Is Berkeley mean to its homeless? A new study by two national homeless advocacy groups says so. -more-

While Berkeley suffers from the same impacts from a beleaguered economy as do other East Bay cities, the effects seem to be milder, says Michael Caplan. -more-

Two of the three food vendors at the Bear’s Lair Food Court have accepted a new lease agreement and will stay on. The third, Healthy Heavenly Foods, rejected the offer and plans to move out by December. -more-

UC Berkeley officials announced Tuesday that Assistant Police Chief Mitch Celaya will be promoted to chief Aug. 1. -more-

The Berkeley City Council holds a rare Thursday meeting today, with a light “mopping up” agenda planned before the summer break. -more-

The East Bay Community Scholarship Fund (EBCSF) will provide $70 worth of school supplies to 3,500 Berkeley Unified School District K-12 students starting next spring. -more-

Peralta Community College District’s board of directors moved quickly to look into charges of district improprieties raised in last week’s series of Bay Area News Group articles, beginning an investigation by their own inspector general and calling on the state chancellor of the California Community Colleges to appoint a special investigator to look into the charges as well. -more-

The $1.5 billion gambling, hotel, entertainment and housing resort planned for Richmond’s Point Molate would only create three significant impacts that couldn’t be readily remedied, concludes the project’s draft environmental impact report (EIR). -more-

The Berkeley Unified School District’s Personnel Commission is looking for a new member. -more-

UC Berkeley wants someone to demolish “approximately 35 structures located at the UC Gill Tract Agricultural Field Station in Albany.” -more-

The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley’s independent student newspaper, can stay put—for now. -more-

Berkeley City College has a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education. -more-

David Teece is having a bad year. -more-

Chevron Monday filed an appeal challenging Contra Costa County Superior rulings that forced the company to shut down construction in Richmond. -more-

The July 9 meeting of the Berkeley Housing Advisory Commission kicked off with a bit of improv theater. -more-

A 911 call led to an arrest and seizure of explosives by Berkeley police Saturday. -more-

Berkeley police are investigating two sexual assaults which took place early Thursday morning. -more-

A Berkeley man who had been charged with murder in connection with the shooting death of a former friend near the University of California at Berkeley campus three years ago will be released from jail today after serving only 18 months. -more-

When you visit the Berkeley Public Library you’ll see staff at the circulation desk, at the reference desk, and others who are shelving books. What you are less likely to see are all those library employees, mostly in offices on the second floor of the Central Library, who move a book along from the time it’s either requested by a patron or a librarian. These are the employees who select, order, catalog, and process the 50,000 items added to the library’s collection every year. -more-

During the City Council and public debate on the downtown, much of the discussion revolved around the super-sized height of the buildings. My comments focused on affordable housing, public transit and environmental impacts such as greenhouse gases. Here I will describe what I see as the super-sized flaws of the Downtown Area Plan. -more-

The ethnic diversity of faculty across the campuses of the University of California is the subject of debate and controversy; however there can be little doubt about ethical diversity. It abounds. We need look no further than the present university budget woes, and in particular two competing proposals offered by faculty at Santa Cruz and San Diego. -more-

Times are tough. We are all very aware of this inescapable fact. Individual citizens are struggling with unemployment and reduced incomes. Businesses have seen a sharp drop-off in spending by their customers and, of course, government at every level is struggling to balance budgets that have been affected by declining tax revenues of every category, resulting in a scramble to find solutions to budget woes. -more-

While English language television in the United States mined the minutiae of Michael Jackson’s upcoming funeral, millions watching Spanish, Portuguese and French language media in the rest of the Americas were transfixed by live broadcasts of the Honduran military shooting and killing a 10-year-old boy and other protesters. -more-

After six months as president, Barack Obama has put his own imprint on U.S. foreign policy. That’s fortunate because George Bush broke everything he touched. -more-

I probably first heard the term “Port Chicago” from a 1982 article by now-UC Berkeley professor Robert Allen and researcher-historian Peter Vogel about “the Port Chicago disaster and mutiny” in The Black Scholar magazine. I did not finish the article at the time. I was interested in all things African-American history in those days, and certainly would have been drawn to the subject of a Black naval mutiny. I’m sure I lost interest when I found that the “Port Chicago Mutiny” mentioned in the Allen-Vogel article was not a mutiny in the sense of the Bounty mutiny or a slave revolt-Black sailors taking over a ship from its white officers at gunpoint-but was more of a work stoppage, and, further, that it had occurred during World War II. I was born just a few years after V-J Day and grew up inundated with the subject. World War II was my parents’ war-or so I thought-and I was of a generation that sought desperately to separate ourselves from our parents and leap over them to a more distant past. -more-

Joe gave me an antique garden book as a 36th anniversary present. A true antique, over a century old: The Garden Book of California, by Belle Sumner Angier, 1906, Paul Elder and Company. It does not have an ISBN number, nor does the publisher’s address have a ZIP code. -more-

A few weeks ago, I made the dangerous trek out of Berkeley and into Contra Cost County. I took off my tie-dye, trimmed my mustache and put on dark glasses. True, the “Hate is not a family value” license plate holder was still visible but I parked far enough from the house to be safe. It was OK. We avoided politics. For all I know, they voted for Obama. Lots of people voted for Obama and, despite all my joking, they were actually very nice. -more-

THURSDAY, JULY 23 -more-

The sweep of bowed strings—cello and violin—blends in with piano and guitar, coming down from the musicians’ loft in the Altarena Playhouse, a little moody, impersonal yet country-flavored, powering the singing and texturing the story of The Spitfire Grill, the 2001 musical from the 1996 movie of the same name. -more-

A few years back, pioneering stand-up comedian and social satirist Mort Sahl—who is appearing with veteran humorist Dick Gregory at the Rrazz Room in downtown San Francisco through Saturday—was asked, after a show at the Osher Marin Jewish Community Center, where he placed himself in the political spectrum. -more-

Summertime ... Charlie Brown stolidly leading his baseball team down to defeat, hit after hit flying high over his head as pitcher, while the players gossip about him in the outfield. Soon it’ll be fall—with Lucy yanking away the football she’s suckered the ever-gullible Charlie Brown into trying to kick off. -more-

This weekend may prove to be the choicest moment of summer opera in the East Bay, indoors and out—and over a span of millennia, from ancient Rome through the 18th century to the present day. Two adventuresome independent local companies, Open Opera and Oakland Opera Theater, will stage, respectively, Mozart’s most famous opera, The Marriage of Figaro in period dress, outdoors (and free) in John Hinkel Park, and a “a post-modern view” of Handel’s opera on its 300th anniversary, Agrippina 2000, American Emperor at their Oakland Metro Operahouse near Jack London Square. -more-

The sky-blue Victorian villa—part Stick-Eastlake, part Gothic Revival, and proudly holding aloft a tower and weathervane on the northeastern corner of Francisco and Milvia Streets—is a striking sight. -more-