news@sfbg.com

With my partner-in-crime Keith Chandler at the wheel, we're driving through San Francisco on our way to Stanford University Law School for the Three Strikes Summit, a deeply personal topic to both of us. Three Strikes is partly why I served 15 years in prison, and Stanford's Three Strikes Project is a big reason why I was released earlier this year.Read more »

rebecca@sfbg.com

In January, Mayor Ed Lee appeared on the PBS NewsHour to talk up the city's Zero Waste program, an initiative to eliminate all landfilled garbage by 2020 by diverting 100 percent of the city's municipal waste to recycling or compost. "We're not going to be satisfied," with the 80 percent waste diversion already achieved, Lee told program host Spencer Michels. "We want 100 percent zero waste. This is where we're going."Read more »

tredmond@sfbg.com

It's going to take longer, sometimes, to get from here to there. Acres of urban space are going to have to change form. Grocery shopping will be different. Streets may have to be torn up and redirected. The rules for the development of as many as 100,000 new housing units in San Francisco will have to be rewritten.

That's the only way this city — and cities across the country — can meet the climate-change goals that just about everyone agrees are necessary.Read more »

steve@sfbg.com

This was the moment these indignant motorists had been waiting for. The elected supervisors were finally going to get the unelected bureaucrats at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency to back off of plans to manage street parking and install new parking meters in their Western SoMa, northeast Mission, Potrero Hill, and Dogpatch neighborhoods. Read more »

steve@sfbg.com

When a four-year-long court injunction against new bicycling improvement projects in San Francisco was finally lifted in 2010, there was great hope in the cycling community that the city would rapidly move forward on completing its long-planned network of bike lanes.Read more »

Hacking Oakland's budget

Sporting trucker hats, nose rings, and in activist Shawn McDougal's case, a white tee with "Revolutionary" printed across the front in simple black lettering, the young, energetic activists assembled at Sudo Room, an Oakland hacker space, come across as unlikely ballot-initiative proponents. Nevertheless, in a few short weeks, the all-volunteer Community Democracy Project crew intends to hit the pavement and begin collecting signatures for a measure to introduce "participatory budgeting" to Oakland city government.Read more »

rebecca@sfbg.com

David Graeber is renowned among occupiers and idealists as an intellectual founder, or anti-leader as it were, of the Occupy Wall Street encampment that sprung up in Zucotti Park in the fall of 2011. He's an organizer, an anarchist, a professor of anthropology and sociology at Goldsmiths University of London, a former instructor at Yale, and the author of several books, including Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a tome tracing the concept of debt back to the roots of Western civilization.Read more »

steve@sfbg.com

May Day, also known as International Workers Day, began in the United States, but it's been all-but ignored by most Americans for decades. And on this May Day, 2013, in the city of San Francisco, it's a good time to note that the growing wealth and income gaps between the rich and the rest of us are reaching historic highs — a dangerous situation, many economists warn — and hardly anyone at City Hall is talking about it.Read more »

The first week in April was a rough time for Connie Salguero. The Filipina nursing assistant, who says she would've been eligible to retire in two years, reported to her shift at the University of California San Francisco medical center at Mt. Zion on April 1 — and was told she was laid off. Two days after that, she was forced out of her home through an eviction, but fortuitously met an elderly Filipina woman who said Salguero could stay with her until she gets back on her feet.Read more »

steve@sfbg.com

San Francisco restaurants that have been cheating their customers and employees — charging diners for city-required healthcare coverage that they aren't fully providing to workers — will finally be exposed in the coming weeks, with some notable names in foodie circles among the likely culprits.Read more »