U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents pick-ed up a Berkeley family around 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, during what immigration authorities called routine targeted enforcement action, and took all four family members to the Office of Detention and Removal Opera-tions in San Francisco for questioning. -more-

The scattered hair lying on the front porch of the Sigma Pi fraternity house Monday sum-med up the residents’ feelings for UC Berkeley engineering student Christopher Wootton, stabbed to death early Saturday morning less than a block away—love, admiration and respect. -more-

A brazen Friday night shooting of two young brothers in a troubled south Berkeley neighborhood has renewed calls for a greater police presence there. (The Planet is witholding their names because of their age.) -more-

The District Attorney’s office charged Berkeley City College student Andrew Hoeft-Edenfield, 20, with murder in the stabbing death of UC Berkeley engineering student Chris Wootton Tues-day afternoon. -more-

UC Berkeley officials briefed the Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) last week on several campus project sites still in the planning phase at landmarked buildings and sites. -more-

Rep. John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, didn’t mince words in a recent letter to the Drug Enforcement Agency asking for a response to allegations that the agency has stepped up raids on dispensaries of medical marijuana. -more-

The wisdom of siting new laboratory facilities proposed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories in the “pristine” Strawberry Creek Canyon area was strongly questioned by members of the public and several councilmembers at the Tuesday evening Berkeley City Council meeting. -more-

The Gaia Building on Allston Way was back before the council Tuesday. -more-

The Daily Planet sat down with the four candidates in the California Assembly District 14 race, and asked them their views on various issues: health care, education, and economic development. The Planet is presenting some of their responses, continuing here with the economy. Their views on health care were published in the April 25 issue. -more-

Candidates in the Assembly District 14 race were asked their views on urban casinos as an economic development strategy. -more-

Campaign statements from candidates in two key local legislative races—former 16th District Assemblymember Wilma Chan in Senate District 9 and Berkeley physician Phil Polakoff in Assembly District 14—do not appear on the official ballot pamphlets for the June 3 primary, some of which have already been mailed to voters. -more-

Former Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board member Chris Kavanagh was sentenced last week to five years probation, including six months in the Alameda County jail, for his conviction of one felony count of falsely registering an ineligible voter, namely himself. -more-

Berkeley High School came under a brief lockdown Wednesday morning when Berkeley police searched the campus for a 17-year-old high school junior who was arrested for robbing a sophomore. -more-

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

Long ago my mother-in-law had a handyman who called himself, in those pre-PC days, a hillbilly. He was a snaggle-toothed fellow who chewed tobacco and was not shy about telling you he’d done time “Inside.” We knew him only as Chester. -more-

As our Internet experiment ("daily online, weekly in print") moves forward, we’ve encountered a certain amount of guilt-tripping from our friends and neighbors for “deserting” them on Tuesdays. Everyone seems to like getting their weekend paper earlier, on Thursdays, but they whine that they’ve been accustomed to having another little news fix earlier in the week, and they hate to give it up. Friends, there’s new stuff posted on this web site almost every single day: news, opinions both letters and commentary, columnists, you name it, something new every time you turn around. . . Today, check out the surprise announcement of the Mayor's State of the City Address, something we didn't know about when we put the print paper to bed last week. -more-

Rapid Bus Plus is a draft alternative to AC Transit's Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) proposal. Our goal is to get the most environmental and economic benefits from each scarce transit dollar invested, while making no one worse off. To win new transit riders, we would enhance the best features of BRT, while expanding their benefits beyond the BART/Telegraph corridor (where buses already work well and commuters also have the BART alternative). -more-

In his 11-plus years on City Council, Kriss Worthington has been such an effective leader on so many issues that it would be easy to come up with a list of well over a hundred reasons he’s earned my support in his bid for a state Assembly seat. Here are just 10 of them: -more-

On May 13, 1968, students, workers, and activists marched through the streets of Paris to challenge the nation’s social, economic, and political structures. The marches were a prelude to what became a two-week general strike, the impact of which remains hotly debated to this day. The events of May 1968 were not the world’s first mass protests, but their role in the subsequent alteration of French society was widely hailed as proving the power of political action outside the electoral process. The United States also saw mass protests in 1968, but their failure to end the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon that November left many activists frustrated. The successful WTO protests in Seattle reasserted the power of mass protest, but this appears to have dissipated as the Bush Administration invaded Iraq despite millions taking to the streets and the federal government failed to legalize undocumented immigrants despite the mass protests of the Spring of 2006. Can mass protest still make a difference in the United States, or is the electoral process—embodied in the mass involvement of those in the Obama campaign—now seen as the leading if not exclusive route to progressive change? -more-

Proposition 98 in the June 3 ballot is good for tenants. It phases out rent controls on a unit only when that unit becomes voluntarily vacant. Via Prop. 98, the local rent law is folded into the state constitution and the current tenant is protected from any changes in the law. Changes do happen: the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, undermined rent control in Berkeley, San Francisco, Oakland, and other California cities. Many people say that if 98 passes then there will be mass evictions. This same claim was made prior to the passage of vacancy decontrol (Costa-Hawkins) in the mid ’90s, but the evictions never materialized. It is nearly impossible to evict a tenant and Prop. 98 does not change that fact. -more-

Could the tragedy of Christopher Wootton’s death have been avoided if we had been more proactive with prevention and enforcement efforts in our community? Sadly, we think it’s possible that might be the case. We are a group of neighbors who have volunteered our time for over two years on the Chancellor’s Task Force on Student/Neighbor Relations working on issues of alcohol-related behavior in the Southside. -more-

The Berkeley High Warm Pool is under siege from many fronts. Although the gym is registered on the state and federal registries of historic landmarks, the Berkeley Unified School District is still slated to tear down the pool. Swimmers have been working with the City of Berkeley for nearly a decade, but we have been told that there are no funds to build a new pool. -more-

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of fears! Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by -more-

The state Density Bonus Law is having a major impact on the face of development in Berkeley. It has resulted in buildings which are substantially larger then those allowed by the Berkeley Zoning Code and which are impacting the neighborhoods along our transit corridors in ways that were not anticipated. While both the neighborhoods and our newspapers like to label the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) and City Council as pro-development and the development community sees both as anti-development, this misses the point. It is the state law that has created these larger buildings. The law is a poorly written document riddled with ambiguities which in itself contributes to the angry debate which is the mode for all Density Bonus project hearings. The approval process on these buildings is all but dysfunctional and we need to address the issue so that ZAB and the City Council can regain control over the development of our city. -more-

Thursday, May 15 is National Bike to Work Day and, across the country, we can witness the spectacle of mayors and governors, CEOs and celebrities, donning brand new helmets and pedaling off toward a green horizon. Tomorrow, they’ll be back to driving so that, by year’s end, they’ll have traveled more than 13,000 miles by car. -more-

An April 25 commentary in the Daily Planet (“No Compromise On Apple Moth Pesticide”) misrepresented our organization’s position. We’d like to clarify our mission and the position of Pesticide Action Network (PAN) regarding the light brown apple moth (LBAM). -more-

The June 2008 Ballot has a dangerous measure known as Proposition 98 (California Property Owners and Farmland Protection Act, or CPOFPA). If passed by the voters, Prop. 98 would terminate rent control, tenant protections, and would place homeowners at risk by allowing unscrupulous property owners to challenge existing building codes and zoning laws that may prohibit the placing of a “pig sty” next to someone’s home, or a “porn shop” next to a church or school. -more-

A strange thing happened last week. Financial experts, government officials, CEOs, and the odd billionaire investor declared the financial crisis all but over. These are the same folks who only a month before were calling it the worst systemic financial crisis since the 1930s and predicting that even the basic functions of the global money machine were at risk. Now only weeks later we’re being told that the worst is over and stocks have begun rising again. Things move quickly in the new economy—but that quickly? After all, that other big crisis that started in 1929 lasted a bit longer than nine months. -more-

Tuesday, May 6th, was the decisive night in the struggle for the Democratic nomination. It provided new insight into the character of the two competitors. -more-

From all over Oakland this winter and spring, there have been calls for a crackdown on the city’s crime and violence, with police being allowed to fill in the details, at their discretion, of how such crackdown will be carried out. -more-

A “very odd affair” is how the Financial Times (FT) characterized the Bush Administration’s release of intelligence charging that the Syrian building bombed by the Israelis last Sept. 6 was a North Korean-designed nuclear reactor just weeks from being operational. -more-

Last week—just as I was in the middle of writing my column about the calls for Illinois Senator Barack Obama to go for a knockout blow in the Democratic presidential primaries—the latest round of national clamor over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright issue was breaking. This was prompted first by Rev. Wright’s appearances on Bill Moyers and his speeches at the National Press Club and the NAACP Freedom Fund Dinner, and then by Sen. Barack Obama’s followup press conference in which he broke, once and for all, with his former pastor. -more-

Once upon a time, houses were built with the materials at hand, or those things that could be made using the materials at hand (concrete, for instance). Around here, that tended to be wood and masonry (stone, brick, stucco, and concrete). These days, more and more construction materials are fake. -more-

If you’re like Joe and me, you’re spending as much of this sunny weather as you can outdoors, especially in our handy local parks. The breeding birds are here, and they’re putting on a show as they sing and chase and carry on, establishing territories, picking mates, building nests. The bloom season is at its height, multiple species carpeting outer Point Reyes and interior grassy hillsides. -more-

THURSDAY, MAY 8 -more-

In theater,” said that poet and visionary of drama, Antonin Artaud, in The Theater and Its Double, “there is a kind of strange sun, an unusually bright light by which the difficult, even the impossible, suddenly appears to be our natural medium. And [John] Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore is lit by the brilliance of that strange sun.” -more-

Amid the slapstick of aristocrats stashed in packing crates to cheat the guillotine, flashbacks of the genteel antediluvian life signaled by opera singers popping up out of nowhere to sing Mozart and close-ups of those singers’ and comedians’ faces projected on a big screen from a camera in the wings, a wry concept seems to be taking shape from Theatre de la Jeune Lune’s Figaro, onstage at Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theatre. -more-

This Friday Berkeley Opera opened the second opera of its 29th season, with two one-acts from the early 20th century, Béla Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle (A kékszakállú herceg vára) and Maurice Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges. Wildly different in tone and intent, the operas nonetheless provided a wonderful program that was evocative and satisfying. -more-

I had a slight tense phone call with a rather difficult person this morning. Not a great way to start the day, but I guess it goes with the business and I’m lucky to be employed. -more-