BERNIE WILSON, Associated Press

12 hours ago

Australia SailGP team helmed by Tom Slingsby, front left, leads the fleet ahead of New Zealand SailGP team helmed by Peter Burling, right, and Denmark SailGP Ttam helmed by Nicolai Sehested, center, on Race Day 1 of the Spain Sail Grand Prix races in Cadiz, Spain, Saturday, Oct. 14 2023. (Bob Martin/ SailGP. via AP)

Three-time defending SailGP champion Tom Slingsby skippered Team Australia into the lead of the Spain Sail Grand Prix Cádiz on Saturday, finishing well ahead of his top rivals as he pursues his first victory of Season 4.

Slingsby steered the Flying Roo foiling catamaran to finishes of 5-2-1 to take a one-point lead over Nicolai Sehested’s ROCKWOOL Denmark, with Spain’s Diego Botin six points back in third. Botin, who won in Los Angeles in late July, thrilled the home crowd with a victory in the first race.

Britain’s Sir Ben Ainslie had a rough start in his pursuit of a third straight regatta victory, going 8-10-6 to settle into ninth in the 10-boat fleet. Peter Burling and Team New Zealand returned to the racecourse with a new wingsail but struggled with finishes of 4-5-8 to sit in sixth place, nine points off the lead.

Jimmy Spithill’s Team USA is fourth, seven points off the lead, after going 2-3-10. Taylor Canfield is filling at flight controller for Hans Henken, who was seriously injured three weeks ago when the catamaran crashed hard off its foils.

“We’re stoked with today, and it’s definitely a confidence booster going into tomorrow, considering we are expecting similar light air conditions,” said Slingsby, an Olympic gold medalist and former America’s Cup champion.

The Aussies came into the regatta with a six-point lead over Ainslie and Botin in the season standings despite not having won yet this season. Their last victory was in the $1 million, winner-take-all grand finale of Season 3 in May in San Francisco, the third straight time they clinched the championship of tech billionaire Larry Ellison’s global league.

“It’s been quite frustrating,” Slingsby said. “Although we have been consistent and sailed well, we haven’t managed to get a win this season. I’ve got to do everything I can to secure this win for the team.”

This is the second anniversary of SailGP’s Women’s Pathway Program and strategist Nina Curtis rejoined the Aussie crew after taking maternity leave. She was the first woman to win a SailGP regatta when the Aussies were victorious in Cádiz in 2021.

“It’s amazing to see how much the program has developed in two years and the role it has played in inspiring young female sailors across Australia,” said Curtis, an Olympic silver medalist and ocean racer. “It’s a pretty special moment for me to be back racing here with the team, and now having my own daughter Dylan watch on.”

The Kiwis were back on the water for the first time since their $1 million wingsail suddenly shattered and fell into the Mediterranean just minutes after they finished racing in the opening day of the France Sail Grand Prix in Saint-Tropez on Sept. 9. They were unable to race in the following regatta at Taranto, Italy, and were awarded fifth place.

“We definitely had a pretty tough day where we never quite found our groove fully,” said Burling, the two-time reigning America’s Cup champion and a three-time Olympic medalist. “It’s our first day racing in a while, so we can go away, tidy that up and come out swinging tomorrow.”

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Three-time defending SailGP champion Tom Slingsby skippered Team Australia into the lead of the Spain Sail Grand Prix Cádiz on Saturday, finishing well ahead of his top rivals as he pursues his first victory of Season 4.

Slingsby steered the Flying Roo foiling catamaran to finishes of 5-2-1 to take a one-point lead over Nicolai Sehested’s ROCKWOOL Denmark, with Spain’s Diego Botin six points back in third. Botin, who won in Los Angeles in late July, thrilled the home crowd with a victory in the first race.

Britain’s Sir Ben Ainslie had a rough start in his pursuit of a third straight regatta victory, going 8-10-6 to settle into ninth in the 10-boat fleet. Peter Burling and Team New Zealand returned to the racecourse with a new wingsail but struggled with finishes of 4-5-8 to sit in sixth place, nine points off the lead.

Jimmy Spithill’s Team USA is fourth, seven points off the lead, after going 2-3-10. Taylor Canfield is filling at flight controller for Hans Henken, who was seriously injured three weeks ago when the catamaran crashed hard off its foils.

“We’re stoked with today, and it’s definitely a confidence booster going into tomorrow, considering we are expecting similar light air conditions,” said Slingsby, an Olympic gold medalist and former America’s Cup champion.

The Aussies came into the regatta with a six-point lead over Ainslie and Botin in the season standings despite not having won yet this season. Their last victory was in the $1 million, winner-take-all grand finale of Season 3 in May in San Francisco, the third straight time they clinched the championship of tech billionaire Larry Ellison’s global league.

“It’s been quite frustrating,” Slingsby said. “Although we have been consistent and sailed well, we haven’t managed to get a win this season. I’ve got to do everything I can to secure this win for the team.”

This is the second anniversary of SailGP’s Women’s Pathway Program and strategist Nina Curtis rejoined the Aussie crew after taking maternity leave. She was the first woman to win a SailGP regatta when the Aussies were victorious in Cádiz in 2021.

“It’s amazing to see how much the program has developed in two years and the role it has played in inspiring young female sailors across Australia,” said Curtis, an Olympic silver medalist and ocean racer. “It’s a pretty special moment for me to be back racing here with the team, and now having my own daughter Dylan watch on.”

The Kiwis were back on the water for the first time since their $1 million wingsail suddenly shattered and fell into the Mediterranean just minutes after they finished racing in the opening day of the France Sail Grand Prix in Saint-Tropez on Sept. 9. They were unable to race in the following regatta at Taranto, Italy, and were awarded fifth place.

“We definitely had a pretty tough day where we never quite found our groove fully,” said Burling, the two-time reigning America’s Cup champion and a three-time Olympic medalist. “It’s our first day racing in a while, so we can go away, tidy that up and come out swinging tomorrow.”

Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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Self-driving cars once seemed like futuristic wonders, however, in tech-savvy San Francisco, autonomous vehicles are now just about everywhere, making deliveries and shuttling passengers.

Despite the city’s legacy of embracing new technology, San Francisco has become one of the fiercest battle grounds in the debate over autonomous vehicles, and whether they can safely coexist on streets already bustling with human drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, and other urban obstacles.

Across California, a total of 41 companies currently operate more than 2,000 autonomous vehicles in California. While most have test drivers inside, who are capable of overriding the cars when necessary, hundreds of vehicles on the road right now have no one behind the wheel.

As autonomous vehicle companies now seek to further expand their operations in the San Francisco, some say it’s time to hit the brakes on the emerging technology.

Questions, however, about safety and how exactly human drivers stack up against their A.I. counterparts don’t always have simple answers.

If you haven’t spotted one already, it’s only a matter of time. Driverless cars are here. Would you get into one? Many people want to hit the breaks on the technology. Senior Investigative Reporter Bigad Shaban explains what’s driving the controversy and what happened to him on a test run.

State transportation records, obtained by NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit and NBC News, reveal self-driving cars have been involved in hundreds of crashes across the state over the past five years. Most self-driving vehicles in California have test drivers traveling inside, who are able to override the cars’ computer systems.

According to records from the California DMV, those safety drivers had to override their vehicles thousands of times last year, including for safety reasons.

In another incident that snarled up rush hour traffic, a self-driving car shuttling Senior Investigative Reporter Bigad Shaban, swerved, then simply stopped on a major thoroughfare in the Outer Sunset neighborhood, blocking two lanes of traffic for 20 minutes.

Despite the technology’s current imperfections, industry insiders are quick to highlight the technology’s safety benefits, which they argue allow the vehicles to often outperform human drivers.

“Our cars don’t drive drunk, they don’t get distracted,” said Prashanthi Raman, Vice President of Global Government Affairs at Cruise, which is majority-owned by the automotive giant General Motors.

“In the vast majority of situations, the vehicle behaves exactly like it’s supposed to do, similar to a human driver,” Raman said.  “We’re really looking to improve interactions where that doesn’t work as appropriately as it should.”

Prashanthi Raman is the Vice President of Global Government Affairs at Cruise

Cruise and its major competitor, Waymo, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, are two of the largest driverless car companies in the United States.

Both companies are currently petitioning regulators with the California Public Utilities Commission to expand their robotaxi services in San Francisco, the state’s largest testing ground for autonomous vehicles, so passengers can request rides from their phones, 24 hours a day.

Waymo and Cruise already hold test permits from the California DMV that allow them to operate their vehicles at all hours of the day throughout San Francisco. However, both companies have their ultimate sights set on ride-sharing services, similar to Uber and Lyft, which requires the companies to secure separate permission from the California Public Utilities Commission. As of now, Cruise is only allowed to collect fares from passengers from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. in select parts of the city.  Waymo isn’t allowed to charge for its robotaxi services at all. On Thursday, however, the CPUC’s five commissioners will vote on whether to allow both companies to expand their ride-sharing services to all of San Francisco, regardless of the time of day.

It’s not always a smooth ride

Regulations in California require autonomous vehicle companies to self-report each collision involving an autonomous vehicle. Transportation documents, obtained by the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit through a public records request, show autonomous cars have been in involved in at least 532 collisions since June 2018. However, in 252 of those crashes, the car was being fully controlled by the test driver, known in the industry as ‘conventional mode.’  The remaining 280 crashes occurred while the car was in full control, known as ‘autonomous mode,’ resulting in at least 64 injuries and a dead dog.

Of those crashes, 42 were truly driverless – with no safety driver inside the vehicle.

* An at-fault determination is typically made by law enforcement and insurance companies, according to the California DMV, which aimed to track at-fault data during the onset of the state’s testing program by collecting police reports and insurance-related information.  Law enforcement, however, does not always respond to the scene of an accident and so an at-fault determination isn’t always made.  As a result, the California DMV, says it has since stopped collecting such information and has not documented an at-fault determination since Nov. 25, 2019.

A California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) database, obtained by the Investigative Unit, details collisions with other vehicles, bicyclists, scooterists, skateboarders, and even city busses.

Self-driving cars were not always at fault in those crashes, according to the records. It’s unclear from the data, however, exactly how often other parties were to blame.

For autonomous vehicles in testing, with actual humans inside who can take the wheel, DMV records reveal the human drivers had to override their cars more than 8,000 times last year alone.

“If humans have to override these vehicles because of a safety issue, they’re not good to go,” said San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson, who said she opposes the expansion of driverless cars until the technology can be improved.

“I am not anti-technology. I am pro safety,” Nicholson said. “There’s a lot of smart people on both sides and they can troubleshoot and they can work together to figure things out and make things better, and I have seen no effort on the [autonomous vehicle] side to make that happen. And it’s really distressing.”

Nicholson says for months her department has asked Cruise to make its engineers available to meet with fire department staff to craft solutions to some of the technology’s shortcomings relating to emergency scenes.  Nicholson says those requests have so far gone nowhere.

Cruise, however, denies the accusation.

“We know that our relationship with city agencies and city departments are very important,” Raman said. “We continue to work with them and have met with them dozens of times over the last 18 months.”

While Nicholson acknowledges she and her staff have previously met with representatives from autonomous vehicle companies, those meetings have yet to yield any substantial solutions to the problems, she says, the fire department has repeatedly raised.

San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson

In San Francisco, cameras have captured self-driving cars getting confused by emergency scenes, sometimes plowing into caution tape, or blocking fire trucks.

Without a driver in the car, Nicholson said, it’s difficult to get the vehicles to move when they’re impeding first responders. The chief said her crews have even had to smash the window of a driverless car to stop it from getting in their way.

In instances where first responders need help moving an unresponsive driverless vehicle, fire department officials have been given a toll free phone number to call to reach a company representative.

“We don’t have time to call a 1-800 number when we are doing CPR on someone,” Nicholson said. 

Waymo never responded to NBC Bay Area’s interview request.

Raman, one of the leaders at Cruise, said the company’s fleet of vehicles are designed to come to a safe stop when they approach a situation they are unsure about.

“Traffic blockages are not something that we want to have happen, but it’s also one of the realities of living in a very dynamic street with pedestrians and bicyclists, with delivery trucks, with double parked vehicles,” she said. “So we are working to minimize when those things happen.”

Raman conceded the technology isn’t perfect, but said Cruise’s own analysis found the safety record of its self-driving cars often outperforms human drivers, who were responsible for more than 42,000 traffic related deaths in the United States last year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

Self-driving cars are only believed to have been involved in one fatal crash, which occurred in Phoenix back in 2018.

The comparison is a difficult one to make, however, since there are hundreds-of-millions more cars on the road being driven by humans, who log more than 3 trillion miles each year.

According to Cruise, its cars have driven more than 3 million miles, and haven’t been involved in a single death or life-threatening injury.

The one fatal crash involving a self-driving car

The accident involved an autonomous car from Uber, which has since halted its operation of self-driving vehicles.  The car, which had a test driver riding along behind the wheel, struck and killed a pedestrian who was jaywalking at about 10pm. In a 2019 report issued by the National Transportation Safety Board, investigators cited an “inadequate safety culture” at Uber, and noted “inadequate safety risk assessment procedures, ineffective oversight of vehicle operators, and [a] lack of adequate mechanisms for addressing operators’ automation complacency.” Other contributing factors, according to the NTSB, included drugs being found in the pedestrian’s system and the “failure of the vehicle operator to monitor the driving environment and the operation of the automated driving system because she was visually distracted throughout the trip by her personal cell phone.”

While injuries have so far been rare, traffic blockages are increasingly more common, something NBC Bay Area witnessed firsthand during one of two rides with Cruise’s autonomous vehicles.

The first test drive appeared to go smoothly, with the vehicle maintaining the speed limit and pausing for pediatricians in the cross walk. Senior Investigative Reporter Bigad Shaban hailed the ride through the company’s app and spent about 45 minutes in the vehicle, traveling from the Pacific Heights neighborhood to the Outer Sunset without any problems.

Soon after being dropped off, Shaban ordered a second ride, where he was accompanied by Eugenia Borges, a driving instructor of 15 years. Borges, who works for Ann’s Driving School in San Francisco, has instructed thousands of beginner drivers during her career and joined the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit to assess the driverless ride.

Driving instructor Eugenia Borges and Senior Investigative Reporter Bigad Shaban take a test ride in a Cruise autonomous vehicle.

Less than one minute into the ride – and less than two blocks away from our pickup point – there were already signs of trouble.

Despite a green light, the car sat there for two minutes without budging.

“It’s very confused,” Borges said from the back seat. “Poor thing.”

The car eventually got through the intersection, but there were even more problems to come.

A construction sign up ahead indicated the far-right lane the vehicle was traveling in would be closed and was signaling vehicles to merge into the center lane. For more than three minutes, the car haltingly inched forward, but kept stopping, sometimes straddling the far-right and center lanes without moving.

“It’s a very safe situation for the car to turn and it’s just staying here,” Borges said. “I’m not sure why.”

Then, suddenly, the car accelerated and veered straight towards the median, stopping just short of hitting it.

“Oh, oh!” Borges exclaimed from the back seat. “This is not good.”

The car sat there occupying the far-left lane and part of the center lane without budging, as rush hour traffic backed up for blocks behind it.

NBC Bay Area’s second test ride with Cruise doesn’t go as planned.

Not even coaching from Borges could get the car moving again as onlookers stared and frustrated drivers honked their horns.

“Turn your wheel right!” she instructed.

After being stuck for twenty minutes, a Cruise employee arrived and drove the car away in manual mode.

The company declined an interview request to explain what happened, but sent a statement saying the issue stemmed from an “unexpected construction zone” that would have required several lane changes.

“The better course was for the [autonomous vehicle] to come to a safe stop rather than proceed,” the statement said.

Tweaking the technology to be able to handle every type of roadblock could take the industry years, according to experts, so gearing up driverless cars to navigate all across the country may still be a long road ahead.

“I’m rooting for this,” Borges said.  “I want this to happen, but with what I saw right now, it’s a big no for me.”

You can explore the entire California DMV database of autonomous vehicle collisions below.

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SAN FRANCISCO — The San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Tuesday expressed concern and frustration over potential patient discharges happening once again at the Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center in light of an agreed-upon grace period coming to a close on Friday.

At Tuesday’s board meeting, Laguna Honda interim CEO Roland Pickens laid out the hospital’s progress in reaching federal and state recertification, two days before the hospital may have to begin discharging its patients once again.

The discussion comes after federal and state regulators cited safety concerns at Laguna Honda last April, stripped it of its Medicare and Medicaid provider agreements and required the hospital to move all 700 patients out of the facility by September. Among the concerns were drug paraphernalia in the facility, a lack of infection prevention and control, and missed doses of medication.

Thanks to a settlement agreement initiated by City Attorney David Chiu in the summerthe US Department of Health and Human Services allowed the hospital to postpone patient discharges until February, and the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) agreed to keep funding Laguna Honda, so long as they worked to find solutions to the cited issues .

Days before the no-eviction window closes, city supervisors and health leaders are once again concerned about the dangers of quickly discharging and transferring patients, many of whom have complex medical conditions.

The hospital alleges that of the 57 residents who were transferred into other facilities last summer, at least 12 died within three months.

In response, CMS has issued a dozen citations against Laguna Honda for the deaths, though Pickens alleges that the regulators were partially responsible because of their pressurizing, expedited timeline and lack of guidance.

“We maintain to this day that the best place for those residents [who died] was Laguna, and the best place for the residents at Laguna now is Laguna, which is why we are doing everything we can to ensure that we do not have to resume transfers,” said Pickens.

The organization California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform alleges that Laguna Honda evicted extremely sick patients “known to be at high risk for transfer trauma” to nursing homes outside of the city with “poor track records,” some even being sent to homeless shelters.

CANHR said the series of $3,000 fines were “a mere slap on the wrist for repeated and lethal acts of elder abuse.” They added that federal and state regulators played a “lead role” in the deaths by forcing Laguna Honda to evict patients quickly, without safety in mind.

Patricia McGinnis, CANHR’s executive director, called on the Legislature to investigate the leadership of the California Department of Public Health.

“CDPH must not be allowed to whitewash the deaths of these vulnerable residents and its own role in them,” McGinnis said.

dr Grant Colfax, head of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, said the department has issued a letter to CMS seeking out another pause in transfers, and CMS promised to respond before Friday. Concurrently, Laguna Honda is continuing to make improvements to become recertified, Colfax said.

“While we’ve made great progress over the last six months, and while there is more work ahead, I am confident in our direction,” said Colfax. “As we go through this process, we are again unwavering in our dedication to our residents and their families. The health, safety and well-being of our residents remains our top priority.”

Pickens said the hospital has worked closely with quality improvement experts to identify eight key issues that led to Laguna Honda’s decertification based on regulatory surveys from the past 18 months and developed an action plan to address all the concerns.

Some of the actions Laguna Honda plans to make to achieve the 300-plus milestones needed to reach recertification include creating better individualized care plans for its residents, especially those with mental health and substance abuse issues, creating better infrastructure to prevent residents from bringing illicit materials into the facility, and switching to in-person emergency preparedness drills rather than training their staff via online modules.

Laguna Honda has until May 13 to demonstrate progress toward meeting regulatory requirements before it resubmits its certification application.

“We are hopeful that when CMS comes back for their second monitoring survey, that they will see improvements and that the results will be better than they were for the first survey,” Pickens said.

Supervisor Dean Preston said he felt CMS was acting in bad faith for not responding to a request for an extension on the transfer pause.

“I cannot believe after a dozen people are dead as a result of how this has gone down to date, that CMS is not being more responsive and working with us around an extension,” said Preston at Tuesday’s meeting.

Supervisor Rafael Mandelman said he was “struck” by how much harm the oversight agencies have allegedly caused, and called their leadership “unaccountable” and “disconnected.”

“I’m sure they think they’re just following the rules they’re supposed to follow, but the real-life, on-the-ground impacts of the way in which they are proceeding is causing huge distress and stress, and in 12 cases, deaths,” Mandelman said.

Supervisor Hillary Ronen said CMS’s requests are “truly cruel and unbelievable.” She thanked Laguna Honda staff for “trying to accomplish the impossible” in meeting the regulators’ guidelines without much help.

“They don’t seem to take that into account on how much Laguna has bent over backwards to try to be helpful in resolving the crisis on our streets and with mental illness, that certainly the state and the feds don’t seem to provide any funding nor help,” Ronen said. “This whole thing is just mind-boggling.”

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SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) – Union leaders and members joined hundreds of San Francisco city workers in a march down Market Street on Wednesday, saying more needs to be done to fill the city’s staffing gaps.

Participants in the event called “Staff Up SF” insisted that the city is critically understaffed in so many areas. They pointed to more than 3,800 openings in positions across the city.

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Workers said the vacancies in areas like the Department of Public Works and the San Francisco International Airport are making it harder to do their jobs safely.

Mike Casey, the president of the San Francisco Labor Council, spoke at a rally outside City Hall.

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“This is not our building. This is the public’s building. And when they don’t staff up and when the staffing doesn’t happen, the services affect citizens across the city,” Casey said.

Heather Bollinger is a Registered Nurse and called on increased staffing at her hospital, saying the matter had reached critical levels.

“We can’t provide patient care without the resources to do it. It’s a really simple equation, when you come to the hospital, you need a nurse,” Bollinger said. “And they’re dropping like flies. It’s getting worse by the day in our departments.”

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KPIX 5 reached out to Mayor London Breed’s office for comment, but she is currently traveling in Europe to promote the city of San Francisco as a place for tourism and commerce.

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LIVERMORE (KPIX 5) – A power surge in Livermore early Tuesday fried thousands of appliances and likely caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, as it impacted 521 homes.

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. said it happened around midnight Monday night into Tuesday morning when a palm frond falling across a high voltage distribution line and a lower voltage transmission line at Elaine Avenue and Holmes Street in Livermore.

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It caused a power surge so powerful it blew the meters off houses and fried electronics.

“I had the TV on and I literally can see the smoke and sparks flying. It was like a big fire, poof, and then it was over. Completedarkness. It was scary,” said Christy Garcia, one of the impacted homeowners.

“Our dishwasher we just bought is like completely destroyed, coffee maker, Xbox, monitors are fried,” Garcia recalled.

Neighbors also said they lost solar panels, pool pumps, hot tubs, TVs, computers and other small electronics, garage door openers, kitchen appliances, HVAC systems, sprinkler controllers – basically anything that was plugged in when the surge hit.

“How do you have that much electricity going through your house at one time to cause that much damage?” Garcia wants to know.

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“We’re extremely busy right now. Non-stop calls,” said Tim Agront, is one of the project managers for Five or Free, a local Livermore electrical company.

Agront told KPIX 5 that they have worked on 36 houses Tuesday and 43 houses Wednesday.

“Cost of repairs that I’ve seen, probably on the high end, would be at least up to $40,000-$50,000 and that’s just in appliances alone,” he says.

PG&E said impacted homeowners can file a claim on their website but told KPIX 5 in a statement that “Although the palm tree was not in PG&Es right of way and we are not responsible for its maintenance, we will review and consider each claim.”

Agront said one way to prevent something like this from damaging electronics in your home is to have a whole house surge protector installed or ensure all electronics are plugged into strip surge protectors before they’re plugged into the wall.

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Claims with PG&E can be filed by calling the utility’s claims department at (415) 973-4548 or online at www.pge.com/claims. Each household can only file one claim per incident, so people need to make sure they check everything in their homes before filing the claim.

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SAN FRANCISCO – The San Francisco Bay Area has the highest rates of commercially sexually exploited youth in the United States, according to the FBI, and about 98% identified were involved with the child welfare system.

Not only that, but according to a 2017 report, data from 22 agencies serving trafficking survivors in San Francisco, housing and shelter were among the top service gaps reported for youth ages 10-17.

And in fact, researchers have found that key barriers to housing include a lack of available beds, a lack of specialized support services at shelters and short-term residential care or group homes, restrictive policies that prohibit youth from returning to shelters, a lack of adults who are willing to care for older youth, and lack of adults who have the knowledge, training, and skills to support youth who have experienced complex trauma.

So, the San Francisco Department on the Status of Women partnered with the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center, Freedom Forward, Family Builders, Huckleberry Youth Programs, and West Coast Children’s Clinic to create a family-based foster care pilot for these children.

That’s why the program, called Family and Me, or FAM, is seeking foster care parents.

Interested caregivers can visit joinfam.org to learn more about the program.

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San Francisco authorities are calling on the public to help identify a woman who allegedly fed wild coyotes around the city, an act that can cause the animals to lose their fear of humans.

San Francisco Animal Care & Control said in a statement Wednesday that it had received reports of feeding in multiple areas and shared a picture of a person the agency identified as “a particularly outrageous coyote feeder.”

The picture was taken with a camera on Bernal Hill and shows a woman with a platter of meat sitting on the floor while she feeds a coyote.

“The same person is reportedly feeding coyotes elsewhere in the city,” the agency said. “If anyone can identify this person, please call Animal Care & Control at 415-554-9400.”

San Francisco Animal Care & Control is calling on the public for help in identifying a woman who allegedly fed a coyote on Bernal Hill in San Francisco. The picture was taken by a camera on the hill.

SF Animal Care & ControlSF Animal Care & Control

Coyotes are often spotted in San Francisco, where the animals shape the urban landscape, build caves and raise young in vegetation zones between the neighborhoods. Neighborhood groups next door are full of stories of coyotes killing cats, and Instagram is awash with pictures of coyotes strolling the streets of SF. Although the animals are nocturnal, photos often show them on the move in broad daylight.

Wild coyotes are naturally shy and shun people, but they can be comfortable around people if intentionally fed.

An aggressive coyote alerted several park visitors at Golden Gate Park last year, and authorities said there have been five reports of an animal attacking young children. According to an ongoing investigation, federal agencies captured and killed the animal.

Despite signs urging people not to feed coyotes, Animal Care & Control said that people were consistently and illegally feeding the coyotes so that they lost their natural fear of humans. The agency stated that feeding coyotes “creates dangerous situations when animals learn to approach people when they seek easy access”.

Feeding wildlife is illegal, and anyone caught in the act could face fines of up to $ 1,000 and / or jail time, the agency said.

“People need to stop feeding wild animals,” said Virginia Donohue, the agency’s executive director, in a statement. “If you continue to defy the law – and common sense – you will hurt a person and destroy an animal.”

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The British explorer Sir Francis Drake landed on a beach in what is now Point Reyes National Seashore in the spring of 1579 and claimed the land for England.

That was 28 years before an English colony was founded in the United States.

But some people in Marin County wish he had never stopped visiting, regardless of its historical significance.

As the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum after the death of George Floyd, calls for the deletion of monuments and memorials to racist figures have multiplied in the United States

Drake was a slave trader. ABC7 reported that activists want its 10 meter high statue next to the Larkspur Ferry Terminal removed and renamed Sir Francis Drake Boulevard.

Lauren Brown told a reporter that the statue “disgusted” her.

“This is about moving that tale of white supremacy,” she said.

As is to be expected, the sculptor disagrees.

“That was not a sculpture of him, but the event!” Dennis Patton from San Rafael told the broadcaster.

A petition to remove Drake statues in Plymouth and Tavistock, England has garnered 14.00 signatures, the Guardian reported.

Drake was the most famous captain of his day, a pirate hired by Queen Elizabeth to ambush and pillage the Spaniards, and a vice admiral in the fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada, a turning point in English history.

But two decades before the naval battle, he made three trips to Guinea and Sierra Leone, during which 1,200 to 1,400 Africans were enslaved. Historians estimate that another 4,000 likely died in the process.

In addition to the statue and the boulevard, Drake’s name can be found throughout Marin County and the Bay Area, including San Anselmo High School and a famous hotel in Union Square, San Francisco.

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Mike Moffitt is an SFGATE digital reporter. Email: moffitt@sfgate.com. Twitter: @Mike_at_SFGate

The post Activists search elimination of Sir Francis Drake’s identify in Marin appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

SACRAMENTO (CBS SF) – Following a US Supreme Court ruling in favor of college athletes’ compensation, two major California lawmakers say they will introduce the state’s pioneering Fair Pay to Play Act in time for the 2021 college football season want.

State law that allows college and university athletes in California to make money using their name, picture, and likeness does not currently go into effect until January 1, 2023.

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State Senators Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, and Steven Bradford, D-Gardena, say they plan to go into effect September 1st.

“California has taken state action to challenge the NCAA’s exploitation of college athletes, and today the Supreme Court essentially agreed to tell the NCAA that they could no longer act as monopoly“ price fixers, ”” Skinner said in a statement on Monday. “And with 18 states following California’s lead to give student athletes ownership of their name, image and likeness, student athletes are the winners.”

NIL laws in seven states – Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, New Mexico, Mississippi, and Texas – will come into effect this year.

“Postponing the entry into force of the Fair Pay to Play Act is a sensible move to ensure that college student athletes, many of whom are people of color, are treated earlier with financial fairness and economic ownership,” said Bradford. “It also enables California higher education institutions to attract the best talent compared to schools in other states that would otherwise have a head start in attracting athletes by implementing similar guidelines earlier.”

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The September 1st implementation date makes the law an urgent measure, which means it requires a two-thirds majority in both chambers of the legislature. To date, it has received strong bipartisan support, has no opposition, and has not received “no” votes.

The US Supreme Court ruled Monday that the NCAA cannot enforce certain rules that limit the educational benefits – things like computers and graduate scholarships – that colleges offer athletes. But the case doesn’t determine whether student salaries can be paid.

Colleges harvest billions of student athletes but keep them from making a single dollar. It’s a bankrupt model.

I just signed the Fair Play to Pay Act with @KingJames – making CA the first state to allow student athletes to benefit from their name, image and likeness. pic.twitter.com/aWE9OL9r1v

– Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) September 30, 2019

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In a unanimous opinion, Judge Brett Kavanaugh wrote: “The bottom line is that the NCAA and its member colleges are cutting the pay of student athletes who collectively generate billions of dollars in college revenue each year. These enormous sums of money seem to flow to everyone except the student athletes. College presidents, sporting directors, coaches, conference commissioners, and NCAA executives earn six- and seven-digit salaries. Colleges are building generous new facilities. But the student athletes who make the income, many of which are African American and low-income backgrounds, end up with little or nothing. “

The post State Lawmakers Say It’s Time To Pay Faculty Athletes; Search To Transfer Up California’s Honest Pay to Play Act To Sept. 1 – CBS San Francisco appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.