Alex Shultz

San Francisco has all sorts of intriguing political bouts this upcoming election year. Mayor London Breed is vulnerable to an increasingly crowded lane of fellow moderates; District Attorney Brooke Jenkins will have to run again, this time even further removed from blaming her political bogeyman Chesa Boudin; and Rep. Nancy Pelosi recently decided to run for another term in Congress, slamming the brakes on a BART train’s worth of candidates hoping to expedite their ambitions. And yet, it’s Super…

A makeshift tribute to Dianne Feinstein opened at San Francisco City Hall on Friday, just hours after her death was announced. Feinstein, 90, died Thursday night, according to a statement from her office. Her cause of death is not yet known. Before her lengthy tenure as a California senator, Feinstein served as a San Francisco supervisor and then mayor. City Hall honored her Friday by lowering its flags to half-mast and putting out a remembrance signing station on the fourth floor south gallery,…

On Sept. 29, Dianne Feinstein, 90, died of natural causes. She had cast a vote in the Senate less than a day prior. Feinstein’s death came after months of declining mental and physical health, and years of speculation about her fitness to serve. And yet, her death was described as a “complete shock” by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is among the many prominent Democrats now attempting to recast Feinstein’s final years in public service as heroic, rather than a damning symbol of a broken syste…

Former Los Angeles Dodgers MVP Steve Garvey announced his candidacy for the California Senate seat previously held by Dianne Feinstein on Tuesday — and he did his best to shout out San Francisco Giants fans in the process. Garvey, 74, has plenty of name recognition from his nearly two decades playing for the Dodgers and the San Diego Padres. He’s also a Republican in a state that voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary, for Joe Biden over Donald Trump in the 2020 general by a nea…

On Thursday, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) was charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent for the Egyptian government. It was the latest federal indictment filed against Menendez, who refused to resign last month after he was charged with bribery, fraud and extortion. The charges against Menendez are wide-ranging and significant; hundreds of thousands of dollars of alleged bribes, conveyed in cash and gold bars, were found in Menendez’s home, and he and his wife have been accused of enric…

San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins backpedaled Monday after claiming that a weekend event in the city was “pro-Hamas” — though she stopped short of an apology. Saturday’s “All Out for Gaza” rally in San Francisco, which drew thousands of participants according to Mission Local, was in response to the killings and forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza. At least 2,750 people have been killed and roughly 9,700 people have been injured by recent Israeli air strikes in Gaza, accordi…

Oakland A’s owner John Fisher was called out this week by now-retired pitcher Trevor May in a viral rant: “Take mommy and daddy’s money somewhere else, dork,” May said during his farewell speech on Twitch. Fisher, the locally despised billionaire heir to the Gap Inc. fortune who’s trying to move the A’s to Las Vegas, is indeed spending his money elsewhere: politics. On Sept. 29, Fisher donated to the political campaign of Texas Rep. Jodey Arrington, who repeatedly objected to the 2020 presidenti…

On Thursday, the Oakland A’s encouraged their more than 600,000 followers on X (formerly Twitter) to take a stand against the bullying of LGBTQ youth. They posted about Spirit Day — a now-annual event that the advocacy organization GLAAD promotes to “support LGBTQ youth by creating clear possibility models for them to thrive and be represented in the world.” “On #SpiritDay and every day, we are proud to support LGBTQ+ youth everywhere,” the A’s post reads. Meanwhile, A’s owner John Fisher has s…

The bargaining unit representing San Francisco teachers reached a tentative agreement on a new contract with the San Francisco Unified School District at 6 a.m. on Friday, according to the United Educators of San Francisco union. UESF members will need to ratify the agreement, but coming to a tentative deal signals a strong likelihood that San Francisco’s school district will avoid a strike, an action that 97% of voting UESF members had voted in favor of last week after months of stalled negotia…

For the first time since 2011, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference — an annual economic forum featuring delegates from 21 member economies, including the United States, China, Japan, Canada, Mexico and Russia — will take place in America. More specifically, from Nov. 11 to 17, APEC will be in San Francisco. In a press release last week, the mayor’s office referred to the upcoming event as “the largest convening of world leaders in San Francisco since the UN Charter was signed…

On the afternoon of Friday, Oct. 13, Michael Eisen — a tenured UC Berkeley professor and the editor-in-chief of the open-access journal eLife — reposted an Onion article on X, formerly Twitter. “Bingo,” he wrote in a response to The Onion link, titled “Dying Gazans Criticized For Not Using Last Words To Condemn Hamas.” In another post, he wrote, “The Onion speaks with more courage, insight and moral clarity than the leaders of every academic institution put together. I wish there were a @TheOnio…

California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently completed a weeklong trip to China, where he met with President Xi Jinping and other high-ranking Chinese officials. The ostensible purpose of the trip was to discuss climate change, and specifically, more cooperation between California and China on climate-related matters. But as with all things involving Newsom, it’s fair to wonder whether there may have been ulterior (presidential) motives to his diplomatic visit. This story isn’t about what Newsom’s trip…

In July 2022, Elon Musk tried to renege on purchasing Twitter for $44 billion. Anxious to finalize a deal with Musk at a price point that was generally considered an enormous overpay, Twitter sued Musk. On Oct. 28, 2022, the day before the trial was supposed to start, Musk and Twitter came to terms on the original $44 billion asking price. A year later, Musk is now claiming that he was actually compelled to buy Twitter — now X — out of an overriding sense of civic duty, because he needed to save…

An 81-year-old Bay Area woman in declining health, one of hundreds of Palestinian Americans trapped in Gaza amid Israeli airstrikes, has filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of California in a last-ditch effort to compel the United States government to help her evacuate the war zone. At a press conference Thursday afternoon, one of the woman’s grandchildren, Sayed Bseiso, joined attorney Ghassan Shamieh at the Phillip Burton Federal Building in San Francisco to discuss the case. SFGATE is ho…

Shasta County’s Tuesday election is arguably the most watched in California on an otherwise muted Election Day. That’s not because of what’s on the ballot in the rural county’s special election, which includes choosing a new school board member. Instead, people are eyeing Shasta — four hours north of San Francisco, with a population of less than 200,000 — to see how residents consumed by conspiracies and the politicians they’ve elected will react to a recently enacted state voting law, and the o…

Former President Donald Trump is back to blaming one of his favorite scapegoats, Sen. Mitch McConnell, after Kentucky voters chose to reelect Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear on Tuesday night. Election Day 2023 was relatively light on big races, with notable exceptions in Ohio — where voters ultimately chose to legalize marijuana and protect abortion access — and Kentucky, which had an off-year governor’s race. Despite high approval ratings, polling indicated that incumbent governor Beshear was vuln…

Familial squabbling over the bountiful estate of wealthy financier Richard Blum and the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein has grown more acrimonious and accusatory since Feinstein’s death in late September, according to a recent court filing reviewed by SFGATE. The filing reveals heated discussions about multimillion-dollar properties, “Himalayan stuff” and “the automobiles at Aspen.” A few weeks prior to Feinstein’s death at age 90, Judge Roger Picquet ordered Feinstein’s daughter Katherine and some o…

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is considering leaving Congress entirely after getting booted from the House Speaker position in early October, CNN recently reported. He’s allegedly going down swinging. On Tuesday, NPR’s Claudia Grisales reported on a tiff between McCarthy and Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), who was one of eight Republicans to vote in favor of ousting McCarthy from leadership. Burchett was being interviewed by Grisales on Capitol Hill when McCarthy strolled by and “shoved Burchett,”…

Hours after arriving in San Francisco on Tuesday for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, President Joe Biden — joined by Vice President Kamala Harris, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and San Francisco Mayor London Breed, among others — attended a glitzy fundraiser for his 2024 re-election campaign. Just a half-block away, hundreds of protesters marched in support of Palestinians and a Gaza cease-fire. The fundraiser, referred to as a “super event” by in-the-know sources who spoke to Polit…

President Joe Biden led off his remarks at an APEC welcome reception in San Francisco on Wednesday evening by semi-jokingly floating a future Gavin Newsom presidency. “I want to talk about Gov. Newsom. Want to thank him,” Biden said at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, according to a transcript released by the White House. “He’s been one hell of a governor, man. Matter of fact, he could be anything he wants. He could have the job I’m looking for.” Newsom, the governor of California, has for ye…