Twitter on Wednesday suspended an account that used publicly available flight data to track Elon Musk’s private jet, despite a pledge by the social media platform’s new owner to keep it up because of his free speech principles.
Then, hours later, Musk brought back the jet-tracking account after imposing new conditions on all of Twitter‘s users — no more sharing of anyone’s current location.
But shortly afterward, the account was suspended again. That came after Musk tweeted that a “crazy stalker” attacked a car in Los Angeles carrying his young son.
He also threatened legal action against Jack Sweeney, the 20-year-old college sophomore and programmer who started the @elonjet flight-tracking account, and “organizations who supported harm to my family.” It’s not clear what legal action Musk could take against Sweeney for an account that automatically posted public flight information.
Before Wednesday, the account had more than 526,000 followers.
“He said this is free speech and he’s doing the opposite,” Sweeney said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Sweeney said he woke up Wednesday to a flood of messages from people who saw that @elonjet was suspended and all its tweets had disappeared. Started in 2020 when Sweeney was a teenager, the account automatically posted the Gulfstream jet’s flights with a map and an estimate of the amount of jet fuel and carbon emissions it expended.
He logged into Twitter and saw a notice that the account was permanently suspended for breaking Twitter’s rules. But the note didn’t explain how it broke the rules.
Sweeney said he immediately filed an online form to appeal the suspension. Later, his personal account was also suspended, with a message saying it violated Twitter’s rules “against platform manipulation and spam.”
And then hours later, the flight-tracking account was back again, before it was shut down anew. Musk and Twitter’s policy team had sought to publicly explain Wednesday that Twitter now has new rules.
“Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation,” Musk tweeted. “This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info. Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok.”
“Doxxing” refers to disclosing online someone’s identity, address, or other personal details.
For Sweeney, it was the latest in a longtime tangle with the billionaire. The University of Central Florida student said Musk last year sent him a private message offering $5,000 to take the jet-tracking account down, citing security concerns. Musk later stopped communicating to Sweeney, who never deleted the account. Their exchange was first reported by tech news outlet Protocol earlier this year.
But after buying Twitter for $44 billion in late October, Musk said he would let it stay.
“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” Musk tweeted on Nov. 6.
Sweeney ran similar “bot” accounts tracking other celebrities’ airplanes. For hours after the suspension of the @elonjet account, other Sweeney-run accounts tracking private jets used by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and various Russian oligarchs were still live on Twitter.
But by later Wednesday, Twitter suspended all of them, including Sweeney’s personal account. He also operates accounts tracking Musk’s jet on rival social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment. Musk has promised to eradicate automatically generated spam from the platform, but Twitter allows automated accounts that are labeled as such — as Sweeney’s were.
Its note to Sweeney about the suspension, which he shared with the AP, said “You may not use Twitter’s services in a manner intended to artificially amplify or suppress information or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts people’s experience on Twitter.” But that rationale was different from what Musk explained later Wednesday.
Sweeney had days earlier accused Musk’s Twitter of using a filtering technique to hide his tweets, and revealed what he said were leaked internal communications showing a Twitter content-moderation executive in charge of the Trust and Safety division ordering her team to suppress the account’s reach. The AP has not been able to independently verify those documents.
Sweeney said that he suspects the short-lived ban stemmed from anger over those leaks.
Musk has previously criticized that filtering technique — nicknamed “shadowbanning” — and alleged that it was unfairly used by Twitter’s past leadership to suppress right-wing accounts. He has said the new Twitter will still downgrade the reach of negative or hateful messages but will be more transparent about it.
In his push to loosen Twitter’s content restrictions, he’s reinstated other high-profile accounts that were permanently banned for breaking Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct, harmful misinformation or incitements of violence.
Sweeney said he originally started the Musk jet tracker because “I was interested in him as a fan of Tesla and SpaceX.”
In the weeks since the Tesla CEO took over Twitter, the @elonjet account has chronicled Musk’s many cross-country journeys from his home base near Tesla’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, to various California airports for his work at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters and his rocket company SpaceX.
It showed Musk flying to East Coast cities ahead of major events, and to New Orleans shortly before a Dec. 3 meeting there with French President Emmanuel Macron.
In a January post pinned to the top of the jet-tracking account’s feed before it was suspended, Sweeney wrote that it “has every right to post jet whereabouts” because the data is public and “every aircraft in the world is required to have a transponder,” including Air Force One that transports the U.S. president.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Dave Chappelle asked the crowd at his comedy show to “make some noise for the world’s richest man.”
They did. Lots of booing.
It was a rather uncomfortable appearance for Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, at Chappelle’s show with Chris Rock on Sunday night at the Chase Center in San Francisco. At the end of the show, Chappelle was talking about the need to get along and communicate with people with different viewpoints and perspectives.
He invited Musk onstage. The billionaire obliged, wearing an “I Love Twitter” T-shirt. Loud boos filled the arena – along with some cheers, too.
Chappelle joked to Musk: “Sounds like some of those people you fired.” As the boos continued to ring out, the comic pointed out that “All you people booing, and I’m just pointing out the obvious — are in terrible seats.”
Twitter is going through massive changes since Musk took over the social media platform, with the first few weeks of tenure seeing widespread layoffs and the restoration of several blocked accounts, including those of former president Donald Trump and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The other performers from the night, including Rock, Donnell Rawlings from “Chappelle’s Show” and the hip hop group Black Star, came up on stage to say goodnight, while Musk also remained on stage. Chappelle asked Musk to repeat Rawlings’ catch phrase from their classic show – “I’m rich b—-” Rawlings went first, and then Musk complied.
That’s when Chappelle asked the crowd not to boo Musk as he needs him to open up the first comedy club on Mars. He also asked Musk if he could help Black Star’s Talib Kweli, who Chappelle said had been banned from Twitter.
Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion in October, responded by saying: “Twitter customer service here.”
He stayed onstage and shook hands with many of the performers. Attendees had been required to lock up their phones during the show, but a few videos of the encounter made their way online.
NEW YORK (AP) — For Alexandra Pelosi, the brutal attack on her father earlier this year was a culmination of vitriol that had been building for decades. Her family’s name, she says, has been weaponized for years, turned into a curse word for Republicans.
Then, in October, a man broke into the family’s San Francisco home and attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer, leaving him unconscious in a pool of his own blood.
The bubbling political rhetoric that led to that moment is chronicled in a new documentary premiering Tuesday night on HBO. The film, “Pelosi in the House,” directed and produced by Alexandra Pelosi, the youngest of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s five children, follows the elder Pelosi’s career over three decades.
The film offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at her political life, chronicling major milestones from her election to Congress in 1987 to becoming the first female House speaker in 2007 to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress was voting to certify Joe Biden’s presidential win.
“There’s a thread from the very first time they started taking ads out against Nancy Pelosi and turning her into a witch and turning our last name into a curse word. You can follow that thread 20 years later to my parents’ doorstep to my father getting attacked,” Alexandra Pelosi said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Pelosi’s film follows her mother, literally, through the Capitol and behind the scenes as she negotiates key votes for major pieces of legislation. It also depicts threats the family received, including a severed pig’s head that was delivered to the speaker’s San Francisco home just days before the attack on the Capitol.
The camera was also rolling on Jan. 6 as the House speaker prepared for the certification of the presidential election and as rioters began smashing through the doors and windows, violently shoving past overwhelmed police officers, leaving many officers bruised and bloodied.
The film includes extended clips recorded as Pelosi and other congressional leaders are rushed out of the Capitol and evacuated to Fort McNair, a nearby Army base. It captures frantic leaders calling the defense secretary, attorney general, then-Vice President Mike Pence and other officials trying to get assistance to the Capitol.
Some of the footage was played during a hearing of the House panel investigating the attack on the Capitol. Alexandra Pelosi and her team provided the footage to the committee.
“When they took Nancy Pelosi out of the chamber, she didn’t even get to take her cellphone. They rushed her out. And she was making calls to the defense secretary, the attorney general, the vice president, and I thought there should be a record of this,” Alexandra Pelosi said.
“She didn’t get to take the House clerk, who has a transcript of all this, to record what was happening. This was historic what was happening, and somebody needed to have a record of what was said,” she said.
Among those historic moments: discussion about whether to move the entire Congress – all 100 senators and 435 members of the House – by bus to Fort McNair and convene the joint session there to continue the certification of the election.
For the House speaker, the attack on the Capitol was one of the worst moments of her career, as her panicking staff members fled for cover, hiding silently under tables as rioters trashed the speaker’s office and called out “Nancy!” as they searched for Pelosi.
“She thinks that the Capitol is sacred ground,” Alexandra Pelosi says of her mother. “That’s why January 6 really tore at her soul. Because to her, the Capitol is sacred ground, and the rioters literally pooped inside the sacred ground.”
Less than two years after that attack, a man broke into the Pelosi family home in San Francisco, roused the speaker’s husband and reportedly demanded “Where is Nancy?” Officers arrived at the home after Paul Pelosi called 911 and they arrested the intruder, David DePape. He appears to have made racist and often rambling posts online, including some that questioned the results of the 2020 election, defended former President Donald Trump and echoed QAnon conspiracy theories.
The Pelosi family has also received death threats. The FBI has stepped in on several cases involving threats to Pelosi’s grandchildren and Alexandra Pelosi said she receives threatening messages nearly every day.
“It was so inevitable, because the rhetoric has just amped up so much over the past few years,” Alexandra Pelosi said as she looked out the window of her New York home.
As the family gathered for Thanksgiving this year, a tactical team of police officers holding rifles lined the perimeter of the house. Alexandra Pelosi has been struggling to explain to her children why so many people want to kill their grandmother.
“My son comes into the kitchen in the morning for breakfast. He’s like, ‘Hey, did you see that that guy that said that he wanted to hang Nancy Pelosi from a lamppost got convicted?’ That’s just weird for a teenager to be talking about his own grandmother, being hung from a lamppost,” she said.
“And as the mother you’re trying to say all humanity is good. We are decent people. No, we’re not.”
SAN FRANCISCO — Dave Chappelle asked the crowd at his comedy show to “make some noise for the world’s richest man.”
They did. Lots of booing.
It was a rather uncomfortable appearance for Elon Musk, Twitter‘s new owner, at Chappelle’s show with Chris Rock on Sunday night at the Chase Center in San Francisco. At the end of the show, Chappelle was talking about the need to get along and communicate with people with different viewpoints and perspectives.
He invited Musk onstage. The billionaire obliged, wearing an “I Love Twitter” T-shirt. Loud boos filled the arena – along with some cheers, too.
Chappelle joked to Musk: “Sounds like some of those people you fired.” As the boos continued to ring out, the comic pointed out that “All you people booing, and I’m just pointing out the obvious — are in terrible seats.”
Twitter is going through massive changes since Musk took over the social media platform, with the first few weeks of tenure seeing widespread layoffs and the restoration of several blocked accounts, including those of former president Donald Trump and Rep. Marjorie TaylorGreene.
The other performers from the night, including Rock, Donnell Rawlings from “Chappelle’s Show” and the hip hop group Black Star, came up on stage to say goodnight, while Musk also remained on stage. Chappelle asked Musk to repeat Rawlings’ catch phrase from their classic show – “I’m rich b—-” Rawlings went first, and then Musk complied.
That’s when Chappelle asked the crowd not to boo Musk as he needs him to open up the first comedy club on Mars. He also asked Musk if he could help Black Star’s Talib Kweli, who Chappelle said had been banned from Twitter.
Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion in October, responded by saying: “Twitter customer service here.”
He stayed onstage and shook hands with many of the performers. Attendees had been required to lock up their phones during the show, but a few videos of the encounter made their way online.
Holiday shopping could extend another month for Twitter’s biggest fans. In mid-January, the social media giant will auction off some of the surplus office items at its San Francisco, California, headquarters — including statues, kitchen items, furniture and more.
Along with standard office furniture, the auction will include some more advanced technology, such as smart TVs, mobile media centers and digital whiteboards, as well as commercial kitchen supplies, including ice machines, a heavy-duty griddle and espresso machines.
Some of the most unique items available, however, represent Twitter itself – a more than 3-foot tall Twitter bird statue and a massive 6-foot “@” sculpture planter that currently has artificial plants that can be replaced with live ones.
A more than 6-foot tall “@” sculpture from Twitter headquarters is one of many items to be auctioned off in January.
Heritage Global Partners
The auction sale, hosted by Heritage Global Partners, will run from January 17 at 7 a.m. PT to January 18 to 10 a.m. PT with opening bids ranging from $25 to $50.
“It’s pretty obvious that they’re sleeping at the office. There’s certainly an expectation given that beds, full queen-sized beds, mattresses, the whole thing, were brought into Twitter HQ over last weekend,” Forbes senior editor Katharine Schwab told CBS News on Friday. “And employees were not informed that this was happening.”
The bedrooms have prompted an investigation by the San Francisco Department of Buildings Inspection, who says the agency needs “to make sure the building is being used as intended.”
The “hardcore culture” laid out by Musk, Schwab said, will likely lead to more people leaving Twitter after the exodus that has already ensued. About two-thirds of the company’s staff have been fired or resigned so far.
Aside from behind-the-scenes issues, the platform itself has also seen controversy after controversy, with research showing a rise in hate speech since Musk’s takeover and many famed users, such as Elton John, vowing to leave the platform due to fears of misinformation.
When someone becomes homeless, the instinct is to ask what tragedy befell them. What bad choices did they make with drugs or alcohol? What prevented them from getting a higher-paying job? Why did they have more children than they could afford? Why didn’t they make rent? Identifying personal failures or specific tragedies helps those of us who have homes feel less precarious—if homelessness is about personal failure, it’s easier to dismiss as something that couldn’t happen to us, and harsh treatment is easier to rationalize toward those who experience it.
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But when you zoom out, determining individualized explanations for America’s homelessness crisis gets murky. Sure, individual choices play a role, but why are there so many more homeless people in California than Texas? Why are rates of homelessness so much higher in New York than West Virginia? To explain the interplay between structural and individual causes of homelessness, some who study this issue use the analogy of children playing musical chairs. As the game begins, the first kid to become chairless has a sprained ankle. The next few kids are too anxious to play the game effectively. The next few are smaller than the big kids. At the end, a fast, large, confident child sits grinning in the last available seat.
You can say that disability or lack of physical strength caused the individual kids to end up chairless. But in this scenario, chairlessness itself is an inevitability: The only reason anyone is without a chair is because there aren’t enough of them.
Now let’s apply the analogy to homelessness. Yes, examining who specifically becomes homeless can tell important stories of individual vulnerability created by disability or poverty, domestic violence or divorce. Yet when we have a dire shortage of affordable housing, it’s all but guaranteed that a certain number of people will become homeless. In musical chairs, enforced scarcity is self-evident. In real life, housing scarcity is more difficult to observe—but it’s the underlying cause of homelessness.
In their book, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, the University of Washington professor Gregg Colburn and the data scientist Clayton Page Aldern demonstrate that “the homelessness crisis in coastal cities cannot be explained by disproportionate levels of drug use, mental illness, or poverty.” Rather, the most relevant factors in the homelessness crisis are rent prices and vacancy rates.
Colburn and Aldern note that some urban areas with very high rates of poverty (Detroit, Miami-Dade County, Philadelphia) have among the lowest homelessness rates in the country, and some places with relatively low poverty rates (Santa Clara County, San Francisco, Boston) have relatively high rates of homelessness. The same pattern holds for unemployment rates: “Homelessness is abundant,” the authors write, “only in areas with robust labor markets and low rates of unemployment—booming coastal cities.”
Why is this so? Because these “superstar cities,” as economists call them, draw an abundance of knowledge workers. These highly paid workers require various services, which in turn create demand for an array of additional workers, including taxi drivers, lawyers and paralegals, doctors and nurses, and day-care staffers. These workers fuel an economic-growth machine—and they all need homes to live in. In a well-functioning market, rising demand for something just means that suppliers will make more of it. But housing markets have been broken by a policy agenda that seeks to reap the gains of a thriving regional economy while failing to build the infrastructure—housing—necessary to support the people who make that economy go. The results of these policies are rising housing prices and rents, and skyrocketing homelessness.
It’s not surprising that people wrongly believe the fundamental causes of the homelessness crisis are mental-health problems and drug addiction. Our most memorable encounters with homeless people tend to be with those for whom mental-health issues or drug abuse are evident; you may not notice the family crashing in a motel, but you will remember someone experiencing a mental-health crisis on the subway.
I want to be precise here. It is true that many people who become homeless are mentally ill. It is also true that becoming homeless exposes people to a range of traumatic experiences, which can create new problems that housing alone may not be able to solve. But the claim that drug abuse and mental illness are the fundamental causes of homelessness falls apart upon investigation. If mental-health issues or drug abuse were major drivers of homelessness, then places with higher rates of these problems would see higher rates of homelessness. They don’t. Utah, Alabama, Colorado, Kentucky, West Virginia, Vermont, Delaware, and Wisconsin have some of the highest rates of mental illness in the country, but relatively modest homelessness levels. What prevents at-risk people in these states from falling into homelessness at high rates is simple: They have more affordable-housing options.
With similar reasoning, we can reject the idea that climate explains varying rates of homelessness. If warm weather attracted homeless people in large numbers, Seattle; Portland, Oregon; New York City; and Boston would not have such high rates of homelessness and cities in southern states like Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi such low ones. (There is a connection between unsheltered homelessness and temperature, but it’s not clear which way the causal arrow goes: The East Coast and the Midwest have a lot more shelter capacity than the West Coast, which keeps homeless people more out of view.)
America has had populations of mentally ill, drug-addicted, poor, and unemployed people for the whole of its history, and Los Angeles has always been warmer than Duluth—and yet the homelessness crisis we see in American cities today dates only to the 1980s. What changed that caused homelessness to explode then? Again, it’s simple: lack of housing. The places people needed to move for good jobs stopped building the housing necessary to accommodate economic growth.
Homelessness is best understood as a “flow” problem, not a “stock” problem. Not that many Americans are chronically homeless—the problem, rather, is the millions of people who are precariously situated on the cliff of financial stability, people for whom a divorce, a lost job, a fight with a roommate, or a medical event can result in homelessness. According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, roughly 207 people get rehoused daily across the county—but 227 get pushed into homelessness. The crisis is driven by a constant flow of people losing their housing.
The homelessness crisis is most acute in places with very low vacancy rates, and where even “low income” housing is still very expensive. A study led by an economist at Zillow shows that when a growing number of people are forced to spend 30 percent or more of their income on rent, homelessness spikes.
Academics who study homelessness know this. So do policy wonks and advocacy groups. So do many elected officials. And polling shows that the general public recognizes that housing affordability plays a role in homelessness. Yet politicians and policy makers have generally failed to address the root cause of the crisis.
Few Republican-dominated states have had to deal with severe homelessness crises, mainly because superstar cities are concentrated in Democratic states. Some blame profligate welfare programs for blue-city homelessness, claiming that people are moving from other states to take advantage of coastal largesse. But the available evidence points in the opposite direction—in 2022, just 17 percent of homeless people reported that they’d lived in San Francisco for less than one year, according to city officials. Gregg Colburn and Clayton Aldern found essentially no relationship between places with more generous welfare programs and rates of homelessness. And abundantotherresearch indicates that social-welfare programs reduce homelessness. Consider, too, that some people move to superstar cities in search of gainful employment and then find themselves unable to keep up with the cost of living—not a phenomenon that can be blamed on welfare policies.
But liberalism is largely to blame for the homelessness crisis: A contradiction at the core of liberal ideology has precluded Democratic politicians, who run most of the cities where homelessness is most acute, from addressing the issue. Liberals have stated preferences that housing should be affordable, particularly for marginalized groups that have historically been shunted to the peripheries of the housing market. But local politicians seeking to protect the interests of incumbent homeowners spawned a web of regulations, laws, and norms that has made blocking the development of new housing pitifully simple.
This contradiction drives the ever more visible crisis. As the historian Jacob Anbinder has explained, in the ’70s and ’80s conservationists, architectural preservationists, homeowner groups, and left-wing organizations formed a loose coalition in opposition to development. Throughout this period, Anbinder writes, “the implementation of height limits, density restrictions, design review boards, mandatory community input, and other veto points in the development process” made it much harder to build housing. This coalition—whose central purpose is opposition to neighborhood change and the protection of home values—now dominates politics in high-growth areas across the country, and has made it easy for even small groups of objectors to prevent housing from being built. The result? The U.S. is now millions of homes short of what its population needs.
Los Angeles perfectly demonstrates the competing impulses within the left. In 2016, voters approved a $1.2 billion bond measure to subsidize the development of housing for homeless and at-risk residents over a span of 10 years. But during the first five years, roughly 10 percent of the housing units the program was meant to create were actually produced. In addition to financing problems, the biggest roadblock was small groups of objectors who didn’t want affordable housing in their communities.
Los Angeles isn’t alone. The Bay Area is notorious in this regard. In the spring of 2020, the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published an essay, “It’s Time to Build,” that excoriated policy makers’ deference to “the old, the entrenched.” Yet it turned out that Andreessen and his wife had vigorously opposed the building of a small number of multifamily units in the wealthy Bay Area town of Atherton, where they live.
The small-c conservative belief that people who already live in a community should have veto power over changes to it has wormed its way into liberal ideology. This pervasive localism is the key to understanding why officials who seem genuinely shaken by the homelessness crisis too rarely take serious action to address it.
The worst harms of the homelessness crisis fall on the people who find themselves without housing. But it’s not their suffering that risks becoming a major political problem for liberal politicians in blue areas: If you trawl through Facebook comments, Nextdoor posts, and tweets, or just talk with people who live in cities with large unsheltered populations, you see that homelessness tends to be viewed as a problem of disorder, of public safety, of quality of life. And voters are losing patience with their Democratic elected officials over it.
In a 2021 poll conducted in Los Angeles County, 94 percent of respondents said homelessness was a serious or very serious problem. (To put that near unanimity into perspective, just 75 percent said the same about traffic congestion—in Los Angeles!) When asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how unsafe “having homeless individuals in your neighborhood makes you feel,” 37 percent of people responded with a rating of 8 or higher, and another 19 percent gave a rating of 6 or 7. In Seattle, 71 percent of respondents to a recent poll said they wouldn’t feel safe visiting downtown Seattle at night, and 91 percent said that downtown won’t recover until homelessness and public safety are addressed. There are a lot of polls like this.
As the situation has deteriorated, particularly in areas where homelessness overruns public parks or public transit, policy makers’ failure to respond to the crisis has transformed what could have been an opportunity for reducing homelessness into yet another cycle of support for criminalizing it. In Austin, Texas, 57 percent of voters backed reinstating criminal penalties for homeless encampments; in the District of Columbia, 75 percent of respondents to a Washington Post poll said they supported shutting down “homeless tent encampments” even without firm assurances that those displaced would have somewhere to go. Poll data from Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles, among other places, reveal similarly punitive sentiments.
This voter exasperation spells trouble for politicians who take reducing homelessness seriously. Voters will tolerate disorder for only so long before they become amenable to reactionary candidates and measures, even in very progressive areas. In places with large unsheltered populations, numerous candidates have materialized to run against mainstream Democrats on platforms of solving the homelessness crisis and restoring public order.
By and large, the candidates challenging the failed Democratic governance of high-homelessness regions are not proposing policies that would substantially increase the production of affordable housing or provide rental assistance to those at the bottom end of the market. Instead, these candidates—both Republicans and law-and-order-focused Democrats—are concentrating on draconian treatment of people experiencing homelessness. Even in Oakland, California, a famously progressive city, one of the 2022 candidates for mayor premised his campaign entirely on eradicating homeless encampments and returning order to the streets—and managed to finish third in a large field.
During the 2022 Los Angeles mayoral race, neither the traditional Democratic candidate, Karen Bass, who won, nor her opponent, Rick Caruso, were willing to challenge the antidemocratic processes that have allowed small groups of people to block desperately needed housing. Caruso campaigned in part on empowering homeowners and honoring “their preferences more fully,” as Ezra Klein put it in The New York Times—which, if I can translate, means allowing residents to block new housing more easily. (After her victory, Bass nodded at the need to house more people in wealthier neighborhoods—a tepid commitment that reveals NIMBYism’s continuing hold on liberal politicians.)
“We’ve been digging ourselves into this situation for 40 years, and it’s likely going to take us 40 years to get out,” Eric Tars, the legal director at the National Homelessness Law Center, told me.
Building the amount of affordable housing necessary to stanch the daily flow of new people becoming homeless is not the project of a single election cycle, or even several. What can be done in the meantime is a hard question, and one that will require investment in temporary housing. Better models for homeless shelters arose out of necessity during the pandemic. Using hotel space as shelter allowed the unhoused to have their own rooms; this meant families could usually stay together (many shelters are gender-segregated, ban pets, and lack privacy). Houston’s success in combatting homelessness—down 62 percent since 2011—suggests that a focus on moving people into permanent supportive housing provides a road map to success. (Houston is less encumbered by the sorts of regulations that make building housing so difficult elsewhere.)
The political dangers to Democrats in those cities where the homelessness crisis is metastasizing into public disorder are clear. But Democratic inaction risks sparking a broader political revolt—especially as housing prices leave even many middle- and upper-middle-class renters outside the hallowed gates of homeownership. We should harbor no illusions that such a revolt will lead to humane policy change.
Simply making homelessness less visible has come to be what constitutes “success.” New York City consistently has the nation’s highest homelessness rate, but it’s not as much of an Election Day issue as it is on the West Coast. That’s because its displaced population is largely hidden in shelters. Yet since 2012, the number of households in shelters has grown by more than 30 percent—despite the city spending roughly $3 billion a year (as of 2021) trying to combat the problem. This is what policy failure looks like. At some point, someone’s going to have to own it.
This article appears in the January/February 2023 print edition with the headline “The Looming Revolt Over Homelessness.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
Today is Monday, Dec. 12, the 346th day of 2022. There are 19 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Dec. 12, 2015, nearly 200 nations meeting in Paris adopted the first global pact to fight climate change, calling on the world to collectively cut and then eliminate greenhouse gas pollution but imposing no sanctions on countries that didn’t do so.
On this date:
In 1787, Pennsylvania became the second state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
In 1870, Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina became the first Black lawmaker sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives.
In 1913, authorities in Florence, Italy, announced that the “Mona Lisa,” stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris in 1911, had been recovered.
In 1915, singer-actor Frank Sinatra was born Francis Albert Sinatra in Hoboken, New Jersey.
In 1917, during World War I, a train carrying some 1,000 French troops from the Italian front derailed while descending a steep hill in Modane (moh-DAN’); at least half of the soldiers were killed in France’s greatest rail disaster. Father Edward Flanagan founded Boys Town outside Omaha, Nebraska.
In 1977, the dance movie “Saturday Night Fever,” starring John Travolta, premiered in New York.
In 1985, 248 American soldiers and eight crew members were killed when an Arrow Air charter crashed after takeoff from Gander, Newfoundland.
In 1995, by three votes, the Senate killed a constitutional amendment giving Congress authority to outlaw flag burning and other forms of desecration against Old Glory.
In 2000, George W. Bush became president-elect as a divided U.S. Supreme Court reversed a state court decision for recounts in Florida’s contested election. The Marine Corps grounded all eight of its high-tech MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft following a fiery crash in North Carolina that killed four Marines. (The Osprey program was revived by the Pentagon in 2005.)
In 2010, the inflatable roof of the Minneapolis Metrodome collapsed following a snowstorm that had dumped 17 inches on the city. (The NFL was forced to shift an already rescheduled game between the Minnesota Vikings and New York Giants to Detroit’s Ford Field.)
In 2019, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson led his Conservative Party to a landslide victory in a general election that was dominated by Brexit.
In 2020, thousands of supporters of President Donald Trump gathered in Washington for rallies to back his desperate efforts to subvert the election that he lost to Joe Biden; sporadic fights broke out between pro-Trump and anti-Trump demonstrators after sundown, and four people were taken to the hospital with stab wounds. Charley Pride, the son of sharecroppers in Mississippi who became the first Black member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, died in Dallas at 86 from what a spokesman said were complications from COVID-19. John le Carre, the former spy whose novels defined the Cold War espionage thriller, died in England at the age of 89.
Ten years ago: North Koreans danced in the streets of their capital, Pyongyang, after the regime of Kim Jong Un succeeded in firing a long-range rocket in defiance of international warnings. Pope Benedict XVI sent his first tweet from his new account; it read, “Dear friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter. Thank you for your generous response. I bless all of you from my heart.”
Five years ago: Democrat Doug Jones won Alabama’s special Senate election over Republican Roy Moore, who had denied accusations of sexual misconduct with teenage girls that allegedly took place when he was in his 30s; it was the first Democratic Senate victory in Alabama in a quarter-century, and came despite an endorsement of Moore by President Donald Trump. San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, the city’s first Asian-American mayor, died at the age of 65 after collapsing while grocery shopping.
One year ago: Despite critical acclaim and two years-worth of anticipation, Steven Spielberg’s lavish “West Side Story” revival made little noise at the box office, with just $10.5 million in ticket sales on its opening weekend. Veteran anchor Chris Wallace announced at the end of his “Fox News Sunday” program that he was leaving Fox News after 18 years; CNN then announced that he was joining its new streaming service.
Today’s Birthdays: Former TV host Bob Barker is 99. Basketball Hall of Famer Bob Pettit is 90. Singer Connie Francis is 85. Singer Dionne Warwick is 82. Rock singer-musician Dickey Betts is 79. Hall of Fame race car driver Emerson Fittipaldi is 76. Actor Wings Hauser is 75. Actor Bill Nighy (ny) is 73. Actor Duane Chase (Film: “The Sound of Music”) is 72. Country singer LaCosta is 72. Gymnast-turned-actor Cathy Rigby is 70. Singer-musician Sheila E. is 65. Actor Sheree J. Wilson is 64. Pop singer Daniel O’Donnell is 61. International Tennis Hall of Famer Tracy Austin is 60. Rock musician Eric Schenkman (Spin Doctors) is 59. Author Sophie Kinsella is 53. News anchor Maggie Rodriguez is 53. Actor Jennifer Connelly is 52. Actor Madchen Amick is 52. Actor Regina Hall is 52. Country singer Hank Williams III is 50. Actor Mayim Bialik is 47. Model Bridget Hall is 45. Actor Lucas Hedges is 26. Actor Sky Katz is 18.
RENO, Nev. — Pulled from a sunken trunk at an 1857 shipwreck off the coast of North Carolina, work pants that auction officials describe as the oldest known pair of jeans in the world have sold for $114,000.
The white, heavy-duty miner’s pants with a five-button fly were among 270 Gold Rush-era artifacts that sold for a total of nearly $1 million in Reno last weekend, according to Holabird Western American Collections.
There’s disagreement about whether the pricey pants have any ties to the father of modern-day blue jeans, Levi Strauss, as they predate by 16 years the first pair officially manufactured by his San Francisco-based Levi Strauss & Co. in 1873. Some say historical evidence suggests there are links to Strauss, who was a wealthy wholesaler of dry goods at the time, and the pants could be a very early version of what would become the iconic jeans.
But the company’s historian and archive director, Tracey Panek, says any claims about their origin are “speculation.”
“The pants are not Levi’s nor do I believe they are miner’s work pants,” she wrote in an email to The Associated Press.
Regardless of their origin, there’s no denying the pants were made before the S.S. Central America sank in a hurricane on Sept. 12, 1857, packed with passengers who began their journey in San Francisco and were on their way to New York via Panama. And there’s no indication older work pants dating to the Gold Rush-era exist.
“Those miner’s jeans are like the first flag on the moon, a historic moment in history,” said Dwight Manley, managing partner of the California Gold Marketing Group, which owns the artifacts and put them up for auction.
Other auction items that had been entombed for more than a century in the ship’s wreckage 7,200 feet (2,195 meters) below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean included the purser’s keys to the treasure room where tons of Gold Rush coins and assayers ingots were stored. It sold for $103,200.
Tens of millions of dollars worth of gold has been sold since shipwreck recovery began in 1988. But last Saturday marked the first time any artifacts hit the auction block. Another auction is planned in February.
“There has never been anything like the scope of these recovered artifacts, which represented a time capsule of daily life during the Gold Rush,” said Fred Holabird, president of the auction company.
The lid of a Wells Fargo & Co. treasure box believed to be the oldest of its kind went for $99,600. An 1849 Colt pocket pistol sold for $30,000. A $20 gold coin minted in San Francisco in 1856 and later stamped with a Sacramento drug store ad brought $43,200.
Most of the passengers aboard the S.S. Central America left San Francisco on another ship — the S.S. Sonora — and sailed to Panama, where they crossed the isthmus by train before boarding the doomed ship. Of those on board when the S.S. Central America went down, 425 died and 153 were saved.
The unique mix of artifacts from high society San Franciscans to blue-collar workers piqued the interest of historians and collectors alike. The pants came from the trunk of an Oregon man, John Dement, who served in the Mexican-American War.
“At the end of the day, nobody can say these are or are not Levi’s with 100% certainty,” Manley said. But “these are the only known Gold Rush jean … not present in any collection in the world.”
Holabird, considered a Gold Rush-era expert in his over 50 years as a scientist and historian, agreed: “So far, no museum has come forward with another.”
Panek said Levi Strauss & Co. and Jacob Davis, a Reno tailor, received a U.S. Patent in May 1873 for “An Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings.” Months later, she said, the company began manufacturing the famous riveted pants — “Levi’s 501 jeans, the first modern blue jean.”
She said before the auction that the shipwreck pants have no company branding — no “patches, buttons or even rivets, the innovation patented in 1873.”
Panek added in emails to AP this week that the pants “are not typical of miner’s work pants in our archives.” She cited the color, “unusual fly design with extra side buttonholes” and the non-denim fabric that’s lighter weight “than cloth used for its earliest riveted clothing.”
Holabird said he told Panek while she examined the pants in Reno last week there was no way to compare them historically or scientifically to those made in 1873.
Everything had changed — the materials, product availability, manufacturing techniques and market distribution — between 1857 and the time Strauss came out with a rivet-enforced pocket, Holabird said. He said Panek didn’t disagree with him.
Levi Strauss & Co. has long maintained that up until 1873, the company was strictly a wholesaler and did no manufacturing of clothing.
Holabird believes the pants were made by a subcontractor for Strauss. He decided to “follow the money — follow the gold” and discovered Strauss’ had a market reach and sales “on a level never seen before.”
“Strauss was the largest single merchant to ship gold out of California in the 1857-1858 period,” Holabird said.
The list of the $1.6 million cargo that left San Francisco on the S.S. Sonora in August 1857 for Panama was topped by Wells Fargo’s $260,300 in gold. Five other big banks were next, followed by Levi Strauss with $76,441. Levi Strauss had at least 14 similar shipments averaging $91,033 each from 1856-58, Holabird said.
“Strauss is selling to every decent-sized dry goods store in the California gold regions, probably hundreds of them — from Shasta to Sonora and beyond,” Holabird said. “This guy was an absolute marketing genius, unforeseen.”
“In short, his huge sales create a cause to be manufactured. He would have to contract with producers for an entire production run.”
SAN FRANCISCO — Two women who lost their jobs at Twitter when billionaire Elon Musk took over are suing the company in federal court, claiming that last month’s abrupt mass layoffs disproportionately affected female employees.
The discrimination lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal challenges over Musk’s decimation of Twitter’s workforce through mass layoffs and firings.
Days after the world’s richest man bought the social media platform for $44 billion, the company told about half of employees on Nov. 4 that they no longer had a job but would get three months severance. The lawsuit filed in a San Francisco federal court this week alleges that 57% of female employees were laid off, compared to fewer than half of men, despite Twitter employing more men overall before the layoffs.
The cutbacks continued throughout November as Musk fired engineers who questioned or criticized him and gave all remaining employees the choice to resign with severance or sign a form pledging “extremely hardcore” work, long hours and dedication to Twitter’s new direction. Scores more lost their jobs after declining to make the pledge.
The lawsuit alleges that also disproportionately harmed women, “who are more often caregivers for children and other family members, and thus not able to comply with such demands.”
San Francisco-based Twitter started the year with about 7,500 employees worldwide, according to a filing with securities regulators. Now a private company, it hasn’t disclosed how many are left. Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
The lawsuit filed late Wednesday for former employees Carolina Bernal Strifling and Willow Wren Turkal on behalf of similarly-situated female workers makes the claim that 57% of female employees were laid off on Nov. 4, compared to 47% of male employees, citing a spreadsheet. The plaintiffs are scheduled to speak about the lawsuit on Thursday.
The gap is even greater for women in engineering-related roles — 63% were laid off, compared to 48% of men with engineering roles, according to the lawsuit filed by prominent Boston workers’ rights attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who ran an unsuccessful Democratic primary campaign for Massachusetts attorney general earlier this year.
“The mass termination of employees at Twitter has impacted female employees to a much greater extent than male employees – and to a highly statistically significant degree,” Liss-Riordan wrote. “Moreover, Elon Musk has made a number of publicly discriminatory remarks about women, further confirming that the mass termination’s greater impact on female employees resulted from discrimination.”
The lawsuit adds to a number of examples of discharged Twitter employees in the U.S. and elsewhere fighting back.
In Ireland, a senior executive is fighting the company in court to get her job back after she didn’t respond to Musk’s email demanding that employees pledge to “extremely hardcore” work or resign with severance pay.
Sinead McSweeney, Twitter’s global vice president for public policy, won a temporary injunction last week preventing Twitter from terminating her employment, according to Irish news reports. The company told the Irish High Court its human resources department intended to enter into talks with McSweeney to resolve the dispute, the reports said.
In a sworn statement to the court, McSweeney said many staffers in Twitter’s European headquarters in Dublin “expressed concerns and confusion” about Musk’s email.
McSweeney said she was forced to make a “completely artificial decision” that “placed me in an impossible and and extraordinarily unfair and unjust position” between accepting a “unilateral change” in her terms of employment or being fired through a “sham resignation.”
After her lawyers received assurances from Twitter that her employment was still valid, she tried to return to the Dublin office, but found her access pass didn’t work. Security said they’d need to check with human resources to verify she was still an employee.
“I felt utterly humiliated, deeply confused and was reduced to tears in a public place,” she said.
———
AP writer Kelvin Chan in London contributed to this report.
San Francisco regulators are looking into what appears to be employee bedrooms newly installed at Twitter’s headquarters.
As part of Elon Musk’s overhaul of the social media company, the billionaire CEO had part of Twitter’s offices outfitted with sleeping quarters, Forbes first reported this week.
Workers returning to the company’s San Francisco hub were greeted by “modest” bedrooms furnished with mattresses, drab curtains and conference-room monitors, according to the financial media outlet. There are roughly four to eight sleeping rooms per floor, Forbes said, citing an unnamed employee who shared photos of the setup. Some of the rooms appear to have been used, the worker said.
Users of the social media platform flagged the San Francisco Department of Buildings Inspection, and the agency soon confirmed it’s looking into the setup.
“We need to make sure the building is being used as intended. There are different building code requirements for residential buildings, including those being used for short-term stays. These codes make sure people are using spaces safely,” Patrick Hannan, the department’s communications director, told CBS News in a statement.
The department plans to launch an investigation within 72 hours and will conduct a site inspection of the building, Hannan added. “Everyone in San Francisco deserves a safe place to live, work, play and sleep and no one is above the law,” he said.
On Twitter, Musk mocked the city’s response, calling it an example of misplaced priorities.
“So city of SF attacks companies providing beds for tired employees instead of making sure kids are safe from fentanyl. Where are your priorities,” he said in a tweet directed at Mayor London Breed.
So city of SF attacks companies providing beds for tired employees instead of making sure kids are safe from fentanyl. Where are your priorities @LondonBreed!?https://t.co/M7QJWP7u0N
Musk has moved quickly to revamp the company since he took control in October after buying Twitter for $44 billion, firing most of the staff and telling remaining employees they need to be “super hardcore” as he tries to make it profitable. The billionaire is known for his hard-charging style and working long hours, with Musk previously saying that he often slept at a Tesla production plant to meet deadlines.
Given that reality, installing bedrooms at Twitter “makes sense to an extent” because workers were “already putting in late nights” at the company, one employee told Forbes. However, another said the beds amount to “another unspoken sign of disrespect” from Musk, even though they looked “comfortable.”
Police in San Francisco responded to State Sen. Scott Wiener’s home early Tuesday morning to search for potential bombs amid a new wave of threats against the senator, CBS News Bay Area reports.
A police spokesperson told the station they were called around 6 a.m. about reports of a bomb threat against an elected official. Officers arrived on scene, searched the home and didn’t find any devices. No injuries were reported.
In a statement, Wiener said he was the target of a bomb threat that listed his home address and threatened to shoot up his office at the State Capitol in Sacramento. According to the senator, the threatening email said “we will f—–g kill you” and called him a “pedophile” and “groomer.”
The threats against Wiener come amid recent online exchanges with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), whose Twitter account was reinstated following Elon Musk’s takeover, and with conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Greene used the term “groomer,” which refers to adults who build relationships with children in an effort to abuse them. The word has been used by some on the far right against LGBTQ people, trading on an old stereotype that gays are predators.
“This latest wave of death threats against me relates to my work to end discrimination against LGBTQ people in the criminal justice system and my work to ensure the safety of transgender children and their families,” Wiener said Tuesday. “I will always fight for the LGBTQ community — and for the community as a whole — and will never let these threats stop that work.”
“As a gay Jewish man, I represent everything, almost everything that they hate, and so much of what they hate about people who don’t fit their definition of how you’re supposed to be,” he said in a report that aired November 21.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The unabashedly liberal city of San Francisco became the unlikely proponent of weaponized police robots last week after supervisors approved limited use of the remote-controlled devices, addressing head-on an evolving technology that has become more widely available even if it is rarely deployed to confront suspects.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 8-3 last Tuesday to permit police to use robots armed with explosives in extreme situations where lives are at stake and no other alternative is available. The authorization comes as police departments across the U.S. face increasing scrutiny for the use of militarized equipment and force amid a yearslong reckoning on criminal justice.
A new California law requires police to inventory military-grade equipment such as flashbang grenades, assault rifles and armored vehicles, and seek approval from the public for their use.
So far, police in just two California cities — San Francisco and Oakland — have publicly discussed the use of robots as part of that process. Around the country, police have used robots over the past decade to communicate with barricaded suspects, enter potentially dangerous spaces and, in rare cases, for deadly force.
Dallas police became the first to kill a suspect with a robot in 2016, when they used one to detonate explosives during a standoff with a sniper who had killed five police officers and injured nine others.
The recent San Francisco vote has renewed a fierce debate over the ethics of using robots to kill a suspect — and the doors such policies might open. Largely, experts say, the use of such robots remains rare even as the technology advances.
Michael White, a professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University, said even if robotics companies present deadlier options at tradeshows, it doesn’t mean police departments will buy them. White said companies made specialized claymores to end barricades and scrambled to equip body-worn cameras with facial recognition software, but departments didn’t want them.
“It’s hard to say what will happen in the future, but I think weaponized robots very well could be the next thing that departments don’t want because communities are saying they don’t want them,” White said.
San Francisco official David Chiu, who authored the California bill to inventory militarized equipment when he was in the state legislature, said communities deserve more transparency from law enforcement and to have a say in the equipment’s use.
San Francisco “just happened to be the city that tackled a topic that I certainly didn’t contemplate when the law was going through the process, and that dealt with the subject of so-called killer robots,” said Chiu, now the city attorney.
In 2013, police used a robot to lift a tarp as part of a manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspect, finding him hiding underneath it. Three years later, Dallas police officials sent a bomb disposal robot packed with explosives into an alcove of El Centro College to end an hourslong standoff with sniper Micah Xavier Johnson, who had opened fire on officers while a demonstration against police brutality was ending.
Police detonated the explosives, killing the suspect. A grand jury declined charges against the officers, and then-Dallas Police Chief David O. Brown was widely praised for his handling of the shooting and the standoff.
“There was this spray of doom about how police departments were going to use robots in the six months after Dallas,” said Mark Lomax, former executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association. “But since then, I had not heard a lot about that platform being used to neutralize suspects … until the San Francisco policy was in the news.”
The question of potentially lethal robots has rarely cropped up in public discourse in California as more than 500 police and sheriffs departments seek approval for their military-grade weapons use policy. Oakland police abandoned the idea of arming robots with shotguns after public backlash, but will outfit them with pepper spray.
Many policies are vague as to armed robots, and some departments may presume they have implicit permission to deploy them, said John Lindsay-Poland of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, who has been monitoring implementation of the law.
“I do think most departments are not prepared to use their robots for lethal force,” he said, “but if asked, I suspect there are other departments that would say ‘we want that authority.’”
San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin first proposed prohibiting police from using robot force against any person. While the department said it would not outfit robots with firearms, it wanted the option to attach explosives to breach barricades or disorient a suspect.
The approved policy allows only a limited number of high-ranking officers to authorize use of robots as a deadly force — and only when lives are at stake and after exhausting alternative force or de-escalation tactics, or concluding they would not be able to subdue the suspect otherwise.
San Francisco police say the dozen functioning ground robots the department already has have never been used to deliver an explosive device, but are used to assess bombs or provide eyes in low-visibility situations.
“We live in a time when unthinkable mass violence is becoming more commonplace. We need the option to be able to save lives in the event we have that type of tragedy in our city,” San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said in a statement.
Three city supervisors who felt otherwise joined dozens of protestors outside City Hall on Monday, the day before the board is set to take a second and final vote on the policy. The demonstrators held signs protesting the use of deadly robots and a large banner that read “We all saw that movie… No Killer Robots.”
“There is no way that I am going to sit by silently and allow a policy as dangerous and reckless as this to be adopted and go into effect,” Supervisor Dean Preston told the crowd.
The Los Angeles Police Department does not have any weaponized robots or drones, said SWAT Lt. Ruben Lopez. He declined to detail why his department did not seek permission for armed robots, but confirmed they would need authorization to deploy one.
“It’s a violent world, so we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” he said.
There are often better options than robots if lethal force is needed, because bombs can create collateral damage to buildings and people, said Lomax, the former head of the tactical officers group. “For a lot of departments, especially in populated cities, those factors are going to add too much risk,” he said.
Last year, the New York Police Department returned a leased robotic dog sooner than expected after public backlash, indicating that civilians are not yet comfortable with the idea of machines chasing down humans.
Police in Maine have used robots at least twice to deliver explosives meant to take down walls or doors and bring an end to standoffs.
In June 2018, in the tiny town of Dixmont, Maine, police had intended to use a robot to deliver a small explosive that would knock down an exterior wall, but instead collapsed the roof of the house.
The man inside was shot twice after the explosion, survived and pleaded no contest to reckless conduct with a firearm. The state later settled his lawsuit against the police challenging that they used the explosives improperly.
In April 2020, Maine police used a small charge to blow a door off a home during a standoff. The suspect was fatally shot by police when he exited through the damaged doorway and fired a weapon.
As of this week, the state attorney general’s office had not completed its review of the tactics used in the 2018 standoff, including the use of the explosive charge. A report on the 2020 incident only addressed the fatal gunfire.
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Lauer reported from Philadelphia. AP reporter David Sharp contributed from Portland, Maine.
Supervisors in San Francisco voted Tuesday to give city police the ability to use potentially lethal, remote-controlled robots in emergency situations — following an emotionally charged debate that reflected divisions on the politically liberal board over support for law enforcement.
The vote was 8-3, with the majority agreeing to grant police the option despite strong objections from civil liberties and other police oversight groups. Opponents said the authority would lead to the further militarization of a police force already too aggressive with poor and minority communities.
According to CBS San Francisco, at the start of the meeting, Supervisor Aaron Peskin acknowledged the controversy, saying the robots “speak to fears about a dystopian robot killing future.”
“I understand the concern and fear that that can evoke in our society,” Peskin said.
Supervisor Connie Chan, a member of the committee that forwarded the proposal to the full board, said she understood concerns over use of force but that “according to state law, we are required to approve the use of these equipments. So here we are, and it’s definitely not a easy discussion.”
The San Francisco Police Department said it does not have pre-armed robots and has no plans to arm robots with guns. But the department could deploy robots equipped with explosive charges “to contact, incapacitate, or disorient violent, armed, or dangerous suspect” when lives are at stake, SFPD spokesperson Allison Maxie said in a statement.
“Robots equipped in this manner would only be used in extreme circumstances to save or prevent further loss of innocent lives,” she said.
Supervisors amended the proposal Tuesday to specify that officers could use robots only after using alternative force or de-escalation tactics, or after concluding they would not be able to subdue the suspect through those alternative means. Only a limited number of high-ranking officers could authorize use of robots as a deadly force option.
“San Francisco is not a warzone, and these kinds of devices are not needed to protect this city,” said Supervisor Dean Preston, who was one of three supervisors who voted against the proposal, per CBS San Francisco.
San Francisco police currently have a dozen functioning ground robots used to assess bombs or provide eyes in low visibility situations, the department says. They were acquired between 2010 and 2017, and not once have they been used to deliver an explosive device, police officials said.
But explicit authorization was required after a new California law went into effect this year requiring police and sheriffs departments to inventory military-grade equipment and seek approval for their use.
The state law was authored last year by San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu while he was an assembly member. It is aimed at giving the public a forum and voice in the acquisition and use of military-grade weapons that have a negative effect on communities, according to the legislation.
A federal program has long dispensed grenade launchers, camouflage uniforms, bayonets, armored vehicles and other surplus military equipment to help local law enforcement.
In 2017, then-President Donald Trump signed an order reviving the Pentagon program after his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, curtailed it in 2015, triggered in part by outrage over the use of military gear during protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the shooting death of Michael Brown.
San Francisco police said late Tuesday that no robots were obtained from military surplus, but some were purchased with federal grant money.
Like many places around the U.S., San Francisco is trying to balance public safety with treasured civilian rights such as privacy and the ability to live free of excessive police oversight. In September, supervisors agreed to a trial run allowing police to access in real time private surveillance camera feeds in certain circumstances.
Debate on Tuesday ran more than two hours with members on both sides accusing the other of reckless fear mongering.
Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who voted in favor of the policy authorization, said he was troubled by rhetoric painting the police department as untrustworthy and dangerous.
“I think there’s larger questions raised when progressives and progressive policies start looking to the public like they are anti-police,” he said. “I think that is bad for progressives. I think it’s bad for this Board of Supervisors. I think it’s bad for Democrats nationally.”
Board President Shamann Walton, who voted against the proposal, pushed back, saying it made him not anti-police, but “pro people of color.”
“We continuously are being asked to do things in the name of increasing weaponry and opportunities for negative interaction between the police department and people of color,” he said. “This is just one of those things.”
The San Francisco Public Defender’s office sent a letter Monday to the board saying that granting police “the ability to kill community members remotely” goes against the city’s progressive values. The office wanted the board to reinstate language barring police from using robots against any person in an act of force.
On the other side of the San Francisco Bay, the Oakland Police Department has dropped a similar proposal after public backlash.
The first time a robot was used to deliver explosives in the U.S. was in 2016, when Dallas police sent in an armed robot that killed a holed-up sniper who had killed five officers in an ambush.
The World Health Organization has recommended a new name for monkeypox, asking countries to forget the original term in favor of a new one, “mpox,” that scientists hope will help destigmatize the disease. But in the United States, the request seems to be arriving late. The outbreak here has already been in slow retreat for months—and has already left many Americans’ minds.
About 15 cases are now being recorded among Americans each day, less than 4 percent of the tally when the surge was at its worst. After a sluggish and bungled early rollout, tests and treatments for the virus are more available; more than a million doses of the two-shot Jynneos smallpox vaccine have found their way into arms. San Francisco and New York—two of the nation’s first cities to declare mpox a public-health emergency this past summer—have since allowed those orders to expire; so have the states of New York and Illinois. “I think this is the endgame,” says Caitlin Rivers, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
But “endgame” doesn’t mean “over”—and mpox will be with us for the foreseeable future. The U.S. outbreak is only now showing us its long and ugly tail: 15 daily cases is not zero daily cases; even as the number of new infections declines, inequities are growing. Black and Latino people make up a majorityof new mpox cases and are contracting the disease at three to five times the rate of white Americans, but they have received proportionately fewer vaccines. “Now it’s truly the folks who are the most marginalized that we’re seeing,” says Ofole Mgbako, a physician and population-health researcher at New York University. “Which is also why, of course, it’s fallen out of the news.” If the virus sticks around (as it very likely could), and if the disparities persist (as they almost certainly will), then mpox could end up saddling thousands of vulnerable Americans each year with yet another debilitating, stigmatized, and neglected disease.
At this point, there’s not even any guarantee that this case downturn will persist. “I’m not convinced that we’re out of the woods,” says Sara Bares, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, in Omaha. Immunity, acquired through infection or vaccines, is now concentrated among those at highest risk, says Jay Varma, a physician and epidemiologist at Weill Cornell Medicine. But researchers still don’t know how well those defenses can stave off another infection, or how long they might last—gaps in knowledge that may be tough to fill, now that incidence is so low. And although months of advocacy and outreach from the LGBTQ community have cut down on risky sexual activities, many cautionary trends will eventually reset to their pre-outbreak norm. “We know extensively from other sexually transmissible infections that behavior change is not usually the most sustained response,” says Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, an infectious-disease physician at Emory University.
At the same time, this year’s mpox outbreaks are stranger and more unwieldy than those that came before. A ballooning body of evidence suggests that people can become infectious before they develop symptoms, contrary to prior understanding; some physicians are concerned that patients, especially those who are immunocompromised, might remain infectious after the brunt of visible illness resolves, says Philip Ponce, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and the medical director of San Antonio’s Kind Clinic. (Some 40 percent of Americans who have been diagnosed with mpox are living with HIV.) Researchers still don’t have a good grip on which bodilyfluids and types of contact may be riskiest over the trajectory of a sickness. Cases are still being missed by primary-care providers who remain unfamiliar with the ins and outs of diagnosis and testing, especially in people with darker skin. And although this epidemic has, for the most part, continued to affect men who have sex with men, women and nonbinary people are getting sick as well, to an underappreciated degree.
Intel on the only mpox-fighting antiviral on the shelf, a smallpox drug called tecovirimat, also remains concerningly scant, even as experts worry that the virus could develop resistance. The treatment has been given a conditionalgreenlight for use in people who are currently, or at risk of becoming, severely sick. Anecdotally, it seems to work wonders, shaving days or weeks off the painful, debilitating course of symptoms that can send infected people into long-term isolation. But experts still lack rigorous data in humans to confirm just how well it works, Bares, who’s among the scientists involved in a nationwide study of the antiviral, told me. And although clinical trials for tecovirimat are under way, she added, in the U.S., they’re “struggling to enroll patients” now that infections have plummeted to such a sustained low. It’s a numerical problem as well as a sociocultural one. “The urgency with which people answer questions declines as case counts go down,” Varma told me.
Recent CDC reports show that a growing proportion of new infections aren’t being reported with a known sexual-contact history, stymieing efforts at contact tracing. That might in part be a product of the outbreak’s gradual migration from liberal, well-off urban centers, hit early on in the epidemic, to more communities in the South and Southwest. “In small towns, the risk of disclosure is high,” Bares told me. In seeking care or vaccination, “you’re outing yourself.” When mpox cases in Nebraska took an unexpected nosedive earlier this fall, “a colleague and I asked one another, ‘Do you think patients are afraid to come in?’” Those concerns can be especially high in certain communities of color, Ponce told me. San Antonio’s Latino population, for instance, “tends to be much more conservative; there’s much more stigma associated with one being LGBT at all, let alone being LGBT and trying to access biomedical interventions.”
Hidden infections can become fast-spreading ones. Monitoring an infectious disease is far easier when the people most at risk have insurance coverage and access to savvy clinicians, and when they are inclined to trust public-health institutions. “That’s predominantly white people,” says Ace Robinson, the CEO of the Pierce County AIDS Foundation, in Washington. Now that the mpox outbreak is moving out of that population into less privileged ones, Robinson fears “a massive undercount” of cases.
Americans who are catching the virus during the outbreak’s denouement are paying a price. The means to fight mpox are likely to dwindle, even as the virus entrenches itself in the population most in need of those tools. One concern remains the country’svaccination strategy, which underwent a mid-outbreak shift: To address limited shot supply, the FDA authorized a new dosing method with limited evidence behind it—a decision that primarily affected people near the back of the inoculation line. The method is safe but tricky to administer, and it can have tough side effects: Some of Titanji’s patients have experienced swelling near their injection site that lasted for weeks after their first dose, and now “they just don’t want to get another shot.”
The continued shift of mpox into minority populations, Robinson told me, is also further sapping public attention: “As long as this is centered in BIPOC communities, there’s going to be less of a push.” Public interest in this crisis was modest even at its highest point, says Steven Klemow, an infectious-disease physician at Methodist Dallas Medical Center and the medical director of Dallas’s Kind Clinic. Now experts are watching that cycle of neglect reinforce itself as the outbreak continues to affect and compress into marginalizedcommunities, including those that have for decades borne a disproportionate share of the burden of sexually associated infections such as syphilis, gonorrhea, and HIV. “These are not the groups that necessarily get people jumping on their feet,” Titanji told me.
Some of the people most at risk are moving on as well, Robinson told me. In his community in Washington, he was disappointed to see high rates of vaccine refusal at two recent outreach events serving the region’s Black and American Indian populations. “They had no knowledge of the virus,” he told me. Titanji has seen similar trends in her community in Georgia. “There’s some sense of complacency, like, ‘It’s no longer an issue, so why do I need to get vaccinated?’” she said.
The tide seems unlikely to shift. Even tens of thousands of cases deep into the American outbreak, sexual-health clinics—which have been on the front lines of the mpox response—remain short on funds and staff. Although the influx of cases has slowed, Ponce and Klemow are still treating multiple mpox patients a week while trying to keep up the services they typically offer—at a time when STI rates are on a years-long rise. “We’re really assuming that this is going to become another sexually associated disease that is going to be a part of our wheelhouse that we’ll have to manage for the indefinite future,” Klemow told me. “We’ve had to pull resources away from our other services that we provide.” The problem could yet worsen if the national emergency declared in August is allowed to expire, which would likely curb the availability of antivirals and vaccines.
Rivers still holds out hope for eliminating mpox in the U.S. But getting from low to zero isn’t as easy as it might seem. This current stretch of decline could unspool for years, even decades, especially if the virus finds a new animal host. “We’ve seen this story play out so many times before,” Varma told me. Efforts to eliminate syphilis from the U.S. in the late ’90s and early 2000s, for instance, gained traction for a while—then petered out during what could have been their final stretch. It’s the classic boom-bust cycle to which the country is so prone: As case rates fall, so does interest in pushing them further down.
Our memories of public-health crises never seem to linger for long. At the start of this mpox outbreak, Titanji told me, there was an opportunity to shore up our systems and buffer ourselves against future epidemics, both imported and homegrown. The country squandered it and failed to send aid abroad. If another surge of mpox cases arrives, as it very likely could, she said, “we will again be going back to the drawing board.”
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Thanksgiving afternoon game between the New York Giants and Dallas Cowboys set the mark for the most-watched NFL regular-season game on record.
The Cowboys 28-20 victory on Fox averaged 42 million viewers, according to Nielsen, surpassing the 41.55 million average for the Dec. 3, 1990, Monday night game between the Giants and San Francisco 49ers on ABC. Average viewer record numbers date to 1988.
The average viewership for the three Thanksgiving Day games on Thursday was 33.5 million, surpassing the previous high of 32.9 million in 1993, when two games were aired.
The average was also up 6% over last year’s average of 31.6 million.
The night game between the New England Patriots and Minnesota Vikings averaged 25.9 million, the second-highest audience for a Thanksgiving night contest. The Vikings’ 33-26 victory was surpassed only by the 2015 game between the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers (27.8 million).
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The Golden State Warriors were named in a lawsuit Monday alleging the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX used the reigning NBA champions to fraudulently promote its platform.
The Twitter logo is displayed on the exterior of Twitter headquarters on October 26, 2022 in San Francisco, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
After Twitter told employees it would be closing its offices until Monday, new owner and CEO Elon Musk has called engineering staff into the San Francisco headquarters office, according to internal emails obtained by CNBC.
Late Thursday, Twitter sent out a companywide email saying its offices would be closed from Friday until Monday, and badge access would cut off during that temporary closure.
Then, in a pair of widely distributed emails sent at the start of business Friday, Musk called for “anyone who actually writes software” to report to Twitter’s headquarters by Friday afternoon. First, though, he asked them to send him a high-level report of the best code they have worked on in the last six months.
After the initial call for engineers to come into the office, he also sent a follow-up encouraging people to fly to San Francisco to present in person. He said, in one of his emails, he would be working late into the night at the company’s headquarters office Friday and again on Saturday morning.
Musk said the point of sharing all this code and meeting with him in the office would be to do “short, technical interviews” that would help him “better understand the Twitter tech stack.”
Musk said those authorized to work remotely could request to speak with him by video. But quixotically he also said, “Only those who cannot get to Twitter HQ or have a family emergency are excused.”
Their new “Chief Twit,” as Musk humorously calls himself, had issued an ultimatum a day earlier telling them they would need to commit to his vision for Twitter 2.0, and agree to work “long hours at high intensity.”
Three employees who resigned Thursday told CNBC they still had access to some internal systems at Twitter on Friday morning.
One believed that so many people from Twitter’s human resources and IT teams had resigned or been laid off that it may take a long time for the company to figure out whose access to email, Slack and other systems should be switched off.
These people asked to remain unnamed, citing fear of professional repercussions.
Here are the emails sent from Elon Musk to employees at Twitter early on Friday (transcribed by CNBC) over the first few hours of the business day in San Francisco:
From: Elon Musk
To: Team
Subj. All Software Engineers
Date: Nov. 18, 2022 [time stamp removed]
Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2 p.m. today.
Before doing so, please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past 6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code.
Thanks,
Elon
From: Elon Musk
To: Team
Subj. All Software Engineers
Date: Nov. 18, 2022 [time stamp removed]
If you’re working remotely, please email the request below nonetheless and I will try to speak to you via video. Only those who cannot physically get to Twitter HQ or have a family emergency are excused.
These will be short, technical interviews that allow me to better understand the Twitter tech stack.
Thanks,
Elon
From: Elon Musk
To: Team at Twitter
Subj. All Software Engineers
Date: Nov. 18, 2022 [time stamp removed]
If possible, I would appreciate it if you could fly to SF to be present in person. I will be at Twitter HQ until midnight and then back again tomorrow morning.
Elon Musk emailed Twitter staff on Friday asking that any employees who write software code report to the 10th floor of Twitter’s office in San Francisco at 2 p.m., according to an email reviewed by Reuters.
“There will be short, technical interviews that allow me to better understand the Twitter tech stack,” Musk wrote in the memo.
The billionaire said, “I would appreciate it if you could fly to SF to be present in person,” adding that he would be at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters until midnight and would return Saturday morning.
Musk ordered employees to email him a summary of what their software code has “achieved” in the past six months, “along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code.”
He added that he would try to speak with remote employees by video. Musk also said that only people who cannot physically get to the company’s headquarters or have a family emergency would be excused.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky joins “CBS Mornings” to share the company’s updated process to become a host on the platform, price transparency for guests and how he is listing a room in his own San Francisco home.
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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Ballot measures in the U.S. to build more affordable housing and protect tenants from soaring rent increases were plentiful and fared well in last week’s midterm elections, a sign of growing angst over record high rents exacerbated by inflation and a dearth of homes.
Voters approved capping rent increases at below inflation in three U.S. cities: Portland, Maine, and Richmond and Santa Monica in California. Another measure was leading in the vote count in Pasadena outside of Los Angeles. In Florida, voters in Orange County, which includes Orlando, overwhelmingly passed a rent stabilization measure but a court ruling means it’s unlikely to go into force.
There were also dozens of proposals on the Nov. 8 ballot raising money for and authorizing construction of affordable housing, said Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Many passed.
“Housing is a winning campaign issue. It’s one that voters show up for and it’s one that should cause policymakers at all levels to act,” said Yentel, adding that even a loss can be a win.
“The act of organizing itself builds strength, it builds power, and it builds connections and it builds momentum,” she said.
Calls for more affordable homes and policies to keep tenants housed have been growing as homelessness increases even in places outside coastal urban centers such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. Moreover, teachers, police and other public servants say they cannot afford to live in the places where they work, resulting in nightmare commutes and staffing shortages.
“The market is out of whack, the government needs to step in and regulate it so there can be stability,” said Leah Simon-Weisberg, a tenants rights attorney and chair of the rent board in Berkeley, California.
Opponents say rent control increases costs for landlords, the majority of whom are mom-and-pop operations with a handful of units each. Restricting rents will spur disinvestment in rental stock and discourage construction of affordable housing.
“Decades of empirical research have shown this policy does not help the underlying cause of the housing shortage that we have now. If anything, it makes the housing challenge more acute,” said Ben Harrold, public policy manager at the National Apartment Association.
Most states preempt cities and counties from enacting rent stabilization, the result of lobbying by the real estate industry in the 1970s. Still, in cities accustomed to rent regulation voters approved stronger rent caps and more tenant protections.
The California cities of Richmond and Santa Monica easily approved measures to tighten existing rent increase maximums to 3%, significantly less than the state cap of 10%. In Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco, voters expanded eviction protections for tenants.
In Portland, Maine, 55% of voters approved a measure to slim down an existing rent cap, from 100% of the consumer price index to 70%. The proposal also dictates a host of other tenant protections, such as limiting security deposits to one month’s rent and requiring 90 days notice for a rent increase or lease termination.
A ballot measure in Pasadena to cap annual rent increases at 75% of the consumer price index had more than 52% of the vote late Tuesday, and the campaign declared victory. The campaign’s finance coordinator, Ryan Bell, said organizers went all out to reach voters but also, the timing was right.
“The pandemic really made it clear that people who are renting their housing are insecure by definition. Their housing could be taken away from them in some cities for no cause and a massive rent increase is functionally an eviction,” he said. “There’s just more and more stories.”
Meanwhile, the rent cap overwhelmingly approved by voters in Orange County, Florida, is on hold. A court ruled it didn’t meet what it acknowledged was an “extremely high bar” set by a state law that requires a housing emergency be identified before a rent cap can be put in place.
Nearly 60% of voters approved the measure after rents that jumped 25% between 2020 and 2021 and another double-digit increase this year. The Board of County Commissioners in Orange was scheduled to meet Thursday to decide whether to appeal.
Tenant advocates and landlords do agree on the need for more affordable housing, and cities and counties in Arizona, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas and Ohio were among those that approved bond measures for more units, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
In Colorado, voters approved a sweeping measure to set aside roughly $300 million a year for programs that curb homelessness and promote affordable housing. But in Denver, where Zillow data shows median rental prices jumped $600 in two years, 58% of voters rejected a $12 million proposal to expand free legal counsel for all tenants facing eviction.
The eviction fund would have been financed by a $75 annual fee on landlords.
For Drew Hamrick, vice president of government affairs for the Apartment Association of Metro Denver, the opposing argument “that resonated the most was that this $12 million tax was going to end up being paid for by the consumer regardless of what political outlook you have.”
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Michael Casey in Boston, Patrick Whittle in Portland, Maine, and Jesse Bedayn in Denver contributed.
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Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
