The University of California plans to appeal a court ruling it claims could shut UC out of some of the most lucrative investment opportunities on the market. -more-

FRIDAY, AUGUST 15 -more-

This issue of The Planet marks a watershed. It’s the last one for which Michael Howerton is managing editor. The house joke is that we decided to hire him because we knew that if we didn’t like him he’d be gone soon. In fact, we had already decided to hire him when he learned that his historian wife had been awarded a prestigious fellowship to spend a year in Rome, and, oddly enough, he wanted to go with her. Because he seemed so well suited to the job, we decided to hire him anyway for the four month duration, and we haven’t regretted it. -more-

“Measure for Measure” has more than enough for a contemporary American audience: a corrupt official who tries to extort sexual favors, misguided attempts to legislate morality, squeamishness about the death penalty. -more-

FRIDAY, AUGUST 15 -more-

It’s older than the Campanile, older than Sather Gate, older than the city of Berkeley itself. And on Aug. 30 Gorman & Son Furniture, a Telegraph Avenue fixture that grew out of a tragic fire and an immigrant’s pluck, will pack up and leave town. -more-

GET INVOLVED -more-

After years of preaching by animal advocates, pet owners are finally getting the message and spaying and neutering their animals, and Bay Area animal shelters are getting smaller numbers of abandoned cats and dogs. The flip side is that the ones they do take often prove the most difficult to place, requiring considerably more human investment than newborn pups and kittens. -more-

In the film “The Sum of All Fears,” last year's Ben Affleck nuclear terrorism flick, actor James Cromwell plays a president up for reelection who in one scene recounts his political assets in a humorous speech to the press. That he admitted to smoking a little weed while serving in Vietnam, he jokes, should help his reelection campaign to carry California. -more-

Berkeley-based Youth Radio scored yet another journalistic triumph when the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) awarded the innovative program its Salute to Excellence honors for a radio documentary examining the violent culture created by the high murder rate in Oakland as seen through a teenager’s eyes. -more-

Confronted with a blistering state report on the state of Berkeley’s schools, Board of Education Directors took their first step toward addressing the 500 concerns raised in the evaluation by meeting with its authors earlier this week. -more-

Robbery with a Caddy -more-