When news that Dutch police had raided the High Times Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam this year filtered back to the United States, the reaction was a mixture of shock, outrage, and outright disbelief. Surely, even with a center-right government, the laissez-faire Dutch weren't locking up peaceful pot-smokers in what's been the international capital of cannabis use (sorry, Oakland) for decades?
As it turns out: No, they weren't. It was a permitting snafu that led police to visit the High Times Cup, which was allowed to continue in peace -- peace that included attendees happily passing joints back and forth in front of smiling police officers, according to reports.
This kind of lax enforcement won't last for long, however. Dutch officials announced this week a plan to finally, once-and-for-all close its famed "cannabis coffee shops" to tourists.
But no need to hurry to Holland -- the country-wide closure won't go into effect until 2013, and there's no serious effort to recriminalize possession of five grams or less.
Israeli entrepreneur Rotem Guez tells media outlets that he has legally changed his name to "Mark Zuckerberg," but not because he admires the Silicon Valley tech guru, or because he likes the name.
No, he came up with an even better reason: to piss off Facebook, which is threatening to sue him.
"If you want to sue me, you're going to have to sue Mark Zuckerberg," he tells Facebook.
Clever, huh?
The man who was shot by San Francisco cops during a routine traffic stop on Wednesday died last night, police told reporters.
Officers had pulled the man -- who has not yet been identified -- over on Bush and Larkin streets Wednesday just before 1:30 p.m.. As the officers approached the car, the driver got out and ran south on Larkin Street. Halfway through the block, he turned around and fired several rounds at police, who then shot back.
Police say he was struck in the neck area and collapsed to the ground. He was taken to San Francisco General Hospital where he died on Thursday.
Update (noon): Officer Albie Esparza called us back and said that the man's body was so badly decomposed that the medical examiner has to run forensics tests to determine the race, age, and cause of death. Officers are unsure when the man was killed or how long his body had been sitting inside the residential unit. Neighbors had contacted police yesterday because of the smell. Police are interviewing neighbors and hoping there is a surveillance camera near the building that could help them determine who killed the man.
Original story (9:24 a.m.): Police say a man was found dead in the Polk Gulch early Thursday morning. The medical examiner has confirmed this is the result of a homicide.
Police released very little information about the incident, including how the victim died. All we know at this point is that officers responded to a call on the 2000 block of Polk Street at about 8:15 a.m. on Thursday and found a deceased man.
"Pandering to the conventional wisdom," former New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller once observed, is "the mortal sin of journalism." There are plenty of journalistic sinners out there, particularly when it comes to the conventional wisdom on San Francisco.
Self-consciously middle-of-the-road pundits love to play the part of the straight man in this city, making facile attacks on San Francisco as a parody-worthy leftist metropolis characterized by job-killing social initiatives, totalitarian limits on real-estate development, and fruitless posturing by local politicians on the day's grand causes.
The reality is that San Francisco's politics is a shifting battlefield of interests -- some idealistic, many others venal, and a few corrupt -- in constant competition with one another, as in any other city. (You think supervisors' resolutions condemning Israeli aggression or banning the de-clawing of cats are bad? A New Hampshire town I used to cover for a daily newspaper once considered a measure making it illegal for agents of the United Nations to venture within municipal boundaries.)
And here's some information the purveyors of conventional wisdom might not have predicted about San Francisco: It's apparently at the top of the list of job-creating urban areas in California.
You can take Occupy protesters out of the streets, but you cannot take the streets out of the protesters. Occupy Oakland folks stormed a Commonwealth Club meeting last night in San Francisco where the very unpopular Mayor Jean Quan was a sitting panelist.
The club had arranged a panel to speak about what's next for the controversial Occupy Oakland movement, which was booted from its camp site on Frank Ogawa Plaza last month. But protesters used that as an opportunity not to discuss its future, but rather to rail on Quan over the past.
KTVU reports that the panel was "barely seated before Quan became a target and some audience members were thrown out of the room."
We've been giving readers a lot of depressing news about dogs being shot and killed this week. So here's an uplifting story with a happy ending. Frosty, the cute 1-year-old poodle-terrier mix whose photo was plastered everywhere after being tossed from a moving car, has been found -- alive.
A woman walking on Manor Road around 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday spotted the injured pup, who walked up to her appearing hungry and dehydrated. He's currently at the vet being treated for the head injury he received after being cruelly thrown from a moving car on Dec. 5. Sadly, vets already had to remove one of Frosty's badly infected eyes during emergency surgery.
"He is thin, dehydrated, has grease marks on his back, and has many ticks, but is in good spirits and very friendly," Beth Brookhouser of the Monterey County SPCA told reporters.
In San Francisco, District Attorney George Gascón is known as an administratively competent political moderate with a firmly established place in the ascendant "city family" headed by Mayor Ed Lee. During his tenure as chief of the Mesa Police Department in Arizona, Gascón was known for something else: his courage in standing up to the bizarre and nefarious reign of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Now it appears like that reign might finally be crumbling. It's been a tough December for Arpaio, who has endured a storm of political criticism over his deputies' bungling of hundreds of sex-crime cases; an unfavorable federal court hearing in a lawsuit that targets him for violating SF Weekly sister paper the Phoenix New Times' constitutional rights; and, as of yesterday, the long-awaited results of a federal probe into civil-rights violations by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department.
The U.S. Justice Department found that Arpaio had instituted "discriminatory policing that was deeply rooted in the culture of the department, a culture that breeds a systematic disregard for basic constitutional protections." In fact, the DOJ concluded that the MCSO, in its treatment of Latinos, had committed the worst observed racial profiling in American history.
