Madeleine Thomas

What it really means to move a body at Mountain View Cemetery

At more than 226 acres, Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery is a final resting place for some of the Bay Area’s most notable figures. And docents there are uncovering new and interesting tombstones all the time, helping to piece together Oakland’s rich history. Madeleine Thomas has the story.

Planned Parenthood opens on Seventh Street in West Oakland

There are a number of free or discounted health clinics across Oakland — like La Clinica de la Raza in the Fruitvale, or Asian Health Services in Chinatown. Now, West Oakland has its own reproductive health clinic. Reporter Madeleine Thomas has the story of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte’s new location on Seventh Street.

After the raid: For patients, worries that medical marijuana dispensaries will shut down

Oakland resident Sableu Cabildo was diagnosed at the end of 2011 with a kind of brain cancer known as an astrocytoma. It originated on the right side of her thalamus, the lobed mass under the cerebral cortex that acts like the brain’s switchboard, regulating sensory perception and motor functions. Because of the cancer, Cabildo has been steadily losing her short-term memory and her balance. She stutters sometimes, and to be on the safe side, doesn’t drive at night anymore.

To alleviate some of the symptoms of her cancer and the harsher side affects of her medications, Cabildo, 34, has a medical marijuana prescription. It’s helped to calm her mood swings and improve her diminished appetite. It also dulls the pain from the migraine headaches caused by her disease. It lets her sleep at night.

After the raid: First Oaksterdam, then legal battles for Harborside Health Center

He might direct the largest medical marijuana dispensary in the country, but Steve DeAngelo isn’t scared of the government’s attempts to shut it down.

“The federal government has thrown everything they had at us and we met them and we pushed back,” DeAngelo said, referring to Harborside Health Center, where he serves as founder and executive director. “It’s a drug war machine that’s bound for extinction.”

After the raid: The financial fallout for Oaksterdam and Oakland’s pot business

Following the federal raid on Oaksterdam University last April, Dale Sky Jones found herself with an incredible task: rebuilding the school from the ground up. Not only had Richard Lee, Oaksterdam’s founder and director, just stepped down—assigning Jones to take over his role—but during the raid, federal agents had gutted the university entirely. As Jones took on the responsibility of providing for the students, staff and volunteers who had already signed on for the spring semester, the rest of Oakland’s burgeoning pot industry was left wondering what lay ahead for their businesses and whether they, too, were vulnerable to raids or legal action from the federal government.

After the raid: One year after federal agents raided Oaksterdam, what’s changed?

One year ago, federal agents raided Oaksterdam University, a move that sent ripples throughout Oakland’s well-established cannabis industry and raised questions about the complex and often conflicting web of state and federal regulations surrounding medical marijuana use and patient rights. In this four-part series, Oakland North will examine what’s changed since last year’s raid, who was affected the most, and what may lie in store for medical marijuana use here in Oakland.

Love and sex at the Oakland Zoo

“How would you like to have husbands who have testicles that weigh 14 percent of their body weight?” asked Harry Santi to a handful of women at the Oakland Zoo on Friday.

He isn’t talking about any sort of terrifying medical anomaly here. Santi, 81, a docent at the Oakland Zoo, is referring to the tuberous bushcricket, a type of tiny katydid, and one of dozens of animals with unusual, peculiar, or fascinating sex lives that were highlighted at Oakland Zoo’s annual Animal Amore this Valentine’s Day.

Oakland by the ZIP code: Photos from the 94601

Welcome to the debut photo gallery for The Pulse of Oakland. Oakland North reporters will be taking photographs documenting each of the ZIP codes in Oakland over the next few months. Every neighborhood is diverse and different, and we want to capture that. This week’s featured ZIP code is 94601 in East Oakland. The area includes Fruitvale, Peralta Hacienda and other neighborhoods. Of course, we can’t see everything in Oakland ourselves. So we also want to know how you view this…

This weekend in Oakland

Community events and activities for the weekend of February 8-10, 2013. Got an event we didn’t know about? Please add it in the comments!

Clinics reach out to Oakland’s Asian community to prevent “silent killer” hepatitis B

The Bay Area has one of the largest Asian and Asian Pacific Islander (API) populations in the entire country; together the two groups make up almost 19 percent of Oakland’s population. This group is uniquely at risk for hepatitis B, a disease that is sometimes known as the “silent killer,” as an infected person can remain asymptomatic for long periods of time, leaving many unknowingly infected. Nationwide, nearly 1 in 12 people of Asian and API descent are infected. But here in Oakland, healthcare workers are drawing more attention to getting residents screened for the disease and vaccinated against it, specifically among the low-income and uninsured.

In West Oakland, the “Tree of Life” traveling mural project urges neighborhood healing

On a barren West Oakland corner, amongst homes where the windows and front yards are gated and dead-bolted protectively from the world outside, now stands a “Tree of Life” — the Attitudinal Healing Connection’s debut traveling mural project. The mural and all seven of its transportable panels were unveiled Thursday afternoon at the West Oakland Youth Center’s construction site on Market Street. Construction on the facility, currently a skeleton of drywall, scaffolding and timber, isn’t expected to be complete until…

Thief makes off with historical gold jewel box from the Oakland Museum

At a press conference Wednesday morning, the Oakland Museum of California announced the theft of a historical quartz and gold-encrusted jewel box from its Gallery of California History. The burglary, which occurred early Monday, is the second the museum has recently experienced; in the early morning hours between November 12 and 13, gold nuggets were stolen from the same collection.