"Dozens of chanting protesters laid on the sidewalk in front of the Eastmont Health Center in Oakland on Thursday, holding signs meant to resemble tombstones with epitaphs like "R.I.P. Lost My Healthcare" or "Clinic Closed."

For Valerie Bachelor, director of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) Oakland, it's not an exaggeration to describe healthcare funding as a matter of life and death.

"What's at stake is people's health. Whether a senior is going to continue to be with us or not. And whether our folks with disabilities are going to be able to continue to live with dignity," said Bachelor.

She explained that facilities like the Eastmont Center are directly at risk for service reductions and closure, after H.R.1 — the so-called "Big Beautiful Bill" — passed last fall."

"When it comes to affording rent or a home mortgage in California, every candidate in the race for governor seems to have a personal stake.

Katie Porter wants her three teenage children to eventually move off her couch. Antonio Villaraigosa wants reliable home insurance. Matt Mahan doesn’t want to fight with his wife over their mortgage, as his parents did.

As the affordability crisis literally drives residents out of the state, the candidates have made housing a central point of their campaigns. That’s a sea change from previous elections, said Laura Foote, executive director for YIMBY Action."

"Earlier this year, in the windowless conference room of a downtown San Francisco hotel, one of the first gubernatorial candidate forums of the season kicked off with a simple question: “Do you think California’s housing shortage is primarily the result of local and state regulatory barriers to home building?”

It made for a pithy summary of the “Yes In My Backyard” movement’s pro-development philosophy that the question-asker — Brian Hanlon, co-founder of California YIMBY — and his organization have been pushing California lawmakers to embrace for more than a decade. California’s chronic unaffordability is born of a shortage of homes and the state needs to play an aggressive role in getting more units built, the YIMBYs argue."

"Protesters planned to gather across the Bay Area on Friday for a series of May Day rallies aimed at boosting workers’ rights and criticizing the rising cost of living in America under President Donald Trump, particularly as energy prices spike during the war in Iran.

Hundreds of May Day protests were planned across the nation — including dozens in Northern California, where protests were planned in most major cities — amid a call by organizers for “no work, no school, no shopping.” Its goals appeared myriad, including voicing support for workers rights and opposing actions by ICE, the United States’ war in Iran and the growing income inequality across the nation."

"A Peninsula state senator and multiple San Francisco supervisors were arrested Friday amid a swell of May Day protests across the Bay Area, which saw thousands of people decry the rising cost of living in America and an increasingly empowered billionaire class under President Donald Trump.

The arrests of Menlo Park Democrat Josh Becker and two-dozen other elected officials, labor leaders and fellow protesters at San Francisco International Airport marked the latest public action to hit the region and the nation. The rallies, under the banner of “May Day Strong,” called for a national one-day business boycott and “no work, no school, no shopping,” prompting some businesses to shut their doors as people took the streets in solidarity with International Workers’ Day."

"A few dozen protesters brought a charged jolt to a morning panel at the DTECH energy conference in San Diego yesterday, climbing onto the stage and chasing PG&E's vice president for wildfire mitigation away from the podium. Activists packed the front of the room with blue signs and loud chants, forcing panelists to step down while the moderator urged the audience to clear out. The disruption halted a session billed as a discussion of technologies for locating and identifying wildfires."

"A few dozen protesters disrupted the energy industry conference DTECH in San Diego on Tuesday, interrupting a morning panel and prompting its speakers — including a PG&E executive — to flee the stage.

The protesters called on PG&E to cancel its contract with the tech company Palantir, a data and artificial intelligence outfit that has become the focus of ire over the past year due to its extensive work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The activist group Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment Action carried out the protest; ACCE campaign director Eric Lerner told SFGATE that they attempted to give a demands letter to Andrew Abranches, PG&E’s vice president of wildfire mitigation, but he left the room without taking it."