Free Republic

Terry Childs, the man whom prosecutors allege hijacked San Francisco's municipal computer network, will get another chance to meet with mayor Gavin Newsom. And this time the tête-à-tête will be in court instead of jail. Childs, a network engineer, was hired by the city to work on the municipal network, which is used for city employee payroll and other services. When a dispute arose with his boss, Childs was jailed and refused to turn over critical system information such as passwords to anyone but Newsom. Defense Attorney Richard Shikman has as the court to have the criminal charges of felony...

"OK, so Jimmy Stewart is sitting in his DeSoto right where that white minivan is parked — right there!" says author Aaron Leventhal, as knowledgeable an Alfred Hitchcock fanatic as you are bound to find. "And he's looking between those two pillars — right over here — at Kim Novak, who's coming out of her apartment building to get into her green Jaguar and go wandering through the city." We're standing at the corner of Mason and Sacramento streets atop Nob Hill in San Francisco, and we're about to follow, 50 years later, in the footsteps of Stewart, Novak —...

S.F. mayor drops bid for blue-ribbon panel, names aide to solicit ideas across the U.S. Mayor Gavin Newsom, faced with strong opposition to his call for a blue-ribbon panel to change the San Francisco Police Department's culture, told The Chronicle on Tuesday he has abandoned that plan and instead will ask national experts to recommend reforms. Newsom said that he has assigned Allen Nance, director of the Mayor's Office on Criminal Justice, to consult experts across the country and to give him a preliminary report by fall on organizational and operational changes needed to reform the department. "The idea of...