Free Republic

It appears San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin has a shadier past than we thought. The 45-year-old parolee held for the New Year’s Eve hit-and-run deaths of two pedestrians had been facing a Three-Strikes life prison term until he was freed last year under San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, NBC Bay Area reported Monday evening.

Chinatown crime boss Raymond 'Shrimp Boy' Chow - the man at the heart of a federal corruption case that brought down former state Sen. Leland Yee and engulfed City Hall with allegations of 'pay to play' politics, took the center stage in U.S. District Court this week to deny the murder and racketeering charges against him. But anyone expecting his testimony to blow the roof of City Hall or cause Mayor Ed Lee further embarrassment would be sadly disappointed. The trial has largely boiled down to unpacking the nearly decade-old murder of businessman Allen Leung, and whether Chow - who...

Downtown San Francisco storefronts are boarding up ahead of Election Day in anticipation of looting and rioting. Landlords are preparing for potential unrest only months after people flooded streets to protest the killing of George Floyd. Most marched peacefully, but some opportunistic vandals engaged in violent activity and looting in Union Square. The hope is similar lawlessness won't flare up after the election, but just in case, buildings along Market Street, from the Salesforce Tower to San Francisco Centre, are covered in massive pieces of plywood. On Friday afternoon, Macy's on Union Square was already fully covered and a crew...

San Francisco has managed to curb the virus slightly in its city – but at what cost? Those paying sky high taxes to live in the Bay Area may soon be wondering why they are paying to live in a shut down city that state and local government officials have refused to allow to reopen due to a virus with a CDC-predicted infection fatality rate of between 0.00002 and 0.093. The entire downtown area of the city, once vibrant with business and tourism, is now “empty” according to a new report by AP. Everything from food trucks to local workers...

The officials in charge of San Francisco's public schools are hard at work—not coming up with a plan to quickly reopen the schools, but to rename as many as 44 of them. As parents, teachers, and principals deal with the frustrations of distance learning, the San Francisco Unified School District recently asked them to brainstorm replacements for schools that are "inappropriately" named after problematic historical figures, such as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and even Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.). "I don't think there is ever going to be a time when people are ready for this," Mark Sanchez, president...

EXCLUSIVE: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited a San Francisco hair salon on Monday afternoon for a wash and blow-out, despite local ordinances keeping salons closed amid the coronavirus pandemic, Fox News had learned. In security footage obtained by Fox News, and timestamped Monday at 3:08 p.m. Pacific Time, the California powerhouse is seen walking through eSalon in San Francisco with wet hair, and without a mask over her mouth or nose. The stylist doing her hair can be seen following her wearing a black face mask. Salons in San Francisco had been closed since March and were only notified they...

Last week, the US ordered the closure of the Chinese Consulate in Houston, accusing Chinese diplomats there of turning the facility into an illegal spying hub. However, according to a report this week, San Francisco and New York consulates are the central locales for Chinese spying operations in the United States. The order was made to “protect American intellectual property and Americans’ private information,” a US National Security Council spokesperson said at the time. The problem, however, is that the Houston, Texas-based consulate is not the Communist nation’s primary hub for espionage. The Chinese Communist Party operates two major hotspots...

*** As several demonstrations continued to take place throughout the Bay Area on Tuesday, Muni announced it would no longer transport officers from the San Francisco Police Department to protests. "We transport everyone at MTA and make sure our services are available for critical needs," SFMTA responded at the time. "From the COVID+ patients we transported to health care and rooms to SFPD officers, Muni is for everyone. To be clear, no Muni vehicles or employees will be used to transport any detainee." On Tuesday, however, the transit agency said it was making efforts to advance its racial equity work...

A San Francisco law school, business owners and local residents are suing the city to force it to clean up the Tenderloin neighborhood — alleging an almost 300 percent spike in homeless shanty towns, drug dealing and feces-covered sidewalks have made conditions “insufferable.” The lawsuit, filed in federal court May 4 by a group of plaintiffs led by the University of California Hastings College of the Law, seeks a court order to stop the city from using the neighborhood as a “containment zone” for homeless encampments. “Open-air drug sales and other criminal activity, plus crowds of drug users and sidewalk-blocking...

Airbnb is letting go of a quarter of its workforce, co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky told employees in a memo on Tuesday, as the coronavirus pandemic has decimated demand for his company’s services. The home-sharing platform, which was widely expected to go public this year, becomes the latest sharing economy company to institute or consider instituting significant layoffs. Uber is reportedly considering laying off 20% of its workers while Lyft has already laid off 17% of its employees. "We are collectively living through the most harrowing crisis of our lifetime, and as it began to unfold, global travel came to...

San Francisco teachers will be paid for full-time work but only be required to work four hours a day during the coronavirus closures, according to a labor agreement approved this week. The part-time work schedule was also adopted by other districts across the state, including Los Angeles, San Diego and Oakland, although many others continue to require teachers to work a full day, which is typically up to 7.5 hours.

She trotted out these dubious accusations during an interview on PBS’s “NewsHour” in which host host Judy Woodruff challenged none of her claims — and in which she, Pelosi, had a facial mask hanging off her neck as if she were a cowboy. The claims began pouring out of the speaker after Woodruff asked her to cite the factors that have been “impeding the ability of the federal government to address this” crisis. . . . “I have tried to act in a bipartisan way,” the speaker continued Tuesday. “As I said, three bills in March, bipartisan. Easter, I had...

Muni’s massive cutback in service to cope with the coronavirus pandemic will leave just 17 bus routes active in San Francisco, with the rollout starting in phases Tuesday and taking full effect Wednesday. The decision to eliminate service on 51 of Muni’s 68 bus lines was made because almost 40% of the citywide transit system’s drivers were not expected to report for shifts Monday, said Jeffrey Tumlin, the agency’s transportation director. The drivers are considered to be in high-risk groups if they were to contract the virus. When the cuts are completed, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s system will...

... New Yorkers are also learning that “low-level” and “nonviolent” offenders feel no obligation to remain as such going forward. A man arrested for attempted rape last week in Brooklyn previously had been in jail on burglary charges and $20,000 bail. He was sprung in December in anticipation of the new policy. A man on Long Island with a history of drunken-driving convictions was arrested twice and released both times without bail inside of a two-week period—and the second time was after a crash that killed someone. Of course, these problems aren’t limited to New York. But in recent years,...

LOS ANGELES, CA -- Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti says he hopes to reach a preliminary agreement with the Trump administration on a joint plan to help combat the city's swelling homelessness crisis when he meets with Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson Friday, it was reported. Garcetti said Thursday a final deal was still days or weeks away but expressed optimism that the two sides were making progress toward an agreement to provide federal resources, including land, to augment local efforts to erect more shelter space for people living on the streets, the Los Angeles Times reported...

San Francisco, CA – San Francisco’s new district attorney fired several senior prosecutors on Friday, just two days after he was sworn into office. Chesa Boudin, who ran on a platform to fix the city’s “broken justice system” and put fewer people behind bars, was sworn into office as district attorney on Wednesday, according to KTVU. "I had to make difficult staffing decisions today in order to put in place a management team that will help me accomplish the work I committed to do for San Francisco,” Boudin said in a written statement released after the terminations became public. The...

One of Chesa Boudin’s first planned policy changes when he takes over as San Francisco’s district attorney next month seeks to answer a question that has long ignited debates in the city: Should people accused of crimes face harsher punishments if their actions allegedly benefited a street gang? The former public defender, who takes office Jan. 8, promises to put an end to filing what are known as gang enhancements against defendants — charges that can add years to felony sentences. Gang enhancements have drawn increased opposition in California, driven by statistics showing that they are disproportionately applied to people...

Oracle Corp. is pulling the plug on its annual San Francisco technology convention, relocating the event to Las Vegas in a major blow to the city's hospitality industry. The Redwood Shores company has signed a three-year agreement to bring its OpenWorld convention to the Caesars Forum in Las Vegas, citing rising hotel rates throughout the Bay Area as well as poor street conditions in San Francisco. An Oracle spokesperson confirmed the deal, first reported by CNBC.

Sydney Eicher waits with her newborn son to hear any news from her husband, Joe who is serving in the Army. Lately, their conversation is about a dog named Ragnar.  "They were on a mission and they went to this house and dog was in really bad shape," Eicher said.  She says her husband’s unit found Ragnar tied up in a compound while on a mission in a remote area of Afghanistan. One soldier, Sergeant First Class Josh Lott, traded rations for the dog.  "He had a lot of fleas and stuff,” Eicher explained. “He was really malnourished. They had to do...

It felt like deja vu for Dave Martin as he watched silent security footage of an individual breaking into his San Francisco bar in June. Within the first 16 months after it opened, Pine Tar Grill, Martin’s San Francisco Giants-themed business on Folsom Street filled with sports memorabilia, was burglarized three times. The final incident was caught on camera, showing a person breaking the glass of the front door at around 4 a.m. to steal cash, sports-related bobblehead toys and computers, Martin said. Repairs cost thousands of dollars and were a big factor in his decision to close the bar...