A.M. Splash: New Yahoo! CEO; SJ Mayor Considers Compromise on Pot Rules; Oakland Revokes Occupy Teepee Permit

Yahoo searched for a new chief executive officer for more than three months, but finally landed on an executive who worked just a few miles away -- PayPal President Scott Thompson. Sunnyvale-based Yahoo announced Wednesday that the San Jose online-payments company's leader will take the chair vacated by Carol Bartz, whom Yahoo fired in September after a disappointing two-and-a-half-year stint.

San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed said Tuesday he would consider softening the city's recently approved medical marijuana ordinance after critics succeeded in qualifying a referendum to repeal the new rules. The ordinance the City Council approved in September would shrink the number of medical marijuana collectives allowed in the city from more than 100 to just 10, in addition to requiring them to grow all of the marijuana they distribute on site.

Citing a Friday scuffle that resulted in 13 arrests and one police officer getting hit in the head with a chair, Oakland officials announced Tuesday they are evicting a teepee and leafleting table from Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, ending the last vestige of Occupy Oakland's daily presence at the square.

Despite the cleanup dredging, levels of two pesticides not used in the United States since the early 1970s -- DDT and dieldrin -- are rising in fish around [a Superfund site near the Richmond shoreline] according to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency review.

Despite San Francisco's long-entrenched Transit First policy, nearly 2 in 3 trips in the city are made by car. Transportation officials want to get the number to 1 in 2 trips before the decade is over. That would mean more people would need to get around by riding Muni, biking and walking - options that produce less congestion and air pollution.

Dan Lungren, a Republican member of Congress from Sacramento County, wants to give the world "a second Yosemite Valley." The valley already exists, in Yosemite National Park - buried under 300 feet of water in the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, which provides San Franciscans and 1.7 million other Bay Area residents with pristine water straight from the Sierra. All that would be needed would be to blow up the dam, which Yosemite godfather John Muir fought to his dying breath in 1914. The Schwarzenegger administration in 2006 estimated the cost at $3 billion to $10 billion.

...Walk into any first-year engineering class at Berkeley, graduate or undergraduate, and you'll find nearly everyone, about 95 percent, is white or Asian American. And the scene is as male as a sports bar in football season: roughly three in four new engineering students are male.

A limited number of tickets made available to the general public for the 49ers’ first playoff game in a decade sold out nearly instantly Tuesday morning, leaving fans to scour resale websites where asking prices for seats reached nearly $5,000.

San Francisco police have decided to take a closer look at the return of Banana-Sam, the 2-pound squirrel monkey that was "found" by a passer-by in Stern Grove two nights after being kidnapped from the zoo. "At this point, I can only say that the police have asked us to hold off on handing out any reward" for the returned monkey, said zoo Director Tanya Peterson.

...The outgoing sheriff, who is retiring after 32 years on the job, will christen a wrecking ball today before it takes the first swipe at the infamous San Francisco County Jail No. 3. Hennessey first saw the jail’s deplorable conditions as a young attorney working with prisoners, and he made demolition of the facility a priority in his first-ever campaign for sheriff in 1979.