San Francisco civil rights advocates who are concerned about what they call domestic spying on the city’s Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian (AMEMSA) communities are celebrating new legislation signed into law on May 9 by Mayor Ed Lee. The S.F. Civil Rights Ordinance requires S.F. Police Department officers working with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force to be bound by local and state laws strictly governing intelligence gathering of First Amendment-protected activities like religious worship.
 

In a few weeks, Egypt will elect a president for the first time since a popular uprising that toppled a three-decade-old authoritarian regime under Hosni Mubarak. Violence is engulfing the country, claiming lives and spreading fear. Egypt’s Islamist forces, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood and their more conservative Salafist peers, are preparing for what seems to be an imminent clash, one that ostensibly takes center stage in the presidential election and will decide the fate of the secular government. 

Flirting—the penultimate romance language—is an endangered concept in 21^st-century America.  Gone are the face-to-face conversations, where exposure to body language and tone of voice permit our pheromones to chemically determine compatibility.  “People just aren’t willing to engage in public. It’s so difficult to get someone to make eye contact…” claims Jane, a 20-something New Yorker.

Asian-Americans represent the fastest-growing demographic segment in this country and a critical voting bloc. But, according to a new first-of-its-kind poll, neither Republicans nor Democrats seem to be taking note. The Lake Research Partners poll is the first to gauge political attitudes among Asian-American voters, who are largely aligned with the Democratic Party – by a margin of three to one. 

In Tucson, the Mexican-American Studies department has been dismantled; the curriculum has been outlawed, its books confiscated and banned; its longtime director has been fired; the teachers have been reassigned; their classes and new curriculum are being monitored and state officials are going into classrooms to ensure that they and their students are complying with the unconstitutional ethnic studies ban, HB 2281. 

Sunday, April 29  marked the 20th anniversary of the Los Angeles civil unrest -- the day in 1992 that community outrage erupted hours after a jury’s unjust acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers who severely beat an African-American motorist, Rodney King. Fifty-four individuals died during the six days of unrest. Another 2,400 were injured. Businesses were looted and destroyed, resulting in an estimated $1 billion dollars in property damage. 

Lee Atwater, the late Republican operative, is described by his numerous detractors as the godfather of contemporary xenophobic dog whistles to the baser instincts of a vastly Caucasian political party.  Atwater made his professional bones as chief dirty trickster for the 1978 U.S. Senate candidacy of his own godfather——fellow South Carolinian Strom Thurmond , a white supremacist who secretly fathered a child with a  black housekeeper.