I'm not sorry to say Mike and I won't be in town on June 25 to attend the next discussion of what might constitute significant community benefits for buildings which benefit from up-zoning. We've been following the discussion to a certain extent online, and it's apparent that what we have is a rush to judgment in a city that's already being judged harshly around the world for the tragic consequences of previous hasty construction and inadequate oversight. The Irish and British papers we've been seeing have expressed their shock and horror that something like this could happen in a supposedly progressive city in a developed first world country. Until we have a clear analysis of what went wrong we can't figure out how to avoid something similar in the future. It's apparent that all is not right in Berkeley's construction industry--now we need to figure out what the problems are and how to solve them. Expediting the addition of even bigger buildings to a city already not coping adequately with those now in use is a recipe for disaster. The mayor should cancel the hastily scheduled special council meeting on June 25 and schedule instead a different special meeting at a time and in a place that all interested citizens can attend, with an announced agenda of inquiring into the Library Gardens tragedy and how we can avoid a repetition. -more-

It's time to write a letter to the Berkeley CIty Council suggesting that the agendas for the flurry of meetings now scheduled for this week, especially the special City Council meeting on Thursday, June 25, must be amended to reflect on the consequences of the Library Gardens disaster. The original intent of the Thursday council meeting was to speed up approval of "The Residences at Berkeley Plaza", 2211 Harold. It's been tragically proven that Berkeley has not adequately managed the rush of construction we've experienced in the last few years, and now it's time to pause and reflect before adding to our problems. In particular, do our city inspectors and our first responders know how to deal with such tall buildings? Those who don't understand history are doomed to repeat it. Write to council@cityofberkeley.info and ask them to postpone further approvals until we know what happened at Library Gardens, and even more important, why. -more-

How did Library Gardens, where a collapsing balcony killed six Irish students today, get approved and built in Berkeley? For the full history, click here. -more-

Developers can be required to include affordable housing ...

For the next couple of weeks we’ll be on vacation. What that means is irregular Internet access, so there will not be a “new issue” date for the Planet. If and when new articles come in, I’ll try to add them to the current issue when I can, but no promises.

While I’m gone I urge Berkeleyans to keep a close watch on city government via the city website, including videos of the City Council and the Zoning Adjustment Board. There will probably also be some coverage on dailycal.org and berkeleyside.com.

The Bates/Capitelli crowd will be making its usual depressing attempt to sneak bad plans past an unwary electorate before the long summer vacation. In particular, at 5 p.m. on June 25 the council overlords plan to ram through a cheapo version of what’s laughably called significant community benefits, just in time for the Zoning Adjustment Board later in the evening to approve the environmental impact report for 2211 Harold Way. That is a destructive and ugly project that will do absolutely nothing good for the people of Berkeley, and will close the beloved Landmark Shattuck cinemas for a minimum of three years and perhaps permanently. Don't let them get away with it. -more-

In January, it was widely reported that California had become the world’s seventh largest economy. Among the top ten economies the Golden State (with an estimated 2013 GDP of $2.20 trillion) surpassed Brazil, Italy, and Russia and trailed only the U.S., China, Japan, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. Many factors contribute to California’s preeminence; one being its liberalism. -more-

As a Berkeley liberal, I’m convinced that whomever the Democrats nominate as their 2016 presidential candidate will soundly defeat the GOP nominee. Nonetheless, I’d like to see a sensible Republican candidate, one that agrees with me (and most voters) on the important national issues. Unfortunately, we’ve yet to see signs of intelligence in this set of GOP candidates. -more-

Struggles with employment are nearly universal among persons with a diagnosis of severe mental illness. Employment is the gold standard of self-worth for many persons with a psychiatric condition. Some of us are able to maintain employment, sometimes at a professional level, while some of us are unable to work. Symptoms of mental illness and medication side effects are both obstacles to working competitively.

For those of us unable to hold employment, we are left with the question of what we are to do with our time. Most people have a desire for meaning in their lives. However, some people just want to get the maximum amount of jollies, while still others just want to get through to the end with the least possible amount of discomfort. -more-

Among the many things behind the storm that staggered Turkey’s ruling party in last week’s elections, a disastrous foreign policy looms large. But a major factor behind the fall of the previously invincible Justice and Development Party (AKP) of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was a grassroots revolt against rising poverty, growing inequality and the AKP’s war on trade unions.

On the eve of the election, the government’s Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK) found that 22.4 percent of Turkish households fell below the official poverty line of $1,626 a month for a family of four. The country’s largest trade union organization, TURK-IS, which uses a different formula for calculating poverty levels based on incomes below the minimum monthly wage—$118—argues that nearly 50 percent of the population is at, or near, the poverty line.

Figures show that while national income has, indeed, risen over the past decade, much of it has gone to the wealthy and well connected. When the AKP came to power in 2002, the top 1 percent accounted for 39 percent of the nation’s wealth. Today that figure is 54 percent. In the meantime, credit card debt has increased 25 fold, from 222 million liras in 2002 to 5.8 billion liras today -more-

A quiet meeting this past March in Saudi Arabia, and a recent anonymous leak from the Israeli military, set the stage for what may be a new and wider war in the Middle East. -more-

This Senior Power column concerns an innovative aging in place project being undertaken jointly by several local agencies -- the Area Agency on Aging (AAA), Alameda County Public Health, City Slicker Farms and Satellite Affordable Housing (SAHA.) Low-income senior citizen residents in 5 Berkeley and Oakland housing projects have the opportunity to participate in community gardening and nutrition workshops. I focus on one -- Berkeley’s Lawrence Moore Manor, with its group and individual roof gardening and nutrition workshops enabled by a Public Health Department grant. -more-

A severe psychiatric illness can bring crises, and in some instances, we may need someone's help. Whether we are dealing with an impending relapse of symptoms, or if we have some other problem that we can't solve entirely on our own, refusing help if it is offered could be a mistake. In some instances, communicating to those who might help us is a brave and prudent action. -more-

Kicking off the San Francisco Symphony’s three-week Beethoven festival, Michael Tilson Thomas conducted Beethoven’s monumental Missa solemnis on Wednesday, June 10 at Davies Hall. Of the semi-staged production that he master-mined , MTT explains, “The mission of this performance is to create more space around the music allowing us to better understand the streams of Beethoven’s thought. By strategically placing specific vocal groups, using lighting to suggest underlying moods, and video to create environments and to suggest the design of the piece, we hope to reveal these many musical streams and the incredible impact of this work.”

Let’s just say that as a choreographer, MTT leaves a lot to be desired. His multi-media approach to Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, replete with starburst videos (by Finn Ross), intrusive lighting effects (by David Finn), and near constant parading of soloists to and from all corners of the stage (at the misguided direction of James Darrah), ended up being highly distracting. When the work was over, one listener, who happened to go to school with MTT at USC, dismissed this entire Hollywood extravaganza as “atrocious.” Where the visuals are concerned, I quite agree that it was atrocious. Musically, however, any decent performance of the Missa solemnis – and, musically, at least, this was a decent performance – cannot help but make a huge, if somewhat impenetrable, impact.

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Opens June 19 at the Landmark Shattuck

Based on the best-selling 1933 autobiography of the real-life Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth tells the story of a remarkable young woman who broke barriers at Oxford, lost her brother, his closest friend and her own lover in the bloodbath of WWI, wound up working as a nurse in the battlefields of France and survived the war to become one of her country's most outspoken pacifists.

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Dramatizing the story of the Fall of Troy and the subsequent voyage of Aeneas and his Trojan refugees to Carthage, then to Italy, Hector Berlioz’s epic opera Les Troyens is rarely given in the form Berlioz conceived it. The composer himself was fated never to hear the complete version of Les Troyens, for at its première at Paris’s Théâtre-Lyrique in 1863, only the second part, known as Les Troyens à Carthage, was performed. Berlioz died six years later. Now San Francisco Opera has mounted, for the first time in this company’s existence, the full five-hour plus version of Les Troyens. -more-