Bayer Healthcare announced Wednesday that they will remain in Berkeley, allaying fears of city officials who were alarmed at the prospect of losing the city’s largest private sector employer. -more-

Faculty from every University of California campus, including UC Berkeley, are planning to walk out on Sept. 24 “in solidarity with students and staff to protest the defunding of public education and the UC administration’s mishandling of the budget crisis, which has done disproportionate harm to students and low-paid employees,” according to an ad hoc website ucfacultywalkout.com, which has been set up to gather faculty endorsement signatures, numbering 750 at press time. -more-

With Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates opting to take a slower approach to resolving the issues over the Downtown Area Plan, the possibility has emerged that some of those issues may be worked out though citywide changes to Berkeley policies and ordinances. -more-

City of Berkeley Transporta-tion Department staff has released the city’s draft of a Locally Preferred Alternative to AC Transit’s proposed Bus Rapid Transit system, the East Bay bus agency’s ambitious but controversial plan to establish fast-moving, light-rail-like bus service along the current 1 and 1R lines between downtown San Leandro and downtown Berkeley. -more-

A half-dozen Marin County Sheriff’s deputies and a court-appointed Special Master armed with a search warrant hit a Berkeley marijuana clinic Tuesday but left empty-handed. -more-

Swine flu is alive and well at UC Berkeley, and so are the many students who have contracted the H1N1 influenza virus, reports campus Medical Director Brad Buchman. -more-

They are not your average teenagers. They have held M-16s as kids, watched suicide bombings from their backyards and grown up hearing the rumblings in the West Bank. -more-

The Berkeley Zoning Adjustments Board last week hinted that unless Pacific Steel Casting addressed community concerns about odor and emissions effectively, it could be in trouble. -more-

California’s 2008-09 Accountability Progress Report released Tuesday shows that Berkeley Unified School District received an Academic Performance Index of 769, up 10 points from last year’s score, making steady progress toward the statewide target. -more-

Berkeley police arrested a homeless man in connection with a shooting at Martin Luther King Civic Center Park in downtown Berkeley Sept. 9. -more-

Berkeley organizations shouldn’t get their hopes up about any urned income in the new future. -more-

While the struggle over one of Berkeley’s newest landmarks has focused in part on a moment of national shame, for those who live there, a more crucial question is the fate of their rent-controlled apartments. -more-

Money could play an even more crucial role in Berkeley politics if members of the city’s Fair Campaign Practices Commission (FCPC) approves a proposal to raise contribution limits. -more-

Strong-arm robbery -more-

In the Sept. 10 story “Swanson Withdraws BART Oversight Bill,” the story indicates that Assemblymember Sandré Swanson’s AB 1586 BART Police Oversight bill is being carried over by Swanson to next year’s legislative session. The word “withdraws” only referred to withdrawal from consideration this year. However, because the Planet story also referred to several community groups and individuals who were withdrawing their support for the BART Police Oversight bill, the story may have given the mistaken impression that Assemblymember Swanson was withdrawing his support for the bill as well. Assemblymember Swanson continues to support the BART Police Oversight bill. -more-

To clarify Richard Brenneman’s Sept. 10 article, “Agrofuel Lab Appears Twice on Regent’s Slate”:   -more-

Do you remember that first phone call from your eldest sister? “What are we going to do about Mom—she doesn’t want any help and she won’t move out of the house.” That call set the stage for the last years of your widowed mother’s life. She still lived in the house where you grew up, she’d had some recent falls and sometimes was a bit confused on the phone, but she was still involved with her Wednesday bridge club and tried to get out to church occasionally. Four of her friends died in the last three years—and so did your father. -more-

On Sept. 14, I joined the Mad as Hell Doctors for single-payer Health Care in Denver, part way into their national tour. I’m writing from one of the Care-a-Vans for single-payer Health Insurance. My partners today are Barbara Matthews from the University of Washington and Bob Seward a retired Oregon internist who worked for the VA and in private practice. We rotated drivers every couple of hours all day on the way to our single-payer event in Des Moines, that drew an incredibly energized crowd. The event in a church was organized by the Des Moines, IA Catholic Worker movement with support from four other churches. Asked to speak up as to why they were mad as hell, a near endless lineup of people from as young as teenagers to the elderly came forward and passionately told their brief stories, all video-recorded and to be found via www.madashelldoctors.com. The panel of docs was as moved by the audience and the Catholic Worker folks who have been arrested fighting the health insurance industry here as the audience was moved by the docs. The youngest arrestee came up and gave a beautiful plea for people to move their concern to a higher level of activism and involvement to protect their grandchildren’s futures. She was 10 or 11 years old and has been to a Washington, D.C. speakout for single-payer. -more-

Little more than a month after the Berkeley Daily Planet ran a front-page article on Erling Horn on the occasion of his 104th birthday, the miraculous life of this admirable man came to an end. After falling in his apartment and suffering a stroke, he was taken to Kaiser Hospital, never to return to the Berkeley Town House, where he had happily resided for many years, though missing his adored wife, Margaret, who passed away at age 91 in 2000. Fortunately, he had an adoring family who looked in on him frequently. His grandson, Jacques, lived across the hall and faithfully attended to his needs, as did his daughter, Maggie, when visiting from Canada. His son, Erling, Jr., former mayor of Lafayette, visited him regularly. -more-

One of the oddest—indeed, surreal—encounters around the war in Afghanistan has to be a telephone call this past July 27. On one end of the line was historian Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History. On the other, State Department special envoy Richard Holbrooke and the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal. The question: How does Washington avoid defeat like it suffered in Southeast Asia 40 years ago? -more-

My uncle, Charlie Reid, moved to Richmond in the early 1930s, and my mother often told the story of how my grandmother, Jennie Reid, first went to visit Uncle Charlie out there on the bus. When Grandma Reid got back home, she was sobbing, asking “Why did Charlie move to that God-forsaken place?” -more-

I’ll take the weekend’s set of rainstorms as the starting gun for fall planting season this year. As some might have noticed, I’ve been personally less than productive lately, and quite slow. (Blame the damned fruitless mulberries that shut my lungs down way back in spring. Plus, I Blame the Patriarchy, but then I always do.) As a result, I’m seriously impatient with limitations like energy and stamina and time itself. I want to plant! -more-

On the morning of Feb. 1, 1895, a Berkeley carpenter by the name of A.E. Spaulding entered Stricker’s cigar store at 2132 Shattuck Ave. Laying a bundle of medications on the counter, he announced that he wished to leave it there. Then he walked to the rear of Durgin & Bleakley, a furniture and undertaking establishment at 2129 Center St. Leaning against a barn, Spaulding shot himself through the heart with a 38-caliber revolver. -more-

It always amazes me how nature manages to foil our best laid plans. Nothing is predictable, even the ground we build our houses on. And I’m not just talking about faults or landslides. -more-

Like cyber-chef Julie Powell in the movie Julie and Julia, Colin Beavan has followed the blog-book-flick path to fame. His blog about trying to live a “no Impact” lifestyle in the midst of Manhattan spawned a book, a website (NoImpactMan.com) and a documentary. (No Impact Man, opens in the Bay Area on Sept. 18.) -more-

“I’m about to go off to the grand opening of the fancy new Freight and Salvage folk music coffee house,” I told my son Joe, “but I seriously doubt that it will be as good as the original old funky Freight was back in 1972.” Remember the old Freight and Salvage? Legendary! -more-

Got old family footage you’d like to see on the big screen? Once again, Pacific Film Archive is participating in the international celebration of Home Movie Day, inviting patrons to drop off their old films by Sept. 25 for consideration for screening on Oct. 17. Bring in your home movies, in 8mm, Super-8mm and 16mm formats, and PFA will include as many as possible in the screening, where participants are invited to share their films and memories. -more-

The annual Berkeley Film and Video and Festival returns this year with yet another eclectic program of independent cinema. -more-

The publisher and I were invited to attend the meeting of the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce Governmental Affairs Committee meeting on Monday as executives of a Chamber member business, so we went. The meeting was originally billed as a chance to get to know the Chamber’s newly hired CEO, and each Chamber member attending was asked “to come prepared to give [the new CEO] a three-minute summary of what each sees as the one or two most critical features of the Berkeley political landscape. Once these summaries have been delivered, we will have a lively Q&A.” Unfortunately, that never happened, because the new guy didn’t take the job after all, for reasons undisclosed. -more-

PEDESTRIAN SAFETY -more-

It’s déjà vu all over again. Or back to the drawing board. Or how I like to refer to Berkeley process: governing by the last person standing.  -more-

The Berkeley Downtown Plan our City Council recently tried to foist on us was turned back by direct citizen-action with an astounding 9,200 signatures, nearly twice the number required to place this highly controversial proposal on the ballot. Clearly the city’s Downtown Plan isn’t the downtown the citizens of Berkeley want, nor is it the fatally-compromised downtown plan the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC) approved. -more-

This evening, Sept. 10, the railroad horns are unusually loud. This nuisance increases often when cold foggy air comes into the bay through the Golden Gate, moving underneath the warm summer air. Since the speed of sound is proportional to the absolute temperature, the upper warm air conducts the sound faster than the cold air near the surface. Thus the sound that would have dispersed upwards bends downward toward the surface focusing the sound like an acoustical lens. This amplifies the railroad horn sound pollution sound in our hill areas. On hot days, we can tell when the cool ocean air is coming in by its sound. -more-

We are all very impressed with the action of two UC police officers, who apprehended kidnapper Philip Garrido. Nevertheless, the recent murder of Yale pharmacology graduate student Annie Le inside her own lab building reminds us that danger never stops. The case strikes a cord with me because Annie reminds me of many of the excellent students here at Berkeley, close to her hometown of Placerville. -more-

Last week’s Berkeley Daily Planet generated a good stir of thought on bicycle safety, but most of it misses the point, kind of like the guy who wrote the letter railing against new pavement at North Berkeley BART. Arguing for helmets, for parking fees for bicyclists, for us all to ride like Lance Armstrong, or against traffic circles all loses us in the forest. The focus on traffic safety should first and foremost be on creating great streets in Berkeley where everyone can safely use the roadway. Think about Fourth Street in Berkeley—the shopping district part. You don’t need a helmet when riding this street, you don’t have to be an experienced bicyclist to ride there, pedestrians can safely walk around and cross the street with no traffic lights, and no amount of bicycle parking fees will accomplish anything. The street works for everyone, it’s a great street. All streets in Berkeley should be like this. But as long as traffic engineers are required to move more cars along the street, we’ll never have streets like this, streets that are safe. -more-

It appears that the fair citizens of Berkeley are considering a proposed law requiring all bicyclists to wear helmets. Even Carol Denny, usually so level headed and reliably libertarian when it comes to legislating the behavior of our citizenry, seems to have climbed on board this bandwagon. She writes in her letter to the editor that it will force us all to become better role models for our children.  -more-

Pacific Steel Casting Company (PSC) was the topic at the Sept. 10 Zoning Adjustment Board’s meeting at which PSC’s current performance review was presented as an information item. The staff report stated that everything is fine, but this preposterous claim only served to provoke community members and the ZAB to question what dowe actually know, think we know, and need to know about PSC.  -more-

KPFA listeners know that the Local Station Board elections tend to be acrimonious. What many listeners might not realize is that the controversy of the LSB elections actually reflects a historical issue about the nature of community radio itself. The four of us founded the Independents for Community Radio affinity group of LSB candidates with the goal of ensuring that KPFA remains rooted in the communities it serves. In October 2008, nearly 90 KPFA staff members issued a statement articulating their goals for leadership at the station. They called for management committed to fulfilling the historic Transformation Proposal made during the 1999 KPFA Lockout. They also called for leaders who support the unpaid staff, maintain a respectful and collaborative approach to station operations, and understand that KPFA should include community representatives on its decision making bodies. These aspirations remain largely unfulfilled or have been undermined by the current management and its Concerned Listener allies. -more-

If you’re a KPFA member, you should gotten a ballot by now from the Pacifica Foundation that asks you to rank 29 candidates for nine seats on KPFA’s Local Station Board. Here are the people I’m endorsing (I’ll explain why below). You can read more about them at ww.concernedlisteners.org. In no particular order: Conn Hallinan, Dan Siegel, Andrea j. Turner, Mike Smith, John Van Eyck, Jack Kurzweil, Virginia Rodriguez, Pamela Drake, Donald Goldmacher, Mark Hernandez. -more-