The new data center proposed for a quiet city about 115 miles east of San Diego came across people’s radars in different ways. For patrons of the deli on West Aten Road, it was the white “Not In My Backyard” signs jutting out of lawns. For local irrigation district workers, it was something called an “electric service application.” For Margie Padilla, it was a rant on Facebook.
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In their third report on the subject and second update of data, University of California researchers reach the same conclusions that have twice bedeviled the anti-wage hike sector of the restaurant industry: California’s $20 an hour fast food minimum wage, instituted in 2024, did not reduce employment. It led to only the most modest of price increases — barely noticeable to a consumer.
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For two years, I walked the lower yard track at San Quentin State Prison, watching construction crews tear down an old furniture factory to build a $239 million Scandinavian-styled learning center. They have now removed the fence blocking the incarcerated population’s view of the new facility. Last week marked the opening of the building, only for incarcerated people who have designated…
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Olive Garrison has been teaching high school history in Bakersfield for the past eight years. Born and raised in the Central Valley city, Garrison has incorporated LGBTQ history into lessons, from the Lavender Scare, a moral panic in which thousands of gay workers in the 1940s and ’50s were driven out of government service jobs, to the struggles of queer Americans during the Great Depression.
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State leaders and environmental advocates responded with outrage after the Trump administration on Friday ordered the restarting of a California pipeline that caused one of the largest oil spills in the state’s history, a move that comes as oil prices have skyrocketed following President Donald Trump’s launching of an illegal war against Iran and Iran’s subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
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Former schoolteacher Theo Henderson had been unhoused for six years when he launched the “We the Unhoused” podcast in 2019 from a park in Los Angeles’s Chinatown. Henderson became unhoused in 2013 when he was evicted after losing his job and falling into medical debt due to spiraling costs related to his diabetes. When he began documenting his experiences and those of his unhoused neighbors…
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