News & Views

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Many TV channels broadcast live the entire funeral for four Oakland police officers killed March 21, news anchors calling them "heroes" and "angels." Police funerals are intended to legitimize past and future police violence and tell the public to shut up. The spineless left complies - no mention of Oscar Grant ... or Lovelle Mixon.

The hip hop generation young warriors have to speak for themselves. The movement has always been built on the backs of young brothers and sisters who rose up from the street to defend and stand for justice for our people.

Chauncey Bailey was probably the best known Black journalist in the Bay Area, yet his own Black newspaper is ignored by every agency investigating his murder. Justice for this Black journalist cannot be achieved by silencing Black journalism. By interviewing only the mainstream media, Democracy Now is implying that the Black press and the Black community have nothing significant to say about the murder of the Black editor of a Black newspaper.

Is the Black community supposed to be celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of KPFA when our community is not deemed important enough to be given a public affairs show? "Shut up and keep dancing" is what KPFA's management team is telling the Black community.

If you ask any Somali, if getting rid of the pirates only means the continuous rape of our coast by unmonitored Western vessels and the producing of a new cancerous generation, we would all fly our pirate flags high. One man's pirate is another man's coast guard.

On March 15, Salvadorans headed en masse to the polls and by 9:30 that night Mauricio Funes, presidential candidate of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), had been elected the very first leftist head of state in the country's history.

"Passage of this anti-noose law will be a sign that our state is prepared to confront a visual symbol of America's racist and violent history," said California Assembly Member Wilmer Amina Carter after she introduced a measure that would make it a crime to display a noose in a threatening manner.

Notwithstanding a blistering defeat at the polls and strong opposition from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Mayor Gavin Newsom has opened his Community Justice Center, diverting several million dollars from essential City services to incarcerate poor people for the sole act of being poor.

Most people of color know that the cops, and police departments as institutions, historically represent the street enforcement arm of white American racism. Indeed, the police were born out of the white slave patrols.

My name is Mychal Bell and I was one of the Jena 6 that was charged with attempted murder down in Jena, Louisiana, in 2006.

The U.S. Supreme Court announced today that they have rejected death-row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal's appeal for a new guilt phase trial. Readers are urged to contact the White House to protest this unjust ruling. Call (202) 456-1111 or visit http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/.

The Oakland Police Department suffered a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the foot when it further racialized the March 21 shootings by rescinding Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums' invitation to speak at the public funeral of the four officers who were gunned down.

In an email to the San Francisco Bay View, Laurence Pelosi verified that he was a Lennar senior executive in March of 2004 at the time San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, his cousin for whom he had served as mayoral campaign treasurer, had signed the Hunters Point Shipyard Conveyance Agreement at the behest of Laurence's Aunt Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

"Biomonitoring is the next logical, critical step for us to take in addressing threats to public health." - Sen. Deborah Ortiz, D-Sacramento, author of the California Biomonitoring Program, SB689

Lennar, when will you stop stirring up all that radioactive asbestos in the Hunters Point Shipyard into the air that all the fine people of color in Bayview Hunters Point are obliged to breathe in order to live?

A time bomb is ticking, waiting to explode in communities of color across the nation. Law enforcement officers have become an occupation force. If we are to have peace, we first must place economic justice at the top of our agenda. The day Lovelle Mixon died, those close to him mentioned two explanations: He dreaded being sent back to prison yet he couldn't find a job.

National Women's History Month's roots go back to March 8, 1857, when women from New York City factories staged a protest over working conditions. International Women's Day was first observed in 1909.

The recent UNHCR Gimme Shelter campaign uses the iconic Rolling Stones song and Hollywood star Ben Affleck's video of suffering in Congo as a propaganda tool to peddle the international catastrophe of Western aid, intervention, plunder and depopulation in Central Africa.

Police are virtually an occupying military force in Black urban centers. Their presence will neither eliminate the plague of rampant crime nor address the underlying disease of extreme impoverishment.