Two days before students are scheduled to come streaming into the halls and classrooms, two Berkeley public schools showed radically different approaches to preparation this week. -more-

The Berkeley Unified School District is projecting that it will have $346,000 more for the school year than it anticipated last June when the 2005-06 budget was passed, but district officials cautioned that it’s not quite the time to open up the checkbook to more spending. -more-

“Redevelopment is very simple to understand,” said Orange County Supervisor Chris Norby at Sunday’s community meeting on proposed redevelopment in Oakland. “It’s a land grab by corporate interests, big-box retailers and developers to grab land from people like you.” -more-

South Berkeley’s Flying Cottage hit yet another patch of turbulence Thursday night, this time from members of the Zoning Adjustments Board. -more-

Berkeley election activists rallied on the City Hall steps Monday afternoon to call on Alameda County to hire a voting machine vendor that will support independent runoff voting (IRV) and provide a verifiable paper trail. -more-

Life in the tiny Palestinian hamlet of Qawawis seems straight out of the Old Testament, but that doesn’t stop the Jewish settlers in the hilltop outposts that surround the place from doing their best to destroy it. And if something isn’t done soon about the settlers’ latest threat—denying Qawawis’s shepherds access to watering holes their flocks depend on—the villagers might have no choice but to abandon their ancestral homes and lands. -more-

CARACAS, Venezuela—“I support Chavez for standing up to U.S. imperialism,” said Sean, a 16-year-old Canadian. He was one of 15,000 youths representing 144 countries at the recent 16th World Festival of Youth and Students, a communist splurge organized by Venezuela’s president and self-proclaimed revolutionary Hugo Chavez. -more-

If every working California adult is “headed over the cliff” for lack of affordable health insurance, as the co-author of a new statewide study contends, then Latinos will be the first to go. -more-

I knew I didn’t have long before they would spot me in my hiding place. There were so many that someone was bound to see me. There must have been 40 or 50 of them hanging around the fence and peering through the trees to the spot where I sat breathlessly. They seemed to be searching for wildlife—they found it all right. -more-

http://www.jfdefreitas.com/index.php?path=/00_Latest%20Workj -more-

WELCOME, BETH EL -more-

When 79 percent of Berkeley voters nixed Measure P, a.k.a. the Building Height Initiative, in November 2002, were they expressing satisfaction with the current state of planning and development in this city? That’s what some prominent individuals have been saying ever since that bitterly contested election. -more-

If I didn’t have this column to write I could deal with Ralph’s broken wheelchair. It hasn’t worked in over five weeks, forcing him to stay in bed except for the occasions when he must go to doctor appointments and attend meetings at the Center for Indep endent Living, in which case he and chair must be pushed, not an easy task considering their combined weight tops 300 pounds. -more-

Crime Pedalers -more-

Bob Baldock’s commentary in last weekend’s edition is astonishing. It is a combination of contempt of court and frank admission that the entrenched staff at KPFA has no use for the democracy its broadcasts preach to the world. -more-

A recent guest editorial in your paper inaccurately criticized Secretary of State Bruce McPherson about the latest developments in California’s move to electronic voting machines. The piece misused several figures reported by the Associated Press and Con tra Costa Times about a recent testing of Diebold Election Systems, Inc.’s (DESI) AccuVote-TSX with AccuView Printer Module election voting machines. The author also sarcastically accused a respected public official of poor math skills. One of the misstated facts claimed that during the dry-run test of the Diebold election system, McPherson’s office reported a 10 percent failure rate (the guest writer wondered if the failure rate was actually higher, which it was not). In fact, in that test, 10,720 votes were recorded on 96 voting machines with 100 percent accuracy. Despite 11 paper jams and 21 other problems on the new machine-printer combination, not a single ballot was lost. -more-

Here are some of the things that I learned at the Aug. 1 “community forum” on radio frequency identification devices (RFID) sponsored by the Board of Library Trustees: Patrons’ reading materials cannot be protected from prying eyes, and anyone can buy a reader/scanner for $150. I learned that there are many studies showing that radiation from radio frequency poses a threat to public health, and I discovered that Councilmember Gordon Wozniak studied none of these before he became an expert panelist for the forum. Moreover, Checkpoint (the RFID company that the library contracted with) is negligent in repairing its equipment, and the Berkeley Public Library and its board were, and continue to be, even more negligent in researching the claims of RFID’s efficacy in reducing both repetitive stress injuries and theft of library materials. As well I learned that Checkpoint is not a new company, but one that’s been around since the 1960s. -more-

The Bay Area will play host to an abundance of great jazz this fall. The single most important event of the next few months is the San Francisco Jazz Festival with almost 50 events scattered around the city. In Oakland, Yoshi’s continues to bring some of the best jazz musicians in the world to their restaurant/nightclub, while in Berkeley, there will be great jazz offerings at the Jazz-school and at Anna’s Jazz Island. -more-

A few years ago I attended a performance of a new opera The Aspern Papers, after the Henry James novella. The composer had, of course, taken liberties with the story, juggling generations of time, changing some names, changing the dead poet to a dead composer, changing the setting from Venice to Lake Como so that the poet-cum-composer could drown while taking a midnight swim home from his lady-love’s villa (if you tried to swim down a Venice canal, you’d probably get a nasty case of dysentery, but you couldn’t drown). I accepted these changes, but I became uneasy when private letters were changed to the only copy of a lost opera. And when the finale featured Tina as a woman scorned, burning this manuscript of the last opera by the great composer, I left the hall sputtering condemnations to my bemused companions, who shrugged, “Guess he wanted to make it more dramatic, more operatic.” -more-

TUESDAY, AUGUST 30 -more-

Alert reader Hal Hoffman called the Daily Planet to note that I’d sent the last tree column, published on Aug. 16, without mentioning the tree’s species epithet. He’s entirely correct, and I’m grateful and abashed; getting that Latin-ish binomial in is a principle of mine. Knowing the scientific name of anything is a key to learning what there is to know about it, from every possible source. -more-

TUESDAY, AUGUST 30 -more-