Politics

The City of Oakland has been through this before—the owner of a local professional sports franchise announces they’re moving the team out of town, leaving the Coliseum for a state-of-the-art facility somewhere else.

Seven-year-old Jose Hernandez swiped through images on his mother’s tablet device in Oakland’s Verdes Carter Park as they took their place in a swelling crowd of parents and other children waiting for events marking the National Missing Children’s Day to begin.

The Senseless Bureau knows how to grip their audience with plays on gender, nuance and innuendo. Their improv show—filled with ad-lib, mime and intuition—is provocative and carefree.

Four candidates went before the Alameda County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday afternoon to argue their cases for why they should be named the interim supervisor for District 2 after Nadia Lockyer stepped down. Now the four remaining board members have a week to decide who will join them for the next five months before standing for election this November.

In an effort to get more illegal guns off the streets of Oakland, the city’s police department is now collaborating with the federal government. Oakland Police officers have been partnering with agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) on a four-month campaign that targeted robbery crews responsible for much of the violent crime in the city, OPD Chief Howard Jordan said at a press conference on Tuesday morning at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building.

For months, some Oakland residents and policy makers have seethed about what they consider an unfair interest rate swap between the city and the investment bank Goldman Sachs. Last Thursday, three people from Oakland flew across the country to attend Goldman Sachs’ annual shareholders’ meeting and see what CEO Lloyd Blankfein had to say about the deal.

For one of the first-time candidates running for public office, the first-ever Oakland Caucus on Thursday night seemed undoubtedly formal. Richard Raya is running for the District 1 council seat, which includes North Oakland, in November, and while his campaigning to this point has involved a lot of community meetings and house parties, this event featured most of the candidates for local political seats in full-on campaign mode as they mingled with voters.

On Wednesday afternoon, students from McClymonds High presented ancestral research projects as part of an event entitled “Remembering Our Past, Moving Toward Our Futures.” For three months, students had conducted ancestral research on their families by interviewing relatives and using genealogical search tools with help from volunteers from the African American Geological Society of California (AAGSC). Students even took a DNA test to find out about where their lineage originated.

More than 130 fifth and sixth graders at Lincoln Elementary School in Richmond studied science on Tuesday. Okay, so what? This time their teachers didn’t wear white lab coats and talk about strange things underneath a microscope. Instead, Oakland A’s outfielder Josh Reddick and team mascot Stomper used a Louisville Slugger and chopped up baseballs to talk about the “Science of the Game.”