I collected 22 new business cards today.

Made 22 new friends.

I’ll probably never see any of them again but we share a common bond _ we are journalists. 

The Institute of Internataional Education, an educational and training nonprofit, organized a trip for the 22 international reporters and writers to the Oakland Tribune Friday.

The group was from Angola, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Egypt, Ethiopia, Guinea, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Latvia, Macau, Macedonia, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mexico, Nigeria, the People’s Republic of China, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Eight were women.

The international delegation had been in the United States for 10 days by the time they got to the ninth- floor Oakland Tribune newsroom by the airport.  

They seemed to like the Tribune _ at least they oohed and awed over view from the office building where we’ve worked for the past year.

They told me to skip the tour. They’d seen the newsroom of the Washington Post. Wonder what the view is like there.

Locally, they’d been to Wired and Mother Jones magazines in San Francisco. And they’d visited the Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley to hear about the Chauncey Bailey Project, a consortium of newspaper, radio and TV reporters continuing the investigation of Oakland Post Editor Bailey’s murder and the connected probe into Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland.

The San Francisco Chronicle didn’t return their calls, one of the organizers told me. They have no view.

The group was visibly awestruck by the fact that we cover every Oakland murder and that Oakland is ranked as the fourth most dangerous city in the United States. 

Some of the women told me that females only get to cover light news, education or health care in their countries. They seemed surprised that a woman was allowed to cover homicides. They asked me if I’d ever been scared covering the bloodshed in the kill zones. I said I’d only been threatened once in my 15-year career. They seemed happy to hear that.

They also wanted to know if we covered suicides (we generally don’t unless the person jumps off our building, which happened four years ago when we were at Tribune Tower), kidnappings (yes) and how we get the police to cooperate with us.

Many of the journalists said they aren’t able to cover such news events under strict regulations from their governments.

We talked about the death of the newspaper “scoop” because of online news sites and how multi-media has changed the way we work. They  heard more about the Bailey project from long-time Tribune reporters Cecily Burt and a few tales of woe from crime reporter Harry Harris.

They took business cards from us. One invited me to Sri Lanka to visit.

They thanked us profusely and then got back on the elevators and left. 

I’ll likely never see them again. But I’ll hold on to those business cards. You never know when you might get sent to Tanzania on a story.   

Berkeley Police bicycle Officer Frank Landrum was on routine rolling patrol Tuesday around lunchtime when he spotted a woman riding her bicycle on the sidewalk in the 2100 block of Shattuck Ave. That’s a city no-no and Landrum headed toward the woman to tell her to stay on the street.

But as he got closer, he noticed a man approaching the woman and witnessed the hand-off of a small, green Cellophane-wrapped ball. They looked like round Rice Krispies treats.

Asked about what was inside the plastic wrap, she said, “It’s edible,’’ according to police spokesman Officer Andrew Frankel.

Further probing revealed that the snack was a marijuana-laced Rice Krispies treat. Seems that eating one could lead to a vicious cycle. Eat the treat, get the munchies, eat the treat… you get the point.

Turns out, Berkeley’s finest found that the woman, Tiffannie Cushing, 18, had nearly two dozen of the individually wrapped snacks on her.

She was arrested for giving away marijuana (who knew there was such a charge?) and possession for sale of marijuana. The 35-year-old male buyer was cited for possession of marijuana. The officer did not cite Cushing for riding on the sidewalk, Frankel said.

A shout-out to Save the Oaks at the Stadium member Doug Buckwald who told me several weeks ago that The Economist magazine was looking into a story about the longtime tree sit outside Memorial Stadium at the University of California, Berkeley.

Buckwald was right.

The most recent edition of The Economist gives ink to the most outspoken and possibly the most hirsute (their word) tree-sitter Zachary Running Wolf. The mag story also carries an Associated Press shot of two naked people (not Running Wolf) in the trees with the caption. “Come up and see my nuts.”

Running Wolf, (above) one of the original inhabitants of People’s Perch, tells The Economist reporter his reasoning for the 17-month tree-sit.

“There are `thousands of bodies underneath us’ of the Ohlone tribe, he says, and construction on this sacred burial ground amounts to `a hate crime; we call it Guantánamo Berkeley’”. “The secret truth, he explains, is that the Illuminati and Masons are behind the idea to build on the site, because the grove is at the intersection of compass lines connecting the Haas School of Business (money) with Alcatraz (state violence) and the Lawrence Berkeley lab that gave America nukes.”

Right.

Of course Running Wolf’s statements are well worn. But what is shocking is that Running Wolf talked to a real live news reporter. Running Wolf stopped talking to me more than six months ago after I wrote a story about his fine-dodging and drug charges and fantasy to recall the Berkeley mayor. He also told me that thousands of other Native Americans would do the same.

I also have it on good authority that he no longer speaks to a few Chron reporters.

Strangely, there is no byline on the Economist piece on page 49. But UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof assures me that he was interviewed by a flesh and blood reporter.

In the story, Mogulof sites the university’s reasons for wanting to raze the trees to make room for the $125 million sports training center.

“For every tree we cut down we will plant three new ones,” he says. What’s more, he says in the story, archaeologists have found “no evidence” that the grove is a burial ground but will carefully monitor all excavations.

Publishing the story of the tree-sit this month was timely. Alameda County Judge Barbara Miller is expected to rule on the three lawsuits against the university by June 19. At that point, campus police will bring the tree-sitting to “a safe and certain end,” says Mogulof.

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One of our intrepid Berkeley reporters, Doug Oakley, has been following the crime beat in Berkeley this week and he reports that crime has been sprouting like bad weeds in a spring garden.

A man was arrested for a home-invasion robbery and attempted sexual assault, and a masked bandit did his ninth takeover robbery of a Berkeley business _ all in the last week.

At 12:30 a.m. Wednesday, Berkeley police officers were spotted rifling through bushes and in garbage cans for evidence near Mathews and Blake streets after police arrested a man who entered a woman’s home nearby and attempted to sexually assault her. The police returned the next day to canvass the area further.

The assault was thwarted “purely on the strength of the victim,” said police spokesman Officer Andrew Frankel. Frankel declined to released the circumstances surrounded the crime or the name of man who was arrested because the cause is still under investigation.

And on Tuesday, a man going around holding up businesses and their customers in Berkeley finished his ninth job at Berkeley Wireless on Ashby Avenue.

Takeover style robberies, where someone not only robs the business’ cash register  but also empties the pockets of patrons who have the bad luck of being inside at the time, is a relatively new kind of crime in Berkeley within last year, police say.

Police are asking anyone who knows the man to turn him in. But police understand it’s often difficult to get victims to positively identify someone who wears a mask while committing a crime.

And finally for the good news, sort of: Last Saturday night a 17-year old student at Berkeley Technical Academy turned himself in to police after he allegedly shot a fellow student May 15 at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Dwight Way.

The student is being held at Alameda County Juvenile Hall, according to Frankel.
Police said a teacher at the school picked up the student who was shot and started to take him to the hospital, but then flagged  down a cop who got an ambulance for him.

The boy underwent surgery and is recovering, according to police.

There is also somewhat of a silver lining to the murders that have taken place in Berkeley in the last three weeks. Police detectives solved both recent murders_ of Christopher Wootton, 21, and Maceo Smith, 33, within 48 hours.

Doug Oakley

Several months after the City Council sparked the ire (read: pissed off) the right, the left and just about everyone in between by calling the United States Marine recruiting center “uninvited and unwelcome intruders,” the council showed its’ patriotic side this earlier this week.

The council approved $90,000 to supplement city employee’s military pay and health benefits when they are away from their jobs serving in Iraq. Nine city employees, mostly Berkeley cops, have served in the Middle East since the war began more than five years ago.

Berkeley has spent more than $300,000 paying for the difference between their city pay and their military pay and covering their health benefits, said Mayor Tom Bates.
Of course, Bates said, the city is still against the war.

‘But we want to distinguish between the warriors and the war. We are just very proud of the people who have served (the country),” Bates said.

One of those people is Earl Elzy, a Berkeley public works employee, who recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq and was honored by the council this week.

“I’m very thankful for the appreciation I get from the city of Berkeley,” he said at the meeting. “I am proud to serve my country and the city of Berkeley.”

Like so many people in the East Bay, Steve Sidney doesn’t know Christopher Rodriguez, the 10-year-old Oakland boy who was paralyzed by a stray bullet during a piano lesson earlier this year.

Still, Sidney wants to help.

He’ll do his part on Sunday, running 59 laps around Piedmont’s Witter Field track — one lap for each of the years he’s been alive — and asking for donations for his efforts running about 15 miles in 2 ½ hours.

Child’s play.

“I generally run 30 to 35 mile a week,” he said. “It will be work but it’s not like I’m starting from zero.” He said he may do the 59 laps alone or with a few buddies from his informal running group.

He’s raised $4,500 so far but hopes people will donate at http://christopherrodriguez.blogspot.com/. Click on the Run Steve Run fund-raiser to pitch in .10-cents a lap, $59 or whatever you can afford.

Christopher was taking a piano lesson at the Harmony Music School in Piedmont on the evening of Jan. 10 when a bullet pierced the wall of the music school, tore through a piano and hit him, damaging his spleen and kidney and severing his spine, doctors said.

He spent nearly eight weeks in the hospital recovering and returned home in March.

The man who police say shot him, Jared Adams, is awaiting trial on charges of attempted murder and robbery, among other felonies.

Police say fired the gun during a botched robbery at the Chevron accross the street. In a split second, he ruined his own life and dramatically changed the life of a boy who will likely never walk again.

Since getting out of the hospital in March, Christopher has returned part-time to Crocker Highlands Elementary School where he is a fifth grader. He started taking piano lessons again — at new school — and was filmed recently by Nickelodeon cable TV for a show on gun violence.

Sunday’s event — “Run, Steve, Run” or the Rodriguez Rehab Run will go from 8:30 to 11 a.m. on Sunday at Witter Field at the bottom of the Piedmont High /Middle Schools complex, which is located at 800 Magnolia. Ave. From Grand Ave., take Wildwood Ave., then Magnolia, and finally El Cerrito Ave. The parking lot is at the end of El Cerrito Ave.

A spokesman from the Alameda County Coroner’s Office told me this week that University of California, Berkeley new graduate Alan Hamai died of multiple blunt injuries sustained when he fell (or possibly jumped) 30 feet off from his Durant Avenue apartment rooftop early Saturday.

Detectives are still investigating, talking to friends and neighbors, but by all accounts police say it was an accident or suicide. There was no sign of foul play. No sign of a struggle. Nothing to indicate that anyone else was even with Hamai on the rooftop. Hamai certainly was not the first college student to die from a fall off a rooftop.

Many have done so _ drunk or not _ before him. But Hamai is certainly the first UC Berkeley student to tumble from a building in recent years. But you wouldn’t know it from the call I received Monday from Fox News’ Jeff Miller with the “On the Record with Greta” program.

Miller wanted to know my thoughts on a theory that someone is running around Berkeley pushing people off rooftops. A serial pusher of sorts. I didn’t want to laugh at his theory because death is certainly not a laughing matter. But now I have a better understanding of why journalists get lumped together as sensationalists.

“No,” I told Miller, “I don’t think that.” Police don’t think that. UC officials don’t think that. Why on Earth would you?

Hamai’s death is the third near the Cal campus in three weeks. Christopher Wootton, a 21-year-old nuclear engineering student who was set to graduate this month was stabbed to death in front of a sorority on May 3. Last week, Maceo Smith, a 33-year-old Berkeley man who was not a student, was shot near the Cal campus as students walked to graduation.

Chancellor Robert Birgeneau sent out a statement this week that said that recent weeks have been the most tragic in his long career in education. “In all my years in higher education, this has been among the saddest and most tragic times for a university community that I have known….”

I wonder if Miller realized that when he was digging around for a story that wasn’t there.

The women from Code Pink http://www.codepink4peace.org/ still get more attention than almost anything going on in downtown Berkeley these days. But the protesters at the U.S. Marine Center are far from the only thing happening in the city’s core.

boona cheema, no that’s not a typo, cheema uses all owner case letters in her name to keep her humble, was recently honored as the executive director of Building Opportunities for Self Sufficiency (BOSS) http://www.self-sufficiency.org/ during the organization’s 35th anniversary celebration. More than 250 politicians, business and faith leaders, staff, supporters, and participants of BOSS gathered for the event at Hs. Lordships earlier this month and reports are that the party was a success.

Speaking of parties, seems there’s one at the “new” Brazil Cafe at 1983 Shattuck Ave. every Wednesday afternoon. That’s when Pedro Robbins and Lynn Ferreira offer free shots of Mona Vie _ a delicious fruit drink that includes Acai _ the high vitamin berry from Brazil. The drink is a mix of 19 of the highest powered vitamins on the planet, says Deborah Badhia with the Downtown Berkeley Association. The new cafe is not to be confused with the Brazil Fresh Squeeze Cafe, the little hut at 2161 University in the parking lot of Mike’s Bikes that almost always has a line out the door. Seems that parking lots, little kitchens are a good place to gather, chat, eat and drink.

Berkeley, with the gourmet ghetto and world-renowned Chez Panisse, is a foodie’s paradise. But restaurant owners also want to make sure that places that sell booze are following the law.

Natalie Kniess of Bistro Liaison recently launched the Berkeley Restaurant Action Committee to work on Berkeley’s new responsible beverage ordinance, which mandates more training for restaurant employees who serve alcohol as well as other guidelines around the sales of alcohol. Already 51 Berkeley restaurants have joined the group.

- Kristin Bender

The Berkeley Daily Planet, which is neither daily nor covers the planet, has scaled down the print edition from two days a week (Tuesdays and Fridays) to one day a week, producing a newspaper on Thursdays. But readers can find breaking news, feature stories, columns and opinion pieces each weekday at www.berkeleydailyplanet.com.

Reporters and photographers will also post to the Web on the weekends if anything “big” happens, according to Becky O’ Malley, who has owned the paper for five years with her husband Mike. The reasons for moving to the Web five days a week and cutting back the print edition were two-fold. “This way we can try the Web and see what happens without adding new people,” said O’ Malley.

O’Malley said the couple chose to publish on Thursdays to give people time to check out the weekend happenings and make their plans accordingly. Most of what’s posted on the Web during the week will also show up in print, O’Malley said. The O’Malleys bought the newspaper after running a successful software company in Berkeley for 15 years, she said. “We made more money than we ever expected to make and so we said we should do something good with it,” she said during a recent interview.

The Daily Planet, once owned by publisher Arnold Lee, and Stanford MBA grads Dave Danforth and Ed Carse, had folded in November 2002 when the O’Malleys took over and gave it a go. “I was playing around with starting a Web-based paper and then this came up and we had been readers of the original Planet,” she said. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley in comparative literature, O’Malley said she had written for and edited various publications before going to law school.

After passing the bar exam, she toyed with the idea of practicing law, but journalism seemed more entertaining. She continued writing, for Mother Jones, the Nation, New West and other pubs, she said.. Then came the software company and its success. Although the Berkeley Daily Planet has been in operation under the O’Malley’s leadership since 2003, its new form on the Web is really the first time the publication is living up to its name. Now, the paper just needs to start really covering the planet.

“Well, we might,” said O’Malley “We have lots of people who would like to be writing about international issues. We might have dispatches from Iraq.”

Kristin Bender

Looking for something to do this Saturday?
Consider walking three miles around Lake Merritt to help end poverty and violence or check out an evening event to help the four-legged friends of the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society.

The Community Action Partnership is holding a three-mile walk around Lake Merritt on Saturday to call attention to some staggering numbers. Nearly one in five Oakland residents or about 68,000 people live in poverty. About one-third of the city’s population is receiving some sort of public assistance. Homelessness effects up to 6,000 people in Oakland. The Community Action Partnership is challenging people to be part of the Walk to End Poverty and Violence to call attention to those numbers and work to lower them.

The walk starts at 9 a.m. Saturday with registration at 8 a.m. at the Lake Merritt Bandstand, 666 Bellevue Ave. A community fair with free snacks, children’s activities and free T-shirts follows at 10 a.m. For more information visit www.oaklandcap.or or call 510-238-2368.

Drinking, not walking

If walking isn’t your thing, but drinking wine is, there’s a people-only event Saturday night to benefit the animals—the ones with the fur–of the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society. The event is from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. Saturday at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. in Berkeley. Maestro George Cleve and featured players from the Midsummer Mozart Festival will perform at the event, which also includes wine, hors d’oeuvres and a silent auction for overnight stays, restaurant certificates and more. Tickets are $90 and more information is available at www.berkeleyhumane.org of by calling 510-845-7735, ext. 19.

- Kristin Bender