Story by MAGGIE FAZELI FARD, slide gallery by SAMSON REINY Oct. 31 — They come from the hills and they come from the east. Every year on Halloween, children from all over Oakland descend in the hundreds on Rockridge’s Lawton Street. Spare in its decorations — just days before the holiday only a handful of homes had adorned their homes with plastic ghosts, skeletons and cobwebs, with most opting to forgo the traditional macabre regalia — Lawton is not an…
By MAGGIE FAZELI FARD On first viewing, the TV ad seems to say it all. An animated pig with a soft spot for Motown gives viewers a tour of a macabre farmhouse, where pigs are packed tightly in their crates, a cow is licking its own excrement, and chickens are stacked one over the other. At the heart of the story is an evil farmer who goes as far as to pull a suckling calf away from its mother. The…
Story and slideshow by MAGGIE FAZELI FARD Oct. 24 – It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No – “You’re Gecko Girl!” A rousing cheer burst forth from a dirt-covered lot in downtown Oakland this afternoon as “Gecko Girl” – a.k.a. Lyn Verinsky, an amateur rock climber and general manager of Oakland’s Great Western Power Company climbing school – became the first person ever to scale a smooth, vertical wall using technology that mimics none other than a wily lizard. “I have…
North Oakland car owners have been reporting a new kind of thief–the stealing is done from underneath the car. Click here for the story.
By MAGGIE FAZELI FARD While California state guidelines list required immunizations for school-aged children, there are also several optional vaccines available, such as the flu shot. The one making the biggest waves in medicine today, as much for its flashy advertisements as for its taboo nature, is a vaccine marketed widely as Gardasil, which protects girls and women from the types of human papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted disease, that can cause cervical cancer.
By MAGGIE FAZELI FARD Measles, mumps and polio may sound like plagues of days long past, but they are among the infections that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) aims to hold at bay to this day through required and recommended immunizations, for children and adults alike.
By MAGGIE FAZELI FARD SEPT. 6 — A short stretch of 58th street in North Oakland was alive with the sights, sounds and smells of Latin America this morning as local artisans lined the sun-bleached curb with their small works and residents took time out to talk, eat, laugh and dance in the street. But this was no block party. Alongside the artists sat women’s healthcare advocates, and behind the makeshift bandstand on the corner of Telegraph Avenue and 58th Street…