SAUSALITO — A gray whale found dead on a San Francisco beach was hit by a ship. The 41-foot-long adult female was spotted Monday at Ocean Beach. The Marine Mammal Center says a necropsy performed Tuesday found the whale's skull and upper vertebrae had fractures consistent with a ship strike....
San Francisco to Join List of Those Banning Cashless Stores
SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco is about to require brick-and-mortar retailers to take cash as payment, joining Philadelphia and New Jersey in banning a growing paperless practice that critics say discriminates against low-income people who may not have access to credit cards. The Board of Supervisors will take up the issue at...
San Francisco Billionaire Gives $30M to Study Homelessness
SAN FRANCISCO — A San Francisco billionaire is donating $30 million to the University of California, San Francisco, to research root causes of homelessness and potential solutions. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, a city native, has embraced homelessness as a philanthropic cause, pumping millions into a 2018 city measure to tax...
Baby Sea Lion Rescued from Bay Area Highway
SAN FRANCISCO — A baby sea lion wandered onto a busy highway in South San Francisco Tuesday, stopping vehicles and alarming motorists before officials whisked it away. SFGATE reports California Highway Patrol received the call around 8:30 a.m. Motorists had tried to shoo the sea lion to safer ground, with one man...
Single Family Zoning Could Disappear Under State Housing Bill
SACRAMENTO — California lawmakers advanced a proposal Wednesday to spur more housing near transportation and jobs and make it easier to turn single-family homes into fourplexes as the state grapples with a lack of affordable housing. The measure, a compromise between two Democratic senators, sets different requirements for small and...
Court Sets Hearing on Trump Administration's Asylum Policy
SAN FRANCISCO — A federal appeals court on Wednesday scheduled a hearing over whether to stop the Trump administration from forcing asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their immigration court hearings. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals set a hearing for April 24 in San Francisco over whether...
Mental Health 'Catastrophe:' Vanishing Board-and-Care-Homes Leave Residents Few Options
This summer, Tom Gray will lose his home. A slim man with hunched shoulders and a halting voice, Gray, 72, has schizophrenia. Before he landed in Carmen Palarca’s board-and-care home 11 years ago, he spent 20 years living on the streets, many of them huddled in a doorway across from...
San Francisco Eyes Charge to Drive Its Famed Lombard Street
SAN FRANCISCO — Thousands of tourists could soon have to pay as much as $10 to drive down world-famous Lombard Street in San Francisco. City and state officials on Monday announced a bill that would give San Francisco the authority to establish a toll and reservation system for the street...
What the Dodgers’ and Giants’ 1958 Move West Meant for America
Few phrases are as evocative of a mythical, imagined urban past as “Brooklyn Dodgers.” Those two words, particularly in the borough that is now a punch line for hipster jokes, bring to mind a different America, one where the U.S. saw itself as more of a political innocent just discovering...
MLB Suspends Giants CEO Larry Baer for Altercation With Wife
SAN FRANCISCO — Major League Baseball suspended San Francisco Giants President and CEO Larry Baer without pay through July 1 after a video showed him in a physical altercation with his wife. Commissioner Rob Manfred said Tuesday his office conducted an investigation of the events shown on a video released...