In what one prominent Berkeley progressive—Jaqueline DeBose—angrily said “appears to be a gentrified left-wing conspiracy,” the 20-year City Council career of Berkeley legend Maudelle Shirek may have come to an abrupt end last week when her campaign for re-election was disqualified by the Berkeley city clerk’s office. -more-

Three challengers will be taking on two incumbents for two seats on the school board for the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) in the November elections. Norine Smith, a San Francisco native and 33-year-resident of Berkeley, will repeat her 2000 challenge to longtime incumbent Councilmember Betty Olds for the District 6 Berkeley City Council seat. Filing remains open until Wednesday evening for council districts 2, 3, and 5, and for four seats on the nine-member Rent Stabilization Board. -more-

Following howls of protest from libraries across the nation, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft has rescinded a controversial order demanding that libraries destroy copies of a federal statute and accompanying regulations and documents. -more-

Why are progressive staffers disappearing from San Francisco’s leading paper? In the past month, two staffers at the San Francisco Chronicle have quietly disappeared from their posts. Ruth Rosen, a progressive opinion columnist, was suspended without pay after she wrote a column criticizing the CEO of Curves for Women for supporting anti-abortion groups. Her supervisors accused her of spreading misinformation and of “disloyalty,” and Rosen eventually agreed to leave the paper. Two weeks later, William Pa tes was taken off his job as editor of the letters page after management learned that he had donated $400 to John Kerry. -more-

OWERRI, Nigeria—All summer long I’ve been a celebrity. Schoolboys clamor to greet me. Housewives invite me to their homes. Teenage girls scoop up and kiss my children. Burly security guards open doors for me. Thin roadside hawkers, confidently balancing on their heads baskets of eggs or consumer electronics, cluster excitedly around my car window. Everyone smiles, waves, shouts, “Oyibo! (Foreigner!) Welcome!” -more-

Mayor Tom Bates, Councilmember Kriss Worthington, LeConte neighborhood resident Paul Rabinow and two city employees toast the new sign on Derby advertising the City of Berkeley’s ban on heavy vehicles, which applies to more than three dozen small residential streets. -more-

Gunshots Hit Homes, Cars on Ashby -more-

I received an e-mail about a column I wrote several weeks ago. The writer said, “Tell your friends, the Scrabblettes, that they’re not following Scrabble rules. The first player must start with a four-letter word. Unless my ability to count is off, kea, a word your co-player Louise used, does not have four letters. Plus, you left out an important part of the definition of a kea. It is a green New Zealand parrot that kills sheep by TEARING AT THEIR BACKS TO EAT THE FAT THERE (Webster’s New Universal Unabr idged Dictionary, page 996). If you want to lead off with an acceptable parrot, try the kakapo, also green, and also from New Zealand. It does not have a breastbone and so it is the only bird of the parrot species (psittaciformes) that cannot fly. It is o ften misidentified as an owl, eats only at night, and stays in holes in the ground during the day.” -more-

NATURE ARTICLES -more-

We have read the report of the external review of the collaborative research agreement between Novartis Agricultural Discovery Institute, Inc. (NADI) and the Regents of the University of California. We were pleased to learn the history of the “bidding approach” suggested for selecting corporate partners for the university. We were also pleased to receive assurance from the reviewers that the UCB agreement (the UCB-N deal) had minimal direct impacts on the university, but not excluding the College of Natural Resources (CNR). This conclusion was reached without asking the question “what would have happen if the UBC-N deal had not been brought to light?” by a courageous CNR Executive Committee (EXCOM) ably chaired by a vulnerable untenured Assistant Professor Ignacio Chapela. EXCOM (one of us was a member, APG) enabled a faculty review despite excessive pressure from the dean’s office to rapidly ratify the agreement. The report also assumes at Berkeley that the rise of biotechnology and the fall of applied agricultural fields such as biological control, plant pathology, soils and others is just part of the natural progress of science; a mere part of the process of modernization. In fact, according to the review, the “deal” appears consistent with the universities adjusting to the emerging norms of university-based economic development” and gives the impression that science at Berkeley is protected from the influence of politics and corporate power. -more-

On Aug. 3, about 120 staff from the remaining three county community medical clinics in Newark, Hayward and Oakland walked off the job and confronted the Alameda County Board of Supervisors. The supervisors were holding a retreat in an off-site location and the workers let them know what they think of planned new and deep cuts in staffing and services for the public. At that event I handed the following letter to each member of the board individually. -more-

While Bay Area folks often claim that California is two states, with a virtual political border crossing the state on an East/West line somewhere south of San Jose, perhaps the real second state begins north of Marin County—dividing the sparsely settled rural California of decades past from today’s postmodern urban landscape. -more-

TUESDAY, AUGUST 10 -more-

If you’ve been on the UC campus lately, you may have noticed the oval blue plaques warning against dumping waste into Strawberry Creek, and their logo: a truculent-looking fish with three spines along its back. That’s a three-spined stickleback, part of the creek’s original fauna, and maybe still there. I’ve found conflicting sources on that point. A Strawberry Creek walking tour guide says the sticklebacks were reintroduced during restoration efforts, but were flushed downstream and now congregate where the creek enters the bay, near the Berkeley Marina; another site, though, suggests that some remain. -more-

TUESDAY, AUGUST 10 -more-