Feature Archives

Around the world, workers united on May 1st for International Workers' Day — with marches and rallies. Across Northern California — from Berkeley to San Francisco, from Fresno to Sacramento — thousands of workers and supporters stood up for immigrant and labor rights on May Day 2011. Code Pink and others began an eight-day march from San Francisco to Sacramento to demand a just budget in California.

Activists in the Bay Area are marking the 25th Anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster with rallies, speakers, street theater, and educational events. Calling the catastrophe in Ukraine "the most significant nuclear reactor failure in the history of nuclear power", anti-nuke enthusiasts say they want the world to remember that April 26, 1986 was the day when one of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power station exploded, killing plant employees instantly and leading to a projected increase in cancer deaths in the hundreds of thousands.

On April 16th, over 300 people gathered for a protest at Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County. They called for the closure of nearby Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant and insisted that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must halt PG&E's relicensing application process for the structure.

Stop Smart Meters! and allies held a protest in Mountain View on April 14th as Julius Genachowski, Chair of the Federal Communications Commission, spoke about the need to increase wireless capacity, ignoring those who suffer ill health from "electrosmog" throughout the U.S. Several passers-by stopped and joined the demonstration. Activists smuggled a Stop Smart Meters! banner inside the talk and just when they thought everyone in the audience was about to go to sleep, they stirred things up with a classic banner drop disruption.

Activists in the Bay Area are shining a light on the connection between recently announced budget cuts and a corporate culture of tax evasion. Late last month, members of San Francisco's US Uncut movement held a sit-in at a Bank of America branch in the Mission District to call attention to the fact that the mega bank paid no federal taxes for years 2009 or 2010. As the April 18th tax filing deadline approaches, banks in Santa Cruz, San Francisco, and Oakland are protest targets.

The San Diego City Council spent nearly six hours on March 28th listening to public input and debating a proposed permit process for medical marijuana dispensaries. The Council passed a measure that dispensary members and their supporters say amounts to a virtual ban. Though public speakers in support of medical marijuana far outnumbered opponents at each stage of the process, the Council enacted an ordinance that would make it virtually impossible for dispensaries to locate anywhere in the city of San Diego.

A spike in the level of radioactive iodine from Japan's Fukushima Daichii plant was discovered in milk samples in California's San Luis Obispo County in late March. On April 2nd, the EPA issued a press release stating that radioactive material in California's rainwater is the result of the nuclear disaster in Japan. While health officials assure the public that the increases present no danger, Californians are expressing deep concern about nuclear reactors that are poised near earthquake faults on the coast. Scheduled protests include in San Francisco on April 14th, Avila Beach, California, near Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, on April 16th, and Menlo Park on April 26th.