Updates

Laser-Powered Accelerator Plan Gets Boost from Recovery Act

By Richard Brenneman
Monday July 13, 2009
A strangely colored beam pouring out a quadrillion watts of peak power spewing out subatomic particles juiced up by a ten-billion-electronic-volt laser plasma accelerator housed in a facility dubbed the “experimental cave?” -more-

UC President Announces Sliding Scale Cuts; Regents to Act on Stadium Finances

By Richard Brenneman
Friday July 10, 2009
The University of California Board of Regents is expected to slash pay for faculty and staff during the same meeting where they’re set to approve funds for rebuilding Memorial Stadium. -more-

Pacific Steel Lays Off Half its Workforce, Citing Weak Economy

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday July 10, 2009
West Berkeley’s Pacific Steel Casting, the nation’s fourth largest surviving steel foundry, is hurting badly. -more-

West Berkeley Zoning Struggle Heats Up as Deadline Nears

By Richard Brenneman
Friday July 10, 2009
The fate of large-scale West Berkeley developments—pushed by both Mayor Tom Bates and officials at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—continued to preoccupy city planning commissioners Wednesday. -more-

Berkeley Receives $1.3 Million in Federal Homelessness Prevention Funds

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday July 10, 2009
Berkeley was awarded $1.3 million in federal homelessness prevention funds Thursday under President Barack Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. -more-

Three Arrests in South Berkeley-North Oakland Gang War

Bay City News Service
Friday July 10, 2009
An investigation into two rival gangs from North Oakland and South Berkeley led to the arrests today of several suspects, including one who was shot by a police officer, authorities said. -more-

News

Wareham Wins Permit for West Berkeley Bioscience Lab

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Thursday July 09, 2009
Wareham Development’s proposal for a new 92,000-square-foot bioscience laboratory on the site of the landmarked Copra Building at 740 Heinz in West Berkeley.
In what was regarded as a first for West Berkeley’s zoning history, the city’s Zoning Adjustments Board last week gave Wareham Development the green light to exceed neighborhood height limits and construct a four-story, 92,000-square-foot bioscience lab on the Aquatic Park Campus. -more-

City’s ‘Chronic Homeless’ Count Drops 50 Percent; ‘Hidden Homelessness’ On the Rise

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Thursday July 09, 2009
Berkeley’s chronically homeless population decreased by nearly 50 percent over the last six years according to a recently released study. Federal officials said it was the largest reduction of chronic homelessness in the state to date. -more-

City Council Postpones Final Vote on Downtown Plan

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Thursday July 09, 2009
The Berkeley City Council ground its way slowly—and sometimes painfully—towards passage of its proposed Downtown Area Plan Tuesday night, working its way through consideration of a series of detailed amendments by Councilmember Jesse Arreguín before finally putting the matter off until next week. -more-

Teaching Kids to Dance at AileyCamp

By Jaime Robles Special to the Planet
Thursday July 09, 2009
Sitting in the empty audience of Zellerbach Hall, David McCauley talks about AileyCamp, the educational dance project that he is the charter director of for Cal Performances. Simultaneously, on the barren stage, stripped of its curtains and scrims, some 15 adolescents are being led through modern dance exercises by M’bewe Escobar, who has taught and danced with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater for over a decade. -more-

Farewell to the Fujimotos

Thursday July 09, 2009
The Monterey Market neighborhood—and the greater Slow Food community—hosted a party for Bill and Judy Fujimoto, who are walking away from the Monterey Market due to a family rift. A crowd of nearly 100 foodies, shoppers, growers, restaurant owners, musicians, and even the Cal Band, joined in celebrating the Fujimotos and their pioneering contribution to quality food in the Bay Area. -more-

Battle Over LBNL Computer Center Heads for Key Court Hearing

By Richard Brenneman
Thursday July 09, 2009
The battle over construction of a new computer facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory may hinge on a single issue: whether or not it’s a federal project. -more-

Judge Halts Chevron’s Richmond Refinery Expansion

By Richard Brenneman
Thursday July 09, 2009
Chevron must stop all work on expanding its Richmond refinery until a new project environmental review is completed and approved, a Contra Costa County judge has ruled. -more-

Zoning Board to Vote on Downtown Teen Center

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Thursday July 09, 2009
Almost two years after PG&E handed over their former service center at 2111 Martin Luther King Jr. Way to the Berkeley-Albany YMCA, the Berkeley Zoning Adjustments will vote Thursday on whether to turn it into a teen center. -more-

Richmond Man Convicted of Murder for Berkeley Shooting

Bay City News
Thursday July 09, 2009
A Richmond man was convicted July 8 of first-degree murder and attempted second-degree robbery for the shooting death of 23-year-old Wayne Drummond of Oakland near the University of California at Berkeley campus three years ago. -more-

Hearing Scheduled for Oakland Contractor Charged with Underpaying Immigrant Workers

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Thursday July 09, 2009
A July 20 hearing has been scheduled in Alameda County Superior Court in Hayward for a prominent Oakland general contractor arrested in an alleged scheme to defraud workers and illegally lower her company’s insurance rates. -more-

Albany Woman Killed by Amtrak Train in Berkeley

By Richard Brenneman
Thursday July 09, 2009
A 69-year-old Albany woman died early Friday afternoon when she was struck by an Amtrak passenger train near the Gilman Avenue crossing in West Berkeley. -more-

Bank Robber Strikes in Downtown Berkeley

By Richard Brenneman
Thursday July 09, 2009
A man walked into Chase Bank’s Berkeley branch at 2150 Shattuck Ave. at 1:40 in the afternoon Monday, July 6, and handed a note to a teller. -more-

Flames Force Evacuation of Russell Street Apartments

By Richard Brenneman
Thursday July 09, 2009
A firefighter tosses a shovelful of broken wallboard out the window of a third-floor apartment in the 2300 block of Russell Street Tuesday afternoon. Layers of aluminum, melted by the intense flames, formed metallic icicles visible on the drainpipe and the bottom of the window frame.
Flames gutted most of the interior of two third-floor Berkeley apartments Tuesday, July 7, as firefighters and neighbors worked to evacuate tenants. -more-

Ground Broken for New Wesley Center Building

By Steven Finacom Special to the Planet
Thursday July 09, 2009
Stephen Sutton (UC), the Rev. Renae Extrum-Fernandez (United Methodist Church), Deborah Matthews (Berkeley Zoning Adjustments Board), and Vincent Wong (Wesley Foundation Board President) line up to swing gold-painted sledgehammers during the groundbreaking ceremony, while documentary filmmaker and UC student Brighton Kimbel records the scene from behind.
A long-planned private housing development and religious center for UC students symbolically got under way beneath sunny, breezy, skies Wednesday, July 1. -more-

Black Press Pressures White House for Stimulus Money, Advertising Fairness

By Hazel Trice Edney NNPA News Service
Thursday July 09, 2009
WASHINGTON (NNPA)—U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, is pressing the White House and the president’s cabinet on the apparent void in federal government advertising in black-owned newspapers and radio. -more-

Teenagers practice dance moves at AileyCamp, where the goal is to teach them to value their bodies and themselves as individuals in the world.
Joe Yang
Teenagers practice dance moves at AileyCamp, where the goal is to teach them to value their bodies and themselves as individuals in the world.

Editorials

Development Goes Bust in Ireland

By Becky O’Malley
Thursday July 09, 2009
Sometimes it can be hard to get away from home. Headline in the opinion section of the July 3 Irish Times we picked up in the Dublin airport: “Brought to our knees by bankers and developers.” It was a scathing piece by one Morgan Kelly, identified as professor of economics at University College, Dublin, documenting in exhaustive detail the relationship between Ireland’s building boom and its current disastrous economic bust. -more-

Editorial Cartoons

Gov. Schwarzenegger's Deficit

By Justin DeFreitas
Thursday July 09, 2009

Reader Commentaries

Letters to the Editor

Thursday July 09, 2009

Will High-End Condo Project Doom Courthouse?

By Robert Brokl
Thursday July 09, 2009
The Oakland City Planning Commission that was appointed by Jerry Brown (the two new commissioners from Dellums are no improvement) wasn’t dubbed the Approval Commission for nothing—the commissioners supported Condomania developers with unbridled passion. Some market rate condo projects were built, some are half-built—the most notorious being “CityWalk” in the shadow of City Hall with its torn Tyvek wrapping flapping in the breeze. -more-

Berkeley City Budget 102

By Victoria Peirotes
Thursday July 09, 2009
California is insolvent and in every corner of every county and city we are feeling the pain. Draconian measures have been taken at all levels of civic governance to cut expenditures and boost falling revenues in order to balance budgets. -more-

United We Stand, Diverted We Survive

By Regan Richardson
Thursday July 09, 2009
The current aspect of the “Trader Joe’s” project soon coming up for consideration before the City Council—a traffic diverter on Berkeley Way—is the last recognizable shred of the original requests the neighborhood had made in October of 2002. The mitigation of excessive traffic on a residential street with a full traffic diverter, in this case Berkeley Way, is not a special request on our part. -more-

The Settlements Are the Real Barrier

By Tracie De Angelis Salim
Thursday July 09, 2009
“We are taught from a young age not to see Palestinians, because to see Palestinians would only complicate our lives.” Yahav, our guide from the Israeli Coalition Against House Demolitions (www.icahd.org), said this to us on the first day of a recent delegation to Palestine-Israel with the Interfaith Peace Builders. -more-

Columnists

Public Eye: Where Are the Jobs?

By Bob Burnett
Thursday July 09, 2009
More than 14 million people are unemployed in the United States, 9.5 percent of the workforce. While there are a few signs of economic recovery, employment isn’t one of them. The Obama administration must address the jobs crisis. -more-

UnderCurrents: The End of OUSD State Control: A Tale of Two Legislators

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Thursday July 09, 2009
It seems somewhat odd, doesn’t it, that our good friends at the Oakland Tribune waited until the State of California officially turned (back) over the keys to the Oakland Unified School District Administration Building to write one of the better articles summing up the damaging effects of the state takeover. -more-

Wild Neighbors: Woodpecker Wars: Free the Fort Collins Twenty!

By Joe Eaton
Thursday July 09, 2009
A male acorn woodpecker near Groveland.
Last fall in this space, I wrote about the Rossmoor acorn woodpecker controversy. Homeowners there complained that the birds were drilling acorn storage cavities in their houses, and the Homeowners’ Association (HOA) had obtained a depredation permit from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to kill 50 of the woodpeckers. The actual dirty work was farmed out to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services, an agency with a long and inglorious history of exterminating “nuisance” animals. -more-

Architectural Excursions: Beltane Ranch: From ‘Dusty Place’ to ‘Mammy’s Place’

By Daniella Thompson
Thursday July 09, 2009
The Southern-style house built by Mary Ellen Pleasant at Beltane Ranch in Glen Ellen is now a bed-and-breakfast inn.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of two articles on the Sonoma County village of Glen Ellen. -more-

About the House: Wastewater is Not a Grey Area

By Matt Cantor
Thursday July 09, 2009
I think it’s fair to argue that our biggest problems in saving this planet are conceptual and often simply emotional (though these two intertwine to fuzzy indistinguishability). There are few areas in which this is more true than with our sewers. -more-

Arts & Entertainment

Arts Calendar

Thursday July 09, 2009
THURSDAY, JULY 9 -more-

Envision Presents Frayn’s ‘Copenhagen’

By Ken Bullock Special to the Planet
Thursday July 09, 2009
Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen depicts the wartime meeting in occupied Denmark between physicist Niels Bohr, atomic structure and quantum mechanics theorist, and Werner Heisenberg, namesake of the Indeterminacy Principle, and their conversation about scientific ethics in light of the German atomic bomb program. The 1998 play will be performed this Friday through Sunday only, at the Masquers Playhouse in Point Richmond, staged by Envision, a Masquers Playhouse program. -more-

Woman’s Will Presents ‘Taming of the Shrew’

By Ken Bullock Special to the Planet
Thursday July 09, 2009
“We’ve been talking about doing it since our first year,” said Erin Merritt of Woman’s Will’s production of The Taming of the Shrew. Merritt, the all-female Shakespeare company’s founder, will direct the show at John Hinkel Park to kick off its free summer season in parks around the Bay Area. -more-

Stage and Street at Jewish Museum

By Peter Selz Special to the Planet
Thursday July 09, 2009
Music, 1920, by Marc Chagall.
Last year the Contemporary Jewish Museum opened with Daniel Libeskind’s bold elevated stainless steel cube in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena district, where it has mounted a series of pertinent exhibitions. -more-

Moving Pictures: Fairbanks, Gish Headline 2009 Silent Film Festival

By Justin DeFreitas
Thursday July 09, 2009
Douglas Fairbanks in <i>The Gaucho.</i>
The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, now in its 14th year, screens a wide range of films each July at the Castro Theater, touching on various genres and styles from cinema’s nearly 30-year silent era. The festival starts Friday with a showing of Douglas Fairbanks’ The Gaucho (1927) and continues through the weekend with a program of a dozen screenings. -more-

Farallon Recorder Quartet Performs at St. Alban’s Church

By Ken Bullock Special to the Planet
Thursday July 09, 2009
The Farallon Recorder Quartet—Annette Bauer, Letitia Berlin, Frances Blaker and Louise Carslake—will perform at 8 p.m. tonight (Thursday) at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Albany, featuring works from the 14th century to the present. -more-

Old Friends Reunite for an Evening of Theater Improv

By Ken Bullock Special to the Planet
Thursday July 09, 2009
Bob Ernst, co-founder of the Blake Street Hawkeyes, Berkeley’s innovative theater troupe of the ‘70s and ‘80s, and Ruth Zaporah, dancer and Ernst’s longtime improvisational performance partner, will present an evening of improvisation—”our own version of action theater,” as Ernst put it—at 8 p.m. Saturday, July 11, at Western Sky Studio on Eighth Street, the first time they’ve worked together in Berkeley in eight years. -more-

Around the East Bay

Thursday July 09, 2009
LOWER BOTTOM PLAYAZ -more-

Events Calendar

Community Calendar

Thursday July 09, 2009