Berkeley Police officers escorted Alison Weir, founder of If Americans Knew, into her organization’s South Berkeley office Monday afternoon, three days after a voicemail threat warning her to stay away from her office at 2 p.m. Monday or risk losing her life. -more-

TUESDAY, OCT. 7 -more-

SCHOOL SWAP -more-

It seems unlikely that UC’s Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies bribed the Nobel Prize Committee to choose Oct. 3 to announce they had awarded the world’s most high falutin’ literary prize to South African author J.M. Coetzee. But there must have been at least some dancing in the hallowed academic corridors when the word came over the news. It happened last Friday, the same day that Assistant Professor Peter Glazer’s beautifully staged adaptation of Coetzee’s novel “Foe” opened at Zellerbach Playhouse. -more-

TUESDAY, OCT. 7 -more-

Berkeley is one of the older cities in the Bay Area and the majority of Berkeley’s approximately 40,000 buildings are more than 60 years old. The city’s built environment gives it a physical quality not found in the newer California communities where the majority of the state’s population lives. With the exception of areas just south of the University Campus, Berkeley escaped the massive urban clearances that other older cities experienced. -more-

UC Berkeley graduate student instructors Friday staged a walkout to protest university bargaining practices they blame for a contract impasse. -more-

In memory of Fred Lupke -more-

The West Nile Virus is heading for Northern California and will probably reach Alameda and Contra Costa counties within the next two years, according to an infectious disease expert with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). -more-

In 1891, Charles Keeler and Bernard Maybeck met on the 5 p.m. commuter ferry from San Francisco to Berkeley. Keeler was 20 and worked at the California Academy of Sciences. Maybeck was 29 and employed at the architectural firm of A. Page Brown. Four years later Maybeck designed Keeler’s home--the first house on Highland Place, in the Daley’s Scenic Park tract just north of the university campus. -more-

Some nights a blue light shines in South Berkeley. If you’re in the know, when the light is glowing, you’re in for an enchanting evening at one of Berkeley’s newest hot spots for the underground arts scene, the Jazz House. -more-

Having to put Jesse Jackson on hold so I could take a call from Al Gore. -more-

NEW DELHI, India—With Indian tech workers no longer wanted in the United States, the buzz here is all about teachers. -more-

Sometime in the next three weeks, Berkeley renters and landlords will learn how much next year’s rents will increase, after the city’s rent board negotiates its way through a legal and political minefield to pick a number almost certain to make someone unhappy. -more-

After watching the PBS special on Mark Twain, I became obsessed with the idea of moving close to the Mississippi River. Maybe if I could spend time along its muddy waters the muse I had lost would return and I’d be able to churn out one marvelous, witty paragraph after another, just like Samuel L. Clemons. -more-

When the Oakland Tribune and other ANG Newspapers withdrew their endorsement of Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor over the weekend, citing recent sexual harassment allegations against the actor, the news brought cheer to a group of East Bay female politicians who had pressed the paper to make the retraction. -more-