Health
About 200 people attended the long delayed launch celebration for the Africa Channel-a digital station that focuses entirely on Africa programming- Tuesday night at Oakland’s Chabot Space Center. At the event, an Africa Channel executive announced the results of DNA tests revealing the ancestries of three African-American attendees.
At nighttime along Oakland’s International Boulevard, dozens of teenage girls are working the track—and there’s nothing athletic about it. “The Track” is the street nickname for the epicenter of underage prostitution in Oakland, where girls well under the age of eighteen strut down the street in platform heels and mini dresses while predatory pimps wait in cars around the corner.
At Tuesday night’s meeting, the Oakland City Council approved a major contractor to implement a municipal ID card system, almost a year and half after passing an ordinance allowing the city to issue the cards, and also voted to increase the number of cannabis producer permits in the city from four to eight.
Now that the ash has settled on California’s latest marijuana ballot initiatives, Oakland’s industrial cannabis policy—the nation’s first—can move forward, beginning with the city council’s meeting tonight.
The Chabot Space and Science Center will take on climate change in a big way this month when it opens a new exhibit with the help of a little scientific star power. Science educator Bill Nye, popularly known as “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” came to Chabot on Friday to introduce the new “Bill Nye’s Climate Lab,” which opens to the public on November 20.
Gabriel Rodriguez sat in the student center cafeteria at Laney College the day after the legalization of marijuana in California went down in defeat. Rodriguez, who voted in favor of the initiative, sounded resigned saying that Proposition 19 probably wouldn’t have benefited everyone anyway.
“The move to end marijuana prohibition is far stronger this morning than it ever has been,” said Stephen Gutwillig, the California director of the Drug Policy Alliance, as members of the Yes on 19 campaign gathered at their headquarters in downtown Oakland early Wednesday following the initiative’s defeat, garnering only 46.1 percent of the vote.
A familiar herbal scent filled the air in the Oaksterdam University parking lot Tuesday night as dozens of Proposition 19 supporters heard word that the bill had been defeated.
The Green Party’s Laura Wells was one of four other candidates who took a stab at the governor’s seat. Wells is a longtime Oakland resident, with a background in both citizen-activism and business. On election night, she gathered with other local Greens to close out the election season at La Estrellita Café and Bar in East Oakland.