Caught in Mideast crossfire. Oakland bakery takes Warrior star off menu

The Warriors superstar just got burned. Obviously Draymond Green failed to take a course in Middle East Politics prior to his trip to Israel.

Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 7.14.2019

A Palestinian-Syrian chef in Oakland is discontinuing a popular item at her restaurant that is named after Draymond Green of the Golden State Warriors

Reem Assil, who has been praised by publications like The Chronicle and Food and Wine, has played a vital role in sparking Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood as a food destination. One of her signatures at her Arab bakery, Reem’s California, has been the “Draymond Green,” a seasonal vegetable wrap.

Assil, a lifelong community activist, has also been outspoken concerning social and political issues both inside and outside of the restaurant world. When her bakery opened in Fruitvale in 2018, it drew the ire of members of the Bay Area’s Jewish community, due to a mural of Rasmea Odeh, a Palestinian woman convicted of terrorism in Israel.

“I’m a small business and it’s not easy taking these kinds of stances,” Assil said. “But I think it’s important we do the right things with our platforms.”

The chef’s decision to stop selling the dish is linked to Green’s 2018 visit to Israel. While there, Green posed for a photo holding a military rifle as though he were a sniper, during a stop at the base of an Israeli Defense Force counter-terrorism unit, the Yamam.

The 2018 photo, as well as an accompanying video of Green taking target practice, exploded across the internet and proved to be fodder for political debates around Palestine and Israel relations, as well as the power of an athlete’s platform when it comes to political commentary.

“Draymond should have done more homework on where he was going,” Assil told The Chronicle on Thursday, the same day she announced via her website she would be pulling the wrap from her menu. “I think it’s important to let him know how those images impact Palestinians, people that are fans of his that want him to understand where these feelings are coming from.”

https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/article/Oakland-bakery-discontinues-signature-Draymond-14092205.php#photo-17559805

Greek tragedy. Oakland scientist brutally murdered in Nazi Bunker on Crete

A murder on bucolic Crete in the Greek isles. Dr. Eaton was from Oakland, yet the local Bay Area media has failed to give this crime story the attention it deserves.

The Daily Beast 7.12.2019

The tortured corpse of a 59-year-old American superstar scientist was found wrapped in burlap inside a secret Nazi bunker on the island of Crete, Greece. Police want to know why.

Suzanne Eaton was, by every standard, an accomplished woman. The 59-year-old molecular biologist from Oakland, California, held a black belt in Taekwondo and was a globetrotting speaker on the international science circuit. She was married to a British scientist with whom she had two children, and she was an avid runner, racking up several miles on her daily 30-minute run.

Eaton, who worked as a research leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, was last seen playing piano at the Orthodox Academy of Crete, in Kolymbari, on July 2, where she was attending a conference.

Her family and friends assumed that she had gone for a run and perhaps passed out in the stifling heat wave or fallen on rough terrain during her workout. Her passport, money, phone, cycling shoes, and laptop were all found in her hotel room, they say. All that was missing were her running shoes.

Her relatives and friends raised nearly $50,000 to aid the search through an online campaign. Then, on July 9, her body was found by two local residents exploring a World War II-era Nazi bunker about seven miles from where Eaton had been staying.

suzanne eaton II 7.13.2019

Her body, which was wrapped in burlap, showed signs of torture, including stab wounds, but her official cause of death, according to the coroner, was asphyxiation. The coroner said she likely suffered a “slow and painful death.”

There was no immediate sign of sexual violence, according to investigators, who said she was still dressed when she was found. A full autopsy is under way. Her body was in such an advanced state of decomposition after a week in the extreme heat that dental records had to be used for a positive identification.

On Friday, Crete’s police spokesperson Eleni Papathanasiou confirmed to The Daily Beast that they were questioning several suspects, including some with neo-Nazi ties, who may know something about what happened to Eaton.

Papathanasiou also said they were looking into whether the location of her body inside a labyrinth of tunnels dug out by Nazis occupying Crete during World War II was connected to the murder. “It is of course part of the investigation,” Papathanasiou told The Daily Beast. “It is a curious place to leave a body, especially when the victim was living and working in Germany.”

San Francisco refuses to bow to Feds. Will not cooperate with ICE Immigration Raids

San Francisco will not be part of the abhorrent Gestapo style activity planned for San Francisco by an Administration run amok as the Incumbent caters to his Base at the expense of the most vulnerable citizens.

San Francisco Examiner 7.12.2019

Mayor London Breed on Friday said San Francisco police and officials will not cooperate with immigration agents after President Donald Trump confirmed raids are planned this weekend to deport undocumented immigrants in several U.S cities, including San Francisco.

“San Francisco stands behind our sanctuary city policy. We have been and will continue to be a sanctuary city,” said Breed.

“We will support and stand by our immigrant community and continue to invest and provide resources to help address a challenging time,” Breed said, speaking at a press conference at City Hall.

Breed said undocumented immigrants have the right to remain silent and to have an attorney, and encouraged residents to call both the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs and the San Francisco Rapid Response Network hotline in the case of a raid.

The threat of raids has prompted several protests from pro-immigrants organizations in San Francisco and around the Bay Area this week, including one in front of the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement headquarters on Sansome Street Friday.

Groups including the American Civil Liberties Union have conducted campaigns to inform immigrants of their legal rights in advance of the raids. Nonprofits working with the immigrant community said they have received hundreds of frightened phone calls from undocumented immigrants in the past few weeks.

Joining Breed at the press conference, Assemblymember David Chiu said “Donald Trump has decided to continue to wage his war against our immigrant communities, a war that is immoral, unjust, racist and xenophobic.”

“If you have to come after them, you are going to have to come through all of us,” said Chiu.

“We will get through this,” Breed said.

https://www.sfexaminer.com/the-city/sf-braces-for-immigration-raids/

American terror: Police State raids brutalize undocumented residents

The Police State is a reality.

Excerpted from the San Jose Mercury News 7.11.2019

The prospect of nationwide immigration raids starting this weekend has spread fear in the Bay Area’s immigrant communities and added new urgency to local advocates’ efforts to defend undocumented residents across the region.

Activists have set up a network of hotlines to confirm reports about raids and readied a cadre of volunteer lawyers to assist detainees in court, in preparation for what could be the largest coordinated operation to detain immigrants since President Donald Trump took office.

MCH-L-RAIDS1-0630 — FILE – In this Feb. 7, 2017, file photo released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, foreign nationals are arrested during a targeted enforcement operation conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

“We want to respond with power, not panic,” said Sandy Valenciano, 26, an immigrant rights activist in Oakland, who is undocumented.

The Trump administration is planning to begin a nationwide immigration enforcement operation, moving forward with plans that had been announced — and subsequently postponed — by Trump late last month amid objections from Congressional leaders and officials at the Department of Homeland Security.

Though plans for the raids appear to still be in flux, multiple news outlets have reported that the operation is set to begin Sunday and will target at least 2,000 immigrants with final deportation orders, as well as any “collateral” individuals without documentation who are found in the process.

At least 10 cities are expected to be targeted, including San Francisco. A spokesperson for ICE’s San Francisco office declined to confirm whether or where any raids would occur, but the office noted that it directs enforcement and removal operations around the Bay Area, not just in the city itself.

Activists monitoring ICE activity said they’d already seen a spike in Bay Area enforcement actions since last weekend, particularly in Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties.

“It seems to us that their operation has already begun, in one way or another, here in Northern California,” said Hamid Yazdan Panah, an attorney with the San Francisco Bar Association, which is coordinating pro bono legal assistance for immigrants detained locally.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/07/11/ice-raids-bay-area-immigration-detention/

Judge: Neo-Nazi blogger owes Whitefish woman $14M

UPDATE Excerpted from the Missoulian 7.16.2019

A federal judge on Monday decided more than $14 million should be awarded to a Whitefish woman who suffered a “troll storm” unleashed by a neo-Nazi website publisher in late 2016.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeremiah Lynch issued his decision on Monday, finding Andrew Anglin owes Tanya Gersh $10 million in punitive damages along with $4,042,438 in compensatory damages.

The ruling comes after a daylong hearing Thursday in which Gersh, her husband, and her therapist testified to the emotional damage caused after Anglin called on his followers on the Daily Stormer to “storm” Gersh’s family.

There are a lot of sick and demented people in America. It defies any sense of humanity that anyone could engage in such abhorrent behavior. Sick and twisted people commit these outrages. No amount of monetary relief will cure the pain inflicted on the subjects of such hate crimes.

Excerpted from The Missoulian 7.11.2019

A Whitefish real estate agent testified for more than an hour in federal court in Missoula Thursday about the “troll storm” of threats and anti-Semitic rants unleashed upon her by neo-Nazi blogger Andrew Anglin.

Attorneys from the Southern Poverty Law Center, who brought the case in 2017 on behalf of Tanya Gersh (picture above), asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeremiah Lynch to award more than $4.5 million — $1 million in past lost wages, $2.5 million in future lost wages, $1.2 million in compensatory damages and a punitive damages amount left up to Lynch — in their favor against Anglin.

In a hearing to bolster their claim to that figure, Gersh brought much of the terror she and her family have endured in the last 18 months to the witness stand.

“I’ve lost my sense of safety, security,” she told reporters at a media conference after the hearing. “I don’t know that I’m ever going to get it back.”

In contrast, Anglin was not in court on Thursday, nor was an attorney to represent him. The Ohio native has not appeared in public since he called on the followers of his Daily Stormer website to flood the Whitefish family’s phones, social media and email with hate speech; a barrage described by the federal judge on Thursday as an “atrocity.”

Gersh’s attorney, David Dinelli of the Southern Poverty Law Center, displayed some of those messages, emails and online comments on a large screen.

“Oh, sorry, I think I have the wrong number,” one caller said in a voicemail. “I was looking for the crematorium” — an apparent reference to the crematoria used to burn the bodies of Jews executed in Nazi death camps during World War II. Gersh and her family are Jewish.

“You’re surprisingly easy to find online, and in real life,” another caller said.

These messages were seemingly stoked by the Daily Stormer, where Anglin wrote posts that included photos of Gersh sitting next to a fire with a Star of David on her chest, and her then-12-year-old son superimposed onto another image. Seeing her son’s face, Gersh said, is what urged her and her husband, Judah, to pack their luggage the night they learned of Anglin’s posts.

The Gersh family did not flee that night, but the luggage remained packed for several weeks, Gersh said. She had spent years establishing a career in Whitefish she could be proud of, longer yet building a loving family who felt safe never locking their doors.

“To this day I am just really sick that they could take it all away in a second,” she said.

The emotional trauma that remains a part of her personal and family life to this day began in 2016, when Anglin accused Gersh of trying to force the mother of white nationalist Richard Spencer to sell her building in Whitefish. Anglin posted personal information on Gersh, her husband and their son online, and Gersh received hundreds of threats and anti-Semitic messages.

She now sees a psychiatrist and takes anti-depression medication, Gersh testified. She sought medical treatment for tension in her shoulder, and used to grind her teeth down at night due to stress.

https://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/crime-and-courts/whitefish-woman-s-testimony-bolsters-claim-for-damages-sought-against/article_a32b0956-37fd-5d02-941d-6b0d98963b

San Francisco thuggery outside historic Legion of Honor on a summer afternoon

San Francisco is a tough and unforgiving place.

The visitor from Oregon, visiting the historic Legion of Honor overlooking the Pacific Ocean, was brutally cut down as he documented the all too typical lawless act in San Francisco, a car break in.

He didn’t realize that this is a mean town. Hopefully, he will recover.

Crimes like this are common everywhere. This is not the image outsider visitors carry with them when they arrive in San Francisco to see the sights.

San Francisco Chronicle 7.10.2019

A sightseer was run down by two thieves in a getaway car Tuesday after he spotted them breaking into his vehicle outside San Francisco’s Legion of Honor and began snapping photographs of them, police said Tuesday.

The unidentified victim was rushed to a local hospital with what at first appeared to be life-threatening injuries after he was struck by a silver-colored vehicle, said Officer Joseph Tomlinson, of the San Francisco Police Department.

Tomlinson said officers found the victim at 4:03 p.m. after responding to reports of a vehicle theft in the 100 block of 34th Avenue.

The victim was at the Legion of Honor when he saw a man in a hoodie exit from the passenger side of a silver car driven by an accomplice and break into his parked vehicle, Tomlinson said.

“He came outside and was taking photos of the suspect,” Tomlinson said. “The suspect jumped back in the car. They attempt to flee and they strike the victim with their vehicle. The suspects fled the scene and are still at large at the moment.”

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the driver of the silver vehicle hit the victim on purpose, Tomlinson said. The victim, who is reportedly from Oregon, was upgraded to stable condition Tuesday night with unspecified injuries.

He said detectives are looking through the victim’s photographs to see if they can identify the culprits or the vehicle they were driving. Investigators are also trying to determine whether other vehicles were broken into, he said.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Sightseer-at-SF-s-Legion-of-Honor-run-down-by-14084141.php

California lawmakers perform shameless act. Lap dogs for real estate industry

We know who runs California. The real estate industry continues to have a strangle hold on the State legislature. In order to keep their unfettered power, real estate industry and its lobbyists will spend whatever it takes to stop any pro tenant legislation.

Big bucks are spent to crush legislation and defeat statewide ballot measures through disinformation and fake news. In 2018 the industry spent tens of millions of dollars to crush a statewide pro tenant ballot measure.

New York and Oregon have instituted strong tenant protections this year.

So much for “Progressive” California

Excepted from the San Francisco Chronicle 7.9.2019

SACRAMENTO — Lawmakers and landlords are haggling over how much California housing to carve out of a tenant protection bill that would cap rent increases and require a just cause for evictions.

In a state Senate committee Tuesday, AB1482 faced continued opposition from groups representing apartment owners, developers and real estate agents that could sink the measure in the final weeks of the legislative session.

Letitia James joins rent controlled tennants — NEW YORK, NY – MARCH 13: Residences of a building listen to New York State’s Attorney General Letitia James speak at a press conference to support rent controlled tenants who have been threatened with eviction because their landlord has filed for bankruptcy on March 13, 2019 in the East Village neighborhood of New York City. (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

The proposal has struggled to win support from legislators amid concerns that imposing new restrictions on landlords would discourage housing construction during a historic shortage.

In its current iteration, AB1482 would prohibit landlords from raising rents by more than 7 percent plus the regional cost of living increase, or a maximum of 10 percent, in a year.

The bill exempts owners of housing built in the previous 10 years and landlords who own 10 or fewer single-family homes. The law would expire in 2023, though lawmakers could renew it.

A study by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley found that even with the exemptions, the cap would extend rent protections to 2.6 million to 4.6 million more households in California.

Assemblyman David Chiu, a San Francisco Democrat who is one of the authors of the bill, said the measure would protect tenants “without compromising the ability of landlords to make a healthy profit.”

Chiu said he would be open to a discussion about exempting owners of few multifamily units. But preempting local ordinances is anathema to the tenants’ rights groups that are sponsoring the bill.

Language from a companion measure requiring landlords to provide a just cause when evicting a renter, which was abandoned in the Assembly, was also recently added to AB1482.

Just causes would include a tenant failing to pay rent, breaching a rental agreement, creating a nuisance or engaging in criminal activity. The protection would not kick in until a tenant has been in a rental for a year. Renters evicted through no fault of their own, such as when a property is taken off the market, would receive relocation assistance from landlords equivalent to one month of rent.

Supporters argue that eviction protections are needed to make the rent cap effective. Otherwise, they say, landlords could just kick out tenants and raise rents by as much as they want. Landlords counter that thousands of available units are sitting idle because the owners would rather withhold them from the market than be stuck with a bad tenant they cannot evict because of local just-cause laws.

“We will be taking a step backwards with a policy that discourages development of new housing and will further worsen the housing crisis for Californians,” Sid Lakireddy, president of the California Rental Housing Association, said in a statement.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Rent-control-bill-struggles-in-California-14083866.php

“Politically Correct” San Francisco School Board votes to obliterate history

San Francisco should be embarassed that its local elected officials are bowing to a well meaning but politically tone deaf group who do not want to shine a light on America’s history of violence and racism. The advocates for obliterating history seem to think that by destroying a symbol of the past, people can forget these events took place. I posted an earlier piece on 4.28.2019

Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 7.8.2019

The San Francisco school board “voted to destroy a significant monument of anti-racism. This is a gross violation of logic and sense,” according to a petition already signed by over 400 academics and educators from around the world

“What remains is a mistake in the way we react to historical works of art — ignoring their meaning in favor of our feelings about them — and a mistake in the way we treat historical works of art — using them as tools foor managing feelings, rather than as objects of interpretation.”

Despite the San Francisco school board’s recent vote to destroy a controversial school mural, the debate over the role of art and history is still raging. The Petition will be sent to the district this week urging it to reconsider the decision.

The reason? Painting over the “Life of Washington” fresco is illogical, according to the petition circulated on nonsite.org, a peer-reviewed academic journal focused on politics, history, art history and literature.

The San Francisco Unified School District’s board voted 6-0 on June 25 to paint over the mural, which features slavery and white settlers stepping over a dead American Indian.

In fact, petitioners argued, painting over the mural would accomplish the opposite.

“It exposes and denounces in pictorial form the U.S. history of racism and colonialism,” according to the petition. “The only viewers who should feel unsafe before this mural are racists.”

GW Art Mural 4.28.2019.jpg

There is no public disagreement over the meaning of the images, said Charles Palermo, editor of nonsite.org and a professor of art history at the College of William & Mary.

Palermo said he expects to send the petition to the school board this week, even though supporters continue to add their names.

The Mural at George Washington High School in San Francisco’s Richmond District was painted by Russian artist Victor Arnautoff, a communist who was highly critical of America’s history of racism, Palermo said.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Academics-educators-petition-to-save-14080624.php#photo-17193265

Chile’s September 11. USA overthrew elected government. Condor-era terror

American Operation Condor was involved in the overthrow of the Socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile on 9.11.1973. Nearly 46 years later people either forget, don’t remember, dont care, have no idea or experience political amnesia. Yes, the violent overthrow of Salvador Allende took place 28 years to the day before the 9.11 all Americans will never forget.

Photo above. Chilean presidential palace under siege 9.11.1973

Deutsche Welle 7.8.2019

An Italian court has handed life sentences to 24 ex-officials from South America over their role in Operation Condor. It’s estimated that thousands of people were murdered under the secret US-backed campaign.

Judges in Rome’s Court of Appeal on Monday sentenced a group of former military and police officials from Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Uruguay to life imprisonment for voluntary homicide.

Chilean President Salvador Allende

The individuals were found guilty of the abduction and killing of 23 Italians in the 1970s and 80s as part of Operation Condor — the code name for a campaign of political repression that led to an estimated 60,000 deaths under South America’s dictatorships.

Monday’s verdict reversed an earlier ruling in 2017, in which eight officials were given life sentences and 19 others were acquitted.

Among those sentenced were former Bolivian Interior Ministor Luis Arce Gomez, Peruvian ex-President Francisco Morales Bermudez, former Uruguayan Foreign Minister Juan Carlos Blanco, and a former deputy intelligence chief from Chile.

All were sentenced in absentia, except for former Uruguayan naval intelligence officer Jorge Nestor Troccoli, 69, who had been living in freedom in Italy after escaping justice in his home country in 2007. He had also been acquitted in the previous judgement.

Significant sentence

The ruling provoked a sigh of relief from victims’ relatives who had packed into the courtroom.

“It is an important and emotional sentence for Uruguay and for the victims,” Uruguayan presidential secretary Miguel Toma, who traveled to Italy for the sentencing, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

He was joined by Javier Moncada, Bolivia’s deputy justice minister: “We have come this far, to Rome, to continue the fight against impunity, and because we have the obligation not to forget,” he told AFP.

The verdict is “a great victory of justice,” said Alicia Mejia, a lawyer representing the relatives of Jaime Patricio Donato Avendano, who disappeared in Chile in 1976.

The trial, which began in 2015, was the first of its kind in an Italian court. More than 100 witnesses were called on to give testimony over the course of the proceedings.

The sentencing comes some 20 years after Italy first started investigating the murder of its citizens under Operation Condor. The right-wing dictatorships of six Latin American countries collaborated under the secret campaign, often with US support, to repress and eliminate perceived leftist threats.

Chilean soldiers burning books following the September 11, 1973 military coup

Under Italian law, prosecutors can investigate cases involving the murder of Italian citizens abroad. Monday’s ruling must be confirmed by the Supreme Court of Cassation before the sentences are served. Many of the defendants are already serving jail time in their home countries.

https://www.dw.com/en/italy-jails-24-south-americans-over-condor-era-killings/a-49517886

USA Brash, Brilliant. Wins 4th World Cup

The Guardian 7.7.2019

Brash but brilliant.

They can attack in waves, from the Rapinoe-Morgan-Heath front line to Lavelle in midfield and back to overlapping backs.

If they could give the Golden Ball to a unit, it should be given to the US midfield and defense, which has been stifling. The “expected goals” stat may have favored France and England in those games, but that’s misleading — the USA had it in control most of the time. Final score 2-0.

And today, despite strong Dutch resistance, the USA were a level above. Only strong goalkeeping kept it scoreless at the half.

The US are a team worth celebrating. Enjoy.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/live/2019/jul/07/womens-world-cup-final-usa-netherlands-live?page=with:block-5d2222ff8f0845f89e308633#block-5d2222ff8f0845f89e308633

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A murder on bucolic Crete in the Greek isles. Dr. Eaton was from Oakland, yet the local Bay Area media has failed to give this crime story the attention it deserves.

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The Police State is a reality.

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UPDATE Excerpted from the Missoulian 7.16.2019

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