Customs and Border Protection seized more than a few pounds of opium on Tuesday at package delivery ability in Oakland, Calif.

CBP officers conduct examination of international cargo experimental anomaly in two packages arriving from Thailand. Opium, wrapped in plastic and concealed inside false walls of drums, was found in a shipment destined for Northern California. More than 22 pounds (approximately 10,261 grams) of opium was discovered.


Opium, derived from poppy plant secretion, is a Schedule II narcotic, which contains morphine. The morphine is extracted from the opium and used to create heroin. Heroin is an illegal, highly addictive drug, and its use is a serious problem in America. It is both the most abused and most rapidly acting of the opiates.

Assistant Director of Field Operation for San Francisco Leticia Romero said, "In addition to our primary role of preventing terrorists and terrorism-related articles from entering the U.S., CBP takes active measures to interdict narcotics at the gateways to our country."

Mayor Gavin Newsom envisions Market road without cars and without the nearly dozen Muni bus lines and the historic F-line. The City is in the middle of a six-month trial that aim at warning the amount of private automobiles on the major thoroughfare, and the mayor says that if the data backs it up, he favors an development of the vehicle ban and also moving toward remove Muni from the street.


The present vehicle ban trial begins Sept. 29 and auto traveling eastbound on Market avenue have been compulsory to make right turn at Sixth and Eighth street. The travel measures have been joined with other revitalization pains along the mid-Market stretch, as well as sidewalk seating, landscaped street medians, replanted trees, revamped transit station entrances and a series of art installation, with those placed in abandoned storefronts.

One plan he said, is to reroute Muni to Mission road or another nearby street so that Market Street could be transformed into a place solely for cyclists and pedestrians, and include such amenities as tables and chairs in the center of the street. Newsom said the plan is a long way from actuality, but said the present test on Market Street could lay the groundwork.

"That's not being contemplated in the immediate term, but data collection will afford us the chance to determine if that’s a viable option," he said. The decision is still out on the impact of restrict cars on Market Street, particularly for business, said Carolyn Diamond, decision-making director of the Market Street Association.


"We're still kind of waiting for the data on that," she said. Diamond and others are on-board with car limits, so long as the idea remains a trial. However, the response to banning Muni on Market Street established more skepticism.

"I think a lot of people would be upset," she said. "I can't imagine Mission Street being capable of conduct all that traffic." Tom Radulovich, founder of Livable City, said he's for revamping Market and Mission Street, saying neither "has worked very well for transit, bicycle, pedestrians or even private cars for decades."

However, there is concern about the convenience of transfer from the many surface buses that run along Market Street to underground streetcars and BART, Radulovich said. Banning buses on Market Street was pitched as an idea in the 1970s when the subway was build under the street, said Jim Lazarus, public policy director for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce.

While he supports the current trial, Lazarus says The City wants to study traffic on nearby streets as well as Market." You can't deal with Market Street without dealing with Mission , and you can’t deal with Mission without dealing with Folsom, Howard, and Harrison ," Lazarus said.

Market and Muni

• 5 months Time before new car limits may be added to Market Street
• $167 Minimum fine for failing to obey traffic limits on Market Street
• 3 miles whole length of Market Street
• 12 Muni lines that run on Market Street

Now that a new Muni study has exposed that almost 1 in 10 riders may be rudely riding the city's buses and streetcars for free - costing the cash-strapped agency an estimated $19 million a year in lost revenue - San Francisco Supervisor and mayoral wannabe Bevan Dufty has called for a City Hall hearing on the Police Department's bus check program.

Dufty also plans to focus on violent crime aboard Muni, which has captured public notice with several high-profile incidents, among them the beating of an 18-year-old actor, the stabbing of an 11-year-old boy and the argument between two women fighting over a seat on a bus that became a local YouTube hit.

The bus check program requires SFPD patrol officers to ride Muni at least two times a shift. Muni has a divide team of fare-inspection officers.

"News reports about continued violence on Muni and estimates that up to $19 million is lost every year due to fare avoidance, I look forward to hearing from the Police Department and Muni about the bus inspection program," Dufty said. He listed a hearing earlier than the City Operations and Neighborhood Services Committee at 10:30 a.m. on Nov. 9

A ribbon-cutting rite for a bridge on an 8-mile section of the Bay Trail in South San Francisco will be held at noon today.

The complete Bay Trail, which is administer by the Association of Bay Area Governments, consists of 500 miles of a continuous shoreline pathway around the Bay Area, of which 296 miles have been finished.


The conclusion of the bridge on the eight-mile segment in South San Francisco will present employees and residents with recreational opportunities as well as the facility to walk from the San Francisco International Airport to Brisbane.

The South San Francisco Scavenger Company and HCP joined to fund the bridge at a cost of $1.2 million.

Access to the ribbon-cutting ceremony is obtainable via the Bay Trail or by parking in the Alexandria Building parking lot at 450 East Jamie Court and taking a shuttle.

Twenty years past the Loma Prieta earthquake shook movable a 250-ton section of the Bay Bridge, state transport officials vowed Monday to the long-planned substitution span will be built to improve withstand a main temblor. "When the bridge is total, it's going to be one of the majority seismically higher structures in the world," Caltrans spokesman Bart Ney said.


On Monday, Caltrans at large a computer-generated simulation of how the new East Bay segment of the bridge - set to be completed in 2013 - is likely to respond when jolted by a big quake. The imitation can be view at tr.im/BAa2. In the depiction, the bridge sways and undulates, moving with the earth's rumbling rather than resisting it. Imagine an undersea kelp forest pushed and pulled by a strong tide. The beams connecting different sections of the bridge are planned to take up the earthquake energy and protect the main arrangement. The damaged beams then can be swapped out.

The soaring 525-foot-tall tower of the designed self-anchored suspension span on the East Bay portion of the Bay Bridge will be held up by four steel legs, each able to move separately. The legs will be linked by consumable shock-absorbing beams. The unique East Bay span, which is crossed by about 280,000 cars and trucks a day and has undergone a temporary retrofit, was built to handle about 4 inches of motion. The single-deck substitute span is planned to be able to move at least 39 inches, said Marwan Nader, senior associate of the firm T.Y. Lin International, which helped design the project.


When the 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake struck 20 years ago this week, the shaking snapped off a 50-foot-long section of the upper deck of the Bay Bridge’s eastern span, and it not working onto the lower deck. One driver died. The bridge was closed for a month, choking off one of the Bay Area's busiest transportation arteries.

The new bridge is designed to keep it standing in the largest plausible earthquake to occur within a 1,500-year period. Those calculations don't specify a quake of a certain size. Rather, engineers factored in projected ground motion emanating from various epicenters. "It will be one of the safest places to be in an earthquake," Ney said.

Bridge officials said the roadway may buckle in a major earthquake and get knocked out of alignment, rendering it temporarily impassible. But if the overall structure remains intact, as expected, Caltrans crews would lay down steel plates right away to make the bridge usable for emergency vehicles before it is repaired for public use.

Retrofit work on the San Francisco portion of the bridge has been finished. New bolts and braces, extra steel, a new bearing system and other upgrades were put in place to make it less susceptible to collapse.

The Bay Bridge project now is estimated to cost $6.3 billion and won't be over until 2013 - 2 1/2 decades after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Ney said there is an upside to the long delay: Advances have been made in seismic engineering and bridge-building resources. "What we're building here," Ney said, "is an icon - not something that's built once in a generation, but once."

The California High Speed Rail Authority does not have to stop planning while it correct deficiency in an environmental impact report, a Greater Court judge in Sacramento determined Thursday.

Judge Michael Kenny's tentative ruling found that the current work would not harm the environment or prevent the ability from adhering to his August ruling in a lawsuit filed by Atherton, Menlo Park and four ecological groups opposed to running trains from the Central Valley over the Pacheco Pass and up the Peninsula to San Francisco.


The August choice found that portions of the environmental analysis for the proposed route were inadequate. Unless Kenny is swayed by arguments during a hearing this afternoon, it will become final.

Stuart Flashman, an Oakland attorney representing the cities and environmental groups, said he will argue that the authority and the judge misinterpreted the law. Jeff Barker, a deputy director of the authority, said the tentative decision benefits the authority, which is difficult to get the high-speed rail system on track."The fact that we would not have to stop work is very important," he said.

After an especially strong breeding season, the sea lions are not only booming, they are crowd into commercial fishing harbor, and spark a turf war at public beach. "One bump against me three times, then he went and nipped my little toe," San Francisco swimmer Sarah McCusky told FOX News.

But it's no amused matter for Bay Area fishermen who protest the thousand-pound mammals are damage docks and overcrowding their boats."They take over berths and make it hard for fishermen to get to their boats, and really make it tough for people to do their jobs," Peter Dailey, Deputy Director of the Port of San Francisco, told FOX News.


The Port of San Francisco policy to make the docks sea lion-proof, installing 200-feet of mesh rubber barricade. And if that doesn't work, there are additional options.

"There are humane ways you can make their lives unhappy. You can be like a noisy neighbor, you can turn on loud music, you can have lights flashing on them, you can hose them down," Dailey told FOX News.

The birds are protected under federal law and as Sarah McCusky points out, they were there first. But she and other swimmers don't feel entirely safe in the water with half-ton carnivores.


"I think it's made us all a little bit more anxious about exactly where we will swim to," McCusky said.One cause for hope? Crab season starts soon, and scientists say that the arrival of more boats, noise, and dockside activity may pursuade these sea lions to leave on their own.

Nancy Pelosi released the follow statement in answer to the $11 million decided to the San Francisco International Airport under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act:


The Federal Aviation Administration's announcement today that it would allocate $11 million to San Francisco International Airport is encouraging news for the Bay Area. This money will be directed to the rehabilitation of Runway 1R – 19L, repairing deteriorating pavement, improving the surrounding drainage system, upgrading the electrical runway and taxiway lighting system, and repainting runway markings to increase visibility and improve security for aircraft on the airfield.


The project improves safety for the millions of domestic and international passengers who travel during this airport each year and creates a probable 65 jobs in the Bay Area. This is another example of how Congress swift action to pass the Recovery Act continues to create jobs and invest in America.

H1N1 swine flu is a latest influenza germ causing illness in public. It was initial found in public in April 2009. Swine flu has caused illness all over the earth, including San Francisco. For up-to-date information about H1N1 swine flu, please visit the Department of Public Health H1N1 swine flu.


Mitch Katz, MD, Director of Health, San Francisco Department of Public Health (DPH), earlier announced that the California Department of Public Health has established the first case of 2009 H1N1 Flu in a San Francisco occupant.