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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...