The Berkeley Housing Authority’s Section 8 program is mismanaged, poorly staffed, and on the brink of insolvency, according to a sweeping independent study delivered to BHA board members Friday. -more-
What promises to be the biggest local tax on the November ballot is looking like it will be a little less costly to Berkeley taxpayers. -more-
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first of a two-part series. Part two will appear in the May 14 edition. -more-
According to friends and family, Berkeley’s Wendell Ralph Lipscomb was a renaissance man in the true sense of the word. A former instructor for the Tuskegee Airmen, a physician, musician, and teacher, those who knew him best said he was good at whatever he did. -more-
Planners To Get Hotel Task Force Report -more-
Berkeley Arts Magnet Elementary School is learning that despite a new vaccine that promises to one day vanquish the disease from the face of the earth, the chicken pox can still pack a wallop. -more-
The Berkeley School Board is asking the City Council to step up to the plate and dig up a Berkeley street so that the district can build a new home for the Berkeley High baseball team. -more-
Four Berkeley engine companies battled a blaze fanned by 35-mile-an-hour winds atop Grizzly Peak after Oakland firefighters issued a call for mutual assistance at 10 minutes after midnight Monday morning. -more-
My mother thinks that everyone in California runs around naked. It’s one of her theories left over from the ‘60s, when Life Magazine was delivered weekly to our house in New Jersey. In each issue were big photographs of pain and tragedy: train wrecks, car crashes, runaway children, missile crisis, racial strife and a war somewhere across the Pacific. In-between these articles were snippets of life in California: tan surfer girls shopping in bikinis at the grocery store; movie stars in group therapy; common housewives primal screaming; nude people on the Big Sur coast, sitting in hot tubs discussing their feelings; naked folks in communes having sex with one another; hairy kids in the desert doing god knows what without their clothes on. That’s how mother got the idea that everyone in California was naked, including her daughter: Life Magazine told her so. -more-
A friend of mine just put a new bumper sticker on her car. It says “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention!” When I first saw it, I quipped, “Or, if you are outraged, stop paying attention!” -more-
As our city struggles with budget shortfalls, one fat sacred cow continues to gorge itself at the public trough. The mayor and the City Council willfully ignore it, tip-toeing around this bloated bovine for fear of awakening a stampede of crushing political correctness. -more-
I am writing in response to the recent letter to the editor in your newspaper (Daily Planet, May 4-6) entitled “Warsaw Ghetto” by Jane Stillwater. I would like to commend her on her particularly clear-sighted comparison between the situation of the Palestinians in Gaza and the state of the Jews in Warsaw prior to the Second World War. She is scathingly accurate in writing that the “independent” Gaza that Ariel Sharon would create would be “an exact re-creation of the spirit and mood of the ghetto at Warsaw—no more, no less,” and that “being an Arab these days is chillingly similar to being a Jew in 1939,” with “the only difference” that she can see being the source of the financing of such genocide. -more-
She steps out onto the platform, looking about 16—rail thin and pale—flashes a shy smile, and sits down at the piano. Her long, straight red hair cascades over her shoulders as she focuses, placing her hands on the keys, then begins some hesitant modal runs that become buoyant, lively evocations of Irish dance, then—CRASH!—her right forearm smashes down across the treble keys—CRASH!—her left forearm across the bass, right, left, right, relentlessly, and all illusions of timidity and frailty explode into bursts of joy. -more-
I never thought I’d find myself writing in defense of eucalyptus, but here I am. Go ahead, quote me: Eucalyptus is not the devil. -more-
I never thought I’d find myself writing in defense of eucalyptus, but here I am. Go ahead, quote me: Eucalyptus is not the devil. -more-
With Berkeley’s biggest neighbor planning to add over two million square feet of girth in the coming 15 years, residents gathered Wednesday to tell UC Berkeley to slow down before it gobbles the town whole. -more-
After 31 years as one of the nation’s most prestigious centers for foreigners to come and learn the English language, class was officially dismissed at Berkeley’s English Language Program (ELP) Thursday. -more-
The Florida version of the 2000 presidential election proved that punch cards are problematic. California’s adventures with touchscreen voting machines—including what amounts to a blanket decertification by the California secretary of state—demonstrated that this form of tally has some problems as well. Paper balloting seems a relic of the distant past. With the November general elections quickly approaching, many are wondering how they can ensure that their votes actually are counted. -more-
The proposed fiscal year 2005 City of Berkeley budget presented to the City Council by City Manager Phil Kamlarz Tuesday night erases Berkeley’s $10 million general fund deficit without reducing—as some citizens had feared—fire services or eliminating school crossing guards. What it does to other city jobs is another question. -more-
Nothing seems to represent the philosophy of Berkeley better than the combination of good pastries and a non-hierarchical work environment. -more-
Berkeley’s budget mess is proving difficult to solve, but easy to trace. The city, like 248 other local agencies, has gambled and so far lost on a hastily passed 2000 state law to boost employee retirement benefits on the promise that the state retirement fund had the cash reserves to cover their short term costs. -more-
There is videotape of the beatings by the six guards, available on the Internet for download. Soft and grainy and shot from a distance, still, what is happening is unmistakable. Two prisoners are lying sprawled on the floor, face down, unresisting. An L.A. Times news article graphically describes the scene: “[One of the guards] sits astride [one of the prisoners and] begins punching him with alternating fists, landing a total of 28 blows. At one point, [the guard] can be seen lifting [the prisoner’s] head by the hair in what looks like an effort to get a better angle for his punch. A few feet away, the tape shows [a second guard] slugging [the other prisoner] and using his right knee to pummel him in the neck area as the [prisoner] lies motionless. … One [guard] is seen shooting the [prisoners] with a gun that fires balls of pepper spray, while another sprays their faces with mace.” -more-
Millions of witnesses were shocked by the graphic photographs of American soldiers reveling in the vicious torture and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, a U.S.-run prison outside Baghdad, notorious for torture and massive executions under Saddam Hussein. The photographs depicted images of a prisoner, his head covered in a Ku Klux Klan-style hood with wires fixed to his fingers, toes and genitals; nude inmates piled in a human pyramid; a triumphant soldier named Chip Frederick sitting on top of a naked prisoner while Private Lynndie England shows a “thumbs up” sign while pointing to the genitals of a detainee forced to masturbate; a dog attacking a prisoner; stripped inmates being forced to simulate sex with each other and beat one another. -more-
The recent commentary in the Berkeley Daily Planet by opponents of the new Shasta Fire Station is proof that anti-civic behavior does not die easily. These opponents, having watched a failed appeal to the City Council and a failed law suit against the city (by individuals) to block construction of the fire station, are now attempting a last stand by discrediting the results of an exhaustive four-year public process that produced the program and final design for the new fire station. They are now arguing that the station is unnecessarily large and that the city should not be spending money in tight financial times. They say that the new station will be “an oversized, exorbitantly expensive building” even though it is being built in an area where some of the houses are larger then the size of the new station. Let’s be clear: this is not a group of concerned citizens trying to protect the city’s financial interest but some of the same group that have argued that “a fire station is inappropriate in our bucolic neighborhood.” -more-
When the Berkeley Youth Orchestra takes the stage this Sunday for their final program of the season, it’s quite possible that no one will be having more fun than the performer in the spotlight, 13-year old Jasiu Purat. The winner of the orchestra’s concerto competition, Purat defies cliches of the talented young musician under pressure to excel. Instead, he simply describes his musical activities as opportunities to enjoy himself. -more-
Impact Theatre is up to another one of its delightful pieces of nonsense, the three part Money and Run, staging it—as usual—at La Val’s Subterranean Theatre. That’s what the pizza parlor on Euclid Avenue has dubbed the small black stage in its basement where so many good theater companies spend time while they work their way up the theatrical ladder to more awe-inspiring quarters. But Director Christopher Morrison isn’t much interested in that stepping-stone kind of thing. -more-
“…piecin’ a quilt’s like living a life…the Lord sends us the pieces, but we cut ‘em out and put ‘em together pretty much to suit ourselves…” -more-
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The bit old October Issue
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