Category: issues

A total of 138 organizations serving people of color in Oakland with budgets of $250,000 or less are included in the research. In addition to documenting the impact of these grassroots groups (hint: it’s not just about the arts), the report highlights challenges faced by smaller cultural organizations and offers four overarching recommendations for policymakers and funders to consider.

Workers discovered the bird, a killdeer, guarding her four eggs while they were setting up one of the festival’s main stages. The breed is protected by the Canadian government and cannot be moved without federal permission.

“Despite the [constant] political tumult, a major Palestinian cultural foundation” – A.M. Qattan Foundation, currently based in London – “is preparing to open its new headquarters to the public on 28 June in Ramallah … Construction on the AMQF building began in 2012 and was scheduled for completion in 2016, but the constraints of working in the region have caused a series of setbacks. The local construction industry is not used to this level of complexity and detail, … [and] it was difficult to transport materials across the Israeli border and to find skilled workers, as many are tempted by the higher salaries in Israel.”

This is what’s known as “backward integration,” when a company at the end of the supply chain seeks to shape its products “upstream.” (Compare Netflix, which first rented and streamed TV shows, then started making them.) With both design teams and factories under its umbrella, Katerra hopes to consolidate a messy system into an efficient one-stop shop. It wants to become the Starbucks or Zara of construction, churning out apartments like so many lattes or jumpsuits.

The accord was first signed by more than 80 groups last March. Signing on means committing to an ongoing responsibility to reconciliation with indigenous peoples, the city says. Signatories are required to report yearly on the success of their efforts and their future goals.

The original budget proposal — the first budget under new Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms — called for the city to maintain its current level of arts funding at $995,000. But Bottoms lent her support to District 2 City Councilman Amir R. Farokhi’s push to more than double that figure to $2 million.

“Many websites that Americans access on a daily basis and take for granted, including Facebook, YouTube and Google, are blocked in China. … There’s always the option of bypassing the Great Firewall of China with VPNs, but not everyone may feel the need to go through the hassle for a single news item. Instead, most of them are cognizant of the confines of the web space they occupy and are comfortable employing ways to circumvent censors.” BJ Pang Chieh Ho explains how they do it.

“[It] first bloomed toward the end of the 1970s, and led to major advancements in Britain, such as increased accessibility on public transport and the passing of the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act. Yet strangely, the UK’s Disability Arts Movement isn’t something that’s widely spoken about – except among the disabled creative community.”

“The Green family’s evangelical Museum of the Bible has been funding a number of scholarly projects, including an illegal excavation in the West Bank. This funding could potentially influence the direction of biblical scholarship and will certainly influence how the public understands the Bible and the ancient world.”

A new study confirms that disheartening diagnosis. It finds 2.5 billion people—about a third of the world’s population—live in nations where democracy is in retreat. “Media autonomy, freedom of expression, and the rule of law have undergone the greatest decline among democracy metrics in recent years,” lead author Anna Lührmann, a political scientist at the University of Gothenburn in Sweden, said in announcing the findings. “This worrisome trend makes elections less meaningful around the world.”