Posted Wed., April 16—A Berkeley woman who admitted murdering her 9-year-old son will spend at least eight years in prison under terms of a plea bargain announced Wednesday. -more-
Posted Wed., April 16—The Berkeley Unified School District rescinded 38 of the 60 potential layoff notices it sent out to teachers and counselors last month in response to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposal to cut $4.8 billion from the state education budget. -more-
While laughter at a funeral might seem incongruous, then so was Jay Walter. Speaker after speaker described a man both outrageously public and exceedingly private. -more-
Results from testing water collected from the Berkeley Aquatic Park last week after a sewage spill showed no contamination, city officials told the Planet Monday. -more-
A week after the newly empowered Oakland School Board announced that they had made their choice for an interim superintendent, controversy over the move continued to simmer. -more-
A week after the newly empowered Oakland School Board announced that they had made their choice for an interim superintendent, controversy over the move continued to simmer. -more-
In the 400 years since the first slavery ships docked on the Virginia coast, the African-American Freedom Movement has raised up a continuing series of larger-than-life leaders—Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X. But arguably the most talented of that group, but perhaps the least appreciated, remembered, or studied, is the man whose 110th birthday anniversary is being celebrated this month—Paul Robeson. -more-
Jupiter Beerhouse and Restaurant’s proposed expansion into adjacent Café Panini would replace the cafe, zoning officials told the Planet Monday. -more-
Berkeley’s City Council Monday spurned a Planning Commission proposal to have a city density bonus law in place in the event Proposition 98 passes in the statewide June 3 election. -more-
Construction begins Wednesday on the new guest house at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. -more-
Berkeley Technology Academy’s (B-Tech) hour-long discussion on youth violence with Barrios Unidos co-founder Daniel “Nane” Alejandrez Friday was the first of many events the school hopes to host for its Latino students, who make up 45 percent of the school’s population. -more-
A prosecutor told jurors today that they should convict Christopher Hollis of murder for firing shots that killed his close friend Meleia Willis-Starbuck, a popular Berkeley High School graduate and Dartmouth College student. -more-
A red Pontiac Firebird collided head on with a Berkeley public school bus carrying five students from John Muir Elementary School at 3:50 p.m. Friday. -more-
Posted Sun., April 13—Preliminary results from testing water collected from the Berkeley Aquatic Park last week after a sewage spill showed no contamination, city officials told the Planet on Friday, but a section of the lagoon remained closed to the public throughout the weekend. -more-
The UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Christopher Edley Jr. came to the defense this week of law professor John Yoo, author of one of the "torture memos” for the Bush administration, and said the controversial professor could not be fired. -more-
Posted Fri., April 11—Tomorrow (Saturday) will be a day unlike the usual Saturday in Berkeley. Throngs will be headed for the UC Berkeley campus, but not for classes or football games. -more-
Posted Fri., April 11—Is the Hayward Fault, which runs diagonally through Berkeley, a “tectonic time bomb in our back yard”? -more-
As pro-Tibet groups and supporters of the Beijing Games engaged in a war of words during the Olympic Torch Relay in San Francisco Wednesday, Tibetans in Berkeley kept their businesses closed to join in a movement very close to their heart. -more-
Judging by comments at a Wednesday night hearing, Ber-keley residents like faster bus service but hate the notion of losing car lanes to bus expressways. -more-
A sewage spill discovered at Bayer Healthcare’s Berkeley campus on Monday prompted the city’s Division of Environmental Health to prohibit human contact with water in a section of Ber-keley’s Aquatic Park. -more-
After five years on the back burner, the Southside Plan is finally coming to a boil—with the Planning Commission set to discuss the document later this month. -more-
By a 5-4 vote, Berkeley planning commissioners voted Tuesday night to endorse the recommendations of the Joint Density Bonus Subcommittee over a more developer-friendly staff report. -more-
Solemn firefighters from Berkeley, Livermore and Pleasanton will march through the streets of Berkeley Saturday morning, honoring one of their own, Jay Walter Randall. -more-
The newly empowered school board of the Oakland Unified School District moved swiftly to exercise authority granted by California State Superintendent of Education Jack O’Connell, voting on Wednesday to hire an interim district superintendent on a one-year basis while the board looks for a permanent superintendent. -more-
An Oakland education and labor attorney has filed a California Superior Court lawsuit against the City of Oakland and its recent decision to spend $7.7 million of Measure Y money on police recruitment, asking that the court immediately halt the collection of Measure Y taxes until the original community policing mandates of the bond measure are met. -more-
Warm-water pool users lobbied the Berkeley Board of Education to save the Berkeley High School Old Gym and warm pool right before the board discussed a report recommending the site’s adaptive reuse at the school board meeting Wednesday. -more-
It wasn’t all fun and games at the Berkeley Federation of Teachers’ community rally against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed $4.8 billion state education budget cuts Wednesday, although there was some clowning around. -more-
SIRs are due May 1. What are SIRs, you might ask? The answer: a Student’s Intent to Register at a college. In the next several weeks, Berkeley High School (BHS) college-bound seniors will be deciding where to spend the next four years of their life. -more-
Tuesday's story on the light brown apple moth should have differentiated the roles of the United States Department of Agriculture and the California Department of Food and Agriculture. The USDA is responsible for the New Zealand testing of a new product to eradicate the moth, USDA named the Technical Working Group on the moth and the April 1 telephone press conference included experts from both the CDFA and the USDA. -more-
Larry Bensky was kind enough to forward to us an article by Dan Eggen, from Sunday’s Washington Post. The headline is “Permissible Assaults Cited in Graphic Detail.” -more-
The recent disclosure of a memo by Boalt Law School faculty member John Yoo has given that school and the University of California itself a long overdue public relations nightmare. “Overdue” because quite enough was known about Yoo’s role in justifying the Bush regime’s claims to the dictatorial powers it has taken that a small group of concerned citizens held a weekly vigil outside his class several years ago. That vigil was almost entirely ignored by faculty and students too hurried or plugged in to their iPods to pause or take a leaflet let alone join. When Fernando Botero’s horrific paintings of torture came to Doe Library, few faculty members on panels organized to discuss them mentioned that the man largely responsible for the atrocities Botero depicted is a campus colleague. But when the New York Times published an editorial (reprinted in the International Herald Tribune on April 5) with the clause “Yoo, who inexplicably teaches law at the University of California,” mud finally stuck to Alma Mater’s teflon robes, and the administration had to act. -more-
The small number of Bus Rapid Transit supporters (one third or less of those who spoke) who showed up at the Planning Commission public hearing on BRT on April 9 spent much of their time urging the commission to endorse a “preferred alternative” route for BRT so AC Transit can move ahead with finalizing the environmental impact report on the project. -more-
No matter how you look at it, Barak Obama’s March 18 speech on race was a Category 5 news event; it did for political reporting what Katrina did for disaster reporting. It lacked the ugly pictures but it generated a comparable multitude of comments buoyed by passion and collectively covering every conceivable aspect, from the super-sublime to the hyper-ridiculous. On the left it was rated breathtaking, historic, momentous, from the center it was deemed provocative, memorable, moving and conservatives tagged it hypocritical, duplicitous, deceptive. Titled “A More Perfect Union,” the speech arrived in the aftermath of a hurricane of publicity about the passionate preachments of a man of God, Obama’s pastor, but the devastation that came later was entirely an act of man, as was Katrina’s. -more-
The one thing that was clear at last night’s joint Planning and Transit Commission workshop was that not much is really known about AC Transit’s Bus Rapid Transit proposal. That may surprise many people after the multitude of public hearings and thousands of pages of material written by AC Transit, BRT supporters and those who support better public transit but are opposed to dedicating public roadways to busses that will come once every 10 minutes. -more-
Opposed to BRT” does not fairly describe my position. We citizens have been offered a bad choice: accept BRT in roughly its present form or oppose BRT. Given these lousy choices, I choose to oppose. -more-
Using its absurd draconian police powers embedded in its Blight Ordinances, the City of Oakland has fined a woman resident of Oakland the amount of $951.00 as a penalty for leaving her garbage can on the street curb for a couple of days. -more-
Ask the average American to name a famous war-tax resister and most folks would probably cite Henry David Thoreau. But how about Joan Baez, Noam Chomsky, Gloria Steinem and Julia Butterfly Hill? -more-
With the Time Magazine, April 7 issue, the BP program at Berkeley now becomes so useless that one can not find words to describe it. On March 29, the chief scientist at the United Kingdom’s Department of Environment, Farms and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), Dr Bob Watson, was cited for his calling on the European Union to drop its whole bioethanol program as being a causer of increased emissions of greenhouse gasses (GHGs) not a reducer of such emissions. And a paper in ‘Nature’ has now stirred up charges that the IPCC report with various supposed control steps for global warming are basically unattainable pipedreams. -more-
The Governor’s proposed budget would have a devastating impact on California’s public education system, already noted for being 47th in the nation for per pupil spending. This budget does not consider the educational needs of our children or the protection that voters put in place with Proposition 98, which the Governor will have to set aside in order to slash education funding. He needs the support of two-thirds of the legislature to set aside Proposition 98. -more-
Who was it who said that anyone who isn’t outraged just hasn’t been paying attention? -more-
When the Battle of Basra opened on March 25, President Bush described it as a “defining mo-ment” for the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Within days, however, the White House was scrambling to distance itself from the shellacking the Iraqi Army took at the hands of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. -more-
Since the division of the Oakland Police Department into three geographical districts late last year—a move that is key to Mayor Ron Dellums’ goal of moving OPD into a community policing model—the mayor has begun quietly going around to meetings of the city’s various Neighborhood Crime Prevention Councils, trying to get a community assessment of how the new police realignment is working. -more-
I’ve been the Mulch Queen, or at least her Majesty’s faithful herald, for years. The sight of our locally predominant clay soil lying naked to the elements upsets me. I know what happens when it gets walked on and rained on—yes, rain does compress soil over time if that soil doesn’t have nearly perfect drainage or spongelike absorption—and dried to dust by the sun. -more-
Here is the end of meaning; here is loss beyond comprehension.” A former queen—only the day before, queen of a great city—finds herself and her entourage of young women captives after their home has been overwhelmed by stealth, burned and demolished. Before they are taken away to a new life as slaves, as chattel in a foreign land, there are confrontations with other women that would seem to define, or refine, the terms of their grievous situation. -more-
Who was it who said that anyone who isn’t outraged just hasn’t been paying attention? -more-
Are you wanting to do more this year to live “green”? Looking for simple yet meaningful ways to be part of the solution? -more-
Arms—in Berkeley? -more-
The Emperor’s New Clothes, a family show by that great musicals team Ahrens & Flaherty (Seussical, Ragtime), will be staged by Active Arts for Young Audiences, opening this weekend at the Julia Morgan Center on College Avenue. -more-
The crowd was streaming through the flaming metal portals of The Crucible’s big industrial complex on Oakland’s 7th Street well before curtain time for the “fire ballet” production of Stravinsky’s Firebird. -more-
The Berkeley Art Center’s current show, “Loom & Lathe: The Art of Kay Sekimachi and Bob Stocksdale,” is full of revelations. -more-
I’ve been the Mulch Queen, or at least her Majesty’s faithful herald, for years. The sight of our locally predominant clay soil lying naked to the elements upsets me. I know what happens when it gets walked on and rained on—yes, rain does compress soil over time if that soil doesn’t have nearly perfect drainage or spongelike absorption—and dried to dust by the sun. -more-
“Don’t let school interrupt your education,” said Mark Twain. He spent most of his youth on steamboats going up and down the Mississippi River, earning a living. He lost his father when he was young and could not complete his school education. Later he went on to write many books, such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. -more-
