Comedian and author Sarah Silverman is suing social media giant Meta and ChatGPT pioneer OpenAI in a pair of related lawsuits accusing the high-profile California technology companies of breaking state and federal laws by using her memoir “The Bedwetter” as fodder for their artificial intelligence products.

Silverman and two novelists claim Menlo Park-based Meta and San Francisco-based OpenAI violated copyright and other laws by ingesting their books — and those of thousands of other authors — to train their artificial intelligence software.

Both companies copied works protected by copyright law, including books by Silverman, Pennsylvania author Richard Kadrey and Massachusetts writer Christopher Golden “without consent, without credit, and without compensation,” according to the lawsuits filed Friday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

OpenAI, which sells ChatGPT via subscription, and Meta, which according to Silverman’s lawsuit is planning to commercialize its LLaMA generative AI models, “not only use those works without permission but then put them into the stream of commerce and the marketplace directly in competition with those who created the works,” said Joseph Saveri, a lawyer for the three authors.

Silverman, Kadrey and Golden and other producers of copyrighted material “run the risk of having their work, their economic livelihood, being entirely supplanted” by AI software,” Saveri said.

Matthew Butterick, another lawyer representing the authors, alleged that OpenAI and Meta have landed on a business strategy of “copyright infringement on a massive, unprecedented scale.”

OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment. Meta declined to comment.

Silverman, Kadrey and Golden are seeking class-action status to bring in all U.S. copyright holders whose work of any kind was used to create the companies’ generative AI products.

“The lawsuits raise some very interesting questions,” said UC Berkeley law school professor Pamela Samuelson. “The courts will take them really seriously, but it’s a little bit early to know how the court’s going to look at it.”

The three authors are among a growing number of creators suing generative AI companies over their use of art, music, photographs and additional copyrighted materials scraped from the internet to create chatbots and other software that produces answers, imagery, music, code, voices and other outputs in response to user prompts. The legal disputes highlight a gap between traditional copyright law and a transformative technology that has swept the world since OpenAI launched ChatGPT late last year.

Courts may decide that using copyrighted material for AI training qualifies as fair use and does not violate copyright law, Samuelson said. Or the U.S. Congress could legislate changes to copyright law to address disputes over AI training data, she said.

The OpenAI lawsuit includes purported prompts and answers related to Silverman’s autobiographical “The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee.” Prompted to summarize the book, ChatGPT produced general information about Silverman’s life — for example that she struggled with bedwetting until her teen years — but also material apparently specific to the book, such as, “Silverman shares details of her relationship with fellow comedian and actor Jimmy Kimmel,” and that she “candidly discusses the impacts of fame on her mental health,” according to the lawsuit.

The court can be expected to focus on whether outputs from the companies’ AI software are “substantially similar” to the creators’ inputs, Samuelson said. “The question is, ‘Would the summary essentially supplant demand for the original?’ ” she said. “Most book reviews have a synopsis from the plot, some details from it, maybe a quote or two.”

Both lawsuits are seeking unspecified damages and a court order upholding the rights of creators whose work is used for training AI.

Lawyers Butterick and Saveri are representing plaintiffs in a number of lawsuits against generative AI companies and say the Silverman cases will not be the last because the firms are gathering vast amounts of copyrighted content from the internet. Both Samuelson and Butterick said licensing of creators’ work could provide a way forward.

“All of human culture has already been scraped up, and we have to kind of decide what we’re going to do next,” Butterick said. “We’re not trying to stand athwart of AI. We just want it to be fair and ethical.”

Holmes, 39, surrendered herself for imprisonment May 30, to start serving a sentence of 11 years and three months. But her updated release date is December 29, 2032, just over the 9½ years that federal prison rules say she must remain locked up at a minimum.

The prisons bureau confirmed Holmes’ new release date, but said privacy, safety and security reasons prevent it from discussing inmates’ release plans.

Generally, those incarcerated in federal prisons can earn 54 days of “Good Conduct Time” off their sentences for each year of their sentence, according to the prisons bureau. Eligible inmates can also earn time off from their sentences by participating and completing programs for reducing post-prison re-offending, and educational, health, recovery, victim-impact and employment-training programs. Inmates can also get out up to a year early by completing a drug-abuse program.

Lawyers for Holmes did not immediately respond to questions about her new release date.

Holmes, 39, was sentenced in November in U.S. District Court in San Jose to 11 years and three months in prison for defrauding investors in her now-defunct Palo Alto blood-testing startup out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

The charismatic former technology company founder and mother of two young children fought in court with some success to delay her imprisonment past the April 27 date handed her by Judge Edward Davila, but ultimately had to turn herself over to prison authorities May 30 at federal Prison Camp Bryan near Houston.

She is appealing her January 2022 conviction by a jury on four counts of fraud, claiming Davila made errors conducting the trial, that her conviction was “unjust,” and that her sentence was too severe. Criminal-case appeals rarely succeed, according to a U.S. federal courts fact sheet.

“I would say the majority would come from Silicon Valley,” said Rana Sarkar, consul general of Canada in San Francisco. “This is where the talent is. This is where we’re coming to attract talent.”

The nation to the north, with a population that just surpassed 40 million thanks to high immigration numbers, is once again attempting to leverage foreign workers’ difficulties with the U.S. H-1B visa, the work permit of choice for Bay Area companies wanting to hire tech workers.

“We’re targeting newcomers that can help enshrine Canada as a world leader in a variety of emerging technologies,” Canada’s immigration minister, Sean Fraser, said in a statement.

Canada’s overt efforts to persuade Silicon Valley H-1B workers to abandon the U.S. and head northward date back a decade, when the Canadian government paid for a billboard beside Highway 101 that said, “H-1B problems? Pivot to Canada.”

Silicon Valley’s tech giants rely heavily on the H-1B visa, employing tens of thousands of foreign workers through the permit. Although the visa can provide a path to a green card and eventual citizenship, many foreign workers and their spouses, particularly those from India, face years-long waits because of country-specific quotas.

“I have been here since 2010,” said Pratima Joglekar, of Pleasanton, who works in an immigration law firm under an H-4 visa for spouses of H-1B workers. “I haven’t received my green card yet.”

News of the new Canadian program is spreading quickly through Bay Area communities, piquing the interest of many H-1B holders and their spouses, Joglekar said. “They feel that Canada might offer them stability rather than waiting here for the green card.”

Canada plans to run the program, officially known as the “H1-B specialty occupation visa holder work permit” program, for a year starting July 16. Canadian authorities will issue 10,000 permits to H-1B holders, whose spouses and dependents will be eligible to apply for residence, work and study permits, Sarkar said. Approved H-1B applicants will receive permission to work for up to three years for almost any employer nearly anywhere in Canada. “If this is a successful program, I think there’s all intention to continue it,” Sarkar said.

Participants in the program may be able to obtain permanent residence within the three years and citizenship within a few years after that, Sarkar said.

For H-1B workers, long-running uncertainties around their ability to continue to live and work long-term in the U.S. were exacerbated by attempts during the administration of former President Donald Trump to limit the use of the visa and promises by his administration to strip work authorization from the spouses of H-1B holders.

Sarkar said the new work permit program is “not just Canada taking advantage of a U.S. challenge” and that the flow of skilled workers between the two countries can benefit both. But he acknowledged the long waits for green cards confronting many H-1B workers. “This is an opportunity for families to have some security,” he said. “The feedback I always get is people just want to know where their kids are going to go to high school.”

Joglekar, an Indian citizen, said the Canadian program likely will have special appeal for H-1B holders and their spouses who have children born outside the U.S. who are likely to turn 21 before their parents obtain green cards. Those young adults would face similar uncertainties around getting authorization to live and work in the U.S., Joglekar said. “No parent wants their child to go through the same problem,” she said.

Rufus Jeffris, spokesman for the Bay Area Council, which represents hundreds of employers including heavy H-1B users Google, Apple and Facebook, said it was understandable that Canada would want to take advantage of the “mess we’ve made of our H-1B system” and the resulting uncertainty for foreign tech workers. “It’s inexcusable that the U.S. can’t provide more certainty and sanity to our immigration system, particularly for high-skilled workers that bring considerable value to our tech economy,” Jeffris said.

The country is seeking “catalytic talent” who will “spawn future growth for existing companies and a set of future companies,” Sarkar said. “The attractiveness of H-1B workers is we have this proven pool of talent that is already working in industry in adjacent jurisdictions very complementary to ours. Talent becomes … the stem cells of growth for the future.”

Canada also plans to offer five-year work permits to foreign citizens employed by companies identified as contributing to the country’s “industrial innovation goals” and those in “select in-demand occupations.” The specific companies and occupations have not yet been publicly specified.

The country is also expanding its visa program for entrepreneurs and working to attract “digital nomads” from other countries and facilitate their transition from working remotely for employers outside Canada, to getting jobs with Canadian businesses that would lead to permanent residency and citizenship, Sarkar said.

When the caller asked for her address, she told him. She also answered a second call soon after, believed to be from the same man, who told her he was nearby and she should sneak out without telling her family. Outside, the man met her and led her into a side yard, where he raped her, Sunnyvale Det. Matthew Hutchison wrote in the filing.

The girl was examined, and her clothing was sent for testing, which showed a DNA profile from a male. But there was no one in the FBI’s DNA database matching that profile.

Twenty-seven years later, the detective finally got a match: In an extraordinary scheme, Hutchison went undercover as a busboy at an Irish bar on St. Patrick’s Day to collect the half-eaten hot wings, beer cup and two plastic straws that authorities say finally brought a now 59-year-old San Jose man to justice.

The first big break came last March, when the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office cold-case unit, through DNA and genealogical records — such as those used to catch Golden State Killer Joseph DeAngelo — identified a possible pool of suspects: the sons of a woman who may have lived in or around Sunnyvale.

Hutchison found an archived obituary for the mother in the Mercury News. It said she had given birth to seven male children, with one dying as an infant.

Using police databases, he discovered that two of the surviving sons had died as adults. Of the remaining sons, one was living in Santa Clara, one in Milpitas and two in San Jose.

But although a full DNA profile had been extracted from the girl’s clothing, none of the sons’ DNA profiles were in law enforcement databases. Using discarded items left in public places by three of the brothers, Hutchison was able to obtain their DNA and rule them out as suspects.

That left one man “as the last living brother whose DNA could be directly compared to the suspect profile,” Hutchison wrote.

However, said Rob Baker, the deputy DA who runs the cold-case team, the suspect presented a problem.

“Cops, usually they’ll surveil guys and try to get their trash when they leave it behind,” Baker said Wednesday. “He lived in an apartment complex, with communal trash. He didn’t really have a regular job. He was retired. The success of this case was due to the creative thinking of Detective Matt Hutchison.”

Hutchison, speaking by phone Wednesday, said he knew that with only 10 detectives in the Sunnyvale department, he’d have a hard time getting approval to tail the suspect for days and days in hopes of gathering something he dropped that might have DNA on it. But on social media, he hit pay dirt earlier this year, learning that the suspect and his brothers would meet every St. Patrick’s Day at the same Irish pub in Santa Clara County.

The holiday was about two weeks away at the time of Hutchison’s discovery.

The cold case team obtained a warrant, and the bar owner agreed to let them run an operation. Hutchison showed up at 11 a.m. in a bright green shirt with the name of an Irish whiskey on it, ready to work as a busboy. He’s 38, but said, “People tell me I look younger.” The owner told other employees to help him out because he was new.

A half dozen of Hutchison’s detective colleagues were in the bar in plainclothes to help him and back him up in case of trouble.

Hutchison worked. The team, acting as patrons, waited. And waited.

Finally, at just before 6 p.m., with the barroom crowded with noisy celebrants, the man walked in. Hutchison had seen pictures of the suspect but never laid eyes on him.

“I recognized him immediately,” Hutchison said.

The man was joined by another brother and a handful of family members. For three hours, Hutchison performed his two jobs, as policeman and busboy. “I was all over the restaurant busing tables at every section, busing tables, running food, looking like I was working, while all the time watching his table from the corner of my eye,” Hutchison said.

Over the hours, with colleagues helping him identify items they believed only the suspect touched, Hutchison collected half-eaten hot wings, a beer cup, two plastic straws and other items, bringing them to the back and slipping them into evidence bags.

The Santa Clara County Crime Lab extracted DNA from the suspect’s discarded items, and the California Department of Justice’s lab matched it to the underwear of the 7-year-old girl, Hutchison wrote.

When the girl was attacked, Martinez was in his early 30s. Police believe that around that time — a period in which Martinez was arrested on suspicion of indecent exposure — he was living with his parents about a half mile from the girl’s home.

He is charged with aggravated sexual assault and other felonies in connection with the attack on the girl. On Tuesday, a second possible victim was identified, and prosecutors added two more felony charges. Police said they also identified an additional possible victim.

Martinez, of San Jose, is being held without bail and faces 50 years to life in prison if convicted. His next court appearance is scheduled for July 31.

Hutchison, according to deputy DA Baker, has solved eight cold cases, including six homicides and two sexual assaults. “The numbers and the work that he’s put in are just beyond anything that I’ve ever seen,” Baker said. “He’s probably solved more cold cases than any other detective in the county in modern history.”

With new chatbots and AI software that generates text, images and sound, technology companies have smashed open Pandora’s Box, experts say, unleashing a powerful tool with the capacity to profoundly change virtually all aspects of life — and putting it in the hands of every one of us, builders and destroyers alike.

Silicon Valley’s tech industry, famed for its move-fast-and-break-things ethos, has embarked on an arms race to monetize the transformative and potentially destructive technology. Many of those in the midst of the surge are worried about the dangers — expected and unexpected — that await.

A generative AI market didn’t exist just a few months ago. Then late last year, San Francisco’s OpenAI released a stunning iteration of its ChatGPT bot, which has advanced so rapidly that people in many cases cannot distinguish between what is produced by a human or generated by a bot.

Now even many of the most fervent believers in technological advancement worry that this time tech is going to break everything.

“Everybody should pay attention,” said Chon Tang, a venture capitalist and general partner at SkyDeck, UC Berkeley’s startup accelerator. “This is not a new toy. This is not a fad. This is not VCs looking for attention and founders trying to create hype. This is a society-changing, species-changing event. I’m excited by this technology but the downsides are just so immense. We’ve unleashed forces that we don’t understand.”

The White House recently raised an alarm about AI’s “potential risks to individuals and society that may not yet have manifested,” and urged accountability and consumer safety protections.

The technology uses sophisticated computing, but its basic concepts are simple: Software is “trained” through information feeds — from data sources such as Wikipedia, scientific papers, patents, books, news stories, photos, videos, art, music, voices and even previous and potentially problem-ridden AI outputs, much of it copyrighted and scraped from the internet without permission. The chatbot then spits out results based on “prompts” from the user.

Chatbots can write a term paper, corporate marketing copy or a news story. They can conduct research, review contracts, perform customer service, build websites, create graphic design, write code, create a “photograph” of a Congressional candidate smoking meth, or a faked video of your significant other having sex with your neighbor.

A bot can copy someone’s voice from a social media video clip so a scammer can call their grandparents with a desperate plea for money, create a fake charity showcasing heart-wrenching images in the wake of a major disaster, or chat someone into investing in nonexistent stocks.

For now, generative AI often produces inaccurate results. It can’t understand emotion, or nuance, and lacks the common sense to understand, for example with ChatGPT, that a book cannot fall off a shelf because it “lost its balance.”

Microsoft, in a multi-billion-dollar deal with OpenAI, has turned its Bing search engine into a chatbot, and Google is struggling to catch up with its in-development Bard. New bots are arriving daily, with almost any imaginable function, from turning data into charts to getting puppy-raising advice, to scraping the world wide web for the content needed to create an app.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers warned in a paper recently that generative AI could produce recipes for chemical weapons and addictive drugs.

Worries about generative AI also come from inside the house: “Unintended consequences,” the ChatGPT bot told this news organization recently when asked about its future, “could result in negative impacts on people, society, or the environment.”

Negative impacts, bot? Discrimination in hiring or lending, it said. Harmful misinformation and propaganda, it said. Job loss. Inequality. Accelerated climate change.

Ask Silicon Valley startup guru Steve Blank about generative AI and he’ll start talking about nuclear weapons, genetic engineering and deadly lab-created viruses. Then he’ll tell you about long-ago research scientists seeing potential catastrophes from those technologies and putting on the brakes until guardrails could go up. And he’ll tell you what’s different now.

“This technology is not being driven by research scientists, it’s being driven by for-profit companies,” said Blank, an adjunct professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University. “If the hair’s not standing up at the back of your neck after looking at this thing, you don’t understand what’s just happened.”

Silicon Valley’s history with social media — prioritizing revenue, rapid growth and market share, with too little regard for damaging fallout — does not bode well for its approach to generative AI, Blank said. “Morals and ethics are not on the top of the list, and unintended consequences be damned,” Blank said. “This is kind of the ultimate valley thing. I’d be pissed off if I was in the rest of society.”

Blank worries about job losses and weaponization of AI by governments, and most of all, given the lightning pace of the technology’s evolution, that “we don’t know what we don’t know,” he said. “Where’s this stuff going to be in 10 years?”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai pledged in a New York Times interview last month that in the AI arms race, “You will see us be bold and ship things,” however, “we are going to be very responsible in how we do it.” But Silicon Valley has a history of shipping bold products that ended up linked to eating disorders, foreign meddling in U.S. elections, domestic insurrection and genocide — and Pichai refused to commit to slowing down Google’s AI development.

“The big companies are fearing being left behind and overtaken by the smaller companies; the smaller companies are taking bigger chances,” said Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics Program at Santa Clara University.

An open letter last month from tech-world luminaries including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter CEO Elon Musk raised concerns that generative AI could “flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth” and “automate away all the jobs,” but it received the most attention for highlighting future “nonhuman minds” that might “outsmart, obsolete and replace us.”

Emily Bender, director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory at the University of Washington, said the letter’s fears of an “artificial general intelligence” resembling Skynet from the “Terminator” movies is “not what we’re talking about in the real world.” Bender noted instead that data hoovered up for AI bots often contains biased or incorrect information, and sometimes misinformation. “If there’s something harmful in what you’ve automated, then that harm can get scaled,” Bender said. “You pollute the information ecosystem. It becomes harder to find trustworthy sources.”

The tremendous power of generative AI has suddenly been handed to bad actors who may use it to create hard-to-stop phishing campaigns or to build ransomware, raising the specter of catastrophic attacks on businesses and governments, Raicu said.

Greg Kogan, head of marketing at San Francisco database-search company Pinecone, said companies in a wide variety of industries are developing generative AI or integrating it into products and services, leading to “explosive” growth at Pinecone. “Every CEO and CTO in the world is like, ‘How do we catch this lightning in a bottle and use it?’” Kogan said. “At first people were excited. Then it turned into an existential thing where it’s like, ‘If we don’t do it first, our competitors are going to launch a product.’” Silicon Valley, from startups to giants like Apple, has gone on a hiring spree for workers with generative AI skills.

Tang believes engineering and regulation can mitigate most damage from the technology, but he remains deeply concerned about unstoppable, self-propagating malware sowing devastating chaos worldwide, and automation of vast numbers of tasks and jobs. “What happens to that 20% or 50% or 70% of the population that is economically of less value than a machine?” Tang asked. “How do we as a society absorb, support that massive segment of the population?”

Sandoval, a former sociology professor at UC Santa Cruz, was hired in January at the San Francisco-based think tank founded last year and named after a concept coined by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman. She previously worked at the Insight Center for Community Economic Development in Oakland and became steeped in issues around wealth inequality. “No one wanted to talk about decreasing wealth at the higher end,” says Sandoval.

The think tank promotes adding special surtaxes for ultra-wealthy people, imposing a “wealth tax” on assets such as real estate, yachts and luxury vehicles, and increasing IRS enforcement on the super-rich.

The institute takes aim at the richest .1% of Americans — people holding $50 million or more in wealth. Taxing them what the institute considers to be appropriately and effectively would generate up to $10 trillion over 10 years, Sandoval says.

Q: When you look at a $20-million house, what goes through your head?

A: Nobody needs this.

Q: Why shouldn’t people make a billion dollars if they have good ideas, work hard and make smart business decisions?

A: Most of the people that we are concerned about didn’t themselves work hard and make a billion dollars. A lot of that is intergenerational wealth. I live in California, so a lot of my neighbors are millionaires. They’re not who I’m concerned with. I’m concerned with the people who have hoarded … amounts of wealth that cannot be spent in a lifetime. They’ve taken our government hostage with their lobbyists and their attorneys. That’s where the disorder comes in, when you have people who have so much money that they’re controlling our democracy.

Q: Given the political power of the ultra-wealthy, why do you think you could succeed in making them pay more taxes — are you tilting at windmills?

A: We have an opportunity right now. An increasing majority of people in this country support raising taxes on the wealthy — all the major polls show this. We are seeing actual political will and movement in this space with legislators … introducing wealth, estate, income and capital gains tax legislation and gaining traction. Why would we not commit to working on something that could literally save us? This is a real way we could address the climate crisis, and lots of other crises, but if we don’t work on climate soon and fast, the other crises will be moot.

Q: Americans for Tax Fairness says the number of U.S. billionaires grew from 66 in 1990 to 614 in 2020 — how did we get here?

A: Lobbyists are working around the clock to make sure that the ultra-wealthy continue to get wealthier. On the other side of the spectrum you’ve got the 50% of Americans who don’t have any wealth. They can’t even weather an illness. They can’t weather a broken-down car. It’s upside down. Citizens United (the U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations to spend unlimited cash on elections) didn’t help. We’re talking about a plutocracy disguised as a democracy. When the ultra-wealthy want something, 90% of the time they get it, even if the rest of us who are voting don’t want it.

Q: How do you respond to the assertion that super-rich people are creating wealth and jobs?

A: First I ask, “What kinds of jobs are they creating?” What we’ve seen in the last 50 years in this country has been wage stagnation, it’s been jobs that don’t provide for families.

Q: What are the effects on ordinary people of this concentration of wealth?

A: Most people you would talk to would say they value accessible education … accessible high quality health care … green space, clean air, clean water. We could really move the needle on the most pressing issues of our time if we just broke up those concentrations of wealth.

Q: What does America stand to gain through higher taxation of the very rich?

A: This country was built on the idea of access to opportunity for everyone. The very soul of our nation’s ethos is at stake here. The game is rigged; the vast majority of people don’t have access to opportunity.

Q: What does the IRS need to do under existing tax laws to ensure ultra-wealthy people pay what the tax code says they should?

A: The IRS needs resources in order to enforce properly. We see money that’s been appropriated to fund the IRS and Republicans immediately start working to take that back. If you have a creative accountant at that level of wealth there are so many gray areas, there are loopholes, there are ways to move your money. Regular people say, “Well, we don’t want the IRS to have funds because we’re the ones getting audited.” We have to make sure that the IRS is empowered to actually go after the folks who are evading taxes. There is also a problem of equitable distribution of enforcement. Black families are audited at a much higher rate than White families.

Gabriela Sandoval profile

Job title: Executive director, Excessive Wealth Disorder InstituteAge: 48Education: PhD in sociology, and master’s in regional planning from Cornell University; bachelor’s in psychology and ethnic studies from UC San DiegoBorn in: Santa Paula, CaliforniaLives in: Los AngelesFamily: Daughter, 15; domestic partner with daughter, 11

Five things to know about Gabriela Sandoval1: Performs bachata, a dance style from the Dominican Republic2: Narrowly avoided being trampled by a herd of wildebeest in Namibia3: Drives an almost 20-year-old Jeep Wrangler4: Has a 20-pound chihuahua/terrier mix named Waffle, “had pit bulls in the past that were less vicious.”5: Considers Argentine suffragist and former First Lady Eva Perón a role model

The judge’s excoriation came in a multi-lawsuit legal action involving dozens of states, including California, accusing the Mountain View-based digital advertising giant of monopolizing the distribution of apps that use Google’s Android operating system.

Judge James Donato found Google broke federal court rules, and potentially weakened the antitrust case against the company, by auto-deleting internal employee messages the firm was obligated to hand over to the states and other plaintiffs as evidence.

“Google has tried to downplay the problem and displayed a dismissive attitude ill tuned to the gravity of its conduct,” Donato wrote in his decision Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

The plaintiffs, in a court filing Monday, had claimed Google engaged in “a company-wide culture of concealment coming from the very top, including CEO Sundar Pichai.”

Bonta responded Tuesday to Donato’s findings, saying in a statement, “This egregious behavior demonstrates the lengths that Google will go to maintain its anticompetitive stronghold on the marketplace.”

Google did not respond to a request for comment on Donato’s decision and the plaintiffs’ allegations. The company is accused in the four related lawsuits of putting up contractual and technological barriers to block Android users from using other app-distribution platforms than the Google Play store.

The communications at issue in Donato’s ruling took place in Google’s internal instant-messaging system known as “Chat.” Donato found that Google in the litigation had cast Chat as “primarily a social outlet akin to an electronic break room,” but in fact, company employees routinely used it to “discuss substantive business topics, including matters relevant to this antitrust litigation.”

Chats involving hundreds of specific Google employees were supposed to be preserved for the court case via a “history on” setting in the messaging platform, the judge wrote in his decision. Those communications would then be given to the plaintiffs to use as potential evidence, in a process called “discovery.” Instead, Google “intended to subvert the discovery process” and the Chat evidence “was lost .. with the intent to deprive (the plaintiffs) of the information’s use in the litigation,” Donato found.

Google initially claimed it had no ability to change default settings for individual employees’ Chat history, but evidence in a court hearing “plainly established that this representation was not truthful,” Donato wrote. He added that Google had the ability to set the Chat history function to “on” for all the employees whose communications were relevant to the case, but chose not to.

Shortly after the case was filed in October 2020 and before the issue with the Chat function arose, the company “falsely assured the Court” that it had taken appropriate steps to preserve all relevant evidence “without saying a word about Chats,” Donato wrote. “The Court has repeatedly asked Google why it never mentioned Chat until the issue became a substantial problem. It has not provided an explanation, which is worrisome, especially in light of its unlimited access to accomplished legal counsel, and its long experience with the duty of evidence preservation.”

The plaintiffs claimed in their filing Monday that Google CEO Pichai in one Chat started to discuss a matter relevant to the antitrust case, then immediately asked if the Chat setting could be set to “history off” so the message would auto-delete, before unsuccessfully trying to delete the “incriminating” message himself.

“Like Mr. Pichai, other key Google employees, including those in leadership roles, routinely opted to move … to history-off Chats to hold sensitive conversations … in order to avoid leaving a record that could be produced in litigation,” the filing alleged.

Donato ordered that Google pay the plaintiffs’ attorney fees and other costs related to litigation over destruction of the messages, and said “determination of an appropriate non-monetary sanction requires further proceedings.” The additional proceedings will shed light on how consequential Google’s failure to preserve the communications evidence is for the plaintiffs’ case, Donato indicated.

Vaughn Walker, former Chief Judge of the Northern California U.S. District Court, said judges, when deciding on sanctions in such cases, give heavy weight to the importance of lost evidence. In the most serious cases, a judge may tell a jury “that the party destroyed evidence or allowed it to be destroyed and the jury should infer that the evidence was incriminating,” Walker said.

The group of lawsuits also includes as plaintiffs millions of consumers and several companies.

David DePape, of Richmond, is accused of bludgeoning Paul Pelosi with a hammer in late October after allegedly breaking into the couple’s San Francisco home seeking to kidnap Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, who was second in the line of presidential succession at the time. A recording of DePape describing the attack during a police interrogation and a recording of a 911 call were also released Friday under orders from a state judge.

Pelosi on Friday told reporters that her husband “is making progress but it will take more time.” Referring to the released material, she said, “I have not heard the 911 call. I have not heard the confession. I have not seen the break-in, and I have absolutely no intention of seeing the deadly assault on my husband’s life.”

Police body-camera video shows officers — responding to a 911 call from Paul Pelosi made from a bathroom after DePape allegedly broke in — arriving at the Pelosi home and knocking on the front door, calling for someone to answer.

The door opens to reveal Paul Pelosi in a collared shirt and underwear, and a man later identified as DePape in blue sweatshirt and shorts, both holding onto a hammer with their right hands. DePape appears to be pulling the hammer away from Pelosi.

“What’s going on?” an officer asks.

“Everything’s good,” DePape replies.

An officer commands, “Drop the hammer,” DePape responds: “Um, nope.”

VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED: Video contains graphic content.

DePape then yanks the hammer away from Paul Pelosi, who abruptly lurches backward. DePape swings the hammer back and then launches a savage overhand swing; the impact takes place outside the camera’s view.

In a chaotic scene, the officers rush through the door and wrestle DePape to the ground in an attempt to subdue him. Paul Pelosi lies on the floor unconscious, snoring, with his feet bare, as the officers and DePape struggle just inches away.

Paul Pelosi, 82, underwent surgery to repair multiple skull fractures and was hospitalized for nearly a week after the attack.

Authorities have said they believe DePape broke into the Pelosi household shortly after 2 a.m. on Oct. 28 seeking to kidnap Nancy Pelosi, the then-Speaker of the House and the second person in line for the presidency. He told investigators that he planned to break Nancy Pelosi’s kneecaps and wheel her in front of Congress to deliver a message to lawmakers that their actions carried “consequences” for their actions, prosecutors said at a December preliminary hearing.

But Nancy Pelosi was in Washington, and Paul Pelosi was sleeping in the couple’s bedroom in San Francisco.

In the newly-released recording of DePape’s interrogation five hours after the attack, he tells a San Francisco Police sergeant, “It originates with Hillary,” referring to former secretary of state and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. However, he adds: “Day in and day out, the person that was on the TV lying every day was Pelosi.”

He claimed that Democrats had been on a four-year “crime spree” against former President Donald Trump, who lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden. “They go from one crime to another crime to another crime and it’s like the whole (expletive) four years until they were finally able to steal the election,” DePape said. “It’s unacceptable.”

A video from outside the couple’s house in the upscale Pacific Heights neighborhood shows DePape arriving onto the back patio. He wanders the yard, peering into windows, before disappearing around a corner, then returning, wearing a very large backpack and carrying a smaller bag.

He begins digging into the smaller bag, pulling out a hammer and taking other items from the backpack.

Eventually, he strikes the patio door of the house with the hammer, pushing it through the glass in an attempt to make a hole big enough to reach through. After the door won’t open, he begins swinging the hammer aggressively at the door, using two-handed overhead chops for about 30 seconds, before he steps through the door, into the house, and disappears from view.

The attack shook the nation ahead of the November midterm elections, fueled fears of politically motivated violence and led to the spread of misinformation, including by Twitter and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

DePape, court heard in December, said he planned to target President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and actor Tom Hanks in a suicide mission, according to testimony aired by prosecutors in a San Francisco court.

Court records already have detailed how Paul Pelosi called 911 and alerted authorities before abruptly ending the call as his attacker stood nearby, telling dispatchers that “he wants me to get the hell off the phone.”

DePape faces charges of attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon and false imprisonment, and other state felonies, as well as federal charges of attempted kidnapping of a federal officer and assault of an immediate family member of a federal official. A status conference for the case in U.S. District Court in San Francisco is scheduled for Feb. 8. His next hearing in the state case is set for Feb. 23.

“It’s an EV arms race,” said Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives. Tesla has “a bullseye on their back — the whole auto industry is gunning for them.”

Will Big Auto eat Tesla’s lunch?

Experts say probably not anytime soon — but the company that’s been an EV trailblazer with a cult-like following needs to capitalize on its strengths to stay ahead in the race. 

Legacy players are just getting started in mass EV production, but have the resources to scale up quickly, according to analysts. Tesla will likely lose market share as other players start selling more EVs. And just about everyone is angling for a piece of the market, from Ford and GM to Toyota, Hyundai, Honda, Porsche, Jaguar and Mercedes. Yet amid an explosion of global demand, Tesla’s expansion, its momentum in production, and the strength of its brand mean major auto makers are entering the race going uphill and from far behind.

“The legacy companies need to shift, dramatically,” said Tammy Madsen, a professor in Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business. “We’re seeing companies like General Motors becoming more agile than they have before.” But Tesla also has advantages that position it for long-term growth and survival, Madsen said. “They have a lead in market share, are focused on scale, and they continue to innovate,” Madsen said. “Everyone else that’s following has to move at a faster rate to catch up.”

Tesla, which last year moved its headquarters from Palo Alto to Austin, is the clear frontrunner. The firm’s Model 3 sedan has been the best-selling EV in the world for the past three years, and its Model Y was third-best last year, behind China’s Wuling mini-car, according to data firm EV-Volumes.com.

Yet Tesla remains a scrappy upstart by total vehicles produced, despite selling many more EVs than any other company. Last year, the company reported delivering 936,172 electric cars to consumers, while General Motors alone reported selling 2.9 million vehicles of all types and Volkswagen reported delivering 8.9 million. Major auto makers, whose fossil-fueled conveyances have ruled the world, are falling all over themselves to embrace the EV market. Volkswagen — dabbling in EVs since 2013 and going big since 2020 — said it sold 452,900 of them last year — a fraction of Tesla’s current output. General Motors CEO Mary Barra said in a February letter to shareholders that GM aims to produce more than 1 million EVs in little more than three years. Ford said in May it expects 40% of its vehicles to be electric by 2030, and has cited overwhelming demand for its upcoming electric F-150 pick-up truck, while Musk has been promising but not delivering a pick-up since 2017.

With governments around the world setting targets for electrification of transportation — the White House wants half of all new-vehicle sales to be EVs by 2030, and California has ordered that all new cars and light trucks sold must be zero-emission by 2035 — legacy auto makers, along with startups, are scrambling furiously for market share, brand recognition, and a huge pile of loot: The annual EV market world-wide is expected to balloon from 2019’s $162 billion to $803 billion by 2027, according to Allied Market Research.

Dietmar Burkhardt, owner of the dealership Sunnyvale Volkswagen, noted that skyrocketing gas prices have hiked interest in EVs. Many drivers in the wealthy and tech-positive Bay Area are keener than ever to leave fossil fuels behind, with customers at his lot pre-ordering more than 300 of VW’s new electric ID.4 compact SUV. Demand for the car is strong across the U.S., he said.

“We have a lot of work to do,” Burkhardt acknowledged. “Volkswagen clearly understands that software development is a huge part of playing in the EV market and this is something that frankly we’re a little bit behind the curve on,” he said. “But there are huge investments being made to get us on track and I’m confident we’ll get that issue taken care of. Having the heritage we do, making automobiles, as opposed to electric motors with iPads attached, is really an opportunity. It’s a very exciting time.”

But legacy automakers must convince buyers to choose their EVs over Musk’s. Tesla has an advantage in the U.S. with a powerful brand tied to singular production of EVs and has built similar enthusiasm in China and parts of Europe, said Cox Automotive analyst Michelle Krebs.

Tesla just started producing vehicles from a factory in Berlin, after opening a Shanghai factory in 2019 to serve the growing Chinese market. The firm plans to open a new factory in Austin early next month, and Musk tweeted this month that Tesla, already operating its Fremont factory at full capacity, is considering “expanding it significantly.”

Chinese EV startups present competition for Tesla in Asia, and U.S. startups such as Rivian and East Bay-headquartered Lucid Motors are pushing into the high-end market Tesla feeds, Krebs noted. Major car makers may come out with models consumers would see as strong alternatives to a Tesla, she added. “We have seen things like the Mustang Mach E and VW ID.4 — they’ll nibble around the edges of Tesla but the market is expanding overall and Tesla remains dominant, at least in the U.S,” Krebs said.

Wedbush analyst Ives believes Tesla may be delivering 5 million cars annually within a few years. He expects EV buyers globally will spend $5 trillion over the next decade, with Tesla reaping half of that and the rest going to major carmakers and startups.

Still, Tesla has struggled with quality and safety issues: 11 recalls in four months recently, plus federal probes over purported “phantom braking,” and crashes linked to the firm’s “Autopilot” driver-assist systems. And Tesla owners complain about delays getting cars serviced at special centers, Krebs and Ives noted.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

Many of Tesla’s rivals will play key roles in meeting EV demand, but the exploding market means it is not a zero-sum game, Ives noted. Tesla has Apple-like cachet, and Musk is widely seen as a brilliant, quirky visionary with a proven ability to execute on grand schemes, Ives said.

“It’s ultimately Tesla’s world and everyone else is paying rent,” he said. “It’s like a traveling circus that’s changed the auto industry forever.”

Speaking with confidence — and frequently a small smile — Holmes spoke directly to the central allegation in the case: that she intended to defraud patients and investors, claiming her technology could conduct a full range of blood tests on small samples when she knew it had serious accuracy problems. Asked by one of her lawyers, ‘Did you believe that Theranos had developed technology that was capable of performing any blood test?” Holmes responded, ‘I did.’

Holmes, who founded the Palo Alto blood-testing startup at age 19 in 2003, is charged with allegedly bilking investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars and defrauding patients with false claims that the company’s machines could conduct a full range of tests using just a few drops of blood, when she knew the technology had serious accuracy problems. She and her co-accused, former company president Sunny Balwani, have denied the allegations. Balwani is to be tried next year.

Her testimony was a striking development, and a risky move, in a trial that has captured national attention, primed by two documentaries, a best-selling book and news that Jennifer Lawrence will star as Holmes in an upcoming movie.

One of the biggest questions in the case has been whether Holmes herself would take the stand to try to reshape the narrative about her meteoric rise and fall: Holmes’ company soared to a valuation of $9 billion, but went belly-up in 2018, the same year the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accused her of “an elaborate, years-long fraud.” She agreed to pay a $500,000 penalty and be banned for 10 years from serving as an officer or director for any public company.

Legal experts say having defendants take the stand in criminal cases is rare because it opens them up to aggressive cross-examination from prosecutors. Prior to calling Holmes to the stand, the defense asked the judge to acquit her on the basis of insufficient evidence; the judge said he would reserve his decision on that motion. The judge did dismiss one of the 12 fraud counts against Holmes because of an error made by the prosecution in their indictment.

“It’s always a risk to put your client on because if they make a mistake they can sink the whole case,” said former Santa Clara County prosecutor Steven Clark. But, he added, “what’s at issue here is Elizabeth Holmes’ intent. And the best person to say what Elizabeth Holmes’ intent was is Elizabeth Holmes, and that’s why I think she’s taking the stand. She’s very charismatic. She’s really good on her feet. And I think the jury will like her.”

“This is the pitch meeting of her life,” Clark said. “She’s going to be explaining herself to 12 people as to what was in her mind.”

Prosecutors likely won’t have the chance to cross-examine Holmes until after Thanksgiving as the defense plans to continue  questioning her through the two trial days set next week. In her testimony Friday, Holmes — a Stanford dropout — discussed her background and education, and the origins of her ideas for a blood-testing startup.

That startup, initially called Real-Time Cures, developed a prototype blood-testing device in 2004, she said, before she changed the company’s name to Theranos in 2005. Speaking in a register slightly higher than her infamous baritone, Holmes told jurors that she “worked for years with teams of scientists and engineers to miniaturize all the technologies in a laboratory,” with the “core” goal of running tests on small blood samples.

Initially, Theranos wanted to work with pharmaceutical companies developing new drugs, Holmes said. Her startup later pivoted to offering blood-testing services for the public. Holmes told the jury that around 2009 or 2010, Theranos had a technological breakthrough that allowed the company to “run any test.”

Claims by Holmes that Theranos could perform all the tests a major lab company could do have been a central issue in the trial. Jurors have seen Theranos promotional materials touting a menu of 200 tests. Holmes told the jury her company could run 70 test types for patients, and only 12 on their own machines, but that when she talked publicly she wasn’t limiting her comments to those dozen tests.

Holmes took the stand just hours after the prosecution rested its case, following 10 weeks of critical testimony from witnesses like former U.S. Defense Secretary Gen. James Mattis, four former Theranos lab directors and representatives for ultra-wealthy investors in the company that became Silicon Valley’s most notorious start-up crash. The jury has so far heard compelling evidence that Holmes misled investors, including documents that she distributed lauding Theranos’ technology and bearing apparently stolen logos from pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Schering-Plough.

Jurors also heard that Holmes told investors her technology was being used on military med-evac helicopters, though Mattis, who served on Theranos board and invested $85,000 in the firm, testified that he wasn’t aware the company’s technology was ever deployed by the Pentagon.

Holmes faces maximum penalties of 20 years in prison and a $2.75 million fine if convicted, plus possible restitution, the Department of Justice has said.

Jason Green contributed reporting. 

The Cupertino iPhone giant was responding to the new coronavirus variants that are dramatically increasing case rates and hospitalizations around the world, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because they were discussing the firm’s internal policy.

Apple last month told employees to be back in the office at least three days a week starting in early September, prompting more than 1,700 workers to sign a letter to company executives asking for more flexibility to work remotely, tech website The Verge first reported. This month, Apple employees again wrote to their leaders, objecting to a lack of action on flexibility, according to tech site Recode.

Apple appears to be the first U.S. tech giant to delay plans for a return to normality as COVID persists  and cases involving the highly transmissible Delta variant rise. Apple will give its employees at least a month’s warning before mandating a return to offices, the people said.

Facebook, which kicked off a limited, voluntary re-opening of Bay Area offices last month, and expects to fully re-open U.S. offices in October, said Tuesday it was not changing its plans but was “monitoring the situation closely.” The Menlo Park social media firm noted that health experts believe vaccines are highly effective at preventing COVID, including the Delta variant, and that data show the vast majority of new cases are among unvaccinated people.

“Data, not dates, is what drives our return-to-office thinking,” Facebook spokeswoman Chloe Meyere said in a statement.

Business-software firm Salesforce, which in May began bringing employees vaccinated against COVID into its San Francisco headquarters on a voluntary basis, has said it’s adopting a model that will see about two-thirds of workers on a “flex” schedule that brings them to offices one to three days a week.

A Salesforce spokesperson on Tuesday said in a statement that the firm wasn’t changing its plan in light of increasing COVID rates but that it would “continue to look at each location uniquely based on local government guidance and the advice of public health officials and medical experts.” Salesforce workers can work remotely through at least the end of the year, the spokesperson added.

When Apple CEO Tim Cook said employees should start coming back to offices in early September, he cited the availability of vaccinations and declining infection rates.

Even with half the U.S. vaccinated, COVID continues to kill people faster than guns, car crashes and influenza combined, according to a Bloomberg review of mortality data. After 10 weeks of global declines in coronavirus deaths, the Delta variant is driving a new uptick, and in the U.S., health officials have warned that a similar reversal may be underway: Daily cases have doubled from a low point last month, and hospitalizations are rising again.

Google started bringing workers back to its Bay Area offices and campuses last week on a voluntary basis, ramping up to a broad reopening in September, when workers not needed daily at company facilities will be put on a “hybrid” schedule that will see them in offices about three days a week, CEO Sundar Pichai said. Employees can apply to remain fully remote, or move to other offices, but that could mean reduced compensation, Pichai said. The company on Tuesday noted that the pandemic situation was changing, and said it was continuing to track it.

San Jose software giant Adobe, which started reopening its headquarters offices this month, said fully vaccinated employees can return to those offices voluntarily, and it would continue watching local conditions and monitoring official and expert guidance “to further assess our reopening plans in the Bay Area.”

Uber began re-opening its San Francisco headquarters building March 29 on a voluntary basis. The ride-hailing titan has given employees until the end of September to continue working remotely, and spend three days in the office when they return. Uber on Tuesday declined to say whether increasing COVID rates would alter its reopening plans.

Apple shares rose 2.6% Tuesday to $146.15.

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Gsa Gsa Ward said in the lawsuit that she summoned a Lyft car just before 1 a.m. in April 2019 to take her from her home to a convenience store less than a mile away. “Ms. Ward believed hailing a Lyft ride would be safer than walking at night,” according to the lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court.

The legal action comes as the San Francisco ride-hailing giant faces a “mass tort” lawsuit by dozens of women alleging sexual assault by drivers. The firm’s rival Uber admitted in 2019 that thousands of sexual assaults had been reported during rides.

Lyft said in response to questions about Ward’s lawsuit that safety is “fundamental” to the company. “Since day one, we have designed products and policies that help protect both riders and drivers, and will continue our work to make Lyft an even safer platform for our community,” Lyft said in an emailed statement. The company added that it requires initial and annual background checks for drivers and conducts continuous monitoring related to crime and driving records. Passengers can access emergency help via the app, and reach a live person at any time after a ride, Lyft said.

Ward’s suit alleges that Lyft has refused to provide her with the driver’s full name, but that the app said he was called Rex.

“Soon after the ride began, Rex drove off course, turning down a dark side street without explanation,” the suit claimed. “Ms. Ward asked Rex what he was doing and got no response, so she began tapping him on the shoulder to get his attention. Rex then pulled over to the side of the road, stopped the car, and locked the doors.”

When Ward tapped the man again, he responded with the only vocalizations she ever heard from him, “a gurgling ‘mm mm’ sound” he’d first made after she’d given him directions to the gas station with the store, the suit alleged.

“Rex then lowered his sun visor, revealing a crystal meth pipe,” the suit claimed. “Ms. Ward exclaimed ‘Oh No!’ and Rex reached down for something that Ms. Ward could not see.”

Terrified, Ward told the driver she wanted out and she tried to open her door, but it remained locked, so she began clambering out her window, the suit alleged. “As Ms. Ward was climbing through her window, Rex attempted to close the window on her,” the suit claimed.

Ward managed to escape, her left leg scraped and bruised from the window glass, and ran home, the suit filed last week alleged.

In pain and deeply shaken, she received a call from Lyft before she could contact the company, according to the suit. Lyft said it had received a report that she’d left the ride via the window and the company wanted to know if she’d done that because she didn’t want to pay, the suit claimed.

“She also received an email from Lyft at 1:20 a.m. admonishing her not to ‘jump out of the car when it is in motion’ when she could ‘simply request that the driver stop to let you out,’” the suit alleged.

She is accusing Lyft of failing to protect her, and of negligent hiring, and is seeking unspecified damages.

Lyft and Uber in March announced a new program for ride-hailing companies and delivery firms to share information among themselves about drivers deactivated for sexual assaults and other serious safety incidents.

By late Wednesday afternoon, firefighters rushed to protect the historic Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton above Silicon Valley, shut down Interstate 80 as another blaze hopped the freeway in Fairfield, called for all non-mission essential personnel and their family members to evacuate Travis Air Force Base, and stood ready to protect the rustic mountain town of Boulder Creek in the Santa Cruz mountains.

“There’s not even close to enough equipment here,” Scotts Valley firefighter Jeff McNeil in Boulder Creek said on Wednesday afternoon. “The state is on fire. We’re stretched very thin.”

As the sun set, weary and thinly stretched firefighting crews across the Bay Area braced for a battle through the night to save neighborhoods and entire communities in the path of the blazes.

More than 250,000 acres were actively burning across the region Wednesday afternoon — a jigsaw puzzle of smoke and flames larger in size than more than eight San Franciscos. Tens of thousands of people were evacuated. And well over 100 structures had burned, Cal Fire said, but the fires were so fast and ferocious and spread out that officials hadn’t done a full accounting.

At least one person was killed Wednesday in the growing crisis: a contract helicopter pilot flying solo who was actively making water drops on the Hill Fire in Fresno crashed and died, according to Cal Fire. More than 33 firefighters, often wearing 100 pounds of safety equipment and hoses and working in triple-digit heat, have been injured. Homes scattered through the Santa Cruz Mountains, including in the town of Bonny Doon and on the edge of Boulder Creek, were also ablaze.

“This fire is going crazy. It’s not one of these situations from the past where people say, ‘Oh, I’ll stay here with a hose and protect my property’,” said Kate Garrison, 41, whose home on Whitehouse Canyon Road above the Santa Cruz coast town of Davenport burned down Wednesday. “This is like a firestorm.”

The fires are so widespread, she said, that her best friend who lives an hour away from her home was also evacuated.

“These forests are designed to burn. I’ve always accepted that,” Garrison said. “But what’s devastating now is that it’s so large and affects so many people I care about. If it’s everybody, how do you reconcile that?”

Temperatures and red-flag wind warnings are expected to drop Thursday and Friday, but fire officials expect ruinous conditions again this weekend with more heat and wind predicted.

At least 367 fires, mostly in Northern California, were sparked by Sunday’s historic siege of lightning — more than 10,800 strikes, Cal Fire said Wednesday. And most of the fires are burning out of control. Unrelenting high temperatures and low humidity helped turn air quality in the Bay Area and parts of Central California into the worst on the planet, with so many fires sending smoke in so many directions, it was impossible to be sure which blaze was responsible for the ash raining down.

“We are experiencing fires the likes of which we haven’t seen in many, many years,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday.

Check our California Fires page for the latest coverage of wildfires in the Bay Area and beyond

The one minor bright spot through the smoke so far is that many of the fires are burning in remote locations, Newsom said, but “we have to maintain vigilance.”

Calls for evacuations continued throughout the day, with fire officials pleading with residents from Felton to Fairfield to leave before it’s too late.

“My recommendation is that all the citizens in California be ready to go if there is a wildfire,” Cal Fire spokeswoman Lynnette Round said Wednesday. “Residents have to have their bags packed up with your nose facing out your driveway so you can leave quickly. Everybody should be ready to go, especially if you’re in a wildfire area.”

California’s unprecedented convergence of calamities — heat waves and rolling blackouts, wildfires and coronavirus — were testing the Golden State’s resolve.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Vacaville officials said they opened twice as many evacuation shelters as they would have, to allow social distancing. But there still wasn’t enough space at 3:30 a.m. at the senior center when Shawnee Whaley fled her home on Shady Glen with her mother following in the car behind.

“I could literally see the flames. I was frantic. I grabbed an empty purse, my cell phone, car keys and shoes,” Whaley said, at the Ulatis Community Center, wrapped in a Red Cross blanket and still in her pajamas from the night before. “We tried to go on our phones to see if there’s any, anything at all. Did it burn? My mom has five cats. Are they gone? I have a car that I drive to work. Is it there? I don’t know. Do we have a home to go home to?”

Even naming the fires has become too onerous. There are too many burning across Northern California to give them each their own name, so fire officials have resorted to lumping dozens of smaller fires together into an alphabet soup — the CZU in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties and the SCU in Santa Clara, Contra Costa and Alameda counties. The LNU Lightning Complex fire in Lake, Napa and Sonoma counties..

With Cal Fire stretched thin and mutual aid on the way, tough decisions were made by the minute as to which areas got helicopter help and which didn’t. Some 6,900 fire crews were working to put out fires across the state. The ranks of the state’s inmate firefighters have been depleted by a COVID-19 lockdown at a prison in Lassen County and inmate releases.

“We’ve requested 375 fire engines from out of state this morning,” Round said. “Originally we had asked for 125. Now we asked for an additional 250. We definitely need the help.”

What’s driving Northern California’s freak ‘fire siege’?

There seemingly was no end in sight.

The CZU August Lightning Complex Fire more than doubled in size Wednesday, growing to cover 25,000 acres, destroying at least 20 homes, forcing 22,000 people to evacuate and burning out of control. The SCU Lightning Complex Fire, which covered 85,000 acres as of Wednesday morning, and was just 5 percent contained.

Strong winds and dry air fueled more explosive growth of the fires burning in the North Bay as well, as the collection of blazes more than doubled in size to cover 124,000 acres across four counties, CalFire reported late Wednesday. The LNU Lightning Complex Fire, which has prompted evacuations in parts of Solano, Napa, Sonoma and Lake counties, had destroyed 105 structures, forced more than 15,000 people to evacuate.

The largest of the fires that makes up the complex, the Hennessey Fire in Napa County, which formed when three other blazes merged, now covers 100,000 acres. All of the fires are burning out of control. Four people have been injured by the fire complex.

In Vacaville, the fire came so quickly on hard-hit Pleasant Valley Road on the edge of town late Tuesday night that rancher Taylor Craig didn’t have time to evacuate his goats, chickens, horses and llama.

He never received an evacuation warning on his phone, but from the time he saw the orange glow over the ridge at about midnight, the fire had whipped into his neighbor’s property in about 15 minutes. And suddenly, he and his family were running for their lives. Fortunately, a neighbor told Craig later that he had plowed through Craig’s fences to allow his animals to escape.

Craig didn’t know whether his house survived but says he’s never seen so many days in a row as hot as this, and he worries what that means for this and future blazes.

“I’m a climate refugee,” he said under a hazy orange sky, sitting on the stoop of his RV in a Walmart parking lot.

The batch of blazes that makes up the Santa Clara Unit Lightning Complex stretches about 50 miles north to south and had crossed into five different counties. The largest and most challenging of the fires were in the Canyon Zone, the majority of which were burning in Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties but had also spread into small parts of Santa Clara and Alameda counties.

In Contra Costa County, the Deer Zone fires were expected to be “well contained in the next few days,” said Tim Ernst, an operations section chief with Cal Fire. Several fires in the Calaveras Zone, which splits the Santa Clara-Alameda county line, “have grown together” into one blaze, Ernst said, while firefighters continued to work to put out smaller flare ups before they also merge.

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In Santa Cruz County, the blaze forced campers from the redwoods of Big Basin, California’s first state park.

“We were the last people out,” said Donna Marykwas, 57, who had been living with her husband, Steve Passmore, and their 18-year-old daughter, Maya, in an RV volunteering as camp hosts this summer.

When the lightning storms thundered through the wooded mountains over the weekend, they had to load their dog, Skye, and cat, Junebug, into their pickup truck and flee. They went to the Brookdale Lodge just south of Boulder Creek at first and had just enough time to shower off all the ash when they were told to evacuate from there as well.

“It was just surreal, the sky was red, the light on the pavement was red, it was real smoky, and quiet,” Marykwas said. “I hope everyone’s OK.”

Sitting on the tailgate of their truck in the Safeway parking lot under a hazy, smoky sky and rain of ash Wednesday morning, Marykwas surveyed the dreary scene and wondered what now.

“I don’t know,” she said. “We really don’t have a plan.”

Staff Writers John Woolfolk, Annie Sciacca, Aldo Toledo and Jason Green contributed to this report.

Disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes will go to trial July 28 next year, a judge ruled Friday as Holmes sat with her lawyers in federal court in San Jose.

Jury selection will start on that date with the court to begin hearing evidence Aug. 4, 2020, U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila ruled, noting that choosing a jury would probably take at least part of a second day.

Davila said he would schedule the trial for three months, per a joint request by federal prosecutors and Holmes’ legal team. That request had also included a September 2020 start date for the trial, but Davila said that would “put us perilously close to the holiday season” and potentially cause problems for jurors.

Holmes is charged with felony conspiracy and fraud for allegedly misleading patients, doctors and investors about her now-defunct Silicon Valley blood-testing startup. A grand jury indicted Holmes and former company president Sunny Balwani in June. They are charged with 11 criminal counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Federal prosecutors allege Holmes and Balwani claimed their purportedly revolutionary “miniLab” system could use a few drops of blood from a finger-prick to quickly conduct a full range of tests, when in reality it had accuracy and reliability problems, performed limited tests, and was slower than some competing devices. Theranos’ machines had been available for patient use at Walgreens stores in Palo Alto and Arizona.

The FBI has alleged that Holmes and Balwani endangered health and lives. The two have pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges.

During Friday’s hearing, a lawyer for Holmes complained that federal agencies were failing to produce documents relevant to her defense, which her legal team had requested via federal prosecutors. The Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services were refusing to hand over the documents despite “no indication of any resistance to any requests made by the government,” Holmes’ lawyer Lance Wade said. For U.S. attorneys, “the doors were wide open and the shelves were full and they could take whatever they wanted,” Wade said. With defense requests, “they’re not willing to provide the same level of cooperation,” Wade said. He asked Davila to order the agencies to produce the documents.

Prosecutor John Bostic countered that the fact that the agencies did not provide the documents, when the request came through the prosecution, showed that U.S. attorneys weren’t getting everything they were asking for either. “The defense is simply wrong when it implies we had carte blanche,” Bostic said. He said prosecutors had given Holmes’ team 20 million pages of documents, and added, “it is not a goal of ours to keep the defense from having the documents” from the agencies. “We’ve done everything we can,” Bostic said.

Bostic told Davila that the defense should subpoena the agencies in pursuit of the documents.

Davila pondered issuing an order to compel lawyers from the Washington, D.C.-based agencies to “come and enjoy San Jose” and explain their reasons for denying documents to the defense. But instead he directed prosecutors to tell the agencies within two weeks “to tell us what they’re going to do or why they’re not going to do it.” Davila said that if the explanation does not satisfy him, “it probably will be tempting the court to issue an order.”

Holmes — who dropped out of Stanford University at 19 to found Theranos — and Balwani face maximum penalties of 20 years in prison and a $2.75 million fine, plus possible restitution, the Department of Justice has said. Although Holmes had, while Theranos was still operating, adopted a black turtleneck as her signature garment a la the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, she has been appearing in court in traditional business attire, such as the light gray pantsuit and white blouse she wore Friday.

Last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission hit Holmes with a $500,000 fine. The agency alleged she had committed a “massive fraud” that saw investors pour $700 million into the firm. Before Theranos’ troubles began, it was at one point valued at $9 billion and in 2015, Holmes topped Forbes’ list of America’s richest self-made women with a net worth of $4.5 billion. A year later, Forbes cut her estimated net worth to zero. Theranos shut down in September.

Judge Davila on Friday set the next court date in the case for July 17.

That’s according to the man’s wife, who tweeted out his story. Her husband declined to be interviewed.

“I’m shocked with how they treated him and how they refused to give him his 2018 performance bonus and the rest of his sign-on bonus,” Kari Pollock said of her husband, Dan Pollock.

Last week, Tesla announced it would cut 7 percent of its workforce, with CEO Elon Musk saying the firm faced an “extremely difficult challenge” in becoming competitive in an industry largely powered by fossil fuels.

All Tesla employees receive sign-on bonuses in company equity, and they may receive performance bonuses in equity or cash, according to the company. Both types of bonuses are given out on a schedule, with quarterly payments starting after a year of employment and continuing for four years. Tesla told Dan Pollock on Friday he would not receive the remainder of his sign-on bonus and his entire 2018 bonus, with the firm’s human resources office later clarifying that he would receive one of 48 payments from the 2018 bonus, Kari Pollock said.

The couple consider the entire bonuses to be already earned, and Tesla’s decision has thrown them into hardship, she said. They’re broke, and worried about paying their rent.

“We have no savings,” she said. “The financial situation is very serious.”

However, technology industry analyst Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies in San Jose said tech firms and other companies commonly pay bonuses periodically on a schedule, and laid-off workers may lose payments they would have received had they remained employed.

“It is relatively normal but each company does things differently,” Bajarin said. “The bottom line on that one is going to be how well that was spelled out in the original Tesla agreement that he signed.”

The couple, who share a 15-year-old Hyundai, pay $2,800 a month to live in a small two-bedroom apartment in Fremont with their son, 16, Kari Pollock said. Their former home in New York is for sale, but the market is stagnant and they’re still paying a mortgage on it. “We could lose the house,” she said.

They’re still deciding what to do about Tesla’s offer of a severance package that would provide two months’ salary but carry other consequences they’re still trying to understand, she said.

A Tesla spokesperson said the company had contacted Dan Pollock over the weekend to clarify the bonus-payment process.

“When someone leaves the company, voluntarily or involuntarily, they do not receive equity that has not yet vested,” Tesla said in a statement to this news organization. “This is common across companies and industries where equity is provided to employees and is not in any way unique to Tesla.”

The company said like other impacted Tesla employees at the Fremont factory, Dan Pollock will receive full pay and benefits for 60 days, plus his next quarterly equity award, which was scheduled to vest on March 5.

Tesla recruited Pollock, an Air Force veteran, from a position in New York as a production supervisor for a pharmaceutical company, his wife said. He started at Tesla in the spring of 2017. “We just thought this was an amazing opportunity,” she said. “I was proud of him and the whole family was proud of him. We bought Tesla merch for the kids for Christmas.”

After Kari Pollock went public Sunday on Twitter about the bonuses, commenters described her and her husband as naive, she said. “We were living in upstate New York and he was working for a company that doesn’t behave like (Tesla),” she said. “We just didn’t know. We’re not from the Silicon Valley and we just didn’t realize there was predatory behavior.”

San Jose employment lawyer Jackie Ford said many companies treat bonus payments differently for laid-off workers compared to those who quit, but that it’s also common for contract language to specify that bonus payments are only made to current employees. Ford noted the layoffs Musk announced Jan. 18.

“If I were looking at taking someone’s case I would want to know who got laid off, if it was a disproportionate number of people that were coming up for a portion of their sign-up bonus or a portion of their performance bonus,” Ford said.

Tesla said it spends considerable time educating new employees about how equity awards work, and runs in-person and recorded video-conferences twice a year about performance awards. The firm makes available to workers equity guides, FAQs and calculating functions to help them understand the equity arrangements, and recruiting and HR teams can answer employees’ questions about job-offer letters and equity, before, during or after the job-offer period, the company added.

When she opened up about the issue on Twitter, Kari Pollock said she and her husband had believed in Tesla’s mission.

“We were understanding about Tesla only giving bonuses broken down in payments over 4 years,” she tweeted. “Never, ever did it occur to us that they’d just ‘cancel’ all our money and throw my husband away like he did something wrong.”

That’s the conclusion of a just-released report that said despite large amounts of money and energy spent to attract women into science, engineering and medicine jobs and retain them, “it appears women are often bullied or harassed out of career pathways in these fields.”

The report lands as the #MeToo movement against male mistreatment of women engulfs the nation, and Silicon Valley reels from case after case of sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the tech industry.

In the report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, the researchers lay out three categories of sexual harassment: actions that “convey hostility, objectification, exclusion, or second-class status about members of one gender”; unwanted sexual attention; and “sexual coercion,” which involves favorable treatment in exchange for sexual activity.

Why is this a particular problem in engineering, science and medicine? Higher education is male-dominated, “with men in most positions of power and authority,” according to the report. And in post-secondary education, sexual harassment is tolerated, the report said. Also, higher ed is structured in a “patriarchal” fashion, with “very dependent” relationships between teachers and students. Finally, work and training in academia, especially in the fields in question, often takes place in “isolating environments.”

The research targeted female college and university students, as well as academic researchers and faculty members. To compile the report, the researchers studied existing research and commissioned several studies, one of which included interviews with 40 female faculty members who had been sexually harassed, according to the report.

An “overwhelming majority” of sexual harassment involves put-downs that may include “sexist hostility” and crude behavior, according to the 290-page report.

Unwanted sexual attention is the next most common type of sexual harassment, “and only a small minority of women experience sexual coercion,” the report said.

Responses to sexual harassment in particular academic or working environments are the most important predictor of whether such behavior will occur, the researchers reported.

“Individual-level factors (e.g., sexist attitudes, beliefs that rationalize or justify harassment, etc.) that might make someone decide to harass a work colleague, student or peer are surely important,” the report said.

“However, a person that has proclivities for sexual harassment will have those behaviors greatly inhibited when exposed to role models who behave in a professional way as compared with role models who behave in a harassing way, or when in an environment that does not support harassing behaviors and/or has strong consequences for these behaviors.”

The more women are sexually harassed, the more likely they will leave a field of study or work, the researchers reported.

“Even when they remain, their ability to contribute and advance in their field can be limited as a consequence of sexual harassment — either from the harassment directed at them; the ambient harassment in the environment in their department, program or discipline; or the retaliation and betrayal they experience after formally reporting the harassment,” the report said.