Feature Archives

A rally and march of California-wide advocates for national LGBT equality was held in Fresno on Saturday, May 30th. The California Supreme Court issued its ruling on Prop 8, banning gay marriage, earlier in the week. Organizers chose Fresno for its location in the middle of the state and because the Central Valley is more representative of "middle-America." They say that the struggle for equality has to be won in towns like Fresno and not just in LGBT-friendly metropolitan areas like San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Peter Herlihy and Jerome Dobson, professors of Geography at Kansas University, received funding from the Foreign Military Studies Office, located at the Fort Leavenworth U.S. Army base in Leavenworth, Kansas, to map communally held indigenous land in the states of San Luis Potosi, and in Oaxaca, Mexico. The project, named the Bowman Expeditions or México Indígena, began mapping in 2005 in an indigenous region known as La Husteca, which is partially located in the state of San Luis Potosi, and then moved their operation to the state of Oaxaca amidst the statewide popular uprising of the Oaxacan Peoples’ Popular Assembly (APPO) in 2006.

On Friday, March 27, protesters decried budget cuts to home care workers in front of the State Building in Oakland. SEIU claimed that the California budget passed in February contains $1 billion in "trigger cuts" to home care, health care, higher education, SSI/SSP, and CalWORKS. The protest was part of a day of action organized by SEIU that included a rally at the Capitol Building in Sacramento and in five other cities.

On March 16, 2009, students and educators from public colleges all over the state converged on Sacramento to demand that California fully fund higher education and not raise tuition. Over 6,000 students, teachers, administrators, and education workers converged in Sacramento. They came to demand, “Keep the doors open,” “No budget cuts,” “Bail out colleges, not banks,” “Fund education, not war,” and “Money for schools, not prisons.”

Evaluating the health effects of past and future pesticides applied on and around people to combat the Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM), three state agencies concluded the potential danger was low because they incorrectly divided instead of multiplying. In their analysis, the agencies divided by the thousands of acres sprayed, when they should have multiplied by the same number of thousands. If only 1,000 acres were involved, the peoples' exposure was as much as one million times greater than reported by the state agencies.

Teachers For Class War spent a second Monday in a row discussing massive cuts to education. California Federation of Teachers (CFT) Field Representative Pat Lerman of the Pájaro Valley Federation of Teachers took some time out to speak with l@s Maestr@s. Two of the hosting Maestr@s got pink slips on Friday, March 13th.

A report released in February and authored by a group of researchers from various organizations supports concerns Californians have had about the aerial spraying of pesticides in the Monterey Bay area in 2007. The study shows the correlation of the unprecedented bird die off and red tide with the timing of the spraying of the pesticide Checkmate.