The Week

Disabled People’s Civil Rights Day march and rally, San Francisco, Oct. 20, 1979. Photograph by Kenneth Stein.
Disabled People’s Civil Rights Day march and rally, San Francisco, Oct. 20, 1979. Photograph by Kenneth Stein.
 

News

Center for Independent Living Still Strong at 35

By Judith Scherr
Tuesday September 25, 2007

“Independent Living isn’t doing everything by yourself—it’s being in control of how things are done.” -more-


Rent Board Member Free on Bail

By Judith Scherr
Tuesday September 25, 2007

Kavanagh Will Plead Not Guilty -more-


Protesters Call For Prosecution Of Oakland Police Sergeant

By Angela Rowen, Special to the Planet
Tuesday September 25, 2007

Friends and family of Gary W. King rallied outside of Oakland City Hall Monday afternoon to call for the prosecution of the police sergeant who shot and killed the 20-year-old Oakland resident last Thursday. -more-


‘An Inadvertent Revolution’ Women on the World War II Home Front

By Geneviève Duboscq, Special to the Planet
Tuesday September 25, 2007

After her mother’s death in 1999, journalist Emily Yellin came across the wartime diary and hundreds of letters her mother had written home from the Pacific while working with the Red Cross. Within days, Yellin could see that “My mother’s story served as a window through which to see the story of all the women in World War II.” -more-


UC Berkeley Museum Director Steps Down

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday September 25, 2007

Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive Director Kevin Consey will leave his post in January, the museum announced Friday. -more-


Berkeley Police Investigate Two Weekend Homicides

Bay City News
Tuesday September 25, 2007

Berkeley police are investigating two deaths on Saturday as the city’s third and fourth homicide of 2007. -more-


West Berkeley Car Sales Tops Planning Commission Agenda

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday September 25, 2007

Planning commissioners meet Wednesday to hold their second and final vote on the zoning ordinance and plan amendments paving the way for car dealers to set up shop in West Berkeley. -more-


Memorial Stadium Lawsuit Moves Forward Despite Delay Caused by Bomb Threat

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday September 25, 2007

The courtroom battle over UC Berkeley’s stadium-area building plans has shifted from shaky ground to the broader environment—though a bomb threat delayed Friday’s session. -more-


Oakland Officials Say Bayfill That Delayed Wayans Deal Was Long Known by Both Sides

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Tuesday September 25, 2007

Representatives of the Wayans Brothers-Pacifica Capital Urban Development Partnership have said that they did not know, when they signed an exclusive negotiating agreement (ENA) with the City of Oakland to purchase old Oakland Army Base property, that the Port of Oakland was planning a bayfill and container cargo storage in waters directly across from that property. -more-


Community Benefits District Meeting Delayed

By Judith Scherr
Tuesday September 25, 2007

A meeting, billed as a forum to discuss the West Berkeley Community Benefits District (WBCBD), has been delayed, according to Michael Caplan, the city’s acting economic development director. -more-


Zoning Board Considers Use Permit for Tower Records Re-Development Project

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday September 25, 2007

Berkeley Developers Ruegg & Ellsworth will ask the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) Thursday for a use permit to redevelop the former Tower Records building at 2517 Durant Ave. -more-


Flash: Kavanagh Arrested, Charged with Five Felonies

By Judith Scherr
Friday September 21, 2007

Berkeley Rent Board member Chris Kavanagh was arrested Friday morning by Oakland police and is currently (Friday afternoon) in Santa Rita jail, according to his attorney, James Giller. The date of his arraignment has not been set. -more-


Court Battle Begins Over UC Gym Complex

By Richard Brenneman
Friday September 21, 2007

The city of Berkeley, environmental groups and neighbors are seeking to overturn the UC Board of Regents’ approval of documents that would pave the way for a massive construction program and the removal of a grove of oaks along the stadium’s western wall. -more-


Council Slows BRT Decision Process

By Judith Scherr
Friday September 21, 2007

Finding himself without City Council allies in support of a rapid transit system with dedicated bus lanes, Mayor Tom Bates backed down Tuesday night in his request for the pro-Bus Rapid Transit Transporta-tion Commission to lead city efforts in exploring AC Transit’s BRT proposal. -more-


Sproul Rally Attacks Racism In Louisiana Beating Cases

By Angela Rowen, Special to the Planet
Friday September 21, 2007

About 200 people congregated at UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza Thursday to show support for six black teenagers who they say were unfairly charged in the beating of a white student in a small, mostly white town in Louisiana. -more-


Low-Income Housing List Opens for Week

By Judith Scherr
Friday September 21, 2007

The good news is that Berkeley will be housing three new low-income families in the three- and four-bedroom homes it owns. The bad news is that if you were on the waiting list, you have to start the application process from scratch. -more-


Deal for New AC Transit Buses Lacked Federal Approval

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday September 21, 2007

AC Transit officials have not released bottom-line figures on the complicated exchange of 16 North American Bus Institute buses for 16 buses made by Belgium-based Van Hool company because as late as Aug. 28 the district was still in negotiations over how much it owes the federal government for going through with the deal without federal approval. -more-


UC: People’s Park Plan Lacks Student Input

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday September 21, 2007

At a People’s Park Community Advisory Board meeting held last week, community members listened to San Francisco-based MK Think, the firm hired by UC Berkeley to plan improvements for the park, and Emily Marthinsen, assistant vice chancellor, talk about conceptual designs for the park. -more-


Worthington to Announce Candidacy for State Assembly

By Judith Scherr
Friday September 21, 2007

Much of Councilmember Kriss Worthington’s time is spent working on issues such as low-income housing, diversity and labor. But, he told the Daily Planet on Thursday, his efforts are often blocked by the inadequacy of state laws. -more-


BUSD Sets Dates for Superintendent Search Process

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday September 21, 2007

The first step for the selection of Berkeley’s next school superintendent will begin with a community meeting Monday. -more-


Opinion

Editorials

Editorial: MoveOn Not as Clever as They Thought

By Becky O’Malley
Tuesday September 25, 2007

There’s been a completely unnecessary uproar over MoveOn’s ad about General Petraeus. It almost makes one wonder if there isn’t some Cointelpro-like infiltration going on in the anti-war movement, except that I know that people like us can always manage to shoot ourselves in the foot with no help from anyone. What’s unnecessary about it? -more-


Public Comment

Letters to the Editor

Tuesday September 25, 2007

CORRECTION -more-


Commentary: Guardian Sounds Alarm on ‘Housing Psychosis’

By Zelda Bronstein
Tuesday September 25, 2007

I stopped reading the Bay Guardian after the paper endorsed Tom Bates in Berkeley’s 2006 mayoral election. I’d thought the Guardian stood for neighborhood integrity, affordable housing and democratic governance. Also, for in-depth, pre-endorsement research of political candidates. But its editors embraced Bates—the big developers’ back-room buddy—without bothering to send me so much as an e-mail about my own candidacy. That experience made me wonder how much I should trust the Guardian, especially when it ventures outside San Francisco. -more-


Commentary: Global Warming And Berkeley

By Edna Spector
Tuesday September 25, 2007

Friends! The hour of judgment is at hand for our planet. Doom is knocking on our door in the form of catastrophic climate change. Global warming not only threatens our so-called way of life, it threatens the very existence of the planet itself! Here in Berkeley, we must do more than our fair share to offset this crisis. Why more than our fair share? Quite simply because other communities cannot be relied on to do even their meager fair share in cutting back on carbon emissions. We must make up for what others fail to do on a global scale through our own heroic self-sacrifice. We cannot afford to wait until 2050 to meet our modest carbon emission reduction goals. Many of us who passed this measure will not even be alive then to implement it. By 2050 it will have been too late for this planet I fear, possibly far too late for all of the extinct species whose blood will be on our hands. This is no time for buying absolution through carbon credits or for half-assed symbolic measures which mostly have a feel good significance. -more-


Commentary: Searching for a Cure for Spinal Injuries

By John Smith
Tuesday September 25, 2007

The recent spinal cord injury to Kevin Everett, a special teams player for the Buffalo Bills of the National Football League, highlights the frustrations felt by thousands of families across the United States. Everett’s prognosis continues to improve due to extraordinary emergency care delivered immediately after his accident. And, though he does not know it yet, his fan base grew considerably at the moment he was stilled upon colliding with his opponent. Large portions of the spinal injured community now follow his recovery. Their discontent stems from the reminders of neglect shown to the legacy of another high profile injured individual. -more-


Commentary: Anger and Football Hysteria, Part 2

By Doug Buckwald
Tuesday September 25, 2007

It was with some sadness that I read the recent contributions of Jeff Ogar and Matthew Shoemaker in the letters to the editor section of the Daily Planet. They both provided true-life examples that serve to underscore the concerns I expressed in my Sept. 14 commentary, “Anger and Football Hysteria.” Each man seems to be convinced of two things: First, that I am a bad person, not just someone with views different from their own; and second, that I simply could not love trees and also support the Cal Bears football team. -more-


Letters to the Editor

Friday September 21, 2007

GHANDI’S BIRTHDAY -more-


Columns

Green Neighbors: How Are Things in Guacamole?

By Ron Sullivan
Tuesday September 25, 2007

You old hippies, you probably remember sticking an avocado pit on some arrangement of toothpicks over a jar of water to make it sprout. The tree, if it survived to that stage, made a decent houseplant when it wasn’t turning sickly yellow and dropping leaves and getting all etiolated like a wispy fishing rod because it was stuck in a dark corner and watered too seldom and/or too often by turns and potted in a bucket of backyard clay in the first place and the only fertilizer it ever got was when the cat peed in the pot. -more-


Undercurrents: Director of Public Safety Should Seek Cause of Violence

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday September 21, 2007

One of the things I like least about our New Age Of Information Overload is that it seems to have birthed a sort of mix and mismatch trend in journalism in which a reporter—or columnist—does an online Google search of a subject of which they appear to know little, comes across two disparate bits of information that have some tenuous connection, slaps them together, and thereafter loudly announces that they have uncovered a “trend.” As a six-degrees-of-separation parlor game, this can function as an amusing distraction. As a way to conduct our community dialogue on social issues, it can be damaging, leading us into the realm of silliness, when it is seriousness that is called for. -more-


East Bay: Then and Now – Orchids and Industry Thrived Side-by-Side in Berkeley

By Daniella Thompson
Friday September 21, 2007

At the turn of the last century, wharves, lumber mills, farms, breweries, tanneries, and Victorian residences dotted West Berkeley. The largest employer south of University Avenue was the Standard Soap Company, which had occupied half a block between the bay shore and Third Street north of Allston Way since 1876. -more-


Garden Variety: The Orchid, the Legend, The Avowed Homosapiens

By Ron Sullivan
Friday September 21, 2007

This past Sunday I got a bargain, a cymbidium orchid in a gallon pot for five dollars. Nice healthy-looking thing, too. If I’d been willing to stagger around the crowded Sycamore Congregational Church bazaar conking innocent children on the head with a bigger pot, I could’ve had even more bargains. -more-


About the House: The Fight Between Old Houses and New Houses

By Matt Cantor
Friday September 21, 2007

If you stop and think about it, the notion that old houses are better is just as silly as the notion that new houses are better. The truth is that both things are true. Older houses are better in some way and newer houses are better in others. Construction is fraught with misconceptions. Another one is that the framing or “bones” of old houses is better than that of newer ones. -more-


Quake Tip of the Week

By LARRY GUILLOT
Friday September 21, 2007

Is Your Child’s School Prepared? -more-


Bungalow Details Revealed

By Steven Finacom, Special to the Planet
Friday September 21, 2007

Jane Powell is a bungalow and old house zealot. Every community should be lucky to have even one person like her. -more-


Arts & Events

Arts Calendar

Tuesday September 25, 2007

TUESDAY, SEPT. 25 -more-


The Theater: Shotgun Presents Davis’ ‘Bulrusher’

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Tuesday September 25, 2007

The title character of Berkeley native Eisa Davis’ Pulitzer Prize-nominated play Bulrusher, as produced by the Shotgun Players at the Ashby Stage, says, “I guess I can tell everybody else’s future because I don’t know my own past ... didn’t die like I was supposed to, so I’ve got a one-way ticket to the Land of Could Be.” -more-


Books: Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Read from New Work at Moe’s Books on Tuesday

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Tuesday September 25, 2007

“If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filling dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.” -more-


A Trans-Genre Mythology

Tuesday September 25, 2007

Moe’s Books will host an event tonight (Tuesday) at 7:30 p.m. to celebrate the publication of Viz Interarts: Event, A Trans-Genre Anthology with readings by Laura Moriarty, who teaches at Mills College and helps direct Small Press Distribution; haiku poet and teacher Gary Gach; writer, editor and publisher Mary Burger and spoken word artist and Sister Spit promoter Michelle Tea. The anthology’s 250 large-format illustrated pages contain writers and artists such as Dadaist Tristan Tzara, the late Objectivist poet Carl Rakosi (whose poem is collaged by Anne Waldman), George Hitchcock of Kayak, well-known Beat and New York School poets, Situationists and Fluxus artists, Language poets and well-known Bay Area poets and writers of the present, like Michael Palmer, Norma Cole and Joanne Kyger. -more-


Green Neighbors: How Are Things in Guacamole?

By Ron Sullivan
Tuesday September 25, 2007

You old hippies, you probably remember sticking an avocado pit on some arrangement of toothpicks over a jar of water to make it sprout. The tree, if it survived to that stage, made a decent houseplant when it wasn’t turning sickly yellow and dropping leaves and getting all etiolated like a wispy fishing rod because it was stuck in a dark corner and watered too seldom and/or too often by turns and potted in a bucket of backyard clay in the first place and the only fertilizer it ever got was when the cat peed in the pot. -more-


Berkeley This Week

Tuesday September 25, 2007

TUESDAY, SEPT. 25 -more-


Arts Calendar

Friday September 21, 2007

FRIDAY, SEPT. 21 -more-


Pulitzer Finalist Eisa Davis Returns Home

By KEN BULLOCK, Special to the Planet
Friday September 21, 2007

I was on a break at the Public Theatre in New York,” said Eisa Davis, playwright, actor and South Berkeley native, “during the second week of rehearsing Passing Strange, when I got a voice message from the actress who played the lead in Bulrusher, and she was crying. ‘Have you heard the news?’ I jumped up and screamed!” -more-


East Bay: Then and Now – Orchids and Industry Thrived Side-by-Side in Berkeley

By Daniella Thompson
Friday September 21, 2007

At the turn of the last century, wharves, lumber mills, farms, breweries, tanneries, and Victorian residences dotted West Berkeley. The largest employer south of University Avenue was the Standard Soap Company, which had occupied half a block between the bay shore and Third Street north of Allston Way since 1876. -more-


Garden Variety: The Orchid, the Legend, The Avowed Homosapiens

By Ron Sullivan
Friday September 21, 2007

This past Sunday I got a bargain, a cymbidium orchid in a gallon pot for five dollars. Nice healthy-looking thing, too. If I’d been willing to stagger around the crowded Sycamore Congregational Church bazaar conking innocent children on the head with a bigger pot, I could’ve had even more bargains. -more-


About the House: The Fight Between Old Houses and New Houses

By Matt Cantor
Friday September 21, 2007

If you stop and think about it, the notion that old houses are better is just as silly as the notion that new houses are better. The truth is that both things are true. Older houses are better in some way and newer houses are better in others. Construction is fraught with misconceptions. Another one is that the framing or “bones” of old houses is better than that of newer ones. -more-


Quake Tip of the Week

By LARRY GUILLOT
Friday September 21, 2007

Is Your Child’s School Prepared? -more-


Bungalow Details Revealed

By Steven Finacom, Special to the Planet
Friday September 21, 2007

Jane Powell is a bungalow and old house zealot. Every community should be lucky to have even one person like her. -more-


Berkeley This Week

Friday September 21, 2007

FRIDAY, SEPT. 21 -more-


CALL FOR ESSAYS

Friday September 21, 2007

As part of an ongoing effort to print stories by East Bay residents, The Daily Planet invites readers to write about their experiences and perspectives on living in, working in or enjoying various neighborhoods in our area. We are looking for essays about the Oakland neighborhoods around Lake Merritt and Piedmont Avenue, Fourth Street in Berkeley, and the city of Alameda. Please e-mail your essays, no more than 800 words, to firstperson@berkeleydailyplanet.com. We will publish the best essays in upcoming issues in October. The sooner we receive your submission the better chance we have of publishing it. -more-