Berkeley protesters and their supporters gathered Sunday to celebrate the end of the first year of what they hailed as “America’s longest-running urban tree-sit.” -more-

Are Native Americans buried beneath the oak grove along the western wall of Memorial Stadium? -more-

The City Council continued the discussion on the Aquatic Park dredging to Dec. 18 because of time constraints at last week’s council meeting. -more-

Downtown Area Planning Advisory Committee (DAPAC) members voted 17-4 to adopt their draft of a new downtown plan, but one of the nays came from the head of the Berkeley Planning Commission. -more-

A member of the Berkeley Unified School District’s Merit Commission said the Berkeley school board may not have reappointed him because he took an independent position on budget allocations, one out of step with the board’s wishes. -more-

Claiming its intent is to support future state and county candidates—though it has scarcely done so in the past—Business for Better Government, the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce Political Action Committee, has hired a San Francisco law firm to go to bat for the Chamber PAC’s right to continue filing campaign finance statements with Alameda County rather than the city of Berkeley. -more-

Registered nurses at Alta Bates Summit facilities in Berkeley and Oakland will join colleagues at other Sutter Health facilities for a two-day walkout next week, their union announced. -more-

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will hold hearings on draft environmental impact reports (EIR) on two major buildings in coming weeks. -more-

The Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission will vote on whether to approve a permit to rehabilitate and make alterations to the exterior of the city-landmarked Shattuck Hotel Thursday. -more-

Melinda Jane Morales, 59, of Richmond was struck and killed at 7:25 p.m. Saturday by an Amtrak Capital Corridor train heading south toward San Jose at or near the Gilman Street crossing. -more-

UC Berkeley needs to clean up any remaining radioactivity at a laboratory in the Gill Tract where biologists combined cancer cells with lymphocytes to produce antibodies a decade ago. -more-

As a result of an investigative report by India-West on alleged safety and labor code violations at several Indian American-owned orchards in the Sacramento River valley, the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board plans to launch an outreach and education effort in the Indian American agricultural labor force. -more-

Michael Caplan, acting manager of the Office of Economic Development, was named as manager, and Zach Cowan, assistant city attorney, was named acting city attorney, said Phil Kamlarz in a memo Monday to the mayor and City Council. -more-

State School Superintendent Jack O’Connell came to Oakland on Friday to formally announce that he is turning over two more areas of operation to the Oakland Unified School District. -more-

While international attention is focusing on President Hugo Chavez and the Sunday referendum on the Venezuelan constitution, a conflict that is just as profound is shaking Bolivia. Evo Morales, the first Indian president of the country, is forcing a showdown with the oligarchy and the right wing political parties that have stymied efforts to draft a new constitution to transform the nation. He declares, “Dead or alive I will have a new constitution for the country by December 14,” the mandated date for the specially elected Constituent Assembly to present a constitution for the country to vote on by popular referendum. -more-

Out and about in Berkeley over the weekend, we had a chance to observe numerous examples of the truism that it’s not what you do, it’s who you are that counts. We walked up Ashby to Peet’s on Domingo, one of the oldest locations for Berkeley’s pride and joy, the original leading edge of the gourmet coffee revolution. In the many years we’ve been walking to Peet’s, the shops in the small commercial enclave on that corner have had a lot of turnover. Since we’ve been in the business of selling newspaper advertising, we’ve learned that there are many more people in Berkeley who’d like to run small businesses than there are people who know how to do it. -more-

I like Judith Scherr. She puts in long hours trying to get the story right and it’s not too easy in a town that has become as shady as our Berkeley has become of late. So I will forgive her if she has failed to see what the true purpose behind what is known to us as Options Recovery Services. When I went public a few months ago with my opposition to the mayor and City Council giving Options $200,000 at a time when food and housing to the poor was being cut by precisely the same amount, Judith asked me a good question. “How successful does a program have to be before you would support it?” It was busy and loud in the council chambers that night and I didn’t get to answer her. -more-

It is devastatingly ironic that the world’s poorest countries are, to some degree, subsidizing the healthcare of the wealthiest nations. For years, rich nations encouraged African countries to invest in infrastructure (education, hospitals, medicine); much aid was given to strengthen these very systems. Although it was unintentional, the donations proved to be quite self-serving. As wealthy countries give aid to struggling nations to improve healthcare outcomes with one hand, they siphon off graduates of medical schools with the other. The developed world benefits from the skills and knowledge of newly arrived doctors and nurses while the countries that produced these professionals suffer from staffing shortages. -more-

EDITOR’S NOTE: This commentary was submitted to the San Francisco Chronicle but was not published. -more-

A couple of odds and ends: Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford neurobiologist, published a collection of his provocative essays a few years back as The Trouble with Testosterone. Where do you begin? Sapolsky was mostly interested in the hormone’s effect on the behavior of East African savannah baboons (see his A Primate’s Memoirs for tales of fieldwork) and on humans. But it’s not just a primate thing, or even a mammalian one. Birds have testosterone too, as do reptiles, amphibians, even fish: a common vertebrate heritage. -more-

TUESDAY, DEC. 4 -more-

Christmas in wartime America—but it’s the First World War, and the administration is set to declare a moratorium on toy sales to encourage families to buy Liberty Bonds. -more-

TAJ MAHAL IN OAKLAND -more-