March 22nd, 20240To California’s Muslim, Palestinian American and Arab American communities:
California is a better place because of you—our Muslim, Palestinian American and Arab American neighbors and friends who contribute so much to our state’s sense of faith and belonging. From countless achievements in literature, civil rights, arts,...
November 19th, 20220By Peter White
Despite new laws to keep people from voting and gerrymandering election districts to take away the power of minority communities, the Republican “red wave” that pollsters predicted ahead of last week’s midterms didn’t happen.
Ethnic Media Services debriefed six experts on their reactions to the election...
September 15th, 20220ANAHEIM, CA — After years of lobbying by advocates, Anaheim finally designated its Arab American enclave as "Little Arabia" on Tuesday.
In a statement, Anaheim's spokeswoman told CNN the city plans to follow up the designation with in-depth research.
"The Little Arabia designation recognizes an area of our city we've always...
March 12th, 20220SAN DIEGO — San Diego County’s deep rooted Chaldean community says it is being disenfranchised by the County’s redistricting of the area in which most of this ethnic and religious minority group resides.
A group representing the concentrated Chaldean community in the East County has said the county's redistricting efforts have...
March 9th, 20220Americans are now experiencing soaring gas prices, surging more than 30 percent since Russia invaded Ukraine and the U.S. and other countries imposed a raft of sanctions.
The Biden administration has already begun looking at scenarios in which oil tops $200 a barrel, with gas stations already topping $4 a gallon in many...
December 10th, 20210LANSING — Michigan has recorded its first confirmed case of the emerging Omicron COVID-19 variant as it continues to battle rising cases of the dangerous Delta variant.
The news comes as the country is coming to grips with yet another variant of the virus, with first cases reported in California, New York and Colorado in the last...
December 1st, 20210- Briana Gasorski contributed to this report
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Wednesday that the first case of the newly emerging Omicron variant of COVID-19 was detected in the U.S. A second case was announced in Minnesota on Thursday, after which two more states, New York and Colorado, reported...
September 16th, 20210DEARBORN — The tragic kidnapping, torture and murder in Yemen of Abdulmalek Alsanabani, a Yemeni student who resided in California, sparked outrage and protests in the U.S. and Yemen this week.
Alsanabani was a 25-year-old living in Fresno, California and had decided to take an often dangerous journey across the south of Yemen to...
September 3rd, 20210MARIN COUNTY, CALIFORNIA — A report published by the CDC details a case of an unvaccinated teacher who infected half a class of students with COVID-19 just by reciting a story for them unmasked. The report made headlines this week as schools went through a tense decision process to allow full in-person learning, but with many...
June 23rd, 20210CALIFORNIA — The Bay Area’s growing Yemeni community has made strong headways recently, by organizing an effort to secure much needed representation for Yemenis, Arabs and Muslims in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). Local Yemeni groups, parents and allied organizations and officials worked towards bringing more...
June 11th, 20210WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to look at a decade-long class-action case involving the FBI’s use of an informant to spy on several LA and Orange County mosques, the Courthouse News reported Tuesday.
For more than a year, the FBI planted an informant in the mosques and instructed him to coerce and gather...
May 7th, 20210— The following article was contributed by the Lebanese American Foundation in Los Angeles, California.
LOS ANGELES — To mark the culmination of Arab Heritage Month, The House of Lebanon, the cultural center for the Lebanese American Foundation, composed a star-studded message featuring top Arab and Lebanese leaders and...
March 21st, 20210Progressive members of the Democratic Party are continuing their efforts to raise the national minimum wage to $15 an hour, after the effort failed to pass the U.S. Senate as part of the latest COVID-19 relief package.
Those members, like U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Detroit), intend to ensure a $15 minimum wage increase is incorporated...
February 13th, 20210ANAHEIM, CA — There is a roughly four-to-five-mile stretch in Anaheim where you can get Egyptian food, Syrian ice cream, Lebanese cuisine and many flavors from Arab-speaking countries — it is an area that business owners and organizers are hoping to get a special designation.
One of the businesses on Brookhurst owned by an...
February 12th, 20211NORTH CAROLINA — Toni Breidinger, 21, a rising star in the car racing world, is set to become the first Arab American female driver to compete in a NASCAR national series.
Breidinger, who is also a successful model, hails from the Bay Area in California. Her mother was born in Beirut and Breidinger currently has family in...
February 4th, 20210SANTA MONICA — Lebanese American Will Tanous has gained a prominent promotion in the world’s largest music company, Universal Music Group (UMG). The company announced this week that Tanous will be serving as its executive vice president and chief administrative officer.
Through its labels and subsidiaries, UMG manages the...
February 3rd, 20210WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said this week that federal COVID-19 vaccine sites will be off limits to enforcement actions, such as arrests for deportation.
The department and its federal partners have vowed to keep the vaccine sites run by the federal government accessible to undocumented...
September 27th, 20200With the rise in unemployment and general economic insecurity brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, federal and state authorities have been tracking increased instances of consumer scams.
Adding to an already tragic situation, scammers prey on the desperation of those whose means of living are halted by mass economic shut-downs all...
August 12th, 20200BOSTON — A new survey seeks to assess the health of Arab Americans in the U.S. The Survey of Arab Health in America, or SAHA, aims to bridge gaps in the knowledge of the population that is historically underrepresented in health research, often due to its non-existence as a category on official documents like the...
July 23rd, 20200Race and ethnicity are becoming forefront conversations on our media, academic debates and daily life discussions here in the United States. Each of us has an identity that defines how we see ourselves and others. Arab Americans are a historically understudied minority group in the United States and their health needs and risks have been...
June 8th, 20200WASHINGTON, D.C. — A new police reform and accountability bill introduced on Monday aims to increase the investigative powers of the regional and federal government in cases of police misconduct. The Justice in Policing Act of 2020 has been introduced by the Congressional Black Caucus Chair Karen Bass (D-CA) and House Judiciary...
May 9th, 20200DETROIT— The reality of the global health crisis has brought with it a grave and unprecedented economic crisis in a few short months. In the U.S., state and federal bureaucracies, unemployment agencies and research institutes scramble to understand the breadth and magnitude of the effects of economic closures on both workers and...
May 3rd, 20190LOS ANGELES — The Fontana Police Department in California apologized for a tweet that called Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Detroit) “un-American.”
The now-deleted tweet from the police department was posted last week by an off-duty employee.
"Nice knowing you!" the tweet read, according to the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin in...
October 16th, 20181A small school district in affluent Marin County in California, serving about 2,000 youngsters in the bucolic West Marin towns of Fairfax and San Anselmo, has contracted with Thomson Reuters — a firm linked to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — to check on the residential status of its students.
Ross Valley School...
October 15th, 20180SAN FRANCISCO - With less than a month until the 2018 midterm elections, the California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CA) released a “California Voter Guide”, which offers resources to assist California Muslims and allies as they prepare to vote in the November election.
CAIR-CA’s Muslim voter guide...
September 14th, 20180BAKERSFIELD, Cal. — An unidentified gunman killed his wife and four other people in a series of shootings on Wednesday in Southern California before taking his own life, police said.
The man went with his wife to a trucking company in Bakersfield, where he shot and killed a man and then turned his gun on his spouse, killing her,...
March 30th, 20180WASHINGTON, D.C. — On Wednesday, President Trump praised a major California county for joining his administration's legal challenge to the state's new limits on how much local police and sheriff's departments support his rigorous deportation policy.
"My Administration stands in solidarity with the brave citizens in Orange County...
March 9th, 20180WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO — The Justice Department sued the state of California over so-called "sanctuary" policies that try to protect illegal immigrants against deportation, ramping up a confrontation over whether local police should enforce federal law.
The lawsuit, filed late Tuesday in federal court in Sacramento, the California...
