Latest news with #Guido
San Francisco Chronicle
5 days ago
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
Former city manager sues Santa Clara, claims scrutiny of 49ers led to her firing
The former city manager of Santa Clara filed a lawsuit alleging a pro- San Francisco 49ers bloc on the City Council harassed, bullied and ultimately fired her because she insisted on scrutinizing the team's financial management of Levi's Stadium. In the lawsuit against the city filed Thursday, Deanna Santana accused the so-called '49ers Five' of orchestrating a campaign of intimidation to prevent her from 'blowing the whistle' on suspected legal violations involving the city and 49ers. At one point, the lawsuit claimed, the city even hired an unknown person to conduct surveillance on her and her family when they were on a weekend trip to their vacation home in Pacific Grove. Santana, who served as city manager from 2017 until her 2022 firing, reported the alleged surveillance to police, 'who said they feared for her safety,' according to the complaint. The incident caused her and her family to suffer 'extreme fear, stress, anxiety, insomnia and health consequences," she complained. Soon thereafter, Santana told the council 49ers President Al Guido had potentially illegal conflicts of interest in connection with the team's effort to bring World Cup soccer matches to publicly owned Levi's Stadium. Two days later, she was fired. The council's rationale for firing Santana was a 'lack of confidence' in her, according to actions passed on the day of her dismissal. Mayor Lisa Gillmor had said she believed the 49ers wanted Santana fired because of her suggestion Guido had conflicts of interest involving the World Cup bid. Guido and the 49ers have denied wrongdoing. Thursday's lawsuit, filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court, said her firing was orchestrated by council member Anthony Becker, leader of the 49ers' bloc. Becker was convicted of perjury last year and lost his council seat in connection with election improprieties involving a 49ers lobbyist. A Santa Clara spokesperson declined comment, beyond acknowledging the city has been 'engaged in ongoing settlement negotiations' with Santana and her attorneys. After she was fired, Santana contends the city failed to comply with her termination agreement, withholding promised severance pay and even meddling with her CalPERS pension to deprive her of benefits. The lawsuit doesn't specify how much money is at stake in the dispute. As city manager, Santana was paid about $469,000 per year, according to the Openpayrolls website. She is now acting city manager of Milpitas. Many of the lawsuit's allegations concerning the 49ers and the City Council were first contained in a 2022 civil grand jury investigative report called 'Unsportsmanlike Conduct.' The watchdog agency rebuked pro-49ers officials, saying they 'put the 49ers' interests ahead of the city's interests.' The report also praised Santana and Gillmor for raising 'financial, safety and ethical concerns' about the city's relationship with the team. Santana, a former Oakland city administrator, came to Santa Clara when the council was dominated by 49ers critics. She led a move to replace the 49ers with an independent stadium management company, saying she feared the city was being short-changed on revenue from concerts and other non-NFL events at the stadium. The effort infuriated the 49ers, and in 2020 then-CEO Jed York (now owner) spent $2.9 millionto elect a team-friendly council majority. The new council dropped efforts to replace the 49ers as stadium manager and fired city attorney Brian Doyle, who had defended the city in a series of lawsuits brought by the team. The new council members also began complaining Santana was overpaid and rebuked her, often in sharply personal terms. At one point, council member Kevin Park referred to her as a "dog," the suit says. The allegations about surveillance appear related to a Jan. 26, 2022 article posted on a news website called San Jose Inside. The story accused Santana of being overpaid and reported that she and her husband had just bought the Pacific Grove home. The post was illustrated with a photo of the home, with Santana's car in the driveway. Both the story and photo were attributed to a writer named Alexander Cicak. Days later, the website re-posted the story, replacing the photo of Santana's house with a photo (credited to Cicak)of a public beach. The website soon re-posted the story yet again, this time removing the writer's name from both the byline and photo credits.
Edinburgh Live
08-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Edinburgh Live
Sweet moment Edinburgh Fringe performer proposes to partner during show
Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info A performing duo got engaged during their show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, in a sweet clip captured by an audience member. Sergio and Guido are in the middle of a run at the festival, performing their show JEEZUS! at the Belly Button stage in the Cowgate. During Thursday nights show, those in the audience got more than they bargained for when Sergio got down on one knee. The couple met in 2019, and had dreams of writing a musical together. Now they've not only achieved that, but will be looking forward to a wedding. The adorable footage shows Sergio making a speech at the end of the show as they hold hands, before proclaiming: "I think part of this musical is about what people teach you about love. "What you taught me about love is that it's a choice." Sign up for Edinburgh Live newsletters for more headlines straight to your inbox He then pulls out a ring, and the cheers and applause from the audience drown out his proposal - but Guido clearly heard it. After the proposal, Sergio said: "Guido and I met 5 years ago and started dating in early 2020 and almost immediately moved together because of Covid. Join Edinburgh Live's Whatsapp Community here and get the latest news sent straight to your messages "We used to take long bike rides in lockdown and dream about writing a musical someday. JEEZUS! is that musical! Inspired in my experience growing up queer in Catholic Latin America. "It's about an altar boy that falls in love with Jesus Christ, but is in its core a play about love and how the people in our lives teach us how to love and what love means. "One thing that Guido taught me about love, is that it is a choice, so I wanted to say to him I choose him every single day, and proposing whilst we are doing what we love most felt exactly right!"
Scotsman
08-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Watch the surprise moment Fringe performer proposes live on stage
The couple's award-winning musical comedy is the first show they've put on together Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Two performers are engaged after a surprise proposal live on stage at the Edinburgh Fringe. Sergio Antonio Maggiolo got down on one knee to propose to his partner, Guido García Lueches, in the final moments of their award-winning musical JEEZUS! at the Underbelly Cowgate on Thursday night. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'It was very overwhelming. We don't usually do speeches at the end of the performance, we usually run away,' said Guido, who said they had no idea about the proposal. 'So when he told me not to run away, I was like why?' 'It was a lovely surprise.' Peruvian-born Sergio and Uruguayan-born Guido met in 2019 and now live together in South London | The Scotsman Sergio first had the idea to propose when visiting his family in Peru at the start of the year. 'We'd been joking about it a for a while. Guido was in Peru, and I thought about doing it then. Then at some point I thought, well, we're going to the Fringe, that would be a fun thing to do,' he said. 'It's our first show together, so it just felt very special.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The pair's musical, which received a five star review from The Scotsman, is inspired by Sergio's experience of growing up as a queer person in a strict catholic society in Latin America. Sergio plays a young alter boy who falls in love with Jesus - and is battling his internal conflict in the run up to his first holy communion. Meanwhile, Guido deftly flits between the boy's family, the priest and Jesus himself. 'It's funny, it's sexy and it's silly. But ultimately it's about love, our love,' said Guido. 'We're making people laugh throughout the whole thing, but then at the end we kind of reveal that we're together.' Sergio invited some of their friends to show to watch the proposal, but Guido had no idea it was going to happen | The Scotsman Sergio proposed with a ring passed down from his mum. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'It was really to get that blessing from her. I think the fact that she got super excited about it, I was like ok maybe I will do this then,' he said. 'It's so cute. We're literally telling a story about your mum,' added Guido. JEEZUS! won the Edinburgh Untapped Award this year, designed to discover and support hit-making talent at the Festival Fringe.
West Australian
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- West Australian
Adrian Barich: Life Is Beautiful, Dead Poets Society and Spotlight are just some movies that make you feel
Has a movie ever had an emotional impact on you? I mean, as in, you've found yourself lying or sitting there afterwards, in silence, touched by something you've just seen. That was me last week, rewatching the 1997 movie Life Is Beautiful. I didn't know if I was sad, happy or just simply stunned. This was a movie that came out at the turn of the century, which was so powerful that I thought about it for days after I watched it again. When I first saw the film, I honestly thought it was a romantic comedy. I have always been partial to a good spaghetti western, especially featuring Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, so watching Life Is Beautiful didn't seem a big stretch. And for the first hour or so, it did seem like a rom-com in its own quirky, Italian way. Roberto Benigni's character, Guido, is all charm and chaos, winning over the love of his life with slapstick humour. It was funny. Warm. Light on its feet. Then, without warning, it turns. And by the end, it's something else entirely: something devastatingly human, or maybe inhuman. At the time, it didn't quite connect (mind you, in my 30s I was probably about as deep as puddle). I was younger and without kids, so I hadn't yet felt what it means to want to protect someone so badly that you'd bend reality for them. Watching it now, it felt like a gut punch. Guido, now a father, finds himself and his young son in a nazi concentration camp. To shield the boy from the horror, he creates a fantasy: that it's all a game. If the boy follows the 'rules' and earns enough points, he'll win a real tank. Years later, the boy, who's now grown up, calls that illusion 'his gift to me'. I may not have fully understood that message when I first saw the film, but I do now. That line strikes a chord: it makes you think about what it means to shield someone, not out of deception, but out of love. Lately, the world feels pretty heavy, doesn't it? And there are all sorts of headlines that you may want to shield your kids or grandkids from. And so, it's got some of us thinking about sanctuaries. Not just physical spaces, but emotional ones. A grandparent's house. A mate's shed. A treehouse. A conversation you don't have. The ability to hold back the world for just a bit longer, until they're ready. We live in an age where information, especially of the worst kind, is just about impossible to avoid. Kids see more than we ever did. So the instinct remains: to preserve a little innocence for as long as we can. It's not a new idea; sometimes harsh life lessons delivered through stories have been around since Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm were boys. And the final moments have always been used to cut through everything and hit you 'in the feels'. I remember feeling shaken when I walked out of the film Spotlight, about journalists at The Boston Globe uncovering child abuse in the city's Catholic church. The slow scroll of cities and towns where priests had been accused of abuse went on for page after page, and left me speechless. Or that moment in Dead Poets Society, when Todd climbs on the desk and says, 'O Captain! My Captain!' It was the kind of scene you never forget. Even that mighty TV comedy Blackadder got real in its final episode. Set in the trenches of World War I, in the final three minutes, Blackadder stopped being a comedy and became a tribute to the futility of war: one of the most subtly powerful anti-war statements ever seen. And what about the final scene of The Shawshank Redemption, when Andy Dufresne finally reaches the Pacific? Freedom, hope and friendship all washing ashore. And while I've got you, let's think about The Usual Suspects. That twist when Verbal Kint is revealed to be Keyser Soze left me gobsmacked. Some people reckon they saw that coming; yeah, right. I've lost count of how many people swear they knew all along that Bruce Willis was a ghost in The Sixth Sense. Roughly equivalent to how many blokes are adamant they were sitting right behind Dom Sheed, when he kicked the winning goal in the 2018 AFL Grand Final. It's like that most famous of all endings, when it's revealed in Planet Of The Apes that that the space adventure was actually playing out on Earth. I'll admit that I was as confused as Charlton Heston when he saw the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand. I've spent most of my life reporting on sport — Eagles' premierships, triumphant wins, heartbreaking losses and all the drama in between. And as I've said previously, sport matters. But other stories can remind you what's really important. Heroic acts don't just happen in stadiums. Sometimes they happen in kitchens. In bedtime stories. In the choice to tell your child that the world is still a safe place. In pretending, just for a little while longer, that life is beautiful.
Perth Now
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
The films that have left me stunned
Has a movie ever had an emotional impact on you? I mean, as in, you've found yourself lying or sitting there afterwards, in silence, touched by something you've just seen. That was me last week, rewatching the 1997 movie Life Is Beautiful. I didn't know if I was sad, happy or just simply stunned. This was a movie that came out at the turn of the century, which was so powerful that I thought about it for days after I watched it again. When I first saw the film, I honestly thought it was a romantic comedy. I have always been partial to a good spaghetti western, especially featuring Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, so watching Life Is Beautiful didn't seem a big stretch. And for the first hour or so, it did seem like a rom-com in its own quirky, Italian way. Roberto Benigni's character, Guido, is all charm and chaos, winning over the love of his life with slapstick humour. It was funny. Warm. Light on its feet. Then, without warning, it turns. And by the end, it's something else entirely: something devastatingly human, or maybe inhuman. At the time, it didn't quite connect (mind you, in my 30s I was probably about as deep as puddle). I was younger and without kids, so I hadn't yet felt what it means to want to protect someone so badly that you'd bend reality for them. Watching it now, it felt like a gut punch. Guido, now a father, finds himself and his young son in a nazi concentration camp. To shield the boy from the horror, he creates a fantasy: that it's all a game. If the boy follows the 'rules' and earns enough points, he'll win a real tank. Years later, the boy, who's now grown up, calls that illusion 'his gift to me'. I may not have fully understood that message when I first saw the film, but I do now. That line strikes a chord: it makes you think about what it means to shield someone, not out of deception, but out of love. Lately, the world feels pretty heavy, doesn't it? And there are all sorts of headlines that you may want to shield your kids or grandkids from. And so, it's got some of us thinking about sanctuaries. Not just physical spaces, but emotional ones. A grandparent's house. A mate's shed. A treehouse. A conversation you don't have. The ability to hold back the world for just a bit longer, until they're ready. We live in an age where information, especially of the worst kind, is just about impossible to avoid. Kids see more than we ever did. So the instinct remains: to preserve a little innocence for as long as we can. It's not a new idea; sometimes harsh life lessons delivered through stories have been around since Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm were boys. And the final moments have always been used to cut through everything and hit you 'in the feels'. I remember feeling shaken when I walked out of the film Spotlight, about journalists at The Boston Globe uncovering child abuse in the city's Catholic church. The slow scroll of cities and towns where priests had been accused of abuse went on for page after page, and left me speechless. Or that moment in Dead Poets Society, when Todd climbs on the desk and says, 'O Captain! My Captain!' It was the kind of scene you never forget. Even that mighty TV comedy Blackadder got real in its final episode. Set in the trenches of World War I, in the final three minutes, Blackadder stopped being a comedy and became a tribute to the futility of war: one of the most subtly powerful anti-war statements ever seen. And what about the final scene of The Shawshank Redemption, when Andy Dufresne finally reaches the Pacific? Freedom, hope and friendship all washing ashore. And while I've got you, let's think about The Usual Suspects. That twist when Verbal Kint is revealed to be Keyser Soze left me gobsmacked. Some people reckon they saw that coming; yeah, right. I've lost count of how many people swear they knew all along that Bruce Willis was a ghost in The Sixth Sense. Roughly equivalent to how many blokes are adamant they were sitting right behind Dom Sheed, when he kicked the winning goal in the 2018 AFL Grand Final. It's like that most famous of all endings, when it's revealed in Planet Of The Apes that that the space adventure was actually playing out on Earth. I'll admit that I was as confused as Charlton Heston when he saw the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand. I've spent most of my life reporting on sport — Eagles' premierships, triumphant wins, heartbreaking losses and all the drama in between. And as I've said previously, sport matters. But other stories can remind you what's really important. Heroic acts don't just happen in stadiums. Sometimes they happen in kitchens. In bedtime stories. In the choice to tell your child that the world is still a safe place. In pretending, just for a little while longer, that life is beautiful.
