The Golden Gate Bridge protest
The protesting organization A15 obstructed key economic routes on April 15 to put pressure on governments all around America and even protests in Greece, Spain, and Australia to support Palestinians in Gaza. The protest on the Golden Gate Bridge lasted for five hours and temporarily closed all lanes of traffic. As part of the protest, the protesters used handcuffs and PVC pipes to make removing them from the bridge as hard as possible. This resulted in 26 people being arrested on the bridge, and San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins urged people caught in the protest to file a report with authorities. According to a statement by the city’s district attorney account on X, “This is an active & open investigation. Anyone who was detained against their will (falsely imprisoned) (…) is urged to contact the CHP (California Highway Patrol).”
College campus protests
A huge crackdown on pro-Palestine college campus protests is happening all over the United States. These protests demand colleges divest from companies that benefit from Israeli actions. To show solidarity with other college protests nationwide, UC Berkeley students have increased the number of protests. This increase also is prominent in other UCs like University of California Los Angeles, Cal Poly, & University of Southern California. Almost 3,000 students have been arrested in the US, a number that is only climbing. Colleges have shut down these protests mostly out of fear of antisemitism. In a Twitter post from New York Mayor Eric Adams he said “I am horrified and disgusted with the antisemitism being spewed at and around the Columbia University campus.” As the issue compounds, we have seen a increase in violence, like the fighting at UCLA on April 30th. Columbia University and USC have both canceled graduations and many colleges are having to move classes to accommodate the protests. Closer to home, a Stanford student who requested to remain anonymous talked about their reasons for protesting “We just want the university to diverge how much they invest in companies that benefit from the Israel apartheid and completely divest from them.”
DuPont Abortion Clinic
In November, more than two-thirds of voters joined Californians statewide to enshrine “Reproductive freedom” in California’s constitution. But recently it almost seems like California’s abortion rights have been forgotten in the sea of political turmoil. Specifically, three late-stage abortion clinics in California have been prevented from opening in the last two years. Late stage abortion clinics are clinics that perform abortions after 24 weeks. But a combination of red tape and corrections to the building plan led to the DuPont clinic being unable to open. DuPont Clinic in Beverly Hills Los Angeles was prevented from opening amid a swarm of threats from anti-abortion groups. On April 10, the group Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust projected the words “MURDER MILL” onto a building. A group Beverly Hills for Choice was founded to protest for the opening of the clinic and created a change.org petition online with over 3,500 members.