9 Stories You Should Know About Today: Friday, Jan. 9

The temptation of a new stadium in Oakland apparently wasn’t enough to win the Bay Area its first Olympics, as Boston was chosen Thursday to be the U.S. contender to host the 2024 Summer Games. Boston now will face an international field of candidates that includes Rome, Berlin or Hamburg, and possibly others, like Paris. The International Olympic Committee is expected to decide on the host city for the 2024 Games in September 2017. Officials in San Francisco and the other U.S. cities that had been in the running, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., were left wondering why they came up short. Full story

Write it down: There are exactly 403 days between the formal announcement that Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-California) won’t seek re-election and the date on which candidates can formally file paperwork to run for her seat. It will be a period of buzz and speculation unlike any in California politics in recent memory. Full story

District Five Supervisor London Breed, an African American woman who was raised in San Francisco public housing and represents the racially diverse district where she grew up, will lead the Board of Supervisors for the next two years after being elected by her colleagues Thursday. Breed, 40, was raised by her grandmother in the Fillmore and Western Addition neighborhoods and graduated from Balboa High School before attending UC Davis.  Full story

The Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office said Thursday that no criminal charges are warranted against a San Jose police officer whose combative anti-protest tweets drew wide scorn amid a heated national conversation over police-community relationships. While cleared of criminal conduct, the police career of Officer Phillip White, a 20-year SJPD veteran, remains in jeopardy. He has been on paid administrative leave since a series of his tweets surfaced on the Buzzfeed website in mid-December. Full story

Tired of spending gobs of time and money fighting patent trolls, Apple, Google and other Silicon Valley giants are turning to “death squads.”
It’s an attention-grabbing nickname for the very bureaucratic sounding Patent Trial and Review Board. Created by Congress in 2011, the board, made up of administrative patent judges, offers companies a quicker and more cost-effective way to resolve intellectual property disputes without going to court. Full story

A marijuana investment company has received millions from Founders Fund, the high-profile venture capital firm headed by famed investor Peter Thiel, mimicking the tech industry's headline-grabbing cash infusions. Privateer Holdings, the cannabis industry's first investment firm that's behind the recently launched Bob Marley marijuana brand Marley Natural, announced Thursday that Founders Fund had made a multi-million dollar investment. Full story

BART's Richmond station will get a $2.7 million upgrade in an effort to make it safer and more accessible. The BART board on Thursday awarded a contract to reconstruct the area outside the station where passengers are dropped off and picked up by cars, buses, and taxis. Full story

Last year saw Uber challenged with regulator and government battles across North America, Europe and Asia, and today China took its first step to cracking down on its fast growing taxi app space. State-run media outlet Xinhua reports that the Chinese government has “forbade” private cars and unlicensed vehicles from using taxi-hailing apps such as Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache — China’s top two services — and, of course, Uber. Full story

Although sales of wine have recovered strongly from the depths of the recession, Impact Databank reports that the total U.S. wine market only grew 0.3 percent in 2014 to a volume of 322 million nine-liter cases. The tepid sales result largely from weak on-premise sales in restaurants and bars. Full story