Feature Archives

On Saturday, July 25, the 2nd annual Bay Area Bike 4 Life will be held in Oakland, starting near Lake Merritt and ending up at DeFremery Park. Bikes for Life (B4L) is a community social enterprise in West Oakland promoting peace and a call for a gun truce. Bike 4 Life will feature a scraper bike video shoot, skateboarding, rock climbing, basketball tournament, baseball game, and Circus Bella all happening simultaneously.

Over six months have passed since the murder of Oscar Grant III and BART has yet to tell the truth about what happened on January 1st, nor has a single employee been held accountable. On July 16th, No Justice No BART boarded BART trains to inform thousands of people about what happened on the Fruitvale BART platform moments before Oscar Grant was murdered, and the lies told by Police Chief Gary Gee shortly thereafter.

"Copwatch 13" writes: Two Oakland police officers, Phong Tran and Scott Hewitt, shot and killed Parnell Smith on Wednesday, July 15th, near the corner of 16th Avenue and International Boulevard. Smith, who was unarmed when he was shot, was running away from Tran and Hewitt as they fired on him. On Thursday, when grilled about why police would shoot Smith if he was only running away, Oakland Police Spokesman Jeff Thomason initially said, "This was a gunfight...it was a gun battle that took place in the streets of Oakland." However, on Friday, Thomason acknowledged that his earlier statements were premature.

Advance the Struggle writes:"The murder of Oscar Grant set Oakland on fire, but who put the fire out? The working class people of Oakland, their consciousness set ablaze, found an inadequate set of organizational tools at their disposal to do the work that deep down we all know has to be done – confront the state (government) and its underlying property relations."

On July 13th, defense attorneys for Joseph Buddenberg, Maryam Khajavi, Nathan Pope and Adriana Stumpo (the AETA 4) presented oral arguments on their motion to strike down the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA). The AETA 4 are being represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), Civil Liberties Defense Center (CLDC), and other well-respected civil rights attorneys, including Tony Serra. The defense demanded that AETA be struck down as unconstitutional before Judge Ronald Whyte of the United States District Court, Northern District of California in San Jose.

Since early 2009, thousands of posts related to justice for Oscar Grant have been published to Indybay — video, audio, photos, first-hand accounts of court hearings, analyses, protest coverage, and more. In order to consolidate the history and latest developments in the movement for justice for Oscar Grant, this feature was created. It centralizes the multitude of related stories and has its own unique web address: www.indybay.org/oscargrant.

Over the July 4th traffic on Interstate 80, “torture victims and detainees” staged a banner display on the University Avenue overpass in Berkeley. World Can’t Wait has demonstrated on this overpass action every 4th of July since 2006. This year the focus was on the torture state forged under Bush – and now being continued and refined by Obama – as witnessed by the thousands who passed the display. The act of civil disobedience slowed northbound traffic along I-80.