Community
Hundreds of Ethiopian immigrants and their families from around the Bay Area gathered at the Ethiopian Orthodox Cathedral on Mountain Boulevard Sunday for Meskel, or the finding of the True Cross, one of the most important holidays in the Ethiopian Orthodox calendar and a national holiday in Ethiopia. Wearing snow-white linen, worshippers congregated outside the church for much of the day while others prepared food which filled the air with the aromas of East African spices, turning the church parking lot into a scene out of their home country.
Over the past year, according to the Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, 46 books have been “banned” in the United States—taken off school and main library shelves, removed as “inappropriate” from class reading lists, attacked by bloggers and family value organizations or re-edited to replace words deemed offensive. All of these books are being showcased this week for a library and bookstore event called Banned Book Week.
Going from a dingy yellow wall to a bright-colored, futuristic work of art, the 28th Street Partners apartment complex off of Telegraph Avenue in downtown Oakland has received quite a facelift. Earlier this month, Oakland artists Sidharth Chaturvedi, Samuel Garland and Lindsey Millikan took their art to the streets by painting a mural on the side of the two-story apartment building. Millikan found out about the job after property manager Tony Toppanno posted an ad on Craigslist. Soon after, Millikan…
Founded in October 2010 by Danny Rosen, Arthur Coulston and Billy Parish, Berkeley-based Solar Mosaic is using Oakland as a proving ground to test for the first time its model of this crowd-funded community solar, with plans to finance five to seven projects, of which the Asian Resource Center (ARC) project is the first.
An emotional Oakland Unified School District board meeting that attracted hundreds of agitated parents and children went on until nearly midnight, though the board took no action in its controversial plan to close or consolidate more than a dozen of the city’s schools.
Game Day is a new series that will feature Oakland teams and athletes every Wednesday afternoon. This week, it’s the Oaktown Roots, a new women’s softball team that faced off earlier this week in the championship game against their rivals, the Girlfriends.
Oakland North is continuing with our feature. Every Wednesday, we will publish a photo submitted by one of our readers. This week’s photo is by Michael Thorn.
On Sunday, 20 local businesses exhibited their products and services at Tilt—a contemporary wedding fair catering to, as the event’s website put it, “the creative, alternative-thinking bride or groom.”
The preliminary list of OUSD schools recommended for closure three weeks has changed. Now five elementary schools are recommended for closure while two others are being proposed for “quality expansion.”