A student at Emerson Elementary School in Berkeley is dead, his mother has been hospitalized, and police are questioning her as the suspect in the boy’s death. -more-

Native Americans and their supporters rallied on the UC Berkeley campus Friday, demanding that the university return the remains of Indian ancestors so that they can be buried according to custom. -more-

The question of public comment at council meetings is back before the council today (Tuesday), with Mayor Tom Bates adding greater opportunity for public comment than in earlier iterations of his plan, but not enough to satisfy SuperBOLD (Berkeleyans Organized for Library Defense), the organization that had threatened to sue the city for skirting the state’s open meeting laws with inadequate opportunities for the public to speak at public meetings. -more-

Anti-tobacco advocate Stan Glantz spoke about tobacco money and tainted research at the University of California at last Tuesday’s Talkin’ Tobacco De-Cal class at UC Berkeley. -more-

While the reaction to AC Transit’s ambitious Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) proposal has not stirred up the sort of public controversy in Oakland and San Leandro that it has in Berkeley, interviews with city officials show that the transit district may have a way to go before the development of a BRT plan will win approval in those cities as well. -more-

Unable to defeat Tom Bates in a challenge at the polls last year, Berkeley tree-sitter Zachary Running Wolf launched a second campaign Monday, this one aimed at a recall election to unseat the mayor. -more-

At a concert on Sunday night we encountered a friend in the seat behind us who has been active on multiple city commissions for many years. I asked him if I’d missed anything, since I’d been in Pasadena over the weekend. He said he didn’t know, because he’d been out of town too. I asked if it was a vacation. “It was outside of Berkeley,” he said. “That’s all it takes to make it a vacation.” But at intermission time I spotted him chatting with another commissioner, and threatened jokingly to bust them for a violation of the Brown Act, California’s open meeting law. -more-