Tag: san francisco

San Francisco Judge Frees Man Who Killed 84-Year-Old ‘Grandpa Vicha’ in Unprovoked Attack After Citing Murderer’s ‘Traumatic Childhood,’ Releases Him on Probation

A San Francisco Superior Court activist judge has ordered the immediate release and probation of Antoine Watson, the man convicted in the 2021 unprovoked killing of 84-year-old Thai immigrant Vicha Ratanapakdee, widely known as “Grandpa Vicha.”

On Thursday, Judge Linda Colfax sentenced Watson to a total of eight years but suspended the remaining portion of the term after giving him credit for approximately five years already served in San Francisco County Jail.

Watson, now 25, was released to live with his mother in Hayward on five years’ probation, which includes weekly therapy sessions and regular check-ins.

The high-profile killing was captured on surveillance video and helped lead to the national “Stop Asian Hate” movement in early 2021.

On January 28, 2021, Watson, then 19, was recorded on video running full speed and violently shoving Ratanapakdee to the ground as the elderly man took his daily morning walk in San Francisco’s Anza Vista neighborhood.

Ratanapakdee struck his head on the pavement, lost consciousness, and died several days later from his injuries.

Watson was initially charged with murder, assault, and elder abuse.

This January, a jury convicted him of involuntary manslaughter and assault but acquitted him of murder and elder abuse charges.

During Thursday’s sentencing hearing in the San Francisco Superior Court, Judge Colfax explained that she selected the middle term of three years for the assault conviction and added a five-year enhancement for aggravating factors, including the victim being over 70 and suffering great bodily injury.

However, because Watson had already served more than five years, he was eligible for immediate release.

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Election Fraud in Deep Blue California? Officials Investigate Alleged Scheme Paying People to Sign Ballot Petitions With Fake Names

California election officials are investigating a disturbing allegation that petition circulators in San Francisco were paying individuals to sign ballot petitions using fake names.

According to state officials, the investigation began after a video surfaced online earlier this week showing what appears to be a sidewalk operation offering cash in exchange for signatures on ballot petitions, News4Jax reported.

The footage, posted Monday on X, shows a sign reading “Sign petition for $5” with a line of people waiting along a San Francisco sidewalk.

At a nearby folding table, a woman appears to be instructing individuals on what name and address to use while filling out the petitions.

When the person recording the video asked what the petitions were for, the woman simply responded: “Just sign it.”

The video quickly went viral and caught the attention of California election authorities.

In a statement Friday, the California Secretary of State’s office confirmed it is actively investigating the matter.

“We are aware of, and investigating, the matter,” the office said.

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Caught in Broad Daylight: Ballot Initiative Signature-Gatherers in California Paying For Signatures – Backed by Billionaire PAC

On Monday, street videographer JJ Smith captured on camera what appears to be election crimes in San Francisco, California.  In broad daylight.

The video shows a line of people at the corner of 6th Street and Mission Street in the SoMa neighborhood, soliciting signatures on Monday afternoon.

The clip begins with Smith walking up on the line with a sign that reads, “Can you read & Write?  Sign Petition for $5.”

Smith asks a man in the line, “What’s the line for?”  He responds that they’re “giving five bucks to sign a petition.”

When Smith asks the two women seated at the table, “I get $5 too?”  She replies, “Yeah.”

“What is it?” he asks.

The woman responds, “Just sign it.”

The woman can then be seen highlighting a paper for another woman in the line but off camera.

“First name is going to be Carol, last name Sanderson.  This is the address right here.  This is the city, Avila Beach, and this is the zip code,” she tells the woman.  As the woman takes the paper and pen to sign it, the worker says, “So remember, first name is ‘Carol’”.

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Democrat Mayor of San Francisco Slowly Walks Away as His Security Team Violently Attacked; Officer Left with Severe Head Injury

San Francisco’s Democrat Mayor Daniel Lurie calmly walked away as his security team was violently attacked on the street in the Tenderloin District on Thursday evening.

One San Francisco officer assigned to Lurie’s security detail was bleeding from his head after he was bodyslammed.

Lurie was not injured.

According to Mission Local, Lurie “hopped out” of his SUV to confront the three people who were standing in the street and blocking his vehicle.

The officer instructed the men to move out of the street when one of the men came at him.

The officer tried to fend off the attacker and grabbed his arm. The suspect slammed the officer to the ground.

Two suspects were arrested.

Mission Local reported:

Mayor Daniel Lurie’s police security detail was attacked at the edge of the Tenderloin on Thursday evening just before 6 p.m., according to witnesses and a video obtained by Mission Local.

The mayor was unharmed. One unidentified San Francisco police officer, who was part of Lurie’s security team and was in the black SUV used to ferry Lurie around alongside the mayor and his driver, was left bleeding from the back of his head.

He panted as he spoke to Mission Local and gave a statement to fellow police officers who responded to the scene.

The officer said that three people blocked the car shortly prior to the attack, and that Lurie “hopped out” to ask them to move. They began to “comply,” the officer told his fellow cops, but, at some point, one man began “talking gibberish.”

The officer then intervened and asked the man to move out of the way. The man did at first, but then came at him, he told officers.

The officer held onto the man’s upper body and then “fell back” with the man on top of him, and hit his head on the pavement as he fell.

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So-Called ‘Moderate’ San Francisco Mayor Signs Ludicrous Reparations Scheme That Could Award Each Black Resident $5 MILLION

The People’s Republic of San Francisco has decided to enshrine race-based reparations into law with the help of their alleged ‘moderate‘ mayor.

As the Daily Mail reported, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie gave black residents of his city an early Christmas gift by signing a reparations bill that could grant each one of them a whopping $5 MILLION in reparations. The legislation was signed on December 23.

Per The Daily Mail, here is how this scheme will unfold:

The ordinance establishes a reparations fund, as recommended by the city’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee (AARAC) in its 2023 report.

The legislation establishes the fund but does not allocate any money to it, setting up the framework for any future contributions, whether they be through the city or privately donated.

The AARAC is tasked with developing ‘recommendations for repairing harm in our black communities,’ according to its website. Per the 2023 report, every eligible African-American adult in San Francisco should be handed a $5 million lump sum to ‘compensate the affected population for the decades of harm that they have experienced.’

Approximately 50,000 black people live in San Francisco, and the qualifying requirements remain unclear.

This move also comes despite the city facing a whopping $1 billion budget deficit. But this did not deter Lurie in the slightest.

“For several years, communities across the city have been working with the government to acknowledge the decades of harm done to San Francisco’s black community,” Lurie wrote.

“While that process largely predates my administration, I am signing the legislation to create this fund in recognition of the work of so many San Franciscans and the unanimous support of the Board of Supervisors.”

Roughly a week before Lurie signed off on the plan, the city’s Board of Supervisors voted in favor of it.

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San Francisco Reparations Fund Now Causing Infighting Among Various Groups in the City

San Francisco passed a resolution right before Christmas, creating a reparations fund that is supposed to pay a ridiculous amount of money to black residents, despite the fact that California never even had slavery.

Bear in mind that there is no money for this. The city has a massive deficit.

To make matters worse, the divisive policy is now driving infighting among various groups in the city. It seems like this was inevitable.

FOX News reports:

San Francisco residents band together to shut down reparations fund, claiming it’s ‘dividing’ the city

Richie Greenberg, one of the plaintiffs suing San Francisco over its reparations fund, claimed the measure is divisive because it solely favors Black residents.

“It is dividing the city rather than trying to unite. So, what we really need is to be focusing on how to uplift everybody rather than focusing on one group giving everything to that one group. And then everyone else is then responsible for paying for that one group,” Greenberg told Fox News Digital…

The city was sued over its reparations fund on grounds its taxpayer money is being “unlawfully” used for a policy that allegedly violates the equal protection clause.

According to the Pacific Legal Foundation, several San Francisco residents and Californians for Equal Rights Foundation sued San Francisco Thursday, challenging an ordinance that establishes a fund for Black residents.

The lawsuit alleges that the ordinance is discriminating on the basis of race because it allows taxpayer money to be funneled into the fund. The plaintiffs said a win would protect taxpayers from supporting a government-based racially motivated program and establish boundaries for other cities implementing similar policies.

“Acknowledging past injustice does not give the government license to spend public resources on programs that sort people by race and ancestry today,” said Andrew Quinio, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation.

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San Francisco Ends $5M-A-Year Program That Supplied Alcohol To Homeless Addicts

Sigh. It’s not parody. It’s San Francisco. The city is shutting down a controversial program that used millions in taxpayer funds to provide alcohol to homeless residents struggling with addiction, according to the NY Post.

Mayor Daniel Lurie said the city will end the Managed Alcohol Program, which cost about $5 million each year and began during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“For years, San Francisco was spending $5 million a year to provide alcohol to people who were struggling with homelessness and addiction — it doesn’t make sense, and we’re ending it,” Lurie told The California Post.

The program was launched in April 2020, when the city placed unhoused residents in hotels during lockdowns. Medical staff supplied controlled amounts of beer and liquor to prevent dangerous withdrawal symptoms while stores and bars were closed. Although intended as a temporary measure, it continued for nearly six years.

During its operation, the program served only 55 people, translating to an average cost of roughly $454,000 per client.

Now, Lurie says the city has fully pulled its support.

“We have ended every city contract for that program,” he said.

Community Forward, the nonprofit that managed the initiative in recent years, confirmed that the city has terminated its funding. Financial records show the group received millions in public money, much of it spent on staff salaries.

San Francisco’s program was the first of its kind in the United States, modeled loosely on similar efforts in Canada. Unlike other harm-reduction policies, such as needle exchanges, MAP directly supplied alcohol to people already dependent on it.

Since taking office last year, Lurie has moved away from long-standing harm-reduction policies. He has also ended the distribution of drug-use equipment and pushed for stricter enforcement of street drug activity.

“Under my administration, we made San Francisco a recovery-first city and ended the practice of handing out fentanyl smoking supplies so people couldn’t kill themselves on our streets,” Lurie said.

“We have work to do, but we have transformed the city’s response, and we are breaking the cycles of addiction, homelessness and government failure that have let down San Franciscans for too long.”

Last year, he warned open-air drug markets that enforcement would increase.

“If you do drugs on our streets, you will be arrested,” Lurie said. “And instead of sending you back out in crisis, we will give you a chance to stabilize and enter recovery.”

The Post writes that recovery advocates welcomed the decision to end MAP. Tom Wolf, a former homeless addict who now works in outreach, said the program wasted public funds.

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Bay Area scientist launches new company with sights on gene-edited babies

Last month, as he announced the launch, he said that Preventive has raised almost $30 million from private funding.

The funding is reportedly coming from some heavy hitters in the tech world, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his husband Oliver Mulherin.

Harrington also said his team included leading experts in the fields of reproductive technology, reproductive medicine and genome-editing.

“Our goal is straightforward,” he wrote, “to determine through rigorous preclinical work whether preventive gene editing can be developed safely to spare families from severe disease.”

Harrington acknowledged the major ethical concerns around the science and the gray areas in the regulatory process, which he said, have opened the field to potentially detrimental outcomes. 

“The combination of limited expert involvement and lack of a clear regulatory pathway has created conditions for fringe groups to take dangerous shortcuts that could harm patients and stifle responsible investigation,” the researchers said, adding, “Given that this technology has the potential to save millions of lives, we do not want this to happen.”

Gene editing can only be used in in vitro fertilization to allow for the first step of genetic testing on an embryo.

“It requires IVF because you have to have the embryo in a dish,” explained Stanford law professor Henry (Hank) Greely, a leading expert on ethical, legal, and social implications in bioscience technologies.

Once a test determines an embryo has the DNA makeup of a genetic disease, for example, like Huntington’s or cystic fibrosis, scientists would then use the DNA editing technique known as Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR, to make alterations to the DNA.

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San Francisco mayor sneaks through reparations bill just before Christmas that could give each black resident $5MILLION

The mayor of San Francisco discreetly approved a bill to create a fund that may eventually grant each of the city’s eligible black residents $5 million in reparations. 

Mayor Daniel Lurie quietly signed the incredibly divisive Reparations Bill just two days before Christmas. 

The ordinance establishes a Reparations Fund, as recommended by the city’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee (AARAC) in its 2023 report. 

The legislation merely establishes the fund but does not allocate any money to it – setting up the framework for any future contributions, whether they be through the city or privately donated.

The AARAC is tasked with developing ‘recommendations for repairing harm in our black communities,’ according to its website. 

Per the 2023 report, every African American adult in San Francisco should be handed a $5 million lump sum to ‘compensate the affected population for the decades of harms that they have experienced.’

While this effort has captured the most attention – and sparked the most controversy – the AARAC rattled off more than 100 suggestions, including debt relief, guaranteed annual income of $97,000, debt forgiveness and city-funded homes for black people. 

In 2023, the conservative public policy think tank Hoover Institution said the plan would cost each non-African American household in the city about $600,000 in tax dollars. 

However, Lurie told the Daily Mail that this is not the case, citing the city’s struggling finances. 

‘For several years, communities across the city have been working with the government to acknowledge the decades of harm done to San Francisco’s black community,’ Lurie wrote. 

‘While that process largely predates my administration, I am signing the legislation to create this fund in recognition of the work of so many San Franciscans and the unanimous support of the Board of Supervisors.’

But Lurie said the city is bracing for a $1 billion budget deficit next year.

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Massive power blackout leaves at least a third of San Francisco in darkness

A massive outage has knocked out power to 130,000 homes and businesses across San Francisco, leaving at least one-third of the city in darkness.

The power failure left a large swath of the northern part of the city in the dark on Saturday, beginning with the Richmond and Presidio neighborhoods and areas around Golden Gate Park.

Social media posts and local media reported mass closures of restaurants and shops and darkened street lights and Christmas decorations.

The San Francisco Department of Emergency Management said on X there were ‘significant transit disruptions’ happening citywide and urged residents to avoid nonessential travel and treat down traffic signals as four-way stops.

The city’s transportation agencies said they were bypassing some Muni bus and BART train stations because of the power outages.

At least some of the blackouts were caused by a fire that broke out inside a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) substation at 8th and Mission streets.

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