content=”https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https%3A%2F%2Farc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2FZRKDUTZ5YXAHZUVOOH4ZPA4KII_size-normalized.jpg&w=1200″
San Francisco, the crusading city for gay rights and sexual liberation, closed its last legal bathhouses during the ravages of the AIDS epidemic.
Now, for the first time in nearly 40 years, the city has authorized a new gay bathhouse.
The San Francisco Planning Commission approved permits last week for Sanctum Baths. The plans call for the conversion of a two-story, 7,516-square-foot commercial building into a bathhouse and “adult sex venue” in The Hub neighborhood, next to the historic Leather & LGBTQ Cultural District. Backers of the project, first reported by the Bay Area Reporter, expect it to open by the end of next year.
Sanctum is first adult bath to be approved since the San Francisco Board of Supervisors rescinded its AIDS-era ban on them in 2020, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
San Francisco had as many as 20 baths at their peak in 1982, according to Jacob Binder writing in the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice. The spaces, which typically included saunas and steam rooms, served a gathering spaces and safe havens for sexual contact without harassment by law enforcement. In the 1970s, they became political symbols for the gay liberation movement.
“The baths were hallowed sites of queer community-building and epicenters of the city’s sexual subcultures,” Binder wrote. At first the bathhouses had few regulations or legal restrictions and hosted as many as 12,000 patrons a month. But the AIDS epidemic devastated the lives of gay men and became a new catalyst of prejudice against them. A “mix of caution, declining business, and government persecution” closed all the bathhouses by 1987.
Now, as new drugs for the treatment of HIV and AIDS have vastly reduced the transmission of the virus and the lethality of the disease, other cities such as Minneapolis and San Diego have rolled back AIDS-era policies.
“For decades sex positive spaces were systematically stigmatized and forced out of existence,” Jonathan Ohene, a local business owner and cultural district board member said in public comment.
”Approving this project is a vital step towards healing that painful chapter of our history,” he said. “It’s exactly what our neighborhood needs.”
A judge in Alaska denied a request from Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola’s campaign for information about absentee voters whose ballots have been rejected, as counting continues in the tightly contested race.
The Peltola campaign filed a lawsuit against state election officials last week, seeking the names of affected voters and the reasons for their rejection. It said it needed this information to ensure that all lawful votes were properly counted.
But Alaska Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews ruled Wednesday that the records “cannot reasonably be produced at this juncture, nor redacted of confidential information.”
The division of elections “is actively in the middle of counting ballots. It has active deadlines it must meet. … The timing of the Campaign’s request could simply not be worse,” Matthews wrote in a 17-page ruling Wednesday, that was uploaded by Anchorage Daily News.
Alaska’s division of elections welcomed the ruling. The Peltola campaign did not immediately respond to an overnight request for comment.
Alaska is the only Senate race that has not yet been called. Fewer than two percentage points separate the two main contenders, Peltola and incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (R), with 86 percent of votes counted.
After Jensen Huang’s stunning ouster as the CEO of Nvidia, President Donald Trump weighed in that former Apple CEO Tim Cook should be the one to take the reins at the chipmaker.
“A Legend replaces a Legend,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding that Huang had done a “fantastic job.”
Nvidia’s chief financial officer, Colette Kress, will serve as interim CEO while the company conducts a search for a permanent leader. There’s no indication that the company is considering Cook or that Trump has a say in the decision.
Trump and Huang have enjoyed a close relationship during the president’s second term in office. Trump spoke in support of Huang in a Monday news conference.
Cook stepped down as the CEO of Apple this year after transforming the company in the post-Steve Jobs era from a spunky innovator to a global market juggernaut. While CEO, he was among the tech leaders who courted Trump, presenting him with a plaque on a gold base in the Oval Office. He remains the chairman of Apple’s board.
President Donald Trump threatened Thursday to double tariffs on Mexico if authorities there do not stop what he said were “huge CARAVANS” of migrants on their way to the border with the United States.
The warning fused two of the president’s favored issues — immigration and tariffs — as he regroups following historic losses for the Republican Party in the midterm election last week.
Exit polls showed that although the president is broadly unpopular, his intense crackdown on immigration was not the primary reason voters opted for Democrats. High prices are a major electoral concern, however, and they are likely to be pushed higher by further tariffs, which are taxes on imports.
Trump has long warned of migrant caravans at moments of political peril for him, including ahead of the 2018 midterm election, in which Republicans lost control of the House.
“With the perceived loss by the Republicans in the Midterms – I WAS NOT ON THE BALLOT- the INVASION of our Country is taking place again,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Huge CARAVANS are forming and beginning their illegal march through Mexico.”
Groups of immigrants traveling together are not uncommon in Mexico, where threats from criminal gangs can be a major concern. Reuters, citing regional government information, reported Wednesday that a caravan of about roughly 1,500 people, including many families, set off northward on Tuesday from a city near Mexico’s border with Guatemala. One of the people walking north told Reuters that he hoped that with Democrats empowered — including in the Texas governorship — a new, more lenient immigration policy would take hold in the United States. Representatives from the group said they initially planned to walk to Mexico City, a journey of several weeks, to seek assistance from the Mexican government.
“MEXICO MUST STOP THEM, NOW, and if they do not do so, the Tariffs on Mexico will be IMMEDIATELY DOUBLED. MEXICO, THE GOVERNOR OF TEXAS, THE VERY LIBERAL NEW GOVERNOR OF TEXAS, OUR GREAT BORDER PATROL, & ICE, HAVE BEEN SO INFORMED. There will be no leniency!” Trump wrote.
Trump last week elevated the main architect of his immigration push, Stephen Miller, to be his chief of staff, suggesting that he will double down on his migration policies in his final two years in office.
The incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is pledging to conduct “aggressive” oversight of U.S. spy agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency’s growing global covert action programs, when Democrats take control in January.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Rep. Jim Himes (D-Connecticut) said that, under Director John Ratcliffe, the CIA has expanded covert action — secret overseas operations where the U.S. government’s role is not acknowledged.
“There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, it just means that we need to — if we’re doing our constitutional duty — up our attention to the matter,” Himes said. “They’re being aggressive on covert action, so we’re going to be aggressive on oversight.”
Himes declined to discuss classified details of such programs. The Post has reported CIA actions in Ecuador, Mexico and Venezuela during President Donald Trump’s second term. The CIA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Himes said his priorities for the committee include probing defense and intelligence contractors’ donations to Trump’s Washington-area construction projects, and investigating a slew of firings and security clearance revocations by Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence.
He said he wants to adhere to the committee’s traditional bipartisan ethic, which cracked under Trump’s first impeachment during his first term. “We’re treading carefully. We don’t want to break this committee,” he said.
Himes acknowledged that Democratic-led investigations are likely to face fierce White House pushback. “The Republican Party has not learned the lesson that the American people want oversight of this administration,” he said.
An El Niño that developed this summer has now set ocean temperature records for 165 days straight, with effects on global climate expected to linger through the first half of 2027.
Water temperatures in the central equatorial Pacific Ocean, where El Niño is measured, have surged as much as 3.5 degrees Celsius (6.3 degrees Fahrenheit) above average, topping the previous record from November 2015 — and, after a slight dip in early November, water temperatures are forecast to rise again.
Although the U.S. is thousands of miles from this stripe of exceptional ocean warmth, it will help change the country’s weather patterns.
That’s because El Niño alters the storm-steering jet stream, which causes cells of high and low pressure to shift. This winter, the southern branch of the jet stream may blow at record strength, helping to spawn potentially dangerous storms from California to Florida and along the East Coast.
In some parts of the U.S., the chances for extreme precipitation are much higher than others. The key risk areas include:
- California, the Southwest and Four Corners region
- The central and northern Plains
- Florida, the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast
Maps show that winter snowfall may be above average across the drought-stricken Intermountain West, parts of the Plains, in the Appalachians and potentially the interior Mid-Atlantic.
Across the planet, 1.1 billion people live in areas where there is at least a 10 percent chance for precipitation that is in the top 5 percent of historical observations through February — which is double the normal risk.
See where The Washington Post’s just-updated El Niño tracker expects patterns of drought, floods, heat and humidity to shift across the planet into next year.
United Airlines says it will prevent artificial intelligence agents and assistants from booking flights, citing data and security concerns.
The company said in a news release Wednesday that sharing details with third-party AI assistants “can expose sensitive information” or lead to unintended purchases or changes to customer accounts.
Such agents may also violate federal regulations, the airline said, including requirements for passengers to confirm their luggage does not include explosives or other banned substances during check-in.
“As a result, United is taking steps to restrict access — directly within our digital platforms and indirectly via travel agencies and aggregators — to prohibit use by unauthorized, third-party personal AI agents or assistants,” United Airlines said, adding that it would update its booking, ticketing and distribution policies.
Southwest Airlines has taken a very different approach to the use of AI: In October, the company announced the launch of a ChatGPT plug-in to allow customers to “discover and shop” for flights on the platform.
The post San Francisco approves first gay bathhouse since AIDS epidemic appeared first on Washington Post.
