When Layma Murtaza touched down at Cairo International Airport in late August 2010, the first image she saw was of families sitting on the floor, yelling and having a picnic as they waited for their luggage. -more-

Human rights activists with CODEPINK, including Sharat Lin of Fremont, CA, joined Egyptian protesters this week in Cairo as perhaps the only international solidarity delegation on the ground in the country. They have been in the streets with the Egyptian people for the last five days. Several members of the group of nine activists are available by phone for interviews this week. Tomorrow the delegation plans to do a solidarity action at the US Embassy. Medea Benjamin, a leader of the delegation and co-founder of CODEPINK Women for Peace, is currently available by cell phone in Cairo at 011 20-107148431. Sharat Lin is the president of the San Jose Peace and Justice Center and first visited Gaza and the region in 1973. He will return to the Bay Area by the end of the week. Bay Area groups are planning a protest and march to stand in solidarity with the people of Egypt and Tunisia this Saturday, February 5th at 1 pm at the UN Plaza (Market and 8th in San Francisco), and a march across the Golden Gate Bridge on Sunday, February 13. -more-

In early 1994, two men violently robbed, kidnapped, and carjacked an Oakland couple. The victims were forced into their own trunk, driven around to ATMs for the purpose of withdrawing cash (which was unsuccessful), and brought to a clearing in the hills only to see the male violently beaten, tased and forced back into the trunk before the female was violently raped. With no expectation but being buried alive, the couple was released. In the short time it took for someone who lived nearby to allow the couple to call the police, the two men disappeared. -more-

Don't miss the extra stories from last week. They include city council reports, People's Park updates, and more. -more-

Can You Hear Me Now? Keith Olberman’s Firing; Don’t Gut the Clean Air Act; Alzheimer’s Reign of Terror;Street Music; Basic Needs;Republicans are at It Again; Tree-Sit as Viewed by a Yahoo from La-La Land -more-

As the planning effort to revise West Berkeley zoning approaches its second public hearing before the City Council on Tuesday February 8, the environmental impacts of increased development on Aquatic Park, the aesthetics of scale, traffic, and air quality are emerging as community concerns. -more-

Sit Down With Council Members Demonstrates Strength of Existing Production & Distribution Economy -more-

The recent arrival of the library’s new bookmobile represents a door slammed shut on expectations of first-class interim service during planned closure of branches for Measure FF-related construction. -more-

Most of the nation enjoyed a white holiday season so now we fully should be prepared to enjoy a white Academy Awards. Not one African American appears on the 2011 nominees list. -more-

it hails me from the recess of my mind
I park and cross the threshold of the store
to shop, perhaps to drift among my kind
forgetting that I should have one thing more
I have my wallet, keys, my shopping list
my patience, my forbearance all in hand
my willingness to change should I insist
on suddenly a switch from fresh to canned
I’m ready! I’m a shopper! Hear me roar.
I’m headed for the register and then
that voice, that sense of something from before
speaks out just as my items hit the scan
my urge to green is sturdy, true and strong
like bags that I forgot to bring along -more-

I hope to see thousands of Americans on the street yelling and holding signs saying "Mubarek Go NOW!" We need to support the Egyptian people's desperate struggle for freedom. I heard a man in Cairo being interviewed this morning and the interviewer asked him if he would stop protesting now because of the violence. He said "Never. For the first time I feel like a man. I never knew freedom before but now I have freedom." When asked if he expected to be protesting for a year he said, "Inshallah, I will always protest for freedom." -more-

Matthew Hallinan knows perfectly well that KPFA lost over half a million dollars in 2008-2009. And lost another half a million in 2009-2010. He himself voted, not once, but twice – for budgets that called for hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary reductions at KPFA. What did he expect to happen after he did that? -more-

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

Why is the New York Times claiming the laws of physics are different in Iran then they are anywhere else? Well, the tip off to that answer is the word “Iran.” -more-

Twenty-two months will pass before Americans cast their votes on November 6th, 2012, but few who saw Barack Obama’s State-of-the-Union address on January 25th doubted that the Presidential campaign had begun. The President’s stirring speech contrasted with the tepid Republican responses delivered by Representatives Paul Ryan and Michele Bachmann and established the ideological battle lines for the next election. -more-

January marked the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Émery Lumumba, a Congolese independence leader and the first legally elected Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo after he helped win its independence from Belgium in June 1960. Ten weeks later, the United States helped orchestrate a coup of Lumumba's government. Lumumba was then imprisoned and murdered. -more-

Syndicated political cartoonist Bulbul says it well. Hands on hips, faced with a lengthy medical bill and zero Medicare, an elder confronts a gent who displays a MedBiz diploma on his office wall. She grrrs “No it’s not senile dementia— It’s too much MEDI and not enough CARE!” -more-

During last week’s warm dry spell, I finally got around to attacking the Bermuda sorrel. (You never quite get it all, but you can make a dent; and in theory it will die out if sufficiently discouraged.) In the process, I was gratified to find two California slender salamanders (Batrachoseps attenuatus) in the front bed. Ron reported a couple more in the back yard. We hadn’t seen any of these odd amphibians for a while; good to know they’re still around. -more-

Viewed through the prism of the American mainstream media, Lebanon always appears a place that best defines the term Byzantine: a bewildering mélange of different religions, rival militias, cagey politicians, and shadowy regional proxies taking orders from Teheran, Tel Aviv, Damascus, Riyadh, and Ankara. -more-

In the past, you have seen a person with bizarre or unusual behavior, and may have heard a comment from someone next to you that “he is off his medication…” People often believe medication is the solution for problems with mentally ill people. And while there is significant truth to this belief, a solid recovery requires more than taking the prescribed medication. If this weren‘t true, mentally ill people would be relapsing much less than they do. -more-

The days of Cockney flower girls and Indiana librarians as our heroines are long past. Admittedly,NEXT TO NORMAL pushes limits: it’s a contemporary story could have been written by Ibsen. It takes us behind the façade of normal into domestic despair. -more-

We all love it when the curtain is pulled and the hubristic man behind it is revealed. We don’t all love it when the I-thing we just turned off and slipped into our pocket is shown to be the product of something near slave-labor. -more-

Grab your popcorn and fasten your seatbelts — San Francisco’s 13^th annual explosion of independent cinema is set to light up the Bay Area beginning February 3. This year, Indiefest’s intrepid organizers plan to screen more than 80 films from the US, Britain, Canada, France, Israel, Mexico, Sweden, Switzerland and Taiwan at the Roxie Theater (3117 16^th at Valencia) over two event-packed weeks. -more-

I’m nearing Medicare age, so when I go to a place where everybody is under 30, I get a little antsy; then, with a little liquor, I start to transform and regress and get back to 25 again--in about 5 minutes.

Many times I have bemoaned that too many gray and bald heads comprise the view of the audience in local theatre. I am pleased to tell you that there is a bonfire of theatrical talent glowing bright in a garage down on 55^thSt. near MLK in Oakland mysteriously named the K & S Ranchito.

MAD STASH (or Mad Stache) is a series of bawdy, hysterically funny and insightful “sketches” combined with professionally edited short films combined with a band whose lead singer may well shortly become a star. It follows the Saturday Night Live model with the major difference being that MAD STASH is entertaining and you don’t want to change the channel. It makes me wish I tweeted. -more-

Heartbreak House, a comedy Bernard Shaw began writing before the First World War and finished after war's end, is playing now at Live Oak Theater, an Actors Ensemble production directed by Robert Estes. Shaw called it "a fantasia in the Russian manner, on English things"--and fingered Chekhov's plays as an inspiration to write a comedy with a sting in its tail about the leisure classes of Europe in the build-up to the holocaust that lit up from the tinder of their studied obliviousness in 1914. -more-