A free press is apparently now a criminal conspiracy. By Yashar Ali. [Autoplay]

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Tuesday enacted the first ban by a major city on the use of facial recognition technology by police and all other municipal agencies. The vote was 8 to 1 in favor, with two members who support the bill absent. There will be an obligatory second vote next week, but it is seen as a formality.

A study published last week in Science Advances comparing pre- and post-rideshare boom traffic in the US city of San Francisco found that the presence of Uber, Lyft, and similar companies has been an overall detriment for people who like getting where they’re going quickly.

A group of parents in San Francisco are rallying around a second-grade teacher with breast cancer who was required to pay for her classroom's substitute teacher while she is on medical leave. The parents at Glen Park Elementary School were stunned to learn that the teacher's paycheck was being docked $195 for each day she is out ill with the disease.

Statistics like this throw into sharp relief the challenge for Silicon Valley and its leaders in 2019.

Promoting homeownership as an investment strategy is a risky proposition. No financial advisor would recommend going into debt in order to put such a massive part of your savings in any other single financial instrument—and one that, as we learned just a few years ago, carries a great deal of risk. Even worse, that risk isn’t random: It falls most heavily on low-income, black, and Hispanic buyers, who are given worse mortgage terms, and whose neighborhoods are systematically more likely to see low or even falling home values, with devastating effects on the racial wealth gap.

Shortly after Apple used a new tax law last year to bring back most of the $252 billion it had held abroad, the company said it would buy back $100 billion of its stock. On Tuesday, Apple announced its plans for another major chunk of the money: It will buy back a further $75 billion in stock. “Our first priority is always looking after the business and making sure we continue to grow and invest,” Luca Maestri, Apple’s finance chief, said in an interview. “If there is excess cash, then obviously we want to return it to investors.”

The median price of a San Francisco Bay Area home sold last month fell slightly compared with the prior-year period, marking the first annual drop since the bottom of the last housing crash, seven years ago, according to CoreLogic. In March, the median price was $830,000, down 0.1% compared with March 2018. The decline came as price gains had been shrinking for several months. Before last month, the median sale price had risen annually for 83 consecutive months since April 2012. Both May and June 2018 had the highest ever median sale price: $875,000.

In 2017, the real estate site Trulia crunched numbers and determined that it was still cheaper to buy than to rent in San Francisco, albeit by a very slim margin. At the time, San Jose had even worse figures: buying was cheaper than renting in the South Bay city too, but the difference was only 3.5 percent. Respectively, the two Bay Area cities had the most anemic returns for buyers nationwide in over seven years.

San Francisco is inching closer to becoming the first American city to ban facial recognition surveillance, a booming technology that’s a fast-growing business in the United States and extends to the core of China’s high-tech authoritarianism. A proposal to ban facial recognition from the city as well as provide significant transparency and oversight requirements to buying or using other forms of surveillance was heard by a committee in the San Francisco’s board of supervisors on Monday.

Three blocks from Mark Zuckerberg’s $10 million Tudor home in San Francisco, Jake Orta lives in a small, single-window studio apartment filled with trash. There’s a child’s pink bicycle helmet that Mr. Orta dug out from the garbage bin across the street from Mr. Zuckerberg’s house. And a vacuum cleaner, a hair dryer, a coffee machine — all in working condition — and a pile of clothes that he carried home in a Whole Foods paper bag retrieved from Mr. Zuckerberg’s bin.

In Silicon Valley, an open house can be more than an open house. At a six-bedroom, seven-bath home in the town of Menlo Park, a flamenco dancer swirled and a guitarist fingerpicked in a kitchen alcove. Outside, pesto pizza was pulled from the pizza oven. A face painter splotched unicorns on pudgy cheeks. A barista whipped up lattes. There were squishy toys for kids and videos of the house for potential homebuyers, who could keep the video-players.

Officials in San Francisco have proposed a new law to ban e-cigarette sales until their health effects are evaluated by the US government. The law appears to be the first of its kind in the US and seeks to curb a rising usage by young people. Critics, however, say it will make it harder for people to kick addiction. A second city law would bar making, selling or distributing tobacco on city property and is aimed at an e-cigarette firm renting on Pier 70.

IF A LOCAL tech industry critic has his way, San Francisco could become the first US city to ban its agencies from using facial recognition technology. Aaron Peskin, a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors, proposed the ban Tuesday as part of a suite of rules to enhance surveillance oversight. In addition to the ban on facial recognition technology...

I’m driving down the 101 toward San Francisco International Airport. A gray blanket of fog pours over the hills in the distance, smothering what would be a luminous California sunset. Eleanor is sitting next to me in the passenger seat taking deep breaths. She does not like to fly. I hesitate, then finally ask what’s on her mind, cutting the air between us. “I don’t want to put any pressure on you, but since this is the last time we’ll be hanging out for a while, I feel like we have drifted apart over the last year. Is there something I did wrong?

Would become first in the nation to ban the tech

Airbnb is making its biggest donation yet in its hometown — $5 million — toward helping address the homelessness crisis in San Francisco. The announcement comes at a time when politicians and social justice organizations are increasingly calling upon tech companies to give more to the city where they created their wealth. Last week, San Franciscans voted to pass a “homelessness tax” — Prop C — on large corporations in the city.

A television production crew investigating the car break-in issue in San Francisco inadvertently played themselves when thieves broke into not just a bait car, but the camera crew's vehicle as well. Inside Edition, a CBS-affiliated news program, brought a car to Alamo Square with a Michael Kors purse and a $250 speaker in plain view inside. Both items had been fitted with GPS tracking devices. As anticipated, the car was broken into by a woman and a man soon after they parked. The crime, they later noted after reviewing footage, took about 20 seconds.

San Francisco police arrested 75 hotel workers protesting outside the J. W. Marriott’s Westin St. Francis hotel on Labor Day for blocking a street in one of the city’s busiest tourist areas. About 900 Marriott hotel workers demonstrated Monday at Union Square as they consider a vote to authorize a strike, said Unite Here Local 2 spokesman Ted Waechter. He said 8,000 workers in more than 50 hotels in San Francisco and six other North American cities are working without a contract.

San Francisco jurors just ruled that that Roundup, the most popular weedkiller in the world, gave a former school groundskeeper terminal cancer. So they awarded him $289 million in damages, mostly to punish the agricultural company Monsanto. Dewayne Johnson's victory Friday against Monsanto could set a massive precedent for thousands of other cases claiming the company's famous herbicide causes non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.