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Ricardo Ramirez seemed an unlikely success story: At 57, the former Marine Corps judo instructor had spent more than 20 years as a paving contractor and had little to show for it but a long string of lawsuits, business failures and bankruptcies. Then, in 1998, the struggling businessman appeared to hit upon a way to make it in a new venture. Taking advantage of city and state programs designed to help minority-owned businesses, Ramirez started turning out low-priced, locally produced concrete for projects that included earthquake retrofit work on the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge. By 2003, his...

Three years after the extension opened, ridership is nowhere near what BART officials had hoped. The route is losing money, and BART is embroiled in a funding fight with another Peninsula transit agency. Prior to construction, BART projected there would be 17,800 average daily boardings to and from the airport by the year 2010. During the first year of operation that began in 2003, there were 5,864 daily boardings, the second year 6,675, and the third year 7,116. Likewise, ridership to and from the three other stations on the airport extension route -- in South San Francisco, San Bruno and...

Hello my fellow Freepers. How are you today?I am writing this vanity out of sense of frustration more than anything else. Last weekend I was in San Francisco with two of my children when I noticed the massive amounts of congestion caused by a few loudmouthed, deviant perverts from the homosexual community. I had forgotten that this is their "Gay Pride" week and much to my chagrin and the embarrassment my sons experienced when those less modest sodomites gleefully strolled down the streets and sidewalks, I couldn't help but wonder why this nation continues to support this corrupt, vial city...

Friends, I bear bad news. SF editor and founder of Baen Books, Jim Baen, died quietly around 5PM yesterday, June 28, 2006. The source link has his obituary, written by his friend and fellow author and editor, David Drake. Editor extraordinaire, friend of the fans, patriot. Jim will be greatly missed. . . .

Police are looking for a man who turned the tables on three would-be robbers and shot them early Tuesday in the Tenderloin. Police say the three first tried to rob a man at 3:30 a.m. at Turk and Leavenworth streets, but he was able to escape. The man then watched as the suspects confronted a couple and tried to grab a backpack from them, police said. The man with the backpack pulled a gun and shot the three, police said. One man was wounded in the leg and was quickly arrested, and a second man wounded in the arm and...

Police are searching for a would-be victim who fought back against three armed robbers with his own gun early this morning in the Tenderloin neighborhood, according to San Francisco police Lt. John Loftus. The three men, one armed with a shotgun, approached a man and a woman on the corner of Leavenworth and Turk streets around 4 a.m. and held them up. Instead of complying, however, the man pulled out a gun of his own and shot all three assailants. Loftus said the man was acting in self defense, and though he is currently being sought for questioning, police are...

Last week, a state judge struck down a ban on handguns in San Francisco passed by city voters, arguing that the measure conflicted with state laws that regulate handguns. Proposition H, which won a 58 percent majority last year, would have outlawed the possession of handguns by all city residents (but not nonresidents or tourists) except law enforcement officers and people who used the guns for "specific professional purposes." It also would have barred the manufacture, sale, and distribution of all guns and ammunition within the city. The National Rifle Association sued the city the day after the measure passed,...

A San Francisco Superior Court judge on Monday threw out the city's voter-approved ban on handguns, ruling that state law trumps local jurisdictions in gun control matters. Proposition H, approved last November with 58 percent of the vote, banned the possession, manufacture, distribution, sale and transfer of firearms and ammunition within San Francisco. (Exceptions were made for specific professional purposes, such as police or security work.) The National Rifle Association sued the city, arguing that state law preempts local gun control ordinances. The judge agreed. Both the National Rifle Association and the Second Amendment Foundation called the decision a victory...

June 10, 2006 was the date for the World Naked Bike Ride, which -- as its name suggests -- is an international political event at which protesters take off all their clothes and ride bicycles through various cities around the globe. The focus of the protest is theoretically to encourage people to give up their "dependence on fossil fuel" -- but in practice the messages (which the organizers tell participants to paint directly on their bodies) are more scattered, ranging from "free speech" to presidential politics. I attended the San Francisco version of the event, which started at noon in...

SAN FRANCISCO -- A taxi driver who was wrongly identified in Chronicle photographs as a San Francisco police officer with a history of excessive force settled his lawsuit against the newspaper today for an undisclosed amount of money. Jack Neeley Jr., 42, of San Francisco sued The Chronicle in Superior Court last month, saying he had suffered emotional distress and embarrassment and had to cut his work hours because of the mistaken photos. Neeley's picture ran on the front page and an inside page Feb. 5 to illustrate a story about Officer John Haggett, who has been suspended three times...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Clasping purple irises, calling out names and clapping to a gospel beat, San Francisco paid tribute Thursday to the thousands of residents who died from AIDS in the last 25 years and honored the thousands more still living with the HIV virus. About 200 people gathered in a performing arts center to hear elected officials, AIDS activists and long-term survivors of the disease reflect on the epidemic that was formally identified on June 5, 1981. That was the date the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a paper about a mysterious illness that had been...

he San Francisco Board of Education faces big challenges: dealing with perennial budget shortfalls, lagging test scores for African American students, crafting a new school-assignment plan, hiring a new superintendent and trying to reverse a decline in enrollment. But at its last meeting on May 23, the big issue was whether to boot Junior ROTC from the city's public schools in protest of the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy outlawing openly gay service members. An angry crowd turned out to denounce the proposal, which will be voted on this summer. To Faith Luber, it was yet another distraction from...

Life in the San Francisco Unified School District often seems to lurch from one financial crisis to another: Lay-offs. Program cuts. School closures. Frantic contract negotiations nearly ending in strikes. But according to new figures provided by the U.S. Census, San Francisco public schools are rolling in money compared to other districts around the state and even the nation. They spend more per student than the vast majority of other large districts in California and even most of the big districts around the country. So why all the hand-wringing about money? At the same time the school district faces declining...

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early half of San Francisco residents feel unsafe or somewhat unsafe from crime, especially while riding public transit, according to a new survey funded by The City. The San Francisco Safety Network, a nonprofit conglomeration of neighborhood community groups, polled 2,400 residents representing all 10 police districts. They found that city residents felt the least safe from crime on the street and on public transit, where 48 percent of residents felt at least somewhat unsafe; respondents felt most secure at home. In the Bayview, where more than 70 percent of residents reported feeling unsafe on the streets, the Police Department’s...

Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her mega-millionaire husband, Dick Blum, have a bit of fence mending to do with their soon-to-be neighbors in San Francisco's Gold Coast. It seems that workers remodeling the Pacific Heights mansion that the couple just bought leveled all the green in the adjoining public garden -- without the city's approval. And not just any green -- we're talking about a Tivoli-style garden just off the front entrance of the couple's $16.5 million abode, which sits at the foot of Vallejo Street, between the Presidio and some of the city's most posh residences. The garden is actually...

This should be a good time for San Francisco's public schools. Test scores are rising, the district has earned national praise, and voters have approved a measure that will add millions of dollars to the school budget each year. Instead, the schools are at a crisis point, and the main cause is beyond their control: High housing prices are spurring many families to leave the city. As a result, enrollment is declining, schools are closing and officials are concerned the turmoil will reinforce negative perceptions that have helped give San Francisco the state's highest percentage of children in private schools,...

SACRAMENTO -- Hoping to head off a messy fight for the Democratic Party endorsement, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom will ask the Democratic candidates for governor to avoid attacking each other. "I think there's no greater gift for the Republicans than for this convention to dissolve into finger-pointing and infighting," Newsom told The Associated Press in an interview Friday. He will open the state party's weekend convention with its kickoff speech Friday night. Newsom said Democrats nationally and in California appear weak compared to Republicans because they have shrunk from defending their ideals. Although he has been fiercely critical of...

Diana Sue Sylvester had been living in San Francisco only six months when she was raped and killed in the Sunset District after walking home from work at UCSF, three days before Christmas in 1972. On Friday, San Francisco police said DNA evidence and a computer search of sex offender records finally had led them to a suspect. John Puckett, 72, a retired carpet installer living in Stockton, was arrested at a trailer he shared with his wife, Marlene, and is expected to be arraigned next week on murder charges in the slaying of the 25-year-old nurse. "Even though he's...

Decades of Denial About AIDS Buried amid the findings of a recently released study of San Francisco’s gay population is an insight that gay activists and the intellectual enablers of the political “gay liberation” movement, including many self-styled “experts,” had long labored to suppress: gays remain the most at-risk group for the transmission of AIDS. According to the study, conducted by William McFarland, the head of HIV/AIDS statistics San Francisco's Department of Public Health, more than one out of every four gay males living in San Francisco--nearly 26 percent--is infected with the HIV virus. Of the estimated 63,577 gay males...