A day after Berkeley High School students mourned the sudden death of Vice Principal Denise Brown, over 800 Berkeley High sophomores filed into the gymnasium to take the California High School Exit Exam Tuesday. -more-

Is the referendum fast becoming the weapon of choice for Berkeley voters to challenge City Council decisions? -more-

When residents and merchants of North Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto walked into the North Shattuck Plaza workshop on Wednesday evening, the walls were sans plans, sans easels. -more-

While Councilmember Gordon Wozniak thinks it would be a stellar idea to develop the old Wright’s Garage at 2929-23 Ashby Ave. as a restaurant and shops, some criticize the District 8 councilmember, saying he should keep an open mind on land-use questions that may come before him. -more-

Despite heated opposition from representatives of both bus drivers and the bus riding community, the Board of Directors of Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District voted unanimously last week to go forward with a contract that would put 50 new revised models of the controversial Van Hool 40-foot buses on East Bay streets. -more-

One of my favorite cartoons of all time—I think it was in the New Yorker—shows a stream of little men in stovepipe hats and knee britches hurtling off a cliff. An observer off to one side says to another, “Flemings…” The message? (Do cartoons have messages?) Even Flemings, the sober inhabitants of Flanders, what is now the northern part of Belgium, pictured in britches in late Gothic and early Renaissance paintings, could be gripped by the kind of mass hysteria that sometimes causes little animals (lemmings) to jump off cliffs during frantic migrations. Never mind the natural historians who say that lemmings have gotten a bad rap in this story, that they’re not committing suicide but just fall by accident—the image is compelling, and it certainly applies to human behavior all too often. -more-