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Request for Proposals The Peralta Community College District is seeking proposals

The Peralta Community College District (PCCD) is seeking proposals from qualified firms to provide Geotech Engineer of Record Services, Laney College Library & Learning Resources Center (RFP No. 23-24/07).  Proposals are to be delivered to the Purchasing Department, 501 5th Avenue, Oakland, CA 94606 or electronically (via Vendor Registry), until 11:00 A.M. on October 31, 2023.

The project includes the selective site demolition and construction necessary for a new academic library and learning resource center on the Laney College campus. The project is a 75,622 square foot, three (3) story concrete and steel structure, Type IIA construction and consists of Type A-3 and B occupancies. Work includes site utilities and landscaping at 900 Fallon Street, Oakland, CA 94607.

A non-mandatory Pre-proposal video conference meeting will be held on October 12, 2023 at 11:00A.M. via Zoom: Conference Meeting ID 869 1952 7712

https://peralta-edu.zoom.us/j/86919527712

Copies of the proposal documents may be obtained by clicking on the following link: https://vrapp.vendorregistry.com/Bids/View/BidsList?BuyerId=4d041f6c-7568-4c8a-8878-c82684292a3c  or, by contacting the Peralta Community College District, Purchasing Department, 501 5th Avenue, Oakland, California, 94606, Phone (510) 466-7225, Office Hours: 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Governing Codes:

GC 53068

EC 81641

Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide wins lifetime achievement award

Graciela Iturbide, 81, is recognized worldwide for her intimate portraits of Indigenous communities of Mexico. (Mario Jasso/Cuartoscuro)

MND Staff

Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide has won the prestigious William Klein Prize from the French Academy of Fine Arts, honoring her decades of work capturing Mexican culture and Indigenous communities.

Starting in 2019, the William Klein Prize is awarded every two years to a photographer from anywhere in the world, and assesses artists’ career and commitment to photography. Previously, it was awarded to Raghu Rai (India) and Annie Leibovitz (USA).

The 120,000-euro (US $132,000) prize money will be awarded to Iturbide in a ceremony at the Palais de l’Institut de France in Paris on Oct. 18.

“[Iturbide] is an icon of photography in Latin America,” the Academy said in a statement. “For more than five decades, she has created images that navigate between a documentary approach and a poetic sensibility.”

Born in 1942, Iturbide trained under the iconic Mexican artist Manuel Álvarez Bravo and has worked in countries across the world, including Cuba, East Germany, India, Madagascar, Hungary, France and the United States. She is most well-known for her documentation of Mexican culture, particularly her projects about the Seri Indigenous people of the Sonoran Desert and the women of Juchitán de Zaragoza, Oaxaca.

Iturbide’s portraits of the Seri were part of a commission she received in 1978 from the Ethnographic Archive of the National Indigenous Institute of Mexico. She lived in the 500-person Seri community of Punta Chueca for two months while completing the project.

“I lived with them in their homes so they would see me always with my camera and know that I am a photographer. In this way, we were able to become partners,” she later said.

A year later, she undertook a similar project in the Zapotec Indigenous community of Juchitán de Zaragoza, Oaxaca, which is known for elevating women to positions of authority. She returned to the community multiple times over the following decade, eventually publishing her powerful photographs in the book “Juchitán de las Mujeres” in 1989.

Iturbide has described her relationships with her subjects as a fundamental part of her art, sometimes requiring her to pass up photographic opportunities to respect an interpersonal moment. “To me, it’s more important to get to know the worlds I travel in,” she has said. “This knowledge is so attractive that the photography almost takes second place.”

The Academy recognized this deeply sensitive approach in awarding her the William Klein Prize, saying: “Photography for [Iturbide] is a ‘ritual’ in which she strives to capture the most mythical part of man.”

With reports from Milenio.

The ‘unmet need for contraception’ scam is just another excuse for depopulating the planet

Contrary to the population controllers’ claims, the women of the world are not begging U.S. taxpayers to chemically or surgically sterilize them

by Steven Mosher

Sat Sep 30, 2023 – (LifeSiteNews) — You may be forgiven for not knowing that September 26 was “World Contraception Day.”

In fact, you will probably be surprised to learn that such a day even exists, and that the population controllers continue to celebrate it.

After all, you may say, the population bomb has long been exposed as a myth, while the world’s fertility is in free fall. Even the New York Times admits that the world is about to go into absolute population decline. Don’t the population controllers know when to quit?

The short answer is no, they don’t. And they won’t.

The population control movement, which has billions of dollars in its coffers and tens of thousands of employees, does not intend to go quietly to its grave. Rather, convinced that there are still too many Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans, it hungers to drive human numbers down even faster. In this it enjoys the wholehearted support of the Biden administration, which each year spends over a billion dollars to chemically and surgically sterilize women in low- and middle-income countries.

Now that the population bomb has fizzled, however, they have had to come up with another excuse for their war on people. After all, simply telling entire races or ethnicities to stop having babies just isn’t done anymore, at least outside of Communist China.

So they have taken a different tack. They are now producing studies claiming that poor women around the world are asking to be sterilized and contracepted. This allows them to justify continued U.S. funding of anti-baby programs as a humane response to a real and pressing need of women in the developing world.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a phony statistic called the “unmet need for contraception” came to be conjured up.

In the run-up to World Contraception Day – with the exquisite timing characteristic of a planned propaganda campaign – a new study of the “contraceptive needs of women of reproductive age” was published by The Lancet. (You know, the same British medical journal that disgraced itself during the pandemic by claiming that the COVID virus came from nature.) The study, funded by the Gates Foundation, purported to show that some 162.9 million women around the world had an “unmet need for contraception.”

“Africa has the highest unmet need for contraception in the world,” the authors write. They define this “as the share of sexually active, fertile women who do not have access to contraception but do not want a child at the moment or wish they could have delayed or avoided their most recent pregnancy… Young women between the ages of 15 to 19 saw the lowest demand satisfied at just around 65 percent, followed by the age group of 20 to 24-year-olds (72 percent).”

The reader comes away with the impression that these young women are “demanding” contraceptives that are being denied them, or perhaps that some are even victims of a kind of forced pregnancy.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The surveys relied upon by the authors avoid asking women directly if they wanted contraceptives because that would give away the game: most of those interviewed would say no.

Instead, they cleverly dance around the question of contraception. They ask women who are not pregnant if they planned on having a baby within the next two years. If the answer is no, they are categorized as having an “unmet need for contraception.”

Women who are pregnant are asked if they had planned on getting pregnant when they did. If they respond that their pregnancy was not precisely planned – whether they are happy about it or not – they are categorized as having an “unmet need for contraception.”

Still other surveys don’t even pretend to take the woman’s opinion into account. The simply classify all women of reproductive age with a child two and under, and who is not on birth control, as having an “unmet need for contraception.”

Not until the very end of this 32-page study, which is filled with a dizzying array of charts and sophisticated statistical analysis, do the authors admit that the actual opinions of women do not matter. Their “algorithm,” they say, “does not entail asking women if they need or want contraception, but rather defines need based on whether partnered women do not want children and are not infecund [infertile]. Only unpartnered women who report being sexually active and have these other characteristics are considered to have need.” (p. 325, italics added)

An algorithm is a set of rigorous instructions designed to solve a specific problem. In this case, it was designed to justify the continued effort to abort, sterilize, and contracept the world by claiming that over 100 million women had an “unmet need for contraception.”

The last thing the population controllers want to do is ask the women themselves. Billions upon billions of dollars are at stake.

The ultimate goal of the most anti-human movement in human history remains the same: to depopulate the planet.

Steven Mosher is an internationally recognised authority on China and population issues as well as an acclaimed author and speaker and founder and head of the Population Research Institute. He was the first American social scientist to visit mainland China in 1979 where he witnessed women being forced to have abortion under the new “one-child-policy” which he then exposed to the world.

Truck accident in Chiapas kills 10 Cuban migrants, injures 17

El camión transportaba a 27 personas, de las cuales 10, nueve mujeres y un menor, murieron en el impacto. (@isain/X)

by the El Reportero‘s wire services

Ten Cuban migrants died and 17 more were injured when an overloaded truck overturned in Chiapas early Sunday morning.

The accident happened on the Pijijiapan-Tonalá highway, which is frequently used by migrants traveling north from the Guatemalan border towards the United States. The dead were all women, one of them a minor.

According to a statement by Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM), “the driver was speeding, lost control of the unit and overturned.” The driver then fled.

Photos of the accident scene show that the truck was a wooden-backed Ford model not designed to carry people, and was also missing license plates. The vehicle was almost entirely destroyed on impact.

Of the 27 Cuban migrants traveling in the truck, 17 survived but were seriously injured. They were transferred to hospitals in Pijijiapan and Huixtla for treatment, and Cuban authorities are being kept informed of their condition.

The newspaper El Universal reported that the migrants had spent several days in Tapachula trying to obtain Mexican humanitarian visas before boarding the truck north. The human smugglers who facilitated the journey have not been identified by authorities.

With reports from CNN, Reuters and El Universal

Bolivia and Brazil will talk about a binational bridge

La Paz, Sep 27 (Prensa Latina) The Minister of Public Works, Edgar Montaño, assured that today Bolivia and Brazil will hold a technical meeting about the construction of the Guayamerín-Guajara Mirín binational bridge, which will link the department of Beni with that country.

Bolivia and Brazil will talk about a binational bridge

“Once again we ratify all our predisposition to make this bridge a reality, that is why this Wednesday we will hold a technical meeting with Brazil and the next day (Thursday) an informative meeting will be held on the conclusions,” Montaño wrote in his X account (previously Twitter).

Benjamín Blanco, Vice Minister of Foreign Trade and Integration, for his part, stated that the purpose of the meeting is to define the necessary specifications for the construction of the bridge, which will connect the regions of Guayaramerín, Bolivia, and Guajará Mirín, in Brazil.

The Governments of both countries are in the process of exchanging technical information, after the Brazilian side sent a proposal with the request for Bolivian observations already sent, in accordance with the corresponding procedures for this type of works.

The bidding process must be approved by the Brazilian-Bolivian Mixed Commission, which will be convened after the approval of the technical project, and the territorial authorities of Beni and the municipality of Guayamerín will also be invited to that meeting, as reported.

The road over the Mamoré River dates back more than a century, however, despite the fact that there was a commitment to its execution, former president Jair Bolsonaro shelved the project.

The proposal was reactivated by presidents Luis Arce and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

This is a historic debt established in the Treaty of Petrópolis, of 1903, which provides for a 1,200-meter bridge at a cost of 52 million dollars, covered by Brazil, a counterpart that guarantees up to 70 million for this purpose, according to Blanco.

For his part, the governor of Beni, representing the opposition Third System Movement party, Alejandro Unzueta, demanded that the Government not truncate the construction of the binational project and that the report proposed by the Bolivian Ministry of Public Works be withdrawn.

The residents of Guayamerín, meanwhile, announced an ultimatum to the Government to make the work viable and threatened to carry out blockades throughout the department.

However, Blanco confirmed that “we have been able to see, on the part of the Government of Brazil, all the predisposition to reach mutually beneficial agreements for the construction of this bridge, to be able to shorten the times as much as possible (…) and have a bridge that satisfies the needs, both of our population of Beni and of the Brazilian part.”

A plan to guarantee community college transfer to California’s public universities died. Now it’s back

Estudiantes caminan por el campus de Sacramento City College el 23 de febrero de 2022. Foto de Miguel Gutiérrez Jr., CalMatters

The bill, if approved, would begin at UCLA, with other campuses added later. But not everyone is on board with the latest plan

by Mikhail Zinshteyn

CalMatters

It’s rare for a California bill to come back to life after enduring a quiet legislative death, but a shelved effort to help more community college students transfer to the University of California suddenly has new legs.

Spearheading this last-minute revival is bill author Assemblymember Kevin McCarty, a Democrat from Sacramento, who told CalMatters in an interview that his office spent weeks crafting the legislation with representatives from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office.

McCarty said the proposed law, Assembly Bill 1291, has input from the Senate and Assembly legislative leaders as well. It must pass the Legislature by Sept. 14.

“This is a game changer for higher education access and for expanding enrollment through the community college transfer process,” McCarty said in an interview. “While not perfect, this simplifies more than anything we’ve ever seen.”

He said the bill sets in motion a pathway to achieve a holy grail for higher-education advocates: A common admissions guarantee for community college students to get into a UC or California State University campus. Currently, community college students earning an associate degree for transfer, a specialized associate degree, are guaranteed admission to a Cal State campus — but not one of their choice. No such systemwide guarantee exists for the UC, though select campuses have their own transfer pathways, and the system is working on its own transfer guarantee.

It’s a striking and rapid turn of events for a measure that a Senate committee killed Sept. 1. The original version of this effort, Assembly Bill 1749, also by McCarty, was held by the Senate Appropriations Committee in the semi-annual bill culling called the suspense file. That bill would have created a UC-wide transfer guarantee through the associate degree for transfer and was backed by student groups and the Campaign for College Opportunity, a major player in California higher education advocacy and policy.

The UC system opposed it, arguing that some of its majors have higher academic standards than what’s required to earn the associate degree for transfer. The UC has no position on McCarty’s latest bill, a spokesperson said.

Scholars say California needs to overhaul its process for how students transfer. “Most students who wish to transfer never do, with large variation across racial and ethnic groups,” said a recent report by the Public Policy Institute of California.

McCarty’s bill would create a pilot at UCLA that identifies 12 majors — four in the sciences and math — by 2028 that would be similar to the courses community college students take to earn associate degrees for transfer and that are accepted by Cal States. The pilot would identify eight majors by 2026. The bill also would phase in at least four more UC campuses that would accept 12 majors that are similar to those associate degrees. There’s intent language to have all nine UC campuses that enroll undergraduates take part in the program by 2031-32.

But while McCarty’s original bill included an admission guarantee, this version doesn’t, noted Jessie Ryan, a senior executive at the Campaign for College Opportunity. Instead, the current version says the UC would “prioritize admission” to transferring students.

“We see this new bill as being the baseline and not the ceiling for what we hope will happen with the UC’s commitment to strengthening the transfer pathway,” said Ryan, who added the organization isn’t taking a position on the new bill.

But two students representing University of California and California Community Colleges student governments oppose McCarty’s new bill — and were caught off guard by McCarty’s latest proposal.

“We were definitely not reached out to by the author nor the sponsors for this,” said David Ramirez, government relations director of the UC Student Association and fourth-year student at UCLA.

The new bill is a gut-and-amend, which takes legislation that’s gone through some of the legislative process and completely rewrites it to meet legislative deadlines.

“I’m initially very concerned with what this bill looks like,” Ramirez added. “We certainly won’t be supporting it.” His organization will take a formal position on the bill this evening, he said.

Ramirez wasn’t aware of the bill’s existence until a CalMatters reporter called him for comment yesterday morning.

Chanelle Win, who leads legislative efforts for the Student Senate for California Community Colleges, also said she opposes the bill.

Chiefly, it undermines the goal of having one admissions guarantee for the UC and Cal States by taking a piecemeal approach. She also fears it preempts an existing student and advocacy effort to propose a transfer guarantee to the UC created by a previous state law. Ryan said she doesn’t think the bill upends that effort.

McCarty understands the students’ criticisms, but “like everything else in the legislative process, you have to compromise,” he said.

“I’m not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” he added.

– Mikhail Zinshteyn has been a higher education reporter since 2015. As a freelancer, he contributed to The Atlantic, The Hechinger Report, Inside Higher Ed and The 74.

Alexandra Rieloff reappears on the Bay Area stage/Day of the Dead events

by Magdy Zara

After a time away from the Bay Area stages, renowned jazz singer Alexandra Rieloff returns with her trio to delight the San Francisco public with a wonderful repertoire.

Alexandra Rieloff, who was born in Brooklyn and is of Chilean descent, is a well-rounded artist, as she: she is an actress, choreographer, dancer, filmmaker, broadcaster, photographer and a masterful jazz vocalist.

Rieloff will be performing with her jazz trio on Saturday, Oct. 7 and 14 at Scopo Divino, starting at 4 p.m.

Scopo Divino is located at California Street @ Divisadero San Francisco. For reservations through tim@scopodivino.com.

San Francisco host of the 2023 Litquake Festival

Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, organized the “Litquake 2023” literary festival, which will take place starting October 5 of the current year, offering two full days of in-person wind.

This year at the Gardens, Litquake Out Loud will feature prominent writers and thought leaders from the Bay Area, ensuring representation of all people are included in the creation of and access to the historic and thriving Bay Area art scene.

The festival will take place between Oct. 5 and 21, with Saturday the 14 and Sunday the 15 being the central days.

The event will be held at its Esplanade location, Yerba Buena Gardens Mission St. between 3rd and 4th Sts. San Francisco; from 12 noon, admission is free.

Day of the Dead is commemorated with several events

Migrations always entail changes, not only for those who leave or change countries, but also the families that disintegrate, the cities that are left without their citizens, as well as the cities that receive them.

Such is the case of the commemoration of the Day of the Dead, which, being a Mexican tradition, has spread throughout the American continent, wherever a Mexican citizen resides and California is no exception. Below, several of the events that have been organized to remember this important date:

Lila Downs, presents “Día de los Muertos” for a special night of music with folk dances, a mariachi band, impressive thematic-inspired visual projections, among others.

Downs stands out for being an opera singer, a specialist in Mexican folklore, and stands out for her vocal and emotional range. She will perform this Sunday, Oct. 15, at 6:30 p.m., at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, 2025 Broadway, Oakland, tickets range from $40 – $115.

For its part, Redwood City presents Danzas De Fantasmas: Un Día De Los Muertos Cuento De Dos Mundos, this is a dance production, based on a love story that travels to the world of the living and the dead, full of ancestral rituals and a trail of marigolds.

It will feature a group of excellent artists from the Peninsula Ballet Theatre, the Mexican Folkloric Ballet of Carlos Moreno and Calpulli Tonalehqueh (Aztec dancers).

The public is invited to dress up for Halloween, tickets are $60, $45 and $35.

There will be two presentations, one on Oct. 27 and 28 starting at 7 p.m. m., in the

Fox Theater 2215 Broadway, Redwood City.

The 26th Festival and Procession will also be held, the SJMAG’s annual Day of the Dead parade in collaboration with the San José Art Museum.

According to the organizers of the activity, this will be a day for the community, to share with the family, as it will be full of live entertainment, cultural demonstrations and an eclectic combination of artistic experiences, this will be a truly intracultural and multigenerational event!

Among the scheduled activities are the decorating of sugar skulls, which will be adorned with brightly colored icing often used to decorate ofrendas or altars, celebrating those we have lost; as well as making paper alebrijes, among others.

To kick off this festival, the procession gathers at 11:30 a.m. m. at City View Plaza, corner of Market Street and San Fernando, the procession begins at 12:20 p.m., and travels through César Chávez Park to the San José Museum of Art corner of Market and San Fernando streets, on Saturday, the Oct. 28, the activity will be from 11 a.m. until 5 pm. Admission is free all day.

Climate alarmists once again claim we have reached the ‘tipping point’

by Jack Hellner

Kamala Harris says that a huge number of young people have climate anxiety. Maybe they wouldn’t be depressed if they were told the truth that the climate has always changed cyclically and naturally

(American Thinker) — Dozens of scientists say we have hit the tipping point… again. It is amazing how often we’ve hit this tipping point, yet things don’t seem to be as dire as “they” predicted. From CNN via Yahoo News:

Human actions have pushed the world into the danger zone on several key indicators of planetary health, threatening to trigger dramatic changes in conditions on Earth, according to a new analysis from 29 scientists in eight countries.

Then, former climate scientist at NASA James Hansen said it is far worse than he originally anticipated in 1988:

In a recent statement released by Hansen alongside two other scientists, Hansen predicted the warming of the planet to accelerate in the coming years, musing about a ‘new climate frontier.’

…

Of the lack of response by humanity as a whole, Hansen added, ‘It means we are damned fools. We have to taste it to believe it.’

Yet, Hansen has a tough time explaining why we had a global cooling period from 1940-1970. His best guess? Aerosols. From NASA:

‘I think the cooling that Earth experienced through the middle of the twentieth century was due in part to natural variability,’ he said. ‘But there’s another factor made by humans which probably contributed, and could even be the dominant cause: aerosols.’

So, if aerosols can override all the things we are told cause warming, why don’t we just use aerosols to cool the earth instead of destroying industries that produce reasonably priced energy and which have greatly improved our quality and length of life?

We were told 1970 was also a tipping point, and billions would soon die from an impending ice age, because the earth had been cooling for 30 years.

READ: Putin approves Russian climate policy committed to reaching ‘net zero’ by 2060

The media operatives have been warning the public of a “tipping point” since at least 1989, and as always, the window of time to solve the problem was rapidly diminishing:

Over the last 30 years, the media has made this clear. ‘A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000,’ wrote Peter James Spielmann of the Associated Press in 1989. ‘UN scientists warn time is running out to tackle global warming. Scientists say eight years left to avoid worst effects,’ wrote David Adam in the Guardian in 2007. ‘We have 10 years left to save the world, says climate expert,’ wrote HuffPost’s Laura Paddison in 2020.

Meanwhile, in 2021, Antarctica had the coldest six months on record, six degrees colder than the average of the last 40 years.

California had record snow in 2023, a weather event – not a transition to electric vehicles or less crude oil consumption – which alleviated the state’s long drought.

Texas also had record cold in February 2021.

And in 2023, Los Angeles had the coldest May and June on record. How could a big city like LA – with lots of cars and people, and notorious smog – set record low temperatures for months if everything we are told caused warming actually did?

Why doesn’t the media highlight record snow and cold periods to show natural variability? The answer is that it wouldn’t scare people, and the green pushers would lose all public support.

My wife and I just took a 5,000-mile trip out to the West. It would help if journalists took a similar trip to see that the climate has always changed cyclically and naturally, instead of just repeating what they are told.

Here are a few places I saw and what I learned:

Lake Tahoe has gone through millions of years of change including earthquakes, volcanoes, and glacial activity. All natural!

Yosemite National Park was formed two million years ago when a huge sheet of ice melted. The warmup, which had to be significant, did not destroy the planet.

California, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona are all covered by massive deserts that have been there long before humans and our use of natural resources could have caused them.

Here are more than 1,600 scientists who will never get a voice on or in mainstream media outlets, because they are scientists who say that there is no climate emergency, and assure the public that the climate is changing cyclically and naturally as it always has.

Kamala Harris says that a huge number of young people have climate anxiety. I wonder why! Maybe they wouldn’t be depressed if they were told the truth that the climate has always changed cyclically and naturally.

It is pathetic that we see what is going on in China, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Israel, and North Korea, that we see rampant crime with the open border… but our “president” says the greatest existential threat is a predicted temperature rise (of one or two degrees) based on easily-manipulated computer models that have been consistently wrong.

It is even more pathetic when most people posing as journalists, entertainers, and educators just repeat the leftist talking points instead of asking questions and doing research. That makes them dangerous to our survival as a great and prosperous country.

Reprinted with permission from American Thinker.

Palo Alto Museum opens dinosaur exhibit, Chilean Artist José Basso

by Magdy Zara

Aiming to inspire young scientific minds, Palo Alto Junior Museum & Zoo’s (JMZ) California Dinosaur Garden opens a Dinosaur Exhibit, which will feature life-size dinosaur and animal sculptures, prehistoric plants, and interactive exhibits, including a fossil dig.

This exhibit is approximately 34,000 square feet and offers children hands-on opportunities to learn about science, the environment and the natural world.

The California Dinosaur Garden, located outdoors in JMZ’s Dawn Redwood Courtyard, will offer a glimpse of what life was like during the Cretaceous period, more than 66 million years ago, when many different dinosaurs lived in what is now California. .

John Aikin, director of the Palo Alto Junior Zoo and Museum, mentioned that this exhibition aims to encourage children ages 3 to 11 to increase their knowledge about dinosaurs and the evolution of life over time.

He added that the display will feature seven life-size animal sculptures, ranging in size from a small bird to a 32-foot-long hadrosaur, helping children imagine these animals in an ecosystem.

This exhibit debuts on October 7 with an opening celebration that will include a free tour of the gardens and advance ticket sales for special programming, beginning at 10:30 a.m. to noon, at the Rinconada Cultural Park, the Palo Alto Junior Museum & Zoo.

For more information about the city of Palo Alto and the Dinosaur Garden, visit www.cityofpaloalto.org

Get to know the work of Yolanda López, with a tour in Spanish

The San José Art Theater presents the new exhibition of Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist, and has scheduled a special day to take a guided tour, for families completely in Spanish.

The invitation is to register to take this free tour in Spanish, which will be led by Studio Arts educator, Ruby Morales, who will guide families to facilitate interpretation activities and a special artistic activity to take home inspired by the exposure.

Artist and activist Yolanda López (1942-2021) created portraits that have become icons of feminist and working class empowerment.

The exhibition will be open until Oct. 29, however, the guided tour in Spanish will be this Saturday, Oct. 7, starting at 11 a.m. At the San José Art Museum located at 110 Calle Mercado Sur, San José.

Chilean Artist José Basso presents: Southern Lights of the World

Within the framework of the festivities for the Independence of Chile, the Chilean artist José Basso opens his exhibition Lights of the South of the World, at the CK Contemporáneo gallery.

José Basso is a Chilean painter, who was born in Viña del Mar, on June 27, 1949. He studied at the School of Fine Arts of Viña del Mar in 1969 and in 1972 at the University of Chile based in Valparaíso where he graduated Professor of Fine Arts with a mention in Painting in 1977. In 1990 he began to paint his first Landscape paintings; In 1993 he was a guest professor at the Faculty of Art of the Pontifical Catholic University to teach the course Meaning in Painting.

Basso gained early recognition for his work and won the Painting Prize at the 1975 International Art Biennale in Valparisio.

José Basso’s landscapes are unique, serene and intense, the artist’s ability to reduce the natural world to its most essential elements, leaving only light, air, space and the few components that remind us of the human presence, is what which allows him to communicate extraordinary complexity.

Luces Del Sur Del Mundo, has its opening on Saturday, Oct. 14 from 5 to 8 p.m., at the headquarters of the CK Contemporáneo gallery, located at 246 Powell Street, San Francisco.

Exhibition of Folklore dresses from Mexico

From Sept. 15 to Oct. 15, within the framework of Hispanic Heritage Month, a Mexican cultural exhibition will be held, which includes folklore dresses from many regions of Mexico.

The Family Place of the Centro Library is the place chosen for families to share and learn more about Mexican culture.

As is well known, Hispanic Heritage Month begins in the middle of the month because Sept. 15 marks the anniversary of the independence of five countries: Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

It will be displayed in the Center Library, at 1044, Middlefield Road

Redwood City, until the 15th of this month. The activity is completely free, and is being sponsored by the friends of the Redwood City Public Library.

For more information contact Armando Ramírez through (650)780-7015 Or at aramirez@redwoodcity.org.

What’s coming to the 51st Cervantino Festival in Guanajuato

photo: Latin America’s biggest arts and culture festival welcomes artists from over 30 countries to Guanajuato’s stages, theaters and galleries for 17 days in October. (festivalcervantino.gob.mx)

by MND staff

September 27, 2023 – This year’s International Cervantino Festival (FIC) in Guanajuato promises an unexpected twist for a performing arts festival: the inclusion of sports. Baseball, flag football and boxing can be enjoyed in addition to the festival’s world-renowned program of arts and culture celebrations.

The reason? The United States is this year’s invited country of honor.

The 51st “Cervantino” will take over the city of Guanajuato from Oct. 13 to 29. Though a small part of the festival will include athletic clinics and demonstrations, the festival’s marquee offerings will still be the music, dance and theater performances that have put Latin America’s largest cultural festival on the map.

Mariana Aymerich Ordóñez, Mexico’s new general director of Promotion and Cultural Festivals, explained that as the country of honor – following South Korea last year and Cuba in 2021 – the U.S. wanted to provide a sample of activities that are a fundamental part of the American experience.

According to Aymerich, the initial plan was to have a baseball tournament with teams from the U.S., Sonora and Guanajuato, two Mexican states where baseball is big. Sonora is this year’s Mexican state of honor.

Though things didn’t work out in that regard, “a series of [sports] clinics were organized, as well as [two flag football] workshops at the José Aguilar y Maya baseball stadium,” Aymerich said.

The 69-year-old ballpark happens to provide one of the most picturesque stadium views in all of Mexico, but this story can’t dwell on sports forever.

The real stars of the show at this year’s Cervantino are the international roster of artists that will descend on Guanajuato for 17 days, filling the city’s theaters, concert halls and public squares.

More than 2,800 artists from Colombia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, India and 29 other countries will participate.

The opening night show, “Broadway Goes to Hollywood,” is already sold out, as is the closing show with jazz musician Arturo O’Farrill, the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra and the Son Jarocho Conga Patria Collective, all of whom combined to create the 2023 Grammy-winning Latin jazz album “Fandango at the Wall in New York.”

Other sold-out shows include a concert by La Santa Cecilia paying tribute to the iconic Mexican singer José Alfredo Jiménez, who died 50 years ago, and concerts by Mexican-American opera singer Arturo Chacón, Sonoran reggae-indie singer Caloncho, the band Orquesta Aragón from Cuba and the Venice Baroque Orchestra from Italy.

Several high-caliber folkloric ballet shows are also sold out.

Tickets remain available for many performances, including a concert by the 18-piece U.S. Army Blues band on Oct. 16 in the gorgeous, 120-year-old Juárez Theater.

In a push to provide more options for young people, an open-air stage in Pasitos park will be set up for aerial shows, street theater from France and a diverse lineup of music genres: hip-hop, pop, rock and the music of Indigenous peoples.

Tickets can now be purchased at convenience stores around the country, as well as online.

For details, visit festivalcervantino.gob.mx (click on “English” as needed) or download the Cervantino app.

Left-wing groups call push to change Constitution ‘risky’; right wings want balance budget

United States Constitution with Flag in background

by Suzanne Potter

Left-wing groups are speaking out against the idea of a constitutional convention, warning it could be used to impose conservative policies on things such as civil rights, guns, voting rights and abortion.

Right-wing groups such as the Federalist Society have said they want to require a balanced budget and limit the power to tax, moves critics say would lead to huge cuts in Medicare, Social Security, education, Medicaid, and environmental protection.

Nancy MacLean, professor of history and public policy at Duke University, noted Article Five of the Constitution requires consent from just 34 states to call for a convention.

“The organizers of the convention effort have made clear the votes taken would not be based on population but on one vote per state, so as to grossly underrepresent the majority of Americans,” MacLean pointed out.

It would give outsize influence to states with tiny populations such as Wyoming at the expense of huge states such as California. Over the years, many states have called for a constitutional convention on specific topics. Golden State lawmakers just called for one on gun control. Conservative groups argued the requests could be aggregated to reach the 34-state threshold and force a convention.

Russ Feingold, president of the American Constitution Society and a former U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, just wrote a book, warning a convention is likely if Republicans win full control of Congress next year.

“They’re asserting that you can just mix and match these and that meets the constitutional requirements,” Feingold emphasized. “It’s not right. And the Supreme Court doesn’t appear to have the authority to step in and stop it.”

Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause, said the risk of a runaway convention is too great, because there are very few rules in place.

“We would have no idea who’s seeking to influence the members of the constitutional Convention,” Stein pointed out. “What lobbying would be happening behind the scenes? Would there be public-records requirements? Would there be transparency requirements? We just have no idea.”

Health care open enrollment season is here

It’s open-enrollment season for most health-care plans – meaning within the next month and a half, you can make changes to your health plan.

Open enrollment starts today for more than 1.5 million public employees in California. Deb Reyman is the health benefits spokesperson for the California Public Employees Retirement System, or CalPERS.

“The most common mistake people make during open enrollment is they do nothing,” said Reyman. “They don’t look at any of the information. So for example, they might not know how their premium is going to change come January of 2024. And they see a change and it’s too late to change health plans.”

People with employer-sponsored health plans should check the plan’s website for important dates. The Medicare Open Enrollment Period runs from Oct. 15 through Dec. 7.

Open enrollment for people on the state’s marketplace for health plans – CoveredCA – runs Nov. 1 through Jan. 31, but you have to sign up by the end of December for coverage to start Jan. 1.

CoveredCA executive director Jessica Altman said premiums are rising quite a bit for 2024, but more than 90 percent of enrollees get a state subsidy to soften the blow – and many people in the standard Silver Plan will pay no deductible.

“The statewide average increase for Covered California for premiums is 9.6 percent, and that’s high,” said Altman. “There’s the impact of inflation. We’re also still seeing people using more health care coming out of the pandemic.”

Dr. Rhonda Randall – the chief medical officer for UnitedHealthcare’s commercial operations – advised people to pay close attention to the coverage for specialty benefits such as dental, vision, hearing, critical illness, and mental health.

“You want to know what specifically you’re going to have access to,” said Randall. “How big is the network of therapists and psychiatrists, mental health professionals? Some employers offer navigation or advocacy services to help you find a good fit.”

UnitedHealthcare sponsors a website called Just Plain Clear that explains the difference between terms like monthly premium, co-pay, co-insurance, and deductibles. They also have a page to help people understand the various Medicare plans.

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