A charter school proposed by the Berkeley Unified School District hit a road bump last week when an activist group charged it would lead to segregation. -more-

Berkeley health officials said Tuesday, Oct. 6, that the city is expecting its first shipment of H1N1 vaccines as early as this week. -more-

About 200 students gathered in Lower Sproul Plaza Sept. 30 to discuss the upcoming Oct. 24 mobilizing conference at UC Berkeley, potentially the next big event planned in protest of the university’s budget cuts, furloughs and fee hikes. -more-

AC Transit—which recently risked delay or even major overhaul of its long-planned Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project in order to hold off major bu-line and service cuts—is now poised to consider revamping another major district policy directive: its controversial “partnership” with Belgian bus manufacturer Van Hool. -more-

Berkeley public elementary schools are bursting at the seams and there is no quick fix for the problem. -more-

A notorious crossing near South Berkeley’s Malcolm X Elementary School will finally get its due. -more-

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau will pay a consulting firm $3 million to tell the university how to save money. -more-

UC Berkeley wants bidders for its first major downtown construction project in the city center, the Helios Energy Research Facility, with the contract to be awarded Oct. 15. -more-

The Berkeley City Council returns Tuesday night to its most controversial subject of the year—the Downtown Area Plan—but the planned agenda item itself is unlikely to generate controversy. -more-

The Oakland City Council voted early Wednesday morning to support BART’s plan to build a $522 million rail connector between the Coliseum station and Oakland International Airport, provided that certain conditions are met. -more-

Certain U.S. populations are historically undercounted by the census. The 2000 Census data show that in Los Angeles County alone, African American and Latino populations were undercounted by a margin of 2.85 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively. This may not seem like a lot, but when you consider that a UCLA Center for Regional Policy Studies analysis alleges undercounts cost more than $26,000 per 1,000 people not counted, it adds up. -more-

The California Highway Patrol Wednesday renamed a stretch of Interstate Highway 880 in Oakland after an officer who was killed on an on-ramp in 2006 while investigating a crash. -more-

Brazen banditry -more-

UC BERKELEY Administration Pay -more-

There are no easy answers to the budget problems facing our cities and counties. There are strong disagreements about which services to reduce, which programs to eliminate and which fees to increase. Even the search for the elusive “unnecessary administrative costs” is contentious. Raising taxes, cutting services, and cutting administrative oversight can all result in unintended consequences and increased risk.  -more-

I wish to comment about the People’s Park book which just came out. For the most part the book is fine, but there’s a huge deficiency. Has anybody noticed that the book jumps from 1979 to 1991 with very little commentary. It is almost as if the 1980s never existed. In actuality the 1980s was the most critical decade in the People’s Park history. The decade started with Ronald Reagan, one of the worst enemies of the park, in the White House. People’s Park was under siege. By the end of the decade, Sheriff Plummer was advising the university that it would no longer get support from the Sheriff’s Department for every incident that the university drummed up. -more-

People whose mission is to justify every Israeli crime have no choice but to rely on lies. Such is the case with Faith Meltzer’s claim, (Oct. 1 letter) that ninety-five percent of the 1,417 Palestinians butchered by Israel in three weeks of attacks on Gaza were males. Research by B’Tselem, Israel’s highly respected human rights organization, documented the killing of 320 minors and 109 women. B’Tselem also documented that in the first day of the attack Israel murdered 248 Palestinian police officers, most were killed in aerial bombings of 60 police stations. Police officers are mostly males and are considered civilians ; targeting them is a war crime. Israel also destroyed 45 mosques and in some mosques, the bombing took place during prayer services when the mosques were full with male worshipers, another war crime.  -more-

For those who take pleasure in dismissing energetic local, social critiques as rants, raves or diatribes, they need not read any further. But for the rest of us, it’s about time to admit there’s a whole lot of stupid going on these days, and it is not confined to areas outside of Berkeley, California. Take the gourmet ghetto, North Berkeley’s venerated depository of designer food, and garrulous café bloviators with whom I have been happily participating with for many years (being one myself). Don’t get it wrong, I love hangin’ with the homeys over by the strip, and perusing the endless parade of beautifully tapered young women, self-important cell phone calls, the panhandlers, the cartwheelers, and the carnival of economic disparity that underwrites the whole scene. -more-

I want to cut through the endless series of charges and countercharges that have dominated KPFA’s Local Station Board campaign, and focus on the real, substantive difference that distinguishes Concerned Listeners (CL) from the other slate running for the Board. That difference is rooted in how the two sides view KPFA’s role. CL’s opponents argue that KPFA should be a “community radio station” as opposed to something they call a “top-down, corporate model,” which is what they claim CL stands for. The CL slate is made up of left activists who have spent the better part of their lives working for progressive causes. Why would we choose a “corporate model” over a “community model”? These two labels are completely misleading and are used to package a real, honest difference in a morally charged and disingenuous way. -more-

The KPFA board elections are in full swing and the ballots are due October 15. I was struck by couple of developments. -more-

The current attack on KPFA, WBAI, and Pacifica by revolutionary fascists in NYC, where they originated, and by their members who came to Berkeley in the 1960s, originally to recruit young college students at UC Berkeley, and after the Civil Rights Movement ended they were less involved in recruiting students, and they turned their attention to KPFA in Berkeley and to WBAI in New York City, as desirable targets to promote their global violent anti-democratic revolution. Over the decades that followed they had minor successes at influencing or invading these stations. Some of their members became active inside the stations as volunteers, or even as employees, and one was even successful at becoming the KPFA General Manager for a short while. However, although they attempted to do some damage to KPFA and WBAI for many years since the 1960s, they did little damage to the stations until 2003.  -more-

In the grocery store parking lot, soon after the KPFA “Ramparts Magazine” event—a panel of three on a new book about the short-lived but powerful magazine of 30-40 years ago—I waited for Renee Asteria to return to the car before I took her home. Renee is KPFA’s funny, diplomatic, disarmingly creative, hard-working—and young—local election supervisor. I picked up a Planet and was a bit shocked to find an article publicizing two KPFA candidate forums, in Richmond and South Berkeley, where locals could meet candidates running for the hotly-contested KPFA local station board.  -more-

Readers of the Daily Planet might have noticed an odd disconnect in the recent exchanges between the supporters of Concerned Listeners (CL) and their opponents in the current KPFA Local Station Board elections. CL’s endorsers are heavy on the labor side, including at least two Labor Councils, the leadership of several others, not to mention scores of militant organizers from a wide range of unions. Yet some of our attackers have called us anti-worker. Such is the mudslinging in this election. -more-

There’s a growing consensus that the great recession is over, but the pace of U.S. recovery will be slow. Meanwhile, China’s economy is speeding up. A comparison of economic policies in the two countries indicates the White House must be more aggressive. -more-

They only hold the summer Olympics every four years and 2009 wasn’t the year for them. But they do hold the International Association of Athletics Federations world athletic championships every odd year, which is not quite the same thing, but close. This summer they were held in Berlin, and there were some absolutely memorable moments for those who love watching track and field competition on the world stage. -more-

Along with the migrant songbirds (the recent tanager, a female black-headed grosbeak, and a couple of yellow warblers, among others), I’ve been seeing a steady trickle of monarch butterflies in the neighborhood. Whether western monarchs actually migrate or not is a point of controversy. UC Santa Barbara emeritus professor Adrian Wenner has argued that what we have here is more of a range expansion and contraction between wintering roosts along the Central Coast and interior breeding areas. Unlike eastern monarchs, the western population doesn’t all wind up in the same place. -more-

Periodically I see something that is so stupid that I have to reset my stupid gauge, re-evaluate the relative stupidity of all the other things I see, and give all the other builders, handy-folk and homeowners a little more slack because they didn’t perform this particularly odious act. As you may have surmised, I was recently privy to such an act and it is both fascinating and incredibly stupid. So without further ado, I present for you the mysterious, eternally exploding water heater. -more-