Arts & Entertainment Watch: 4/20 Blankets Hippie Hill With Pot Smoke, Erykah Badu Exhorts Crowd To Smoke Even More Erykah Badu hit high notes at the most entertaining 4:20 countdown yet at Hippie Hill, as what appeared to be 20,000 happy stoners blazed up a gargantuan cloud of marijuana smoke for a blissed-out 4/20 celebration.
SF News Supervisors Give SFPD Significant Pay Raise, Starting Salary Now $103,000 The SF Board of Supervisors approved a nearly 11% salary increase for SFPD officers over the next three years, which will hopefully do something to encourage new officers to join the department, and encourage existing officers to solve more crimes.
Bay Area Sports Oakland A’s Move to Las Vegas Looks Like a Done Deal, Team Just Bought Stadium Site, But Who Knows A wild Wednesday night of developments loaded the bases for the Oakland A’s to move to Las Vegas, as the A’s organization bought land for a stadium, Major League Baseball blessed the deal, and Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao declared she was done negotiating with team executives.
SF News SFMTA Board Member Admits to Illegally Lobbying City Hall Colleagues To Get Permits for Italian Restaurant Vice chair of the SFMTA Board of Directors Gwyneth Borden took an undisclosed $12,500 to help a Sunset District Italian restaurant, and worked the Planning Commission she used to be a member of to help the restaurant get permits for a roof deck.
SF Politics Four Candidates Already In Race For Ronen’s District 9 Seat, as She’s Termed Out Next Year Nearly 19 months before the November 2024 election, four candidates already say they’re running for the District 9 seat from which Hillary Ronen will be termed out, a real contrast from the other five 2024 SF supervisor races where no one has really declared.
SF News Pleasanton Home Depot Employee Shot and Killed When Confronting Shoplifter A 26-year old Home Depot employee was shot and killed on the job in Pleasanton Tuesday afternoon while trying to thwart a shoplifter, in a story that gets more heartbreaking when we learn that the shooter had a getaway car with a young child inside.
SF News Day Around the Bay: Outside Lands Announces Single-Day Lineups Fox News settled their Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit for nearly $800 million, the Petaluma “mommy influencer” headed to court today over her allegedly faked kidnapping story, and Outside Lands announced its single-day schedules.
SF News ‘$1.7 Million Toilet’ Controversy Toilet Comes Out OK In the End, Supes Approve Lower-Cost Project After the $1.7 million toilet project released a torrent of outrage, the SF Board of Supervisors plopped down the cost with donations and state grants, approving the Noe Valley bathroom and maybe even a Precita Park bathroom too.
Arts & Entertainment SF SPCA Celebrates 155th Anniversary Tuesday Night With ‘Late Night Wooftop Party’ The San Francisco SPCA is fur-nishing cocktails, bites, and DJ dancing at Thursday night’s Late Night Wooftop Party at Dandelion Chocolate Factory, with animal therapy pets on hand to greet you.
SF News Berkeley Gets Burned as Federal Appeals Court Overturns Berkeley’s Natural Gas Ban The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned Berkeley’s ban on natural gas in new construction, which could have national repercussions as other cities consider phasing out natural gas stoves, furnaces, and water heaters.
SF News City Hall Inches Forward to Landmark Castro Theatre Seats, Old Contract Comes Back To Haunt Another Planet An SF Board of Supervisors committee was in favor of saving the Castro Theatre seats at a Monday hearing, and while the vote is nowhere near final, they brought up a skeleton in Another Planet Entertainment’s closet regarding millions in unfinished renovations at Bill Graham Auditorium.
SF News Day Around the Bay: San Jose Falcon, Who Mated With Berkeley-Born Falcon, Has Died 85% of Bay Area cities still have not passed their Housing Element, the latest Omicron subvariant may be causing pinkeye, and a falcon who mated with the son of our beloved Berkeley falcons Annie and Grinnell has died from avian flu.
SF News Shady COVID Street Testing Sites, Offering $5 Cash Per Test, Appear Unlicensed A slew of very informal-looking COVID-19 testing sites, paying people $5 a pop to take tests, is drawing another round of scrutiny for their lack of licensed staff and apparent flouting of public health protocols.
SF News Victim In 1998 Santa Cruz Murder Case Finally Identified Though Forensic Technology The John Doe in a 24-year-old Santa Cruz murder case is no longer a John Doe, as he has been identified as Eric Cupo, though the suspects pleaded guilty back in 2000 and have been locked up since.
SF News State AG Rob Bonta Investigating Last Week’s Fatal Police Shooting in Newark While it’s unclear whether Newark police, Fremont police, or an Alameda County officer fired the fatal shot in a suspected East Bay carjacking last week, the state attorney general took up an investigation of the police shooting the day after it happened.
SF News Sideshows Barraged All Corners of the Bay Area This Weekend, In SF, Oakland, and San Jose After a wave of sideshows again hit San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose this weekend, police are touting that they did make a few arrests, handed out more than 30 citations, and impounded nearly a dozen cars.
SF News Breed Announces $600 Million Plan To Cut Unsheltered Homelessness In Half Within Five Years Mayor Breed came out with a new $600 million plan to reduce “unsheltered homelessness by 50%” in five years, but the key word there is “unsheltered,” because the details of the plan reveal it would only reduce overall homelessness by 15% over that period.
SF News BART Unveils Renderings of Its New $90 Million, Allegedly Evasion-Proof Fare Gates, Which Have Spikes Think you can hop these upcoming new supposedly evasion-proof BART fare gates? Before you jump, realize they’re going to have bird-repellent spikes designed to be very hostile toward gate-hoppers’ hands.
SF News Two Men In Custody For Last Weekend’s Freeway Shooting of Five-Year-Old In Fremont A big development in last Saturday's I-880 shooting of five-year-old Eliyanah Crisostomo, as two men have been arrested on suspicion of murder, and both are alleged gang members who may have been involved in a separate freeway shooting where no one was hurt.
SF News Day Around the Bay: Third Berkeley Falcon Chick Hatches, and There Is Video An SF street will be named after Emperor Norton, Pier 70 is getting a new Standard Deviant Brewing and Breadbelly bakery, and a third baby falcon hatched Thursday afternoon alongside its snuggling siblings.
SF News Another Racist Police Text Scandal Hits In Antioch, Mayor Goes Apoplectic Antioch mayor Lamar Thorpe is justifiably upset that his city’s police officers offered among themselves a “prime rib dinner” to any cop who’d shoot at him, but his yelling “'You want to go? Let's go!” during a city council meeting has raised a few eyebrows.
SF News Another Freeway Shooting on I-580 Killed One Person Wednesday Night A yet-unidentified driver of a Toyota Tacoma died after being shot and colliding with another vehicle just before midnight Wednesday night, in a shooting that happened on I-580 but whose aftermath spilled into a gas station on Lakeshore Avenue in Oakland.
SF News Someone Died From an Overdose Inside the Mid-Market Whole Foods That Just Closed We’re learning there had been a fatal overdose in September at the Whole Foods at Eighth and Market Street that was closed down early this week, with someone who had OD’ed on fentanyl and methamphetamine while in the grocery store’s restroom.
SF News One Oak Property Has Reportedly Gone Into Foreclosure, 40-Story Tower Likely Won’t Get Built What started as a proposed 309-unit condo tower at Market and Oak Streets, and was turned into a proposed 460 rental units at the same location, will now perhaps be zero units, as the developer has surrendered the property to their lending bank.
SF News More Oakland PD-LeRonne Armstrong Drama, Fired Captain Claims He Was Made A Scapegoat A subplot of Oakland PD chief LeRonne Armstrong’s February firing has spawned another subplot, as a former captain who lost his job over a seemingly botched internal affairs investigation insists he’s not the one who botched the investigation.
