Thousands marched throughout Oakland Tuesday in a kaleidoscopic variety of protests ranging from skirmishes with police to dancing, chanting throngs of demonstrators peacefully waving signs calling for an end to economic inequality and a strengthening of worker rights.

San Francisco police and sheriff's officers arrested 24 people when they cleared about a vacant building that Occupy protesters had claimed as their own Tuesday afternoon. Officers in riot helmets quietly surrounded the building at 888 Turk St. about 5 a.m. Wednesday and began escorting the two dozen occupants into

San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed lost a bid Tuesday to reduce retirement benefits for future San Jose city workers -- something voters endorsed in 2010 -- when the City Council deadlocked on a split vote. Reed had urged the council to trim pension benefits for all new city workers hired after July 1 except for police officers and firefighters, and to add a cheaper health plan for current and retired city workers, something aimed at shrinking the city's retiree health insurance bill by making retirees pay deductibles or higher premiums. But the council deadlocked on a 5-5 vote.

A federal judge has given Oakland officials less than a week to submit a plan for completing police internal affairs investigations stemming from last year's Occupy protests, or risk weekly fines. U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson issued the order Tuesday, one day after a federal monitor released a report critical of the department's handling of the Occupy protests and its struggles to fully implement reforms measures spelled out in a 2003 agreement that settled the Riders police misconduct case.

Mayor Ed Lee on Tuesday accused suspended Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi of engaging in "an attempted cover-up" and of "attempting to dissuade witnesses to a crime" in a domestic violence investigation involving him and his wife, according to documents filed Tuesday in Mirkarimi's official misconduct case.

Business owners in San Francisco's Mission District, cleaning up after a night in which protesters damaged more than 30 stores and restaurants and vandalized cars, questioned Tuesday why activists had singled them out and why police hadn't done more to halt the rampage.

The group seen as having the best chance to oust Mayor Jean Quan now appears short on cash, volunteers and signatures just weeks before a self-imposed deadline to put a recall vote on the November ballot. The Committee to Recall Mayor Quan Now has collected fewer than 7,000 signatures, committee member Lee Edwards said -- less than half of the nearly 20,000 valid signatures from registered Oakland voters needed to trigger a recall.

Council members got their first opportunity Tuesday to weigh in on Mayor Jean Quan's 100-Block initiative that concentrates law enforcement and social services on Oakland's most violent streets. The council didn't try to halt or alter the program, but several council members expressed concerns about the program moving violent crime to other parts of the city and that the police couldn't produce meaningful statistics to measure the program's success.

A Police Department review has cleared two San Francisco police officers of any impropriety in last year’s shooting of a wheelchair-using man who was causing a disturbance outside a South of Market city health clinic.

Having tried everything else, the managers of San Francisco's Bill Graham Civic Auditorium are blasting the overnight homeless off their doorstep with the high-decibel sounds of chainsaws, motorcycles and jackhammers - topped off with an aircraft carrier alarm.