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      Newsom 2024: could the California governor be a rival to Joe Biden?

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      One of the strongest candidates for US president in 2024 may be one who’s not yet in the race. There’s growing evidence that Gavin Newsom, the charismatic and energetic Democratic governor of California, is running something of a shadow campaign to Joe Biden and ready to step up if, or when, the incumbent is out of the running.Several developments in recent days suggest Newsom, who romped to re-election a year ago without really campaigning, is ready to bring forward what was already expected to be a strong run for the presidency in 2028.There are mounting concerns inside the Democratic party, matching polling among voters, that Biden is too old for a second term, the start of which in January 2025 would see him two months past his 82nd birthday if re-elected. Some want him to stand down.Newsom, 56, is among a generation of younger, prominent and popular Democrats expected to emerge from the shadow of the old guard, and has stolen a march on his peers with a series of bold moves many analysts see as strategic.Even movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, himself a Republican former two-term governor of California, thinks a Newsom run at the White House is inevitable.“I think it’s a no-brainer. Every governor from a big state wants to take that shot,” Schwarzenegger said earlier this year.But not all Democrats appear thrilled at the prospect. Pennsylvania US senator John Fetterman, at a dinner in Iowa, connected Newsom with Dean Philips, a congressman who said he is challenging Biden.“[There are two] running for president right now,” he said. “One is a congressman from Minnesota, the other is the governor of California, but only one has the guts to announce it.”This week, Newsom made a financial donation to a Democratic mayoral candidate in Charleston, South Carolina, 2,800 miles from his governor’s mansion in Sacramento. Reaching into political elections in other states is, experts say, a sure sign of a potential presidential candidate wishing to raise their profile on the national stage.“South Carolina is an early state in the primary process for Democrats, and doing well in the early states is seen as momentum for later ones,” said Eric Schickler, professor of political science at University of California, Berkeley, and co-director of its institute of governmental studies.“In fact, Biden’s win in South Carolina is really what propelled him to the top 2020, so building connections to important politicians in the state can certainly be seen by potential candidates as an important step.”Newsom has publicly denied that he has sights on Biden’s job.“I’m rooting for our president and I have great confidence in his leadership,” he told Fox News earlier this year.But while Schickler believes Newsom’s own thinking about the timing of any White House run probably hasn’t changed, he says circumstances have.“The Democratic party’s nervousness about Biden has certainly increased, and with him polling behind Donald Trump in many states, his low approval ratings, young voters being especially disenchanted with Biden, all of that has heightened interest among a lot of party supporters in an alternative,” he said.That alternative might not be Kamala Harris, who as vice-president would usually be assumed Biden’s heir apparent. Her public approval is currently as low as the president’s.So a rising, often progressive-leaning politician such as Newsom, with a wealth of executive and legislative experience, and a willingness to counter head-on Republican policies and personalities, makes for an attractive proposition.“It’s not a situation where there’s like 20, or 50, or 100 Democratic leaders who could be viewed as legitimate. If there were such a group, Newsom has positioned himself pretty well and would be on a very short list along with [Michigan governor] Gretchen Whitmer and a couple others,” Schickler said.“The problem is the party. There’s just a lot of different voices, a lot of different constituencies, and not really anybody or any group that could authoritatively say, ‘Oh, it’s Newsom’.“[But] he would certainly be one of the most serious people. The things he’s doing now, it helps him for 2028, which still is the most likely scenario, and certainly doesn’t eliminate him if something crazy or unexpected were to happen in the next six months.”Other not so subtle clues that Newsom has sights on higher office include his $10m (£8.2m) investment earlier this year in a new political action committee designed to spread the Democratic party’s message in Republican-held states he said have “authoritarian leaders directly attacking our freedoms”.Among the targets is Ron DeSantis, the hard-right Florida governor and faltering candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. The pair will debate each other on 30 November in a highly anticipated nationally televised event once billed as a clash of two leading White House contenders.“The idea of debating DeSantis was probably a lot more appealing when it really did look like he might actually defeat Trump. In that scenario, showing you can debate him and score a lot of points helps Newsom’s visibility with the party and makes his case that he would be an effective candidate,” Shickler said.“With DeSantis not doing so well, the upside for Newson is less, but there are still Democrats who would be happy to see him debate and defeat him. He only stands to benefit, it’s just the benefit will be smaller.” More

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      Man accused of attacking Paul Pelosi absorbed conspiracy theories, trial hears

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      The trial of a man accused of breaking into Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home and bludgeoning her husband with a hammer has begun, with a defense attorney arguing that her client, David DePape, was caught up in conspiracy theories.Paul Pelosi, who was 82 at the time, was attacked by DePape in the early hours of 28 October last year and hospitalized with a skull fracture and injuries to his right arm and hands. The encounter, which was captured by police body-cam footage, sent shockwaves through the political world just days before last year’s midterm elections.“There’s too much violence … political violence. Too much hatred, too much vitriol,” Joe Biden said shortly after the attack. “Enough is enough is enough.”The defense attorney Jodi Linker said on Thursday in opening statements in court in San Francisco that she would not dispute that DePape attacked the former House speaker’s husband. Instead, she will argue that DePape believed “with every ounce of his body” he was taking action to stop corruption and the abuse of children by politicians and actors.“This is not a whodunit. But what the government fails to acknowledge is the ‘whydunit’ – and the ‘why’ matters in this case,” Linker said.DePape pleaded not guilty to attempted kidnapping of a federal official and assault on the immediate family member of a federal official with intent to retaliate against the official for performance of their duties. Paul Pelosi is expected to testify next week.The federal prosecutor Laura Vartain Horn told the jurors that DePape started planning the attack in August, and that the evidence and FBI testimony will show he researched his targets online, collecting phone numbers and addresses, even paying for a public records service to find information about Nancy Pelosi and others.During her opening statement, Vartain Horn showed a photo of Paul Pelosi lying in a pool of blood. She also played a call DePape made to a television station repeating conspiracy theories.“The evidence in this case is going show that when the defendant used this hammer to break into the Pelosi’s home he intended to kidnap Nancy Pelosi,” Vartain Horn said, holding a hammer inside a plastic evidence bag.DePape is known to have a history of spreading far-right conspiracy theories, posting rants on a blog and an online forum about aliens, communists, religious minorities and global elites. He questioned the results of the 2020 election and echoed the baseless rightwing QAnon conspiracy theory that claims the US government is run by a cabal of devil-worshipping pedophiles. The websites were taken down shortly after his arrest.If convicted, DePape faces life in prison. He was also charged in state court with attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, elder abuse, residential burglary and other felonies. He pleaded not guilty to those charges. A state trial has not been scheduled.In the courtroom on Thursday were Christine Pelosi, one of the Pelosis’ daughters, as well as Gypsy Taub, DePape’s ex-girlfriend, and Taub and DePape’s two teenage sons. Taub called DePape’s name softly and blew a kiss, and he smiled and waved in return.A Canadian citizen, DePape moved to the United States more than 20 years ago after falling in love with Taub, a Berkeley pro-nudity activist well-known in the Bay Area, his stepfather, Gene DePape said. In recent years, David DePape had been homeless and struggling with drug abuse and mental illness, Taub told local media.Federal prosecutors say DePape smashed his shoulder through a glass panel on a door in the back of the Pelosis’ Pacific Heights mansion and confronted a sleeping Paul Pelosi, who was wearing boxer shorts and a pajama top.“Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy?” DePape asked, standing over Paul Pelosi at about 2am holding a hammer and zip ties, according to court records. Nancy Pelosi was in Washington and under the protection of her security detail, which does not extend to family members.Paul Pelosi called 911 and two police officers showed up and witnessed DePape strike Paul Pelosi in the head with a hammer, knocking him unconscious, court records showed.After his arrest, DePape, 43, allegedly told a San Francisco detective he wanted to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage. He said that if she told him the truth, he would let her go, and if she lied, he was going to “break her kneecaps” to show other members of Congress there were “consequences to actions”, according to prosecutors.DePape, who lived in a garage in the Bay Area city of Richmond and had been doing odd carpentry jobs to support himself, allegedly told authorities he had other targets, including a women’s and queer studies professor, the California governor Gavin Newsom, the actor Tom Hanks and Joe Biden’s son Hunter. More

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      Dianne Feinstein should be remembered for her full range of positions: good and bad | Rebecca Solnit

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      Flags are at half mast in San Francisco’s city hall for a woman who was born here and died in Washington DC at the end of a remarkable life. It was inside that building that the most dramatic and pivotal event of Dianne Feinstein’s political career took place, when a murderer made her mayor, the mayor who would become one of the country’s strongest leaders in response to the Aids crisis. That role gave her the visibility to run for the Senate in 1992, and she held onto that seat to her dying day, showing up on Thursday to cast a vote in the budget battle, hours before her death at 90.Senator Feinstein began her political career being ahead of her society and ended it by being behind it. This is not surprising for a public life in politics that stretched through 60 years of dramatic social and political change. But it may be hard to perceive for those who don’t know she was early on a champion for women’s rights – including her own just to participate, at a time when that was groundbreaking – and for rights and recognition for queer people at a time when most politicians would only mention them to demand punishment and ostracization for them.She was one of California’s first two women senators (Barbara Boxer won office in the same 1992 election) and the nation’s first two Jewish women senators, the first female member of the Senate judiciary committee, first woman to chair the Senate rules committee, and in 2009, the first woman to preside over a presidential inauguration.Obama, of course, was that president, and he later opposed her years of effort to expose widespread torture by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during George W Bush’s “global war on terror”. Feinstein, as head of the Senate intelligence committee, fought both presidents, the CIA’s director and various Republicans to release a scathing summary report on that torture. But she also defended the National Security Administration’s surveillance of US citizens.She was often a contradiction and always a patrician, born into wealth and becoming far wealthier through her third marriage in 1980 to the billionaire financier Richard Blum. She was also in her Senate career an important advocate for reproductive rights, environmental protection and gun control. But in recent years, she seemed like a ghost moving among ghosts, acting as though collegiality, bipartisanship and adherence to norms still prevailed in a Senate in which most Republicans had long been ruthless, reckless partisans whose one goal was power.Upon news of her death on Friday, many recalled her patronizingly clueless response to young members of the Sunrise Movement occupying her office in 2019 to press for passage of the Green New Deal. She had remarkable achievements in old-school environmentalism, with legislation that protected millions of acres of the California desert, then did the same for redwood forests and Lake Tahoe. But she too often deferred to business interests – as Mother Jones noted: “She brokered a monumental restoration agreement on the valley’s overstressed San Joaquin River in 2009, but then helped override species protections for fish on that same river in 2016.”First elected to the San Francisco board of supervisors in 1970, she became its first woman president. On the morning of 27 November 1978, the former policeman Dan White, who’d resigned from his seat on the board of supervisors, snuck into San Francisco city hall through a basement window carrying a gun. He demanded the liberal mayor, George Moscone, restore him to his position, and when Moscone declined, White fired several bullets into the progressive, finishing him off execution-style with a bullet to the head, then ran past Feinstein’s open office door as she called to him, and murdered the supervisor Harvey Milk, the country’s first gay elected public official.Feinstein was the first to try to come to Milk’s aid; she reached for his wrist to take his pulse, only to have her finger go into one of the dead man’s bullet wounds. Cleve Jones, Milk’s friend and aide, remembers her sleeve and hand were red with Milk’s blood when he got to city hall later that morning. Cleve, who remains a political activist to this day, told me on Friday: “I have so many conflicting feelings about Dianne Feinstein. We have never been close friends, but we have quite a history and even at those moments when I was the most angry with her for whatever reason, we aways had this bond that we both were there in city hall looking down at Harvey’s body, and that was something that changed both of our lives forever.”The video of a shaken Feinstein telling the press, to audible gasps and cries, that the two officials had been murdered and that the suspect was Dan White, is still riveting. She stepped into the mayor’s seat later that day and won re-election for two full terms. She picked a gay man, Harry Britt, to take Harvey Milk’s seat. Jones recalled: “There was a time when every candidate for public office refused to acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ people. There’s no question that Dianne Feinstein was one of the very first political leaders in the country and the world to acknowledge the existence of our community, to seek our vote, and to attempt to represent us on the issues that matter.”He continued: “When Aids started, it unleashed an incredible amount of cruelty. People were celebrating what was happening to us because first it was seen as a gay disease.” The Black community was also hugely impacted, and so “that initial reaction of homophobia compounded by racism led to some really horrible demagoguery”. Feinstein, he says, “rejected all that hatefulness with love and compassion and a belief in science”. Under Feinstein’s leadership, San Francisco led the world in Aids research, treatment and advocacy. Jones told me that watching her decline was sad, because “whether I agreed with her or not on her issues and her class loyalty, she was brilliant, truly brilliant” in her prime.When I moved to San Francisco at age 18 in 1980, Feinstein had been in city government for a decade. I never saw her in person, but she was omnipresent throughout my adult life, first as my mayor, then after a few years out of office my senator. She was a highly recognizable figure, tall and upright, with a helmet of black hair and boxy skirt suits, and she was often mocked locally by constituents far to the left of her. Like so many public figures, Feinstein was full of contradictions, sometimes brave and ahead of her time, sometimes mired in the status quo.But early on she did make waves by her very existence as a woman who entered the political arena at a time when women were unwelcome and largely absent there; later, she made more when she fought the CIA to expose their human rights abuses and took on the gun industry with her campaigns for banning assault rifles and regulating gun access. She deserves to be remembered for the full range of her achievements and positions, good and bad.
      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More

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      Dianne Feinstein obituary

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      The US senator Dianne Feinstein, who has died aged 90, was long cherished by the CIA and others in the defence and intelligence community as someone whose staunch support they could rely on. Until one day they could not: on 11 March 2009 she launched an investigation into the CIA’s torture of detainees post-9/11.That investigation by the Senate intelligence committee, which she chaired, turned into a bitter struggle with the agency and it tried to block it. She did not buckle and finally, in December 2014, she published her report, revealing the scale and brutality of what the CIA had done and its repeated attempts to mislead Congress and the White House. On top of all that, the report found the torture had proved counter-productive in obtaining valuable intelligence.On the day of publication, she told the Senate: “There are those who will seize upon the report and say ‘see what Americans did’, and they will try to use it to justify evil actions or to incite more violence. We cannot prevent that. But history will judge us by our commitment to a just society governed by law and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say ‘never again’.”Her fight was dramatic enough to interest Hollywood, and the film The Report was released in 2019, with Feinstein played by Annette Bening.What made her fight with the CIA so surprising was that it was out of kilter with her career before and after, as a Senate hawk. She voted for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – though she later expressed regret over the former – supported Republicans in defence procurement projects and defended the spy agencies in controversies such as illegal mass surveillance in 2013.Her reputation as a hawk frequently put her at odds with the Democratic left and this disillusionment with her grew rapidly in the latter part of her career.In February this year, facing calls to stand down as her physical and mental health declined, she said she would not seek re-election in 2024.There was much in her life she could look back on with pride: a trailblazer for women in politics; the calm leadership she displayed as mayor in San Francisco after the killings of her predecessor, George Moscone, and of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to an official position in the US; her success, albeit limited, in getting gun control through the US senate in 1994. But it was the torture report she cited as the achievement she was most proud.The first she heard of the torture was in September 2006, when Feinstein and other members of the intelligence committee were privately briefed by the then head of the CIA, Michael Hayden. Although Hayden played down what the CIA euphemistically described as “enhanced interrogation techniques”, Feinstein was troubled by what she heard.When she became chair of the intelligence committee in 2009 – its first female head – she launched the investigation. The final 6,700-page report remains classified, but she got around this by publishing a 500-page executive summary and that was damning enough.Between 2002 and 2008 the CIA had detained 119 men at “black sites” – secret locations around the world – and of these 39 had been subjected to waterboarding, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, stress positions and “rectal rehydration”.In 2015, Feinstein worked with the Republican senator John McCain in steering through the Senate an amendment that reinforced a ban on torture. The McCain-Feinstein amendment was the kind of bipartisan consensus that Feinstein, a centrist, valued. But, as US politics became more polarised, her attempts to work with Republicans increasingly grated with fellow Democrats.When Donald Trump, as president, began to pack the supreme court with rightwingers, Democrats complained that Feinstein, who was the senior Democrat on the judiciary committee, did not put up enough of a fight. After the 2020 confirmation hearings of a Trump appointee, Amy Coney Barrett, Feinstein left Democrats seething when she hugged the chair, Republican Lindsey Graham.Born in San Francisco, Dianne was the daughter of Betty (nee Rosenburg), a model, and Leon Goldman, a surgeon. Her family was affluent but she had a traumatic childhood: her mother was unstable and given to sudden rages due to an undiagnosed brain disorder. According to David Talbot, in his history of San Francisco in the 1960s through to the 80s, Season of the Witch (2012), Betty once chased her daughter with a knife around a dining table.Dianne attended a convent school before going to Stanford University, where she graduated in 1955 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and history. She went on to secure a job on the state parole board. Although politics was overwhelmingly male-dominated, she was elected in 1969 on to the 11-member San Francisco board of supervisors, basically the city and county council. Runs for mayor in 1971 and 1975 proved unsuccessful.In 1976, she was the target of a bomb attack on her home claimed by a California-based leftwing terrorist group, the New World Liberation Front. The bomb was planted in a window flower box but failed to go off. A few months later, another group, the Environmental Life Force, claimed responsibility for shooting out the windows of her holiday home with a BB gun.She began to carry a concealed handgun for protection. In 1978, dispirited by the combination of the mayoral defeats and being targeted, she told a reporter she was on the verge of quitting politics.Only hours after this exchange, the mayor of San Francisco, Moscone, and Milk, a fellow supervisor, were shot dead in City Hall by a former supervisor. Feinstein was the first into Milk’s office. She told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008: “It was one of the hardest moments, if not the hardest moment, of my life.” Checking Milk for a pulse, one of her fingers slipped into a bullet hole.As president of the board of supervisors at the time, she was well placed to take over as mayor, which she duly did, becoming the first female to occupy the post.She served until 1988. With Aids rampant, she supported many initiatives to help the gay community. She secured federal funding for an overhaul of the cable car network, which proved popular with residents and tourists.Influenced by seeing the damage to Milk’s body, she introduced in 1982 a local ordinance banning most residents from owning handguns. She had her own gun and 14 others that had been handed over in a buy-back scheme melted down and turned into a cross and given to Pope John Paul II on a visit to the Vatican.After an unsuccessful bid to become governor of California in 1990, she was elected as a US senator from California in 1992. She quickly made an impact, guiding through in 1994 the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, outlawing civilian use of certain semi-automatic firearms, though with a proviso that it would expire in 2004 if not renewed, which it was not.She was ranked in 2018 as the second wealthiest senator, with her fortune estimated at about $88m (about £74m).Feinstein married three times: Jack Berman in 1956, with whom she had a daughter, Katherine, divorcing in 1959; Bertram Feinstein in 1962 until his death in 1978; and Richard Blum from 1980 to his death in 2022.She is survived by Katherine, three stepdaughters, and a granddaughter, Eileen. More

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      Dianne Feinstein: a life in pictures

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      Dianne Feinstein, left, California assembly speaker Willie Brown, center, and the Rev Cecil Williams of the Glide Memorial Church of San Francisco, hold hands during Dr Martin Luther King Jr march in downtown San Francisco, January 1986

      Photograph: Paul Sakuma/AP More

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      ‘We’re not just clowns and jesters’: San Francisco’s first drag laureate on surviving a dangerous time

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      When D’Arcy Drollinger, a veteran of the San Francisco drag community, was named the city’s first drag laureate this year, she quickly realized she was walking right into the eye of a storm.The 54-year-old performer, who said she was initially caught off guard by the nomination, has found herself at the forefront of a long-brewing culture war. With anti-trans legislation spreading across the US and bills banning drag performance being passed in various states, her first few months in the role have been a whirlwind.“It came in at full force, and I was as ready for it as I could be,” said Drollinger, who uses “she” pronouns when in drag and “he” in daily life. “I feel very lucky to be able to be in that spotlight and be an ambassador and a beacon for all of the places that are not like San Francisco – where people don’t have the same kind of enthusiasm and support from not only audiences but city officials.”Drollinger will receive a $55,000 stipend in her 18-month role as the city’s inaugural drag laureate, described in the job listing as someone who will “embody San Francisco’s historic, diverse and inclusive drag culture, elevating the entire community on the national and international stage”. Thus far, her duties have included participating in drag events, throwing out the first pitch at a Giants game, and liaising with politicians on how to preserve LGBTQ+ culture and history.The position has brought official recognition to the art form Drollinger has dedicated her life to – one she says is often dismissed as “frivolous” or just entertainment at a time when it has become more political than ever.“Drag is an art form, but it is also a lens through which you can view all other art forms,” she said. “Drag is everything over the top – it’s larger than life. And when you look at something in a magnifying glass or under a microscope, you see things in very different ways. So I think the power of drag is being able to look at things with a different perspective.”The schedule of a drag laureate can be grueling, said Drollinger, speaking on a video call from her “drag room”, a walk-in closet of sorts filled with wigs, outfits and heels. She now spends almost every day in drag, doing three or more events, speaking with news outlets, and performing. But a few months in, she has finally been able to catch her breath.“It all happened so suddenly, but now that it has had time to sink in, I have more clarity about what I want to do” in the remainder of her 18-month tenure, she said. “With this role being brand new, there isn’t a path – I’ve got to pave it myself. I have to decide what this position could and should be in the future.”And not just for San Francisco. West Hollywood also appointed its first drag laureate in June, and other cities could be next. San Francisco’s decision to appoint a drag laureate came in part as a response to the rise of anti-LGBTQ+ crimes and legislation in recent years, said the mayor, London Breed. “While drag culture is under attack in other parts of the country, in San Francisco we embrace and elevate the amazing drag performers,” she said.The list of such attacks is seemingly endless. Drag story hours, in which drag queens read to children, have been targeted in a number of protests by white supremacists in recent years – including in the Bay Area in 2022. The American Civil Liberties Union is tracking hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ pieces of legislation in the US, including more than a dozen specifically targeting drag performers. Texas successfully passed a ban on drag performing in June, but the law was blocked temporarily before going into effect this week.Drollinger said in this cultural environment, it has “never been more dangerous to be a drag performer”. She feels her role has gone beyond a laureate – typically an artist or a figure simply recognized for significant contributions to a field – to a spokesperson for and a defender of LGBTQ+ rights at a dire crossroads. And that responsibility that can be daunting at times.“The problem is I just want to entertain people – I don’t want to spend all my time fighting,” she said. “But the reality is if more cities appointed drag laureates and recognized what we do – not only politically and economically but for the community on a social level – I think the less power these proposed laws could have.”Drollinger, who was born in San Francisco, said her interest in drag began at age four, when – inspired by Mary Poppins – she asked her mother to buy her a pair of heels and an umbrella. She started drag performances in adulthood in 2004 after she moved to New York City, and opened her own nightclub with friends in 2015, after moving back to San Francisco.That nightclub, called Oasis, has become “much more than a venue”, she said – it is a center for queer community in San Francisco. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, she launched Meals on Heels, where performers brought food, cocktails and socially distant lip-synching performances to home-bound customers. She said the drag laureate position provided official recognition to the foundational work she and many before her had done for the city.“The drag community so often are the ones taking care of our community,” she said. “We are not only the clowns and the jesters; we are the political voice. We’re here to entertain, but also to support – and that’s why I think that drag is very important.”Drollinger said to that end, she was looking forward to working with the city on the best ways to preserve and celebrate queer history, and to honor the people who had come before her. San Francisco was the site of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot – a historic act of resistance led by the transgender community that predated the Stonewall riots.She said over her decades-long career, she had never seen drag as politicized as today. In her childhood, she remembers tourists from outside the Bay Area driving to see drag shows in the North Beach area of San Francisco, or men wearing drag on television and in films like Some Like it Hot. Now, she feels the need to hire more security and use metal detectors at her nightclub.“Racism and prejudice has always existed in our culture, but after Trump and others hijacked the Republican party, it has opened the floodgates for people who were already feeling this way to be very vocal about it,” she said. “It’s not about being anti-drag, it’s about being anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-community.”She said she was working hard to make concrete changes – to protest, to speak out, and to develop programs with the city to fight anti-LGBTQ+ hate. But her biggest weapon, she said, was her sparkle.“If we just sit here and watch, we feel helpless,” she said. “We ask ourselves: what can we do? But the truth is, if we can live more authentically every day of our lives, things will change. And by authentic, I mean more fabulous – because that is what we all want. If we can be that free and that fabulous every day, we inspire everybody around us.“People might not realize it, but deep down everybody wants to be the most fabulous they can be in this life – and if everyone is just a little more fabulous, there’s that much less room for anger and hate and hostility and violence. And little by little we can create social change around us. I do believe that is possible.” More

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      Overdose deaths in San Francisco hit 200 in three months: ‘A crying shame’

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      Drug-related deaths surged by 41% in San Francisco in the first quarter of this year – with one person dying of an accidental overdose every 10 hours, as the fentanyl crisis continues to ravage the US west coast.San Francisco saw 200 people die of overdoses in the past three months compared to 142 in the same months a year ago, according to reports by the city’s medical examiner.Those living on the streets were particularly hard hit – with twice as many unhoused people dying of overdoses between January and March compared to a year earlier.Fentanyl was detected in most of the deaths. The city’s minority populations were particularly hard hit. A third of the overdose victims were Black, despite Black people making up only 5% of the city’s population.“It’s a crying shame that a city as wealthy as San Francisco can’t get its act together to deal with overdose deaths,” said Dr Daniel Ciccarone, a professor of addiction medicine at the University of California San Francisco, who said the city’s increasingly punitive approach to handling drug users has only heightened their overdose risks.“We’re a politically divided city between the people who have a lot of money and want the streets swept and those who think a compassionate, science-based, health approach is appropriate,” he said.The spike in deaths began in December and was particularly apparent in January, when 82 deaths put the city’s overdose fatalities at an all time high. This came just after the city government closed a key outreach center, where drug users were using with medical supervision, and increased policing in San Francisco’s drug-plagued Tenderloin district.Last summer, voters recalled the city’s liberal district attorney and the San Francisco mayor London Breed appointed a new district attorney, Brooke Jenkins, who vowed to take a law-and-order approach to the problem and has since stepped up arrests of drug dealers.Then in December, Breed closed the Tenderloin Center, a facility designed to provide daytime shelter for the unhoused, along with housing referrals, food, addiction treatment and health services. The center had unofficially allowed drug use in a supervised outside area. Attendants used Narcan to reverse more than 330 opiate overdoses in the 11 months the center was open, according to city data.The center, which served more than 400 people daily, was opposed by some in the community, who said it was drawing drug users to the already-impacted neighborhood.Breed said in December she had been disappointed by the low number of visitors at the center who ultimately accepted help to get off of drugs. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, fewer than 1% of visits resulted in someone getting connected to addiction treatment services.Since closing the center, Breed has sought $25m to increase police overtime with the priority of arresting drug dealers.“We are dealing with multiple serious public safety challenges locally, from a fentanyl-driven overdose epidemic, open-air drug dealing, property crime in our residential and commercial neighborhoods, increasing gun violence and prejudice-fueled incidents,” she said in a March letter seeking more federal help in policing and prosecuting cases.Last week, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, promised to send in resources and personnel from the national guard and the California highway patrol to bolster policing.Gary McCoy of HealthRIGHT 360, the nonprofit that ran the drug overdose prevention portion of the Tenderloin Center, said the government’s law-enforcement focused approach is backfiring and is instead pushing drug users into isolation, where they are more at risk of overdose deaths.“Something that has been sold to folks as a strategy that is going to work and help tackle the overdose crisis is having the exact opposite effect,” said McCoy, adding that the police tactics create dangers that go beyond the fact that health officials no longer have the chance to witness and reverse overdoses at the Tenderloin Center.“When people don’t have a safe place to go, when they’re using in doorways and public places and they’re afraid of getting caught and put in jail, they tend to rush and use more substance,” he said. “And when they rush, there’s a higher risk of overdose.”Ciccarone said other safe use centers around the world, including one in Melbourne Australia that opened five years ago, have shown to reduce overdoses, bring drug use off the streets and help get addicts into treatment. But he cautioned it takes far longer than 11 months to see the results.“People expected too much from it too soon,” he said of San Francisco’s center. “It gave the outward appearance that people were congregating to consume drugs. But here we have it closed for three months and the first three months show a tremendous rise in overdose deaths.”The city’s supervisors have pushed to replace the Tenderloin Center, which was designed as a temporary measure, with 12 smaller “wellness hubs” around the city. These would provide health and shelter services, as well allowing supervised drug use to prevent overdose deaths.But last summer, Newsom vetoed legislation that would have allowed supervised drug use centers in three California cities, including San Francisco. And the plan for the wellness hubs stalled, after San Francisco’s city attorney raised the objection that the city could wind up bearing significant legal liability.Breed has said she supports the wellness hubs.“These are difficult situations because this involves legal advice, significant criminal liability which we cannot just ignore,” said the mayor, according to KTVU news. Nonprofits are now seeking a way to fund the overdose prevention portions of their operations without city funding.In a statement, the San Francisco Department of Health (SFDPH) said it has undertaken a host of measures to prevent overdoses, including adding hundreds of new beds for addiction recovery treatment, expanding neighborhood street care teams and making Narcan and medication-assisted addiction treatment options more available.“SFDPH recognizes that any overdose death is one too many and mourns the loss of each of these lives,” the department said. It added the department is also looking for legal ways to open supervised use clinics. “These deaths drive us to find more ways to prevent overdoses and reduce the harms caused by fentanyl.”Breed and the new district attorney have touted increased arrests and jail time for drug dealers. In a April blog post, the mayor said police made 162 arrests for drug possession for sales in the last three months of 2022, an 80% increase, and are seizing dozens of kilograms of narcotics.“These enforcement actions will continue, while our street outreach teams continue to go out and offer services and treatment,” wrote Breed.But Alex Kral, an epidemiologist at the independent nonprofit research institute RTI International, who led an evaluation of the Tenderloin Center, said the drug dealing arrests actually make the drug supply more dangerous by forcing users to go to people they don’t know for their drug supply and forcing users into hiding.“You’re making an unpredictable drug market even more unpredictable,” he said.“We’ve spent the last 50 years trying to arrest our way out of this and it’s clearly not working. The conditions on the streets are getting worse, the drugs are becoming more dangerous and the health of the community is much, much worse with increased policing.”According to San Francisco supervisor Hillary Ronen, who has championed the idea of wellness hubs, the city has failed to come up with any new tactics to deal with a “horrific crisis”.“We closed the Tenderloin Center with no plan in place to replace it,” she said. “Fentanyl is corrupting every part of the drug supply and all the social problems that underlie the drug addiction crisis continue – widespread poverty, trauma with no access to mental health care, inequality, and homelessness.”“What did we expect to happen?” More

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      Democrat Barbara Lee announces bid to replace Dianne Feinstein in US Senate

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      Democrat Barbara Lee announces bid to replace Dianne Feinstein in US SenateLee is the highest-ranking Black woman in House Democratic leadership and seeks to take seat in hotly-contested raceUnited States congresswoman Barbara Lee on Tuesday formally launched her campaign for the Senate seat held by the retiring Dianne Feinstein, joining two fellow House Democrats in the race in the nation’s most populous state.California senator Dianne Feinstein, 89, announces she will not seek re-electionRead moreIn a video posted on Twitter, Lee ran through a list of the personal and professional battles she has taken on in her life, including fighting to be her school’s first Black cheerleader, championing protections for survivors of domestic violence and being the only member of Congress to vote against the authorization for the use of military force after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.“Today I am proud to announce my candidacy for US Senate. I’ve never backed down from doing what’s right. And I never will,” Lee said in the video. “Californians deserve a strong, progressive leader who has delivered real change.”Today I am proud to announce my candidacy for U.S. Senate. I’ve never backed down from doing what’s right. And I never will. Californians deserve a strong, progressive leader who has delivered real change.#BarbaraLeeSpeaksForMe pic.twitter.com/sEjmABg2BS— Barbara Lee (@BarbaraLeeForCA) February 21, 2023
      Lee, a former chair of the congressional Black caucus, filed federal paperwork last week to enter the campaign shortly after the 89-year-old Feinstein announced she would step down after her term ends next year. Feinstein, the oldest member of Congress, has held the seat since 1992.Democratic US congresswoman Katie Porter, who is known for her use of a whiteboard during congressional hearings, and Adam Schiff, the lead prosecutor in then President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, announced their Senate campaigns last month.The three Democratic candidates occupy much of the same political terrain, so the race could be shaped by other factors that distinguish them.Lee’s district in the San Francisco Bay Area is one of the most liberal in the country and includes Berkeley and Oakland. Porter represents a politically divided district in Orange county, south-east of Los Angeles, that was once a conservative stronghold. Schiff’s district runs north from Los Angeles and includes Hollywood and Burbank, where he lives.Lee is the highest-ranking Black woman appointed to House Democratic leadership, serving as co-chair of the Policy and Steering Committee. Schiff and Porter are white. Lee, at 76, is the oldest of the group. Porter is 49, and Schiff is 62.In a nod to her age, Lee said she was the same fighter she has always been.“For those who say my time has passed, well, when does making change go out of style?” she said in the video. “I don’t quit. I don’t give up.”There are no Black women in the Senate, and there have been only two in the chamber’s history: Vice-President Kamala Harris, who was California’s first Black senator, and Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois, who served one term.None of the candidates has run statewide before. They face the challenge of becoming more widely known, though they each have established political reputations.Lee and Porter have been leaders in the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Schiff describes himself as a progressive champion but was once a member of the House’s centrist Blue Dog Coalition.Why are Americans paying $32m every hour for wars since 9/11? | Barbara LeeRead moreLee has long been on outspoken defender of abortion rights. In 2021, she was one of several members of Congress who shared personal testimony about their own abortions during a congressional hearing.She became pregnant at age 16 in the mid-1960s. Abortion in California was illegal at the time, so a family friend helped send her to a back-alley clinic in Mexico, she said at the time.She had no ill effects from the procedure, but she said many other women weren’t so lucky in that era.Democrats are expected to dominate the contest in the liberal state. A Republican hasn’t won a statewide race in California since 2006, and the past two US Senate elections had only Democrats on the November ballot.TopicsCaliforniaUS CongressUS politicsDemocratsDianne FeinsteinSan FrancisconewsReuse this content More