“Let your hair down, roll your sleeves up and let’s praise the Lord,” Rev. Allen L. Williams told his congregation at St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church. Williams had a special reason to rejoice. Last Sunday, he and churchgoers celebrated St. Paul’s 70th anniversary in Berkeley. -more-

FRIDAY, NOV. 28 -more-

FRIDAY, NOV. 28 -more-

Berkeley is home to many unique small businesses started by people from all over the world who came to California, liked what they found, and stayed. We’re an international city, and many of our retail stores mirror the countries their owners came from. -more-

It’s happened more than once, but I’m still not used to it: looking down from my dining room window as a Cooper’s hawk flies up the driveway. The driveway seems to be a transit corridor, part of the bird’s (or birds’) hunting territory. The effect—a feathered projectile hurtling past the kitchen window—would be even more startling from ground level. -more-

UC Berkeley’s planned downtown hotel and convention center is part of a growing trend for UC campuses that lure cities with the promise of big tax revenues. But in at least one case, university ownership delivered exactly the opposite. -more-

“The first time you sleep on the streets you become obnoxiously ill within two weeks. It happens to everyone,” said Marz, one of the many young transients who consistently line Telegraph Avenue. -more-

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first of a two-part series on the University Avenue strategic plan. -more-

When Henry Poole met Dennis Kucinich last May, politics fused with passion and technological savvy. What emerged from the meeting was an electronic presidential campaign, run in part from a room in a house that was once Berkeley’s best-known radical commune. -more-

There’s a best-selling book with a title something like Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. As far as I’m concerned, I learned most of what I need to know in my ninth grade English class. One semester of ninth grade English in my school was devoted to what we called “Mythology,” that is, the stories that the ancient Greeks and Romans used to explain the universe. It never fails to amaze me how often contemporary human behavior can be described in terms of what I can remember from the old stories I learned fifty years ago. People haven’t changed much since ancient times. -more-