A curious bird photobombed Mark Tamayo KTVU's weather report

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Officials increased the cost estimate for the first phase of California's high speed rail project by 35 percent on Tuesday, to $10.6 billion.

A "friend for life" has been campaigning for years, along with others, to make a California landmark safer. John Blackstone has her story: On a stage in Nashville, songwriter Sarah Lockwood Barr performs songs she's written that she loves to sing ... and one that breaks her heart. "This is for Casey Brooks, who would have turned 27 this past May," she announced, before playing "Starting Over"...

A former US Marine suspected of plotting a Christmas holiday terror attack on a popular San Francisco tourist destination was indicted Thursday by a grand jury. Everitt Aaron Jameson said he wanted to use pipe bombs to "funnel people into an area in order to shoot them," at Pier 39, according to the federal indictment.

Police are investigating a shooting involving an off-duty Richmond police officer inside a hotel in San Francisco’s Financial District.SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — Police are investigating a shooting involving an off-duty Richmond police officer inside a hotel in San Francisco’s Financial District. Around 4:55 a.m. officers responded to reports of gunfire inside the Four Seasons Hotel in the 700 block of Market St., according to San Francisco Police Department. Police say the suspect did not immediately cooperate, prompting a shelter in place.

The San Francisco branch the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) has been ordered by the city to stop using a robot to patrol the sidewalks outside its office, the San Francisco Business Times reported Dec. 8. The robot, produced by Silicon Valley startup Knightscope, was used to ensure that homeless people didn’t set up camps outside of the nonprofit’s office. It autonomously patrols a set area using a combination of Lidar and other sensors, and can alert security services of potentially criminal activity.

Robots that trundle along sidewalks R2D2-style to deliver takeout food or packages are still in early test phases. Few even exist. But San Francisco is cracking down on them, and that may stem from mounting concerns about automation gobbling up jobs. On Tuesday night, San Francisco's Board of Supervisors unanimously passed tough new regulations that will limit companies to three robots each; limit the city to nine robots total; and confine robots to industrial areas where almost no one lives - all of which makes it hard to test their basic function of delivering goods to consumers.

Coinbase has been at the center of the speculative frenzy driving up the value of Bitcoin — which topped $13,000 on Wednesday — and similar currencies. While there are many Bitcoin exchanges around the world, Coinbase has been the dominant place that ordinary Americans go to buy and sell virtual currency. No company had made it simpler to sign up, link a bank account or debit card, and begin buying Bitcoin.

Last week, San Francisco became the first major city in America to pledge to connect all of its homes and businesses to a fiber optic network. I urge you to read that sentence again. It’s a ray of light. In an era of short-term, deeply partisan do-nothing-ism, the city's straightforward, deeply practical determination shines. Americans, it turns out, are capable of great things—even if only at the city level these days.

Tim Lincecum’s last known address is tucked behind a partial fence, just off a sloped dead-end street near the shores of Lake Washington. Getting to the front door of the barn-red building requires crossing a short bridge. It feels like walking the plank.

The cities of San Francisco and Oakland are suing some of the world’s largest oil companies over climate change, joining an emerging legal effort to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for the damages wrought by rising seas. The suits, filed separately in Superior Court in San Francisco and Alameda County and announced Wednesday, claim that a slate of oil, gas and coal producers not only caused the heat-trapping gases that drove sea level rise but knowingly did so, a challenge akin to litigation against big tobacco companies in the 1990s.

TOBACCO is to lose its taste in San Francisco. The Californian city has become the first in the US to ban all sales of flavoured tobacco. Starting next April, the ban covers any tobacco product with a “distinguishable taste or aroma”, including menthol cigarettes and flavoured vape fluids. Its backers say it will protect certain minorities.

Dollar for dollar, a comprehensive look at the agony of building a business

Police sealed off streets in city's Potrero Hill area after the shooting, which took place around 9 a.m. local time. Neither police nor UPS immediately confirmed the death toll.

An interactive historical photo map allows viewers to experience the cataclysm from a neighborhood-level perspective.

A massive blackout likely caused by a fire at a PG&E substation swept through San Francisco on Friday, darkening homes and businesses for hours, shutting down a subway station and all the cable cars, and knocking out streetlights across a wide swath of the city. The power outage, which at its height affected 88,000 customers, struck just after 9 a.m. when a fire erupted at a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. depot at Larkin and Eddy streets.

Americans see foreigners as the people who steal their jobs, and people who destroy American way of life. My observations in the San Francisco Bay area provides clues for the origin of this common view that is shared by many Americans, since the foreign born population in this region increased significantly in the last decade or two, which also caused the current real estate bubble in the region.

Housing in the San Francisco Bay Area is not just more expensive than average, it is off the charts expensive, and it represents a never ending housing bubble. Many engineers or other technical people might come here for the job prospects but for the most people, it is not a good idea to move here.

With fears about the job-killing effects of automation growing every day, once unthinkable ideas are starting to get an airing. A universal basic income (UBI)–where the government gives everyone enough money to live on–has lots of supporters, especially in Silicon Valley. And now some prominent individuals are calling for a tax on robots. The thinking: If you make robots more expensive, there will be more public funds to help retrain workers (or pay for that basic income)–and the higher cost might keep some companies from buying robots and quickly tanking the employment rate.

Following the recent advice of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Supervisor Jane Kim called for a hearing Tuesday on imposing a tax on robots and automation. “We are finding that robots have begun to destroy millions of American jobs. The long predicted era of robots and automation replacing human workers has arrived,” Kim said. “We need to ensure that the massive new wealth created by automation is redirected to investing in education and training displaced workers for the jobs of the future.”