• A two-alarm fire broke out in a vacant apartment building in Oakland's Chinatown Wednesday night, at 152 Ninth Street. Firefighters had the blaze under control by around 11 pm. [KRON4]
• Much like SF Mayor Daniel Lurie recently did, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan is pushing city workers to employ AI to do "drudge work." And Mahan admits to using ChatGPT to help write his speeches. [Associated Press]
• The Senate voted overnight to claw back $9 billion in foreign aid and funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The vote was 51 to 48, and Democrats are pissed, seeing this as a miniscule amount of spending being cut in the name of "waste" after Congress passed that "beautiful" bill that adds $4 trillion to the deficit. [New York Times]
• In some unsurprising news, the state of California has suspended all the operating licenses for Devastating Pyrotechics, the fireworks company that had that devastating explosion on July 1. [KTVU]
• California officials say that they are making up for a change made by the Trump administration to strip away an LGBTQ youth dial-menu option on the "9-8-8" suicide prevention hotline by training all California hotline operators to be capable to address the needs of this population. [KTVU]
• The town of Healdsburg is quickly losing families with kids, with its share of kids under the age of 18 dropping precipitously in recent years, according to census data. [Chronicle]
• Chronicle history guy Peter Hartlaub looks at the folly that was Fleishhacker Pool, a massive, 1,000-foot-by-150-foot saltwater pool built in 1925 as a gift to the city by millionaire banker Herbert Fleishhacker, but located next to Ocean Beach in the coldest part of the city. [Chronicle]

Photo by Ian Hutchinson