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Teachers Poised To Strike, First Time In 26 Years

March 17, 2015 Mario Vasquez, www.inthesetimes.com , ,
Los Angeles may be close to its first teachers strike in 26 years after its school district and the local teachers’ union declared that they would be unable to make progress on contract negotiations. Consequently, later this month California’s state labor board for public employees will be mediating between the two sides in the first of several sessions scheduled thus far. United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), a union representing over 35,000 teachers in the area, is working under terms of a contract that expired in 2011 but still remains in effect. Negotiations for a new contract began last July upon the swearing-in of President Alex Caputo-Pearl.

Protests Over LAPD Killing Of Mentally Ill, Black Homeless Man

March 11, 2015 Bethania Palma Marcus, www.truth-out.org , , , ,
Roughly 200 protesters gathered in front of the Los Angeles Police headquarters downtown at least twice last week, demanding justice for a mentally ill homeless man who was shot to death by LAPD officers March 1 in a videotaped killing that went viral. The video, which has been viewed millions of times, shows Charley Keunang, who was known to his fellow skid row residents as "Africa," because he was from the West African nation of Cameroon, being subdued on the ground by multiple officers and tased. Three officers then opened fire on him, leaving him motionless. The shooting, along with the recent release of a scathing Department of Justice report on racism by the Ferguson Police Department, have amplified even further the national spotlight on racial bias and violence in American policing.

‘Black Lives Matter’ Protesters Met With LAPD Chief

January 12, 2015 Charles Davis, www.laist.com , , ,
Melina Abdullah began her week in jail. On Monday, the Cal State professor was one of two people arrested for trying to deliver a letter to Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck on behalf of protesters who for almost two weeks now have camped outside LAPD headquarters. They've been holding signs declaring "Black Lives Matter" and demanding an end to what they see as a pattern of impunity for cops who kill unarmed people of color. By Friday, she was meeting with Beck himself—and while he didn’t meet any of their demands, the fact that he was even acknowledging them was portrayed as a sign of progress. “It was worth it,” Abdullah told reporters at a press conference immediately after she and three other activists met with Beck to discuss the deaths of people such as Ezell Ford, a 25-year-old black man who was unarmed when he was shot in the back last August.

After A Week, Police Bust Up Occupy LAPD Camp-In, Arrest 2 Women

January 7, 2015 Veronica Rocha, www.latimes.com , , , ,
For seven days, organizers with the regional Black Lives Matter movement camped peacefully outside Los Angeles police headquarters downtown, calling their protest "Occupy LAPD." They had a set of demands centered on Ezell Ford and wanted an audience with Police Chief Charlie Beck. But Monday morning, they were forced to pack up tents, blankets, pots and pans and get off the sidewalk. Then two women in the group were arrested as they tried to take a letter to Beck. The group had been camped outside LAPD headquarters on 1st Street since Tuesday after the release of the autopsy report on Ford, the South Los Angeles man shot and killed in August during a confrontation with police.

Occupy The Rose Bowl Parade Strikes Again

January 4, 2015 Jessica Lux, www.la.indymedia.org , , ,
A people’s parade aligned with the Occupy Wall St. movement trailed the official 2015 Tournament of Roses Parade in near-freezing temperatures Thursday morning. The Occupy the Rose Parade tradition returned for the fourth straight year in a row, joining the 126th Rose Parade in front of one million live spectators on New Year’s Day. True to their tradition, KTLA turned off their live broadcast prior to the arrival of the Occupy the Rose Parade floats and banners. The group of several dozen assembled on a side street off Orange Grove at the rear of the 39 massive corporate-sponsored fresh floral floats celebrating icons of popular culture. Astonished onlookers paused for photos with the “Overthrow Capitalism” banner and the “Stop Wall Street Banksters” message carried by several top-hat clad bankers with an oversized puppet Uncle Sam. Spectators paused to ask, “What is fracking?” in response to the 20 ft. tall flaming oil derrick declaring “Gov Brown: Don’t Frack CA.” John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” played over public address system as members of Occupy Venice Beach posed with onlookers interested in their other 20 ft. tall float, showing the Constitution of the United States being shredded by a corporate sponsored paper-shredder. Another yellow sheet with red letters declared, “Money Out of Politics.”

Los Angeles Police Will Get Body Cameras

December 18, 2014 Matt Ferner, www.huffingtonpost.com , ,
Every Los Angeles police officer will soon be equipped with a body camera, Mayor Eric Garcetti announced Tuesday. Garcetti said at a press conference that the department will buy 7,000 on-body cameras for Los Angeles Police Department officers to expand transparency and accountability. "The trust between a community and its police department can be eroded in a single moment," Garcetti said. "Trust is built on transparency." The announcement comes two weeks after President Barack Obama announced a $363 million package that includes $75 million to pay half the cost of 50,000 officer-mounted cameras. The technology has been widely endorsed as a reform following the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager killed by Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson in August.

Los Angeles Activists Block Unloading Of Israeli Cargo Ship For Two Days

October 19, 2014 Charlotte Silver, www.electronicintifada.net , , ,
The Block the Boat coalition of Los Angeles claimed another victory this weekend after an Israeli cargo ship, the Zim Savannah, delayed docking at the port of Long Beach for at least 34 hours. Cookie Partansky, an organizer with the LA Block the Boat coalition, told The Electronic Intifada that approximately 150 activists gathered at the Los Angeles port at 6am on Saturday, 18 October. The morning’s action followed weeks of communication with the longshoremen’s union and educating workers about Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine, as well as the group’s reasons for targeting Zim, an Israeli shipping line. The coalition — representing nineteen different activism groups — showed up at the port Saturday morning despite being informed at 5am by a member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 13 that the ship was still at sea and no workers had been called in to unload it.

L.A. City Council Approves Minimum-Wage Hike

September 27, 2014 David Zahniser, Emily Alpert Reyes, www.latimes.com , ,
Big hotels in Los Angeles will soon be required to pay at least $15.37 an hour to their workers — one of the highest minimum-wage requirements in the country. The City Council voted 12 to 3 on Wednesday to impose the higher wage on large hotels, delivering a huge victory to a coalition that included organized labor, more than a dozen neighborhood councils and the ACLU of Southern California. Lawmakers cast their vote despite warnings from business advocates, who said the measure would trigger job losses at hotels stretching from Harbor Gateway to the San Fernando Valley. Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education, predicted that other cities would follow L.A.'s lead, much as they did after passage of the city's landmark 1997 "living wage" ordinance mandating higher pay for employees of many city contractors.
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