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For 17 hours – 4:45 p.m. Monday, July 4, until 9:45 a.m. Tuesday, July 5 – San Francisco Homes Not Jails took direct action conducting a second open housing occupation at the long-empty Mission District Sierra Hotel.

Betty McGee, PhD, serves as the Bayview Hunters Point Health and Environmental Resource Center’s (HERC) executive director, working to create a more environmentally just San Francisco.

Whenever the subject of ghettos is mentioned, our first inclination is to focus on Afrikan and Latino communities. However, historically, the word “ghetto” came about as a result of Jewish sections in European cities designated as poor slum areas. The Jews formed a minority group based on their economic and social plight, rooted in religion and racial discrimination.

On Saturday, July 16, a 19-year-old young man, Kenneth Harding, from Seattle, Wash., came to San Francisco at the wrong time. He rode a transit vehicle to Bayview Hunters Point’s Palou station only to exit and have an encounter with two police officers about paying his $2 fare.

Two of the nation’s most pressing issues involving young people — childhood obesity and violence — are indeed connected. How so? Just ask the Rethinkers. The correlation between unhealthy food choices and crime and violence was at the focal point of this year’s Rethink press conference.

Like the country it governs, Washington is a city of extremes. In a car, you can zip in bare moments from northwest District of Columbia, its streets lined with million-dollar homes and palatial embassies, its inhabitants sporting one of the nation’s lowest jobless rates, to Anacostia, a mostly forgotten neighborhood in southeastern D.C. with one of the highest unemployment rates anywhere in America.

Kenny was a real happy person. He had a beautiful spirit. He loved his mom. He was really into music and underground rap and really liked most of the local Bay Area underground artists – people from Hunters Point and Fillmore. Now that the police in San Francisco have killed Kenny, we’re going through a lot with the police in Seattle. They brought out the SWAT team to my home for nothing. The police said that my son was a piece of trash and that he got what he deserved. I don’t think nobody deserves to be killed in the fashion that my son was.

“The police in our community occupy our area, our community, as a foreign troop occupies territory. And the police are in our community not to promote our welfare or our security or our safety, but they are there to contain us, to brutalize us and murder us,” said Huey P. Newton, co-founder and minister of defense of the Black Panther Party. Hunters Point has stood up to the Lennar Corp. and the City about the shipyard. It is time to expand that movement to include police terrorism, put new energy into it, and claim our right to live and not be wantonly killed.

Kenneth Harding Jr., 19, was shot and killed on July 16 as he ran away from two police officers interrogating him for his alleged failure to pay a $2 fare for a ride on the city’s light-rail train. Incredibly, after originally admitting that two officers shot and killed Harding, the new story from the police some days later is that the young man must have killed himself.

The “rebels” in Misrata in Libya have driven out the entire Black population of the city, according to a chilling story in the Wall Street Journal ... The “rebels” now eye the city of Tawergha, 25 miles away, and vow to cleanse it of all Black people once they seize the city. Isn’t this the perfect definition of the term “genocide”?

The argument in Libya has been won by the Al Fateh revolution. There is now a glaring truth confronting the North Atlantic Terrorist Organization (NATO) – Muammar Qaddafi has handed out over 1 million kalashnikovs to the Libyan people. If he was the brutal dictator that NATO would have us believe him to be ...

In September 1966, after police killed 16-year-old Matthew Johnson, I stood in the Bayview Opera House as police bullets from Third Street ripped through the building, hitting my childhood friend. This is how the 1966 Hunters Point riots began. Forty-five years later, blood has been spilled by police bullets just feet from where young Mr. Johnson died. Welcome the family of Kenneth Harding on Tuesday, July 26, 6:30 p.m., at the Center for Self Improvement, 5048 Third St. at Revere, San Francisco.

The historic prisoner hunger strike led by 11 now “shrunken” but alive Pelican Bay Prison inmates advocating human rights, peace and justice continues at several prisons, according to officials, prisoners’ families and prisoner attorney Marilyn McMahon. Hunger strikers' families and supporters will rally in Sacramento again Monday, noon-4 p.m.

On July 15, 2011, to mark the 58th birthday of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a gathering of volunteer medical doctors and nurses provided a free medical clinic in Port-au-Prince. This year was special because of the return of Haiti’s first democratically elected and twice ousted president.

Adding to Kevin Gosztola’s recent coverage of the hunger strike at Pelican Bay prison ... I want to look more closely at one of the prisoner’s demands, in particular their call for the abolition of the “debriefing process.”

Folks we talked to in the Bayview vehemently refute the accounts given by the police who claim 19-year-old Kenneth Harding shot at them. Why so distrustful of “San Francisco’s finest”? Since the recent SRO scandal, SFPD has lost credibility with the public. Many who staunchly support the police while overlooking these recent scandals suggest that because Harding had a criminal past he deserved to be shot. That’s wrong on all angles. Come to the community vigil Friday at 6 p.m. at Mendell Plaza, Third and Palou.

Another young, unarmed Black man, Kenneth Harding, has been gunned down in broad daylight. He was shot numerous times in the back as he fled, his empty hands held in the air. His crime had been a simple train fare evasion for which San Francisco police executed him in the street.

Sympathy for the prisoners on hunger strike in the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison is limited due to the widely held impression that these men — and indeed most supermax prisoners — are the “worst of the worst.” According to conventional wisdom, in order to land in the most secure units in the prison system, these men must have committed terrible crimes in the first place ...

Reaching at least 6,600 prisoners across 13 prisons, this massive and inspiring act of solidarity and people power across prison-manufactured and exacerbated racial and geographic lines has dumb-founded the CDCR (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation).

We sat together: elders, youth, workers, students and folks. We were on our way to a low-paid job, an overpriced university, a pre-gentrified home and a public school. There were laughter and shouts, murmurs and silence. Then suddenly, there were nine heavily armed police officers and fare inspectors walking through the crowded 14 Mission Muni line. One stopped in front of me and my son.