Feature Archives

From the open publishing newswire: "That's how the corporate university works. It's because of the licensing of bovine growth hormone (rBGH) by the UC system (human growth hormone is also a UC patent). In the past (before Bayh-Dole in 1980), any company that wanted to use the results of academic research for their business could - but with Bayh-Dole came the exclusive licensing of patents to private industry, for which the UC gets a little cut, as do the professors who created the patent - at taxpayer expense."

A rescue effort by local animal protection groups has saved 650 hens from a California egg farm. The hens were rescued on Friday and Saturday from battery cages and will soon be placed in permanent homes. Coordinating the effort was Animal Place, a farmed-animal sanctuary and education center in Vacaville, about 45 miles northeast of San Francisco.

On November 4th, 2008, California voters passed Proposition 2 by a 63% to 36% margin. The new "Standards for Confining Farm Animals" statute phases out some of the most restrictive confinement systems used by factory farms — gestation crates for breeding pigs, veal crates for calves, and battery cages for egg laying hens — affecting 20 million farm animals in the state by granting them space to stand up, stretch their limbs, turn around and lie down comfortably.

On October 13th, a protest held outside of UC Berkeley's new animal testing facility drew media and cops. The protest marked National Primate Liberation Week, which featured demonstrations and press conferences across the country. Completion of the laboratory will lead to a seventy percent increase in animal research at the University, which already experiments on approximately 40,000 animals at any given time, including at least 15 primates.

In Santa Cruz last week, at least three individuals were visited by FBI agents and compelled to give DNA samples. The agents possessed court orders for their DNA in investigation of a "violation of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act." Another individual was served with a subpoena for a federal grand jury hearing.

Following last month's raid of the venerable Long Haul Infoshop in Berkeley, UCPD is still holding the computers and data storage devices seized from the computer lab, Slingshot newspaper and other tenants for analysis by a forensics team. The San Francisco chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) says it is working with EFF on a legal response on behalf of the Long Haul.

On August 29th at approximately 2:00pm, an FBI agent posing as a neighbor knocked at the door of a home in Oceanside, CA, lured Nathan Pope/Knoerl from his mother's house, and arrested him. The only known charge at this point is felony perjury. He is being held on $100,000 bond. Nathan is a resident of the house on Riverside Avenue in Santa Cruz that has been raided twice in the past six months.