Day Around the Bay: Oakland Vice Mayor Rebecca Kaplan Faces $19K Ethics Fine

San Francisco's Roosevelt Middle School says it received some kind of threat for Tuesday, which it does not deem credible, on Facebook. The school sent a letter to parents saying it would be taking extra precautions today and student absences would be excused. [KRON4]. Paul Pelosi has been invited as...

A new, previously confidential report has emerged saying, essentially, that Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong lied to investigators about his knowledge of the case at the center of his being removed from the job. The report, from the law firm Clarence Dyer and Cohen, suggests Armstrong was "not credible" when he claimed not to have knowledge of the car crash incident involving a sergeant that occurred in 2021. [KTVU]

The state of California rejected Oakland’s housing element plan, adding it to the list of Bay Area cities that did not get their housing plans approved in time. Oakland’s plan to build 26,000 new units was deemed inadequate by the California Department of Housing and Community Development, which said the city wasn't adding enough low-income housing to wealthy neighborhoods. [Chronicle]

A group of deplorable teens allegedly conducted a home-invasion robbery on Monday at the home of a UC Berkeley student using Tinder, and the ruse of a hookup with a 19-year-old girl. The incident happened early Monday morning, and as the Berkeley Scanner reports via Berkeley police, this all began...

Mayor London Breed’s practice of demanding secret, undated letters of resignation from her appointees created a three-week mini-scandal this past autumn, and SF supervisors voted Tuesday to ban the practice for good. It created a political headache for SF Mayor London Breed in late September when a public records...

What was once northern California’s largest homeless encampment at Wood Street in Oakland now has a collection of tiny homes to house 100 people. But on the flip side, the clearing of the encampment continues. West Oakland’s Wood Street encampment has been a years-long headache for the city of...

"With our Housing Element approved by the state, we have the plan," Mayor London Breed said on Tuesday. "Now we need to put it into action." The swift and on-time approval of San Francisco's Housing Element last week came as a surprise to many of us. But maybe that's because the hand-wringing in local media about how it might not happen was just that — though there are many towns and cities now in a legal gray zone, including Oakland and Berkeley, who saw their Housing Elements rejected by the state. It's hard to give credit to any one city department or entity for a plan that has been in draft stages for several years.

Fast on the heels of the news that Michelin three-starred Quince is undergoing a six-month renovation, we learn that owners Lindsay and Michael Tusk are planning a new casual off-shoot. The SF Business Times reports that the Tusks are taking over the space formerly occupied by The Station SF at...

You knew it was coming, with all the bankruptcy rumblings in the news, but yes, Bed Bath and What's More is closing its only San Francisco store. The place could already be picked over, weeks after warnings went out in the media that you should use up that pile of never-expiring coupons while you can. But the Bed Bath & Beyond location at 555 Ninth Street — otherwise known as the Trader Joe's complex at Ninth and Bryant — is slated to close.

Four years, a James Beard Award, and a pandemic later, Chronicle food critic Soleil Ho is relinquishing the post — and without a whole lot of explanation. It feels like just yesterday that Soleil Ho was taking on the esteemed job at the Chronicle that had been held by Michael Bauer for over three decades — and in some ways, it kind of was just yesterday, in restaurant time. A lot of us are having trouble remembering if something happened last year, or in 2021, or in 2019, and there's been a Groundhog Day aspect to the three pandemic years that have just barely passed. We are still about four weeks away from the anniversary of everything shutting down in SF, and for many restaurateurs it's been a long slog back to some sense of normalcy, with debts still to pay.

County officials are calling it “the largest law enforcement-related settlement in anyone’s memory” after agreeing to pay a $4.5 million settlement for the tasering and killing of an unarmed pedestrian who’d merely been jaywalking. When San Mateo sheriff’s deputies tasered and killed 36-year-old Black man Chinedu...

The often-comical or rambling public comments at City Hall meetings have been submittable via Zoom or by phone since the start of the pandemic, but the Board of Supervisors may vote to end that practice by the end of the month, forcing commenters to show up again to complain in person.

Beware that not all things on Eventbrite can be trusted! A San Francisco chef was recently alerted to a phony wine dinner being advertised at his Noe Valley restaurant, and it took a few days for him to get Eventbrite to pull it down. Chef Telmo Faria, chef-owner of Portuguese...

51-year-old Dmitri Mishin is accused of firing shots in an Outer Richmond synagogue last week — and while the shots were blanks, his disturbing social media posts have synagogue leaders calling for hate crime charges. It was last Wednesday night that a man allegedly walked into a synagogue and...

We now have three arrests of people allegedly selling clearly shoplifted goods on Mission Street, but the methods used make one wonder why we didn’t start doing this months or years ago. Rampant vending in the Mission was never a notable issue until the practice exploded in 2021, which...