Students at the University of California at Berkeley are continuing a sit-in on campus today following a decision Thursday by the Board of Regents to raise tuition by as much as 5 percent a year for the next five years, university police said. -more-

Since Wednesday night, students, alumni, and community members have held the building of Wheeler Hall as a direct response to the undemocratic decision to yet again raise the fees required to receive what is supposed to be a quality education from what is supposed to be a public institution. Similar events fueled Occupy Cal years ago. Several demands have been made, and the demands are evolving with the movement, but at the core, students will not leave this building until fee hikes stop. Students at Davis, Riverside, and Santa Cruz are currently acting in solidarity, with more UCs to surely join in the coming days. Protestors are asking for donations of food, bedding, people who can come to Wheeler for any amount of time. For live updates, at this time #OccupyWheeler and #fightthehike are being used. -more-

Students and activists protesting tuition hikes remain camped out at Wheeler Hall at the University of California at Berkeley today after taking over the lobby last night, according the university's police department. -more-

In the movie about Edward Snowden's revelations and ordeals (Citizenfour), there is a line that pretty much characterized the current political dilemma -- instead of living in a nation made up of the elected and the electors, the major division seems to be between the rulers and the ruled. Unquestionably, democracy is declining. You are familiar with many of the problems that have been undermining democratic decision making --unlimited political spending by the corporations and the wealthy, disenfranchising of minorities and the poor by requiring voter ID cards along with other means, and election fraud. With regard to the latter, the discrepancy in voting patterns that we see by comparing exit polls with the official vote is increasing. And note what happened in Georgia. Forty thousand votes were found missing, and no explanation has so far been offered. -more-

The courageous whistleblower, Alayne Fleischmann, who exposed JPMorgan Chase’s mortgage fraud has finally moved out of the shadows and gone public. She provided details how she witnessed massive criminal securities fraud in the bank’s mortgage operations. Her story is profiled in Matt Taibbi’s new Rolling Stone investigation, "The $9 Billion Witness . .” Fleischmann accused JP Morgan of committing outright fraud by overstating the quality of mortgages it was selling to investors. When the toxic securities turned sour investors lost faith in the banking system which precipitated the housing crisis of 2008 that caused millions of home foreclosures. -more-

Sierra Club members have an opportunity to elect a strong environmentalist to the Northern Alameda County group (NAC) Executive Committee by voting for Richard Bangert of Alameda. He deserves the support of Berkeley members, who outnumber those from other cities within the NAC jurisdiction that also includes Albany and Oakland. In the past, Berkeley and Oakland have dominated NAC, leaving the island city unrepresented. -more-

You're on a two-lane road in a 40-MPH zone, and the vehicle in front of you is doing twenty five. Another car is tailgating you from behind. You wait until there are no oncoming cars in the opposite lane and you begin to pass the slow car. Of course, the slow car speeds up at that point. Meanwhile, an oncoming car has appeared, and you need to gun the accelerator to avoid a head-on collision. Aborting the two lane pass is not an option--the gap in cars has closed up. -more-

I was trying to catch a bus to downtown Berkeley from the stop at San Pablo and Monroe Street. There was so much shattered glass strewn around the bus stop I could not find a yard of clear space in which to stand while waiting for my bus. I made my way downtown on foot because I had urgent errands to run. I had a problem with extreme littering at a bus stop in Albany two years ago. When I called the city office I was told it was AC Transit's responsibility to keep bus stop areas clean and safe. I wonder which department will take charge to ensure that needy riders of the Transit system don't have to put their safety on the line as they wait for a bus. -more-

Woody Nance was born December 4^th 1938 in Troy North Carolina and died August 20^th 2014 in Los Angeles. He grew up in rural circumstances with brother Hank and sister Liz. After graduating high school in Troy, he attended Highpoint College and then Duke University as a divinity student. He moved to California in the early Sixties and was deeply involved in the Free Speech movement, which began in 1964 at the Berkeley campus. He worked as a lumper (unloading trucks on the waterfront), and as a masseuse for rock stars (he once gave a massage to Van Morrison). He lived at various communes in San Francisco. -more-

Happy Thanksgiving weekend to anyone who's online today! There will NOT be a whole new issue this week, but there WILL be important new things added as time permits, so keep on checking. -more-

Democrats got shellacked on November 4th. Republicans gained at least 8 Senate seats, 12 House seats, and 3 governorships. Democratic partisans spread the blame around: President Obama, Party leaders, lethargic blue voters, and a hostile media. Nonetheless, there are five elementary lessons to be learned from the debacle. -more-

This Senior Power column (#177) is mostly about hospice. In July 2010 my column (#20) was about Death Hospice Palliative; it is accessible via the Planet’s online archive. That was then. This is now.

Hospice is a care philosophy based on belief that every person with a life-limiting terminal illness, regardless of age, is entitled to be as free of pain and symptoms as long as possible.

Some folks, including “professionals,” assume that hospice provides assisted suicide. It is currently possible to obtain physician-assisted suicide, albeit not easily, in three states. Popular literature conveys two pictures of hospice-- an at-home service and a building/program elsewhere. It can be confusing. -more-

Meditation allows me to have more inner peace in spite of troublesome thoughts that may occur and in spite of the difficult circumstances that I sometimes experience. It causes me to seek relief through mental exercises and not through the escapism of alcohol or illicit drugs. Meditation gives me the hope that I can feel better when suffering. Meditation allows me to fall right to sleep at night. -more-

It is now old news that San Francisco’s proposed Soda Tax (Proposition E) did not pass and Berkeley’s (Measure D) did. Proposition E would have placed a two-cent per ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages while Berkeley’s Measure D will now place a one-cent per ounce tax. -more-

Perhaps my greatest experience in a lifetime of opera-going was hearing Luciano Pavarotti sing Rodolfo and Mirella Freni sing Mimi in 1967 in their first ever appearances in San Francisco. As I recall, Pavarotti had only sung once before in the USA, in Houston. The impression made on me by Pavarotti and Freni in these roles was mind-blowing. Later, when these two great singers returned to San Francisco in 1988 to sing the same two roles in La Bohème, I took my 15-year-old daughter to hear them, and she too was blown away. Although I have continued to love La Bohème, –and who doesn’t? – nothing has ever come close to eliciting in me the spine-tingling shivers I experienced hearing Pavarotti and Freni as Rodolfo and Mimi. -more-

Under the auspices of Cal Performances, Zellerbach Hall hosted a much ballyhooed mixed-media production of English composer Benjamin Britten’s 1964 work Curlew River: A Parable for Church Performance. Featuring noted British tenor Ian Bostridge, Curlew River was given two performances – Friday and Saturday, November 14-15. This work was initially inspired by Britten’s 1956 trip to Japan, where he eagerly steeped himself in traditional Japanese culture. With his lifelong partner Peter Pears, Britten attended two performances in Japan of the 15^th century noh drama Sumidagawa, which tells the tale of a woman driven mad by the kidnapping of her young son, whom she seeks endlessly as she wanders the countryside. Britten was particularly struck by the chanting and austere instrumentation used in this noh drama. Once back in England Britten began to think of setting this story to music that would combine Japanese elements and the style of European medieval mystery plays. -more-

The Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA) will hold its 40th Anniversary Celebration on Sunday, 23 November 2014, from 2:00 to 4:00 pm.

Join us as we mark 40 years of preservation advocacy, education, and activism.

We welcome the entire community to this free event, which also celebrates the Landmarks Preservation Ordinance and the many struggles to preserve the heritage and texture of Berkeley. -more-

When Abraham Lincoln finally succumbed to John Wilkes Booth’s bullet after an all-night struggle, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton is supposed to have intoned over the President’s body “now he belongs to the ages.” While Stanton probably did say—or wanted to say— something like that, the actual quote itself was most likely polished up and prettified sometime afterwards for posterity’s sake, either by Stanton himself or someone who was standing nearby. That is how reality so often morphs into myth. -more-

Shot in luminous black-and-white, the cinematography in The Better Angels pulls viewers into the boyhood world of a young Abe Lincoln, revealing the early forces—including two strong women—that forged his character. The film—by Terrence Malick's longtime protégé, A.J. Edwards‑regales the senses with haunting images of a raw, half-tamed world—in this case, rural Indiana in the year 1817—that recall the stark clarity of Civil War photographer Matthew Brady and the magnificence of landscape artist Ansel Adams. -more-

"A Parable for Church Performance" ... The subtitle for Benjamin Britten's unusual musical theater piece, 'Curlew River,' is precise, yet doesn't illuminate what the spectator will see and hear. And the promotional tag, "part Noh theater and part medieval Mystery Play" can make the performance sound more a glib or academic hybrid than a moving experience ... -more-

The Iranian American Community of Northern California will hold a Picket-Line in Berkeley on Saturday November 22nd to oppose the horrifying human rights condition in Iran and especially the high number of public executions -more-