Twitter’s landlord is suing the social media giant for failing to pay rent at its downtown San Francisco office, according to reports.

The company owes around $136,260 in unpaid rent, according to its landlord, Columbia Property Trust, which filed the lawsuit last Thursday.

Low-angle view of sign with logo on the facade of the headquarters of social network Twitter in the South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood of San Francisco, California, October 13, 2017. SoMa is known for having one of the highest concentrations of technology companies and startups of any region worldwide.

Twitter’s failure to pay rent was first reported last month, about a month and a half after Elon Musk acquired the company for $44 billion, following a chaotic legal battle.

Two people familiar with told matter The New York Times that Musk has been trying to renegotiate the terms of the lease agreement amid mass layoffs and downsizing.

ELON MUSK BECOMES FIRST PERSON TO LOSE $200 BILLION: REPORT

The downsizing continued on Friday, with Twitter closing its Seattle offices, cutting janitorial and security services, according to The Times.

READ ON THE FOX BUSINESS APP

Meanwhile, cleaning and security staff were laid off from the company’s New York and San Francisco offices. At the latter, Musk has reduced the company’s office space from four floors to two, according to The Times.

FOX Business has reached out to Twitter for comment. A spokesperson for Columbia Property Trust declined to comment.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ON FOX BUSINESS

The case is Columbia Reit – 650 California LLC v. Twitter Inc., CGC-22-603719, Superior Court, State of California in San Francisco.

The post Twitter sued for not paying lease at San Francisco headquarters appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Late yesterday, the Coalition on Homelessness and seven individual plaintiffs filed suit against the City and County of San Francisco and Mayor London Breed for their efforts to criminalize homelessness through an array of brutal policing practices that violate the constitutional rights of unhoused San Franciscans. The plaintiffs are also seeking a preliminary injunction to stop these practices on an emergency basis. Plaintiffs are represented by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area and the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, as well as the global law firm Latham & Watkins LLP.

For years, San Francisco has claimed that it is taking steps to address the City’s homelessness crisis. But in fact, the City is forcing unhoused people out of sight—destroying their survival belongings and citing and arresting them for sleeping in public when they have no shelter to go to. San Francisco has more laws penalizing homelessness than any other place in California, and possibly America. These regressive mass incarceration era policies only perpetuate San Francisco’s homelessness crisis and scapegoat unhoused people for the City’s egregious failure to support affordable housing for San Francisco residents.

San Francisco lacks—and has always lacked—adequate affordable housing and shelter for thousands of unhoused San Franciscans. San Francisco’s threats, citations, arrests, and removal of unhoused residents from public spaces therefore violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The City is also engaged in a practice of illegally seizing and destroying the personal belongings of unhoused residents in violation of the Fourth Amendment. These practices help San Francisco claim that it is solving the homelessness crisis—when it has actually just swept it under the rug.

San Francisco’s homelessness crisis is one of unaffordability. When longstanding residents can no longer afford to stay in their homes, they are forced out onto the street. San Francisco’s politicians have understood this for years, but they have failed to act. Instead, the City has consistently relied on tough-on-crime policies to respond to homelessness instead of addressing the root cause of the problem: the clear lack of permanent affordable housing.

This is immoral, cruel, costly, and ultimately counterproductive—not to mention unconstitutional. The City knows this because it constantly violates its own policies that purport to require a humane, services-first approach to the homelessness crisis. The reality is that unhoused San Franciscans wake up to find their survival belongings seized and destroyed as they face criminal penalties for sleeping outside even though the city has little to nothing to offer San Francisco’s unhoused residents in terms of shelter, housing, and services. This lawsuit combines massive amounts of public data with eyewitness accounts to expose the City’s unlawful conduct, which makes it almost impossible for the thousands of affected San Franciscans to exit homelessness.

Those experiencing homelessness in San Francisco are disproportionately people of color due to decades of discrimination in housing, education, healthcare and the criminal justice system. Today, for example, Black people comprise 6% of San Francisco’s general population but make up 37% of the City’s unhoused population. Black renters in San Francisco still face some of the worst housing discrimination anywhere in the country. That targeted exclusion has only exacerbated the homelessness crisis for people of color.

San Franciscans deserve real solutions to homelessness. That starts and ends with the City actually investing in affordable housing. This lawsuit seeks to hold the City to account for its unconstitutional attack on unhoused San Franciscans. The City cannot punish unhoused people for a housing crisis it created.

Client statements:

Plaintiff Nathaniel Vaughn, a life-long San Franciscan who recently became unhoused, reflects: “We do not deserve to be treated like criminals and to have our belongings thrown in the trash when we are at our most vulnerable.”

Plaintiff Toro Castaño notes the impact this has on unhoused people: “The City’s sweeps [are] a dehumanizing disruption to the small ounce of stability that I was trying to build for myself during one of the hardest times of my life.”

Plaintiff Sarah Cronk says the same: “We are just trying to scrape by and build as much of a life for ourselves as possible—with both dignity and safety. The City makes that impossible for us.”

Jennifer Friedenbach, Executive Director of the Coalition on Homelessness: “San Francisco’s homelessness crisis is its affordable housing crisis. Instead of investing in permanent affordable housing, the city has spent millions of dollars to rid our neighborhoods of visible signs of homelessness. Punitive approaches make homelessness worse, as it only makes it harder for people to access already limited services, find employment and secure stable housing.”

Attorney statements:

“The City is using unhoused residents as the scapegoats for a crisis of economic and racial justice that it helped to create. San Francisco should fight to end homelessness. But the only real solution to San Francisco’s homelessness crisis is housing. Instead of solving homelessness, the City has invested in carceral policies that make the crisis worse. That’s not only unconstitutional, it’s also just bad policy. We should expect better far better from our political leaders.” – Zal Shroff, Senior Staff Attorney, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the Bay Area

“Racism is embedded in the criminalization of homelessness in San Francisco as people of color are disproportionately targeted by anti-homeless ordinances. The current system is complaint-driven, allowing housed residents to dictate traumatizing enforcement against unhoused people who attempt to live in whiter, gentrifying neighborhoods. This suggests that the City is doing more to appear wealthy homeowners than it is to support the health and wellbeing of the most vulnerable with real opportunities out of homelessness. Through the lawsuit, we aim to lay bare the City’s illusory shelter options and end the racist results that criminalization produces.” – John Do, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU of Northern California

The post Metropolis of San Francisco & Mayor London Breed Sued for Harassing Unhoused San Franciscans, Violating Civil Rights to Cowl Up the Metropolis’s Reasonably priced Housing Failures appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

A jury rejected a handyman who claimed that he injured his neck and a shoulder in a fall while renovating a Miami home.

On March 28, 2019, plaintiff Eduardo Rivero, 47, a handyman, worked at a residence that was located at 2901 SW 67th Ave., in Miami. The home was undergoing extensive renovation. Rivero claimed that he fell into a hole in an unfinished floor. He claimed that he suffered injuries of his neck and a shoulder.

Rivero sued the home’s owner, Cesi Properties Inc. The lawsuit alleged that Cesi Properties’ president, Cesar Rodriguez Sotolongo, negligently created a dangerous condition that caused Rivero’s fall. The lawsuit further alleged that Cesi Properties was vicariously liable for Sotolongo’s actions.

Rivero claimed that, while he was working on a ladder, installing a beam, Sotolongo removed plywood that had been covering the hole. Rivero claimed that, when he descended the ladder, he inadvertently stepped backward, into the hole. He claimed that he sunk about six feet but secured himself before completely descending through the hole.

Sotolongo claimed that he was not involved in the accident or at the premises when the accident was said to have occurred.

Defense counsel contended that Rivero should have avoided the hole. Defense counsel also suggested that Rivero fabricated the accident. Rivero had been disabled and unable to work for about a year but had resumed working shortly prior to the date on which the accident was said to have occurred. Defense counsel argued that Rivero may have resumed working with the intent of fabricating an accident, for the purpose of initiating a lawsuit.

Rivero visited HCA Florida Kendall Hospital in Miami. He underwent minor treatment.

Rivero ultimately claimed that he suffered a comminuted, nondisplaced fracture of his left, nondominant arm’s shoulder. The fracture involved the head of the left arm’s humerus. Rivero also claimed that he suffered a tear of the same shoulder’s glenoid labrum; a mild tear of the same shoulder’s subscapularis tendon, which is a component of the rotator cuff; herniations and annular-tissue tears of his C2-3, C4-5 and C6-7 intervertebral discs; a herniation of his C3-4 disc; and trauma that disrupted the cervical lordosis, which is the normal curvature of the spine’s cervical region.

He claimed that each herniation disc caused impingement of a spinal nerve. He also claimed that his left shoulder’s rotator cuff developed tendinopathy, and he further claimed that the shoulder developed bursitis.

Rivero’s left shoulder’s injuries were addressed via his use of a sling, which was discarded after some six months had passed. His remaining injuries were addressed via about five weeks of chiropractic treatment.

Rivera claimed that his left shoulder experiences excruciating residual pain that restricts his performance of physical activities. He also claimed that he required further treatment. He sought recovery of future medical expenses, and he sought recovery of damages for past and future pain and suffering.

Defense counsel contended that Rivero’s left shoulder’s fracture predated Rivero’s work at Cesi Properties’ premises. Text messages sent by Rivero during the four months that preceded the job, referenced injuries of Rivero’s left arm and shoulder. Defense counsel also noted that the fracture was not deemed acute when it was diagnosed.

Defense counsel further contended that Rivero’s herniated discs were degenerative conditions that also predated Rivero’s work at Cesi Properties’ premises.

The jury rendered a defense verdict. It found no evidence of negligence attributable to Cesi Properties.

Verdict: defence

case: Edward Rivero v. Cesi Properties, Inc, no. 2019-021138-CA-01

Court: Miami-Dade County Circuit Court, 11th

judge: William Thomas

dates: 2/22/2022

Plaintiff Attorney: Michael P Weisberg; Weisberg and Weisberg; Miami, FL

Defense Attorney: Martyn Verster; Martyn WD Verster, PA; Miami, FL

Demand: $100,000

Offer: $5,000

Plaintiff Expert: Gregory Mazzotta DC, chiropractic, Miami, FL

Defense Experts: None reported

The post Jury Rejects Handyman Who Sued Miami House owner Throughout Renovation appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Antonio Brown has been suspended for the first eight games of the 2020 season due to multiple off-field incidents and the veteran recipient is now facing a civil lawsuit regarding one of them.

According to Broward County court documents Matt Baker received from the Tampa Bay Times, Brown was sued by a driving truck driver who was allegedly assaulted by Brown and Brown’s coaches earlier last year. The driver, Anton Tumanov, claims in the lawsuit that he brought Brown’s belongings from California to Hollywood, Florida, last year when he “encountered resistance and violence”.

Tumanov said Brown and Brown’s trainer Glenn Holt attacked his vehicle and broke the key before “verbally and physically assaulting him and causing serious personal injury”. The driver says that as a result of the incident, he “continues to suffer serious physical injuries, financial losses and emotional distress”.

Holt and Brown face assault and battery charges. Tumanov is seeking more than $ 30,000 in damages.

Police were called to Brown’s Hollywood home in January 2020 after he was accused of assaulting a driving truck driver over a payment problem. More details about the incident can be found here.

Brown was arrested not long after the incident and did not advocate a criminal battery charge last June. The 32-year-old avoided jail time and received two years probation, 100 hours of community service and a psychological examination.

Brown is unlikely to receive further discipline from the NFL, as the incident with the moving truck was part of the reason he was suspended last season.

Brown caught 45 passes for 483 yards and four touchdowns with the Bucs last season. He recently signed a one-year contract with the team.

The post Antonio Brown sued over shifting truck driver incident appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Gabriela Lopez

Onomastics is the study of the origin, history and use of proper names. A lawsuit filed Thursday in the San Francisco Superior Court said the San Francisco Board of Education failed the course.

It is about the process by which the board determined which schools in the San Francisco Unified School District bore the names of people who did not deserve to be so honored, whether because they were slave owners, or had subjugated tribal peoples were otherwise responsible for racist, sexist purposes or other abusive behavior.

By resolution dated January 26, 2021, the board voted 6: 1 to approve a report by the School Names Committee, a so-called “Blue Ribbon Panel”, which targeted the names of 44 district schools for removal, including this one named after Abraham Lincoln (Cruelty to indigenous peoples), George Washington (slave owners), and Diane Feinstein (alleged support for the Confederate flag).

The board’s action was widely criticized and came at a time when the district schools were closed because of the pandemic, even though many independent schools in the city had reopened. A comment in the national media ridiculed the decision as an expression of a school board that was more interested in “culture break” than in the education of the district’s 57,000 students.

The outcry was so loud that CEO Gabriela Lopez – at the time hardly six weeks in action – admitted errors in the process and promised to suspend work on the renaming project until the district students were back in their personal school.

While some thought their Mea Culpa had ended the matter, a local lawyer representing several alumni associations and graduates of the affected schools urged the district to overturn the resolution and dissolve the body. When the district did not respond, he filed a mandate application.

The petitioners’ attorneys include San Francisco attorneys Paul D. Scott and Lani Anne Remick, and Laurence Tribe, Professor Emeritus at Carl M. Loeb University, Retired from Harvard Law School.

Tribe’s treatise on American constitutional law is the most cited legal text in American law since 1950, according to Tribe’s biography on Harvard’s website.

Tribe – a veteran with more than 35 arguments in the US Supreme Court – graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School (aged 16) before becoming a noted constitutional scholar and lawyer.

The petition alleged that “petitioners will suffer irreparable harm as the names of 44 schools will remain on an official public list that damages their reputations by characterizing their names as morally inconsistent with San Francisco values.”

On the same day the petition was filed, Supreme Court Justice Ethan Schulman issued an “Alternative Mandate Letter” instructing the district to overturn the resolution and dissolve the panel or attend a May 6 hearing attend to explain why this was not the case.

An alternative letter is a court order that gives the respondent the choice of doing what the plaintiff requests or attending a hearing to prove that it shouldn’t be necessary.

The petition was based on an alleged series of errors in the drafting of the report which formed the basis of the contested resolution. The alleged mistakes included that the renaming panel was biased and its research was sloppy.

For example, the petition claims that the research was based on Wikipedia articles and occasional commentary, not scientific research. The petition mischievously suggests that students are advised not to rely on Wikipedia in their school newspapers, but this has been the main source of the panel’s decisions.

The petition also claims that the panel did not include historians as they believed they were not necessary to the findings it made.

A key claim was that the panel was considering whether the individuals could be classified into one of seven categories of offensive behavior, disregarding historical context, or whether the individuals had taken other virtuous acts that outweighed their offensive views or behaviors.

The petition alleges that the panel was biased and used this approach selectively. When asked, for example, whether the Malcolm X Academy should be renamed for its allegedly offensive words and actions relating to women and Jews, the panel said that its other accomplishments and work outweighed those views, but they did not follow that standard when them as Washington and Lincoln.

The lawsuit also challenged the Board’s decision to adopt the panel’s report. According to the filing, the board failed to comply with the public assembly law, as the assembly’s public notice described the resolution merely as identifying schools for “possible renaming” without specifying that the schools identified would lose their names , and further public contributions would be limited to new names.

The petitioners also stated that alumni of the schools were deliberately excluded from the panel’s review of names, even though alumni “appear to represent by far the largest number of people who have a direct interest in the name of the school they attended” .

One of the schools on the renaming list was Lowell High School because James Russell Lowell allegedly did not want black people to be given the right to vote. According to the petition, the research leading to this conclusion was flawed and the scientific work shows that Lowell was an abolitionist who supported the extension of the franchise to ex-slaves.

Explaining the decision to apply for the alternate letter, Scott explained, “If this case had followed normal, it would have taken weeks for the petition to even be processed by the clerk’s office and then another extended period for an application to be made would be tuned and listened to. The school board buried its head in the sand and ignored our request to overturn the renaming resolution and dissolve the committee. ”

According to Scott, “alternative mandate letters are seldom issued. An alternative mandate letter can be issued if there is a risk of irreparable damage. We have successfully argued that our situation is urgent. ”

The lawsuit follows a pending lawsuit and a threatened lawsuit, which is also causing the board of directors a headache. In the pending lawsuit, prosecutor Dennis Herrera is leading a team of city attorneys who want to force the board to reopen the city’s closed schools.

On the other issue, the Board was moved, because of its decision to move Lowell from a selective admissions school, where admission is determined by academic achievement reflected in grades and test scores, to a lottery admissions school where all district students are placed Eligible if chosen at random.

The district has not publicly stated whether it will overturn the contested renaming decision and dissolve the nomination committee or appear at the May 6 hearing to contest the petition.

The post San Francisco college district sued over renamings | Bay Space appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

A group of alumni have come together to sue the San Francisco school system in hopes of permanently blocking the possibility of allegedly “racist” names – including Abraham Lincoln and Dianne Feinstein – being removed from schools.

A lawsuit filed Thursday in the San Francisco County Superior Court against the San Francisco School Board and Superintendent Vincent Matthews demands that officials formally overturn the controversial renaming decision, claiming the city was wrong by not giving parishioners or historians a chance to win to complain.

Last month, school officials temporarily withdrew the school renaming plan amid public outrage, saying they would not rename the 44 schools amid the coronavirus pandemic.

But lawyers representing a group of alumni associations told The Post Friday that the walk-back was not legally binding.

The new lawsuit is designed to ensure the city keeps its word and follows legal protocols before any future name changes are made, said one of the attorneys, Paul Scott.

The renaming decision violates the Brown Act, according to which the school board must ensure that members of the community have a say in the matter, said Scott.

“The whole process itself was flawed because they decided whether or not to rename 44 schools with 30 minutes of public comment in one vote,” said Scott.

“Nobody was able to show up in person, and again, as I said, insufficient notification. So there were a number of issues with the process, ”the lawyer continued.

A group of alumni is suing the San Francisco School Board and Superintendent Vincent Matthews for revoking renaming of public schools with “racist” affiliations.
AP Photo / Jeff Chiu

Another alleged violation was the school board’s misrepresentation that an independent blue ribbon panel would consider changing the names of schools – the school board’s offenders were named after “racist, sexist, or oppressive” historical figures, including George Washington and Paul Revere.

“It wasn’t really independent. There was a lack of specialist knowledge. There were no historians on the committee and they ended up dictating what would happen before the school board even voted, ”Scott said.

In the lawsuit, school officials must tell the court whether they will overturn the renaming order and dissolve the committee by April 15.

“Reflecting on our national history and uplifting disadvantaged groups are both positive and necessary steps to achieve a level of social justice while reducing prejudice. They help us heal and move forward, ”the lawsuit reads.

“However, as with all of the major tests our society faces, it is critical that our solutions are considered fair in order for them to last. And in this context, nothing is more important than complying with the law and due process. “

The San Francisco School Board voted 6-1 in January to remove the names of Founding Fathers, Abolitionists, and even California’s longtime Democratic Senator from school buildings.

The move was widely planned as an overreach of “culture abandonment”. One group report found that the decisions were “arbitrary, subjective, superficial” and based on research gathered through “occasional Google searches”.

School officials had claimed Paul Revere should be canceled because the members didn’t like a benign top ten Revolutionary War list they saw on the History Channel, according to the Mission Local report.

Abraham Lincoln High School – named after the president who many historians consider the greatest in the country – was to be renamed after only five seconds of renaming, as it was labeled “discriminatory and harmful to Native Americans.”

Feinstein’s name should be removed from an elementary school because it replaced a Confederate flag that was removed by a protester when she was mayor of San Francisco.

Even the famous bohemian neighborhood of San Fran The Mission was unsuitable for adornment at a school because “all CA missions are places of slavery and colonization,” reported the school’s renaming committee.

“If you want to have a discussion about school names, it should be done in a context where there really is full and fair opportunities for public input, and it should come from individual school communities and individual school stakeholders,” said Scott.

“The parents, the teachers, the staff, the alumni – everyone has a fair opportunity to make contributions and decide whether they want to do so for their respective schools.”

Liberal law icon Laurence Tribe of Harvard University is among the lawyers who filed the lawsuit on Thursday.

The post San Francisco college sued over plan to rename ‘racist’ colleges appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.