MeidasTouch Aug 31, 2025 The MeidasTouch Podcast MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on Donald Trump getting busted on tape committing unthinkable actions against people in the United States. Visit https://meidasplus.com for more!

A close-up of the Wikipedia website through a magnifying glass on the laptop on June 12, 2012.

 (Photo: Getty Images)

The effort furthers the goals of the Heritage Foundation, which has launched a plan to “identify and target Wikipedia editors” using a number of underhanded tactics.

STEPHEN PRAGER

Aug 28, 2025 (CommonDreams.org)

A pair of House Republicans is moving forward with an investigation that will seek to reveal the identities of Wikipedia editors who have edited articles to include information that portrays Israel negatively.

On Wednesday, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chair of the House Oversight Committee, and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), chair of the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation, sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that owns the free encyclopedia.

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The representatives asked Wikimedia’s CEO, Maryana Iskander, for “assistance in obtaining documents and communications regarding individuals (or specific accounts) serving as Wikipedia volunteer editors who violated Wikipedia platform policies as well as your own efforts to thwart intentional, organized efforts to inject bias into important and sensitive topics.”

The letter requested information about “nation state actors” or “academic institutions” that may have been involved in efforts to “edit or influence content identified as possibly violating Wikipedia policies.”

A spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation told The Hill that they were reviewing the request.

“We welcome the opportunity to respond to the committee’s questions and to discuss the importance of safeguarding the integrity of information on our platform,” the spokesperson said.

The GOP investigation coincides with a long-standing objective of the far-right Heritage Foundation, which has accused Wikipedia of anti-conservative bias and promoting content that portrays Israel in a negative light, and sought to unmask the identities of the internet users who run it.

The letter sent by Comer and Mace requests that Wikimedia provide Congress with “records showing identifying and unique characteristics of accounts (such as names, IP addresses, registration dates, user activity logs) for editors” who have been “subject to actions” by Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, which resolves internal disputes between editors.

It was, in essence, a request by Congress for Wikipedia to “dox” many of its editors.

“In the culture of Wikipedia editing, it is common for individuals to use pseudonyms to protect their privacy and avoid personal threats,” wrote tech writer and Wikipedia expert Stephen Harrison for Slate in February. “Revealing an editor’s personal information without their consent, a practice known as doxing, is a form of harassment that can result in a user’s being permanently banned from the site.”

Of chief concern to the legislators is investigating Wikipedia’s handling of content related to Israel. They cited a report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a pro-Israel lobbying group, which the legislators said “raised troubling questions about potentially systematic efforts to advance antisemitic and anti-Israel information in Wikipedia articles related to conflicts with the state of Israel.”

The ADL report makes the allegation that 30 “bad-faith” Wikipedia editors, whose identities are not public, were collaborating to edit pages about the Israel-Palestine conflict by “spotlighting criticism of Israel and downplaying Palestinian terrorist violence and antisemitism,” and in the process violating Wikipedia’s commitment to neutrality.

That report, however, has been heavily criticized, including by some of the academics it cited. In a piece for The Forward, Shira Klein, whose research on Wikipedia’s documentation of the Holocaust appears in the report, said the ADL “inaccurately” used her work, and the work of others, as part of its “ramped-up efforts to police public discourse about Israel,” and quoted other researchers who felt the same.

Klein described the study’s interpretation of the facts as “very skewed” and said it was reliant “on a faulty premise: that criticism of Israel or Zionism is inherently antisemitic.”

“To establish foul play, the ADL would need to demonstrate that Wikipedia content about Israel and Zionism regularly expresses as fact ideas that diverge from broadly held scholarly opinions on the matters in question,” Klein said. “But where is the evidence of editors repeatedly misrepresenting or contradicting peer-reviewed literature? There is none. The report simply wants us to take the ADL’s word for it.”

The ADL’s report, as well as a similar report from the Atlantic Council alleging that Wikipedia editors had conspired to spread pro-Kremlin propaganda, are the sole pieces of evidence cited by Comer and Mace in their request for identifying information on Wikipedia’s editors.

However, right-wing efforts to undermine Wikipedia’s independence and attack the privacy of its editors go back much further.

In January, documents obtained by The Forward’s Arno Rosenfeld revealed a secret plan by Heritage, the think tank behind the authoritarian Project 2025 playbook, to “identify and target Wikipedia editors” who the organization said were “abusing their position.”

Among the methodologies it directed Heritage employees to use include “analyzing text patterns, usernames, and technical data through data breach analysis, fingerprinting, [human intelligence], and technical targeting.”

The targeting methods also included “creating fake Wikipedia user accounts to try to trick editors into identifying themselves by sharing personal information or clicking on malicious tracking links that can identify people who click on them.”

According to Rosenfeld, “The Heritage Foundation sent the pitch deck outlining the Wikipedia initiative to Jewish foundations and other prospective supporters of Project Esther, its roadmap for fighting antisemitism and anti-Zionism.”

Jewish Voice for Peace has described Project Esther as Heritage’s “blueprint for using the federal government and private institutions to dismantle the Palestine solidarity movement and broader US civil society, under the guise of ‘fighting antisemitism.'”

“Even if you take issue with how the site is currently framing the conflict, that doesn’t justify Heritage’s plan,” Harrison wrote. “Targeting Wikipedia editors personally, instead of debating their edits on the platform, marks a dangerous escalation.”

Coming amid the Trump administration’s crackdowns against campus protests and efforts to deport immigrants over pro-Palestine speech, critics have described the House Republican investigation as the latest GOP attempt to censor criticism and the spread of unflattering information about Israel.

Adam Johnson, a co-host for the political podcast Citations Needed, described it in a post on X as “House Republicans working with the ADL and Atlantic Council to discipline Wikipedia into parroting the Israeli and NATO line.”

Johnson noted that this push was coming as the clear majority of Americans, including an overwhelming number of Democrats, now oppose US support for Israel, with many now believing the country is committing a genocide.

“Rather than end the genocide,” Johnson said, “the response instead is to continue firing, doxing, smearing, and attempting to censor inconvenient narratives.”

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STEPHEN PRAGER

Stephen Prager is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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US Ambassador to the United Nations Dorothy Shea speaks on August 27, 2025. 

(Photo: US Mission to the United Nations/X)

While acknowledging that “hunger is a real issue in Gaza,” the US ambassador to the UN repeated a debunked claim that the world’s leading authority on starvation lowered its standards to declare a famine.

BRETT WILKINS

Aug 27, 2025 (CommonDreams.org)

Every member nation of the United Nations Security Council except the United States on Wednesday affirmed that Israel’s engineered famine in Gaza is “man-made” as 10 more Palestinians died of starvation amid what UN experts warned is a worsening crisis.

Fourteen of the 15 Security Council members issued a joint statement calling for an immediate Gaza ceasefire, release of all remaining hostages held by Hamas, and lifting of all Israeli restrictions on aid delivery into the embattled strip, where hundreds of Palestinians have died from starvation and hundreds of thousands more are starving.

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“Famine in Gaza must be stopped immediately,” they said. “Time is of the essence. The humanitarian emergency must be addressed without delay and Israel must reverse course.”

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“We express our profound alarm and distress at the IPC data on Gaza, published last Friday. It clearly and unequivocally confirms famine,” the statement said, referring to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification’s declaration of Phase 5, or a famine “catastrophe,” in the strip.

“We trust the IPC’s work and methodology,” the 14 countries declared. “This is the first time famine has been officially confirmed in the Middle East region. Every day, more persons are dying as a result of malnutrition, many of them children.”

“This is a man-made crisis,” the statement stresses. “The use of starvation as a weapon of war is clearly prohibited under international humanitarian law.”

Israel, which is facing a genocide case at the UN’s International Court of Justice, denies the existence of famine in Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the International Court of Justice for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder and forced starvation.

The 14 countries issuing the joint statement are: Algeria, China, Denmark, France, Greece, Guyana, Pakistan, Panama, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, Somalia, and the United Kingdom.

While acknowledging that “hunger is a real issue in Gaza and that there are significant humanitarian needs which must be met,” US Ambassador to the UN Dorothy Shea rejected the resolution and the IPC’s findings.

“We can only solve problems with credibility and integrity,” Shea told the Security Council. “Unfortunately, the recent report from the IPC doesn’t pass the test on either.”

Shea also repeated the debunked claim that the IPC’s “normal standards were changed for [the IPC famine] declaration.”

The Security Council’s affirmation that the Gaza famine is man-made mirrors the findings of food experts who have accused Israel of orchestrating a carefully planned campaign of mass starvation in the strip.

The UN Palestinian Rights Bureau and UN humanitarian officials also warned Wednesday that the famine in Gaza is “only getting worse.”

“Over half a million people currently face starvation, destitution, and death,” the humanitarian experts said. “By the end of September, that number could exceed 640,000.”

“Failure to act now will have irreversible consequences,” they added.

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Wednesday’s UN actions came as Israel intensified Operation Gideon’s Chariots 2, the campaign to conquer, occupy, and ethnically cleanse around 1 million Palestinians from Gaza, possibly into a reportedly proposed concentration camp that would be built over the ruins of the southern city of Rafah.

The Gaza Health Ministry (GHM) on Wednesday reported 10 more Palestinian deaths “due to famine and malnutrition” over the past 24 hours, including two children, bringing the number of famine victims to at least 313, 119 of them children.

All told, Israel’s 691-day assault and siege on Gaza has left at least 230,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, according to the GHM.

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BRETT WILKINS

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

Full Bio >

1 day ago (BBC.com)

Johanna Chisholm, BBC News

A federal appeals court has ruled that most of Donald Trump’s tariffs are an overreach of his use of emergency powers as president.

The so-called reciprocal tariffs – imposed on nearly every country the US trades with – are being illegally imposed, the US Court of Appeals said on Friday.

The decision upholds a ruling in May from the Court of International Trade, which also rejected Trump’s argument that his global tariffs were permitted under an emergency economic powers act.

Many of the tariffs that would be affected by the ruling stem from an announcement in April of a flat 10% rate on imports from all countries, which Trump said would even out “unfair” trade relations with the US.

The court did not halt the tariffs but instead said they would remain in place until mid-October, setting up a further legal challenge in the US Supreme Court.

There are still a lot of unknowns, but here’s what we understand so far about the ruling – and what it could mean for the US president’s flagship policy.

What did the appeals court say?

In its 7-4 decision, the appellate court backed a lower court’s finding that Trump did not have the authority to impose global tariffs.

This was largely because of the law Trump used to justify the policies, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which the judges said did not grant “the power to impose tariffs, duties, or the like, or the power to tax”.

The US Court of Appeals rejected Trump’s argument that the tariffs were permitted under his emergency economic powers, calling the levies “invalid as contrary to law”.

Trump immediately criticised the judgement, taking to Truth Social in the hours after it landed to call the appeals court “highly partisan” and the ruling a “disaster” for the country.

“If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America,” he wrote.

What is the IEEPA?

The decades-old act, which has repeatedly been deployed by Trump during both his terms in office, grants a US president significant authority to respond to a national emergency or a major threat from overseas.

The 1977 law states that a president can pull a number of economic levers “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy or economy”.

It’s been used by both Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who invoked the act to impose sanctions on Russia after the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, and then again after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine eight years later.

But the appeals court stated in its decision that the emergency law “did not give the president wide-ranging authority to impose tariffs”.

The IEEPA “neither mentions tariffs (or any of its synonyms) nor has procedural safeguards that contain clear limits on the president’s power to impose tariffs”, they said.

Trump argued when he unveiled his global tariffs that a trade imbalance was harmful to US national security, and was therefore a national emergency.

But the court ruled that imposing tariffs is not within the president’s mandate, and “the power of the purse (including the power to tax) belongs to Congress”.

Why is this important?

Beyond being a significant setback to a centrepiece of Trump’s agenda, the federal appeals court ruling could have an immediate impact on the US economy, with knock-on effects felt in global markets.

Tariffs are taxes companies have to pay for importing certain goods from foreign countries – so they can have an affect on sales and profit margins.

“Businesses are going to be subject to uncertainty,” Dr Linda Yueh, an economist at Oxford University and the London Business School, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Tariffs are aimed at deterring domestic firms from buying foreign goods, in turn affecting international trade.

As countries wait to see if the US Supreme Court will take up the case – which seems likely – they could decide to hold off on conducting business with the US.

If this happens, Dr Yueh said, it could “dampen down economic activity”.

There are also significant ramifications that could be felt within the political sphere.

For instance, if the Supreme Court reverses the federal appeals court decision and sides with the Trump administration, it could set a precedent that emboldens the president to use the IEEPA more aggressively than he has done so far.

What happens next?

The case will now most likely proceed to the highest US court, a challenge that Trump signalled on Truth Social.

“Tariffs were allowed to be used against us by our uncaring and unwise Politicians,” Trump wrote. “Now, with the help of the United States Supreme Court, we will use them to the benefit of our Nation, and Make America Rich, Strong, and Powerful Again!”

The conservative majority on the US Supreme Court could potentially make it more likely to side with the president’s view.

Six of the nine justices were appointed by Republican presidents, including three who Trump selected during his first term in the White House.

But the court has also been more critical of presidents when it seems they’re overreaching on policies not directly authorised by Congress.

During Joe Biden’s presidency, for example, the court expanded on what it called the “major questions doctrine” to invalidate Democratic efforts to use existing laws to limit greenhouse gas emissions by power plants and to forgive student loan debt for millions of Americans.

What if the tariffs are ruled illegal?

The federal appeals court was divided 7-4 in its decision that Trump’s nearly universal tariffs are illegal. It has now given the US administration until mid-October to appeal to the US Supreme Court on a case with implications for both the US economy and its trade relationship with the rest of the world.

If the Supreme Court affirms the decision, it could trigger uncertainty in financial markets.

There will be questions over whether the US will have to pay back billions of dollars that have been gathered by import taxes on products.

It could also throw into question whether major economies – including the UK, Japan and South Korea – are locked into the individual trade deals they secured with the US ahead of the August deadline. Other trade deals currently being negotiated could also be thrown into chaos.

If allowed to stand, the appeals court decision would also be a tremendous blow to Trump’s political authority and reputation as a dealmaker. But if it were overturned by the Supreme Court, it would have the opposite effect.

Are there still tariffs in place?

This ruling affects Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs”, which includes a patchwork of different rates on most countries around the world, including taxes slapped on products from China, Mexico and Canada.

Those levies on nearly all goods from nearly every country with which the US conducts trade will remain in place until mid-October.

After 14 October, they will no longer be enforceable, the appeals court has said.

Separately, the tariffs on steel, aluminium and copper, which were brought in under a different presidential authority, will remain intact and unaffected by the court’s ruling.

What tariffs has Trump announced and why?

Trump tariffs

Donald Trump

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

― Lyndon B. Johnson

Lyndon Baines Johnson, also known as LBJ (August 27, 1908 – January 22, 1973), was the 36th president of the United States, serving from 1963 to 1969. He became president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, under whom he had served as the 37th vice president from 1961 to 1963. Wikipedia

Critics of fossil fuel-driven transport are debating whether to subsidize or deregulate EVs — or discourage driving altogether

by Michael Stoll August26, 2025 (SFpublicpress.orgO

BJ Birtwell strode across the concourse of his Electrify Expo with a look of satisfaction this past weekend, watching thousands of families stream past rows of prototype and production electric cars, bikes and scooters on the waterfront in Alameda. 

The proliferation of consumer options and the popularity of battery-electric car technology, he insisted, meant it might be time for state and federal regulators to stop trying to nudge people into zero-emission vehicles in service of global climate and clean-air goals.

“We now live in a day and age where EVs can live on their own merit,” said Birtwell, the festival’s founder and CEO. “The government just needs to get the hell out of the way.”

Many environmental groups are pressing California, the nation’s leading electric vehicle market, to fill the vacuum created by the federal government’s dramatic retreat from support for energy-efficient transportation. They advocate adding billions of dollars in new public funding for rebates, charger infrastructure and support programs. Major public investments, they say, can help the state transition away from gasoline cars and trucks to make less-polluting rides the default consumer choice.

But for Birtwell, the future is already here: Manufacturers are producing more models with better range, performance and features every year, bringing EVs to the cusp of price parity with their gasoline counterparts. What’s needed now, he said, is for public officials to stop meddling and emphasizing that electric cars are the environmental choice, because for car buyers of some political persuasions, that language is a turnoff. EVs are just better products at this point, he said, and they are only improving every model year.

It was hard for festival attendees to find fault with that assessment while standing in line for test-drives of midprice sedans, like the new Volvo EX30, that could accelerate to 60 mph in less than four seconds.

Consumers’ appetite for these products is important to gauge at a time when leaders in Sacramento begin a multibillion-dollar debate about how much money to put into building up both supply and demand for carbon-free mobility.

Regulators at the California Air Resources Board last week released a report offering a menu of proposals to Gov. Gavin Newsom that included subsidies for electric chargers, as well as streamlined permits and vehicle purchase rebates. The goal is to help offset the loss of federal EV credits that Republicans in Congress and the White House canceled in their July budget bill, and to counter other legal moves by the Trump administration that undercut California’s ability to transition away from petroleum-powered cars by setting its own fuel-efficiency standards.

But the policy recommendations left key details unresolved — including how to pay for these new programs — leaving the hard work of turning policies into laws and regulations to the governor and the Legislature in the coming months. That will be a particularly hard task in an era of steep budget shortfalls.

Adrian Martinez, director of the Right to Zero campaign at the environmental law organization Earthjustice, wrote in an Aug. 19 blog post that he was “frankly underwhelmed” by the report led by the California Air Resources Board. The board, which has taken more aggressive stances in the past, came off as hesitant to Martinez: “This doesn’t quite feel like the CARB of the last decade,” he wrote. “The state needs to be ready for the great rebuild that will need to happen in the next federal administration.”

Ethan Lipman, director of commercial energy solutions at charging-equipment maker Autel, was part of onstage conversations about the energy transition at the Electrify Expo. He said the real transportation bottleneck is infrastructure. Rolling out chargers in dense neighborhoods remains a technical and permitting challenge for many companies, he said, and without a robust network of charging stations many urban drivers will not find EVs viable. When visiting job sites, he drives a hybrid car because he doesn’t want to get stranded while installing electrical equipment for future EVs to use in remote locations. “That’s the challenge we’re up against,” he said.

But the state has limited resources, and perspectives differ on the best way to reduce transportation emissions. Some environmental policy critics say states and localities can put the money to better use in other ways if they want to clean up the pollution and climate toll of transportation. In a 2020 academic paper, Jason Henderson, a professor in the School of the Environment at San Francisco State University, warned that an aggressively pro-EV policy risks locking in “automobility” rather than replacing it with even greener options. Mass electrification, he wrote, could deepen inequality by keeping personal cars the dominant mode, consuming scarce urban space better devoted to buses, bikes and pedestrians.

The value of reducing overall car use powered by any technology is not lost on the Clean Rides Network — a coalition including the Sierra Club of California, Clean Air Council, Greenlining Institute, Natural Resources Defense Council, Evergreen Collaborative and other prominent environmental groups. In addition to promoting EVs, California must use all policy tools available to reduce vehicle miles traveled. “That requires committing to sustainable funding for public transit operations, more housing near transit, and infrastructure that supports safe walking and biking,” the groups wrote in a letter to regulators in the lead-up to the state’s report. “It also means prioritizing highway maintenance over new highway expansion.”

In a press event last week, Liane Randolph, chair of the Air Resources Board, said more still needed to be done to help consumers make the leap to electric transportation. She added that California still has the ability to phase out the sale of gasoline cars by 2035, the state’s official policy, but new tools need to be developed.

“The world is accelerating forward toward cleaner vehicle technologies,” Randolph said, “and is going to watch the U.S. fade into the rearview mirror because this administration is choosing to quit the race.”

At the Alameda fairgrounds, parents waited in long lines with their children, ready to get hands-on with everything from pickup trucks to e-bikes. Birtwell said these firsthand encounters — not subsidies or mandates — will ultimately propel the EV transition.

The Public Press interviewed Birtwell at the Electrify Expo to learn more about the EV transition. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q: Do you think government incentives for greener cars have helped or hurt the EV market?
A: The biggest drawback to broader EV adoption, which is what most people want, especially on the left side of politics and legislation, was politicizing EVs to begin with. After you sell to the early adopters, there’s a little bit of a lag. And that’s exactly where we find ourselves today. And I think that time frame would have been shortened if we didn’t make buying an EV about the climate. If we made EVs more about a practical decision, especially nowadays, where these cars are actually very practical. In fact, they’re much more practical today than they were four or five years ago when it was a one-horse race. Today, they charge faster, they go farther, and they cost less, certainly, than they did in the past.

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Q: What happens now that the $7,500 federal credit for new-EV purchases is expiring?
A: Actually, a lot of people didn’t qualify for that rebate to begin with. And in many cases, a lot of people who were shopping for EVs didn’t even know that a rebate existed. And I know that that’s wild to think about, because sometimes when you’re in the industry or you’re writing about the industry, you know a lot about what’s happening. But when you’re a mainstream shopper and EVs have just come on your radar and you just started to think about them last night, you may not know about that rebate. The only caveat to that is there is more awareness right now around the EV rebate ending on Sept. 30, and so I am starting to see a little bit more of a rush into people who were not aware of that rebate, who now have become aware of it and are in the market for a car and want to take advantage of that rebate. We have two events that happen before that rebate ends and we feel we can see the rush. I think once this rebate goes away, I have a feeling that the manufacturers and different states are going to step in to fill a void that the feds are going to leave out. And so I’m not too concerned about it.

Q: At your Expo, do people really change their minds on the spot?
A: Thousands, thousands all the time. That is the biggest takeaway we get, is the light-switch moment that people have when they’re in line. They’re waiting in the sun, and they got kids pulling on their pant leg — they want to go to the kids’ zone, they want to go ride an e-bike — and Mom and Dad are waiting in the line to go drive. And they’re like, “Fine, we’ll do this.” And then they get out of the car and there’s smiles for miles. We are surrounded by shoppers, and we listen to shoppers and we know that the experiences in these cars are what create the light-switch moment. That’s the importance of Electrify Expo and why we’ve scaled so quickly as a festival over the past, basically, four years. And I think it shows, also, the popularity of our festival and how we’ve really outgrown and outpaced auto shows that are in the same markets as ours but have seemed to fatigue out. And here we are growing a million, million-and-a-half square feet everywhere we go.

Related

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August 8, 2025

California Weighs New EV Incentives Backed by Fee on Gas Cars and Trucks

July 28, 2025

California Proposes Charging Subsidies, Rebates to Boost EVs — but Leaves Key Details Unsettled

August 19, 2025

MICHAEL STOLL

Michael Stoll is senior editor and co-founder of the San Francisco Public Press. Formerly executive director, he has also been a reporter and freelance writer for local and national outlets, including the San Francisco Examiner and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He has taught journalism at two Bay Area universities, and researched media ethics at Stanford.More by Michael Stoll

• by Eliot Faine
• Friday, August 22, 2025 (ebar.com)

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A trans flag with the words “Liberate Compton’s” was held by activists outside the San Francisco Board of Appeals meeting in July.

Photo: Eliot Faine

After the loss of their request for a rehearing aimed at ousting private prison operator GEO Group from a site of historical transgender resistance in San Francisco, local activists known as the Compton’s x Coalition are regrouping to consider their next steps. The setback came amid observances of August as Transgender History Month.

The rehearing this week before the San Francisco Board of Appeals had been requested by activists following the board’s 4-1 decision in July to uphold a zoning letter of determination that allows GEO Reentry Services, a subsidiary of GEO Group Inc., to continue to utilize 111 Taylor Street as a halfway house for formerly incarcerated people. The site used to house Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, where there was a riot in August 1966 to protest police harassment of LGBTQ people.

Although a writ, a lawsuit that would take the Board of Appeals to San Francisco Superior Court, was originally on the table, Compton’s x Coalition spokespersons Chandra Laborde and Wilder Zeiser told the Bay Area Reporter that the coalition will instead refocus its efforts toward the upcoming Board of Supervisors hearing to investigate GEO Group’s operations at 111 Taylor Street, as well as pursuing a community-landmark designation .

The Board of Appeals voted 3-2 Wednesday, August 20, to deny a request for a rehearing of its July 16 decision that upheld the letter of determination for the GEO Group.

The building’s ground floor commercial space had housed Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, where one night 59 years ago this month – the exact date has been lost to history – a drag queen reportedly threw a cup of hot coffee in the face of a police officer who tried to arrest her without a warrant. The incident sparked a riot between trans and queer patrons of the 24-hour diner and cops, as detailed in the 2005 documentary “Screaming Queens” by transgender scholar and historian Susan Stryker, Ph.D.

The property earlier this year became the first one of its kind granted federal landmark status specifically for its connection to the transgender movement in the U.S. It is also now on the California Register of Historical Resources.

In 2022, San Francisco officials had landmarked the intersection of Turk and Taylor in front of the building in recognition of the uprising by the LGBTQ Compton’s patrons. The city’s 307th landmark also included portions of the structure’s exterior walls containing the commercial space that had housed the Compton’s eatery on both the Turk and Taylor street facades.

For 36 years, GEO Group, a private prison operator and federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement contractor, has been operating a reentry facility at the location.

Laborde, the appellant of the original letter of determination, was represented at Wednesday’s governance meeting by Laura Strazzo, a land use attorney. Strazzo had been officially retained less than a day before.

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In order for anyone to present a rehearing request to the Board of Appeals, they must adhere to the appeal procedure, which states that new or different evidence shall be brought before the board in extraordinary cases and “to prevent manifest injustice” .

Strazzo presented the new evidence, chief among which was the death of former 111 Taylor Street resident Melvin Bulauan on July 14. He was found dead on the sidewalk, just up the street from the facility, after having been transferred there the day before. News of Bulauan’s passing came from his son, Anjru Jaezon de Leon, the day after the appeals board upheld the housing determination in July.

Strazzo also pointed out the discrepancies between the legal requirements of group housing, such as long-term residential arrangements and communal kitchen use, and GEO Group’s facility. She noted it reportedly does not offer at 111 Taylor Street such group housing amenities.

“My understanding is that [GEO Group is] not complying with the rent ordinance for just-cause eviction protections. … Every other group housing use, once you’ve been there 30 days you get eviction protections. And [at 111 Taylor Street], after six months they say ‘you’re out, you’re on the street,’ that’s a really different use.” Strazzo told the board.

She noted that the precedent set for this determination will impact how group housing is considered in San Francisco.

“By making this determination that this type of use falls under group housing, that opens the door for this use to be in any zoning for group housing.” Strazzo said.

GEO Group attorney David Blackwell argued there was no “smoking gun,” or manifest injustice, that the Compton’s x Coalition had presented.

“This is a rehashing of the same arguments as before,” Blackwell said, “The rehearing request must state the nature of new facts or circumstances, names of the witnesses, and why the evidence was not produced at the July 16 hearing. There’s none of that here. There’s just these vague statements of, ‘well, we may have interviewed somebody, we might have some new information’, that just does not cut it for a rehearing request.”

Both Blackwell and city Zoning Administrator Corey Teague agreed that the rehearing request should not be granted. 

Commissioner Rebecca Saroyan moved to deny the request on the basis that the board did not find the stipulations of the appeals process had been met. 

Compton’s x Cafeteria will host an event at Counterpulse Saturday , August 23, to involve community voices in the future of 111 Taylor Street. The event is sold out. 

There will be a vigil at 111 Taylor Street for Bulauan on Saturday, August 30, from 7 to 8:30 p.m.

Updated, 8/23/25: This article has been updated with the time of the August 3o vigil

Gerrymandering in red states is predicated on Republicans holding Trump’s support in 2024, particularly from Latinos. That could be a bad bet.

BY DAVID DAYEN 

AUGUST 29, 2025 (Prospect.org)

As Americans have physically sorted themselves along ideological lines and as Big Data has dug into voting preferences on practically a house-by-house basis, it can be compelling to suggest that cartographers hold a skeleton key to U.S. elections. That’s definitely the assumption underlying the Trump administration’s red-state redistricting tour, which has already stormed through Texas, has dates booked in Florida, Missouri, Ohio, and possibly Indiana (whose leaders still sound indifferent on moving ahead), and is lying in wait for a Supreme Court go-ahead to shred other parts of the South.

In short, Trump and his allies are trying to erect impregnable walls around their own unpopularity; you can call it an attempt to steal the midterm election. But the universe of voters changes from year to year, and even in today’s polarized political environment, individuals change their minds. Exercises in mapmaking can amount to fighting the last war, with old information not fit to the current circumstances. That’s particularly true with new maps that are largely predicated on Donald Trump’s 2024 overperformance, particularly with Latino voters.

More from David Dayen

How much of an overperformance 2024 was, or whether it sparked a new realignment in American politics, is the key question. “Democratic performance writ large is almost certainly going to improve from 2024,” said Katherine Fischer, director of Texas Majority PAC, which seeks to elect more Democrats in the state. “To what extent, anyone who tells you is guessing or lying.”

It follows that slotting seats into red or blue corners based on one potentially ahistorical election is a dangerous play for Republicans, especially with the smaller, more engaged electorate that in increasing numbers opposes this president and his actions. The national political environment can overwhelm even the most data-heavy efforts by politicians to choose their voters.

Democrats aren’t relying solely on a blue wave to overpower gerrymandering. California’s redistricting election is on track for victory, according to Democratic pollsters. Maryland may take action to nullify a Republican seat. And gerrymandered congressional maps in Utah, in defiance of an anti-gerrymandering ballot measure, were finally ruled illegal by a state judge, who required the state to draw new maps that don’t crack liberal Salt Lake County four ways, a situation that will almost certainly create one solid-blue seat.

But Democratic fortunes in 2026 can also be tied to the instability of the Latino voting shift, particularly in Texas. Three of the five new “Republican” seats created in Texas remain contested territory; while Trump won all of them by double digits, in the same election, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) did not reach 52 percent in any of those seats. So Trump’s popularity is not automatically transferrable down the ballot even when he appears on it, and he won’t next year.

Exercises in mapmaking can amount to fighting the last war, with old information not fit to the current circumstances.

Those districts are all heavily Latino. TX-28 (90 percent Latino) and TX-34 (77 percent), two Rio Grande Valley seats, are currently held by Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, respectively. The new TX-35 (53 percent Latino), formerly a Democratic vote sink that stretched from San Antonio to Austin, is now a San Antonio–only seat that incorporates some of the city and its suburbs, along with outlying red counties. Joe Biden won both the new TX-28 and TX-34 districts in 2020, and only lost TX-35 by 1.9 points.

Trump’s Latino support shifted at least 13 points from 2016 to 2024; he shifted some Biden 2020 voters and took a large share of first-time voters. But House Republicans sharply underperformed Trump. And today, Latinos are snapping back away from Trump. An Equis Research poll from July showed Trump’s job approval among Latinos at just 35 percent, and one-third of Latino Trump supporters are thinking of voting Democratic in 2026. That number rises to half of Biden 2020–Trump 2024 voters. Other polling picks up similar trends.

That really changes how to think about districts with large numbers of Latinos. As Eli McKown-Dawson’s numbers show, if Texas Democrats win Hispanic voters 53-47 next year—Kamala Harris lost those voters to Trump 55-45—they would hold onto TX-28 and TX-34 and be a coin toss in TX-35. “If Latinos move somewhere in the middle of where they were in 2024 and in 2018, they won’t win some districts,” Fischer said.

In its redistricting analysis, Texas Majority PAC gave Cuellar a very good chance to retain his seats, Gonzalez a fighting chance, and even put TX-15, the other South Texas seat held by Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz, in play with the right candidate. Bobby Pulido, the likely Democratic nominee in TX-15, fits the profile, Texas Majority PAC added, though he would be a long shot.

Republicans didn’t weaken any of their incumbents, and the map cannot totally backfire. But the absolute best-case scenario for Democrats would be a Republican gain of just one seat in Texas. A more realistic optimistic scenario is Republicans +3, still substantially better than the R+5 expectation.

TX-35 could be more likely to flip to the Democrats in future years, as new voters migrate in. “New movers into the state are more Democratic than the current electorate,” Fischer said. “San Antonio is one of the fastest-growing cities in Texas … It is a thing Texas Republicans have dealt with in the past, they draw maps and in two to four years they look way different.”

Democrats still must persuade these swingy voters, which is not guaranteed. Indeed, the California maps that could move up to five seats into the Democratic column are similarly predicated on Latino voters coming home to Democrats. Swing-seat Democrats across the state are being shored up by getting an influx of Latino voters. If there really is a realignment, that won’t pan out; indeed, Latino support for Democrats in California has been steadily eroding.

The information we have to go on right now involves premature polling and unrepresentative special elections. Democrats have been tearing up special elections, winning a state Senate seat in Iowa this week with a 22-point swing from Trump’s performance in 2024; that now denies Republicans in the chamber a supermajority. But that Democratic winner only received 4,200 votes; a low-turnout, off-year August election should not be used to forecast a midterm. Generic ballot tests are starting to trend toward Democrats by as much as eight points, and those do have predictive power. But the consensus polling is closer to three points, and it’s still early days.

Democrats are concerned about their collapse in voter registration over the past four years, which has continued. But Texas Majority PAC sees that as a lagging indicator, where you would expect the party in power to gain ground after a big victory. They plan to engage in a targeted voter registration drive in Texas (the largest in state history, they claim) to pick up Democratic-leaning voters and persuade them to turn out.

Some of the uncertainty for the midterms involves how far gerrymandering will actually go. The Supreme Court is hearing arguments on October 15 on whether to obliterate what remains of the Voting Rights Act, opening the door for diluting racial minorities in congressional districts. Louisiana, whose maps are at issue in the case, has already scheduled a special session just in case the Supreme Court moves quickly, and the ripple effects would reverberate throughout the South. (This could also save the Texas maps, which even with some of the heavy minority participation are under a lawsuit claiming that they violate the racial gerrymander section of the Voting Rights Act.)

But there are some limits to unfair maps, even in the worst-case scenario. If voters are unhappy with Trump and display their anger next November, maps are unlikely to stop the House from flipping.

DAVID DAYEN

David Dayen is the Prospect’s executive editor. His work has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His most recent book is ‘Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.’

US Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) speaks during a press conference on Social Security in front of the US Capitol on May 5, 2025 in Washington, DC.

 (Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)

Social Security Administration chief data officer Charles Borges described “fear and anxiety over potential illegal actions resulting in the loss of citizen data” in his resignation letter.

BRAD REED

Aug 29, 2025 (CommonDreams.org)

A federal worker who filed a shock whistleblower report alleging that employees of the Department of Government Efficiency had potentially compromised Americans’ Social Security data abruptly resigned on Friday.

In a letter obtained by independent journalist Melissa Kabas, Social Security Administration (SSA) chief data officer Charles Borges said that he was “involuntarily” stepping down from his position at the agency due to “serious… mental, physical, and emotional distress” caused in the wake of his whistleblower report.

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Borges said that after filing his report with the help of the Government Accountability Project, he was subjected to “exclusion, isolation, internal strife, and a culture of fear” that created a hostile work environment and made “work conditions intolerable.”

Borges then recounted that he filed the whistleblower report because he was concerned that Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employees had uploaded Americans’ Social Security information onto a cloud server that he believed was vulnerable to external hackers.

“As these events unfolded, newly installed leadership in IT and executive offices created a culture of panic and dread, with minimal information sharing, frequent discussions on employee termination, and general organizational dysfunction,” Borges claimed. “Executives and employees were afraid to share information or concerns on questionable activities for fear of retribution and termination.”

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Borges concluded by saying that the total lack of visibility into the actions of DOGE employees who were handling Americans’ most sensitive data created a sense of “fear and anxiety over potential illegal actions resulting in the loss of citizen data.”

The report, whose existence was made public earlier this week, contends that Borges has evidence of a wide array of wrongdoing by DOGE employees, including “apparent systemic data security violations, uninhibited administrative access to highly sensitive production environments, and potential violations of internal SSA security protocols and federal privacy laws by DOGE personnel.”

At the heart of Borges’ complaint is an effort by DOGE employees to make “a live copy of the country’s Social Security information in a cloud environment” that “apparently lacks any security oversight from SSA or tracking to determine who is accessing or has accessed the copy of this data.”

Should hackers gain access to this copy of Social Security data, the report warns, it could result in identity theft on an unprecedented scale and lead to the loss of crucial food and healthcare benefits for millions of Americans. The report states that the government may also have to give every American a new Social Security number “at great cost.”

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

BRAD REED

Brad Reed is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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