Susan Brandt Hawley, attorney for Concerned Library Users, has informed the Planet that a tentative settlement has been reached between her clients and the City of Berkeley regarding one part of a lawsuit filed in September which challenged some aspects of the city’s plans to demolish and rebuild two of the city’s four branch libraries.

The proposed settlement affects plaintiffs’ contention that the City amended the municipal code to allow demolition of libraries with a use permit instead of a variance, without carrying out the environmental study required by the California Environmental Quality Act because the changed language would enable significant environmental impacts. -more-

After drying out from last weekend’s rain and hail beset final home game at present day Memorial Stadium, here are some observations, recollections, and speculations on the end of the Cal football season, the temporary pause in 2011 while Memorial Stadium is renovated, and seasons to come in 2012 and after. -more-

The Alameda County Coroner’s office has confirmed rumors that a young man fell to his death from the KPFA antenna tower at 4 a.m. on the morning of Thanksgiving day. The office identified him as Steven Tassell, 25, of Antioch. -more-

Once you take crazy off the table, you'll find it hard to understand the tree-sitter encamped in the branches of a 40- foot tall Redwood in near-freezing People's Park. -more-

Shopping in a local Berkeley toy story yesterday, I came across three options that are uniquely suited for this holiday season. (Note: I'm not making these up. Photographs are attached as evidence.) -more-

It is High Time to Repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell; Don't Ask;
Silence of the Press: US media turns blind eye to RT crew arrest;
Black Friday; Black Friday; Nuclear Madness -more-

As a librarian recently retired from the Berkeley Public Library, I want to respond to Peter Warfield's recent commentary in the Planet on the lawsuit against the Library’s plans to replace South and West branches with new buildings rather than renovating and expanding the existing structures. -more-

There is currently an ongoing crisis at KPFA. The KPFA union on their website, KPFAworker.org, portrays the crisis as one of union busting political purges by top heavy bureaucratic Pacifica. However, the real problem is the KPFA finances over the past ten years. -more-

Oakland’s Blight Ordinance was enacted during the administration of Mayor Elihu Harris. Most community activists supported it at the time, hoping some of the most glaring and intractable instances of blight could be corrected: vacant lots or front yards with dead cars and refrigerators, illegal dumping, empty and deteriorating buildings. But, as the cliché goes, be careful what you wish for. Your prized landscaping, important to you for screening, aesthetics, and habitat has also come to be, in unexpected ways, defined as blight. Because of the extraordinary powers of the City to collect heavy fines and fees on seemingly open-ended blight investigations and massive City deficits, the ordinance has been redefined. -more-

There seems to be a growing consensus about education reform in this country, at least a consensus about how we have a serious problem. Unfortunately, education is a complex affair, made up of many components. Many of the diverse small problems that make up the large one require leadership skills, buy-in from a diverse group of stakeholders and revised curriculums. There is, however, one area that isn't complex and would go a long way toward true reform, even though it would be hard to implement.

Tenure is a relic from long ago, perhaps a good idea 100 years ago, but a disaster now. Eliminate tenure and start improving education immediately. -more-

Editor's Note: The latest issue of the Pepper Spray Times is now available. -more-

December 1st was World AIDS Day, which brought back memories of the death of our only child Michael, who died of AIDS in November 1984, the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Michael was 19 and a senior at U.C. Santa Cruz. He would be 45 today. We received a call on Saturday morning from a physician at a Santa Cruz hospital, who said that Michael had been admitted to the hospital with a serious illness. The physician indicated that if we wanted to see our son alive, we had better rush down to Santa Cruz. -more-

There are lots of dangerous places in this world: Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Bolivia, Iran, Palestine, Yemen, and Somalia to name a few. But there is only one that could destabilize a goodly part of the globe and end up killing tens of millions of people. And yet for reasons of state that is the one place the Obama administration will not talk about: Kashmir. -more-

Since the midterm elections, there’s been speculation that the Democrats’ shellacking, coupled with the rightward shift of the Republican Party, would force President Obama to “move to the middle.” That’s a terrible idea! There’s no longer a halfway point between Democrats and Republicans and any further Obama movement to the right would label him a wimp. -more-

Last week’s column on hybrid birds requires a correction. I wrote that some years ago an American avocet mated with a black-necked stilt at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, producing a hybrid offspring which was nicknamed “avostilt.” Wrong. According to the Aquarium’s Ken Peterson, the event did not happen there. “Our birds rarely breed, and when they do they breed true,” writes Peterson. -more-

“Boomer” may refer to a place in North Carolina, an adult male kangaroo , several sports personalities, and numerous fictional creations. A baby boomer is someone born during the period of increased birth rates and economic prosperity in many nations following World War II. -more-

You have probably heard the statistic that mental illness affects one in five adults in the U.S. Most people who are affected by mental illness are in hiding about it for fear of public shame and because a disclosure about it could cause them to lose their jobs.
National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, also known as NAMI, is an organization of the family members of persons with mental illness. At one time, the slogan of NAMI was; “Open your mind—mental illnesses are brain disorders.”
-more-

John Brown's Truth , by William Crossman, is a multi-genre, musically improvised opera with classical and jazz singers and musicians, dancers, and spoken-word artists. It is a radical departure from traditional opera format and, as such, is truly an opera for the 21^st Century. Its most innovative feature is that while its script (libretto) is written, its music is not. -more-

Landmark's Shattuck Cinemas will host a special screening Wednesday, Dec. 1, of two short films: Rite of Love and Death (30 minutes) by Yukio Mishima and Rites of Love and Math (26 minutes) by Reine Graves and Edward Frenkel. The 7 p.m. screening is presented by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and the Berkeley Video and Film Festival, and will include a Q&A with Edward Frenkel. -more-

The Pacific Mozart Ensemble, acclaimed for performances of music ranging from Mozart to Meredith Monk, presents a special L@TE program this coming Friday at 7:30 pm at the Berkeley Art Museum, with new commissioned works by Amy X Neuburg and Sanford Dole, as well as vocal gems by Meredith Monk and Gabrieli. The singers will position themselves around the acoustically resonant Gallery B, and listeners are invited to sit or recline on the BAMscape sculpture and on the floor. A limited number of chairs are available. -more-

When I acted in a theatre company down on 20^th St. in NYC’s Chelsea district in the late 70’s, some twenty actors who all shared one dressing room would perform a bad rewrite of Candide or Bartleby the Scrivener for no pay. We sometimes lured our audience with a bottle of muscatel (“just don’t rattle the paper bag”). -more-

Musica De Amor, Berkeley Symphony's concert this Thursday, at 8, will see the premiere of Mexican composer Enrico Chapela's Private Alleles, the Symphony's first commission under the music direction of Joana Carneiro. Peter Lieberson's Neruda Songs (composed for his wife, the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson), sung by resident artist, mezzo-soprano Rachel Calloway, and Manuel de Falla's 1915 El amor brujo (originally composed for flamenco singer-dancer Pastora Imperio), complete the program. -more-

Architect Julia Morgan, widely admired in the Bay Area, remains surprisingly little known. And those who do know of her are curious about her private side. She remains elusive, even to her most ardent admirers. Berkeley playwright Belinda Taylor addresses this conundrum in Becoming Julia Morgan, exploring Morgan’s determination to stay out of the limelight – “I’m not one of those talking architects!” – and the equal determination of one young San Francisco Examiner reporter to persuade her to give up her secrets. -more-

A benefit concert for Chilean children victims of the February earthquake -more-