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BERKELEY -- A longtime Berkeley tree sitter has been convicted of illegal lodging and pointing a laser at a police officer. Fifty-five-year-old Matthew Dodt received a 60-day suspended sentence and three years of probation . . .

Berkeley considers closing its multimillion dollar Wells Fargo account over bank's handling of foreclosure crisis Berkeley is considering closing its Wells Fargo account worth $350 million and entrusting the money to a community bank or credit union, saying the bank is partly to blame for the financial crisis of the last four years.The City Council voted unanimously Tuesday night to study cutting ties with the bank and rewarding "responsible financial institutions" with its business. The city manager will return with a report in May on the feasibility of ending the 8-year-old contract, which is up for renewal at the end...

“The Bay Area Occupy Movement has got to stop using Oakland as their playground,” said Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, speaking at a press conference Saturday evening after a day of demonstrations called by Occupy Oakland that saw approximately 400 arrests, multiple injuries and numerous confrontations with police. She ticked off the damage that had been done when a group of protesters broke into City Hall, overturning a scale model of the building, vandalizing a children's art exhibit, and burning an American flag. The next day in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, she returned to her talking point: "It's...

Progressive observers treat the Tea Party’s forays into land use planning as the work of paranoid reactionaries. The March-April 2011 issue of Mother Jones ran an article by Stephanie Mencimer that portrayed Tea Partiers as “nutters” whose opposition to increased density and mass transit is rooted in “a hostility to what it sees as elites” and a pro-sprawl, suburban lifestyle. Last December, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s Anthony Flint riffed off of Mencimer’s piece in a post on the Atlantic magazine’s “Urban Wonk” blog that decried Tea Party disruption of planning efforts from California to Maine to Florida. The...

The University's recent bulldozer "maintenance" in the Park is problematic in several ways. First, it is a violation of trust and respect. The University snuck into the Park in the early hours with no notice to the community and long time Park volunteers. The Pergola, or trellis in the West End, which UC rather mysteriously decapitated, was designed and agreed upon during almost a year of meetings with University architects and the volunteers who built it. And the information that the University is providing for their recent attack is misleading, if not outright falsehood. I'll eat my hat if the...

Bulldozers ploughed through the west end of People’s Park today turning decades of community garden into rubble. Dozens of police watched as crews tossed mountains of healthy plants and a community-built arbor into dumpsters, leaving behind stripped earth. A young student who claimed to be volunteering as a police assistant handed out university fliers which stated, “In response to park users and neighbor concerns, we are doing maintenance work to address the rat infestation and safety issues in People’s Park.” A UC press release described the activity as "an effort to provide students and the broader community with safer, more...

Being out and about in Berkeley in the week before Christmas provides a good window on the world in 2011. A lot of fuss has been made, rightly so, about the major divide between the 1% super-rich and the 99% others, but the old distinction of the haves versus the have-nots is still valid. Berkeley has recently been certified as the center of this split. We have the biggest gap between the rich and the poor of any city in the Bay Area. Of course, the simple explanation is that we’re the rich city most tolerant of also including some...

olice said they'd enforce no-camping restrictions in Civic Center Park, but they didn't say when. When has since come and gone—and so has the encampment. Goodbye, and good riddance? Twenty-five Occupy addicts, and some curiosity-seekers showed up at Thursday's general assembly, in Civic Center Park, to debate responses to the city's take-down of the camp. Many denounced the troubled camp, but some supported it. One Occupier tried to rally the GA to march across the street to the Berkeley police station, but had to do so, himself. After 10 minutes, he returned—a man without a crowd. The GA was disrupted...

I don't know about you, but I'm getting fed up with these self-important gangs of masked, black-clad agitators running roughshod over our city streets. They've occupied parks, shut down roadways, vandalized private property, assaulted law-abiding citizens and left entire communities afraid to venture into financially struggling downtown business districts. They've wielded spray cans and left behind eyesores that have incensed the community. I am speaking, of course, about the police.

An Open Letter to UC Berkeley Students, Faculty, Administration & Regents from the UC Berkeley Police Officers’ Association It is our hope that this letter will help open the door to a better understanding between UC Berkeley police and the University community. The UC Berkeley Police Officers’ Association, representing approximately 64 campus police officers, understands your frustration over massive tuition hikes and budget cuts, and we fully support your right to peacefully protest to bring about change.  It was not our decision to engage campus protesters on November 9th. We are now faced with “managing” the results of years of poor...

Flash: U.C. Berkeley Faculty Senate Registers 10-1 Vote Condemning Administration Response to Occupy Berkeley ProtestersThe Berkeley Division of the University of California Faculty Senate endorsed, by a 10-1 margin (336-34), a group of four resolutions expressing, with varying degrees of specificity, their lack of confidence in the way Berkeley administrators have handled student protests. Three U.C. Berkeley executives, Chancellor Robert Birgenau and two of his subordinates, attempted an explanation of their actions on November 9, when students and faculty were clubbed by police. They were greeted with stony silence by the faculty members in the front of the International House...

The Bay Area has come down with a serious case of Protest Fatigue. The 99 percent of Northern Californians who want to go about their business are being jammed with protests and forced to pay for shutdowns imposed by the 1 percent of activists who don't know the difference between free speech and free camping. There are so many protests here that the group No Justice No BART had to call off a planned demonstration on Nov. 2 in order to accommodate activists planning to take public transit to the Occupy Oakland general strike. When President Obama came to San...

A face-off on the UC Berkeley campus this morning pitted Democrats vs. Republicans, pro-affirmative-action students vs. those favoring race-blind policies, and, ultimately, cupcakes vs. brownies. None other than former UC Regent and affirmative action opponent Ward Connerly, showed up on Sproul Plaza today to sell frosted cupcakes priced according to the race of the buyer. Connerly, who wrote Proposition 209, the state's voter-approved ban on race preferences in government programs, sat at a table with the Berkeley College Republicans to hawk their baked goods. The group's stunt, which some students have called racist and insensitive, was touted as a satirical...

I don't know about the political ethics or math skills of the UC Berkeley students who came up with the idea for an Increase Diversity Bake Sale, but they certainly know how to draw a crowd. The student Republican group that sponsored a race-based bake sale set to be held on the campus today must have been counting on raising more than just the cookie dough. There are few places in America more reactionary than a college campus, and among them, UC Berkeley is a leader. A bake sale flyer posted on Facebook last week linked the price of pastries...

The Berkeley College Republicans have taken a strong stance against a proposed law that would allow, among other things, race to be taken into consideration during the admissions process. They say on a Facebook event page: "The Berkeley College Republicans firmly believe measuring any admit's merit based on race is intrinsically racist." In this note I'll show that their belief is wrong. Not only is the use of race in admissions not intrinsically racist - the failure to consider race and other similar factors is intrinsically racist. This is not some subjective interpretation of histories of oppression. This is not...

BERKELEY -- The protest season began with a near bang at UC Berkeley this afternoon as hundreds of chanting, fist-pumping students angry about tuition hikes charged into Tolman Hall after a raucous noon rally. They filled the ground-floor hallways and jostled police officers. One student grabbed an officer's .40-caliber magazine, sending the ammunition clip flying. Officer Donna Chapman, who had been trying to order students to clear the building entrance, ran to pick up the clip before protesters could grab it. Around her, students shouted "No cuts, no fees, education must be free" as they flooded into the building. Classrooms...

<p>First she was buoyantly up in a "dangerous" People's Park tree protesting "Everything," but now she's at Highland Hospital with a broken back, ending an eight-day protest which was a protest-in-progress.</p> <p>Her last fall from the tree was her second. She fell in her second day in the tree and was caught in the arms of a friend before she hit the ground. "Moon Shadow," who was first up, last Monday, reportedly took a plunge when—out on a limb—he helped attach a protest banner.</p>

A bizarre showdown between well-known indie journalist Josh Wolf and an optometry professor is set to reach its dramatic conclusion Friday in Berkeley Small Claims Court. Cal Prof. Robert DiMartino wants Wolf to reimburse him $1,066, and a judge will decide if he has to. But this dispute is about cash like "Bleak House" is about a will. To Wolf, it's a question of democratic principles. A known First Amendment-hugger, the June graduate of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism first gained notoriety in 2007 after serving 226 days in federal prison for refusing to give police the video he'd...

BERKELEY -- UC Berkeley is asking some of the country's largest foundations to help undocumented immigrants afford college. Buoyed by a new state law that allows public colleges and universities to offer private scholarships to students who came to the United States illegally, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau said Wednesday he has spoken to major organizations such as the Carnegie and Ford foundations about helping the university. "One was nervous about the political impact," he said in an interview after his annual back-to-school media briefing. "The other said, 'This is fantastic.' " Birgeneau has been a vocal supporter of undocumented...

ATHENS, Greece - 235 years after the American colonies declared independence from Britain, the passenegers on the U.S. Boat to Gaza call for a new American Declaration of Independence, this time from Israel. The passengers issued their call from the decks of the U.S.-flagged boat, The Audacity of Hope, which is currently confined to a Greek military pier near Athens, while its captain sits in jail. Like the Founders in Philadelphia, the passengers in Athens recognize that "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them to another, a...