When Sonia Nazario was 14 years old, she and her mother came across a pool of blood on the sidewalk. It had been about a year since they’d moved from Kansas to her mother’s native Argentina, right at the onset of the country’s “Dirty War.” She asked her mother about the blood. “The military killed two journalists today, for telling the truth about what’s going on here,” Nazario recalls her saying.
Posted on April 6, 2017 - 3:55pm
After President Donald Trump’s inauguration, information was altered and links up and died on government websites. In response, citizen programmers, scientists and activists met up at UC Berkeley for Data Rescue SF, an event created to preserve publicly accessible data, specifically from NASA Earth Sciences and the Department of Energy National Labs.
Posted on April 5, 2017 - 1:44pm
President Trump’s positions on immigration and trade are causing some queasiness among people who largely supported him during the campaign: farmers. The reasons are straightforward enough. Oft-repeated protectionist sentiments raise the possibility of a trade war that could throttle U.S. food exports, and Trump’s fixation on building a “beautiful wall” on the nation’s southern border threatens the agricultural labor force.
Posted on April 3, 2017 - 3:44pm
Most of the discussion surrounding the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the US Supreme Court has, quite properly, centered around the jurist’s judicial philosophy and political leanings, and the opinions he has issued from the bench. (In case you’re just tuning in, court watchers place Trump’s nominee on the right of the spectrum, more conservative than Samuel Alito and on one side or the other of the late Antonin Scalia depending on the issue.
Posted on March 30, 2017 - 3:11pm
Seven hours before Shane Bauer was to start his 6 a.m. shift at the Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana, his wife shook him awake. “Something’s wrong,” she said. His colleague from the magazine Mother Jones, James West, hadn’t returned from shooting nighttime footage of the private prison where Bauer worked. Had officials there discovered that Bauer wasn’t just a regular guard, but an investigative reporter from San Francisco?
Avowed Second Amendment enthusiast Donald Trump drew plenty of scorn and outrage recently when he signed a bill overturning an Obama era restriction on handgun sales to certain mentally disturbed citizens. But the action was significant more as a political statement than functional policy, says UC Berkeley Law Professor and Center for Studies in Criminal Justice Director Franklin Zimring, an authority on Second Amendment issues.
Posted on March 8, 2017 - 2:19pm
After graduating from the UC Berkeley’s Journalism School in 2000, Sara Maamouri has dedicated her career to working on documentaries about social justice. Frustrated by the portrayals of Arabs in the American media, the Tunisian-American alum decided to start focusing on Arabic films five years ago.
Posted on March 7, 2017 - 12:52pm
While progressives are scandalized by Breitbart’s nativist tone, it’s deeply appealing to millions of disenfranchised and largely white citizens. Indeed, it helped energize them to the point that they actually got out and voted in numbers sufficient to elect Donald Trump, much to the horror of the droves of Democrats who couldn’t be bothered going to the polls and the prestigious mainstream news outlets that predicted an easy Hillary electoral victory.
Posted on February 28, 2017 - 11:32am
The latest trendy theory among progressives is that emotions, not facts, are most effective in convincing conservative Americans to change their minds for the good of the country.
Posted on February 23, 2017 - 4:28pm
The title of UC Berkeley criminologist Franklin Zimring’s book, When Police Kill, released by Harvard University Press this week, is as stark as its mission is simple: to conduct a comprehensive study of police use of lethal force in the United States.
Posted on February 21, 2017 - 4:42pm
Is it a simple free speech issue or something far darker and conspiratorial? In either case, Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos is surfing the wave of his notoriety like Laird Hamilton carving down a fifty-foot face at Jaws in Maui.
Posted on February 7, 2017 - 5:11pm
The rapid fire train wreck-a-day strategy of the Trump administration has left some people breathless and others queasy. Flogging a travel ban designed to exclude Muslims, provoking China, insulting Australia, staring down Iran, comparing Russia to the United States, and locally, floating a question of pulling federal funding from Cal due to inadequate “free speech protections” for far-right pundit Milo Yiannopoulos—whew. It’s enough to leave you wondering who or what’s on first.
Posted on February 6, 2017 - 12:59pm
On August 28, 1789, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison from Paris about the French revolutionaries, relaying an important piece of strategic information: “Mirabeau is their chief.”
Posted on January 31, 2017 - 4:46pm
They wrong. They’re rigged. They’re partisan. They’re worthless.
Polls took as vicious a drubbing as civility and real news in the latest election. And they’re still drawing withering abuse from Donald Trump and his supporters, who maintain that surveys showing that he is highly unpopular are lies, perfidious lies. Trump, in fact, continues to promote a narrative that we are living in a post-poll world, that polls are not only inaccurate but passé; nobody cares about them.
Posted on January 30, 2017 - 2:19pm
Far-right provocateur and Breitbart News Technology Editor Milo Yiannopoulos has prospered mightily by posting screeds that his many detractors characterize as racist and misogynistic; so popular is his invective with a certain political subset that Simon & Schuster recently handed him a $250,000 book deal.
Posted on January 26, 2017 - 5:29pm
