Well, the bad news is still that we've hit a 12 year high for homicides in the City and County of San Francisco, with two weeks left to go in the year. On the statistical side, though, the SFPD year to date murder count has moved down by three victims, from 100 to 97. What happened to those three victims? Well, they're not any less dead, unfortunately. Rather, three of them were reclassified into non-murders.......

-- Van Halen jumps. [SFGate] -- Tommi Avicolli-Mecca to be visited by three ghosts Xmas Eve. [Beyond Chron] -- Gavin Newsom wants to be President of the U.S.A. you to get healthier. [Matier and Ross] -- SWL 337 Planning Challenge winners announced. (Go Jackson!) [Curbed] -- Susan Leal hit by a car. Chin up, girl. [CBS5] -- San Francisco's 100th homicide. [The Snitch] -- Bloggers, copyrights, photos, and lots of hair pulling. [Laughing Squid]......

Between the oil spill and Barry being his Bonds self, crime has been a wee bit sloooow over the past few days -- well, at least reports of foolish mischief seem sluggish. -- Santa Rosa fuzz have a suspect in the robbery/shooting death of Gurdip Singh, which took place at Bill's Market far away in the land of Santa Rosa this past Monday. Javier Pena, 37, is now in custody. Good ol' CBS 5......

More to the point, can you see these cars? Yeah, hard for us, too. (Go here to see the shocking! riveting! scandalous! footage that borders on tepid here.) But these two American-made automobiles -- an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme and Chevrolet Malibu Wagon, respectively (chortle) -- are believed to be involved one of the 101 shootings that took place on September 30. If you have any info on these fine cars, you're urged to call......

Following up on yesterday's blotter, we're sorry to pass along word from today's Chronicle that one of the murder victims over the weekend, David Sterling, was killed on the way home Monday afternoon, after picking up a burrito for his girlfriend. Investigators think it was supposed to be a retaliation shooting from the guy shot in the garage by kids on bikes a day earlier, but because Sterling had no record and no known gang......

...And that's not even the curviest part! A car chase that started in Marin County around 3:00 a.m. Monday morning ended abruptly when the driver, speeding at around 75 mph over the Golden Gate Bridge, overshot the turn from Doyle Drive onto Lombard Street and flipped over. A open fifth of Hennessey was found in the car, and the passengers are in SF General with non-fatal injuries. Your SF Labor Day weekend homicide count: 3.......

Maybe it was the heat. There were four serious attacks in SF last night, one of which were fatal. Here's the time line, from CBS 5/Bay City News. --around 9:20 p.m.: shooting at Taylor and Market in the Loin. One victim hit in the arm. --around 10:00 p.m.: shots fired in Sunnydale (can Dede Wilsey help with that?). Victim found with four gunshot wounds, one in each arm and two in the chest. Injuries considered......

We've got some follow-up news on Blotter items covered previously! In response to allegations by deceased Stanford engineering grad student May Zhou's father earlier this week that his daughter's death was a homicide and not self-inflicted, the Santa Rosa police released additional information from their investigation. Namely, they said they have videotape and receipts of her buying four bottles of sleeping pills from local drugstores in two days, and they have an email she sent......

Your Black Muslim Bakery update: the business is being liquidated in an involuntary bankruptcy proceeding (they have almost $1 million in debt) after a number of unnamed potential buyers dropped out, and the 19-year-old arrested for shooting journalist Chauncey Bailey now says (video clip) he was beaten and coerced into a false confession to the murder. The Oakland PD homicide officer assigned to the case says that's false and they have a taped confession where......

It's time for the San Francisco crime mid-year report card, and we're not doing so great -- homicide rates are up 20% from last year. The SFPD reports that drug-related homicides are up (15 for the year so far, compared to only 13 all year in 2006), spontaneous violence is up, and fatal stabbings are up (10 for the year so far, as opposed to 8 all last year). On the bright side, gang-related homicides......

The rumblings from a week ago have been confirmed: Josh Wolf, on his blog, has declared his intent to run for mayor. ...

Here's todays wrapup of the news...

It seems like, all across the network, folks were up to no good. Maybe it was all the green beer from last weekend... Gothamist spent the week writing about New Yorkers behaving badly: at the post office, at the Garden, and at the fertility clinic. Calvin Klein may not be misbehaving, but he's just a little dirty, and in a completely different way than some NYC kitchens. SFist had its share of misbehave-rs, too, like......

If you, like us, heard very stressed-out-sounding BART announcements on your commute home today about the Hayward BART station being closed because of a police action and needing to take Richmond trains to get to Fremont last night, that's because four people were shot in the area of the Hayward BART stop around 5:48 p.m. No one is dead, but one person was found injured on a platform and another in a bus zone (we......

Last Friday, the Examiner got their hands on a bunch of statistics and a calculator and crunched a whole bunch of numbers about crime in the city. Their verdict is that curiously, the number of homicides has gone up but the number of people arrested for said homicides has gone down. It doesn't take a math major to realize that's not very good. ...

-Yesterday was a mother fu----ing protest-off over abortion. -Pelosi and the Governator aren't even MySpace buddies. -Nobel prize winners meet in Berkeley to discuss Grey's Anatomy, Global Warming. -Man shot in Oakland-- homicide #6 for the year. -Six car crash on I-80 near Vacaville kills three, injures eights, and closes westbound lanes for more than six hours. Drugs and alcohol are suspected -The new dot.coms just aren't any fun. -Save the Presidio clarkia! Illustration of......

The Board of Supes' budget committee were doing performance reviews of various departments in the city to see who is doing what and how well. When they did a review of the SFPD, the results weren't so hot. According to the report, Homicide investigators only "cleared" just thirty-three murders for the 2006 fiscal year that ended July 1. The hoped for number was fifty-five cases. In other words, if the SFPD were a major corporation, there'd be layoffs, pension cuts, and more outsourcing to India. You know, that's one good thing about being a cop: it's probably one of the few jobs that won't eventually be outsourced to India. ...

Two people saved from gunshots by inanimate objects -- a deputy saved by his belt buckle, and a husband saved from his pistol-waving wife by his La-Z Boy. The wife of the man in the La-Z Boy tried to kill him by shooting him through the back of the chair, but the chair blocked the bullet. The man then got out of the chair and followed his wife into the kitchen, where she tried to......

--Did you fall back? --Old(er) people use the Internet. --Babies eat organic. --Protest against the war yesterday. --Homelessness is a difficult problem. --A debate breaks out at Left In SF about what Rob Black supporters think Daly should have been doing in District 6. As for us, we'd like Chris Daly to personally pee on our block. --M&R relate an incident involving the Gettys' butler, a cup of coffee in the Marina, and overzealous cops......

Somehow, the world of -ists managed to make it through the week despite news that Jen & Vince broke up. -Chicagoist had fall on their mind as they made squash and fudge, read "House of Leaves" and ">tried to figure out what's next for the Cubs. Not fall related, but still of utmost concern, the whole skinny black pants thing. -Torontoist fought off an evil scourge of raccoons and went to go see who......

In one of those stories straight out of a TV show, a security guard for Brinks Trucks, you know the kind of truck that drives around with all that money, was shot and killed this morning after an attempted heist of the truck. While stopping for a bite to eat (at a doughnut shop) at the Fruitvale Shopping Center, a masked assailant hopped into the truck and forced the drivers to go to an industrial site at industrial area at East 10th Street and 23rd Avenue. Somewhere along the way, one of the guards was shot and killed. It is not known how. The assailant is still missing as he ran off with some money when the truck got to the industrial area. ...

SFist Sarah L, about the East Bay crime news -- going from bad to worse: A Hayward teenager was beaten up and left bloody on a stranger's porch. In the pleasant upscale suburb of Lafayette, on Happy Valley Road, no less, a human body was found burned to death in a car fire. Suicide, homicide, accident - the authorities aren't sure yet. We already wrote about the dead man at the Cal sorority, in what......

The SFPD found the 5-month-old baby whose father claimed she was stolen from the back seat of his car in the Mission when he went out to grab some smokes. They found her body in a remote area of McLaren Park. For those of you who thought something about this case didn't sound right, consider yourselves vindicated: the father is now considered the main suspect in the murder. (We knew those Mission hipsters going to......

Besides the homicide rate, Oakland residents' quality of life continues to be impaired by wasteful immigrants flocking to the shores of Lake Merritt - the Canada geese, also causing trouble in Richmond, as reported recently by the East Bay Express. The Lake Merritt geese population produces an estimated ton of fecal matter a day. The geese have also been sighted exhibiting aggressive pedestrian behavior not unlike that of Oakland's human residents, known for holding up......

Special all-SF shootings edition. And the murder count keeps going up -- the latest: one man killed Thursday night at 25th and Harrison. It's the 57th SF homicide of the year. Meanwhile, late Wednesday night, two tourists in the drive-through at a Burger King in the Bayview were shot too. They managed to drive themselves to a hospital and are recovering. It's been a bad month for crime, particularly in District 5, which has seen......

While doing our standard election-night browsing, we dropped by the Guardian to see if any late reports were filed online -- but the site was down! Details at this point are still very, very sketchy, but the initial report from Steven T. Jones suggests foul play:Maybe there is something to this 6/6/06 numerological weirdness after all. The mood seems dark and sinister for an election day. And it was certainly some devilish characters who......

Our occasional series on the District 6 Board of Supervisors election! This week's episode: Everybody Hates Varnish. Yesterday, we were wandering with some friends in SoMA trying to find a place to get some post-work libations. As we entered the Varnish art and wine bar on 77 Natoma Street, we noticed a sign in the window: DRAKE '06, www.drake2006.com. Could it be? Could it be another candidate running against Chris Daly? After we ran through two, maybe three, glasses of Varnish's fine red house wine and shamelessly eating all the tasty chex mix they offered, we staggered home, logged in, and can report the following information! Candidate Matt Drake is a former mechanical engineer turned lawyer. Man, everyone running against Chris Daly is a lawyer! Drake doesn't say where he's working now, but says he's never worked in government. Other than that, he's an enigma. We're piecing this together from his (kind of boring) website and blog, but it looks like Drake supports pretty much everything Newsom supports, wants to build more market-rate housing in the Mission, wants a Home Depot in Bayview, and wants them to berth the USS Iowa here. Also, he loves trees and wishes more people filmed movies in town. Drake's throwing a fundraiser next Thursday at Varnish if you want to stop by; your suggested minimum donation is $30. If you go, get the house wine; it was pretty tasty. ...

Go see Ladies They Talk About this Wednesday and Thursday at the Reel SF film fest at the Balboa! Santa Clara's high tech crime unit is preening itself after prevailing against a burglar who caused at least $750,000 in losses to local companies. A 6'5" African-American burglar with a shaved head (they called him "The Green Mile") was pretending to be a security guard, walking into companies like Cisco, eBay, Yahoo, and Google, and stealing......

Between a skyrocketing homicide rate, brutal and incompetent police, moves to completely redevelop the last community stronghold in The City, the shutdown of a school named after a famous local civil rights leader and disproportionate incarceration rates, black people just can't seem to get a break in San Francisco. Oh, sure, if you're a rich, womanizing Democratic party machine hack (or went out with one), or are willing to do illegal electioneering on The City's......

And this week's good father award goes to...... the drunk guy in the Richmond who took his 1-year-old son out in the rain on Sunday and left the kid in a mud puddle under a van. The guy left the house with the baby after he and the baby mama got in a fight over his drinking. With a shooting early Sunday morning, the homicide count in Oakland is now three times what it was at this time last year -- last year by March, there were 8 homicides, and this year there have been 24. Is Jerry Brown also distracted by comely CBS actresses? And authorities in Palo Alto are warning everyone to be on the lookout for counterfeit $100 bills. They then give a detailed description on how to make one yourself: basically, soak a $5 in bleach and then print a $100 design on top of it. ...