Hana Baba

The US dominates in many Olympic sports – track and field, swimming, basketball. But, one sport the US has never won a medal for is table tennis.

This year, the US team is hoping to change that. It’s going to be challenging. Only 4 players qualified to compete on the 2012 US Olympic Table Tennis team. Three of those four live and train right here in the Bay Area at an unlikely Olympic training ground – a converted warehouse that’s part of the Indian Community Center in Milpitas (ICC).

Street art has long been at the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District. With its colorful wall murals, it has been called the largest concentration of public painting in the world, embodying culture, passion, and activism. It would be quite a treat if you could see hundreds of the Mission's murals in one place – well, now you can.

The book Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo features over 500 full color photographs, with 30 essays by icons in the San Francisco public art movement. KALW’s Hana Baba sat down with the editor of the book, artist Annice Jacoby.

While The Birds and Vertigo may be some of the more obvious classic films featuring the Bay Area, a new exhibit showing at the Old Mint building in San Francisco is exploring the obvious, the not so obvious, and the downright obscure. The exhibit is entitled "The Stuff that Dreams are made of: San Francisco and the Movies," and it shows scripts, collectibles, artwork and posters from films shot in San Francisco. One room is dedicated to movie posters from classic Noir films related to the City by the Bay.

The Silicon Valley company Benetech’s motto is “Technology serving humanity.” It’s a different type of tech venture. It measures its success not in dollars, but by service to society and the environment. The man who founded Benetech is Jim Fruchterman, a former rocket scientist turned pioneer in this field called “social technology.” He was named a Macarthur Fellow, a “genius,” for his work. Fruchterman came by spoke with KALW’s Hana Baba about why he chose social good over monetary profit.

Since 9/11, surveillance of Muslims has been on the rise. New York City made national news in February when the Associated Press broke the story about the NYPD spying on area mosques. AP won a Pullitzer Prize for that reporting.

About a month later, in March, we received similar news much closer to home. The ACLU announced it had documents showing the FBI spied on mosques here in the San Francisco Bay Area between 2004 and 2008.