The state Legislature’s failure to pass a budget on time is creating short-term financial headaches for public and private agencies in Berkeley and could lead to the temporary closure of a local community college and the elimination of vital health care services if the stalemate lingers into the fall, according to education and health care officials. -more-

FRIDAY, JULY 4 -more-

Just after we took on the job of resurrecting the Berkeley Daily Planet, Mayor-elect Tom Bates got some bad publicity for trashing copies of the Daily Californian which endorsed his opponent. Wags opined that if he’d recycled them instead, it would have been less shocking to Berkeley. Friends suggested to us that the first edition of the revived Planet should be headlined “Steal This Paper,” homage (for those of you too young to remember) to yippie Abbie Hoffman’s “Steal This Book.” The idea made us laugh, but we didn’t use it. -more-

FRIDAY, JULY 4 -more-

On the south end of People’s Park, California indigenous plants meld with living sculptures, dinosaur tracks and Andean potatoes due to the work of a group of volunteer gardeners. -more-

The man police pulled from the bay at the Berkeley Marina early Monday morning was severely beaten, not shot as originally believed, and still recovering from severe head injuries at Oakland’s Highland Hospital Thursday afternoon, police said. -more-

FREEMAN MEMORIAL -more-

The state jobless rate for teens has climbed to 19.8 percent, the highest in a decade, and those looking for jobs this summer are finding that even the low-level job market, usually open to students, has been saturated by adults. -more-

Arleen Goodwin and Joan Kloehn founded the small Berkeley nonprofit Senior Medi-Benefits in the mid-eighties hoping to assist seniors with the paperwork generated by illness, so that people whose medical bills and insurance claims were piling up would get some help. People assumed that such nightmares would slowly recede as health providers joined networks with interconnected billing, and more claims would be submitted electronically. -more-

A divinity student at Berkeley’s Pacific School of Religion (PSR) was crowned Miss California last weekend, winning $12,000 and a trip to the storied Miss America pageant. -more-

For more than 10 years, I have been proud to be employed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). Although I know that some in the community object to some of the lab’s actions, I have generally been pleased with the lab’s activities over the past decade, have enjoyed my time there, and I know that our research has been top-notch. -more-

Despite signing a new contract that provides University of California lecturers with pay hikes and increased job security, some instructors are still feeling vulnerable and undervalued by a system that caters to tenured and tenure-track professors. -more-

Five months after pledging to boycott the Claremont Resort and Spa the UC Berkeley football team has signed up for a week-long stay at the hotel in August. -more-