“Independent Living isn’t doing everything by yourself—it’s being in control of how things are done.” -more-

Kavanagh Will Plead Not Guilty -more-

Friends and family of Gary W. King rallied outside of Oakland City Hall Monday afternoon to call for the prosecution of the police sergeant who shot and killed the 20-year-old Oakland resident last Thursday. -more-

After her mother’s death in 1999, journalist Emily Yellin came across the wartime diary and hundreds of letters her mother had written home from the Pacific while working with the Red Cross. Within days, Yellin could see that “My mother’s story served as a window through which to see the story of all the women in World War II.” -more-

Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive Director Kevin Consey will leave his post in January, the museum announced Friday. -more-

Berkeley police are investigating two deaths on Saturday as the city’s third and fourth homicide of 2007. -more-

Planning commissioners meet Wednesday to hold their second and final vote on the zoning ordinance and plan amendments paving the way for car dealers to set up shop in West Berkeley. -more-

The courtroom battle over UC Berkeley’s stadium-area building plans has shifted from shaky ground to the broader environment—though a bomb threat delayed Friday’s session. -more-

Representatives of the Wayans Brothers-Pacifica Capital Urban Development Partnership have said that they did not know, when they signed an exclusive negotiating agreement (ENA) with the City of Oakland to purchase old Oakland Army Base property, that the Port of Oakland was planning a bayfill and container cargo storage in waters directly across from that property. -more-

A meeting, billed as a forum to discuss the West Berkeley Community Benefits District (WBCBD), has been delayed, according to Michael Caplan, the city’s acting economic development director. -more-

Berkeley Developers Ruegg & Ellsworth will ask the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) Thursday for a use permit to redevelop the former Tower Records building at 2517 Durant Ave. -more-

CORRECTION -more-

I stopped reading the Bay Guardian after the paper endorsed Tom Bates in Berkeley’s 2006 mayoral election. I’d thought the Guardian stood for neighborhood integrity, affordable housing and democratic governance. Also, for in-depth, pre-endorsement research of political candidates. But its editors embraced Bates—the big developers’ back-room buddy—without bothering to send me so much as an e-mail about my own candidacy. That experience made me wonder how much I should trust the Guardian, especially when it ventures outside San Francisco. -more-

Friends! The hour of judgment is at hand for our planet. Doom is knocking on our door in the form of catastrophic climate change. Global warming not only threatens our so-called way of life, it threatens the very existence of the planet itself! Here in Berkeley, we must do more than our fair share to offset this crisis. Why more than our fair share? Quite simply because other communities cannot be relied on to do even their meager fair share in cutting back on carbon emissions. We must make up for what others fail to do on a global scale through our own heroic self-sacrifice. We cannot afford to wait until 2050 to meet our modest carbon emission reduction goals. Many of us who passed this measure will not even be alive then to implement it. By 2050 it will have been too late for this planet I fear, possibly far too late for all of the extinct species whose blood will be on our hands. This is no time for buying absolution through carbon credits or for half-assed symbolic measures which mostly have a feel good significance. -more-

The recent spinal cord injury to Kevin Everett, a special teams player for the Buffalo Bills of the National Football League, highlights the frustrations felt by thousands of families across the United States. Everett’s prognosis continues to improve due to extraordinary emergency care delivered immediately after his accident. And, though he does not know it yet, his fan base grew considerably at the moment he was stilled upon colliding with his opponent. Large portions of the spinal injured community now follow his recovery. Their discontent stems from the reminders of neglect shown to the legacy of another high profile injured individual. -more-

It was with some sadness that I read the recent contributions of Jeff Ogar and Matthew Shoemaker in the letters to the editor section of the Daily Planet. They both provided true-life examples that serve to underscore the concerns I expressed in my Sept. 14 commentary, “Anger and Football Hysteria.” Each man seems to be convinced of two things: First, that I am a bad person, not just someone with views different from their own; and second, that I simply could not love trees and also support the Cal Bears football team. -more-

You old hippies, you probably remember sticking an avocado pit on some arrangement of toothpicks over a jar of water to make it sprout. The tree, if it survived to that stage, made a decent houseplant when it wasn’t turning sickly yellow and dropping leaves and getting all etiolated like a wispy fishing rod because it was stuck in a dark corner and watered too seldom and/or too often by turns and potted in a bucket of backyard clay in the first place and the only fertilizer it ever got was when the cat peed in the pot. -more-