Eclectic Building Plan Certain to Stir Up Plenty of Free Speech -more-

University of California President and UC Berkeley Physics Professor Robert Dynes announced his resignation Monday as head of the nation’s leading public university system. -more-

Reorganization Hurts Native American Repatriation Efforts, Critics Say -more-

There’s a new kind of campaign at Berkeley City Hall. It aims to tap Berkeley’s best and brightest young minds to solve problems in the city. -more-

Charges and countercharges are flying between workers locked out by the owners of West Berkeley’s Metro Lighting. -more-

Media News Group—the chain has captured a near-monopoly of the East Bay newspaper world—busted its newsroom union Monday. -more-

The Oakland Unified School Board is preparing to discuss and take action on a proposed censure resolution against Board member Chris Dobbins at a special meeting to be held later this month, but the date of the special meeting and the form the resolution will take have not yet been released to the public. -more-

The daughter of former South African President Nelson Mandela will speak this Thursday afternoon at Contra Costa College, keynoting a summit conference calling for a continuation of the street peace legacy of the late Stanley Tookie Williams. Maki Mandela, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology from Amherst College in Massachusetts, is the child of Nelson Mandela and his first wife, Evelyn Ntoko. -more-

Hearing on Blood House Postponed -more-

EDITOR’S NOTE: The death of Chauncey Bailey highlights how deadly the news business can be. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) monitors the killings of journalists all over the world. Since they began tracking these deaths in 1992, CPJ found that on average more than three journalists are killed every month in the line of duty. Seven out of 10 of the murdered journalists were killed in direct retaliation to the stories they have done. Abi Wright is the communications director for the Committee to Protect Journalists. She spoke to Sandip Roy on the New America Media radio show UpFront. -more-

Recently I read a novel in which the heroine “rose” from a hammock to greet a visitor. The author must surely have lacked the hammock experience, that necessary adjunct to the life of the gardener, for one can roll out of a hammock, but I defy anyone to rise from it without putting a foot through the mesh. -more-

I think I’ve discovered an effective way to stave off Alzheimer’s. Tacked on to the tasks of solving New York Times crossword puzzles, learning ballroom dancing, and attending repeated sessions of Conversational Spanish, I’ve begun attending an improvisation class at Berkeley Repertory’s School of Theatre. -more-

A SUGGESTION -more-

In an unusual expression of outrage, a coalition of psychologists will stage a rally outside the annual convention of the American Psychological Association at the Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco, Friday, Aug. 17, at 4 p.m. -more-

When I was editing books for a major, Washington D.C.-based environmental organization, there was always a chapter on public process. The basic process is that participants work together in small groups and then report back to the whole group. It operates on the principle that community members’ coming together to discuss the issues and develop consensus results in good community decisions. -more-

On July 23, Judges Thelton Henderson and Lawrence Karlton called for the formation of a three-judge panel to develop recommendations to address the issue of overcrowding in California state prisons. The formation of the panel is essentially a no confidence vote in AB 900, the band-aid approach put forward by Gov. Schwarzenegger and the California Legislature. The legislation primarily calls for the construction of the 53,000 new jail cells. Judge Karlton has been widely quoted as saying “From all that presently appears, new beds will not alleviate this problem but will aggravate it.” -more-

You’re gone now, it looks like for good. That’s a shame, at least for me personally. Let me explain. -more-

President Bush is promoting the independence of Kosovo from Serbia, but why? Kosovo has been under the administration of the United Nations. The Kosovars, as ethnic Albanians, seek to be an independent country, while the Serbs consider Kosovo to be an important part of their history and territory. Do the Kosovars have a natural right to independence? The answer becomes clear when we realize that countries and nationalities have no natural rights. All natural rights are inherent in individual persons. Each human being has the moral right to be sovereign, to be independent of the mastership of any other person. -more-

Charles Siegel and Steve Geller certainly respond promptly and with great vigor to anyone who suggests that there might be flaws in the massive and expensive Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) proposal put forward by AC Transit. The problem is, these two men usually shed more dust than light on the issues involved. In their separate letters in last Tuesday’s issue of the Daily Planet (August 7), they both ignore two essential facts: First, there has not been any city forum held to debate the issue of the approval of the BRT proposal, nor has there been any decision by our City Council on this matter. Mr. Geller’s and Mr. Siegel’s efforts to assist groups like the Transportation Commission in squelching public debate on this important issue are profoundly undemocratic. They are just as guilty as the Transportation Commission in perpetrating the falsehood that BRT is a “done deal”—a cynical strategy intended to hoodwink the opposition into accepting the program. Second, it is AC Transit’s own study (the Draft Environmental Impact Report) that shows that BRT will not motivate many people at all to shift from driving cars to riding the bus. Therefore, Mr. Siegel and Mr. Geller should be criticizing AC Transit for failing to provide a better alternative to automobile transportation—rather than leveling their contempt and disdain at citizens who are struggling to find transportation choices that work. -more-

All our victories are temporary; all our defeats are permanent,” David Brower is supposed to have said. Case in point: Oakland’s Arrowhead Marsh, the crown jewel of the Martin Luther King Jr. Shoreline Regional Park. Friends of Arrowhead were relieved in 2005 when the Lower Lake Rancheria Koi Nation dropped their plans for a casino complex next door to the marsh. Now the developers are back: this time it’s at least one, maybe two trucking terminals. -more-