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San Francisco Examiner
How families can spend the summer in The City
San Francisco might take more pride in its fog than its sunshine, but a wealth of uniquely local summer options for kids make “staycations” ideal for families. The City is home to some of the best-known fine-arts institutions in the world, many of which offer free or discounted summer programs and events for children. Science museums — including the California Academy of Sciences and the Exploratorium — are well worth a visit, too, especially for residents of the nation’s de facto tech and innovation capital. ...
With millions lost to wage theft, Mahmood pledges action
Carpenters want to build homes, and aspiring politicians want their support. But Bilal Mahmood’s route to winning the carpenters’ union’s favor is not a straightforward YIMBY promise to upzone neighborhoods and facilitate new construction. Instead, Mahmood, who is running for District 5 supervisor against incumbent Supervisor Dean Preston, introduced a proposal on Thursday to combat wage theft by employers. ...
Nintendo of America promises to open a big new Union Square store in 2025
San Francisco’s Union Square got a welcome bit of good news Friday with a big announcement by video gaming company Nintendo of America that next year it will open a large new store in the iconic shopping district, where retail vacancies hit a record high in the first quarter of the year. The new outlet will occupy nearly 10,000 square feet spread across two floors, according to the Redmond, WA.-based company, which is a subsidiary of Japan’s Nintendo Co. No further details were available, including...
Smoking, not injecting, more popular fentanyl method, UCSF study finds
San Franciscans struggling with fentanyl addiction have increasingly pivoted away from injecting the drug to smoking it instead, according to new research from UCSF published this week. In the paper, more than 90% of participants reported currently smoking fentanyl, while around 53% reported currently injecting the drug. “Public-health officials, harm-reduction organizations, and different research groups have been observing this transition from injecting to smoking predominantly on the West Coast, especially...
Legal aid nonprofit says it can lower SF homelessness
Reggie Daniels lived with his grandmother for nearly all his life and never doubted that he and his sister would one day inherit her house in Bayview-Hunters Point. But when his grandmother died in 2020, he said, he discovered that her will had been reworked in the final months of her life to bequeath Daniels’ longtime residence to her children — not to Daniels and his sister. The inheritors decided...
Campus protests hearten San Franciscans with family in Gaza
Reem Assil said she last heard from her family in Gaza about two weeks ago, about a month after Israeli forces withdrew from Al-Shifa Hospital. “The [Israeli Defense Forces were] taking over the Al-Shifa Hospital, and my family was sheltering outside,” Assil said. “Unfortunately, some of them didn’t make it — the houses they were sheltering in got destroyed.” In the aftermath, her family feared that her aunt had fled...
Mayor offers money to bring HBCU satellite campus to The City
San Francisco Mayor London Breed offered money Thursday — estimated to be between $500,000 and $1 million — to help establish in The City a satellite campus of one of the schools known as historically Black colleges and universities. Breed’s administration announced the funding opportunity while issuing a request for qualifications from HBCUs interested in pursuing such a campus, an idea the mayor first touted in early February when she hosted a group of HBCU representatives to explore the possibility. ...
Why unusually late rains could delay start of wildfire season
Experts say an above-average and unusually lengthy rainy season could bode well for California’s wildfire fortunes as the state heads into the summer months. After a historic storm drenched Northern California over the course of less than 24 hours at the beginning of the month, dumping roughly an inch of rain in downtown San Francisco and more than a foot of snow at some of the state’s highest elevations, the rest of May has stayed almost completely dry. ...
$5 fee fight erupts across The City’s pickleball courts
The San Francisco Recreation and Park Department calls it a reservation fee, but pickleball players call it a use tax. Whichever way you slice it, the $5-per-hour ‘pay-to-play’ fee that commissioners unanimously approved last week has pickleball players up in arms. It now goes to the Board of Supervisors for approval in June, and pickleballers are protesting with petitions and letters to elected officials in an effort to keep court access free. ...
SF neighbors organize donation drive for dog walker whose home burned
Alamo Square residents are continuing to rally around Terry Williams, the longtime San Franciscan and dog walker who has received racist and threatening mail in recent weeks and whose home was gutted in a fire Tuesday. Forty San Francisco Fire Department crew members responded to the one-alarm blaze, which broke out Tuesday shortly after 11:30 a.m. on the 900 block of Grove Street between Steiner and Fillmore streets. Williams’ parents — his 79-year-old mother and 82-year-old father — were rescued from the blaze and treated...
SF overdose deaths decline amid new push to expand treatment access
Fatal drug overdoses in San Francisco declined for the second time in three months this year, according to preliminary data released by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner on Wednesday. The City recorded 56 overdose deaths in April, down from 68 in March, 63 in February and 71 in January. Officials last month had tallied 66 deaths in February and 61 in March. It also represented a decline from the 71 deaths reported in April 2023, the year in which San Francisco recorded more...
Israel-Hamas war sparks strife at San Francisco museums
San Francisco boasts a proud history of political protest and radical art, so it’s no surprise that local artists have been outspoken in their calls for a cease-fire in Gaza — and for the museums where they exhibit to join them. But those calls have largely gone unacknowledged by The City’s major art institutions. These local tensions mirror the strained discourse throughout the art world around the ongoing Israeli offensive...
This court-appointed expert is tasked with righting Emporium Centre mall
The huge Emporium Centre San Francisco mall that dominates the intersection of Market and Fifth streets is like a large, half-empty ocean cruise liner crashing through stormy seas, with retailers as recently as this month getting ready to jump ship amid the economic headwinds. At the wheel, working to keep the ship aright through the gale, stands Gregg Williams, a receiver appointed in October by a San Francisco Superior Court after the mall’s owners said in June that they would walk away from their mortgage,...
San Francisco mayoral race heats up as five candidates take stage
One by one, San Francisco’s leading candidates in the race to be The City’s next mayor took the stage Tuesday night during the first public forum to include all five contenders. Hosted by the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club, the battle of ideas played out in front of an audience that seemed to lean heavily toward the progressive end of The City’s political spectrum. Although the candidates largely rehashed well-trodden...
SF, public-health nurses tentatively agree to new contract
San Francisco’s public-health nurses union reached a tentative agreement on a new contract with The City to avoid a possible strike. SEIU Local 1021, which represents the nearly 2,300 nurses who work for the San Francisco Department of Public Health, said that 99.5% of its members voted nearly in favor of authorizing the strike due to the lack of progress in bargaining sessions. Union officials said the new contract, which...
CCSF names historic interim chancellor as permanent search continues
City College of San Francisco will have a new chancellor next week, bringing a temporarily end to a search that began when the current chancellor, David Martin, announced his resignation in September. Mitchell Bailey was chosen by the CCSF Board of Trustees and will be the first openly gay man to lead the institution — albeit in an interim role over one academic year — until the college finds a permanent replacement. ...
Battle over Prop. 22 heads to California Supreme Court
The California Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case on Tuesday that could have big implications for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and the workers who drive for these companies. At issue is Proposition 22, an initiative passed by state voters in 2020 that designated drivers as independent contractors rather than employees of such companies. A group of drivers and the Service Employees International Union argue that the move unconstitutionally stripped the state legislature of the ability to include such workers in California’s workers-compensation system. ...
Why 'moderate' and 'progressive' are words of choice in SF politics
When Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin entered the mayoral race in April, it was assumed that San Francisco progressives could breathe a sigh of relief. After all, Peskin was the first — and to date, only — progressive candidate to run against incumbent Mayor London Breed, who is widely considered a moderate in a field full of ideologically like-minded candidates. But in San Francisco, what is a progressive, and...
SF General treats patients by considering ‘whole life story’
As mental health increasingly becomes a statewide priority, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital is embracing a more inclusive treatment method for those struggling with addiction and their mental and physical health. The nearly 7-year-old social medicine program — which its website claims has served more than 6,000 patients since it was founded by Dr. Hemal Kanzaria in 2017 — looks at how every aspect of a patient’s life can play a role in their health outcomes. Factors such as housing, family and food insecurity can...
Paul Pelosi attacker still due in SF court amid resentencing drama
It remains unclear how David DePape’s federal resentencing, stemming from his conviction of striking the husband of longtime San Francisco congresswoman Nancy Pelosi in the head with a hammer, will impact his looming state trial. U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley reset DePape’s federal sentencing hearing Saturday after realizing she didn’t give the 44-year-old a chance to speak during his sentencing hearing the previous day. She wrote in court filings that neither the prosecution nor the defense brought attention to the initial omission, which she...
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