Politics
At 1:14 pm on Tuesday, the Port of Oakland issued the following statement, titled “Open Letter to the Community of Oakland,” with regard to the planned general strike tomorrow, Wednesday, November 2 organized by Occupy Oakland.
The Oakland Hills Fire may have started on the ground, but the Eucalyptus trees surrounding people’s homes in the Oakland-Berkeley Hills helped it burn more and spread even further. The highly flammable non-native species accounted for 70 percent of the energy released through combustion of vegetation during the fire, according to the National Park Service. Twenty years after the fire, Eucalyptus trees still surround many homes and live in many of Oakland’s parks, while residents debate whether they should be saved or removed as fire hazards.
On Friday, parents, kids, and community leaders came out to Youth Uprising, a youth center in East Oakland, to help build a community playground. In six hours, the play area at Youth Uprising transformed from a slab of concrete to a playground that includes swings, monkey bars and artwork made by the kids who volunteered. “If you would have showed up here at 7:00 this morning, you would have seen an empty lot with a bunch of concrete,” said Manuel…
In places like Oakland, where local authorities treat syringe exchange as an accepted public health practice, groups like HEPPAC no longer face the risk of arrest. Today their challenge is going mainstream, and needle exchange programs are now reaching for the biggest government seal of approval of all—federal funding.
Heated confrontations between Oakland police and over 500 Occupy Oakland demonstrators during a march against police brutality on Saturday night threatened to turn into a repeat of Tuesday night’s violence, but the tension dissipated as the march moved away from OPD headquarters and into West Oakland. The night ended peacefully and without arrests.
Members of the Occupy Oakland general assembly discussed more details of the proposed general strike in the early evening Friday, agreeing after much fanfare to march on the Port of Oakland on Wednesday, November 2— the day of the proposed general strike— at 5 p.m.
As Mayor Jean Quan fielded reporters’ questions on Friday about the clash between police and protesters earlier this week, she was suddenly drowned out by cheers coming from outside as documentarian and activist Michael Moore arrived to speak to a gathering crowd of hundreds on the steps of City Hall.
The ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) jointly sent a public records request to the Oakland Police Department this week, asking for detailed information about the arrests and use of force in response to the Occupy Oakland confrontations.
On Friday, Oakland Interim Police Chief Howard Jordan issued a message to the community, which was sent to news publications, regarding police officers’ use of force during the Tuesday night clash between Occupy Oakland protesters and law enforcement, and the department’s position on the ongoing downtown demonstrations.