Right at 11 00, some breaking news in the east bay. A scary sight at lake merritt this evening. This video just in to the newsroom. Thats a fire at the rotary Nature Center in oakland. You can see the flames just leaping out of that building. Firefighters say it started just before 7 30. But luckily, it was under control in 15 minutes. Firefighters are still trying to figure out exactly what started it. Good evening, everyone. Our other top story tonight, taking the target off its back. A stunning announcement from retail giant target. Sick of rampant store crime, the company is closing three Bay Area Stores in just a matter of weeks. One in San Francisco, another in oakland, and the target pittsburg, which is in contra costa county. Tonight were hearing from the mayor of pittsburg, who says this is a huge loss for that city. Nbc bay areas pete serateos has more. I didnt think it was that bad that it has to be closed. There was safety concerns. Reporter yeneli martinez is one of many shoppers at target just hearing news about the store closing in a matter of weeks. The retailer says its due to ongoing retail theft at the location, a problem some shoppers say is commonplace. Ive been here a few times and you just see them walk right now while were waiting in line to pay. Reporter its an unfortunate consequence for shoppers, who rely on the store. Its going to be pretty tough. The next one is i think antioch and its pretty far. Reporter target is also Closing Locations in oakland and stris for the same reason. In a statement target said, we cannot continue operating these stores because theft and organized retail crime are threatening the safety of our team and guests and contributing to unsustainable business performance. Now, the mayor of pittsburg says that target actually reached out to the city to discuss the retail theft issues at this store. Despite the store actually employing its own private security. So the city added its own measures to address the problem. Our Police Department is doing more patrol out here in the area. City staff and the council decided that we need to put a substation here. And so a substation will be here the first week of october. Reporter and its why pittsburg mayor shanelle scales preston is disappoint bid todays announcement. She claims retail theft is trending downward at the target due to the Police Presence and she hopes this isnt the beginning of a trend of Stores Leaving the city. We dont want to see a store leaving when were trying to attract stores to come to our city. Reporter in pittsburg pete suratos, nbc bay area news. The question is can Artificial Intelligence help . News of that closure comes as our Response Team is looking into some new technology that some stores are using to fight back against retail crime. Theres a Grocery Store in petaluma that took us behind the scenes and let consumer investigator chris chmura test out the technology. Thats coming up in 12 minutes. What happened when the computer tried to catch chris redhanded . Well show it to you. Also tonight, this would be a big deal for the bay area. The all sports new site the athletic is reporting that the warriors are close to bringing a wnba franchise to the bay area. Now, the deal is reportedly not complete but the athletic says the team would be based at the warriors practice facility in oakland and would play at chase center in San Francisco. The wnba currently has 12 teams. Earlier this year the League Commissioner said the wnba would like to add two teams by 2025. Okay. In less than an hour from now at 12 01 a. M. The Writers Strike will be over. Leaders of the Writers Guild of america voted unanimously to approve the deal reached with studios. The strike lasted 148 days, one of the longest in hollywood history. Streaming residuals reportedly a big part of those negotiations along with protections from Artificial Intelligence. Hollywood, though, cant fully resume until the actors union, sagaftra, makes a deal with the alliance of Motion Pictures and television producers. Now, actors have been on strike since july. We should note that comcast, the Parent Company of Nbc Universal and this station, is a member of the amptp. Okay. President biden in San Francisco this evening after a huge fundraiser on the peninsula for his reelection campaign. Now, mr. Biden has another big fundraising day tomorrow with some official business mixed in. Nbc bay areas Terry Mcsweeney followed the president to the citys fairmont. Reporter this president ial visit is very similar to mr. Bidens stopover back in june. Both times it was a fundraiser in atherton. Both times he stayed here at the fairmont. And both times theres mixed reaction. The sight of the president ial motorcade is impressive, especially climbing San Franciscos nob hill. Yes, disruptive to traffic but not a problem for this family on their first visit from australia. Theres a real aura in the air. The president s in town. Were super excited. Reporter mr. Bidens bay area visit began at mountainviews Moffett Field 3 30 this afternoon. Sun shining, shades on. Selfies and a brief chat with a lucky few. I shared with him that in 2012 i changed my citizenship from mexico to the United States so that i could vote for him. Reporter then on to atherton for a fundraiser. People paying from 100,000 at the home of billionaire couple mark hyzing and liz simons. A Pool Reporter says the president spoke of his administrations accomplishments including his support for ukraine and decried political violence. This woman attended and loved it. He shook everybodys hand. Hes so warm. Hes so real. Reporter but not everyone in the neighborhood supports a biden reelection. Unfortunately, again, i think hes too old to be president and we need some youth. Who are you thinking of . Rfk. Reporter back at the fairmont i asked what hed ask the president should they kroos paths. Id ask him what his favorite ice cream flavor is. Reporter for the president tomorrow there are more fundraisers but also some business. Hes going to be meeting with his Advisory Council on science and technology, then its off to arizona for mostly more fundraisers. In San FranciscoTerry Mcsweeney nbc bay area news. Thank you, terry. A big name, big money challenger has entered the race for San Francisco mayor. Daniel lurie is a billionaire, philanthropist and heir to the levis family fortune. He announced his candidacy today at a wellattended kickoff event. And while lurie has never held an elected office he has run a highprofile Nonprofit CommunityImprovement Organization for more than 50 years. 15 years. Today he criticized mayor breeds response to the citys fentanyl epidemic and what he called the delay in dealing with the citys homeless encampments. Lurie also pledged to hire more police officers. People are tired of the politics of the day where people are just finger pointing and making excuses. They want things done, and i will get things done. Current district 11 supervisor ashraf sefai has also announced his intentions to run for mayor. In oakland today more than 200 Small Businesses shut their doors for two hours to send a message to the city. From Jack London Square to chinatown they say crime is threatening their survival. Todays strike comes after the city admitted that it missed a deadline to apply for millions of state dollars to fight retail theft. East bay chefs and Restaurant Owner nigel jones helped organized todays strike. His business was burglarized earlier this month for the fourth time in three years. This time they broke through the front door and also took our cash register, about 500 in cash and 3 1 2 thousand dollars in damages. The only thing thats going to make i adifference in terms of what were doing is numbers and attention. There has been no response on todays strike from city hall. Okay. Theyre demanding equitable response time. Gilroys Firefighters Association says staffing shortages at one of their stations are so bad its impacting Patient Outcome and the ability to control fires. Heres nbc bay areas stephanie margion. Reporter tonight fire station 4 in gilroy is open. But thats not always the case. According to this letter put out by the citys firefighter association, sometimes theres two firefighters at the santa teresa station and other times theres none. And thats raising major safety concerns. Its not a good situation to be in. We depend on these Emergency Personnel to be able to arrive quickly. Life and death situations. Reporter the gilroy firefighter Association Says this station needs to stay open 24 7 to provide an equitable response and that means they need more firefighters. Emsrelated emergencies, cardiac arrest, if we dont get there in time the Patient Outcome is not good. So thats why we need a paramedic to show up within that adopted seven minutes and 30 seconds to have good Patient Outcomes. Reporter another concern is their ability to stop the spread of fires. But in this letter sent to the community drury city administrator and the fire chief say Staffing Levels are connected to demand at each station. This graph shows the santa teresa station only responds to 6 of the citys calls. But the firefighter Association Says those numbers are off. In that march, april and may this station was closed down roughly 82 of the time. There was no one here. I believe that 6 is coming from whenever the fire engine that is staffed here responds to a call in this district. Reporter based on the latest city budget the station should be fully staffed by november of next year. Fully staffing it now could mean higher taxes or cuts to other services. According to the city administrator and fire chief. We just went through the budget process. If that was an issue it should have been brought up. Reporter Council Member rebecca armendari says she was in the dark about the current staffing situation. Were already short one station for our population and also to be compliant with response times we really should be working on getting to that fifth station instead of having to worry about this one as well. Reporter city Council Members are expected to discuss the staffing situation at this Fire Department and the budget issue during next weeks city council meeting. In gilroy im stephanie magallon, nbc bay area news. Okay, thank you, stephanie. Another member of the Extremist Group the Boogaloo Boys has been found guilty in the death of a federal officer gunned down in oakland. Robert justice jr. Faces a mandatory life sentence for killing David Underwood in 2020. He was also found guilty of attempted murder of another officer who was hurt by that gunfire. Officer underwood was standing guard outside of a federal courthouse in a protest against Police Brutality when he was shot. Prosecutors say justice was the driver of the van owned by fellow boogaloo follower steven carillo, who says justice and carillo drove to oakland with the intent of killing police. Last year carillo was sentenced to 41 years in prison for killing underwood. He was also sentenced to life in prison for the death of Santa Cruz County officer Deputy Sergeant damon gutswiller back in 2020. Okay. Trading drug treatment for welfare money. Thats the deal San Francisco mayor london breed wants to make with People Living on the streets. Breed wants to require people to undergo drug testing and treatment to qualify for benefits. And if you refuse, you would be denied all city cash assistance. That requirement would only apply to the county adult assistance program, which provides benefits to single adults between the ages of 18 and 65, including many homeless and formerly homeless. Last week alone 80 people were contacted and touched out on the streets, asked if they wanted services, provided treatment on demand and only one agreed. People are not accepting help. And so now its time to make sure that we are cutting off resources that continue to allow this behavior. It does still need to be approved by the board of supervisors. Matt dorsey supports the idea. Board president aaron peskin released a statement blasting the proposal saying in part about mayor breed, if she cant find the way to prevent several hundred brazen criminals from selling deadly drugs, how does she think she will be able to find the resources to drug test thousands of welfare recipients . The answer is she cant. Okay. Back in 60 seconds. Ahead, they were hiking half dome when a storm moved in. The terrifying moments that played out in a yosemite cave after some hikers were struck by lightning. Shoplifting is lowtech. But some stores are going hightech to stop it. Even bringing in ai. Im consumer investigator chris chmura. Well show you how it works, next. Im chief meteorologist jeff ranieri. Theres now rain in my weekend forecast. Ill have the up at cretors, we handcraft every batch of our delicious popcorn. Like our cretors cheese and caramel mix. Great on their own, even better together. Try cretors, handcrafted smallbatch popcorn. Time is running out to fund the government to avoid a Government Shutdown. This is a line look at capitol hill. The senate began voting tonight to debate a shortterm funding bill that would keep money flowing until november 17th. That bipartisan measure includes 6 billion in aid to ukraine and another 6 billion for fema. Without a deal the government would shut down sunday at midnight. In the meantime fleet week is set to start monday. And there could be trouble because of whats happening in washington. If the shutdown happens the navy ships would be here but there would be no public tours of them. The blue angels would also be grounded. So no air shows. Fleet week organizers say for now theyre still planning to move forward with the full event. Okay. From mom and pop stores to mega chains, retailers say they are under siege. They say shoplifting is spiraling out of control. Today the National Retail federation issued a new report saying the industry lost 112 billion to retail crime during the last fiscal year. The group called it a dramatic jump. Tonight our consumer investigator is showing how some stores are fighting back with Artificial Intelligence. The Grocery Store invited chris chmura to steal something to see if ai could catch him in the act. Reporter youve probably seen the viral videos. Stealing the headlines. In front of everybody in plain daylight. Reporter organized retail thefts are a new challenge. But daily a longstanding problem eats into store profits too. Its the everyday small shop lifter. The people taking two, three, four, five dollars at a time and coming in all the time. Reporter benny tiapon is an independent grocer in petaluma. His team is catching lots of shoplifters. At least one shoplifter every day. Three yesterday. Reporter but he says far more go undetected. So now hes adding a new layer of Artificial Intelligence to his Stores Security cameras. All 36 feed into an ai system developed by a french tech Company Called vision. It analyzes the video feeds for telltale movements that suggest someone is stealing. Placing items in a backpack, a purse, in a trousers, in a jacket, consuming the product. Reporter vision cofounder Benoit Koenig invited me to try it, playing the thief. I walked down the wine aisle and slipped a bottle in my backpack. I stole it. How quickly will you get the alert . Just have to wait a few seconds. Reporter less than a minute later got it. Reporter a very suspicious activity alert popped up on a managers phone. With a video clip of me. Without ai my crime might have gone undetected. The algorithm doesnt care about what people look like. Its just recognizing a gesture. Reporter vision says it signed up 300 mostly independent u. S. Stores for its new ai. Thats a tiny slice of u. S. Retailers. But its not the only one on the job. To see what else is on the horizon we traveled 2500 miles east, to the university of florida. Home of the Loss Prevention research council. Weve got between 230, 250, depending on who you ask, technologies in here. Reporter director reed hayes is a criminologist. We have a visible camera here. Reporter this mock store complete with shelves and checkouts is a oneofakind laboratory. This is the only place in the world like it. Reporter scientists here are working with 110 Tech Companies and 88 retailers to cut stores losses. Theres ai here that can pick up if youre not actually scanning an item at selfcheckout. Reporter the tech here at this tiny concealed exit camera is focused on identifying and stopping shoplifters. Oneoff thieves and smash and grab crews alike. The labs crawling with cameras. Youll see that weve got eight of them. Reporter and often retail executives. They want to brainstorm with us but they want to spend time in these labs. When they meet with you, how many of the stores tell you shoplifting is flat or down . None of them have told us that shoplifting or theft or losses are down or flat. Reporter a National RetailFederation Security survey found 52 of stores are increasing budgets for security equipment. Were talking about tens of millions more nationally. Reporter back in petaluma so were in the back office. Reporter vision told us a small ai system like bennys costs just a couple hundred dollars a month. A fraction of what a Security Guard would cost. Reporter benny says during the first few weeks his systems already flathd several people for pocketing an item. And his team has approached them. Typically say im sorry and give it back. Thats all we want. Please dont do it again. Reporter deterrence would be a big win for benny. And man for shoppers. I hope that for the shoppers eventually it means groceries will cost a little less, if we can stop shoplifting. Reporter Artificial Intelligence in stores, possibly bringing real savings home to you. In petaluma chris chmura, nbc bay area news. It is a bold new world for sure. All right. Lets turn things over to chief meteorologist jeff ranieri. Jeff, its been getting cooler for sure. A little darker in the evenings as well. Now theres the potential of even a little bit of rain. We do have an active sevenday forecast. As far as tomorrow goes, those storm tracks are going to be just off the to north. Thats going to bring us a little bit of patchy fog to start. Most importantly the hottest airway off to the south. Then again some updated rain chances now in my sevenday forecast where eventually were going to get some of this action out here with some weekend rain. Ive got all those details coming up right now in that microclimate forecast. Were going to begin here with tomorrow morning and we will start it off on the chilly side. Might find yourself needing some sort of a jacket to begin. Well be down here to 53 over the trivalley. For the south bay 55. Chilliest weather over the north bay and 51. For the east bay looking all good there with double 5s. Temperatures through tomorrow afternoon. Were coming in with some great weather. Down here across the south bay last of low 80s from cupertino down to morgan hill up to the east bay. Vallejo 79. Danville 81. And hayward 76. The peninsula a little bit of a breeze. Afternoon sunshine and 78s going to make it pretty much perfect in redwood city. Up to San Francisco blustery in the marina. 66. Winds out of the west at 19. But you head to downtown or the mission and we will have some low 70s. Then off to the north bay right here into wine country, temperatures in the low 80s. Now, i still expect some dry weather all the way through the day on friday. Then the thing that were seeing right now, certainly by this weekend, its going to be a system thats dropping down. Now, whats different about this storm system than what we saw this time yesterday is now it looks like the storm is going to actually kind of sit and develop over the pacific. So thats going to help bring in some pacific moisture. Thats why im calling for the chance of some spotty rain on saturday, maybe even an isolated thunderstorm and even a little bit of wind coming in with this one. I dont think its going to be a washout this weekend, but we are looking at trace amounts to about a quarter of an inch. Again, on saturday. And if youre headed to the sierra, a half to about 3 4 of an inch. On the sevenday forecast we see that wind kicking up friday, north, 15 to 30 Miles Per Hour nap spotty rain chance on saturday. Check out the temperatures for the inland valleys. Its going to be feeling like fall. We are going to go from 83 tomorrow to 73 on saturday, and by sunday we are at 75. The weekend were still going to be able to get through it. Its again not going to be wet all weekend long. That sounds good. Yeah. A life and death struggle in yosemite. A group of hikers forced to take shelter in a cave during a storm at the top of the parks most notorious hike, half dome. Two of them actually struck by lightning. Miraculously, all of them survived and theyre back home. The ordeal documented in this now viral tiktok. It started this past thursday when six friends made their way up half dome. There were a lot of people going up, too. Once they reached the summit, around 12 30 in the afternoon, they noticed that a storm was rolling in. Two members of the group started to make their way back down the cables. The other four took shelter in a rock cave that they found at the top. Thats when things started to get scary. I talked to them this evening and they told me that lightning started hitting the rocks around them. Two people in the group were struck by lightning. One in the leg and the other in the back of the head. He just kind of falls forward and he was like, buddy, wake up. Wake up. And he was just unconscious. And he was trying to take a pulse and couldnt find one. Thats when he started punching him in the chest. Those two men eventually came back. The man you saw there, jordan dean, he was struck in the leg. And the two guys that were hit in the rocks they didnt know who they were when they came back. They ultimately got their memory back. The group when the lightning ended was able to climb back down a very slippery half dome, make it out of there, but they also witnessed people falling down half dome after because the cables were so slippery. Frightening. Okay. The giants are holding on to their postseason hopes by the slimmest of margins. Howd they okay. Both the giants and the padres needed a win tonight to keep their postseason dreams alive. So take you out to china basin, top of the first inning. No score when the padres juan soto blasts one to deep center field. All the giants outfielder Tyler Fitzgerald can do is watch the ball go over the wall. Byebye. Soto wasnt done. In the top of the seventh inning he hit his second homer of the game, made the score 40, and that was it. With tonights loss the giants eliminated from postseason play. It is over, folks. As for the as, they lost to the Minnesota Twins 113 in a raindrenched evening in minneapolis. Twins scored five runs in the first inning, four of which came courtesy of a grand slam home run finally tonight we know about the garage where the first Apple Computers were built, but what about the san jose dennys where nvidia, now a trilliondollar company, got its start . That dennys is on berryessa road in san jose. And yes, thats nvidia very jensen huang visiting the staff. Back in the early 90s huang and his cofounders planned out the company while sitting at a booth at this very restaurant. So today the ceo of dennys presented huang with a plaque reading the booth that launched a trilliondollar company. And so in honor of that this plaque will sit in the booth here in honor of all the work that was done in honor of your amazing company. But more importantly now, your story. Excellent career choice. I highly recommend everybody started, start your first job in the restaurant business. It teaches you humility, hard work. Thats because he did. Huangs ties to dennys goes deeper. One of his earliest jobs was actually as a bus boy at a denny and is a dishwasher. Good for him. Congratulations. What d tonight, President Biden making history, becoming the first sitting president to join a picket line President Biden with a bull horn, urging auto workers to stick with it in their fight against the big three. The show of support just one day before former President Trump is also set to speak to auto workers. Our team is there. Also tonight, the new york judge finding donald trump liable for fraud. What it means for his civil trial set to begin next week. The tech ceo, just 26, found dead in baltimore. The armed and dangerous suspect police are looking for. Senator bob menendez back on capitol hill, as calls to resign over bribery charges grow from his own party. Our Reporter Asks him directly about what hell do next. The clock ticking toward a Government Shutdown the new poll, who gets the blame if it happens . Sweeping antitrust lawsuit against amazon the online giant accused of an illegal monopoly how it is responding. The fleecing of america. Why are taxpayer dollars being sunk into navy ships that may never sail again and just in, news on a beloved Baseball Hall of famer. Remembering brooks robinson