The Berkeley Board of Educa-tion unanimously approved revisions to the school district’s 2008-09 budget Wednesday, March 18, to offset this year’s $3.1 million shortfall. -more-

The director of finance of the City of Berkeley says the Office Depot company has overcharged the city by as much as a quarter of a million dollars during the course of a three-year, $550,000-a-year contract to provide miscellaneous office supplies and recycled copy paper to the city. -more-

Berkeley Unified School District earned another legal victory Tuesday, March 17, for its student placement plan. -more-

Just as his father promised, Zachary Michael Cruz’s memorial was more a party than a funeral. -more-

Coming soon to a theater near you: Kobe beef sliders, salads and chicken wings, and if you’re 21 or older, cocktails—all of which can be enjoyed while watching your favorite movie from a comfy red loveseat or a leather rocker. -more-

A one-time Memorial Stadium tree-sitter remained in critical condition in an Israeli hospital, Wednesday, March 18, injured in a clash between Israeli troops and Palestinian protesters in the West Bank. -more-

Albany’s Golden Gate Fields goes on the auction block April 3 as part of a court-mandated sale of properties owned by ailing Magna Entertainment. -more-

Drug and alcohol use among Berkeley public school students is twice the national average, according to a survey cited by Berkeley Unified School District officials at a recent Berkeley Board of Education meeting. -more-

Pink balloons, pink bow-ties, pink arm bands and even pink toilet seats marked a rally organized by the Berkeley Federation of Teachers Friday, March 13. -more-

AC Transit District, battered by the economic downturn, raised its regular bus fares by 25 cents and youth, senior and disabled fares by 15 cents last Wednesday night. The new fares go into effect July 1, when regular fares will rise from $1.75 to $2, and youth, senior and disabled fares from 85 cent to $1. -more-

Berkeley City Manager Phil Kamlarz announced Tuesday, March 17, that Berkeley Police Department Chief Douglas Hambleton will retire from his position this summer. -more-

Berkeley Liberation Radio’s never-ending war with the Federal Communications Commission is heating up again. -more-

San Francisco Chronicle workers voted Friday to cut their benefits and extend their working hours so that fewer of their colleagues would lose their jobs. -more-

Berkeley planning commissioners are nearing the end of their rewrite of the Downtown Area Plan (DAP), meeting even as this paper goes to press. -more-

Bay Trail advocates have sued the State Lands Commission (SLC) and Chevron U.S.A., challenging the agency’s decision to renew the lease for Richmond’s Long Wharf Terminal. -more-

Firefighters saved seven members of a West Berkeley family from a Friday the 13th early morning encounter with a silent, deadly killer—carbon monoxide. -more-

Berkeley police officers responded with guns drawn to a late-night incident at the downtown Berkeley BART station Wednesday, March 11, cordoning off sections of the station for approximately 30 minutes. -more-

Berkeley police have arrested three suspects in connection with a brutal home invasion robbery two weeks ago but five suspects remain at large. -more-

Second home invasion -more-

Rug burn -more-

In light of recent threats by a Mr. Jim Sinkinson to Daily Planet advertisers, we feel we should clarify the policies of the paper, its overall mission, and the nature of this campaign of intimidation. -more-

Thank you Mary Lou Van Deventer for the time you took to research and write your March 12 commentary. I too am an advertiser with the Daily Planet and received the letter from Jim Sinkinson asking me to drop my ads with the Planet, and if I didn’t that I and my business would be seen as a supporter of what Sinkinson claims are anti-Semitic views published in the paper. Of course, the reason I take out ads is to establish good rapport with the community and to encourage people to come to Expressions Gallery and support its artists and events. I do not want to be in a paper that is viewed as one-sided or biased or losing supporters. I don’t want to be involved in someone else’s problems. There was a form attached to withdraw from advertising for me to fill out. I paused … should I fill this out and send it in? -more-

Jim Sinkinson, who sent out the misleading packet to Daily Planet advertisers accusing the paper of anti-Semitism and suggesting that they close their accounts, is, among other things, the director of F.L.A.M.E. (“Facts and Logic about the Middle East”), an organization with an address in San Francisco. Perhaps you’ve seen F.L.A.M.E.’s monthly letters in The Nation or in other publications, but whether you have or haven’t, you should check out their website to get a take on where they’re coming from. These folks, however many of them there are (two? three?), are extreme right-wing Zionist ideologues, the pro-Israel version of all those many online crazies who can fill your surfing hours with horror and amusement. -more-

In high school, there was a kid who would call me “Jack the Jew.” I asked the fellow student how he knew I was Jewish, and he told me he could tell by my looks. -more-

So there have been people outside Berkeley Bowl urging people to boycott Israeli products. OK. I understand that you are ticked off at Israel and in love with the Palestinians. That’s fine with me, as long as you have truly weighed all the facts. -more-

Recently Raúl Casto reshuffled Cuba’s government, replacing or moving 12 cabinet members a year after assuming the presidency from his brother Fidel. Supposedly, Fidel approved the reshuffle. It would seem that Raúl is now the undisputed Cuban leader, although the shadow of Fidel will linger over Cuba long after his demise. Who will succeed the 77-year old Raúl? And will the U.S. keep its hands off? -more-

We seldom think of oxygen unless it’s absent. You’d think about it a lot if it suddenly exited this room; you’d start gasping and writhing, your eardrums would burst, you and your neighbors would do a lot of bleeding on each other, then you’d die. But if we gradually replaced oxygen with nitrous oxide mixed with just a soupcan of cyanide gas, you might not notice that anything was missing at all; you might feel very content as your brain and body gradually turned off and you lapsed into a sleep without end. -more-

The Feb. 25 commentary by Allen Sanford, “Mr. Potter and the Postal Service,” lacks any logical cohesion. He faults the very company he dedicated so many years working for by purporting it has a “monopoly” that through his faithful work he helped support. -more-

It’s understandable that Californians breathed a sigh of relief on Feb. 19, when the state Legislature ended months of political gridlock and agreed upon a $144.5 million budget. Given America’s hard times, it’s likely that many Golden State residents turned their attention to pressing financial concerns such as holding onto their job or paying their mortgage. Nonetheless, Californians’ behavior is problematic because the issues that precipitated the fiscal battle have not been resolved and another serious problem has emerged: the possibility of an immutable spending cap. -more-

For some time now, I’ve been commenting on the methods used by my good friend, Chris Thompson, in writing items for the Seven Days column and the 92510 blog of the East Bay Express. In case you missed it, I pointed out how Mr. Thompson didn’t actually attend the events or meetings he wrote about in these blogs and columns, but would simply take accounts of these events from other stories posted online, and then write them up as items adding his own interpretive spin. It’s a spectacularly bad form of “journalism,” if it even qualifies to be considered as journalism, even more so when Mr. Thompson made outright errors in fact, as he once in a while did. -more-

Corinne Greenberg has kept an eye on the Berkeley Meadow—the unit of the Eastshore State Park just east of the Marina and north of University Avenue—for a while now, paying particular attention to the northern harriers that have nested in the meadow’s northwest corner since at least 1994. No one knows for sure whether it’s been the same pair of hawks all along, or whether the territory has changed hands. -more-

THURSDAY, MARCH 19 -more-

Word For Word, the San Francisco theater company that stages verbatim versions of classic and contemporary fiction, is producing More Stories By Tobias Wolff at the Julia Morgan Center through Sunday afternoon. Directed by Joel Mullennix and featuring three tales from Our Story Begins (2008), Wolff’s most recent collection, More Stories has just completed an extended San Francisco run and regional tour. It follows Word For Word’s successful 2002 production, Stories By Tobias Wolff. -more-

The John Adams Young Composers Program will present its second annual Faculty Concert, Music of Youth, with premieres of New Music About Youth and Being Young, by Alexis Alrich, Molly Axtmann, Dean Curtis, Clark Suprynowicz and Katrina Wreede, played by ChamberMix (flute, clarinet, cello and piano quartet), this Saturday night at the Crowden Music Center in Berkeley. -more-

Considering that the Berkeley Art Museum is only about 40 years old, it has a remarkable collection spanning the centuries and continents. For too long a time it was largely invisible, but now much has come to light in an exhibition aptly entitled “Galaxy.” As the museum’s founding director I was delighted to re-visit old friends and greet new arrivals. -more-

Joe Fischer took his bachelor’s in American Colonial History in the early 1950s, and was leaning toward Middle Eastern Studies for his master’s. Then a combination of circumstances nudged him toward Indonesian studies. Once he had seen Bali, he was hooked. From 1956 until 2004, he made frequent visits to Bali, studying Balinese history and mythology and collecting Balinese textiles, embroideries, and paintings. He has written six books, including Folk Art of Java and Folk Art of Bali (both from Oxford University Press) and, most recently, Story Cloths of Bali (Ten Speed Press, 2006). -more-

Oakland East Bay Symphony, conducted by musical director Michael Morgan, will perform a Passionate Celebration in concert Friday night, March 20, at Oakland’s Paramount Theater, featuring Act 1 of Verdi’s opera, Otello, with tenor Richard Crawley and soprano Talise Trevigne as The Moor and Desdemona, and the Oakland Symphony Chorus, directed by Lynne Morrow. -more-

The Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, led by violinist Elizabeth Blumenstock, will present Winds and Waves, featuring the “lavish wind scorings of Baroque masters” (including Bach, Telemann, Vivaldi and Rameau) that “evoke the complexities and contradictions of the natural world,” this weekend at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley. -more-

It’s hard to believe now, but there used to be a time when Berkeley’s Southside was a fashionable place to live, dotted with the residences of professors and society people. -more-

I’m not a fan of the building codes but I have to admit that they do a lot for us. That may come as a surprise to those of you who know me as a building inspector. “Aren’t the codes what that’s all about?” you may ask. Well, not really. Not for me. -more-