In what was regarded as a first for West Berkeley’s zoning history, the city’s Zoning Adjustments Board last week gave Wareham Development the green light to exceed neighborhood height limits and construct a four-story, 92,000-square-foot bioscience lab on the Aquatic Park Campus. -more-

Berkeley’s chronically homeless population decreased by nearly 50 percent over the last six years according to a recently released study. Federal officials said it was the largest reduction of chronic homelessness in the state to date. -more-

The Berkeley City Council ground its way slowly—and sometimes painfully—towards passage of its proposed Downtown Area Plan Tuesday night, working its way through consideration of a series of detailed amendments by Councilmember Jesse Arreguín before finally putting the matter off until next week. -more-

Sitting in the empty audience of Zellerbach Hall, David McCauley talks about AileyCamp, the educational dance project that he is the charter director of for Cal Performances. Simultaneously, on the barren stage, stripped of its curtains and scrims, some 15 adolescents are being led through modern dance exercises by M’bewe Escobar, who has taught and danced with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater for over a decade. -more-

The Monterey Market neighborhood—and the greater Slow Food community—hosted a party for Bill and Judy Fujimoto, who are walking away from the Monterey Market due to a family rift. A crowd of nearly 100 foodies, shoppers, growers, restaurant owners, musicians, and even the Cal Band, joined in celebrating the Fujimotos and their pioneering contribution to quality food in the Bay Area. -more-

The battle over construction of a new computer facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory may hinge on a single issue: whether or not it’s a federal project. -more-

Chevron must stop all work on expanding its Richmond refinery until a new project environmental review is completed and approved, a Contra Costa County judge has ruled. -more-

Almost two years after PG&E handed over their former service center at 2111 Martin Luther King Jr. Way to the Berkeley-Albany YMCA, the Berkeley Zoning Adjustments will vote Thursday on whether to turn it into a teen center. -more-

A Richmond man was convicted July 8 of first-degree murder and attempted second-degree robbery for the shooting death of 23-year-old Wayne Drummond of Oakland near the University of California at Berkeley campus three years ago. -more-

A July 20 hearing has been scheduled in Alameda County Superior Court in Hayward for a prominent Oakland general contractor arrested in an alleged scheme to defraud workers and illegally lower her company’s insurance rates. -more-

A 69-year-old Albany woman died early Friday afternoon when she was struck by an Amtrak passenger train near the Gilman Avenue crossing in West Berkeley. -more-

A man walked into Chase Bank’s Berkeley branch at 2150 Shattuck Ave. at 1:40 in the afternoon Monday, July 6, and handed a note to a teller. -more-

Flames gutted most of the interior of two third-floor Berkeley apartments Tuesday, July 7, as firefighters and neighbors worked to evacuate tenants. -more-

A long-planned private housing development and religious center for UC students symbolically got under way beneath sunny, breezy, skies Wednesday, July 1. -more-

WASHINGTON (NNPA)—U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, is pressing the White House and the president’s cabinet on the apparent void in federal government advertising in black-owned newspapers and radio. -more-

HOW BERKELEY CAN YOU BE? -more-

The Oakland City Planning Commission that was appointed by Jerry Brown (the two new commissioners from Dellums are no improvement) wasn’t dubbed the Approval Commission for nothing—the commissioners supported Condomania developers with unbridled passion. Some market rate condo projects were built, some are half-built—the most notorious being “CityWalk” in the shadow of City Hall with its torn Tyvek wrapping flapping in the breeze. -more-

California is insolvent and in every corner of every county and city we are feeling the pain. Draconian measures have been taken at all levels of civic governance to cut expenditures and boost falling revenues in order to balance budgets. -more-

The current aspect of the “Trader Joe’s” project soon coming up for consideration before the City Council—a traffic diverter on Berkeley Way—is the last recognizable shred of the original requests the neighborhood had made in October of 2002. The mitigation of excessive traffic on a residential street with a full traffic diverter, in this case Berkeley Way, is not a special request on our part. -more-

“We are taught from a young age not to see Palestinians, because to see Palestinians would only complicate our lives.” Yahav, our guide from the Israeli Coalition Against House Demolitions (www.icahd.org), said this to us on the first day of a recent delegation to Palestine-Israel with the Interfaith Peace Builders. -more-

More than 14 million people are unemployed in the United States, 9.5 percent of the workforce. While there are a few signs of economic recovery, employment isn’t one of them. The Obama administration must address the jobs crisis. -more-

It seems somewhat odd, doesn’t it, that our good friends at the Oakland Tribune waited until the State of California officially turned (back) over the keys to the Oakland Unified School District Administration Building to write one of the better articles summing up the damaging effects of the state takeover. -more-

Last fall in this space, I wrote about the Rossmoor acorn woodpecker controversy. Homeowners there complained that the birds were drilling acorn storage cavities in their houses, and the Homeowners’ Association (HOA) had obtained a depredation permit from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to kill 50 of the woodpeckers. The actual dirty work was farmed out to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services, an agency with a long and inglorious history of exterminating “nuisance” animals. -more-

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of two articles on the Sonoma County village of Glen Ellen. -more-

I think it’s fair to argue that our biggest problems in saving this planet are conceptual and often simply emotional (though these two intertwine to fuzzy indistinguishability). There are few areas in which this is more true than with our sewers. -more-

The Farallon Recorder Quartet—Annette Bauer, Letitia Berlin, Frances Blaker and Louise Carslake—will perform at 8 p.m. tonight (Thursday) at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Albany, featuring works from the 14th century to the present. -more-

Bob Ernst, co-founder of the Blake Street Hawkeyes, Berkeley’s innovative theater troupe of the ‘70s and ‘80s, and Ruth Zaporah, dancer and Ernst’s longtime improvisational performance partner, will present an evening of improvisation—”our own version of action theater,” as Ernst put it—at 8 p.m. Saturday, July 11, at Western Sky Studio on Eighth Street, the first time they’ve worked together in Berkeley in eight years. -more-

LOWER BOTTOM PLAYAZ -more-