Politics
Over 40,000 women and their allies spent Saturday, January 20, marching in Oakland to support the cause of women. Women’s March Oakland organizers will focus on registering voters throughout the year leading up to midterm elections in November as well as helping more women run for public office. Around the rest of the country, protests drew more than a million people.
In Berkeley, the La Peña Cultural Center and the UC Berkeley Womxn of Color Initiative hosted an open mic night on January 26 called “Empowering Women of Color Open Mic.” The event opened a three-show series intended to provide a safe space for women of color to express themselves.
On January 31, Ahed Tamimi, a Palestinian activist, turned 17 years old behind bars in an Israeli prison. Almost 8,000 miles away, in Oakland, Rania Salem, another 17-year-old Palestinian activist from San Francisco, joined a rally to celebrate Tamimi’s birthday and demand her release. Tamimi could face 10 years in prison after being charged with aggravated assault and 11 other charges. On December 18, a video of her slapping two Israeli soldiers went viral. That same day, her cousin Mohamed…
On a sunny January morning, two Oakland women took up banners and headed to San Francisco to participate in a demonstration. Both had ended a pregnancy and both have since found healing in activism. But a few blocks separated the two. One was part of the “14th Annual Walk for Life West Coast,” and the second was countering that walk at the “Rally for Reproductive Justice.” At the intersection of 7th and Market streets, a modest crowd of 50 people…
In Oakland, city officials and immigration advocacy groups are preparing for the worst and hoping for the best after an alarm was sounded earlier this month, notifying the Bay Area that federal immigration officials could be planning massive raids on undocumented immigrant communities in the coming weeks. On January 16, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that federal immigration officials are preparing to arrest more than 1,500 undocumented people in Northern California. This news came the same day that the Oakland…
A $4 billion bond measure that will determine funding for California’s local and state parks will appear on ballots during the June statewide direct primary election.
On Thursday morning at the youth center at Skyline High School in Oakland, about 10 women sat around a table and practiced shouting. “I want to speak with my lawyer!” demonstrated Antonio Medrano, the chapter chair of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California’s Berkeley/North East Bay chapter. He stood in front of them and said, “Repeat it!” The women repeated the sentence with louder voices: “I want to speak with my lawyer!” They were participating in a…
2017 brought a new group of student reporters to Oakland North from across the country and the globe. They covered a city in flux: a housing and homelessness crisis that shows no sign of abating, a school district facing millions in budget cuts, a citywide crackdown on warehouse spaces in the wake of the Ghost Ship fire, and local reactions to the new immigration and sanctuary city polices coming out of Washington under the new Donald Trump administration. But they also dug…
Community members and city officials struggle to confront the the epidemic of hundreds of Oakland residents–most of them black, many of them elders–sleeping on the streets due to to skyrocketing rents and a lack of affordable housing.