Crosscurrents

Bad news for pot lovers: the City of Berkeley has ordered two medical cannabis collectives to close down. According to officials, collectives are acting like rental dispensaries and violating the city's municipal code…

Last Friday, 18 Occupy Cal protesters were detained in the early morning after setting up another on-campus encampment. On Monday, around 700 demonstrators convened at San Quentin to Occupy the prison.

If you assumed, as did I, that the coming of winter would mean the end of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, well guess again. Whether because of the unseasonably mild weather prevailing here and elsewhere, Occupy Wall Street encampments stubbornly persist. And despite increasingly more aggressive measures taken against them by local authorities, the “movement” appears to be growing.

Don’t mean to overreact and risk boosting everybody’s blood pressure higher than opening offers on Facebook’s IPO, but this might be a halfway decent time to seek out a nice, safe, steel bunker to hunker down in or behind, because it’s awards season and heavy metal statuettes are being tossed around like dimes at a county fair. Like the flurry of résumés from the outer office of Michele Bachmann’s inner circle. As plentiful as the doubts currently circling Mitt Romney’s Super PAC.

Oakland Chinatown’s Pacific Renaissance Plaza opened in 1993. It was a real victory for Chinatown and signaled its change from a Chinese-centric neighborhood to a multicultural and pan-Asian identity.