San Francisco’s overdose deaths have sharply increased since the start of December, an alarming jump that comes amid the closure of the city’s Tenderloin Center — an informal place where people were able to use drugs under medical supervision. An average of 58 people died each month in the three months before the center’s closing on Dec. 4, compared with an average of at least 68 in the three months following, The Chronicle’s analysis of new preliminary data from the medical examiner’s office shows. New numbers released for January show it was the highest monthly total in three years.

"We sincerely hope that resolving this matter early in the legal process will offer the Brace family a measure of peace and healing," university chancellor Jerry Jackson said in a statement. The lawsuit had said that Brace, a native of Louisville, became "profoundly disoriented" after the difficult first day of practiceat an area of the campus known as "Punishment Hill". The university junior had been diagnosed with ADHD and narcolepsy, forcing him to take medications that require proper hydration, especially during exercise. Despite his medical needs, the lawsuit said that two coaches would mock him when he asked for a water break, saying: "Do you think you are special and are allowed more water?" On the day of his death, Brace completed numerous sprints and then "sat down out of exhaustion", the lawsuit said. After being told that he would be kicked off the team, he is said to have performed an additional run to the top of the hill before stopping and saying: "I'm done. I can't do this anymore." "Suffering from heat stroke, Grant begged 'I need water, somebody help me,'" the lawsuit said, adding that he told people that he felt like he was dying and was speaking in gibberish phrases.

Newly released genetic data gathered from a live food market in Wuhan has linked Covid-19 with raccoon dogs, adding weight to the theory that infected animals sold at the site started the coronavirus pandemic, researchers involved in the work say. Swabs collected from stalls at the Huanan seafood market in the two months after it was shut down on 1 January 2020 were previously found to contain both Covid and human DNA. When the findings were published last year, Chinese researchers stated that the samples contained no animal DNA. That conclusion has now been overturned by an international team of scientists. Their analysis of gene sequences posted by the Chinese team to the scientific database Gisaid found that some of the Covid-positive samples were rich in DNA from raccoon dogs. Traces of DNA belonging to other mammals, including civets, were also present in Covid-positive samples.

Before last year, the public monthly meetings of the board of Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Sarasota, Florida, were sleepy affairs, typically drawing just a handful of attendees. The hospital, a 98-year-old public healthcare system that serves more than a million patients a year, was considered a crown jewel of the community: A highly rated public safety net institution composed of two hospital buildings and several clinics, its core mission is to serve people who are uninsured or underinsured. At a typical board meeting, members would discuss the hospital’s priorities, from finding healthcare providers who practiced in specialties that the community lacked to building a new cancer center. So it came as a surprise late last year when attendance at the board meetings began to grow: More than a hundred people showed up in December’s monthly board meeting, then 200 in January, and 300 in February. The attendees, some traveling from hours away, lambasted the hospital for adhering to the CDC’s recommended Covid protocols, accusing emergency care physicians of murdering patients. “We were getting people complaining, and they’ve never even had a family member in the hospital, and they’re talking about the horrible treatment they’ve received,” Dr. James Fiorica, the hospital’s chief medical officer, told me. “You wonder if there is a different agenda than how we treated the particular patient.” Indeed, the campaign against Sarasota Memorial appears to be part of a coordinated effort of a varied constellation of right-wing groups and individuals. Some have deep ties to the anti-vaccine movement; others are part of the “parents’ rights” movement that has sought to stack school boards with conservative members; a few are ardent Big Lie promoters with ties to the January 6 insurrection. The result is an increasingly unhinged and threatening campaign against the very healthcare workers who saw the community through the worst of the pandemic, says a hospital spokesperson, Kim Savage. “Our board meetings are open to the public, and for the first time, we feel like we have to wand people,” she says. “We worry that the language these groups use might incite someone who is not stable.”

In the early 2000s, Katie O’Bryant was a homeless teenager living on the streets of Berkeley and San Francisco. Like many people who use drugs, she found that different substances played very specific roles in her life.  As someone who was opiate dependent, O’Bryant needed to use heroin to function on a day-to-day basis. But she also took other drugs recreationally to get high and relied on stimulants to balance out heroin’s sedative effects—something that dealers took into account by selling heroin and cocaine as a packaged deal.  “When I first started doing dope, they used to sell one-on-ones in the mission. All the dope came with coke,” she said, recalling that small balls of black tar heroin would be sold alongside little baggies of powdered cocaine. Today, O’Bryant works in harm reduction as the Outreach Coordinator for West Oakland Punks with Lunch, a group that provides food, clean needles, and social services to Oakland’s unhoused population, which includes many people who use drugs. She explained that in her work on the streets of Oakland, she sees a lot of poly-substance use—the term that health workers use to describe someone who routinely uses multiple substances. 

Behind the scenes, one publisher went to great lengths to avoid mentions of race, even in the story of Rosa Parks.

2018 HAS BROKEN CONTAINMENT AND IS BLEEDING THROUGH TO THE PRESENT! SUMMON THE LANGOLIERS!

What happened at Silicon Valley Bank will likely enter the broader return-to-office debate.

The actor passed away on Friday morning.

If you see your name in a Sunday Sport headline, you can be sure something funny’s going on. It could be funny ha ha, or funny peculiar or, as in this case, both. I’d been sent the article on my phone. The headline read as follows: “I make a GRAND A DAY cos they think I’m ADRIAN CHILES.” The pictures featured an all but naked man with his bits obscured. He looked a little like me. Gingerly, I expanded the image so I could read the text. As soon as I’d got the gist of the story, recoiling in horror, I pinched the page smaller again so I could read no more. I’d seen as much as I could stand for a moment. The bare bones of it are as follows: a bloke in Leeds who looks a bit like me is earning money on the internet as my naked lookalike. I wouldn’t blame you if at this point you, as I did, stopped reading. Trust me, it gets worse. After a few deep breaths – long exhale, short inhale, as the mindfulness manuals advise – I flicked the screen bigger again. I could only bear to read it one paragraph at a time. Quick look, shrink it again, deep breaths, re-expand, read, shrink and so on.

Friends remember 23-year-old Eden Knight as an inspiring force — and claim that a U.S. security firm convinced her to leave a safe home

The Biden administration on Monday announced that it is approving the largest-ever proposed oil drilling project on U.S. public lands, in a direct repudiation of research warning that new fossil fuel development must cease to preserve a safe climate. The Interior Department approved ConocoPhillips Alaska's Willow project, located in one of the fastest-warming regions of the world. If completed, this project would produce the equivalent of an estimated 263 million tons of carbon dioxide over 30 years. This is about the same as building 20 new gas plants and running them for the same time period; burning 8.8 billion pounds of coal every year for 30 years; or adding 1.7 million cars to the road. To avoid the perception of bias, news outlets sometimes choose to highlight the political implications of a climate fight, rather than the actual climate implications. This choice can be legitimate, particularly if the publication is primarily politics-focused. But we know from experience that this choice is sometimes made because the political battle is more dramatic and easier to understand. And when it’s made too often by too many publications, it risks creating a news environment where readers understand the political importance of big climate fights, but not the actual importance for the planet they live on. So we decided to take a deeper look into Guenther’s claims to see if these choices are actually chronic. Here’s what we found.

A century ago, Thomas Midgley Jr. was responsible for two phenomenally destructive innovations. What can we learn from them today? In the fall of 1940, at age 51, Midgley contracted polio, and the dashing, charismatic inventor soon found himself in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. At first he took on his disability with the same ingenuity that he applied to maintaining his legendary lawn, analyzing the problem and devising a novel solution to it — in this case, a mechanized harness with pulleys attached to his bed, allowing him to clamber into his wheelchair each morning without assistance. At the time, the contraption seemed emblematic of everything Midgley had stood for in his career as an inventor: determined, innovative thinking that took on a seemingly intractable challenge and somehow found a way around it. Or at least it seemed like that until the morning of Nov. 2, 1944, when Midgley was found dead in his bedroom. The public was told he had been accidentally strangled to death by his own invention. Privately, his death was ruled a suicide. Either way, the machine he designed had become the instrument of his death. While The Times praised him as “one of the nation’s outstanding chemists” in its obituary, today Midgley is best known for the terrible consequences of that chemistry, thanks to the stretch of his career from 1922 to 1928, during which he managed to invent leaded gasoline and also develop the first commercial use of the chlorofluorocarbons that would create a hole in the ozone layer.

Despite being exposed as bogus, some right-wing organizations keep coming back from the dead. No one knows who is funding them. by Steven Monacelli March 16, 2023, 7:54 AM, CDT Steven Monacelli is a white man with short brown hair and a curved brown mustache. He's wearing a green v-neck. In September 2020, a large, white transportation truck wrapped in splashy adverts drove through the streets of downtown Dallas. “Tell City Council to Defund Themselves—Not the Police,” read one side. “Don’t let Dallas become Portland,” read the other. It was a direct response to the Black Lives Matter movement in Dallas and was a preposterous display for more than its garishness: Dallas had not seen major unrest since June 2020, when police tear-gassed hundreds and arrested others for protesting on a bridge. But it served to introduce Keep Dallas Safe (KDS)—a shadowy pro-police group with unknown funders—into Dallas politics. Within months of KDS arriving on the scene, my reporting linked a KDS spokesperson to an astroturf scheme in New Orleans. Like many cities across America, Dallas is home to its fair share of dirty politics. But in recent years, a strange phenomenon has plagued the city. KDS is an example of an organization portraying itself as local and “grassroots”—as evidenced by a name that emphasizes a locality—but that have funding sources that are unclear. Political scientists often refer to groups that appear to be local and citizen-based but receive outside funding or fail to disclose funding sources as “astroturf” groups. It’s not merely that Dallas is home to one suspicious “grassroots” group. It’s that multiple astroturf groups continue to amble along like shambling zombies, repeatedly coming back to life despite critical coverage exposing them as empty husks. One telltale sign is their three-word names: Dallas Justice Now, Save Texas Kids, and Protect Texas Kids, all of which appear to be local but decline to reveal their funding sources.

Tracking down the rumor it was Philly’s fault the fast food chain pulled the fuzzy green monster from promotional materials. The story goes that O’Grimacey was discontinued due to choice comments made by an actor playing the mascot at an event in Philly, where he spoke out in favor of the Irish Republican Army, the paramilitary group that claimed the mantle of earlier IRAs active during the Irish War of Independence.

In his emotional acceptance speech after winning the best supporting actor award at the Oscars, Ke Huy Quan spoke of his journey as a young boy on a boat from Vietnam, via a refugee camp in Hong Kong, to California. "I spent a year in a refugee camp and somehow I ended up here on Hollywood's biggest stage," he said. "They say stories like this only happen in the movies. I cannot believe it's happening to me. This is the American dream." He is the first person of Vietnamese origin to win an Oscar, and one of two nominated this year - the other was Hong Chau in The Whale, whose family also fled from Vietnam on a boat. Yet in Vietnam the official reaction has been subdued. Reports in the media, which is nearly all state-controlled, have said little about Ke Huy Quan or his background.

Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland. The first thing that strikes me when I enter the metaverse is the people, the avatars, their — Where are their fucking legs? Bodies stop at the waist in Horizon Worlds, which is Facebook’s — excuse me, Meta’s — home base in the metaverse. So the price of entry to this virtual paradise is the surrender of your bottom half. Frankly, it makes the metaverse feel like a cult. Legs? We don’t even miss them! It’s hard not to read the fact that half of you disappears when you enter Horizon Worlds as symbolic somehow, and it has been a focal point for the widespread derision that’s been aimed at Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. Apparently legs, legs that move in concert with the user, are very hard to do. The engineers are working on it, supposedly, and the people I meet in the metaverse are constantly telling me how “legs are coming,” like the creatures of Narnia whispering to one another that “Aslan is on the move.”

A Black family from Georgia is fighting for the return of their five young children from the custody of the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services after a traffic stop in Manchester, Tenn. last month. Bianca Clayborne and Deonte Williams were on Interstate 24 heading to a family funeral in Chicago — kids asleep in the back of the car — when a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer pulled them over for “dark tint and traveling in the left lane while not actively passing,” according to Feb. 17 citations issued to the couple. The trooper searched the family’s Dodge Durango then arrested Williams for possession of five grams of marijuana, a misdemeanor in Tennessee. Clayborne was cited but not arrested. Clayborne said she was told she was free to leave with the children, but could follow a THP car to find her way to the Coffee County Justice Center in order to bond Williams out. Six hours after the traffic stop, as Clayborne sat on a bench in the criminal justice center waiting for Williams’ release, the five children — a breast-feeding baby now four months old along with 2-, 3-, 5- and 7-year-olds — were forcibly removed from her side while an officer restrained her from reaching for her crying baby, she said. Unbeknownst to Clayborne, DCS had sought and received an emergency court order placing the kids in state custody while she waited for Williams. The DCS petition said there was probable cause that the children were neglected and there was no “less drastic” alternative to taking the children from their parents.

For the two weeks that the Hackneys’ baby girl lay in a Pittsburgh hospital bed weak from dehydration, her parents rarely left her side, sometimes sleeping on the fold-out sofa in the room. They stayed with their daughter around the clock when she was moved to a rehab center to regain her strength. Finally, the 8-month-old stopped batting away her bottles and started putting on weight again. “She was doing well and we started to ask when can she go home,” Lauren Hackney said. “And then from that moment on, at the time, they completely stonewalled us and never said anything.” The couple was stunned when child welfare officials showed up, told them they were negligent and took their daughter away. “They had custody papers and they took her right there and then,” Lauren Hackney recalled. “And we started crying.”

HOUSTON (AP) — Texas officials on Wednesday announced a state takeover of Houston's nearly 200,000-student public school district, the eighth-largest in the country, acting on years of threats and angering Democrats who assailed the move as political.