Step It Up: Green City Shows Its Colors

By Rhyen Coombs

Over 50 people met in downtown Berkeley Nov. 3 to Step It Up, joining hundreds across the Bay Area for the National Day of Climate Action. View audio-slideshow.

This story first published on North Gate News Online.

From Shanghai to Small Claims Court: Pan-Pacific Tussle Ends Well for Tenant

By Rhyen Coombs

Chang-Qin Wu didn’t miss his second court date. He’d traveled all the way from Shanghai to guarantee it. By 9:30 a.m. Oct. 19, he was seated in the Berkeley Courthouse opposite his accuser and former landlady to find out whether the trans-Pacific flight would be worth it. He hastily tugged his blazer over his shoulders and sat up straight as Alameda County Superior Court Judge Marshall Whitley entered the small claims court.

Across the aisle, 78-year-old Esther Yang of El Sobrante shuffled to her seat, propped her feet on her metal walker’s support bars and with a trembling thumb sifted through the photographs and faded receipts she’d brought along as proof of her claim. Wu, she said, had never paid her the $1,000 rent for November 2006 and left apartment No. 3 in her building at 1117 Brighton Street in Albany filled with trash and an overflowing sink. It cost her $6,325 to clean it up.

Anti-Antenna Activists Bring Protest to Verizon’s Door

By Rhyen Coombs

No, they weren’t trick-or-treaters three days late, though cell phone shoppers heading toward 1109 University Ave. Saturday could rightly be confused. Decked out with foil hats and folk songs, poster boards and a bullhorn, it was the Berkeley Neighborhood Antenna-Free Union, bringing their protest directly to Verizon Wireless’ doorstep.

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Led by spokesperson Michael Barglow, about 20 members marched in a circle outside the store, chanting songs of protest against the lawsuit Verizon Communications has leveled at the city. Verizon wants to install five new cell phone antennas on the roof of UC Storage at 2721 Shattuck Ave., and says the Berkeley Zoning Adjustment Board violated the 1996 Telecommunications Act in denying both it and Nextel – which seeks to install another six antennas – use permits in May on health grounds.

The BNAFU activists, many of whom live in south Berkeley and say radiation emissions from the antennas are hazardous to public health, cheered the ZAB’s original stance. Now they’re hopping mad.

Howl-O-Ween at Ohlone Dog Park

By Rhyen Coombs

They came. They howled. They bobbed for carrots. They leaped for popcorn balls. They heeled round the pumpkins. They begged for doggie treats. They begged for human treats – pumpkin cookies – and most of the time, they got them. Because on the last day of October, the rules forbidding children from sugar bend for dogs, too. Never mind the caffeine rush. This was the first Ohlone Dog Park Association Howl-O-Ween.

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Their parents came too. They adjusted tiny witch hats determined to slide off canine heads. They reattached feline ears. Oh, the indignity. They tugged back on matching gray wigs, until succumbing to tug-of-war. They proudly paraded a Dalmatian dangling an udder, an American Eskimo emblazoned with a skunk’s stripe – and a scrappy terrier named Lola festooned as a flower child, with a blossom in her collar and “peace” in psychedelic script across her back.

Help Us Track Two Killers, Say Berkeley Police

By Rhyen Coombs 

A $15,000 reward was laid on the table Thursday for anyone who brings Berkeley police information that brings Dwayne Murphy’s killer to justice.

The death of Murphy, 27, by multiple gunshots off a south Berkeley sidewalk at 63rd and King streets was the second of two homicides in the city on Sept. 22, and the fourth of five in 2007.

Of those five cases, detectives have closed three, including the death of Isaac Castro in west Berkeley earlier that morning. On Sept. 26, Bay Area day laborer Jose Cristian Vera Flores was identified as a suspect in that homicide. While police have not said whether Flores remains at large, they do not believe the two Sept. 22 incidents were related.

The offer joins another $15,000 call for community help in locating the killer of Terrence Marlow Broadnax, 47, who was discovered dead from blunt force trauma injuries inside his 1040 University Ave. apartment June 8.

Police urge those with details on either of these cases to call the BPD Homicide Detail at (510) 981-5741 (office) or (510) 981-5900 (non-emergency 24-hour dispatch line).