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SAN FRANCISCO — Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a trailblazing San Francisco Democrat who leveraged decades of power in the U.S. House to become one of the most influential political leaders of her generation, will not run for reelection in 2026, she said Thursday.

The former House speaker, 85, who has been in Congress since 1987 and oversaw both of President Trump’s first-term impeachments, had been pushing off her 2026 decision until after Tuesday’s vote on Proposition 50, a ballot measure she backed and helped bankroll to redraw California’s congressional maps in her party’s favor.

With the measure’s resounding passage, Pelosi said it was time to start clearing the path for another Democrat to represent San Francisco — one of the nation’s most liberal bastions — in Congress, as some are already vying to do.

“With a grateful heart, I look forward to my final year of service as your proud representative,” Pelosi said in a nearly six-minute video she posted online Thursday morning, in which she also recounted major achievements from her long career.

Pelosi did not immediately endorse a would-be successor, but challenged her constituents to stay engaged.

“As we go forward, my message to the city I love is this: San Francisco, know your power,” she said. “We have made history, we have made progress, we have always led the way — and now we must continue to do so by remaining full participants in our democracy, and fighting for the American ideals we hold dear.”

Pelosi’s announcement drew immediate reaction across the political world, with Democrats lauding her dedication and accomplishments and President Trump, a frequent target and critic of hers, ridiculing her as a “highly overrated politician.”

Pelosi has not faced a serious challenge for her seat since President Reagan was in office, and has won recent elections by wide margins. Just a year ago, she won reelection with 81% of the vote.

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However, Pelosi was facing two hard-to-ignore challengers from her own party in next year’s Democratic primary: state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), 55, a prolific and ambitious lawmaker with a strong base of support in the city, and Saikat Chakrabarti, 39, a Democratic political operative and tech millionaire who is infusing his campaign with personal cash.

Their challenges come amid a shifting tide against gerontocracy in Democratic politics more broadly, as many in the party’s base have increasingly questioned the ability of its longtime leaders — especially those in their 70s and 80s — to sustain an energetic and effective resistance to President Trump and his MAGA agenda.

In announcing his candidacy for Pelosi’s seat last month after years of deferring to her, Wiener said he simply couldn’t wait any longer. “The world is changing, the Democratic Party is changing, and it’s time,” he said.

Chakrabarti — who helped Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) topple another older Democratic incumbent with a message of generational change in 2018 — said voters in San Francisco “need a whole different approach” to governing after years of longtime party leaders failing to deliver.

In an interview Thursday, Wiener called Pelosi an “icon” who delivered for San Francisco in more ways than most people can comprehend, with whom he shared a “deep love” for the city. He also recounted, in particular, Pelosi’s early advocacy for AIDS treatment and care in the 1980s, and the impact it had on him personally.

“I remember vividly what it felt like as a closeted gay teenager, having a sense that the country had abandoned people like me, and that the country didn’t care if people like me died. I was 17, and that was my perception of my place in the world,” Wiener said. “Nancy Pelosi showed that that wasn’t true, that there were people in positions of power who gave a damn about gay men and LGBTQ people and people living with HIV and those of us at risk for HIV — and that was really powerful.”

Chakrabarti, in a statement Thursday, thanked Pelosi for her “decades of service that defined a generation of politics” and for “doing something truly rare in Washington: making room for the next one.”

While anticipated by many, Pelosi’s decision nonetheless reverberated through political circles, including as yet another major sign that a new political era is dawning for the political left — as also evidenced by the stunning rise of Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist elected Tuesday as New York City’s next mayor.

Known as a relentless and savvy party tactician, Pelosi had fought off concerns about her age in the past, including when she chose to run again last year. The first woman ever elected speaker in 2007, Pelosi has long cultivated and maintained a spry image belying her age by walking the halls of Congress in signature four-inch stilettos, and by keeping up a rigorous schedule of flying between work in Washington and constituent events in her home district.

However, that veneer has worn down in recent years, including when she broke her hip during a fall in Europe in December.

That occurred just after fellow octogenarian President Biden sparked intense speculation about his age and cognitive abilities with his disastrous debate performance against Trump in June of last year. The performance led to Biden being pushed to drop out of the race — in part by Pelosi — and to Vice President Kamala Harris moving to the top of the ticket and losing badly to Trump in November.

Democrats have also watched other older liberal leaders age and die in power in recent years, including the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, another San Francisco power player in Washington. When Ginsburg died in office at 87, it handed Trump a third Supreme Court appointment. When Feinstein died in office ill at 90, it was amid swirling questions about her competency to serve.

By bowing out of the 2026 race, Pelosi — who stepped down from party leadership in 2022 — diminished her own potential for an ungraceful last chapter in office. But she did not concede that her current effectiveness has diminished one bit.

Pelosi was one of the most vocal and early proponents of Proposition 50, which amends the state constitution to give state Democrats the power through 2030 to redraw California’s congressional districts in their favor.

The measure was in response to Republicans in red states such as Texas redrawing maps in their favor, at Trump’s direction. Pelosi championed it as critical to preserving Democrats’ chances of winning back the House next year and checking Trump through the second half of his second term, something she and others suggested will be vital for the survival of American democracy.

On Tuesday, California voters resoundingly approved Proposition 50.

In her video, Pelosi noted a litany of accomplishments during her time in office, crediting them not to herself but to her constituents, to labor groups, to nonprofits and private entrepreneurs, to the city’s vibrant diversity and flair for innovation.

She noted bringing federal resources to the city to recover after the Loma Prieta earthquake, and San Francisco’s leading role in tackling the devastating HIV/AIDS crisis through partnerships with UC San Francisco and San Francisco General, which “pioneered comprehensive community based care, prevention and research” still used today.

She mentioned passing the Ryan White CARE Act and the Affordable Care Act, building out various San Francisco and California public transportation systems, building affordable housing and protecting the environment — all using federal dollars her position helped her to secure.

“It seems prophetic now that the slogan of my very first campaign in 1987 was, ‘A voice that will be heard,’ and it was you who made those words come true. It was the faith that you had placed in me, and the latitude that you have given me, that enabled me to shatter the marble ceiling and be the first woman speaker of the House, whose voice would certainly be heard,” Pelosi said. “It was an historic moment for our country, and it was momentous for our community — empowering me to bring home billions of dollars for our city and our state.”

After her announcement, Trump ridiculed her, telling Fox News that her decision not to seek reelection was “a great thing for America” and calling her “evil, corrupt, and only focused on bad things for our country.”

“She was rapidly losing control of her party and it was never coming back,” Trump told the outlet, according to a segment shared by the White House. “I’m very honored she impeached me twice, and failed miserably twice.”

The House succeeded in impeaching Trump twice, but the Senate acquitted him both times.

Pelosi’s fellow Democrats, by contrast, heaped praise on her as a one-of-a-kind force in U.S. politics — a savvy tactician, a prolific legislator and a mentor to an entire generation of fellow Democrats.

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a longtime Pelosi ally who helped her impeach Trump, called Pelosi “the greatest Speaker in American history” as a result of “her tenacity, intellect, strategic acumen and fierce advocacy.”

“She has been an indelible part of every major progressive accomplishment in the 21st Century — her work in Congress delivered affordable health care to millions, created countless jobs, raised families out of poverty, cleaned up pollution, brought LGBTQ+ rights into the mainstream, and pulled our economy back from the brink of destruction not once, but twice,” Schiff said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said Pelosi “has inspired generations,” that her “courage and conviction to San Francisco, California, and our nation has set the standard for what public service should be,” and that her impact on the country was “unmatched.”

“Wishing you the best in this new chapter — you’ve more than earned it,” Newsom wrote above Pelosi’s online video.

OAKLAND — President Trump said Thursday that he had called off a planned federal “surge” into San Francisco after speaking with Mayor Daniel Lurie and other city leaders — a detente that officials and activists in the East Bay said they were not welcomed into and viewed with some suspicion, as potentially enlarging the target on their own communities.

Trump’s announcement came amid protests at the entrance to the U.S. Coast Guard base across the bay in Alameda County, where the Department of Homeland Security has begun staging additional forces. It followed a similar announcement by Lurie, who said he had told Trump during a phone call late Wednesday that San Francisco is “on the rise” and that “having the military and militarized immigration enforcement in our city will hinder our recovery.”

Lurie said Trump agreed to call off any federal deployment to the city, and that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — who is in charge of federal immigration forces — had “reaffirmed that direction” in a conversation with him Thursday morning.

Trump said on social media that his administration had been planning a “surge” in San Francisco beginning Saturday, but that Lurie had asked him “very nicely” to “give him a chance to see if he can turn it around,” and that other “friends” of Trump’s in the city had asked him to call it off because they believe Lurie is “making substantial progress.”

Trump said he told Lurie that he was “making a mistake, because we can do it much faster, and remove the criminals that the Law does not permit him to remove,” but that he had ultimately agreed to pause the surge — in part because Lurie has the support of prominent business leaders Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Marc Benioff of Salesforce.

During a Thursday morning briefing less than an hour after Trump’s post, Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee and other East Bay leaders said they had “no information” about such a stand-down in their communities, and were still bracing for increased federal immigration raids given the staging of forces at nearby Coast Guard Island, which is in the waters between Alameda and Oakland.

“The federal administration, of course, has escalated its rhetoric and its enforcement posture in the Bay Area. We know that Border Patrol agents are being stationed on Coast Guard Island,” Lee said. “But … we are fully prepared. We’re monitoring developments closely and we’ll keep our residents informed if there are any confirmed changes. Oakland is and will continue to be a welcoming city for our immigrants and our refugees.”

The Department of Homeland Security defended the deployment of its agents to the region, saying they would be “targeting the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens — including murderers, rapists, gang members, pedophiles, and terrorists.”

Alameda County Dist. Atty. Ursula Jones Dickson said the staging of immigration forces in the East Bay was part of an established Trump administration “playbook” to rile up communities with immigration actions and then use any unrest to justify further force — and called on East Bay residents not to fall for it.

“We know that they’re baiting Oakland, and that’s why San Francisco, all of a sudden, is off the table,” Jones Dickson said. “So I’m not going to be quiet about what we know is coming. We know that their expectation is that Oakland is going to do something to cause them to make us the example.”

Lourdes Martinez, co-director of the immigrant rights program at Centro Legal de la Raza, said communities are understandably scared given recent legal rulings that federal immigration agents can stop people based on factors such as the color of their skin, the language they are speaking and the job sectors they work in — and organizers expect more such stops given the latest deployments.

She called on immigrants and others to protect themselves by readying documentation and making sure that they and their families are familiar with their rights to remain silent and to have an attorney — and how to contact legal advocacy groups in case of trouble. She also urged community members to report any detentions, to “make sure that nobody disappears.”

“We know this is an uncertain and stressful time. However, this is a moment of unity and power, not panic,” she said.

Shortly after Lee’s event, about 40 protesters gathered near a bridge leading to Coast Guard Island.

Music was blasting. One person wore a blow-up animal costume, a trend that gained momentum amid similar protests in Portland recently. Coast Guard members in tactical gear stood in a line across from protesters who screamed at them.

“We knew there was going to be [an immigration enforcement] presence here and we wanted to disrupt in a peaceful way — to make it harder for them to abduct people,” said Lindsey Swanson, 32, a financial planner who lives in Oakland.

Swanson and others said they believed immigration enforcement would also ramp up in San Francisco, despite Trump and Lurie’s morning assurances, and would continue in the East Bay regardless.

“There’s East Bay — Oakland, Berkeley — so calling off San Francisco means nothing,” said Rachel Kim, a 28-year-old Berkeley resident who is training to become a therapist.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that Trump’s conversation with Lurie was an example of how he is willing to work with Democrats and other states to “do the right thing and clean up America’s cities.”

“He is genuinely interested in this effort to make our streets safer, to make our cities safe and clean again,” she said.

The morning events followed days of growing tensions in the Bay Area over Trump’s plans for the region, after he repeatedly suggested that he would send federal forces into San Francisco — which he called a “mess” in desperate need of help, despite data showing decreasing crime and homeless encampments and surging positive sentiment.

On Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom confirmed the staging of immigration agents in the area, and suggested it was the first move in a broader effort by Trump and his administration to stoke chaos and intimidate residents in yet another liberal part of the country.

“He sends out masked men, he sends out Border Patrol, he sends out ICE, he creates anxiety and fear in the community so that he can lay claim to solving that by sending in the Guard,” Newsom said. “This is no different than the arsonist putting out the fire.”

The response echoed those of leaders and activists in other cities where immigration forces and federal troops have been deployed, including Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Portland. It added to an already rancorous debate around Trump’s mass deportation initiative, which he campaigned on heavily, and the role of federal forces in American cities — something the founders of the nation limited to extreme circumstances.

Central to that debate has been Trump’s repeated and unprecedented decision to repeatedly send troops into American cities without the explicit support of state or local leaders. Federal judges have been divided on that issue, though it has so far been allowed to continue in Los Angeles by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

But even in the appellate court, there has been tense disagreement.

Liberal judges on the court recently called for the decision allowing the deployments to continue in Los Angeles, which was made by a three-judge panel, to be reheard before a larger, 11-judge panel. When that request was denied, several dissented Wednesday — excoriating the deployments as a clear breach of constitutional law and the separation of powers.

Judge Marsha Berzon, in a dissent joined by 10 fellow 9th Circuit judges, wrote that the smaller panel in its preliminary deference to Trump had “invited presidents, now and in the future, to deploy military troops in response to the kinds of commonplace, shortlived, domestic disturbances whose containment conventionally falls to local and federal law enforcement units.”

Times staff writer Ana Ceballos, in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

The Trump administration is sending federal agents to San Francisco following weeks of threats from the president to deploy the National Guard to the Bay Area.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom released a statement on X confirming and criticizing the agents’ upcoming arrival. He called deployment a “page right out of the dictator’s handbook” intended to create the conditions of unrest necessary to then send in the National Guard.

“He sends out masked men, he sends out Border Patrol, he sends out ICE, he creates anxiety and fear in the community so that he can lay claim to solving that by sending in the [National] Guard,” said Newsom. “This is no different than the arsonist putting out the fire.”

Around 100 federal agents, including members of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, are en route to the U.S. Coast Guard’s Alameda base, according to reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle. The Coast Guard and DHS did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.

Trump has suggested for weeks that San Francisco is next on his list for National Guard deployment, after the administration sent troops to Los Angeles and Chicago and is battling in court to send them to Portland, Ore.

On Sunday, Trump told Fox News, “We’re going to San Francisco and we’ll make it great. It’ll be great again.”

Trump has suggested that the role of the National Guard in San Francisco would be to address crime rates. However, the National Guard is generally not allowed to perform domestic law enforcement duties when federalized by the president.

In September, he said that cities with Democratic political leadership such as San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles “are very unsafe places and we are going to straighten them out.”

Trump said he told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training for our military, our national guard.”

Newsom urged Californians to remain peaceful in the face of the arrival of federal agents.

“President Trump and [White House Deputy Chief of Staff] Stephen Miller’s authoritarian playbook is coming for another of our cities, and violence and vandalism are exactly what they’re looking for to invoke chaos,” said Newsom on X.

The sending of federal agents to San Francisco comes as the Trump administration continues to crack down on immigration across the nation in an attempt to carry out what the president has proclaimed is the largest deportation effort in U.S. history.

Oct. 18 (UPI) — Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has apologized for backing President Donald Trump possibly sending the National Guard to San Francisco, where the tech company is based.

Benioff had complained about crime problems outside the company’s annual Dreamforce conference in downtown San Francisco from Tuesday through Thursday, which drew about 45,000 attendees.

“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” Benioff told The New York Times on Tuesday, noting he had the pay for several hundred off-duty law enforcement to help patrol the Moscone Center.

On Friday, he changed his stance.

“Having listened closely to my fellow San Franciscans and our local officials, and after the largest and safest Dreamforce in our history, I do not believe the National Guard is needed to address safety in San Francisco,” Benioff wrote in a post on X in a post on X.

“My earlier comment came from an abundance of caution around the event, and I sincerely apologize for the concern it caused. It’s my firm belief that our city makes the most progress when we all work together in a spirit of partnership. I remain deeply grateful to Mayor [Daniel] Lurie, SFPD, and all our partners, and am fully committed to a safer, stronger San Francisco.”

The Trump administration already has deployed the National Guard to Portland, Ore.; Memphis, Tenn., and Chicago in a crackdown on illegal immigration and crime. Lower courts blocked the deployments of the troops.

On Tuesday, Trump told in the Oval Office that “we have great support in San Francisco” for sending troops to the city, apparently a reference to Benioff. He urged FBI Director Kash Patel to make San Francisco “next” for deployment.

Benioff’s suggestion was condemned by politicians, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, investors and those associated with the company.

Newsom, who was mayor of San Francisco, is a friend of Benioff and appeared at last year’s company convention.

More than 180 Salesforce workers, alumni and community members wrote an open letter on Friday that was published online. They said his comments have “revealed a troubling hypocrisy.”

“Salesforce was built on empowering communities — not deploying the National Guard into them,” they wrote. “Last week, that’s exactly what you endorsed.’

The letter added: “Walking back your words doesn’t undo the damage.”

Startup investor Ron Conway resigned from the board of the Salesforce Foundation on Thursday. Conway told Benioff in an email that their “values were no longer aligned,” according to the New York Times.

Conway donated around $500,000 to at least two funds tied to Kamala Harris’ unsuccessful 2024 presidential election campaign.

Benioff has donated to both political parties but has supported Harris, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for president. He attended a state dinner by King Charles for Trump at Windsor Castle in England on Sept. 15.

His family and Salesforce have given more than $1 billion to Bay Area causes, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Benioff, who acquired Time magazine in 2018, has a net worth of $8.8 billion, ranking 381st in the world, according to Forbes.

Laurene Powell Jobs, a pre-eminent philanthropist, criticized Benioff for his remarks.

“When wealth becomes a substitute for participation, giving is reduced to performance art — proof of virtue, a way to appear magnanimous while still demanding ownership,” she wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “That’s the quiet corruption corroding modern philanthropy: the ability to give as a license to impose one’s will. It’s a kind of moral laundering, where so-called benevolence masks self-interest.”

Conservatives have rallied behind the Salesforce CEO.

Venture capitalist David Sacks, who is now Trump’s artificial intelligence and crypto czar, wrote on X : “Dear Marc @Benioff, if the Democrats don’t want you, we would be happy for you to join our team. “Cancel culture is over, and we are the inclusive party.”

Benioff has previously complained about crime in the city. In 2023, he threatened to relocate Dreamforce to Las Vegas over concerns about drug use, crime and homelessness.

Salesforce has attempted to get on the good side of the Trump administration as the company seeks regulatory approval for its proposed $8 billion acquisition of Informatica, an AI-powered cloud data management company.

Salesforce a few weeks ago announced a new line of business, Missionforce, for more revenue from defense, intelligence and aerospace agencies.

The New York Times also reported that Salesforce has offered its services to increase Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s capabilities.

Salesforce is a cloud-based software company founded in 1999 by Benioff, a former Oracle executive.

The company has a market capitalization of $238 billion with $38 billion in revenue in 2025 and 76,453 employees. The public company is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

SAN FRANCISCO — About 24 hours after President Trump declared San Francisco such a crime-ridden “mess” that he was recommending federal forces be sent to restore order, Manit Limlamai, 43, and Kai Saetern, 32, rolled their eyes at the suggestion.

The pair — both in the software industry — were with friends Thursday in Dolores Park, a vibrant green space with sweeping views of downtown, playing volleyball under a blue sky and shining autumn sun. All around them, people sat on benches with books, flew kites, played with dogs or otherwise lounged away the afternoon on blankets in the grass.

Both Limlamai and Saetern said San Francisco of course has issues, and some rougher neighborhoods — but that’s any city.

“I’ve lived here for 10 years and I haven’t felt unsafe, and I’ve lived all over the city,” Saetern said. “Every city has its problems, and I don’t think San Francisco is any different,” but “it’s not a hellscape,” said Limlamai, who has been in the city since 2021.

Both said Trump’s suggestion that he might send in troops was more alarming than reassuring — especially, Limlamai said, on top of his recent remark that American cities should serve as “training grounds” for U.S. military forces.

“I don’t think that’s appropriate at all,” he said. “The military is not trained to do what needs to be done in these cities.”

Across San Francisco, residents, visitors and prominent local leaders expressed similar ideas — if not much sharper condemnation of any troop deployment. None shied away from the fact that San Francisco has problems, especially with homelessness. Several also mentioned a creeping urban decay, and that the city needs a bit of a polish.

But federal troops? That was a hard no.

A range of people on Market Street in downtown San Francisco on Thursday.

“It’s just more of [Trump’s] insanity,” said Peter Hill, 81, as he played chess in a slightly edgier park near City Hall. Hill said using troops domestically was a fascist power play, and “a bad thing for the entire country.”

“It’s fascism,” agreed local activist Wendy Aragon, who was hailing a cab nearby. Her Latino family has been in the country for generations, she said, but she now fears speaking Spanish on the street given that immigration agents have admitted targeting people who look or sound Latino, and troops in the city would only exacerbate those fears. “My community is under attack right now.”

State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) said troop deployments to the city were “completely unnecessary” and “typical Trump: petty, vindictive retaliation.”

“He wants to attack anyone who he perceives as an enemy, and that includes cities, and so he started with L.A. and Southern California because of its large immigrant community, and then he proceeded to cities with large Black populations like Chicago, and now he’s moving on to cities that are just perceived as very lefty like Portland and now San Francisco,” Wiener said.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, defended such deployments and noted crime reductions in cities, including Washington, D.C., and Memphis, where local officials — including D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat — have embraced them.

“America’s once great cities have descended into chaos and crime as a result of Democrat policies that put criminals first and law-abiding citizens last. Making America Safe Again — especially crime-ridden cities — was a key campaign promise from the President that the American people elected him to fulfill,” Jackson said. “San Francisco Democrats should look at the tremendous results in DC and Memphis and listen to fellow Democrat Mayor Bowser and welcome the President in to clean up their city.”

A police officer shuts the door to his car after a person was allegedly caught carrying a knife near a sign promoting an AI-powered museum exhibit in downtown San Francisco.

A presidential ‘passion’

San Francisco — a bastion of liberal politics that overwhelmingly voted against Trump in the last election — has been derided by the conservative right for generations as a great American jewel lost to destructive progressive policies.

With its tech-heavy economy and downtown core hit hard by the pandemic and the nation’s shift toward remote work, the city has had a particularly rough go in recent years, which only exacerbated its image as a city in decline. That it produced some of Trump’s most prominent political opponents — including Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Vice President Kamala Harris — has only made it more of a punching bag.

In August, Trump suggested San Francisco needed federal intervention. “You look at what the Democrats have done to San Francisco — they’ve destroyed it,” he said in the Oval Office. “We’ll clean that one up, too.”

Then, earlier this month, to the chagrin of liberal leaders across the city, Marc Benioff, the billionaire Salesforce founder and Time magazine owner who has long been a booster of San Francisco, said in an interview with the New York Times that he supported Trump and welcomed Guard troops in the city.

“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” Benioff said, just as his company was preparing to open its annual Dreamforce convention in the city, complete with hundreds of private security officers.

The U.S. Constitution generally precludes military forces from serving in police roles in the U.S.

On Friday, Benioff reversed himself and apologized for his earlier stance. “Having listened closely to my fellow San Franciscans and our local officials, and after the largest and safest Dreamforce in our history, I do not believe the National Guard is needed to address safety in San Francisco,” he wrote on X.

He also apologized for “the concern” his earlier support for troops in the city had caused, and praised San Francisco’s new mayor, Daniel Lurie, for bringing crime down.

Billionaire Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, also called for federal intervention in the city, writing on his X platform that downtown San Francisco is “a drug zombie apocalypse” and that federal intervention was “the only solution at this point.”

Trump made his latest remarks bashing San Francisco on Wednesday, again from the Oval Office.

Trump said it was “one of our great cities 10 years ago, 15 years ago,” but “now it’s a mess” — and that he was recommending federal forces move into the city to make it safer. “I’m gonna be strongly recommending — at the request of government officials, which is always nice — that you start looking at San Francisco,” he said to leading members of his law enforcement team.

Trump did not specify exactly what sort of deployment he meant, or which kinds of federal forces might be involved. He also didn’t say which local officials had allegedly requested help — a claim Wiener called a lie.

“Every American deserves to live in a community where they’re not afraid of being mugged, murdered, robbed, raped, assaulted or shot, and that’s exactly what our administration is working to deliver,” Trump said, before adding that sending federal forces into American cities had become “a passion” of his.

Kai Saetern, 32, was playing volleyball in Dolores Park on Thursday. Saetern said he has never felt unsafe living in neighborhoods all over the city for the last 10 years.

Crime is down citywide

The responses from San Francisco, both to Benioff and Trump, came swiftly, ranging from calm discouragement to full-blown outrage.

Lurie did not respond directly, but his office pointed reporters to his recent statements that crime is down 30% citywide, homicides are at a 70-year low, car break-ins are at a 22-year low and tent encampments are at their lowest number on record.

“We have a lot of work to do,” Lurie said. “But I trust our local law enforcement.”

San Francisco Dist. Atty. Brooke Jenkins was much more fiery, writing online that Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had turned “so-called public safety and immigration enforcement into a form of government sponsored violence against U.S. citizens, families, and ethnic groups,” and that she stood ready to prosecute federal officers if they harm city residents.

Attendees exit the Dreamforce convention downtown on Thursday in San Francisco.

“If you come to San Francisco and illegally harass our residents … I will not hesitate to do my job and hold you accountable just like I do other violators of the law every single day,” she said.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) — whose seat Wiener is reportedly going to seek — said the city “does not want or need Donald Trump’s chaos” and will continue to increase public safety locally and “without the interference of a President seeking headlines.”

Newsom said the use of federal troops in American cities is a “clear violation” of federal law, and that the state was prepared to challenge any such deployment to San Francisco in court, just as it challenged such deployments in Los Angeles earlier this year.

The federal appellate court that oversees California and much of the American West has so far allowed troops to remain in L.A., but is set to continue hearing arguments in the L.A. case soon.

Trump had used anti-immigration enforcement protests in L.A. as a justification to send troops there. In San Francisco, Newsom said, he lacks any justification or “pretext” whatsoever.

“There’s no existing protest at a federal building. There’s no operation that’s being impeded. I guess it’s just a ‘training ground’ for the President of United States,” Newsom said. “It is grossly illegal, it’s immoral, it’s rather delusional.”

Nancy DeStefanis, 76, a longtime labor and environmental activist who was at San Francisco City Hall on Thursday to complain about Golden Gate Park being shut to regular visitors for paid events, was similarly derisive of troops entering the city.

“As far as I’m concerned, and I think most San Franciscans are concerned, we don’t want troops here. We don’t need them,” she said.

Passengers walk past a cracked window from the Civic Center BART station in downtown San Francisco.

‘An image I don’t want to see’

Not far away, throngs of people wearing Dreamforce lanyards streamed in and out of the Moscone Center, heading back and forth to nearby Market Street and pouring into restaurants, coffee shops and take-out joints. The city’s problems — including homelessness and associated grittiness — were apparent at the corners of the crowds, even as chipper convention ambassadors and security officers moved would-be stragglers along.

Not everyone was keen to be identified discussing Trump or safety in the city, with some citing business reasons and others a fear of Trump retaliating against them. But lots of people had opinions.

Sanjiv, a self-described “techie” in his mid-50s, said he preferred to use only his first name because, although he is a U.S. citizen now, he emigrated from India and didn’t want to stick his neck out by publicly criticizing Trump.

He called homelessness a “rampant problem” in San Francisco, but less so than in the past — and hardly something that would justify sending in military troops.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” he said. “It’s not like the city’s under siege.”

Claire Roeland, 30, from Austin, Texas, said she has visited San Francisco a handful of times in recent years and had “mixed” experiences. She has family who live in surrounding neighborhoods and find it completely safe, she said, but when she’s in town it’s “predominantly in the business district” — where it’s hard not to be disheartened by the obvious suffering of people with addiction and mental illness and the grime that has accumulated in the emptied-out core.

“There’s a lot of unfortunate urban decay happening, and that makes you feel more unsafe than you actually are,” she said, but there isn’t “any realistic need to send in federal troops.”

She said she doesn’t know what troops would do other than confront homeless people, and “that’s an image I don’t want to see.”

Times staff writer Dakota Smith contributed to this report.

Raducanu won 28 matches this year and reached the semi-finals in Washington, but her most impressive week was at the Miami Open in March.

The British number one reached the quarter-finals of the WTA 1000 event, beating eighth seed Emma Navarro on the way before losing in three sets to fourth-ranked Pegula.

She was coached by Mark Petchey from Miami until Wimbledon, with Roig taking over in time for the US Open.

The initial agreement with Rafael Nadal’s former coach was until the end of the season but the partnership will continue, with a training block pencilled in for the end of the year.

Raducanu told BBC Sport her three-day trial with Roig after Wimbledon was like a “black ops mission” as they tried to keep the meeting secret.

She came very close to beating world number one Aryna Sabalenka at their first tournament together in Cincinnati in August.

Roig was also with Raducanu in New York, where she reached the third round before being beaten by 2022 Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina.

Marc Benioff has become the latest Silicon Valley tech leader to signal his approval of President Trump, saying that the president is doing a great job and ought to deploy the National Guard to deal with crime in San Francisco.

The Salesforce chief executive’s comments came as he headed to San Francisco to host his annual Dreamforce conference — an event for which he said he had to hire hundreds of off-duty police to provide security.

“We don’t have enough cops, so if they [National Guard] can be cops, I’m all for it,” he told The New York Times from aboard his private plane.

The National Guard is generally not allowed to perform domestic law enforcement duties when federalized by the president.

Last month, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s use of National Guard soldiers in Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act — which restricts use of the military for domestic law enforcement — and ordered that the troops not be used in law enforcement operations within California.

Trump has also ordered the National Guard to deploy to cities such as Portland, Ore., and Chicago, citing the need to protect federal officers and assets in the face of ongoing immigration protests. Those efforts have been met with criticism from local leaders and are the subject of ongoing legal battles.

President Trump has yet to direct troops to Northern California, but suggested in September that San Francisco could be a target for deployment. He has said that cities with Democratic political leadership such as San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles “are very unsafe places and we are going to straighten them out.”

“I told [Defense Secretary] Pete [Hegseth] we should use some of these dangerous cities as training for our military, our national guard,” Trump said.

Benioff’s call to send National Guard troops to San Francisco drew sharp rebukes from several of the region’s elected Democratic leaders.

San Francisco Dist. Atty. Brooke Jenkins said she “can’t be silent any longer” and threatened to prosecute any leaders or troops who harass residents in a fiery statement on X.

“I am responsible for holding criminals accountable, and that includes holding government and law enforcement officials too, when they cross the bounds of the law,” she said. “If you come to San Francisco and illegally harass our residents, use excessive force or cross any other boundaries that the law prescribes, I will not hesitate to do my job and hold you accountable just like I do other violators of the law every single day.”

State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) also took to X to express indignation, saying “we neither need nor want an illegal military occupation in San Francisco.”

“Salesforce is a great San Francisco company that does so much good for our city,” he said. “Inviting Trump to send the National Guard here is not one of those good things. Quite the opposite.”

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s office offered a more muted response, touting the mayor’s efforts to boost public safety in general, but declining to directly address Benioff’s remarks.

Charles Lutvak, a spokesperson for the mayor, noted that the city is seeing net gains in both police officers and sheriff’s deputies for the first time in a decade. He also highlighted Lurie’s efforts to bring police staffing up to 2,000 officers.

“Crime is down nearly 30% citywide and at its lowest point in decades,” Lutvak said. “We are moving in the right direction and will continue to prioritize safety and hiring while San Francisco law enforcement works every single day to keep our city safe.”

When contacted by The Times Friday night, the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who vociferously opposed the deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles, did not issue a comment in response to Benioff.

Benioff and Newsom have long been considered friends, with a relationship dating back to when Newsom served as San Francisco’s mayor. Newsom even named Benioff as godfather to one of his children, according to the San Francisco Standard.

Benioff has often referred to himself as an independent. He has donated to several liberal causes, including a $30-million donation to UC San Francisco to study homelessness, and has contributed to prior political campaigns of former President Barack Obama, former Vice President Kamala Harris, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Hillary Clinton.

However, he has also donated to the campaigns of former House Speaker Paul Ryan and Sen. John McCain, both Republicans, and supported tougher-on-crime policies and reducing government spending.

Earlier this year, Benioff also praised the Elon Musk-led federal cost-cutting effort known as the Department of Government Efficiency.

“I fully support the president,” Benioff told the New York Times this week. “I think he’s doing a great job.”

Sept. 22 (UPI) — A magnitude 4.3 earthquake hit Berkeley, Calif., early Monday morning, according to the United States Geological Survey.

The quake, which struck at 2:56 a.m. PDT, initially had a magnitude of 4.6, and its epicenter was just a few blocks from the University of California, Berkeley campus. It’s depth was about 4.8 miles.

More than 21,000 people reported having felt it on the USGS site within the first hour. Berkeley and Oakland felt it the strongest, and San Francisco and Vallejo felt it slightly less. Reports from people in Salinas and Stockton said residents felt it there, too.

So far, there are no reports of injuries or damage.

USGS Seismologist Sarah Minson said this is what they consider a small earthquake even though it woke people up all over the Bay Area.

“Shaking is variable and it depends a lot on your location, what kind of building you’re in, what kind of land you’re standing on,” Minson told ABC7 News. “However, this being such a small magnitude earthquake, shaking from it is going to be pretty low everywhere, certainly enough to be impactful for people, for them to feel it, for it to be upsetting, potentially even to knock over things very close to the epicenter. But in general, we wouldn’t expect to see, for example, structural damage from an earthquake this small.”

The epicenter was near the Hayward Fault, which runs along the eastern side of the Berkeley campus and bisects its football stadium.

“UC Berkeley is the only major university in the world that has a dangerous earthquake fault running through its campus,” wrote Horst Rademacher, a researcher at the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory in his 2017 walking tour of the Hayward Fault on the campus.

Food delivery app DoorDash is setting its sights on a new destination to test out flying drone deliveries: San Francisco.

The tech company leased a warehouse in the Mission District last month that will serve as a research and development space to advance its autonomous delivery technology, a June letter sent to San Francisco Zoning Administrator Corey Teague shows.

“This project reflects a broader commitment to reinvesting in San Francisco’s innovation economy and creating pathways for local employment in emerging technologies,” the letter said.

The 34,325-square-foot building at 1960 Folsom St. is roughly two miles away from DoorDash’s headquarters. About 200 people are expected to be employed at the site.

DoorDash confirmed on Wednesday that the company will use the facility to test autonomous delivery technology and support research and development for its robotics and automation arm. The company didn’t immediately answer questions about whether California residents will soon be able to get food delivery via a drone.

The San Francisco Chronicle first reported on DoorDash’s drone delivery plans.

Most of the testing would happen inside the warehouse but some of it will also occur outdoors during normal business hours in a gated area. The property includes a big outdoor area with surface parking, the letter said.

DoorDash has been piloting drone deliveries in other states including Texas, Virginia and North Carolina as well as Australia. DoorDash has partnered with aviation companies Wing, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, and Flytrek, an Israeli drone delivery company.

Drone delivery companies have also teamed up with other businesses, including Amazon and Walmart.

The expansion of drone delivery highlights how automation and robotics, powered by artificial intelligence, could reshape the future of work. Companies have been experimenting with drone delivery as a way to get food to customers’ doorsteps within minutes.

DoorDash and Flytrek launched drone delivery in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, in June. The drones delivered from restaurants such as Papa Johns and The Brass Tap and could carry up to 6.6 pounds, according to a news release about the partnership.

In the letter sent to Teague, a San Francisco attorney writes she’s reaching out on behalf of a “leading technology company focused on last-mile delivery solutions” to confirm their client is permitted to use the site as “research and development (R&D) space for autonomous delivery technologies.”

Even though the attorney doesn’t name DoorDash in the letter, the building’s lease has been linked to the company.

“The test flights outdoors are anticipated to be up to approximately 150 feet above ground. No more than two drones would be operated at the same time, and no individual flight would exceed 30 minutes in duration,” the letter said.

DoorDash has also been expanding other types of delivery, including a partnership with Coco Robotics in which boxy robots with wheels deliver food throughout Los Angeles and Chicago.

While San Francisco is a leading hub for technology and innovation, city officials have also encountered safety concerns from residents concerned about running into robots as they take up space on sidewalks. In 2017, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to restrict delivery robots.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Transportation in August proposed a new rule that would make it easier for companies to fly drones over longer distances. A DoorDash spokesperson said the company is encouraged by the steps taken “towards making drone delivery a scalable, safe, and reliable option for more communities across the country.”

As of December 2024, roughly 42 million people used DoorDash monthly, according to the company’s full-year financial results.

Watch San Francisco Giants’ Jung Hoo Lee make the “catch of the decade”, trapping the ball between the knees while sliding against the Tampa Bay Rays.

READ MORE: Standing ovation as first female MLB umpire takes to the field

Pictures courtesy of MLB Europe.

Maybe you’ve heard about San Francisco’s doom loop. But have you met its jumbo nude?

As just about any San Franciscan could tell you, “doom loop” is shorthand for the city’s post-pandemic troubles. Many of those worries stem from dwindling demand for office space, but would-be visitors have also been nervous about crime and withering retail energy.

That brings us to the jumbo nude. It’s a 45-foot, semi-translucent sculpture of a woman now standing at the foot of Market Street, officially named R-Evolution. Not everyone loves her, but she is one among many new or improved elements attracting locals and visitors these days.

Even with San Francisco’s office vacancy rate hovering around 35%, the sun keeps rising and visitors keep smiling, most of them, much of the time.

Make your way to the city and you can see major park upgrades at the Presidio and Ocean Beach. Or you can frolic among massive balloon installations, vintage photo booths and ‘60s artifacts in permanent and pop-up places that bill themselves as museums.

There’s also the prospect of a new “bay lights” show with 50,000 illumination points on the Bay Bridge. (Those lights were supposed to be on by now, but installation snags led to a delay; organizers say they’re hoping to be ready “sometime this fall.”)

Also, the food doesn’t hurt. When our critic Bill Addison chose 101 of his favorite California restaurants recently, 35 of them were in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, crime has been falling since early 2023, especially this year. Tourist arrivals are 11% behind 2019 but have grown steadily since 2021.

As this list attests, there’s plenty to see. But first, we should talk about a few places not on this list.

One is Fisherman’s Wharf. It has added a SkyStar Ferris wheel (which migrated from Golden Gate Park in 2023) and the Port of San Francisco says it will soon begin a big redevelopment, but the area remains dominated by T-shirt shops and multiple old-school restaurants that have been shuttered since the pandemic. The neighborhood was to have added a Museum of Failure this year but, not kidding, the enterprise collapsed amid an intellectual property dispute before opening. The storefront “failure” sign was still up in June, creating the snarkiest photo op ever.

Another mixed bag is Union Square, whose hotels, department stores and passing cable cars have made it the starting point for legions of tourists through the decades. The square is still pleasant by day, with young visitors drawn to assorted free games (ping-pong, badminton, cornhole) while cable cars pass, tourists line up for Big Bus tours and guests at the adjacent Beacon Grand Hotel (formerly the Sir Francis Drake) explore the neighborhood. But many key retailers have shuttered, including Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom, and Macy’s will follow. (The company has said it will close as soon as it finds a buyer for the property.)

“We feel safe here. But kind of disappointed by all the closures,” said Melinda Parker, visiting San Francisco with her husband from Boise. Also, Parker said, “a city should be judged on the quality of its public toilets. They have one here, and it’s closed.”

Still, there are more than enough bright spots to light up a San Francisco visit. Let’s go back for a second to Tunnel Tops, one of the city’s recently improved park spaces. You grab a snack, commandeer a patio table and gaze upon the Presidio and Golden Gate. A family debate erupts over whether to hit a museum next or try an urban hike. This is a sort of problem, but a nice choice to have. And San Francisco now offers plenty like that.

A Texas Lyme-disease researcher who came to the U.S. from South Korea at age 5 and is a longtime legal permanent resident was detained at San Francisco International Airport for a week, according to his lawyer.

Tae Heung “Will” Kim, 40, was returning from his brother’s wedding in South Korea on July 21 when he was pulled out of secondary screening for unknown reasons, said Eric Lee, an attorney who says he’s been unable to talk with his client.

Lee said that he has no idea where Kim is now and that Kim has not been allowed to communicate with anyone aside from a brief call last week to his family. A Senate office told him that Kim was being moved to an immigration facility in Texas, while a representative from the Korean Consulate told Kim’s family that he was going to be sent somewhere else.

“We have no idea where he is going to end up,” Lee said. “We have no idea why.”

Kim has misdemeanor marijuana possession charges from 2011 on his record, but his lawyer questioned whether that was the kind of offense that would merit being held in a windowless room underneath the terminals at the airport for a week.

Representatives from the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the L.A. Times. But a spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection told the Washington Post, which first reported the story, that “this alien is in ICE custody pending removal hearings.”

The spokesperson also said: “If a green card holder is convicted of a drug offense, violating their status, that person is issued a Notice to Appear and CBP coordinates detention space with [Immigration and Customs Enforcement].”

Kim’s attorney said if his client was detained because he “had a little weed when he was pulled over 15 years ago in his 20s,” that was absurd, adding: “If every American who had a tiny amount of weed in their car was detained under these conditions…”

Kim’s mother, Yehoon “Sharon” Lee, told the Washington Post that she was worried about her son’s health in custody.

“He’s had asthma ever since he was younger,” she told the Washington Post. “I don’t know if he has enough medication. He carries an inhaler, but I don’t know if it’s enough, because he’s been there a week.”

His mother told the paper that she and her husband entered the U.S. on business visas in the 1980s but by the time they became naturalized citizens, Kim was too old to get automatic citizenship.

Kim has a green card and has spent most of his life in the U.S. After helping out in his family’s doll-manufacturing business after the death of his father, he recently entered a doctoral program at Texas A&M and is helping to research a vaccine for Lyme disease.

There have been multiple reports nationwide of U.S. permanent residents being detained at airports, particularly those with criminal records, no matter how minor. These cases have prompted some experts to warn that green-card holders should avoid leaving the country, to reduce the risk of not being allowed back.

Molting peacocks squawked in the distance and a Pacific breeze whispered through the eucalyptus as flamingo keeper Liz Gibbons tidied her station at the San Francisco Zoo.

It had been an unusually cold summer in a city famous for them. Marooned on “a breathtaking piece of land” at the peninsula’s far western edge, steps from the deadly surf at Ocean Beach, the timeworn seaside menagerie had endured weeks of gray gloom.

But late that July afternoon, the sun broke through the clouds. Then word began to spread.

“Everybody was like, ‘Oh my God, did you hear?’” the keeper recalled. “It’s the news we’ve been waiting for.”

A sign at the Highway 1 entrance of the San Francisco Zoo.

(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)

For more than a year, the keepers, gardeners, train drivers and office staff of Teamsters Local 856 had been fighting to unseat their boss, longtime San Francisco Zoo Chief Executive Tanya Peterson.

They were not alone.

A growing chorus of animal activists, government watchdogs and civic leaders had called for Peterson to step down. In May, the San Francisco Zoological Society, the park’s nonprofit operator, split down the middle in a failed attempt to remove her.

From late last spring through early this summer, there was a vote of no confidence by the union, a blistering exposé in the San Francisco Chronicle, a damning report by the Animal Control and Welfare Commission, a looming audit by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and a hail-Mary intercession by Mayor Daniel Lurie.

Even the consul general of China had privately sought Peterson’s ouster.

“He was like, ‘You have issues — fix them,’” said Supervisor Myrna Melgar, whose district includes the zoo.

A similar fight recently sent fur flying in Los Angeles, where the city and its former nonprofit zoo partner have locked horns over control of a $50-million endowment. At stake in San Francisco’s power struggle is a pair of cuddly new tourist magnets: two giant pandas from China, hailed as a coup for the tarnished Golden City when then-Mayor London Breed inked the deal to bring them last year.

Only two other American zoos have pandas: San Diego and the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. In San Francisco, where nearly a quarter of residents identify as Chinese, the thrill was palpable. City Hall hoped the panda prestige would burn off any lingering haze of a doom loop.

“We’re getting our house in order,” Lurie said. “We already are a world-class city. When the pandas arrive in San Francisco, that’s just going to be yet another draw.”

A giant panda plays at Chongqing Zoo in Chongqing, China, on May 10, 2025.

(Costfoto / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Others saw the black-and-white bears as a rebuke to Trumpian isolationism.

“The best response to the displeasure of Washington is to be awesome and successful,” Melgar said. “The pandas are a part of our success and a part of our value system.”

For Peterson, who led the zoo since 2008, bringing a pair of the world’s most sought-after animals to San Francisco was a dream come true. The political urgency and multimillion-dollar price tag seemed to ensure her continued leadership.

“The same day that the [Zoological Society] board was meant to vote her out, she let everyone know she was meeting with the Chinese Consulate,” said activist journalist Justin Barker of SF Zoo Watch. Peterson “essentially tells the Board of Supervisors, ‘If you move forward with this audit, you might not get pandas.’”

So how did the ace up her leopard-print sleeve bring her down?

Peterson did not respond to requests for comment. In an emailed statement, zoo spokesperson Sam Singer said she “served with distinction and devotion.”

San Francisco Zoo director Tanya Peterson plans to depart from the zoo on Aug. 1.

(Paul Chinn / The San Francisco Chronicle)

In her own message to staff this month, Peterson likened her planned departure on Aug. 1 to the death of the zoo’s beloved silverback gorilla, writing that “some animals may leave this earth, but they never leave our souls.”

“It has been an honor to serve you, our animals, and the loyal constituents of this amazing community,” she said.

For workers, her exit brought elation.

“I haven’t seen this level of positivity and excitement ever,” said Stephanie Carpenter, a reptile and amphibian keeper.

Former carnivore curator Travis Shields name-checked the infamous large cat wrangler from the Netflix series “Tiger King” when asked what the next zoo leader should bring in comparison with Peterson.

“I don’t think [keepers] care who comes next,” he said. “It can’t be any worse unless Joe Exotic comes in — and he’s still in prison.”

Attendees watch a Western Lowland Gorilla at the San Francisco Zoo.

(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)

But the long fight has clawed open old wounds. Many in and around the zoo described the bitter panda power struggle as the worst crisis the institution has faced since the fatal tiger attack that vaunted Peterson to her current position and nearly shut down the zoo.

“They’re holding their breath,” said one former manager, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation. “It’s a similar feeling to after the tiger got out — what’s going to happen to everything?”

For Peterson’s usurpers, the $25-million question is now: What’s going to happen to the pandas?

The rise of Tanya Peterson is inextricably linked to the fall of Tatiana the tiger, the first and only animal to escape and kill a visitor at an Assn. of Zoos and Aquariums-accredited facility.

San Francisco acquired the 2½ -year-old, 242-pound Siberian from the Denver Zoo in 2005 as a mate for its 14-year old male Tony. They lived in the tiger grotto and were fed at the Art Deco-style Lion House, built for the original Fleishhacker Zoo by the Works Progress Administration.

The park’s original Depression-era structures are iconic, rising gray and craggy from the muted landscape like the Monterey cypress through the ever-present fog.

A lion and tiger emerge into their open enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo.

(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)

“The zoo is right on the water, it’s right next to the beach and all the structures are daily battered by the fog and the wind and the sand and the salt,” Melgar said.

Much of the century-old site is in disrepair.

“The infrastructure really left a lot to be desired,” said Manuel Mollinedo, who took over as the executive director of the San Francisco Zoo in 2004 after a successful turnaround at the Los Angeles Zoo.

Twenty years before Tatiana arrived, the tiger grotto was briefly repurposed to house two giant pandas, Yun-Yun and Ying-Xin, who passed through during the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics before visiting again in 1985.

Those publicity tours preceded a slump in attendance through the mid-1990s. In 1993, the nonprofit San Francisco Zoological Society took over operations, while the city retained ownership of the property.

Many zoos are run on a similar nonprofit model, including the Bronx Zoo and the San Diego Zoo, Assn. of Zoos and Aquariums President Dan Ashe said. Others, such as the Los Angeles Zoo, are run by cities or for profit.

By the mid-aughts, efforts to draw in more blue-collar visitors had begun to bear fruit, and tax records show more than a million people were coming each year.

“The zoo had really turned a corner,” Mollinedo said. “Our attendance was the highest it had ever been since the pandas were brought in 20 years before.”

Then, during a public feeding in the Lion House in December 2006, Tatiana reached under the bars and grabbed keeper Lori Komejan by the arm.

The tiger mauled her as she attempted to drag her into the cage, leading to permanent damage, according to a lawsuit later settled with the city.

Mary Ryan, a San Francisco Zoo employee, arranges a makeshift memorial to Tatiana the tiger in January 2008.

(Noah Berger / Associated Press)

But that wasn’t the end of it. One year after that incident, on Christmas Day 2007 — Tatiana escaped, mauling two men and killing a teenager.

The city and the zoo ultimately reached financial settlements with the injured men and the family of 17-year-old Carlos Eduardo Sousa Jr. A federal investigation found panda-era modifications probably paved the way for Tatiana’s escape.

“It was really rough for everybody,” said Gibbons, the flamingo keeper, who grew up in the Outer Sunset neighborhood and climbed the ranks through the zoo’s youth volunteer program. “I remember the city wanting to close it as a zoo and have it be a sanctuary.”

Instead, the board pushed Mollinedo out and installed Peterson, a fellow board member and an attorney at Hewlett-Packard, whose then-husband had just run the finance committee for then-Mayor Gavin Newsom’s reelection campaign.

“She said all the right things — that she wanted to hear from staff, that her door was always open,” longtime zoo gardener Marc Villa said. “For the time being, it was kind of a breath of fresh air.”

Echoing other critics, Mollinedo said Peterson “knew nothing about animals.” But she made up for it with philanthropic prowess.

“She’s a good fundraiser, I’ll give her that,” said San Francisco Recreation and Park Commissioner Larry Mazzola Jr., who heads the zoo advisory committee.

A mandrill at the San Francisco Zoo.

(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)

As interim CEO, Peterson swapped her corporate wardrobe for ostrich-feathered sheaths, tiger-striped hatbands, snakeskin-patterned coats and cheetah-spotted sneakers.

Her early tenure was already marked by constant tension between what animal experts felt needed fixing and what donors wanted done. Outrage over half-finished safety measures led the Teamsters to their first no-confidence vote in 2014.

“All of this has been degenerating for a long time,” Melgar said. “We have not had labor peace at that institution for years.”

By 2024, the zoo’s annual attendance had slipped to 700,000 — 15% below the nadir after the tiger attack, and roughly two-thirds of the yearly visitors to the Oakland Zoo across the bay.

The pandas were supposed to fix all those problems. Instead, they fomented a coup.

When Breed announced the panda deal late last April, zookeepers were shocked.

“None of the senior managers knew anything about it,” Villa said. “Everybody’s scrambled: How do we make this work? Where are we going to put them? It was just, ‘Hey, we’re getting pandas!’”

It was a week after the union’s second vote of no confidence against Peterson. To many, the move felt emblematic of her leadership flaws.

“If we do have a vision for this zoo besides pandas, it’s not been communicated very well,” Villa said.

Pandas are wildly popular with the public. But they’re a thornier prospect for zoos, experts warn.

Two visitors at at the grizzly bear enclosure at The San Francisco Zoo.

(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)

The bears cannot be kept near lions or other large carnivores. They need a special diet, experienced keepers and state-of-the-art new enclosures. For San Francisco, the cost has been estimated at $25 million.

Raising that money will fall to the interim CEO, which San Francisco has not yet named. The search for a permanent replacement will pit San Francisco against two of the state’s premier animal attractions, the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the San Diego Zoo.

Despite the promise of greater oversight and the possibility of more funding from the city, many animal activists and former zoo staff remain staunchly opposed to the panda project.

Some current keepers also expressed concerns.

“Guests are always asking, ‘Where are the tigers? Where are the monkeys? Where are all these animals that used to be here?’ We need to take care of the animals we have right now,” said Carpenter, the reptile keeper.

But City Hall remains staunchly pro-panda. So does the Chinese Consulate, the Teamsters and the Board of Supervisors, which just last month threatened to withhold $4 million from the Zoological Society over its failure to produce audit paperwork.

“People are proud that we’re doing this, and want us to pull it off,” Melgar said. “The pandas will have a view of the ocean!”

The Chinese visitors were originally slated to arrive at the end of this year. Then, this spring, they were assured by next April, just after the Super Bowl. That date has been pushed again, to the end of 2026.

“We don’t know where we’re going,” Villa said. “Everything runs on rumors and speculation.”

For now, the Teamsters are keeping their ears perked, waiting for good news to swirl in with the fog.

Francisco Rodriguez Jr faces an anti-doping investigation after his shock win over British flyweight Galal Yafai, says Matchroom Boxing.

Yafai’s promoters have been told the Mexican returned an adverse analytical finding following his points victory in Birmingham last month.

Rodriguez, 31, dropped the Olympic gold medallist in the final round and was a clear winner with scores of 119-108, 119-108 and 118-109.

It was Yafai’s first professional defeat as he surrendered his WBC interim title, but the result is now in question.

NEW YORK — The monthlong celebration of LGBTQ+ Pride reached its crescendo as New York and other major cities in the U.S. and around the world hosted parades and marches Sunday.

Pride celebrations are typically a daylong mix of jubilant street parties and political protest, but this year’s iterations took a more defiant stance as Republicans, led by President Trump, have sought to roll back LGBTQ+ rights.

The theme of the festivities in Manhattan was “Rise Up: Pride in Protest.” San Francisco’s Pride theme was “Queer Joy Is Resistance,” while Seattle’s was simply “Louder.”

Lance Brammer, a 56-year-old teacher from Ohio attending his first Pride parade in New York, said he felt “validated” as he marveled at the size of the city’s celebration, the nation’s oldest and largest.

“With the climate that we have politically, it just seems like they’re trying to do away with the whole LGBTQ community, especially the trans community,” he said, wearing a vivid, multicolored shirt. “And it just shows that they’ve got a fight ahead of them if they think that they’re going to do that with all of these people here and all of the support.”

Doriana Feliciano, who described herself as an LGBTQ+ ally, held up a sign saying, “Please don’t lose hope,” in support of friends she said couldn’t attend Sunday.

“We’re in a very progressive time, but there’s still hate out there, and I feel like this is a great way to raise awareness,” she said.

Manhattan’s parade wound its way down Fifth Avenue with more than 700 participating groups greeted by huge crowds. The rolling celebration will pass the Stonewall Inn, the famed Greenwich Village gay bar where a 1969 police raid triggered protests and energized the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

The site is now a national monument. The first Pride march was held in New York City in 1970 to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.

Later Sunday, marchers in San Francisco, host to another of the world’s largest Pride events, planned to head down Market Street to concert stages set up at the Civic Center Plaza. San Francisco’s mammoth City Hall is among the venues hosting a post-march party.

Denver, Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis and Toronto were among the other major North American cities hosting Pride parades on Sunday.

Several global cities including Tokyo, Paris and São Paulo held their events earlier this month, and others come later in the year, including London in July and Rio de Janeiro in November.

Since taking office in January, Trump has issued orders and implemented policies targeting transgender people, removing them from the military, preventing federal insurance programs from paying for gender-affirmation surgeries for young people and attempting to keep transgender athletes out of girls’ and women’s sports.

Peter McLaughlin said he’s lived in New York for years but had never attended the Pride parade. The 34-year-old Brooklyn resident said he felt compelled this year as a transgender man.

“A lot of people just don’t understand that letting people live doesn’t take away from their own experience, and right now it’s just important to show that we’re just people,” McLaughlin said.

Gabrielle Meighan, 23, of New Jersey, said she felt it was important to come out to this year’s celebrations because they come days after the 10th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark June 26, 2015, ruling in Obergefell vs. Hodges that recognized same-sex marriage nationwide.

“It’s really important to vocalize our rights and state why it’s important for us to be included,” she said.

Manhattan on Sunday also hosted the Queer Liberation March, an activism-centered event launched in recent years amid criticism that the more mainstream parade had become too corporate.

Marchers holding signs that included “Gender affirming care saves lives” and “No Pride in apartheid” headed north from the city’s AIDS Memorial to Columbus Circle near Central Park.

Among the other headwinds faced by gay rights groups this year is the loss of corporate sponsorship. American companies have pulled back support of Pride events, reflecting a broader walking back of diversity and inclusion efforts amid shifting public sentiment.

NYC Pride said this month that about 20% of its corporate sponsors dropped or reduced support, including PepsiCo and Nissan. Organizers of San Francisco Pride said they lost the support of five major corporate donors, including Comcast and Anheuser-Busch.

Marcelo and Shaffrey write for the Associated Press.

SAN FRANCISCO — Saturday night, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted his San Francisco Symphony in a staggering performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, known as the “Resurrection.” It was a ferocious performance and an exalted one of gripping intensity.

This is a symphony emblematic for Mahler of life and death, an urgent questioning of why we are here. After 80 minutes of the highest highs and lowest lows, of falling in and out of love with life, of smelling the most sensual roses on the planet in a search for renewal, resurrection arrives in a blaze of amazement.

Mahler has no answers for the purpose of life. His triumph, and Salonen’s in his overpowering performance, is in the divine glory of keeping going, keeping asking.

The audience responded with a stunned and tumultuous standing ovation. The musicians pounded their feet on the Davies Symphony Hall stage, resisting Salonen’s urgings to stand and take a bow.

It was no longer his San Francisco Symphony. After five years as music director, Salonen had declined to renew his contract, saying he didn’t share the board of trustees’ vision of the future.

“I have only two things to say,” Salonen told the crowd before exiting the stage.

“First: Thank you.

“Second: You’ve heard what you have in this city. This amazing orchestra, this amazing chorus. So take good care of them.”

Salonen, who happens to be a bit of a tech nerd and is a science-fiction fan, had come to San Francisco because he saw the Bay Area as a place where the future is foretold and the city as a place that thinks differently and turns dreams into reality.

Here he would continue the kind of transformation of the orchestra into a vehicle for social and technological good that he had begun in his 17 years as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was to be a glorious experiment in arts and society in a city presumably ready to reclaim its own past glory.

He had the advantage of following in the symphonic footsteps of Michael Tilson Thomas, who for 25 years had made the orchestra a leader in reflecting the culture of its time and place. Salonen brought in a team of young, venturesome “creative partners” from music and tech. He enlisted architect Frank Gehry to rethink concert venues for the city. He put together imaginative and ambitious projects with director Peter Sellars. He made fabulous recordings.

There were obstacles. The COVID-19 pandemic meant the cancellation of what would have been Tilson Thomas’ own intrepid farewell celebration five years ago — a production of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” with a set by Gehry and staged by James Darrah (the daring artistic director of Long Beach Opera). Salonen’s first season had to be streamed during lockdown but became the most technologically imaginative of any isolated orchestra.

Like arts organizations everywhere and particularly in San Francisco, which has had a harder time than most bouncing back from the pandemic, the San Francisco Symphony had its share of budgetary problems. But it also had, in Salonen, a music director who knew a thing or two about how to get out of them.

He had become music director of the L.A. Phil in 1992, when the city was devastated by earthquake, riots and recession. The building of Walt Disney Concert Hall was about to be abandoned. The orchestra built up in the next few years a deficit of around $17 million. The audience, some of the musicians and the press needed awakening.

Salonen was on the verge of resignation, but the administration stood behind him, believing in what he and the orchestra could become. With the opening of Disney Hall in 2003, the L.A. Phil transformed Los Angeles.

And for that opening, Salonen chose Mahler’s “Resurrection” for the first of the orchestra’s subscription series of concerts. Rebirth in this thrillingly massive symphony for a massive orchestra and chorus, along with soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists, was writ exceedingly large, transparent and loud. On Oct. 30, 2003, with L.A. weathering record heat and fires, Salonen’s Mahler exulted a better future.

Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in Davies Symphony Hall on Saturday.

(Brandon Patoc / San Francisco Symphony)

The San Francisco Symphony has not followed the L.A. Phil example. It did not put its faith and budget in Salonen’s vision, despite five years of excitement. It did not show the city how to rise again. Next season is the first in 30 years that appears to be without a mission.

In Disney 22 years ago, Salonen drew attention to the sheer transformative power of sound. At the same time Tilson Thomas had turned the San Francisco Symphony into the country’s most expansive Mahler orchestra, and it was only a few months later that he performed the Second Symphony and recorded it in Davies Symphony Hall in a luminously expressive account. That recording stands as a reminder of the hopes back then of a new century.

Salonen’s more acute approach, not exactly angry but exceptionally determined, was another kind of monument to the power of sound. In quietest, barely audible passages, the air in the hall had an electric sense of calm before the storm. The massive climaxes pinned you to the wall.

The chorus, which appears in the final movement to exhort us to cease trembling and prepare to live, proved its own inspiration. The administration all but cost-cut the singers out of the budget until saved by an anonymous donor. The two soloists, Heidi Stober and Sasha Cooke, soared as needed.

Salonen moves on. Next week he takes the New York Philharmonic on an Asia tour. At Salzburg this summer, he and Sellars stage Schoenberg’s “Erwartung,” a project he began with the San Francisco Symphony. At the Lucerne Festival, he premieres his Horn Concerto with the Orchestre de Paris instead of the San Francisco Symphony, as originally intended.

Saturday’s concert had begun with a ludicrous but illuminating announcement to “sit back and relax as Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts your San Francisco Symphony.”

Salonen, instead, offered a wondrous city a wake-up call.

Bertolt Brecht wrote that, in the dark times, there will also be singing. In Susanna Kwan’s debut novel, she asks whether those songs may be sung if there are no choirs to sing them. Choirs require community, and the role of community during environmental disaster is one of the themes that runs through this thoughtful novel about art, creation and the ways we care for one another.

Bo is a 40ish woman living in a San Francisco high-rise in the mid-21st century. The city is underwater after being swamped by the rising Pacific Ocean and incessant rain. But the city continues to exist. Those who have not fled inhabit the upper floors of skyscraper apartment blocks. Bo’s cousins have lined up work opportunities for her in Canada, but when the novel begins, she is insistent on staying. What keeps her there is grief; two years before, her mother disappeared during a storm. Bo clings to the hope that one day she will be reunited with her.

Like Bo before the rains, Kwan is an artist and she conveys what goes missing in her character’s life after environmental disaster: In the perpetual rain there are no longer seasons. And without seasons, there are no holidays or festivals to mark the changes in the year. Bo marks time with her twice-weekly visit to the rooftop markets, where merchants sell food they’ve grown or had brought in by boat. But it’s also where she scans the bulletin boards filled with photos of the missing and lost in search of her mother.

Kwan’s novel hones in on the ways that isolation and boredom sap vital parts of ourselves. The book captures America’s recent history: 2020 and isolating in our apartments and houses while outside, the dead piled up in freezer vans and mass graves. The ways that anxiety and loneliness caused many to turn inward, to make what was happening personal, as if no one else was affected. The loss of community and empathy for others drowned in the waves of fear, uncertainty, and for many, anger. Bo herself struggles with her individual feelings of frustration and grief, but then reminds herself that she hasn’t been singled out for bad fortune.

“What made her special in the long human history of crisis and displacement?” Bo wonders. “She had followed reports of heat waves that never subsided, outbreaks of anthrax and smallpox and malaria, continents dried to deserts, genocidal regimes, military blockades at borders that prevented passage to hundreds of thousands of people with nowhere to go, children drowning at sea. And yet the matter of her own privileged leaving felt extraordinary and without precedent, even as she registered this delusion.”

Before her mother disappeared, Bo worked constantly as an illustrator and painter, a source of joy that sustained her. But after her mom dies — and it is clear that her mother has most likely been washed out to sea — she is paralyzed. “Art, she’d come to feel, served no purpose in a time like this. It belonged to another world, one she’d left behind.” Grief has grayed-out her love for colorful creation.

One day, a neighbor slips a note under her door. It is a request that Bo come help out Mia with household chores. Mia lives alone, and at age 129, is struggling.

Bo has supported herself in the constricted economy as a caregiver. Many of those in the high-rises are the elderly, in some cases abandoned by their fleeing children, but sometimes just too fragile to be moved. By 2050, people are living past 100 and living to 130 isn’t rare. But 130-year-old elders have elderly children and even elderly grandchildren. Weaker bonds with third- and fourth-generation descendants has left many to look after themselves.

Bo is the daughter of Chinese immigrants; Mia came from China with her parents. Mia’s daughter and further descendants live thousands of miles away. Caring for Mia reminds Bo of the time she spent with her mother when they made frequent treks to check in on family elders, a way of paying respect, her mom told her when Bo was a child.

In Mia’s apartment, the two women begin to bond in the kitchen. Bo prepares food while Mia tells stories of her life in San Francisco. She had been born in the 1920s, not that long after the earthquake and devastating fire that leveled the city in 1906. Mia’s life parallels the growth of San Francisco and her memories of how the city changed through the decades in the 20th century intrigues Bo. So much was lost, first in the wave of explosive population growth and wealth, but when the rains came, entire parts of the city disappeared, their histories swallowed by the relentless rise of the Pacific.

Bo’s memories have already been dulled by perpetual grayness. But hanging out with Mia loosens something inside of Bo, and she notices that her senses can serve as “time machines,” and give her access to her own past. There are obvious reminders — a photograph — but songs are especially evocative even before she recognizes the tune. “A song provided passage from the present station back to a place and time, distinct and palpable. The trip was quick, a sled tearing down a luge track, the body sensing its arrival before the mind could register the journey.”

Bo’s occasional lover is a man who visits San Francisco as part of his job working in natural resources. He spends much of the time counting and cataloging what species remain, or what is about to be lost. When he arrives back in town after she has started working for Mia, Bo finds that her growing sense of purpose, her desire to return to art-making, is motivated by a similar impulse.

She wants to catalog Mia’s experiences, her memories of the city that no longer exists. In their long conversations, Mia summons images and histories of places that Bo never knew existed. Inspired by Mia, Bo goes to the city’s archive and searches for the photographs, newspaper articles, blueprints, maps and other ways that the now-missing city documented its existence.

For Mia’s approaching 130th birthday, which Bo senses will be her employer’s last, she decides that she will use her skills as an artist to bring the old city back to life one more time — a gift for her employer, but also a means by which Bo can recapture the wild energy that is creation.

Survivalists preparing for an imagined catastrophic future hoard food and supplies and stock up on guns to “protect” themselves from those in need. But as Kwan shows, such visions of the future are the refractions of nihilism and the American belief that individual survival and success is due solely to individual effort. But that’s never been the case. What preserves human life — even a life in horrific circumstances — are relationships of caring and cooperation. Community built on taking care of each other is the only way that we will thrive. The networks we build to support others eventually becomes the social safety net we will ourselves need.

In dark times, the songs that will comfort us will not be the cacophony of individual voices wailing their grief. The darkness will be lifted by the harmonies of those who recognize each other’s humanity.

Berry is a writer and critic living in Oregon.