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Legendary rapper MC Hammer was arrested during a stop at an East Bay Area mall earlier this week for allegedly resisting an officer, a police sergeant said Saturday. -more-

The United States Postal Service will hold a public hearing on Tuesday, February 26th at 7:00 p.m at the Berkeley City Council Chambers at 2134 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way in Berkeley. There will be a rally starting at 6 PM. We must be there to be sure the USPS hears our views on their proposal to relocate and ultimately sell Berkeley's beautiful historic Main Post Office. We urge you to come to this important hearing on Tuesday at the City Council Chambers at Old City Hall, Berkeley. -more-

The Berkeley School Board has begun its search for the next Superintendent of Schools, with the guidance of professionals from Ray & Associates, a highly experienced school executive search firm. -more-

This may be your last chance to save the main architecturally magnificent and service oriented Berkeley Post office and to oppose the privatization of the system. This Tuesday there will be an official public meeting of the United States Postal Service (USPS) to determine the fate of the post office. During the New Deal era of the Great Depression over 1100 post offices were built. Now the postal system and its employees are facing a raw deal. -more-

The USPS plans to sell off the downtown Berkeley facility and have a smaller scale storefront Post Office nearby. I suggest instead that the scope of USPS occupied space in the existing facility be reduced and other Federal agencies move in. -more-

The Stuart Pratt seniors and Channing/Durant neighbors have brought up one more point about the 2024 Durant/2025 Channing project. Due to the fact that the project uniquely spans two lots and is thus much larger than most projects, and is much larger than is suitable for this quiet residential neighborhood, there will be double the construction noise and construction impact on the neighbors, with simultaneous construction activity on two lots. Given that the neighborhood has been downzoned to three-stories maximum, construction of six or eight stories will be double or triple the amount of construction noise and activity than is appropriate for 2024 Durant--the construction impacts alone are totally inappropriate for the neighborhood in terms of noise and traffic and other safety threats and quality of life disruptions. -more-

" Weak.” “Embarrassing.” “A joke.”

Not my words. I got on the phone after looking at competing proposals from the Health Department and the Rent Stabilization Board regarding smoking regulations in multi-unit housing, and asked some of the public health advocates I know for their opinions. It wasn’t pretty.

With Richmond’s 100% smokefree law as the gold standard and Berkeley D-rated status quo as one of the worst, the new proposal manages to look even more egregious than leaving things as they are, which is hard to do. -more-

The editor is back in town, but still catching up. Here's a new issue, but it's minus a new editorial, which might be coming soon. Keep checking this space, and also use the Previous Issue button at the top of the front page to see everything new which was posted in our two-week-long last issue. -more-

As the Great Horsemeat Crisis continues to spread—“gallops” is the verb favored by the European press—across the continent, and countries pile on to blame Romania (France, Holland, Cyprus, etc.), what is becoming increasingly clear is that old-fashioned corporate greed, aided and abetted by politicians eager to gut “costly” regulations and industrial inspection regimes is behind the scandal. -more-

[This article was originally published on TomDispatch.com]

In 1968, the Phillip Morris Company launched a memorable campaign to sell Virginia Slims, a new brand of cigarettes targeting women, itself a new phenomenon. It had a brand-new slogan: “You’ve come a long way, baby.” The company plastered it on billboards nationwide and put it in TV ads that featured women of the early twentieth century being punished for smoking. In all their advertising, smoking was equated with a set of traits meant to capture the essence of women in a new era of equality -- independence, slimness, glamour, and liberation. -more-

On Sunday, February 17th, 40,000 Americans gathered in Washington, DC, to protest against approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. Thousands more demonstrated in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and other US cities. Nonetheless, there is momentum for pipeline construction; a recent Harris Poll found 69 percent of respondents supported it. However, Environmentalists believe pipeline approval would be the tipping point in the fight against global climate change. -more-

Now is the time to contact your U.S. Senators and Congressional representative to urge them to do all in their considerable power to sustain a HUD budget that will acknowledge the presence of low-income disabled senior citizens in your community. Do not refer to “affordable housing”. Specify “low income” Section 8 subsidized projects for disabled seniors. -more-

Verismo Opera will open its latest production, Verdi’s Il Trovatore,, this weekend at Berkeley’s Hillside Club.

Performances are on Saturday, February 23 at 7:30pm and Sunday, February 24 at 6:30pm . -more-

In Dror Moreh's Oscar-nominated documentary, The Gatekeepers, six former heads of Israel's spy agency speak candidly — and reflect critically — about their clandestine work. To begin to appreciate the magnitude of Moreh's accomplishment, try to imagine a US filmmaker getting all nine of the past CIA directors (from William Casey in 1980 to Leon Panetta) to face a camera and unburden their souls. -more-