San Francisco is rolling out the red carpet for Emirates Airlines, which starting today will be flying nonstop from SFO to Dubai and back three times a week - and the East-West link sure makes for some interesting politics.







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The airline, which is run by the government of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, operates by rules far different from those San Francisco espouses.

Take Emirates' flight attendants, for instance. A recent Wall Street Journal piece on the airline says that "tough rules are enforced, including some that would be deemed discriminatory in the West, such as weight requirements and a no-pregnancy policy for unwed women."

Further, the paper says: "Openly gay male attendants need not apply. Premarital sex and homosexuality are both illegal in Dubai."

In San Francisco, however, it's illegal for contractors doing business with the city to discriminate in employment or in dealing with the public.

And Larry Brinkin, the compliance officer for the city Human Rights Commission, says airline reps, under penalty of perjury, checked off all the boxes on a city form saying they don't discriminate based on "race, sexual orientation or religion."

They also submitted documentation showing they comply with the city's decade-old ordinance guaranteeing benefits to both gays and unmarried couples who register as domestic partners.

"They say they don't discriminate, and we don't know otherwise," Brinkin said.

That might be because the San Francisco law applies only to how companies operate in the United States. In other words, while it affects employees on the ground here - ticket agents and the like - flight attendants who arrive from Dubai apparently are exempt.

"We don't like it - it's awful, but we have no jurisdiction outside the U.S.," Brinkin said.

"It's called following the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law," said Assemblyman and former San Francisco Supervisor Tom Ammiano, author of the city's domestic partners ordinance.

And while he's not happy about it, Ammiano says, the "Muslim world won't change overnight."

BART barking: Quite a tempest at BART headquarters the other day, as a dozen African American and Chinese American contractors led by Hunters Point activist and trucker Charlie Walker confronted the board over what they view as a lack of transit jobs going to minorities.

Walker and his pals lit into the board, complaining that they were losing out on contracts while BART hemmed and hawed over completing the necessary "disparity study" to prove that, in fact, minority contractors aren't getting enough work.

Unless things changed pronto, Walker warned, he would make sure President-elect Barack Obama (whom he claims to know personally) halted all federal contracts with the financially strapped transit agency.

Having had enough of the rant, board member James Fang of San Francisco tried to duck out of the meeting, only to be corralled in the lobby by Walker, who pressed his demands some more.

To which Fang shot back that the only reason Walker and his friends weren't getting any work was that the person doing the disparity study - someone Walker's allies on the board had demanded get the job - was "incompetent" and her findings were unusable.

Or so says Walker, who dashed back into the board room, took to the microphone and repeated every word of Fang's allegedly private conversation to those gathered at the meeting.

Board director Carole Ward Allen, representing Oakland and Alameda, soon jumped in, giving Walker a tongue-lashing for suggesting she and the board hadn't done their part over the years to help disadvantaged minorities.

The bickering continued for the better part of two hours, with no resolution.

Fang wouldn't comment on his conversation with Walker, but said: "I heard much about the prodigious reputation of Charlie Walker, and I can truly say his conduct at the BART board meeting lived up to it."

Fang also said he does have concerns about the disparity report being drafted by the politically connected minority firm run by Eleanor Mason Ramsey.

Ramsey tells us the nearly completed report "will speak for itself" and will be of "as high quality" as the more than 100 others her firm has done for government agencies across the country.

"There have been no challenges to a single program based on our work," she said.

Scratched: Oakland officials recently rolled out a new enforcement program targeting small crimes that lead to big headaches - but their first case turned out to be a real migraine.

The idea was to beef up prosecution of petty crimes such as vandalism, public drunkenness, aiding in drug sales, illegal dumping and the like that normally get short shrift in overburdened courts.

Well, the other day, the very first trial of a defendant charged as part of the campaign got under way - and it was a bust.

The defendant was a 49-year-old gas station manager accused in April of keying a customer's 7-year-old van, causing more than $1,000 in damage.

Somehow the case wound up in the hands of one of three deputy city attorneys who have been loaned out to the Alameda County district attorney as a part of the new small-crimes unit.

It wasn't exactly the type of crime the unit was expected to handle, but "there are just some cases we have to try," said Deputy District Attorney John Rogers.

"Things like getting your car keyed, we can't just ignore," Rogers said.

Maybe not, but after a three-day trial, it took the jury all of 20 minutes to come back with the verdict.

"Not guilty."