Raheem Hosseini

Oakland teenagers were more likely to witness violence and to feel despair than their counterparts around the U.S., according to recently released data from a nationwide survey of high school students. The information comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, an online questionnaire of more than 17,000 ninth-, 10th-, 11th- and 12th-graders in 45 states and 28 school districts. Because the survey allows young people to report their experiences anonymo…

Thenmozhi Soundararajan didn’t waste much time celebrating the watershed moment she and many others had spent more than a year — and in some ways, a lifetime — working toward. On Wednesday, less than a day after the California Legislature adopted a civil rights bill outlawing discrimination on the basis of caste, Soundararajan left a valedictory news conference outside the state Capitol to resume a hunger strike she says will continue until Gov. Gavin Newsom signs SB403. The legislation, introdu…

Hours before California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed landmark legislation to outlaw caste discrimination, Ramesh V. Kapur, a Massachusetts entrepreneur with deep ties to affluent Indian American donors, said Newsom personally emailed him to let him know it was about to happen. “He (emailed) that he was going to veto it,” Kapur told the Chronicle. “That’s courtesy. That, to me, I looked at it as a good sign of the politician.” It was also a sign of Kapur’s political reach. A longtime Democratic Party…

By many measures, it was a feeble showing. Seven or so members from White Lives Matter’s California chapter hid their faces and displayed their antisemitism through signs reading “No More Wars for I$rael” and promoting 2017’s Hitler-deifying fauxumentary “Europa: The Last Battle” from a bridge in Walnut Creek. The small demonstration last month was a social media blip that otherwise drew little regional attention. To practiced hate monitors at the Southern Poverty Law Center, Anti-Defamation Lea…

From Jesse Lewis, Director of Culture and Operations: The Chronicle is pleased to announce the addition of reporter Ko Lyn Cheang, who will cover Asian American and Pacific Islander communities on the newspaper’s Race & Equity Team. Cheang joins the Chronicle after more than two years with the Indianapolis Star, where she did enterprising coverage of housing, criminal justice and city government with an eye for accountability and an understanding of how immigrant communities experience these sys…

He approached from the back row wearing dark sunglasses and a T-shirt with a black swastika at its center. He said his name was “Scottie.” And for the next two minutes, Harley Ray Petero Jr. read clumsily from his antisemitic speech, making threats both legal and genocidal, during Wednesday night’s meeting of the Walnut Creek City Council. “I’m here today because people like you …” Petero said, pointing at Council Member Kevin Wilk, losing his place, finding it again, and resuming, “… think we’r…

When Donald Trump posted a video to his Truth Social account in March promoting a $59.99 Bible packaged with founding American documents and lyrics to a country song, reactions noted the jarring fusion of faith and commerce. Here was the once and aspiring president — facing four criminal prosecutions, owing more than $800 million in civil fines and famously at sea discussing Christian scripture — selling the King James translation appended with the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution,…

Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, wants the American public to be alarmed as he is. In March, the North Bay representative was in a Congressional Progressive Caucus briefing requested by several liberal organizations raising an alarm about Project 2025, the 920-page action plan for a second Donald Trump term. Prepared by the Heritage Foundation and a multitude of conservative organizations, the 2025 Presidential Transition Project calls for swift, sweeping action from the next Republican preside…