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By David Bacon
Residents of Lanare have discovered dangerous concentrations of arsenic in their water supply, and the plant that pumps the water from the ground has been shut down. Lanare is a colonia, or an unincorporated and informal settlement of more than 100 families in the rural San Joaquin Valley. Its residents are all working-class people, many of them farmworkers. Isabel Solorio, a community leader trying to organize residents to win safe water, looks with distaste at a cloudy cup of tap water. Photo by David Bacon
When Mary Broad moved to Lanare in …[Read the details]
By Catherine Campbell
The Needle Exchange has been ongoing in Fresno for almost two decades, providing clean needles to drug users to prevent the spread of numerous diseases. Hepatitis C and HIV are the more serious of the many. All of these diseases can be passed in other ways, through rough sexual contact, amateur tattooing, blood transfusions or any form of blood sharing. Through these means, the many risks of dirty needles are spread widely to non-drug users.
Nineteen percent of AIDS cases in the state are caused by the sharing of dirty needles, and 750 HIV infections resulting …[Read the details]
I want to first thank Mike Rhodes for taking the time and dedication to allow the community to read about what’s being overlooked everyday. People allow themselves to be blindfolded to the truth. Although I am just a “pathetic gang member” who targets the community, I’d like to take the time to shed some light for the reader.
I try to understand how people look at individuals such as myself. Does being a gang member justify the acts of being shot in the back? Does being in a gang prove that a person is less than human? If so, …[Read the details]
We are proud to announce the publication this month of Boston Woodard’s first book, Inside the Broken California Prison System, which is based on a series of articles written for the Community Alliance newspaper. When Maria Telesco, a local prisoner rights activist, asked me to consider printing articles by Boston, who was in Solano State prison at the time, I told her that I would love to see his writing. That was about six years ago. Within weeks, Boston started sending me this amazing series of articles that described the appalling conditions inside California’s prisons.
While I have never …[Read the details]
By Kevin Hall
The No Spin O-Zone
The Fresno-Drummond station mysteriously shut down for a crucial hour on Sept. 6, 2011.
Readers of the Fresno Bee were greeted to an amazing front-page headline a few weeks back, one that must have had many thinking they’d awakened in a parallel universe. You know, that mythical place were the progressive policies of the San Joaquin Valley have led to effective pollution control resulting in clean air. Because blazoned across the top of the Sept. 1 edition were the words, “Valley avoids August ozone offenses.”
My first thought …[Read the details]
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