Soaring construction costs and tight money have forced the developers of the two David Brower Center projects to alter their plans, while forcing the city to up its direct subsidy of the project to $6.2 million. -more-

Foes of the new Landmarks Preservation Ordinance have the signatures they need to block the law from taking effect, said Laurie Bright, the man doing the counting. -more-

Spaceship Earth, that 175-ton sculpture that made an aborted effort to land in Berkeley, has died a premature death in Georgia, giving headline writers and bloggers everywhere endless occasions for schadenfreude. -more-

Dan Sicular, spokesperson for an unincorporated group of football fans calling themselves “Save Tightwad Hill!”, announced late Monday that attorney Susan Brandt Hawley has filed in California Superior Court in Alameda County on their behalf to require the UC Regents to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act by doing adequate study and mitigation of the proposed UC Berkeley Memorial Stadium expansion. Their petition charges that “substantial new seating approved on the east side of the stadium would restrict views and thereby substantially alter the use of the unique cultural landscape known as Tightwad Hill.” It says that the hill “is located 100 feet above the stadium and provides panoramic views of the football field” and that “generations of football fans since the mid-1920s” have gathered there to watch Cal Bear games. -more-

The City of Oakland put several of its many moods and faces on full display for the inauguration of its 48th mayor on Monday, with a rowdy City Council reorganization meeting that ended in spirited boos and catcalls from the audience, an onstage, interfaith, hand-holding prayer featuring representatives of many of the city’s widely diverse ethnic and religious communities, and ending with the usual and expected rousing and uplifting speech by the new mayor himself, Ron Dellums. -more-

Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) weighed in on the side of the tree-in protesters at Memorial Stadium Thursday, urging the preservation of a grove threatened by university building plans. -more-

For the Berkeley Unified School District, 2006 was a very good year. -more-

The Berkeley Unified School District was back in session on Monday after winter break. Elementary, middle and Berkeley High School students started classes Monday. -more-

Second Derby Field Community Meeting -more-

The Zoning Adjustments Board returns to session on Thursday to hear requests by Verizon Wireless and Nextel Communications for use permits to construct a new wireless telecommunications facility that will host eighteen cell phone antennas and related equipment atop the UC Storage building at 2721 Shattuck Ave. -more-

A Few Prominent Businesses Abandoned Berkeley in 2006 -more-

Planning Commissioners will vote Wednesday on a last, crucial legal step to transform what was once the site of one of Berkeley’s more notorious brothels into a 15-unit condo complex. -more-

Donning gas masks to protest against emissions from Pacific Steel Casting, risking arrest to save the People’s Park free box, organizing the city’s first ever international food festival and cooking up civic participation through a website were some of the ways in which Berkeleyans took control in 2006. -more-

Pole to head -more-

From just the smell of their breath or the look on their faces, Karl Smith could tell which of his students at Dejean Middle School in West Contra Costa County were doing poorly in school. -more-

Froilan Chan-Liongco didn’t hear the explosion that incinerated his clothes and left him with second and third degree burns on the lower part of his body. As a welder at Romic Environmental Technologies’ hazardous waste recycling facility in East Palo Alto for 16 years, he’d seen his fair share of chemical fires at work, but this one caught him by surprise. -more-

UC ATHLETIC FACILITY -more-

The mayor’s new “Landmarks Preservation Ordinance,” which is more like a Demolition Ordinance, is deeply flawed and should be repealed by the referendum process. -more-

Jimmy Carter’s Palestine Peace Not Apartheid paints a disturbing picture: of a state, Israel, that has consistently violated international law in its pursuit of territorial expansion at the expense of an indigenous population. A life-long friend of the Israeli people and the mediator of Israel’s peace agreement with Egypt, Carter is like a wise elder statesman who performs an intervention and tells an alcoholic in no uncertain terms, “It’s time to end this addiction, for your own benefit as well as for your family and friends.” Only in this case, the addiction is not to alcohol, but to colonization. -more-

Washington, D.C.: On Jan. 4 at 1:44 p.m. (EST), Nancy Pelosi was sworn in as the first female speaker of the House of Representatives. Besides the historic significance, what difference will this make in American politics? A lot, I believe. -more-

It was going to be a long night. I was spending some time during the holidays with my friend Karen and a group of people I barely knew, including two hard-of-hearing 91-year-olds. There was a lot of shouting and repetition at the dinner table. -more-

Picture a winter’s day 30 years ago. Even in lousy weather you couldn’t wait to get outside. Explore the neighborhood, build a fort, climb a tree, head down to the pond for crawdads; you knew the limits of your adventures but they extended beyond your door. On weekends, family outings ventured into the hills or along the coast and lasted an entire day. Hiking, wildlife viewing, building castles in the sand, being outdoors in nature, giving free reign to your imagination. -more-

I went trolling through my photo files, looking for a good shot of a willow for this column. It took forever to find one—and as you can see, it’s not a beauty shot, but a short horrow show, a big tree split by last year’s windstorms. I found lots of other willows, but always lurking in foreground corners of something more spectacular: fall color on a big-leaf maple, or a sway of gray pines across a creekbed. -more-