At least one of the plane’s tires blew and caught fire on landing, possibly due to brake trouble. Earlier reports which suggested there was a fire on board the plane appear to have been a misunderstanding.

The plane had 86 passengers and crew aboard. This KCRA page has twitter-like updates. And a complete story on CBS News.

The scene at 26th and Harrison, 5:00 pm today.

A phone call to the Alameda County sheriff’s office alleging either a bomb or a terror suspect was on board American Airlines Flight 24 from San Francisco International Airport to New York’s JFK forced officials to prevent the flight’s takeoff this morning. The plane, scheduled for takeoff at 7:30 a.m., was diverted to a taxiway, emptied of passengers, and searched while passengers were interviewed.

Here’s a Twitter feed from one of the passengers, Campbell McKellar, indicating that passengers sat on the plane for about four hours before it began to be un-boarded. Passenger Jay Sears also narrated the events on Twitter.

According to the KPIX website, arrivals and departures at SFO continued unaffected. According to the same source, 163 passengers and 11 crew members were on the plane.

News reports courtesy KTVU, KPIX, KGO, and NowPublic, KCBS.

The project is one of several non-profit journalism efforts in the Bay Area, as local author Frances Dinkelspiel wrote in the New York Times’ Bay Area coverage last week.

Formerly known as the Bay Area News Project, the endeavor originally planned to leverage content and staff from public radio/TV behemoth KQED, but the station dropped out of the project early this year. The Bay Citizen then signed an agreement with the New York Times to provide content to the national paper’s Bay Area coverage.

The Bay Citizen is inviting Bay Area residents to donate some dough to support community journalism. “Founding members” will be acknowledged on the project’s website and will be invited to a launch reception.

He was crying in court and appeared disheveled in a T-shirt and khakis. The magistrate ordered the U.S. Attorney’s Office to interview Giusti to see if he is mentally competent enough to be released to a halfway house, or if he should continue to be detained.

It could be said that a more sympathetic portrait of the man is emerging. If he’s just some poor crazy fuck, can he really be held responsible for his actions? Legally, that’ll be up to the courts, and I’m glad we live in a country where mentally ill people are not held fully responsible. And yet people who live with him, or have dealt with him in recent years — see the previous entry here — have found him scary and intimidating. At what point do you stop being a harmless if abrasive nut and start being a dangerous creep? It’s not up to the victims of a bully to evaluate his mental state or even confront him if they believe they are in physical danger.

Meanwhile, KGO’s Dan Noyes reported (via Politico.com) that his mother said her son was the victim of bad influences like “Fox News, or all of those that are really radical.”

Gregory Lee Giusti

After the FBI hauled him away from his Tenderloin (of course!) subsidized housing building (of course!), his neighbors told TV reporters things like, “He was not one of my favorite people. He had a real attitude problem… I personally was afraid of him.”

He was even kicked out of a local church a few years ago for being “menacing while angry” and a general asshole. Apparently a tech geek (of course!), he rigged a system to make continuous harassing calls to church members.

But that photo gets me. It’s like a picture staged by The Onion to show a generic Tea Party protester all hot under the collar about Obama’s birth certificate, the New World Order, and the secret internment camps at Fort Irwin* for a story headlined “Local man can’t stand it when people won’t engage him in heated political discussion.”

*If this seems unnecessarily detailed, it’s because I’ve been reading up on right-wing paranoid drivel lately.

San Francisco Giants utility man Eugenio Velez played the last three innings of today’s game in Houston before anyone told him he was wearing a jersey with the name of the city misspelled.