Feature Archives

On July 7th through 9th, the G8 countries held their annual meeting high above Lake Toyoaka in Hokkaido Japan at an exclusive spa resort. The one agreement that was reached at the summit was that the G-8 countries would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by the year 2050, 42 years from now. Fidel Castro commented in his reflections of July 15, that this "is about the time that hell freezes over".

On July 10th, Bush signed into law the FISA Amendment Act. The law allows the government to spy on emails, phone calls, web surfing, and other communications without warrants. The law also guarantees immunity to telecommunication companies who participated in the secret and illegal spying conducted by the Bush Administration. Many have stated that the bill excuses President Bush's lawless behavior, is an assault on the first and fourth Amendment, and is a further justification to spy on activists.

Glen Chase, a Professor of Systems Management, has released a report identifying the California Department of Food & Agriculture (CDFA) Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM) eradication program as a fraud. "CDFA claims the moth is an emergency and pretends that they can eradicate it in order to steal $100's of millions from taxpayer emergency funds, set aside for real emergencies."

In a July 14th, New York Times Op Ed, Barack Obama says, "As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces."

The 4th Annual Old Time American Flag Burn took place on July 3rd at the Far West Fire Ring on Seabright Beach in Santa Cruz. This BYOF (Bring Your Own Flag) event is a ritual celebration of the First Amendment to the Constitution which protects freedom of speech, including the burning of the United States flag. Instead of flag desecration, this is flag consecration.

A group of San Francisco residents are gathering signatures for an initiative to be put on the November ballot. The initiative will ask to rename Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant the George W Bush Sewage Plant. The group has managed to collect 8,500 signatures so far; 15,000 are needed for an initiative.

On June 19th, the California Department of Food and Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that aerial pheromone application will no longer take place over urban areas and will be "limited to agricultural land and undeveloped regions as a tool of last result" to control the Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM). “The bottom line for eradicating this pest has always been safety,” said Sam Farr, representative of the 17th Congressional District of California. “The public was never convinced that spraying was safe or the only option, and the result has been protests, anger and a series of lawsuits."