Wingnuts are frothing at the mouth today over the plight of a Northern California teenager, whose life is seriously fucked up right now, thanks to a marijuana charge.
The possible deportation of Saira Munoz "back home" to Mexico is in headlines across the world, with the New York Daily News and UK Daily Mail picking up her story: short of cash for a prom dress, the 18-year-old Yuba City high school senior tried to make money by selling pot brownies.
The restaurant worker sold some to a friend, who sold some to other people -- one of whom went to the hospital after eating a "small piece" and freaking out. That brought in the cops, who arrested her in March 2013.
She could have done two years in jail... "for marijuana," it was breathlessly reported by local television news (in full-on, melodramatic Anchorman-like style).
Instead -- before she was reported to immigration officials -- the local District Attorney charged her with a felony. There's so much wrong here, but that's where the wrong began.
The Arkansas hacker who became a more pugnacious disciple of Aaron Swartz can go free, a federal appeals court ruled this morning.
The news prompted giddy headlines throughout the tech blogosphere, many of which treated Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer as a cause celebre. "Weev Is Free!" TechCrunch trumpeted. "Hacker Weev's Chilling Conviction Is Overturned," said the more measured headline on Huffington Post.
Journalists have assiduously followed the hacker's case since 2012, when a New Jersey jury convicted him of gathering the personal data of 140,000 iPad users from a publicly available AT&T site, and leaking it to Gawker. Weev said he wanted to expose flaws in AT&T's privacy settings, and maintained, in an impassioned speech delivered the day of his sentencing, that he'd been sent to jail "for arithmetic."
His obdurate stance and flamboyant media persona drew international attention, as did the timing of the case; it roughly coincided with the prosecution of famed hacker Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide before he could be tried for downloading academic articles from JSTOR. Both Weev and Swartz were tried under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a controversial law originally meant to discourage hackers from drilling past a firewall. In recent years, the government has used it to go after renegade programmers who feel compelled to make information accessible to the public.
That was the crux of Weev's case: It put a law on trial, in the guise of an individual. In the end, Weev's polarizing, trollish, douchebag personality was less important than the conflict he represented.
But the three-judge appeals panel managed to completely overlook that debate, when it vacated Weev's conviction this morning.
Around the country today, LGBT students will take a 1-day vow of silence in order to protest bullying and harassment affecting their community.
Transgender kids have been particularly hard hit by bullying in schools, as evidenced by the stories SF Weekly recently ran about Jewlyes Gutierrez, an East Bay Trans teen who was charged with assault after she defended herself against her attackers.
Based upon news coverage thus far, 2014, is the year of the vehicle-vs.-pedestrian incident (we have been implored to cease using the malleable term "accident.").
Blaming hapless pedestrians for their own plights -- You! Put away the phone and walk! -- would appear to be solely the domain of contrarians looking to stir the pot. That being said, the number of incidents, let alone fatalities, is still low enough that it's hard to draw strong conclusions on what's going on. The sample size is just too small.
In any event, one conclusion that's not in doubt is that the cops have ratcheted up enforcement.This glut of tickets, headline writers assure us, is to "Curb Pedestrian Deaths." Good luck there.
But, it warrants asking, what if that's not the only reason this is happening?
Bernalwood Press is reporting news of a woman's body found inside a minivan at the Mission District Safeway yesterday.
San Francisco police say because the case is not suspicious, the cops are not investigating at this time. The case has gone to the Medical Examiner. That information coincides with what Bernalwood is reporting. Here's what a neighbor told the blog:
San Francisco police have arrested the driver who they say was responsible for killing 82-year-old Oi Yeung as she walked through Visitacion Valley last month.
Officer Albie Esparza says police arrested 31-year-old Nidra Stubbs at her home on April 10 in connection to the hit-and-run collision. On March 20, Yeung was walking east on Visitacion when a driver in a white SUV Durango struck her.
After hitting the victim, the driver made a U-turn and slowly drove by the scene before speeding off again.
A mom-and-pop jeweler is offering a $5,000 reward to anyone who can nab the crooks responsible for stealing more than 100 vintage gold and costume jewelry pieces.
NBC News aired surveillance video of the burglary at Monkey On Chestnut which occurred on April 1, The store owner shared the footage on Facebook, hoping the public could help solve the case.
"This theft threatens my ability to continue my business and is devastating to dozens of jewelry owners whose family pieces were on consignment at my store," Owner Robert Hemphill told NBC News.
Surveillance video shows two men carrying tools they used to tear a hole through the wall to get into the Monkey on Chestnut.
Watch:
The expansion of the Bay Area Bike Share was approved by the San Francisco Metropolitan Transit Commission yesterday afternoon. Like any committee meeting there were plenty of different opinions, but ultimately, it seems everybody is for bike share.
So $8.7 million will go into developing the East Bay expansion, but right now, nobody knows how or where that will happen just yet.
