News

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory [LBNL] plans a massive new second campus — including 2 million square feet of buildings up to 3,000 feet long —and they’re looking for a place to put it.

The main LBNL campus, the first of UC Berkeley’s Department of Energy [DOE] laboratories, will remain at its current site in the Berkeley Hills above Strawberry Canyon, while the new campus will consolidate existing labs scattered around the East Bay into a single new site.

Lab officials will pick the final site in June, with construction of the first phase currently set to begin in July 2013, with scientists taken possession of the new facilities in December 2015. -more-

Nearly 1000 UC faculty and staff have signed a petition to UC President Mark Yudof condemning the demands of the 36 UC executives threatening to sue UC over the pension cap on salaries above $245K. The number of signatories is remarkable given that the petition has been circulating for less than two days and campuses are only slowly reopening after winter break. Approximately 80% of the signatories are faculty. -more-

On Thursday, December 30, 2010 at approximately 1:15 a.m. two male victims and a few friends, affiliation unknown, were walking on Telegraph from Larry Blakes. At the intersection of Durant and Telegraph one of the victims was approached by an unknown male who stabbed him in the head. One of victim’s male companions intervened and was stabbed in the lower back by the suspect. The suspect and two companions fled the scene on foot. BPD responded to the scene and searched the area for the suspect and his companions but were unable to locate them. BFD treated the victims at the scene for non-life threatening injuries and transported them to a local trauma center. -more-

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan walked through the city on her inauguration day. She is the first Chinese American woman elected mayor. She started at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center in Chinatown. She then stopped at the Asian Resource Gallery, which featured an exhibit of posters curated by Greg Morizumi, from the Third World Strike at the University of California and political movements in the Asian American community since the 1960s. Mayor Quan designed one of the posters in the exhibit, protesting the beating death of Vincent Chin. -more-

Twas the night before New Year's Eve and the Caffe Mediterraneum on Telegraph Avenue was peacefully licking its wounds after a recent spate of violence and a boycott. -more-

Jean Benson Wilkinson, a longtime defender of civil liberties and beloved teacher, passed away at the age of 96 in Berkeley, California, on December 28 surrounded by her loving family. Jean was a California native with deep Bay Area roots whose life embodied almost a century of the state's history. She was a pioneering teacher who believed in allowing high school students to grapple with controversial issues and a civil liberties advocate who, with her husband, stood up for their belief in the constitutional protection of free speech in the face of the McCarthy-era HUAC and the State Committee on Un-American Activities–and paid a high cost. Jean was an active member of the teachers union, an advocate for academic freedom, women's history and multi-cultural education. -more-