Free Republic

bout 30% of San Francisco was blacked out Saturday, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. said, as a power outage grew to about 130,000 customers. PG&E spokesman Edgar Hoida said the cause of the outage was under investigation. PG&E's online outage status reported 124,555 customers without power, or 30.1% of San Francisco, at 6:44 p.m. Outages were first reported in the Inner Sunset neighborhood at about 9:40 a.m., affecting about 14,700 customers. At 10:10 a.m., more outages were reported impacting about 25,000 customers in the Richmond District, the Presidio, Golden Gate Park, Inner Sunset District, and near the Civic Center. Scattered...

When the number of kids locked up at San Francisco's juvenile hall reached record numbers last spring, Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered the population at the hall to be reduced and the city to recommit to partnering with community groups that work intensively with troubled youth while allowing them to live at home. Nine months later, however, executives with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a leading private funder of such initiatives around the country, say the $587,500 it has given San Francisco since 2001 to help achieve that very goal has been wasted and that change is happening at "a snail's...