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-

Posted Wed., April 9—As pro-Tibet groups and supporters of the Beijing Games engaged in a war of words during the Olympic Torch Relay in San Francisco today (Wednesday), Tibetans in Berkeley kept their businesses closed to join in a movement very close to their heart. -more-

Posted Wed., April 9— The United Healthcare Workers-West members who met with the press outside the San Francisco Federal Building Tuesday are in a fight—but this time it’s not with their corporate bosses. -more-

Posted Tue., April 8—A sewage spill discovered at Bayer Healthcare's Berkeley campus at noon Monday prompted the city’s Division of Environmental Health to prohibit human contact with water in a section of the Berkeley Aquatic Park. -more-

A five-year-old city skateboard park that was to cost $200,000 and ended up costing four times that amount today is splitting at the seams. -more-

A small but dedicated crowd turned up to mark the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination by reading aloud his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” at the downtown Berkeley Public Library on Friday. The event coincided with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Youth Council’s National Day of Nonviolence, started nine years ago by the organization’s former director Jamal Bryant to encourage youth to fight against community violence. -more-

A U.S. District Court judge has ruled that the Oakland Police Department’s street strip-search policies are generally constitutional—though portions of it are not—but trials in individual cases must be held before the court can determine whether constitutional rights have actually been violated. -more-

Demolition of the strip mall at the corner of University Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Way will begin June 1, said developer Chris Hudson. Some preliminary dismantling of the building is already visible. -more-

The Berkeley Board of Education will discuss a report recommending adaptive re-use of the Berkeley High School Old Gym on Wednesday. -more-

Berkeley-based Disability Rights Advocates settled a seven-year-old lawsuit with the state Department of Education Friday. In the settlement the state agreed to study the pass rate for special education students on the California High School Exit Exam. -more-

Former 16th District Assemblymember Wilma Chan has filed a complaint with the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) against 14th District Assemblymember Loni Hancock—Chan’s opponent in the race to succeed termed-out 9th District State Senator Don Perata—charging that Hancock has illegally used her assemblymember officeholder account to pay a campaign staff member. -more-

The state agriculture department’s plan to eradicate the light brown apple moth (LBAM) “is like the 9-11 terrorist policy applied to agriculture,” Miguel Altieri, UC Berkeley professor of agroecology and an entomologist, told the Planet Monday. -more-

A federal decision on a plan to create a new North Richmond reservation for a landless tribe of Pomos who want to build a casino is months away, a federal official said Monday. -more-

Berkeley Planning Commissioners face back-to-back meetings this week where they’ll juggle two political hot potatoes on succeeding nights. -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-

Reminders of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, 40 years ago on Friday, were everywhere last week. His sonorous voice was replayed again and again on every radio station—his picture was in every paper. For me, the most immediate and vivid memories of that dreadful week in 1968—indeed, of that whole dreadful year—came flooding back at the Tuesday farmers’ market, to which Full Belly Farms brought huge fragrant bunches of lilacs. -more-

NEWS BLACKOUT IN GAZA -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-

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The either/or alternatives of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) vs. no-project is a false choice. But before I suggest another choice let us step back and look at the goal of BRT and what we can learn from the current BRT dry run. -more-

This is a people-friendly, eco-friendly plan to increase riders and decrease congestion and pollution. It will save millions for transit improvements. -more-

Even though AC Transit began planning for Bus Rapid Transit 18 years ago, in Berkeley we’re still only about half way to deciding whether to build such a system in south Berkeley along with neighbor cities Oakland and San Leandro. -more-

The architect Frank Lloyd Wright is supposed to have said that the right angle is a fascist symbol. That observation may be apocryphal, but it well applies to some of the newer buildings on Berkeley’s commercial corridors, big square apartment complexes that dwarf adjacent residential properties. Currently, the boxes are creeping north along San Pablo Avenue and threatening to change the character of West Berkeley. -more-

When figures like $16 billion and $8 billion and $5 billion are tossed about on a regular basis it’s fair for a person to wonder how Gov. Schwarzenegger’s budget proposal for next year affects the average citizen. What can I do, one might ask, about a gaping deficit of billions of dollars, and why should I care? -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-

In my young adulthood, I fought valiantly against the notion that I would be disabled, unable to work, and dependent on the medical establishment and on public benefits. I tried exceedingly hard to work at jobs, at first by quitting prescribed medication against medical advice, and then tried to work while taking these medications which I had little choice but to take. -more-

The City of Oakland will honor the legacy of Paul Robeson—one of the giant figures in American history—with an April 9 City Hall reception on the 110th anniversary of his birth. -more-

The Berkeley Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) will consider an expansion permit for Jupiter Restaurant on Thursday. -more-

Joe and I spent the other afternoon moving dirt and reshaping the malva rosa by the garage, to allow some sun on the pile we were making. This isn’t the first time we’ve radically reshaped the thing, and it won’t be the last. Except for the fact that it’s so inherently bewildering, I’d call this plant the ideal first thing to learn pruning with: it’s woody but soft; it puts out lots and lots of branches to choose from, and it can take a severe pruning and recover. -more-

FRIDAY, APRIL 11 -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-

FRIDAY, APRIL 11 -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-

TUESDAY, APRIL 8 -more-

Empathy—it’s a muscle. If you don’t use it, it wastes away.” What “society’s monsters”—that is, child molesters—experience, in Stephen Brown’s play Future Me at the Berkeley City Club, seems to have little to do with empathy—with their victims, from society, with themselves. -more-

Future Me is about how society deals with its monsters,” said British playwright Stephen Brown, “what we do with people who’ve done terrible things.” -more-

You may ask, Why another Rolling Stones concert film? Aren’t they a tad past their prime? And haven’t these guys had enough camera time over the past 45 years? -more-

Joe and I spent the other afternoon moving dirt and reshaping the malva rosa by the garage, to allow some sun on the pile we were making. This isn’t the first time we’ve radically reshaped the thing, and it won’t be the last. Except for the fact that it’s so inherently bewildering, I’d call this plant the ideal first thing to learn pruning with: it’s woody but soft; it puts out lots and lots of branches to choose from, and it can take a severe pruning and recover. -more-

TUESDAY, APRIL 8 -more-