Feature Archives

No Justice No BART (NJNB) held their first action at the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland on March 5th. NJNB intends to continue disruptive protests at various BART stations until their list of demands is addressed. NJNB said the demo was a success despite not having fully closed the station. Passengers came and went yet BART collected no fares during the protest. The next NJNB action will be March 19th at Rockridge BART.

From March 2 to March 6, UC Berkeley students will host Israeli Apartheid Week. The week long event will include lectures, panel discussions and movies addressing the legal system of Apartheid in Occupied Palestine. The event is also orientated toward educating the public about the boycott, divestment, sanctions campaign, of Israeli-Apartheid products. In its fifth annual year, Israeli Apartheid Week will be held in over forty cities around the world. At UC Berkeley, the event is happening for the second year.

Over a hundred people marched through Hayward from the BART Station to City Hall on what would of been Oscar Grant's 23rd birthday on February 27th, 2009. A large outpouring of friends and family rallied in front of Hayward City Hall after the march. Family members called for justice for all those murdered by police and to keep the movement going. There was a large police presence throughout.

On February 23rd, students at UC Berkeley voted whether to recall John Moghtader, a senator at the student government. Moghtader, along with members of the student groups Tikva and Zionist Freedom Alliance, are accused of assaulting three Palestinian students for displaying Palestinian flags during a campus event last November.

Following a series of Town Hall meetings that have been held since the murder of Oscar Grant, the first in a series of Caravans for Justice traveled to the California State Capitol on February 19th to speak out and lobby legislators on the issues of Oscar Grant and police killings, repressive gang laws, Three Strikes, the San Francisco 8, environmental justice, and other laws and issues that negatively effect urban communities of color.

The 55-year-old Bevatron particle accelerator at the Berkeley Lab will soon be reduced to 4,700 truckloads of rubble to make way for a new experimental facility. Local residents worry that UC's disposal methods are not taking the human population and environment thoroughly into account, and point to the history of the Bevatron as a facility intended to further nuclear weapons technology. Radioactive waste will be trucked to Nevada, while less hazardous rubble will be dumped in Richmond and Livermore.

Federal authorities have arrested four animal rights activists accused of protesting animal abuse at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, a FBI press release reported on Friday, February 20th. The activists are accused of "chalk[ing] defamatory comments on the public sidewalks", protesting while "wearing bandanas to hide their faces", and distributing leaflets with the contact information for vivisectors on them. All four will be charged at least in part under the federal Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.