- 25-year-old Harry Black of Oakland has been charged with murder and attempted murder for the first homicide that occurred in the new year in Oakland. The fatal shooting of 55-year-old James Stephens occurred on January 1, in an afternoon shooting stemming from a dispute on the 6900 block of International Boulevard in which a 52-year-old friend of Stephens was also wounded. [East Bay Times]
- Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday announced four $50,000 rewards for information on four cold case murders that left in six victims in San Pablo, Fresno, Visalia, and unincorporated Butte County. The killings happened in 2014, two of them in 2020, and one in 2021, and in one of the 2020 murders, 27-year-old Shawn Tillis was killed in San Pablo. [KPIX]
- A Door Dash driver says he was attacked last week in San Jose in an episode of road rage, and the aggressive driver pulled out a machete and smashed his car window. [KTVU]
- The SFPD says two men were stabbed and wounded in SF on Sunday morning, one at 2:30 a.m. at 16th and Mission, and the other at 3 a.m. at Golden Gate Avenue and Hyde Street. [KPIX]
- The CHP was alerted to another Tesla driver asleep at the wheel while it was on autopilot, this one last week in Southern California, on I-15. [KTVU]
- The U.S. military is now admitting that some previous, likely incursions into our airspace by Chinese spy balloons were classified as "unexplained," or UFOs. [New York Times]
- SF-based payment-processing company Square had a major outage today with accepting credit card payments, and this may have been concentrated on the West Coast. [Chronicle]
- And speaking of companies Jack Dorsey is still CEO of, Damus, the decentralized Twitter-like platform backed by Dorsey and built on the Apple-native, decentralized Nostr protocol, launched last week and was quickly banned by China. [Decrypt]
- In honor of the excellent retrospective exhibit of SF artist Joan Brown on view at SFMOMA, the museum hosted a day of pet portrait-making on Saturday, with 50 local artists doing portraits of patrons' animals. [KQED]
Photo: Jay Barmann/SFist