Photo by Gar Smith -more-

The mayor and city manager will propose, at tonight’s (Tuesday) City Council meeting, a shift in tactics for writing Berkeley’s greenhouse gas reduction plan. -more-

The massive Oak-to-Ninth development project continued its various journeys through the state court system last week, with lawyers for the Oakland Heritage Alliance filing its opening brief in a lawsuit challenging the City of Oakland’s CEQA findings on the 180,000-square-foot Ninth Avenue Terminal. -more-

With AC Transit rapidly expanding its purchase of Belgian-based Van Hool buses, the senior vice president of a Bay Area bus manufacturing company is refuting a key reason why AC Transit officials say the European-manufactured buses are more desirable than American-made ones. -more-

As Virginia Tech struggled to recover from the deadliest shooting in U.S. history, residents of International House at UC Berkeley came together in a riot of colors to celebrate unity in diversity Saturday. -more-

The Berkeley Board of Education is scheduled to vote on development of the Curvy Derby Plan for the Berkeley Unified School District’s (BUSD) East Campus field Wednesday. -more-

MENLO PARK (BCN)—Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author David Halberstam was killed this morning in a three-vehicle crash near the Dumbarton Bridge in Menlo Park, the San Mateo County Coroner’s Office reported. -more-

The Berkeley Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) is scheduled to hear a nuisance proceeding Thursday. -more-

Since September, due to a California Supreme Court decision, the Police Review Commission has not held any inquiries into police misconduct. On Wednesday, the commission will hold a public hearing on new regulations for closed hearings. -more-

About 250 UC Berkeley students were shadowed last Thursday, but it was all for a good cause. -more-

Wet Seal chase -more-

SB67 -more-

A group of West Berkeley residents have set up an air monitor to detect emissions from Pacific Steel Casting (PSC) Monday. -more-

Four of the employees of Blackwater USA, one of more than three dozen private military companies operating in Iraq, were murdered, burned and left hanging on a bridge in Fallujah in 2004. Jeremy Scahill, a contributor to The Nation magazine and a correspondent for Democracy Now!, has written a book about how a company that is barely 10 years old rose from the swamp of North Carolina to become the world’s most powerful mercenary army, controlled by one man. Scahill recently spoke to Sandip Roy on the program “Your Call on KALW” about his book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. -more-

From Franklin Trail in Carquinez Strait Regional Shoreline Park spread panoramic views ranging from Martinez and Benicia nearby to the far reaches of Mt. Diablo, Mt. Tam and the Lower Delta. Anchoring the two ends of this trail are the small, strait-side towns of Port Costa and Crockett. Plan a glorious getaway exploring parkland, browsing antique shops and eclectic boutiques and sampling intriguing eateries. -more-

1. Where were you born and where did you grow up, and how does that affect how you regard the issues in Berkeley and in your district? -more-

Korean-Americans’ fear of a backlash from the campus massacre at Virginia Tech eased a bit when mainstream news media began focusing on issues that concern all Americans, such as mental illness, gun control and campus security, rather than the ethnicity of the gunman. -more-

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of imported tschotchkes, have a house full of them. (For the Yiddish-challenged, that’s all the little bits of useless decorative stuff you either love because your mother didn’t let them into your childhood home, or hate because she did.) But still, in the context of our PC-plus city’s Earth Day festival on Saturday, I did wonder. The Planet had a table there, and we spent an hour or so alternately sitting and walking around, chatting with vendors and visitors. We noticed quite a few stalls with merchandise which originated in Asia or Latin America which was delivered in big vans, panel trucks or SUVs. What’s wrong with that, you might ask? -more-

With almost no public examination a private, developer-driven organization with $10,000 in funding from the city has targeted a new property assessment for large swaths of West Berkeley. Bringing into question our foundational tenets of “one person, one vote,” and “no taxation without representation,” this effort appears to find its basis in that ever popular mutation of the golden rule: whoever owns the gold (property) makes the rules. -more-

I’ve been thinking about the violence at Virginia Tech, and about a violent man I once met. He was the boyfriend of a friend of mine. She brought him over to visit one afternoon, but his vibe was so repellent, so dangerous, that I didn’t want him near my kids, near me, nor in my home. I remember him sitting in my kitchen, his eyes moving over the furniture, the fixtures, evaluating everything, sizing everything up. My friend sat a little in the background, not saying much, anxious for us to like him. She was something of an innocent. She owned her own house, had a job, but (and this is my own interpretation; I can’t speak for her) felt she needed a man, a baby, and so invited this man into her home. He had come out of nowhere, had no job—she met him in a café. Over the next few months I often thought of calling her, of warning her about him, and my only excuses for not doing so was that I was pretty sure she wouldn’t listen to me, and moreover that I couldn’t imagine that it would end the way it did. It was obvious that he had all the power, had taken the reins. This is what violence, or the threat of violence does; it trumps good sense, good intentions. So I didn’t call her and he killed her. -more-

Some publicity hound—maybe it was Al Capone—once quipped, “You can write anything you want about me as long as you spell my name right.” Having read about myself in the pages of the Planet lately I can’t say that I have much sympathy for that idea. Maybe it’s my age, but this grandfather of six doesn’t have quite the thick skin he had at 30 when jousting with the windmills of imperialism’s hubris. I actually don’t see why any critic about Berkeley would enjoy being flattered as a writer of “hit pieces,” a “red baiter” or an “agent baiter.” I’ll accept that my piece on KPFA was hard-hitting, but I had thought of that in figurative terms. Sure, I expected some wrathback. Still, those responses helped make my point. -more-

On my plane flight back from Iraq, I was cogitating on what I had learned while I was there and, in between the in-flight movie and the rubber chicken, I started remembering what one female Parliamentarian I had interviewed kept saying to me. “The number of American troops that have died over here is much higher than reported because they do not count the contractors.” -more-

Having ranted about the allergenic pollen from certain flowering trees—the sorts one might not even think of as “flowering” except in the taxonomic sense—allow me to spend a few inches on thanks and praise for their more conspicuous brethren. -more-

TUESDAY, APRIL 24 -more-

A TRIBUTE TO -more-

If you’ve seen the film A Great Day in Harlem, you may have noticed that of the 57 jazz legends who showed up to be photographed by Art Kane standing on the stoop of a Harlem brownstone at 17 East 126th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues on an August morning in 1958, only three of them were women and only one of the three was white. -more-

A young Asian woman in a fashionable, low-cut black dress and high heels busies herself with last minute fussing over the white bulk of an architectural model, positioned on a table elevated enough so that she needs to climb above it on a high tech stepladder to reach down into its interior. -more-

There was a time in history when travel diaries were the way people in London, Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam found out about the countries they had yoked to their imperial ambitions. India, Sumatra, and rural Donegal—the places that funneled raw materials and gold into the great imperial centers—came alive in journals and long letters to leading newspapers. Most of the diarists focused on the exotic, but not a few accurately predicted that no matter how many dragoons were sent to terrorize the Irish countryside, insurrectionary groups like the “Whiteboys” would appear in their wake to burn down a landlord’s house. Or divined that all the “khaki boys” in the British Army would never quell the fierce Pushtin tribesmen of the Northern Frontier. -more-