A standoff between police officials and an armed suspect ended peacefully Monday after 24 hours of negotiations. -more-

TUESDAY, AUGUST 12 -more-

On Sunday afternoon I heard a KQED broadcast of a taped lecture/discussion with author Salmon Rushdie. I wasn’t listening very carefully, and at first I thought Rushdie was commenting on the current state of affairs in occupied Iraq. Eventually I realized that the tape had actually been made sometime in February, before the U.S. invasion started. He was expressing his apprehension about what might take place after the war—destroyed infrastructure, civil chaos, rise of the kind of religious fundamentalism which has caused him a lot of grief in his own life—in short, everything that has indeed happened. -more-

TUESDAY, AUGUST 12 -more-

Glen Ellen, just north of Sonoma, resembles a tiny mountain village in which to hide, get lost, walk and hike, and create. It is all of that and a whole lot more, as both Jack London and M.F.K. Fisher discovered. -more-

A conservative legal group has sued the Berkeley Unified School District, claiming that it has violated California’s ban on affirmative action by seeking racial balance in its elementary schools. -more-

IN LOCK-STEP -more-

Bay Area mothers successfully maintained the region’s reputation as the world’s premier area for breastfeeding mothers, but fell well short of beating their own world record. -more-

So Kennedy bails on 2700 San Pablo Ave. after overcoming the opposition of unappreciative locals. I just hope his counterpart in the White House takes a lesson from this! After five years and countless hours of his precious time why the sudden drop in interest when he’s only a few steps away from leaving his imprint for posterity on the West Berkeley landscape? Perhaps it’s true that he’s beckoned by the siren’s call challenge of developing yet larger oversized projects in a declining rental market but then again maybe there’s more to this story than immediately meets the eye. -more-

Berkeley’s Aquatic Park was dark Saturday night, but the moon was bright and nearly full when about 400 locals pushed dozens of haunting, peace lanterns onto the park’s lagoon, the fulfillment of a Berkeley man’s promise to an aging Japanese woman. -more-

Space here won’t allow me to reply to all of the recent statements regarding city employees. While some have been empathetic to the plight of workers scapegoated for the budget problems, some others have wrongly characterized employees in labor unions as greedy, self-serving, and equivalent to welfare cheats. -more-

Just what’s so special about 2140 Durant St.? -more-

Mayor Tom Bates and State Assemblywoman Loni Hancock were in attendance last week as the West Berkeley Foundation celebrated the $65,000 in grants it gave to neighborhood groups this year. -more-

Most reports coming out of Iraq are built around the casualties of American soldiers in post-war attacks. Deaths and injuries among Iraqi civilians, however, rarely make it to the pages of U.S. newspapers, even when the Iraqis are killed in the same incident—and even when major international newswires report these casualties. -more-

George Harrison, age 88, sat in his Brooklyn apartment and recited lines from Irish poet Patraic Pearse who, upon standing at the grave of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, executed by the British, wrote these lines, and Harrison wishes the Lord would make everyone in Washington read them: -more-

Many of us know the Ocean View section of Berkeley primarily for its high-end shops, Spenger’s Fish Grotto, Bette’s Ocean View Diner, Peet’s Coffee, and the Crate & Barrel Outlet Store. But for West Berkeley writer/resident Barbara Gates, confrontation with one of life’s greatest terrors provided the springboard for an intensely personal search for understanding of place. The result is her gift to us, her readers, of an unexpected and compelling insider’s view of a multi-layered, multi-ethnic neighborhood. -more-

To fans of science fiction and fantasy, Ursula K. Le Guin is a one-person institution, the author of over 100 short stories, 19 novels, 13 children’s books, two collections of essays and numerous poems and translations, as well as winner of the National Book Award, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award, the PEN/Malamud Award and many other literary honors and prizes -more-

The scene of some of the most heated political confrontations of the 1960s, today’s Telegraph Avenue is once again a battleground—in which independent book and music retailers are facing off against “Big Box” and Internet stores. -more-

Growing up in Berkeley, my friends and I sometimes amused ourselves by creating elaborate histories for the familiar homeless people who were fixtures of the Elmwood district. -more-

Daughter, sister, wife, mother, grandmother, capitol punishment abolitionist, gardening activist, Buddhist, private investigator, author and Berkeley resident Melody Ermachild Chavis has written a brief but important book about Meena, the young Afghan woman who founded RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. -more-

With over 450,000 books housed in a nondescript storefront on University Avenue, Serendipity Books is simultaneously one of the largest and least known bookstores in the Bay Area. -more-

In California, where one out of four residents is foreign-born, the entry of an Austrian Hollywood superstar and a Greek anti-corporate pundit has electrified the messy recall contest. But will their gubernatorial bids make immigrants the swing vote at the ballot box in October? -more-

The Board of Education will discuss a blistering, 740-page state report on the Berkeley schools Wednesday night. -more-