After a yearslong battle for worker rights that pulled the governor’s office and state legislators into the fray, Uber and Lyft drivers in California are on the doorstep of having their own union to negotiate with the rideshare giants. Can they win contracts? That answer isn’t nearly as clear. At a celebratory news conference Tuesday, organizers of the California Gig Workers Union…
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Google co-founder Sergey Brin, one of the richest men in the world, has spent more than $100 million backing a group seeking to stop a popular California ballot initiative that would impose a one-time tax on the wealth of the state’s billionaires. New filings reported by The Los Angeles Times detail Brin’s role in funding Building a Better California, which is pushing two ballot measures that…
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During his time on death row in California, before he was found innocent and exonerated, Shujaa Graham said he was beaten and spent nearly entire days in a small cell at the facility formerly known as San Quentin State Prison. Even when he was let out in the yard, he could only look up at the sky through the cage that stretched over the roof. He remembered men around him, some of whom were also…
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Campaigners behind the one-time 5% billionaires wealth tax in California are calling out what they describe as trickery and deception by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who on Friday released a proposal for a national billionaire’s income tax even as he actively opposes the effort to tax the wealth of billionaires in the state that he and his party currently control. “Newsom does not want to…
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“I am the ONLY female being held in a male prison here in New Jersey all because I am transgender,” Gia Valentina told Truthout. In January 2026, after years of requesting the procedure, Valentina had vaginoplasty, a gender-affirming surgery that creates a vagina and vulva. She was hoping that the procedure would allow her to be moved to Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, New Jersey’s sole…
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The Central California Women’s Facility, the nation’s largest women’s prison, is in Chowchilla, where temperatures reached past 90 degrees by the second week of May. The prison lacks air conditioning or any facility-wide cooling system, turning cells into saunas. “I dread going to my groups at night because we have to wait forever at the gates and we cannot bring water with us. We can’t take…
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