San Francisco police have arrested a woman for allegedly scamming several apartment seekers out of thousands of dollars after accepting their rental deposits and then, claiming her mother had cancer, absconding with the cash.

Google Inc. triggered a false alarm Thursday by posting a notice that its search engine and several other services had been cut off from mainland China - a key market where the company has been locked in a high-profile battle over online censorship. But what initially looked like a dramatic development turned out to be nothing more than a technological hiccup.

Wait times at Bay Area bridge toll plazas have gone down since new toll hikes went into effect on July 1, but the number of people carpooling has also decreased, a Metropolitan Transportation Commission spokesman said Thursday.

A panel of federal judges is deciding where to consolidate several lawsuits against Google Inc. that allege the company violated wiretapping laws. At least nine lawsuits seeking class-action status have been filed in the United States so far contending that Google collected fragments of e-mails, Web surfing data and other online information from unencrypted wireless networks as it photographed neighborhoods for its "Street View" Google Maps feature.

Arizona asked an appeals court Thursday to lift a judge's order blocking most of the state's immigration law as the city of Phoenix filled with protesters, including about 50 who were arrested for confronting officers in riot gear. Republican Gov. Jan Brewer called U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton's Wednesday's decision halting the law "a bump in the road," and the state appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Thursday.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom signed the city's $6.55 billion balanced budget at a City Hall ceremony Thursday, though uncertainty remains about millions of dollars in funding yet to be approved at the state and federal level.

After nearly 21 years of planning, cajoling and hand-wringing, the final segment of the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge began to take shape Wednesday in the waters off Yerba Buena Island. Crews set to work at about 6:30 a.m. readying the tower leg for erection by slowly tipping it into a vertical position atop a barge floating near the base of a steel erection tower.

Nineteen people, many of them clergy, were arrested Wednesday after sitting in the middle of Seventh Street in San Francisco during a rally for immigration reform. The rally, organized by the SF Bay Area Coalition for Immigration Reform, brought more than 100 people outside the San Francisco Federal Building at 90 7th St. to call on Congress to pass an immigration reform bill, coalition spokesman Jon Rodney said.

At the unveiling of newly installed "smart meters" as part of the SFPark pilot project, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency had a message for the city's drivers: we're working for you. Not only will the meters make it easier to park by improving space availability, but the SFMTA is anticipating that the ease of payment will mean fewer drivers will be taking a chance by parking without paying.