. "Let me say about unemployment insurance," she told reporters, "this is one of the biggest stimuluses (sic) to our economy. Economists will tell you, this money is spent quickly. It injects demand into the economy and is job creating." She babbled on: "It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name, because, again, it is money that is needed for families...

She’s back! Danielle Lei, the entrepreneurial San Francisco Girl Scout who made international headlines in 2014 with her sales table’s location — in front of a medical marijuana dispensary — is back for another year and is already cleaning house. ~snip~ Lei reports selling a total of 208 boxes in about two hours Sunday — nearly doubling her four-day sales campaign total to 560. “That’s pretty cool,” Lei wrote The Green Cross. “ I would not have sold that many in four days if I did not sell in front of your store.”

A man who was arrested and later released last week in connection with the case of a dismembered body found on a San Francisco street has died. San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr told The San Francisco Chronicle Sunday that Mark Jeffrey Andrus, 54, had died after admitting himself to a local hospital Saturday. The cause of death has not been officially revealed, but the paper reported that Andrus died after going into septic shock due to "drug-related reasons." "I'm very sad to hear of his passing," Andrus' attorney, Public Defender Jeff Adachi, said in a statement. "From what I...

A Berkeley, California man died last December after paramedics were delayed nearly an hour because of an unruly protest against police brutality, recently released records show. Berkleyside, a self-described “independent news site” serving the Berkeley area, reports that the 62-year-old Alvin Henry Jones Jr. would have normally received treatment in minutes. However, due to a nearby #BlackLivesMatters protest, paramedics were instead ordered to go to a local fire station and await a police escort before attempting to rescue Jones. It took 52 minutes to get Jones to a hospital, after which he died two days later. Paperwork filed by the...

Former state Sen. Leland Yee pleaded not guilty Thursday to an expanded indictment in his corruption case that included two new charges of money-laundering. The San Francisco Democrat was first charged in April, along with more than two dozen other defendants, of accepting $62,000 in bribes from FBI agents posing as contributors in exchange for legislative favors, and for illegally importing firearms from the Philippines.

Former state Sen. Leland Yee’s campaign committee for last year’s secretary of state race has spent $128,000 on attorney's fees since he was indicted on federal corruption charges, he reported this week. The practice is legal, but one ethics expert said it should be restricted. "Unfortunately California’s relatively weak restrictions on the use of surplus campaign funds mean that politicians can turn these accounts into personal slush funds," said Sarah Swanbeck, an advocate for the group Common Cause.

Borderlands Books, based in San Francisco, put a notice up on its website the other day that caught the attention of economist and IBD Brain Trust member Mark Perry. "Borderlands is Closing," the notice said.[snip] But as Perry points out, the reason Borderlands is closing isn't just because of Amazon.

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Independent bookstores have faced tough times for quite a while. In San Francisco, neighborhood businesses have been passionately protected, so it's hard to believe that an initiative passed by voters to raise the minimum wage is driving a Mission District bookstore out of business. San Francisco's minimum wage is currently $11.05 an hour. By July of 2018, the minimum wage in San Francisco will be $15 an hour. That increase is forcing Borderlands Bookstore to write its last chapter now. When actor Scott Cox took a job at Borderlands Books he didn't do it for the...

Predictably, the UK’s far-Left Guardian is thrilled that authoritarian thugs defaced Pamela Geller’s AFDI ads calling attention to Islamic Jew-hatred in San Francisco buses. They either do not realize or do not care that once the principle is established that an unpopular group’s freedom of speech can be forcibly silenced, it can be turned on them: one day they may be in the group that is out of favor, and then they will regret the position they took against the freedom of speech. But at that point it will be too late. Anyway, as these Leftist goons applaud the extinguishing...

I call them the Busybody Brigade (The BB for short). The Left’s army of activists who look for problems that don’t actually exist, and solve them with restrictions that don’t actually work. Their motto: “There should be a law….” They are meddlesome. They are relentless. And they are on a quest to influence almost every decision you make, from sunrise to sunset. It’s all in an attempt to “better the collective” and control your life. Let them, help you. After all, it takes a village. The BB is alive and well in Seattle, where a new ordinance on the books...

"Many people were inconvenienced by the Montgomery bus boycotts. Do you think Rosa Parks should pay restitution for that?" Mollie Costello hectored the Bay Area Rapid Transit board at a recent hearing. Costello is one of the Black Friday 14 -- 14 protesters arrested Nov. 28 for shutting down the West Oakland BART station and four of five transit lines for three hours to protest the killing of unarmed black men by police officers. Protesters of those arrests, with the slogan "No Business As Usual," have three demands: 1) The BART board drop criminal charges against Costello and her 13...

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — San Francisco police detained a person of interest Friday night in a case involving a dismembered body found stuffed into a suitcase Wednesday in the South of Market neighborhood.

Video at link of Pelosi's comments. (CNSNews.com) – Responding to statements made by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi--who would not say at her press briefing last week if a 20-week-old unborn child is a "human being"--Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco said that it is a “scientific fact that human life begins at conception” and that “no Catholic can dissent in good conscience” from Church teaching on the sanctity of life. At her Jan. 22 briefing Pelosi said she had "great standing" to speak on the issue of abortion, noting that she was a "Catholic and a mom of five"...

The attention starved pro-abortion group Stop Patriarchy made the rounds this week at pro-life rallies during the various march for life events. On Thursday, a handful of pro-choicers from Stop Patriarchy were arrested attempting to block hundreds of thousands of pro-lifers marching in D.C. at the March for Life, chanting that pro-lifers are for female enslavement! More video and pics here Friday, the group was in Oakland, California calling for a Ferguson style revolution after disrupting Black pro-life leaders at a rally there. (read story here) Bragging on their website, “As politicians continue to ramp up a national assault on...

Passengers on board two Delta flights at Kennedy Airport were taken off each of the aircrafts Monday night as authorities investigated a bomb threat that turned out to be unfounded, officials say. An anonymous phone call was placed to Delta headquarters just after 6 p.m. suggesting a pipe bomb was on Delta Flight 468, according to Port Authority spokesman Joe Pentangelo. There are two Delta flights with the number 468: one has a Boeing 757 plane landing at JFK from San Francisco at 8 p.m., with 171 passengers on board, according to Delta Airlines. The other flight has a Boeing...

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - Accused Chinatown gangster Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow has refused to sign on to a protective order that will allow defense attorneys to receive evidence from federal prosecutors, including audio recordings and video surveillance, from a five-year undercover investigation that led to his arrest, and the arrest of 26 others in March. Attorneys for the federal government on Thursday filed a motion to compel Chow to cooperate, noting that nearly all the other defendants have signed on, and only one other defendant has not signed because of a likely substitution of counsel in the near future. According...

(06-11) 14:24 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- Friends, neighbors and a former fellow inmate of Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow took turns testifying Wednesday that the onetime Chinatown gang leader had turned his life around and should be released on bail while fighting money-laundering charges. Describing the witnesses as sincere but not fully informed, U.S. Magistrate Nathanael Cousins refused to release Chow from jail, where he has been kept since his arrest in April. While Chow has engaged in "community activities of a positive nature" since his release from federal prison in 2003 after serving time for racketeering, federal prosecutors presented evidence...

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - Suspended California state Sen. Leland Yee could face a jury as early as June for charges of political corruption and conspiracy to import guns. At a scheduling conference on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer said Yee will be tried along with his political consultant Keith Jackson, who also faces drug and murder-for-hire charges. Breyer said those charges will be tried separately, but lawyers for the defendants, including Yee's lawyer James Lassart, were not satisfied. "The firearms charges are going to be extremely prejudicial. The government has acquired 50 to 70 different firearms that, undoubtedly to...

**SNIP** The San Francisco Democrat was a fairly high-profile member of the California Legislature, but not a flamboyant one or one who was the subject of gossip and rumor. And that’s probably why the news in March landed with such a bombshell, when the 66-year old former psychologist was arrested and charged with not only corruption, but also with allegedly participating in a scheme to smuggle illegal weapons into the United States. The irony was impossible to miss: gun trafficking charges against a Democrat who made a name for himself as a fierce advocate of gun control, a politician who...

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- San Francisco police confirm four African-American adult males were shot dead in a car in the Hayes Valley neighborhood at Laguna and Page streets. Police say their ShotSpotter -- a gunshot location system -- activated near Laguna and Page streets. They said they also got reports of a car crash. A lot of bullets flew on Laguna Street and some homes were hit. One bullet ended up lodged in someone's refrigerator. There is no description of the suspect or suspects involved. Police don't know if there was more than one shooter or what the motive was.

White is right — in activists’ book.  That is, the right color to ignore when it comes to stories of people shot by police.So says American Thinker editor Rick Moran while reporting on the shooting of a pellet-gun wielding white man on Sunday by San Francisco police. The Washington Post describes the incident: The shooting occurred in the parking lot of the San Francisco Police Department’s Mission Station [at 5:20 p.m. PT]. In a statement, the department said that the confrontation began when police sergeants asked a man in the station’s restricted lot to leave. Instead, the man stood in...

Speaker Mop & Glo made headlines for her call to investigate opponents of the Ground Zero mosque, but there was something else about her remarks that should have raised your hackles: “There is no question there is a concerted effort to make this a political issue by some. And I join those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded,” she said. “How is this being ginned up that here we are talking about Treasure Island, something we’ve been working on for decades, something of great interest to our community as we...

The University of Michigan’s decision this week to commit at least $40 million to Jim Harbaugh over the next seven years raised quite a few eyebrows. Forty million dollars — $5 million a year to start, along with a $2 million signing bonus — for a football coach? Can jock-Armageddon, when the entire bloated-with-corporate-dollars sports world explodes, be far behind? Actually, Armageddon has already pretty much come and gone in college athletics. The attitude of many players at the most visible schools was summed up by a tweet sent two years ago by Cardale Jones, who will start at quarterback...

Silence isn't something people usually associate with middle school, but twice a day the halls of Visitacion Valley School in San Francisco fall quiet as the sixth, seventh and eighth grade students meditate for fifteen minutes. And school administrators tell NBC News that the violence outside of the school, which is situated in one of San Francisco's poorest neighborhoods, was spilling into the school and affecting the students' demeanor. "The kids see guns on a daily basis," the school's athletic director, Barry O'Driscoll said, adding, "there would be fights here three-to-five times a week."

Lion on the loose: Former San Francisco talk radio host Bernie Ward, who has spent the past seven years in federal prison for distributing child pornography online, was quietly freed Friday.

San Francisco 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh has reportedly accepted Michigan's offer to return to his alma mater and become the Wolverines' next head coach, according to CSNBayArea.com, which reports that Harbaugh will be announced at a press conference in Ann Arbor on Tuesday morning. Jason Cole of Bleacher Report and writer John U. Bacon, author of several books about Michigan football, also reported on Saturday that Harbaugh was expected to accept the Michigan job.

SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) — Members of San Francisco’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community are marching Christmas Eve morning and plan to shutdown Highway 101 at Octavia Street in a protest over recent police violence.

A startling new anti-gun ad released by a San Francisco-based production company encourages children to commit a series of crimes by stealing their parents’ guns and turning them over to school officials, The Daily Caller reported Monday. Sleeper 13 Productions released the controversial video on Dec. 13. It shows a pouty, young boy wandering into his parents’ bedroom, stealing a handgun out of their dresser drawer and then shoving it into his backpack

The San Francisco 49ers will reportedly fire head coach Jim Harbaugh "within two days" of the end of the team's season, Jay Glazer of Fox Sports reports. Harbaugh has one year remaining on the five-year, $25 million deal he signed in 2011.

I'm watching the 49er San Diego and the QB is doing the call at the line and much the way Peyton Manning yells out "OMAHA!", Karpernik calls out "OBAMA!" I had to run it back 3 or 4 times to make sure.

Full title: Cop charged with choking and beating a HOSPITAL PATIENT - after he tried to claim the victim attacked him but was caught on video A San Francisco sheriff's deputy allegedly choked and beat a hospital patient who walked with a cane - then lied on the police report to cover his tracks. Michael Lewelling, 33, was accused of approaching a sleeping man as he started to wake up, knocking away his walking cane, grabbing his neck, then arresting him. He then filed a police report claiming that the man started the fight by attacking him with the cane,...

McDonald’s and its franchisees illegally retaliated against employees for participating in union-related activities, the National Labor Relations Board’s top lawyer alleged Friday in a case with sweeping industry implications. NLRB general counsel Richard Griffin announced Friday he will issue 13 complaints involving 78 charges against franchises and McDonald’s USA, LLC. Though many of these alleged labor violations were committed by independent franchise owners, Griffin ruled earlier this year that McDonald’s can be held liable for those actions as a so-called joint employer, leaving the corporatrion — and potentially other franchisors — exposed to such claims. McDonald’s said the decision will...

To save time and syllables, we’re going journo-green today. Thus “common sense” will be replaced by “it,” as in “getting it.” And that’s the point: “it” doesn’t matter, not anymore. It doesn’t matter that the absurd, the grossly inaccurate and the just plain stupid easily can be eliminated. It is what it is. And that’s it. There will be no deviation from, let alone elimination of, the ridiculous, no matter how self-evident.

State Senate Democrats have decided to resume the annual Pro Tem Cup golf fundraiser in 2015, a year after the event was canceled in the wake of criminal charges filed against three Democratic Senators. The event at Torrey Pines golf course in San Diego is the Senate Democrats' largest political fundraiser for the state party and has been criticized for allowing special interests to mingle with lawmakers in exchange for tickets costing between $15,000 and $65,000 per person. The indictment of Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) on public corruption charges a week before this year's event was to be held...

Natasha Bertrand December 11, 2014PG&E is reporting that 155,000 customers are without power in San Francisco after a massive storm hit Northern California early Thursday morning and fried a Civic Center substation. Officials are preparing for the possibility of debris slides and tidal waves as a result of the storm. As much as 8 inches of rain could fall over 24 hours, and up to 2 feet of snow is expected to blanket Sierra Nevada ski resorts. Heavy rain is long overdue in California, which has been suffering from one of its most severe droughts on record. The storm, which...

Flight 623, bound for Phoenix, had just taken off from San Francisco when an unidentified woman went into labor.

Hating Jews at Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley’s graduate student labor union (UAW 2865) is voting on whether the State of Israel should continue to exist. No one is waiting with bated breath for the tally of a vote whose implementation would violate both California and United States law. It is one of those exercises in academic hubris laced with ignorance for which Berkeley is famous. After all, students know slightly less American history after four years at the prestigious institution than before they crossed through Sather Gate. One of the leaders of the anti-Israel movement is Lara Kiswani,...

The remains of a World War II airman from San Francisco, who was missing for seven decades after his plane was shot down over New Guinea, will be returned to the United States and buried with full honors, the Department of Defense said Monday.

Even though San Francisco has been known to be home of the radical gay agenda, and where selective abortion based upon sex has been pushed by government officials, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi seems to think the city is on par with Biblical scripture. During a Thanksgiving day speech at the San Francisco Interfaith Council, Nancy Pelosi stated that San Francisco is the “model” for living the gospel (20:30-20:42): “And I think that we have to challenge all of us in public policy, certainly not in San Francisco which is the model of living the gospel, but in public policy to say,...

Academics have long vexed over urban studies, putting the flight out of major cities down to everything from technology to racism. Yet and still, in the last half century, “some cities were not declining despite these immutable forces and some cities turned around despite these forces,” Stephen J. K Walters pointed out in a seminar on November 20, 2014 at the Cato Institute. Walters is an economist at Loyola University in Baltimore. “If you want a healthy city, secure the property rights that go with capital,” Walters advised. One way of doing so is through tax cuts. When California voters...

Police are investigating the possibility that a 12-year-old San Francisco girl who has been missing for almost two weeks is a victim of sex trafficking. Imani Howell was last seen getting onto a 19-Polk bus for school on Nov. 10, police said. People have reported seeing her in the Mission District and along Oakland’s International Boulevard, known hot spots for the trafficking of young girls.

A window washer was critically injured Friday morning when he plunged from a building in downtown San Francisco, falling 11 floors before smashing onto the roof of a moving car, authorities said. The impact at California and Montgomery Streets caved in the roof, back window and trunk of a 2002 Toyota Camry, but the man was conscious when paramedics arrived.