Joe Eskenazi
@EskSF
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Editor + columnist @MLNow https://t.co/ieZaiLQ2bt Joe.Eskenazi AT MissionLocal DOT com 2019 @SPJ_NorCal journalist of the year "Made it Ma! Top of the world!"
Joined January 2011
My sources also name the suspect in this morning's hammer attack on Paul Pelosi as David DePape, born 1980, of Berkeley. He would appear to be a former Castro nudist protester. Things appear set to be bizarre for a while.
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You needn't be a Kaiser member to get the vaccine from Kaiser if you're 65+. I spent 4.5 hours on hold to be told I need to set up a Kaiser ID number for my mom. That's a different number to call. So: Set up a Kaiser ID# at 1 800 464 4000. Secure the appointment at 866 454 8855.
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Property crime is a problem in San Francisco, but the Internet meme about "Gotham" is dumb and dangerous. The murder rate in S.F. is half what it was a decade ago. Violent crime is way down. This talk is going to get some petty thief or random homeless person shot. Cut it out.
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Lesson of the day: A child who doesn't register "I'm on the phone" will also not register "I'm on live television.".
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Easy. "The president is a terrible person."
Pres Trump at a Penn rally calls my colleague and friend Chuck Todd a “sleeping SON OF A BITCH.”.Really classy. Explain that to your children.
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This is close to where I live and no-fucking-body stops at the stop signs, let alone the crosswalks. Gigantic trucks barrel through the stop signs at 15 mph over the speed limit. I don't worry about the bullshit Mad Max stuff online trolls go on a bout but I do worry about this.
Your tax dollars at work!.
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Multiple sources have confirmed to me that San Francisco Public Works head Mohammed Nuru was on Monday afternoon arrested by the FBI. A press conference announcing details will be held Tuesday afternoon. Other known SF politicos may also come up during that press conference.
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A San Francisco audience reads "Castro" as a district in the city, not Fidel, FYI.
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Today's news regarding the shuttering of SF Weekly is a shock, but not a surprise. And it's deeply dispiriting. The city has never needed an alt-weekly more. I appeal to the ownership to, at the very least, preserve the archives of both the physical and online publications.
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Anchor worker Brace Belden says the Union forces have won, by a vote of 31 to 16.
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If the city doesn't want judges to award homeless people up to $10K after their possessions were taken and not returned, the simplest solution is to adequately document and return those possessions — or not take them in the first place.
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I live in the Excelsior. I can get to JFK Drive by walking 100 meters to the No. 44 bus. My wife and I took the No. 44 bus to go to the hospital to deliver our first child; we can certainly take it to the park. This line of argumentation is confusing.
Open up JFK drive. Residents of the Excelsior, OMI, Outer Mission, Bayview and all neighbors of the Southern portion of the City need to have access to the park as well. Closing JFK takes away access to GGP attractions for many SF families and many communities of color.
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San Francisco is rotting and dying — and here's why I'm leaving. Yes, now *you too* can write your own San Francisco dystopia Mad Libs-type game! .
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Outspoken former Police Commissioner John Hamasaki has today pulled papers to run for DA.
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80% of Lowell teachers walked off the job this morning in protest, leaving the high school a ghost town. Breaking news from @MamarilDavid
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“Do you have a cell phone? No? Come back tomorrow with a phone,” Glide staff told Tenderloin residents waiting in line to be tested for COVID-19. You needed a smartphone and Google address to get tested OFF THE STREETS OF THE TL. This is madness.
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Meanwhile, in Oakland, the kids are having a fun dance party Downtown. I look forward to @SFPD explaining why this is necessary. I look forward to them explaining why they've detained and threatened to arrest a credentialed reporter.
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Revolutionary idea here: Instead of forcing people to shit in the street and then spending millions to clean it up, how about we provide toilets for people? .
Feces in almost half the commercial corridors of our City and over 20% staff vacancies at Public Works - we must make staffing up and cleaning our corridors a top priority in this years budget.
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Supervisor Matt Dorsey, a former spokesman for the police dept., has introduced legislation to allow the SFPD to enter into a contract with a production company to produce a documentary called "The Real Streets of San Francisco.". I am not making this up.
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Bird dumped hordes of scooters on city streets without permission and later misstated its earnings to the SEC. Sidewalk scooters remain a problem. Toddler in my kids' preschool hospitalized this month. SF must improve its business climate. Doesn't need to coddle bad actors.
Exclusive: Bird, a scooter company with 1,500 electric vehicles in San Francisco, is giving up on the city, saying its fines, overly complicated regulations and poor communication are worse than any of the hundreds of cities it works in. My latest column.
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Invent stuff that's already been invented. Monetize stuff that's free.
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The University of California exists for people like this. This is an abject failure. This cannot stand.
Jonathan, the son of a single mother who immigrated from El Salvador, is graduating with a 4.0 GPA and served as student body president. He got into his dream school — but he can’t afford to attend the University of California.
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San Francisco's Republican candidate received 4,674 votes (so far). That's 3 percent. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not everyone gets a New York Times trend article.
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One of last night's San Francisco curfew arrestees says a flirty cop boasted to her he was earning $192 an hour to process her arrest.
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Builder tells me "Day Without an Immigrant" has shut down 95 percent of construction sites in San Francisco, North Bay.
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Four years ago, I asked Jeff Adachi when he'd get his recognition for his work on city finance. "After I'm dead," was his reply. He's likely right. And, sadly, that end came today.
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Withhold the taxes.
Trump administration blocks California wildfire relief
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Jarringly ridiculous thing to say, in writing no less. Whatever your legit criticisms of the major dailies here, California newspapers flood the f****** zone on fire coverage. I assume East Coast papers do the same for their own localized disasters, like Bill de Blasio.
You know one thing we in the media don't report very well? Wildfires as they happen. But this is the best map I've seen.
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The alert really should say where the earthquake was detected and how big. Was I supposed to stop drop and roll in the middle of my kids’ schoolyard in San Francisco?.
My phone buzzed with the #earthquake alert but I didn’t feel a thing here in #Oakland. Initially reported as a 5.7 in Sacramento County but now downgraded to a 4.5 in the Delta (Isleton, which is in Sac County). My dog didn’t even bark.
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BREAKING: The City Attorney has determined that D4 Supe candidate Leanna Louie did not adequately prove her residency requirements, and has been stricken from the ballot. Background:
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So, 11.78M Californians are fully vaccinated. Of these people, 1,379 have gotten Covid. Doing the math, that's 0.011%. That's a 1-in-8,500 chance.
California has recorded about 1,400 "breakthrough" cases of coronavirus infection in fully vaccinated people so far this year.
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Pretty big goddamn news for San Francisco and many other major cities.
GREAT news! . President @JoeBiden makes funding for non-congregate sheltering of people who are homeless 100% reimbursable! Currently FEMA pays 75% & states/cities have to pay rest (& often can’t). We’ve pushed for this for 10 months.
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The tenants evicted by Supervisor Vallie Brown disputed her claims they weren't paying rent. Now we have receipts. They were paying rent.
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It's irresponsible to run Brown's statements unchecked in the NYT just as it was irresponsible for Chron to run his column for 12 years. If WLB is concerned about SF's sparse bench, it's a shame his protégés focused on pillaging the city. Shame NYT didn't ask about this, too.
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Latinos represent 50% of San Francisco's Covid cases — but only 9% of its Covid testing. The city has known it should be flooding resources into vulnerable communities for months. It hasn't. It is increasingly harder to claim San Francisco hasn't failed its Latino population.
City's Mantra to 'follow the data and science' to crush Covid-19 falls short for Latinx and southeast San Francisco
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Fittingly, the NY Times article about how the West is overlooked manages to overlook the existence of the 5 other Bay Area counties in the SF Bay Area, how we're all operating under the same shelter-in-place order, and how it was issued by health directors, not elected officials.
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Powerful stuff. But any article that doesn't take into account the plight of San Francisco's homeless or marginally housed is incomplete. Any story that minimizes or ignores the multi-county response in the Bay Area, driven by unelected Health Officers, is incorrect.
Cuomo and de Blasio led New York to nearly 10 times more coronavirus deaths than California.
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Collins was the French Laundry of the school board recall.
Alison Collins drops $87 million lawsuit against S.F. school district on day recall backers submit signatures via @sfchronicle.
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A bombshell here from @badjujusf. The officer who shot and killed Jessica Williams in 2016 was found by the SFPD oversight body to have violated a slew of department policies. It recommended he be terminated. Instead, he was suspended for a month and a half.
Officer who shot Jessica Williams was recommended for firing. Instead, he was suspended 45 days.
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@BastionoftheBay @badjujusf And you ought to know the meaning of the words "credentialed journalist." . Credentialed journalists are permitted to be outside during the curfew, documenting what goes on. It's literally — wait for it — WHAT WE DO.
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Election Director John Arntz today sent Leanna Louie a letter stating she would not be included on the Nov. 8 ballot. He mailed that letter to her District 10 address — which she listed as the mailing address in her declaration of candidacy to run for District 4 supervisor.
Story:
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The Alameda County DA's office is confused by the claim it tried 2,300 cases in 2020. That would require impanelling 9+ juries a day, during a pandemic. ACDA's office tells me that, last year, it had 26 felony jury trial verdicts and 22 misdemeanor jury trial verdicts. Total: 48.
Police presented @SFDAOffice with the same number of cases as they did in Alameda in 2020 (about 6,300) yet Boudin tried 23 cases while Alameda tried over 2,300. Boudin dismissed 40% of cases to Alameda’s 11%. Sort of important @EskSF.
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When I was a young copyeditor at Alameda Newspaper Group, there was an aging columnist who, somehow, managed to tie every subject back to recreational softball. I was told to NEVER change anything in his columns, lest I prevent him from embarrassing himself and being eased out.
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The owner of a neglected Mission building that burned in a lethal fire now stands to make a killing developing the site. What should the city of San Francisco do? And, more to the point, what *can* it do?.
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"I got just one thing to say: Fuck the POA," says Supervisor Sandra Lee Fewer. Well, it's election night in San Francisco all right.
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If Larry Ellison is concerned with the state of San Francisco's streets, perhaps he could see fit to remunerate the city for the money it lost hosting the America's Cup.
Oracle's 60,000 person OpenWorld conference, one of SF's biggest events, is leaving for Vegas:
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San Francisco’s current police vehicle chase policy was enacted in 2013.
"Members of the Police Commission have gone way too far," Mayor Breed says at Alamo Square presser announcing March 2024 ballot measure to roll back the commission's limits on police vehicle pursuits, among other things. Details:
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It goes without saying that if progressives nominate an SI-educated, Marina-dwelling white guy for mayor at the expense of London Breed — who has had huge support tonight from the black community — the optics would be abysmal. But it also goes without saying everyone knows this.
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There's lots of unseemly behavior here, and everyone is free to spend their limited ice cream dollars in the way they see fit. But the real reason Jason Yu doesn't have an ice cream shop is because of this city. Because of our combo of onerous rules and departmental corruption.
This popular ice cream shop specializes in Asian flavors. But then it filed a complaint against an Asian-owned ice cream shop trying to open nearby. Now, some are calling the owners' actions hypocritical.
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Yes, the dozen "injuries" the cops received in "breaking up a hostile crowd" were from loud fireworks bangs hurting their ears. In other news, 60,000 people were "injured" at a Rolling Stones concert. This was manipulative. "What manner of injuries?" is clearly de rigueur.
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When your workspace is engulfed in flames; when your mistress threatens to reveal your illegitimate family; when a wild beast rampages through your place of business—and when you drink and tell elected officials to "die slow,MF"— you better call Sam Singer
S.F. politicians file police reports against tech exec following threatening social media post via @sfchronicle.
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I loved everything about the Albatross from the bartender's silly hat to the beer selection to the darts to the endless popcorn to the trivia contests to the mishmash of maps serving as wallpaper in the men's room. This one hurts.
Historic Berkeley watering hole Albatross Pub closing due to COVID-19
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Breaking: San Francisco's Dept. of Public Health just declared campaign offices, during an election year, to be "non-essential." . Campaign offices must close.
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Still confused by the man not wearing a mask on a somewhat crowded 14R bus who put on a mask as soon as he stepped off to walk the windy, empty streets.
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Tentative agreement reached between unions, San Francisco school district:. 10 days additional Covid leave;. High-quality masks for students and staff;. Testing in supply that students, staff can have one weekly. Announcement being made now. Here is doc:
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When we schedule votes for high-consequence offices during high-turnout elections, the real beneficiary is clearly antifa. Everybody knows that.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed says a potential ballot measure to move citywide elections to presidential years is a democratic socialist power grab, and the proposal's author is pushing back.
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Once again, this photo reveals desolation. This is, again, a very sparse crowd. The people who aren't distancing may be couples, housemates, families. The second and third photo appear to even be of the same group. SF can do better. But these photos are far from incriminating.
Friend sends me this pic from 20 mins ago at Crissy Field in San Francisco. “Some people observing social distancing, many not,” friend says.
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Asking school officials, in the midst of a pandemic, to devote resources to coming up with alternative names for Abraham Lincoln High is beyond the realm of parody and perhaps downright Pythonesque.
BREAKING: San Francisco might change 44 school names, renouncing George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and even former Mayor Dianne Feinstein. Via @jilltucker
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If "compassion is killing people" in San Francisco, the city seems ready to give cruelty a shot. Latest column here:
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Extracting public subsidies from cities that are willing to pay, and leveraging them against each other, is the business model. No need to make it complicated. It’s just hostage-taking.
Why Oakland could lose the A’s: Development costs and location battles doomed their plans, from @rolandlisf : .
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Gov. Newsom couldn't campaign with Kamala, so he helped break down a Mission homeless encampment instead. His handlers woudln't let our reporter talk to him as this was an "exclusive" for another outlet. Well, evidently not.
The governor was spotted among homeless outreach workers in the Mission District on Harrison and 19th Streets. This comes after his original anti-recall rally got canceled, following VP Kamala Harris's cancelation due to attacks in Afghanistan.
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Eagle-eyed copy-editors Pam and Michael Rosenthal point out to me that the city's 6-feet-of-separation sign is geometrically incorrect. If 4 people are diagonally 6 feet apart, they're only 4.24 feet apart on each side of that square. (Remember the Pythagorean Theorem? They do)
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Just got tossed out of Anchor Brewery, along with other media. That is a first. But, imminently, union voting will finish. And then we'll know what's what.
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San Francisco: If we try hard enough, we can even ruin beer.
Beer is now a wellness product, as breweries craft "activated IPAs," add electrolytes, bee pollen and chia seeds, and promise to help you recover after a marathon. This is not a joke.
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1. This has become a microcosm for an untenable citywide situation, and;. 2. Public Works has inserted itself in the middle of a cat-and-mouse game. I have requested the per-visit costs for replacing these rocks.
And just like that, the rocks on Dolores & Market that have sparked a homelessness debate are back in the street, along with fresh sidewalk messages in chalk. City workers had hoisted them back onto the sidewalk just yesterday. Background here:
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Scoop: Two 49ers linebackers outthink, outrun gunmen, foil would-be robbery in San Francisco:
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Elon Musk is a crank, and his views on voting or the Great Pumpkin or the Designated Hitter do not, in themselves, warrant coverage.
Elon Musk wrote in support of limiting the rights of nonparents to vote on Twitter, in the latest controversial stance for the tech billionaire.
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I once commented to a city official that it was frustrating making out checks for thousands of dollars to "Zuckerberg Hospital." . He told me it was frustrating having $887M in public General Obligation bonds put toward "Zuckerberg Hospital.".
San Francisco is taking steps to explore the possibility of removing Mark Zuckerberg's name from San Francisco General Hospital.
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Curious "Beautify San Jose" billboard is now up at Mission and Trumbull, in San Francisco's Excelsior District. Which is quite a ways from San Jose.
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The Golden State Warriors have rebuffed San Francisco officials' pleas to cancel games due to coronavirus/COVAD-19. SO much for asking. Is the next step telling? .
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With all due respect, these are very sparse crowds for San Francisco and it's only Day 2. Could we do better? Sure. But the highways are abandoned. Public transit is abandoned. The parks are abandoned. People are staying home.
"I still really get the impression people in many places aren't taking this seriously," @drsanjaygupta says on many San Francisco residents ignoring the shelter in place order to stay home. "I'm worried these numbers- they keep going up."
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I never realized what a high percentage of parenting would be worrying about cars. Here's a full listing of all the car-free Halloween streets.
Taking your kids trick or treating? Going yourself?. Check out our map of all the car-free streets across San Francisco this coming Oct. 31, where you can frolic in peace w/out worrying for your loved ones' safety. via @AnnikaHom @kellywaldro .
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"Rodbigo" Santos has been indicted. But he has been facing serious federal charges for more than a year. And yet, he is pulling permits on the regular. And has remained in high demand. And THAT'S an indictment of this city and its Building Department.
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Pretty blistering reply-all retirement message here from a San Francisco police officer. Every sworn member of the department received this today:
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Respectfully, does the Chronicle understand how ranked-choice voting works? . Is the word "unprecedented" justified here when this very editorial gives a close analog — Jean Quan winning in Oakland —within a few words, and 1-2-3 strategies are common in this and every city?
Editorial | Jane Kim and Mark Leno are gaming the city’s ranked-choice election rules in an unprecedented way.
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If you want to know what's going on in the Bay Area, read stuff written by people who live and work in the Bay Area.
In the heart of San Francisco, one neighborhood is experiencing a very different reality than the rest of the city. This is nothing new for the Tenderloin. But in a global pandemic "we are only as safe and as protected as our most vulnerable residents."
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Special delivery: San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin takes aim at DoorDash, files Unfair Business Practices action against company for "illegal misclassification" of workers as independent contractors, not employees.
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Eyewitnesses to attack on bus driver say that police failed to arrest assailant, who loitered 20 feet away, despite driver and passenger pointing him out.
The incident on its own, in which a passenger dragged a 14-Mission bus driver out of his seat and into the street, was alarming enough. But the Cohens were unprepared for the police response that followed on that Monday evening. From @miss_elenius.
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Mission Local placed in a national investigative journalism contest for our stories on pandemic testing inequities. And while @LydiaChavezZ is too modest to admit it, this is a testament to her leadership, news judgment, and drive.
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I read both stories. My $0.02 is that we're lucky to have a writer like @KevinChron here who actually engages with and tells the stories of homeless people and explores the causes of ongoing homelessness — rather than rendering them invisible while describing only their detritus.
San Francisco's homeless problem and filthy sidewalks were featured in both the L.A. Times and the New York Times today. Our city's reputation around the country -- and the world -- seems to be changing quickly.
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San Francisco's Prop. F would compel drug-users on welfare into treatment — or they could lose their benefits. One of its most ardent opponents was shocked to watch a pro-Prop. F ad and see . himself.
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What if we had a massive environmental crisis/fraud/political corruption case and nobody cared?
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Remember: All the money you spend on toilets is money you DON'T spend cleaning shit off the street. Also, this is a better and more dignified expenditure.
We urgently need MORE of these Pit Stop bathrooms, and expand them to weekends and nights. We don't have a single public bathroom open in San Francisco past 10pm, and we only have three open to 8pm. We need 24 hour public bathroom access!
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