A.M. Splash: Oakland Ordered to Negotiate on Police; SF Committee Approves Warriors Arena; SF Micro-Apartment Plan Faces Challenge

The federal judge who will decide the fate of Oakland's embattled police department ordered the city to begin settlement negotiations with attorneys seeking an outside receiver with powers to fire department brass. Citing several areas of mutual agreement, including the need for additional court intervention in Oakland's police department, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson ordered the settlement talks and gave both sides until Nov. 29 to file a joint statement outlining their areas of agreement. Henderson has scheduled a Dec. 13 hearing on a receivership motion brought by the attorneys who represented plaintiffs in the decade-old Riders police corruption case.

A Board of Supervisors committee on Wednesday gave its initial thumbs up to the proposed Golden State Warriors arena, voting that the $1 billion construction project appears fiscally feasible and telling city staff and the team that they can move forward with the planning process. The resolution was passed unanimously by the three-member budget committee, and will come before the full board Tuesday. Under city law, the board must determine that any large development project appears to pencil out financially before the full planning process can commence.

After a quarter-century of legal and political battles to clear city and neighbors' trees, Phyllis Bishop is set to regain the panoramic bay view she once had from her Oakland hills home. The Oakland City Council on Tuesday rejected the latest appeal from Bishop's neighbors, Okhoo and Ernest Hanes, who have steadfastly fought to keep their trees and now the city's trees from being

A political scrap over who should live in San Francisco is threatening to limit a plan to allow construction of tiny, 220-square-foot apartments to meet the city's housing crisis. The new units could become magnets for young, high-paid tech workers looking for a place in the city even though they work elsewhere, said Sara Shortt, executive director of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco.

Cab drivers in San Francisco have filed a class action lawsuit against mobile taxi/town car app service Uber, alleging the company is engaging in unfair business practices by skirting rules that apply to traditional taxi services. The lawsuit was filed by of Leonid Goncharov and Mohammed Eddine, two longtime drivers for the San Francisco-based Luxor Cab. It claims that "by partnering with unauthorized and unpermitted drivers to unlawfully compete with law abiding taxicab drivers," Uber is "acting as a taxicab company while sometimes...[denying] this fact in order to avoid all regulations governing taxicab companies."

Bay Area home sales continued a steady string of yearly gains in October, with middle to high-end homes accounting for the increased inactivity, according to a report Wednesday. The nearly 8,000 sales of all types of homes in the nine-county Bay Area last month shows the market is continuing to recover from the worst downturn in decades, the real estate information service DataQuick reported.

San Francisco's naked people filed a lawsuit yesterday in federal court, attempting to stop the city from banning them from doing what they do best -- be naked in public. The lawsuit filed in San Francisco claims any such ordinance would violate the civil rights of people who want to strip down naked for personal or political reasons. The Board of Supervisors is scheduled to vote on the propose ban next week.

Comedian Katt Williams, in town for a Friday appearance at the Oracle Arena, was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon Wednesday night in downtown Oakland, according to police. Another man was hit in the head with a bottle and taken to a hospital after the incident, which happened about 8 p.m. in a tour vehicle parked near the Courtyard Marriott in the 900 block of Broadway.

Sometimes you have to think inside the box. When architects designed the new Bay Bridge, they drew slender, white, side-by-side decks hanging from gently draped cables over the water as if by magic. That left Caltrans engineers with a challenge worthy of David Copperfield: Where do you hide the anchorages for the world's longest self-anchored suspension span?

A computer outage delayed departures of some United Airlines flights nationwide Thursday morning, but the problem may have been solved before it could cause major problems at Bay Area airports. There was no immediate information on flights delayed at San Francisco International Airport, according to Duty Manager Joe Walsh. The airport's website showed only 3 flights with delays of more than 10 minutes out of more than 300 scheduled.