Asked what he thought would be Jim Slemp’s biggest challenge as Berkeley High School’s new principal, BUSD spokesperson Mark Coplan responded, “managing a small city.” -more-
On my way to the BART station earlier this summer, I noticed an unfamiliar bird skulking in the shrubbery near the tennis courts at the corner of Martin Luther King and Russell. It was pretty nondescript: bigger than a sparrow, smaller than a robin, pale grayish-brown with vague streaking. But it had this furtive look about it. -more-
In 1994 Josh Kornbluth got hit with what was, for him, an enormous tax bill. He suddenly owed Uncle Sam and the state of California a combined total of $27,000. -more-
Rosa Parks Elementary School received failing marks and Washington Elementary School got an incomplete on the latest round of state testing, overshadowing an otherwise solid performance by Berkeley students on the California Standards Test. -more-
The Board of Education is poised to formally decide on Aug. 20 whether to move the Berkeley Adult School from its present West Campus location on University Avenue to the School District’s Franklin site on Virginia Street. -more-
Mark Twain, who chronicled America’s Gilded Age in the 19th century, joined the digital age this month when UC Berkeley researchers put 700 of his letters online. -more-
Alameda County’s first West Nile Virus victim has survived her encounter with the deadly disease—contracted not here but in Colorado—say local public officials who remain deeply concerned about the virus’s spread into California. -more-
Clusters of tall white wind turbines spin gracefully atop green hillsides. Solar photovoltaics (PVs) are integrated into windows and rooftops of modern homes, factories and office blocks. Even the old renovated seat of government is fitted with solar panels. -more-
All you recall junkies, listen up. -more-
Ah, this is the life. To be on vacation near the ocean, sunning on the beach by day, and, by night, hearing Hardball’s Chris Matthews, of all people, repeatedly liken Bush to Ted Baxter, the obtuse anchorman on the old “Mary Tyler Moore Show.” As I eat fried calamari and striped bass, I get to see Matthews, hardly a friend of progressives, hammer Team Bush over their serial lying about weapons of mass destruction and yellowcake. Was Bush such a clueless puppet, sputters Matthews, that he simply read whatever Cheney or Rumsfeld put in front of him and told him to sell to the nation? Why, I must be in Margaritaville. -more-
After my husband’s bicycling accident on Claremont Avenue, our lives turned topsy-turvy. I spent six months at home taking care of him, but to pay our bills, I had to go back to work. Five years later, after his health stabilized and the stock market went gangbusters, I quit my job and set out to make our house more wheelchair accessible. -more-
As the Silicon Valley economy sputters, the ubiquitous H1-B engineers who came to the United States on temporary work visas have become a vanishing breed. Their impact on the cultural landscape, however, is here to stay. -more-
After three years rooted in leafy North Berkeley, with occasional escapes to even leafier Seattle, a week in Paris and four more in small-town Britain proved a salutary shock to the system for a commentator on East Bay buildings. -more-
Peter Jennings has tossed a Molotov cocktail into a bitter Upper West Side real-estate battle. The ABC newsman is charging that Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in America, is pulling strings to destroy the character of his neighborhood by erecting a 14-story residential building on West 70th Street next door to its synagogue on Central Park West. -more-
With its curvy shape, sleek long neck and rounded butt, a wine bottle kind of looks like a voluptuous Marilyn Monroe. But there’s more than meets the eye—there’s utility. -more-
A Stanford dropout who won a Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for literature, John Steinbeck began his life in Salinas on February 27, 1902. His life’s journey ended when his wife Elaine and his son Thom took his ashes to the shore at Whalers Bay south of Monterey for a last visit to his favorite place and a memorial service on Christmas Eve, 1968. -more-
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-
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-
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-
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-
University of California students who sued to block fee hikes will have to fork over the cash, at least for now. -more-
It’s time to tune out the bleating elites and vacant talking heads whose doomsday warnings about these exciting times raise questions about their sanity. They need to spend more time with their de Tocqueville, who could have warned them that here in America nothing is more chaotic than democracy itself. Let’s debunk five myths about the recall. -more-
I guess I’m just the kind of gal who likes to sleep around. I wasn’t always this way. From the time I was four, until I was eighteen, I had my own bedroom: two single beds, (one for an occasional invited friend to use), wall-to-wall closets and an orange and green shag carpet. I didn’t have to share it with anyone. I lived like a princess in my parent’s home for fourteen years. It’s the longest I’ve stayed anywhere. -more-
Ahmed Amin just wants to play football. He’s 17, and Cupertino High’s starting tight end. His older brother Hassan, 19, would rather chase girls around the DeAnza College campus. But Ahmed has to miss school and practice every third Wednesday to report to the INS office an hour away. And Hassan recently spent a night in jail for immigration violations. -more-
Deep in the East Bay Express's Gary Coleman for California Governor issue, you find an interesting, and disturbing, passage: -more-
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The seventh exchange between Berkeley and Japanese progressives culminated earlier this month in an invitation for Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates to attend a mayoral conference in Hiroshima. -more-
It doesn’t take long to be charmed by Point Richmond. Moments after leaving Interstate 580 and turning south, away from the sprawling unsightliness of the ChevronTexaco oil refinery, you are in a town square that seems to have escaped time. -more-
