Day Around the Bay: 78-Year-Old Pedestrian Hit and Killed by Driver in SoMa

Local:

• A wrong-way crash caused by a suspected DUI driver killed one person early Tuesday morning near the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. Someone had already reported the wrong-way Range Rover driver on I-580 to the CHP at 1:36 am, but four minutes later, that driver plowed into a head-on collision that struck a Honda Civic and killed its still-unidentified driver. [NBC Bay Area]
• 78-year-old pedestrian Annabella “Bella” Gabriel Barquera was killed when a car hit her at Sixth and Howard streets on Sunday, constituting the third pedestrian death within a two-block radius of that area since May. All three of those victims were between ages of 74 and 78 years old, and the SFMTA acknowledges that area is among the deadliest in San Francisco. [KRON4]
• The 28-year-old legendary SF sketch comedy group Killing My Lobster says they are temporarily suspending their operations at the end of their 2025 season. The troupe is financially hobbled by less funding to the arts on a local, state, and federal level. [Chronicle]

National:

• Trump’s Soviet-style takeover of US institutions continues, as he’s ordering the combined 21 Smithsonian museums to do a "comprehensive internal review" of anything that mentions Black or LGBTQ people and does not glorify white people in advance of next year’s 250th anniversary of the founding of the US. [NPR]
• The Texas Democrats who fled the state hoping to thwart the state GOP’s redistricting plans have returned, presumably knowing they won’t stop the Republican gerrymandering, but at least knowing they’ve prompted other blue states to similarly redistrict. [ABC13 Houston]
• Pop star Taylor Swift announced that her 12th studio album The Life of a Showgirl is coming soon, but did not announce a release date, though people are still going bonkers over this announcement. [CNN]

Video:

• Today I learned that gangs of river otters will jump up out of the water en masse to chase a butterfly, as we see in the simply magical video below.

Image: Joe Kukura, SFist