Author: CaliNews

By STEVE PEOPLES and MEAD GRUVER CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, Donald Trump’s fiercest Republican adversary in Congress, soundly lost a GOP primary, falling to a rival backed by the former president in a rout that reinforced his grip on the party’s base. The third-term congresswoman and her allies entered Tuesday downbeat about her prospects, aware that Trump’s backing gave Harriet Hageman considerable lift in the state where he won by the largest margin during the 2020 campaign. Cheney was already looking ahead to a political future beyond Capitol Hill that could include a 2024 presidential run, potentially putting her on another collision course with Trump. On Wednesday, calling Trump “a very grave threat and risk to our republic,” she told NBC that she thinks that defeating him will require “a broad and united front of Republicans, Democrats and independents — and that’s what I intend to be part of.” She declined to say if she would run for president but conceded it’s “something that I’m thinking about.” Cheney described her primary loss on Tuesday night as the beginning of a new

The WNBA playoffs begin Wednesday, but the Bay Area has no skin in the game — other than supporting local products like Sabrina Ionescu, Chelsea Gray and others who are playing for various teams across the league. That soon could change. With the WNBA eying an expansion in the near future, the Bay has emerged as a legitimate target market to be the home of a new franchise. Several prominent basketball figures, including NBA commissioner Adam Silver and retiring WNBA legend Sue Bird, have identified San Francisco or Oakland as a prime place to have a team. “I’m definitely in favor of it,” Silver said at the NBA Finals. He also called the Bay a “fantastic basketball market” that “has historically been a great women’s basketball market as well.” Engelbert has repeatedly mentioned the Bay in her comments about an expansion, interestingly noting its close proximity to Silicon Valley. In a July interview with Boardroom, Engelbert said, “When technology is driving so much of your economy, not to have a team in the Bay Area seemed like a missed opportunity, especially with Stanford’s women’s basketball

By Faith Karimi | CNN The 911 call starts with a jarring observation: “A car just went through my neighbor’s house.” Anne Heche had crashed her blue Mini Cooper into a home in Los Angeles on August 5, and the caller, as heard in a recording obtained and published by TMZ, was unaware that the veteran actor was behind the wheel, or that anyone was still in the car at the time. The caller told the dispatcher that the car was about 10 feet into the house. Everyone in the home was accounted for, the caller said, adding that he was unsure how many people were in the car when it crashed. “Somebody is opening the back to see if we can access because they’re kinda trapped … inside the car,” the caller continued. In the background, a voice yelled “fire!” and another one called out for hoses as the dispatcher tried to determine whether the smoke was in the home or car. Heche’s crash into the two-story house in the Mar Vista neighborhood ignited a fiery blaze that took 59 firefighters over an hour

SAN JOSE — Hotel buying activity cooled off in Northern California, including in the Bay Area, during the first six months of 2022, a slump that might worsen during the rest of this year, an unsettling new report says. During the first six months of 2022, the dollar volume for purchases of Northern California hotels totaled slightly less than $1.03 billion, which represented a plunge of 63.4% from the $2.8 billion in hotel deals during the first half of 2021, according to a report released by Atlas Hospitality Group, which tracks the lodging market. Southern California’s hotel market experienced a 1.3% rise in the dollar volume of lodging deals, Atlas Hospitality reported. Hotels in Southern California hauled in $2.42 billion in total purchases during the first six months of this year, compared with $2.39 billion in the first half of 2021. Northern California’s weakness dragged down the statewide results. During the first six months of 2022, California hotel purchases generated $3.45 billion in transactions, which was a steep slide of 33.6% from the record $5.19 billion in hotel deals in the first half of 2021

The ink is barely dry on the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act, which allocates $80 billion over 10 years to help modernize IRS technology systems and provide more effective tax enforcement and collection. Yet already, Republican critics like Sen. John Thune of South Dakota are complaining that the needed funds will do little more than allow the IRS to “spend more time harassing taxpayers around this country.” Given that between $500 billion and $1 trillion a year in taxes goes uncollected, perhaps some American individuals and corporations deserve to be harassed a little. Especially when you consider that, where middleclass American wage-earners have a 95% reliability rate for paying their fair share of taxes, the top 1% of wealthy Americans consistently fail to report (and are very good at hiding) 20% of their income. For years, Republicans as well as Democrats in Congress have blocked giving the IRS the resources it needs to update its computer systems and prevent the steady erosion of its enforcement capabilities. As noted by Charles Rettig, a Trump appointee and IRS commissioner, the “areas of challenge for the agency [are]