Otis writes:,"The rally and march against police brutality on Thursday, October 22nd, in Oakland at 14th and Broadway at 12pm, must be a powerful political expression of our anger and determination to stop a system which sets the police on the people, and then defends them from punishment. First the police murder Oscar Grant in Cold Blood! Now, the the judge has agreed with the murderer's attorney, that killer-cop Johannes Mehserle cannot get a fair trial in Oakland. A screaming irony, considering the "fair trial" that Oscar received at the hands of judge-jury-executioner Mehserle." Actions will also be happening in Arcata, Eureka, and Santa Rosa.
On Friday, September 11th, activists demonstrated in front of the Staples office supplies store in on Cleveland Avenue in Santa Rosa. Staples was targeted because they have been documented using unmarked vans to deliver office supplies to Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS). In recent years, HLS have been infiltrated and exposed multiple times for animal cruelty, including workers punching beagle puppies in the face. Their goal was "to show Staples that if you deal with HLS, you deal with us."
On July 17, 2009, People for Animal Liberation demonstrated in front of the Kentucky Fried Chicken in Healdsburg, California. Demonstrators held signs and banners with a variety of slogans. Street theater included one activist climbing into a guinea pig cage, from which they were pulled out of the cage and murdered.
From Death Row at San Quentin, Donald Ray Young writes: "We had strange fruit for breakfast today...a death row prisoner committed suicide at San Quentin, in East Block. But, I can’t worry about that guy....Wait; how can I not think of the suicide in this very building - - his family...loved ones? What if he was innocent? Do I know him? How many other people on death row have contemplated killing themselves to escape this madness? I believe that when one dies - - a part of all of us all dies...."
On February 13th, about 75 people gathered in Santa Rosa's Courthouse Square to demand that the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department end their use of Tasers, a deadly device which has led to five deaths of unarmed civilians in our community over the last two years. The October 22nd Coalition Against Police Brutality organized the protest as part of a new campaign demanding the end of Taser use in Sonoma County.
Mark Hawthorne writes: One of the most exciting results of Proposition 2 — California’s successful campaign to ban battery cages for hens, gestation crates pigs and veal crates for calves — is that it energized activists across the United States, introducing a new generation of animal advocates to the horrors of factory farming. Many of these people had known little, if anything, about agribusiness practices. But they literally took up the Prop 2 banner, getting involved in the fight to end the use of intensive-confinement devices in California.
Copwatcher and member of the Free Mind Media Center (a Santa Rosa based radical infoshop and bookstore) Ben Saari, was arrested on May Day while doing Copwatch and has charges pending against him.
