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LOS ANGELES | June 7, 2011 Mike Yepremyan was a 19-year old Armenian-American with his whole life ahead of him. A good-looking kid with dreams of space-flight, he was a sentimental young man who once delivered a single rose to every girl in Los Angeles Baptist High on a Valentine's Day the year before his death. Just a month before he died, he asked his parents about becoming an organ donor and when his life ended so unsuspectingly, Mike helped many others carry on their lives with their families. In November of 2009, Yepremyan's life ended after a text message sent to his girlfriend set off a series of events that would change lives forever. "With what appeared to be a sweeping punch aimed at the back of Mike's head....there was a boom and a shower of sparks," witnesses said according to a report in the Los Angeles Times while describing the shooting incident in which Hombert "Mike" Yepremyan was killed. Apparently, the killers escaped that November night in 2009 in a BMW. The driver of the BMW was later discovered to be Vahagn Jurian, 22, of Van Nuys, described in courtroom testimony as the cousin of "Kat." Yepremyan's girlfriend had become close with Kat who Yepremyan referred to as a "bitch" in a text message he sent to his girlfriend that November night in 2009 that set off a series of events that ultimately took his life. More than a year after his murder, Hombert Mike Yepremyan's parents had almost given up hope that their son's murderer would ever be apprehended until police had tracked whom they believed had killed Yepremyan - in Puerto Rico. Federal marshals on the island surrounded Zareh Manjikian's apartment complex in Carolina, Puerto Rico. Manjikian, now 23, finally appeared and was whom police believed escaped in the BMW driven by Jurian. Marshals followed him into a neighboring beach town and when opportunity knocked, U.S. Marshal's arrested Manjikian who was taken away in handcuffs. When Yepremyan's father received a call from a detec

WASHINGTON, D.C. | January 19, 2012 The Mayors for Freedom to Marry campaign will meet on Friday in Washington, the nation's capital, to garner support for same-sex marriages nationwide. The campaign is led by the Mayor of San Diego, California, Jerry Sanders. Joining Sanders in Washington is Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa as well as the mayors of Boston, Chicago and Houston. Freedom to Marry was fonuded in 2003 by Evan Wolfson, the father of the modern marriage movement. The campaign's mission is to garner support, grow the national majority for marriage and end federal marriage discrimination through the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act. The San Diego Mayor, previously opposed to same-sex marriage, in a Los Angeles Times report states that he "could not accept the idea that his daughter Lisa is less worthy of forming a lasting relationship because she is a lesbian."

LOS ANGELES | January 29, 2012 The word "free" and its derivatives take on many meanings in the English language, and this gorgeous California Sunday with the sun shining in all of its splendor, the people are reminded of the many intended meanings of the word "freedom" and how it is interpreted by Americans, and in this particular case, by one Californian. During an ensuing investigation, Police on Thursday arrested Umar Khan, a 34 year old Glendale man, as he was driving around town in his blue, four-door 2004 Honda Accord, naked from the waist down because it gave him a sense of "freedom." They had earlier learned that Khan drove around the city at night or early morning hours naked from the waist down and looks for cul-de-sac or driveways of homes to masturbate in. Khan has previously been convicted of indecent exposure in 1998, according to Los Angeles County Superior Court records. Glendale officers caught Khan again with his pants down and officers arrested him about 2:23 a.m. Thursday on the 1300 block of Doverwood Drive, after patrolling officers noticed he failed to yield at a stop sign on Royal Boulevard, according to police reports. According to the reports, the officers had apparently attempted to stop Khan, but he fled. It must have been his sense of freedom, again. Moments later they spotted Khan and stopped him on Doverwood. As officers approached the vehicle, they noticed he was naked from the waist down. Surprise!

"In this article we discuss the failure of social movement theories to adequately understand and theorize locally based, grassroots social movements like the landless workers movement in Brazil, 'livability movements' in third-world cities, and living wage movements in the USA. Movements such as these come to the attention of most social movement analysts only when the activists who participate in them come together in the streets of Seattle or international forums like the World Social Forum. To date, it is the transnational character of these protests that have excited the most attention. Building on scholarship that looks at the link between participatory democracy and social movements, this article takes a different tack. We show how some social movements have shifted their repertoire of practices from large mass events aimed at making demands on the national state to local-level capacity building. It is the local struggles, especially the ways in which they have created and used institutions in civil society through extending and deepening democracy, that may be the most significant aspect of recent social movements, both for our theories and for our societies. Yet these aspects have received less attention, we believe, because they are less well understood by dominant social movement theories, which tend to focus on high-profile protest events. We look at the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement and the Justice for Janitors Campaign in Los Angeles to illustrate the important terrain of civil society as well as the role of community organizing."