Passersby look at the day's news
Each day, UC Berkeley puts up large-format prints of the front pages of newspapers from around the world right outside the Free Speech Cafe at Moffitt Library. On Friday, the news caught at least two people’s attention.
The arrests of 44 people last Thursday in New Jersey — including three mayors, two state assemblymen, several rabbis and other public officials — on corruption charges also shed light on one of the more gruesome criminal activities, the trafficking of human organs. But for at least one Berkeley professor, this was not news.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, U.C. Berkeley anthropology professor, is a leading expert in the study of human organ trafficking, according to this article in J Weekly.com, and first told the FBI back in 2001 that a Brooklyn man was brokering sales in human kidneys.
[Scheper-Hughes] hoped it might make a dent in this criminal activity. It didn’t — at least not right away.
Instead, law enforcement agencies probed the connections for years, resulting in last week’s wide-ranging string of arrests that included New Jersey political figures and several rabbis from the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn and New Jersey.
In a major coup, the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting has hired Lance Williams, the San Francisco Chronicle’s top investigative journalist, to join its new California Watch Project.
Williams, who has been a reporter for 34 years and who attended UC Berkeley, will be covering money and politics for the new initiative, which is backed by $2.4 million in grants from major foundations. He will join Louis Freedberg, the director of California Watch and a former editorial writer for the Chronicle and Mark Katches, a California native who previously worked the Orange County Register and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
California Watch is a multimedia investigative project started in May to fill the reporting gaps left as the state’s major newspapers cut deeply into their staffs. California Watch is a joint project of CIR and the California Media Collective based out of the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco.
“California is a state facing immense challenges,” said Katches. “It has never been more important for a strong watchdog team to hold those in power accountable and to shine a light on important issues facing citizens of the state.
Williams won numerous awards at the Chronicle for uncovering the BALCO steroid scandal of major league baseball. He and Mark Fainaru-Wada wrote Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports, and the book prompted major league baseball to open a formal investigation into doping.
The Center for Investigative Reporting, founded in 1977, is the nation’s oldest non-profit investigative reporting news organization. Its staff reporters and associated freelancers have produced stories on a range of topics, which have aired on many of the major networks and appeared in many of the nation’s top newspapers or magazines.
The Center is located near Ashby and Shattuck Avenues.
Tonight, Alphonse Berber, the recently opened art gallery on Bancroft Way, is holding a public reception for its new new group exhibition ”Not as a God, But as a God Might Be”.
The show presents the work of seven artists whose concerns, as diverse as their origins, include religion, the environment, racism, pop culture, television, and personal mythology.
Read about the gallery and its founders, Jessica Cox and Cameron Jackson, here. Doors open at 6pm for the reception. Visit the gallery’s website here.
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