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Protesters smashed a large window at President Obama's re-election campaign office in downtown Oakland late Friday night, tore down a nearby fence and vandalized cars, according to police, witnesses and video footage. Staffers and volunteers were inside the Organizing for America office at 1714 Telegraph Ave. when it was vandalized after 9 p.m., but no one was hurt, said a staffer who declined to be identified. The office is a joint effort of the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee. When the window was broken, well over 100 people had joined what began as a rally against the city's...

The Anti-Capitalist Brigade started gathering early on May Day at Oakland’s Snow Park. There was free coffee, oatmeal, doughnuts, fliers with the day’s agenda and plenty of pot. A “street medic” — “I just finished a wilderness first-aid course,” he told me when I asked about his training — tended to his first case of the day, a man in his 20s whose leg had been beaten to a purple hue with a metal rod in an overnight fight in the park. Nearby, an organizer reminded protesters to take down the toll-free number for the National Lawyers Guild: “This is...

OAKLAND -- A crowd of as many as 100 protesters marched through downtown Friday, breaking car windows and a window at Barack Obama's local campaign office. Officer Johnna Watson, a spokeswoman for the Oakland police, confirmed in an email that a window of Obama's campaign office at 16th Street and Telegraph Avenue was smashed. Police also confirmed that several car windows were broken. The protesters began organizing about 9 p.m. and marched up Broadway. Police also said they were following the protesters during the march.

The Oakland Zoo removed a monument enscribed with the Ten Commandments from its property Wednesday. days before a planned weekend protest by a local atheist groups. Zoo officials said the removal had been scheduled previously and was not related to plans by the East Bay Atheists and Atheists Advocates of San Francisco, which intended to picket the zoo to demand that the monument be removed. "We had been wanting to do it for a long time," said Joel Parrott, CEO and president of the zoo. He said he began thinking about taking down the monuments when lawsuits over the...

During a Friday morning ABC News segment, Stephanopoulos interviewed a man named Christopher Ramos, who was inside the Aurora theater in Colorado on Thursday night. Toward the end of the interview, when Ramos started to break down crying, in effect reliving the horror show he had survived, he said something I found to be incredibly revealing. "I see this on TV -- a shooting in a mall or a shooting in a bookstore," he said. "I see it but I actually don't feel it. ... It was the first time I saw something that was real." The reason I found...

Occupy Oakland celebrates 4th of July with 'kill cops' vandalism, flag burningJoe Newby Spokane Conservative Examiner July 7, 2012 Chris Rock and liberal talk show host Nicole Sandler weren't the only ones spreading anti-American hate on Independence Day. The San Jose Mercury News reported Thursday that a group of over 60 Occupy Oakland protesters marched through downtown Oakland Wednesday night, vandalizing a police car and spray-painting anti-police graffiti on police headquarters and other buildings. Protesters painted "kill cops" on a door at police headquarters, and at City Hall, the police Internal Affairs Division near City Hall, a clothing store, hotel...

LANCASTER - Former Los Angeles-Oakland Raiders defensive end Anthony Wayne Smith -- who was awaiting a retrial on a charge stemming from an October 2008 killing -- has been charged with three other murders in a case in which he could face the death penalty, according to a court document released Tuesday. | » POLICE NEWS

Oakland California is ground-zero for recreational drug use, which apparently continues to affect the dwindling staff at the Oakland Tribune. Like some other San Francisco Bay Area rags, the Trib has a congenital dislike for private firearm ownership, though in the wake of continuing gun control movement defeats our local press has suddenly become concerned with how criminals get guns and less about guns themselves. Sadly, the media’s meandering modus operandi retains the end goal of enacting more useless gun control laws. Hence, the Oaksterdam Tribune’s recent propaganda piece of inveigling ink, proving once again that the paper is better...

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan said Wednesday she takes full responsibility for incorrectly claiming for eight months that 90 percent of the city's homicides and shootings took place on 100 blocks.Quan is continuing to stand by her crime plan. The city's news release said that although the statistic was incorrect, "the premise of the public safety strategy is sound and has merit."

On Wednesday, June 13, members of the Occupy movement protested against a conference dedicated to combatting child sex trafficking — thus, the Occupiers in essence were coming out in favor of one of society’s most loathsome moral crimes. The protesters mostly were members of Occupy Oakland Patriarchy, a group within the overall Occupy movement tasked with overthrowing our civilization’s “patriarchy.” The conference which so infuriated them was called HEAT Watch, short for the National Human Exploitation And Trafficking Watch Conference. If there’s one issue that unites Americans of all political stripes, it’s the sexual enslavement of children. Whatever our opinions...

The San Francisco Examiner calls it a “dirty secret:” Groups of black people targeting Asians for violence, robbery and even murder. “In 85 percent of (300) physical assault crimes, the victims were Asian and the perpetrators were African American,” the newspaper said recently, citing a police study. In Philadelphia, secrets may be even more violent and widespread. Over the last three years, the Philadelphia Daily News found “at least 15 home invasions or other attacks on Asian business owners outside their businesses in Philadelphia, Delaware and Montgomery counties in 2008, followed by another spike of at least 19 actual or...

About three dozen Occupy Oakland demonstrators marched from Lake Merritt to an Oakland City Council member's home Monday evening to object to a proposal that would make it a crime to carry shields and clubs at protests and give police the right to arrest protesters who do so. The occupiers marched through the neighborhood just off Lakeshore Avenue to the home of Councilwoman Pat Kernighan, who is sponsoring the ordinance along with City Attorney Barbara Parker. The protesters, followed by half a dozen patrol cars, arrived at Kernighan's house shortly before 7:30 p.m. "You will see there is a police...

SKIERNIEWICE, Poland -- Chinese companies have wowed the world with superhighways, high-speed trains and snazzy airports, all built seemingly overnight. Yet a modest highway through Polish potato fields proved to be too much for one of China's biggest builders. The A2 highway between Warsaw and Berlin was supposed to be an opportunity for Chinese construction to shine on a European stage after years of megaprojects at home and in the developing world. Poland badly wanted the project completed before the European soccer championships starting June 8, which Poland is hosting for the first time with Ukraine. Instead, a key 30-mile...

Oakland is often criticized for its gun violence, then not recognized when it tries to do something about it. On Saturday, the Oakland Police Department set up the city’s first ever gun buyback in a Caltrans lot in Fruitvale. The net recovery? 12 guns. OPD Lt. Blair Alexander, in charge of the buyback operation, told the Trib he was disappointed in the lack of support it received: “The more people who come out, the more they send a message of a united front against violence.” Community leaders including 100 Mothers, which focuses on gun violence, had organized the effort. Oakland...

OAKLAND ( CBS / AP) — Oakland officials were trying to reduce the number of guns in the city by offering a gift card to any Oakland resident who turns in a gun. As part of a gun buyback program, the city was handing out $100 gift cards to residents who handed over a working gun at the Oakland Police Department Saturday.

Leroy Eldridge Cleaver(8/31/1935 to 5/1/1998) Remembering Eldridge Cleaver* By: Larry Walker, Jr. *"Right-wing conservatives and left-wing radicals here in the U.S. must be willing and able to sit down at the same table, look across the table at each other and see not an enemy, a target or a statistic, but a brother, a sister, a fellow American, another child of God. We must expand our hearts and enlarge our identity beyond ‘my people’ to include and embrace all of Creation." ~ Eldridge CleaverIn the late 1960’s, after leading a troubled youth, Leroy Eldridge Cleaver became a prominent member...

Downtown Oakland has no shortage of wildlife. Now it even has some of the nonhuman variety. A colony of giant, squawking, black-crowned night herons has taken up residence in the gritty urban core of Oakland, apparently thriving amid the tattoo parlors and Afghan restaurants, Occupiers and bus exhaust. "Oh my God, I saw one walking right down 14th Street. I'm like, 'What is that?' " said Jalima Morales, 26, who saw a few more of the striking blue birds as she was walking down Jackson Street recently. "Now I see them all the time. They're so loud. It sounds like...

OAKLAND -- A proposed law would make it easier for police to arrest Occupy Oakland agitators by prohibiting them from possessing their weapons of choice at protests. The proposal would make it a misdemeanor to bring a host of items to protests including shields, fire accelerant and pressurized paint sprayers that several Occupiers have used against police officers and private property. Rather than having to catch Occupy agitators in the act of damaging property or using the makeshift weapons, police would be able to arrest protesters they saw carrying the prohibited items, potentially weeding out agitators before protests get violent....

SAN FRANCISCO -- When Johannes Mehserle shot and killed Oscar Grant III on the Fruitvale BART platform in 2009 it was a mistake and a tragedy, his attorney said Wednesday, but it wasn't a case of gross negligence that would justify his involuntary manslaughter conviction. Dylan Schaffer, who is representing Mehserle in his appeal to have his 2010 conviction overturned, said he's looked at similar cases and found manslaughter convictions only for incidents involving "extraordinary imprudence" -- a man pointing a loaded gun at someone's head, or handing a pistol muzzle-first to a drunk spouse, or an old gambling den...

Oakland's sleight-of-hand play to sell the obsolete Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center back to the city for a quick $29 million may have backfired - leaving the cash-poor town with an even bigger deficit to eliminate.As you might recall, Mayor Jean Quan pushed through a deal to sell the old convention hall to the city's own Redevelopment Agency last summer - just before Sacramento eliminated such agencies and sucked their money into the state's ailing budget.The goal was to help erase the city's $58 million deficit for the fiscal year beginning July 1. Oakland thought it had beaten the deadline,...