The James Logan Courier

Courier Staff Writer

Olympic Silver Medalist and Logan graduate Stephen Abas is helping one of his former teachers promote her new business by holding wrestling and mixed martial arts clinics there this weekend.

Abas will appear Saturday and Sunday at Tatami Multi-Arts, opened recently in El Cerrito by former Logan teacher Margaret Klatt Lowry and her husband, Adam.

Tatami Multi-Arts, a practice and work-out space for yoga and a variety of martial arts, is located at 9951 San Pablo Ave. in El Cerrito. For $60 a day, or $100 for both days, those interested in wrestling and mixed martial arts can learn some mat skills during the two four hour clinics from one of the best wrestlers in U.S. history.

By Julia Ortiz, Courier Staff Writer

Belinda, provocative and erotic, is a far cry from author Anne Rice's (pen name Anne Rampling) mystical and magical worlds from previous books while still containing a world of possibilites.

Between the relationship of 16-year-old runaway and 44-year-old children's book artist, adventure unravels like a ball of yarn. Scandal, family secrets and questions of right versus wrong plague the minds of Belinda's readers.

A drawback of this book is that, similar to much of Rice's other novels, it begins very slowly with seeming unnecessary description. Indeed, it can get a bit dry and frustrating to read so much detail about the rain when the story really gets exciting.

By Rick La Plante, New Haven Schools Director of Parent and Community Relations

The East Bay Community Foundation, which during the past two years has granted the New Haven Unified School District more than $40,000 to support literacy programs, has awarded the District an additional $15,000.

The Foundation’s latest grant will enable New Haven Unified to provide another Summer Institute of training for kindergarten through second-grade teachers in Writers Workshop. A research-based approach to writing instruction, Writers Workshop has met with great success in the District since it was adopted in 2007-08.

UNION CITY - The New Haven Unified School District announced today that the New Haven Community Forum meeting originally scheduled for Thursday evening at Alvarado Middle School has been canceled.

Anyone with comments to share with Superintendent Kari McVeigh regarding a possible parcel tax, or any other subject, is asked to send an e-mail by going to the District website, www.nhusd.k12.ca.us and clicking on “contact us and “e-mail by topic”

By Tom Hamburger And Kathleen Hennessey
Tribune Washington Bureau (MCT)

WASHINGTON — With the campaign in its final week, well-funded conservative groups have shifted their focus from the airwaves to voters' phone lines, front doors and mailboxes — part of a get-out-the-vote effort that could tip the scale in tight races across the country.

But the push to get the nation's conservative voters to the polls is fractured and untested, with some "tea party" activists refusing to cooperate with more mainstream Republicans, in contrast to the unified and well-organized parallel effort by labor and the Democrats, according to key players involved in both sides.

By Tish Wells
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

He's a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey with a fondness for planet Earth — which is good because he is constantly saving it from nasty aliens such as Daleks, Sontarans and Cybermen. He flies around in a classic blue British police box and can manipulate any lock in the universe with a sonic screwdriver.

Are you lost yet? Well, check out "Doctor Who: The Visual Dictionary" and you might be able to get caught up before the new season of the show starts in the spring of 2011 on BBC America.

A favorite of science fiction media fans, "Doctor Who" has been on-and-off British television for more than 40 years. The main character changes by regenerating into a new body — 11 times for 11 different actors — thus extending the series. He's had numerous companions _ male and female, young and old, human and alien, who provide him with friendship, challenge his assumptions and occasionally, even save his life.

From wikipedia:
Charles "Teenie" Harris (1908–1998) was an accomplished African-American photographer.

Harris was born in 1908 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, the son of hotel owners in the city's Hill District. Early in the 1930s he purchased his first camera and opened a photography studio. He freelanced for the Washington D.C. news picture magazine, Flash!. From the 1936 to the 1975 Harris chronciled life in the black neighborhoods of the city for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of America's oldest black newspapers. He was nicknamed "One Shot" because he rarely made his subjects sit for retakes. Harris took more than 80,000 images during his career. The body of his work constitutes arguably the largest and most complete photographic documentation of a minority community in the United States.

Read an interview with Charles Harris, free from pbs.org