JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Sept. 2, 2007 (AP) – Half a dozen teenagers are leading scruffy dogs through a slalom of orange plastic cones in the worn asphalt yard of a veterinary clinic.

The dogs have been rescued from nearby townships, the kids from South Africa’s criminal justice system. The teens started coming to the clinic run by Community Led Animal Welfare on Saturday mornings in late April after being arrested for theft, assault and other minor offenses.

Increasingly South Africa is trying to keep young offenders out of juvenile detention centers and adult prisons. Officials of Khulisa, a private group helping provide alternatives, at first thought teen offenders would spend just one day with the animal welfare project, cleaning kennels or feeding dogs to fulfill a community service obligation.

Instead, the group known as CLAW offered to host 15 teenagers every Saturday for six weeks.

“We kind of took it upon ourselves to go a little further because we saw something in those kids that was encouraging,” says Cora Bailey, CLAW’s founder and director.

Some of the kids have continued to show up — of their own accord — for more than three months now. Among them is Victor Molefe, 16, arguably CLAW’s biggest success story.

He was arrested for stealing a car part with four other boys in January. His grandmother and guardian, Lydia Molefe, says she was surprised when her grandson was arrested. But the boy confesses that he was running with the wrong crowd, often skipping classes, smoking marijuana, and staying out late which made his grandmother worry.

Now she says he is a “nice boy,” going to school, always home at a reasonable hour, and helping out with the dishes and other chores. And he has developed a deep affection for animals.

One recent Saturday, a charming wheaten Labrador named Rupert twisted through Victor’s legs. Rupert’s owner, CLAW volunteer Barbara Hammerschlag, says the dog would not trust just anyone enough to do that.

Elza Cilliers of Khulisa said about 90 percent of children who complete the regimen — which includes eight weeks of life skills training and family therapy as well as the community service — don’t commit another crime within the first year of their arrest. But she acknowledges that for many of the kids, eight weeks is not enough.

“Many kids want to attend another session. They want someone to hug them and ask them how they are,” Cilliers says.

South Africa has been trying to get children out of the formal criminal justice system since 1992, when non-governmental organizations in cooperation with public prosecutors and probation officers first piloted programs aimed at teaching juveniles to take responsibility for their actions and avoid getting into trouble. After completing programs like the one run by Khulisa, first-time offenders’ records are cleared.

Ann Skelton, a human rights lawyer who helped draft the Child Justice Bill that includes a provision to encourage getting children out of the formal justice system, said about 10 percent of juveniles who are arrested are currently diverted into programs like Khulisa’s, but that that number should be higher.

“We know that serious violent crimes make up about 30 percent of the offenses, that would give us about 70 percent that we could go at, though some you couldn’t divert because they were secondary offenses,” Skelton says.

And that could indirectly drive a continued drop in the number of children awaiting trial in adult prisons. With fewer cases for courts to deal with, those awaiting trial would move more quickly through the formal justice system. The number of children awaiting trial in prison dropped from a high of 2,934 in 1999 to 1,238 in 2005, according to the most recently available government figures.

All the teenagers spending their Saturdays at CLAW have already seen the charges filed against them withdrawn.

Bailey, CLAW’s founder and director, said her priority was to teach the kids respect for animals. She said animal abuse and neglect are still often tolerated in the townships the teens come from, where CLAW has worked exclusively since 1999.

“If you look at a home where there’s a deliberately abused animal, you will find that there are abused women or abused children. … I think if you can learn to understand an animal and learn to take responsibility and relate to something that’s helpless and that needs you, it’s good for anybody.”

So CLAW has been teaching the kids how to approach an animal and how to identify when an animal is sick. The kids were promenading the dogs around the clinic’s yard on a recent Saturday as part of their first lesson in dog training.

“The first time they came I thought this wasn’t going to work,” Bailey said. In South Africa’s townships many dogs are trained to attack, and the teens were terrified by the canines at the clinic at first.

Bailey said Rupert, the Lab, broke the ice by jumping rope and dancing to “The Locomotion” with his owner.

Rupert’s friend Victor said before coming to CLAW, he hated dogs. Now he jolts out of bed at 5 a.m. each Saturday, eager to get to the clinic and play with his furry friends, even though his ride there doesn’t arrive until 9 a.m.

“I used to kick dogs,” Molefe said. “But from now on, whenever I see a person kick a dog it’s like he’s kicking me.”

About 1 million workers are involved in the strike, described as the biggest since the onset of multiracial democracy in South Africa in 1994.
Tens of thousands of angry teachers, nurses, and other civil servants took to the streets to press their demands for a 12 percent pay raise, saying they cannot live on their salaries and dismissing the government’s 6 percent offer as insulting.

“We are on strike, a permanent strike,” Willie Madisha, the president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, told a massive rally that brought downtown Johannesburg to a standstill.

“Until such time as we get 12 percent we are not going back.”

He vowed to try to extend the strike to the mining, metal workers, and transport sectors and bring the country to its knees.

Many schools throughout the country were closed for the day yesterday, with principals telling pupils in advance not to bother showing up.

Most airports were running normally, but some prisons were operating with a skeleton staff.

Police are classed as “essential workers” and are banned from striking. But they share the same grievances.

Vukile Pambo, a police union official, scornfully said that government ministers would be able to “sleep very nice” because of the police.

“You will see some of us working today, but you will not see that forever. We are not government dogs,” he told the Johannesburg demonstration.

The strike was largely peaceful. Police fired stun grenades to disperse around 500 protesters who were preventing doctors entering one of Cape Town’s largest hospitals, the South African Press Association said.

But there were no immediate reports of other incidents, in contrast to strikes by security guards and transport workers last year that ended in riots.

In many towns, motorists honked their horns to support the teachers and nurses, who say their existing wages don’t even cover basic housing, food, education, and transport costs.

They are particularly angered that top government officials were awarded wage increases of more than 50 percent earlier this year.

In hospitals, there was sympathy for striking nurses.

“I think they are right to strike,” said Joan Grant, an elderly patient who was waiting for her twice-yearly appointment to check her medication and said she risked another six-month wait if it was canceled.

Dikgang Simomosieleng waited hours with his elderly mother to meet a doctor at Johannesburg General Hospital.
“The government should give them their 12 percent,” he said.

OAKLAND, Calif., Dec. 14, 2006 – The debate over the future of Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood might as well be a referendum on the projects developers Ron Kriss and Roy Alper started building here in 2004. Shouts of “too big” and “too many” have grown louder as the pair have bought up half a dozen sites along Telegraph Avenue in Temescal’s pedestrian-scale historic core to build four and five story condominium complexes. The concerns prompted the city to launch a community planning process last spring to update the neighborhood’s zoning.

Alper and Kriss resist being called “developers” in the pejorative sense, just flying in to make a profit. Instead they like to cast themselves as just a couple of guys from the neighborhood trying to revitalize a community they love.

Alper, 63, has lived in or near Temescal for most of the last 40 years. He now lives at 43rd and Webster. Kriss, 49, has lived in nearby Rockridge since the mid 1980s and had his real estate business on Telegraph Avenue for a decade.

That building, which is now home to the popular Lanesplitter Pub, was Kriss’s first project in Temescal. Kriss bought the vacant property in 1990, with his then business partner and next-door neighbor Lou Lovotti, from the Fiorio family that had operated a hardware store on the first floor for generations.

“There had been so little commercial activity that the Fiorios never even bothered after the mid ‘70s to put any effort into finding tenants,” Kriss said. No bank was willing to issue a loan for a building in the downtrodden neighborhood, so they made a deal with the Fiorios who agreed to back them for six months.

“I went in there and tore it apart, we tiled the floors, we put the antique light fixtures up, and we had the entire building leased out before the first payment was due,” said Kriss, who beamed as he remembered turning the space back into a vibrant corner.

Kriss then joined the Temescal merchants association and fought alongside some of his current foes against a suburban-style shopping center and postal distribution center, now home to a neighborhood post office and a Walgreen’s pharmacy. He was overwhelmed by the zeal the community expressed during the fight for what he considers to be good urban planning.

“Buildings to meet and greet the street, and parking to be hidden, all this just amazing stuff. And that’s when I got even more passionate.”

But though a handful of the 150 houses Kriss rehabbed in Alameda and Contra Costa counties are in Temescal, the stars didn’t align for him to build anything from the ground up here until about five years ago, as Lou Lovotti was retiring.

At the same time Alper was looking for someone to help him get into real estate in Temescal. Alper’s son Steve, who Kriss knew from their involvement with the PTA in Rockridge, introduced them.

Alper, a self-described ex-hippie who still sports a thick goatee, spent 30 years in the alternative energy industry before jumping into housing. He was inspired to make the switch after being stunned that another of his sons, who had a Harvard MBA, couldn’t afford to buy a house in Temescal in the late 1990s.

“That’s a really dodgy neighborhood,” Alper had told him.

Alper had first moved to Temescal in 1965 as a Cal law student, and had watched the beginning of the neighborhood’s decline a year later when buildings started coming down to make room for the 24 freeway. In the ‘90s the neighborhood was still home to many more prostitutes and crack dealers than young professionals.

“We put in an offer at $289,000, and we ended up being seventh out of 13 bids. We didn’t even come close,” Alper said.

“What was really going on here was a lot more people wanted to live in this neighborhood than there was housing available for them,” Alper concluded, and shortly thereafter he picked up a copy of Oakland’s General Plan, passed in 1998.

“I started reading, and I was just blown away. It was like, Wow! Look at the vision the General Plan carves out for Telegraph and Shattuck,” Alper exclaimed as he thumped out the bullet points on the conference room table in his Shattuck Avenue office. “Growth and change, high-density housing, vibrant commercial neighborhoods, transit-oriented development!”

“That had been my dream for decades,” said Alper, who often uses a smart growth philosophy to rationalize the dense developments he’s proposed and built in Temescal.

Meanwhile Kriss, who had once ridden his bicycle around Oakland looking for houses to rehab, was attending a development symposium downtown.

Then Planning Director Leslie Gould flipped through a Power Point presentation of properties that the city thought provided opportunities for new development. A picture of a familiar quarter-acre parking lot in Temescal flashed across the screen.

“Leslie said somebody could come in here and do densities of 125 units an acre. And people gasped because that’s just an unheard of number. It’s almost like you can’t comprehend how you could even put that many people, units, on a small piece of dirt,” Kriss said.

The lot belonged to the Fiorio family.

“So I went, Oh my gosh! I know the Fiorios, I’ve worked with them on real estate deals, they told me if I ever wanted to buy that lot they’d sell it to me,” Kriss recalled.

Kriss and Alper bought the lot for $500,000. They built a six-story, 25-unit condo complex, dubbed Temescal Place, on the site. Every unit was sold for an average of $486,180 within two months of being put on the market.

Few buildings here are more than two stories, and now many point to Temescal Place as being out of scale. But it was only after Kriss and Alper introduced plans for a second project, Civiq, originally designed as a six-story, 65-foot high development at the prominent corner of 51st and Telegraph, that their work faced any serious criticism from the neighbors.

Artist and local historian Jeff Norman was initially happy to see Temescal Place going up on the parking lot, which had been an eye sore since before he moved into the neighborhood in 1984. Now one of their most vocal critics, Norman said he had even enjoyed working with the pair for several months on an installation they had commissioned for the lobby of the building chronicling the history of the site.

“It wasn’t until I learned that there was another one and that there were more properties, and Roy said, yes, they would like to build more 65-foot buildings – that’s when I kind of had the sense that they were building this little empire.”

Norman said that feeling has been reinforced by their increasing unwillingness to receive community input. So he’s led a neighborhood coalition to appeal Centrada, Kriss and Alper’s latest project on Telegraph Avenue, and a petition drive to keep buildings in Temescal capped at 40 feet, according to current zoning.

Sarita Waite, a Berkeley resident and Temescal landlord for 29 years, has a more measured view.

“Certainly Ron and Roy deserve credit for two things, early recognition of what a wonderful place Temescal is, and early willingness to make the effort and take the risk to do large multi-family housing.” But Waite said she also understands the fear that Kriss and Alper’s big projects will pave the way for Telegraph Avenue to be turned into a corridor of high-rise condos.

At an October community-planning meeting held in the worship hall of the Faith Presbyterian Church, dozens of Temescal residents, business owners, and other stakeholders lobbed impassioned arguments over height and density.
Alper delivered his usual stump speech.

“I feel that Telegraph Avenue is one of the grand boulevards of the city of Oakland. This part of Telegraph Avenue and Shattuck Avenue in the Temescal area is designated for growth and change,” Alper said. “We have not tried to impose ourselves into areas where the General Plan does not call for that kind of development.”

Alper said he’s never second-guessed their vision for Temescal.

But for the moment Alper and Kriss have stopped acquiring property in the neighborhood, while they await the outcome of the community planning process and the appeal of the Centrada project.

While their plans for Temescal are stuck in a holding pattern, they’re moving on to other communities. They just unveiled a proposal for a seven townhouses in Piedmont.

OAKLAND, Calif., Oct. 20, 2006 – The owners of two toddler-friendly cafés in Oakland, which may be the first venues of their kind in the country, seem to be onto something.

Play Café Inc. president Kelliane Lam said her business broke even one month after opening in September 2005 and is on pace for a 37 percent increase in total sales this October compared to last.

Tumble & Tea LLC co-owner Georgina DeCarlo said her café has been meeting or exceeding cost since it opened three months ago.

Both businesses have plans to expand.

Lam is seeking to franchise, with the goal of expanding throughout California, and then nationwide. She expects it will be at least 18 months before a second Play Café opens its doors.

DeCarlo and her business partner, Susan Older, want to have five cafés in operation in the next five years. They are now searching for possible locations in San Francisco.
Older said their aim was to provide a “third place” for parents outside of work and home. It’s not unusual to find parents curled up with a magazine on one of Tumble & Tea’s comfy couches, or tapping on a laptop at Play Café, while their children frolic in the cafés’ elaborate and imaginative play areas.

Ted Lingle, executive director of the Long Beach-based Specialty Coffee Association of America, said he had never heard of a café specifically targeting families.

“I think it’s a great idea,” Lingle said. “What comes immediately to mind in terms of the play area is McDonalds, but I can see why, if people wanted to go to a coffee café, they wouldn’t go to McDonalds.”

Rachel Antell, a Tumble & Tea regular, said she knows better than to take her daughter to a regular café now that Talia is 13 months old and walking.

“It just wouldn’t be fun for her,” she said. “And if things aren’t fun for Talia, it’s not gonna be fun for anybody.”

Antell said at other cafés, there’s nothing for her daughter to do but get in trouble.
“She’s gonna spill hot coffee on herself, or run into someone’s chair, or just hurt herself,” she said.

At Tumble & Tea kids move freely in and out of the play area. Talia could not decide what to play with first, an oversized foam block or a puzzle. There’s so much to keep her daughter occupied, Antell said, they often hang out for two hours or more – a long time for a toddler.

Such long stays mean that customers often make several trips up to the café counter during a single visit, DeCarlo said.

“A typical family, they come in the morning, they get settled, they get a latté. And they’re still there, and they come up and get lunch,” she said.

A family could easily spend $20 during one visit between a 12 oz. latte ($2.95), a curry chicken salad ($6.95), an organic peanut butter and jelly sandwich from the “kidfood” menu ($2.95), plus $5.95 for one child admission. Siblings cost $2.
Ted Lingle said the average ticket at a regular café is about $4.50.

Tumble & Tea needs the bigger ticket to pay for its bigger space. The business fills about 3,000 square feet, about seven times the footprint of the most basic café. The play area takes up nearly one-third of the space.

Play Café also charges $5.95 per child – there is no sibling discount – and sells toys in the $10 to $20 range to help parents meet toddler birthday party requirements.
On a busy day, Lam said, as many as 300 people can walk through the door.

Because Tumble & Tea is so new, the café’s customer volume has been fluctuating wildly, Older said. On a recent Friday afternoon, the strollers were double-parked just inside its entrance.

“It was really busy today at lunch,” Older said one Friday. “We probably had close to 75 people counting both adults and children. I was one person shy of shutting the door and doing a waitlist.”

Mothers’ groups and bad weather contribute to crowds at both establishments. With the winter rains coming, eliminating parks as a family hangout, both cafés are bound to get even busier.Tumble

EL CERRITO, California – El Cerrito High School Junior Kenneth Thornton, 16, had switched his cell phone to vibrate and stashed it in the pocket of his baggy Rocca Wear jeans. When it went off in Jim Perrero’s Friday morning history class, he ducked under his desk.

“Who is this?” Thornton whispered, “I’m gonna call you back.”

Sliding back up into his chair, Thornton said he had to take the call.

“I didn’t know that number it could have been important.”

But answering a cell phone at El Cerrito High is now risky business. The school’s 1,250 students were greeted on the first day of school with warnings that their phones would be confiscated if they were in view at any time during school hours.

Last year, when hundreds of El Cerrito’s students flipped out their phones during lunch periods, the noise on the schools compact temporary campus could be deafening, assistant principal Jamersina Preston said. Students were often trying to hold two conversations at once: one with classmates, and another on the phone. The multitasking sometimes led to confrontation.

Preston said a student might use a profane word on the phone, but someone nearby at school would think the comment was meant for them. Fights, she said, could erupt “in seconds.”

In another incident last year, students involved in a fight used cell phones to call for back up. Friends from outside the school hopped the fence to join the fight, Preston said.

But even with the new ban, phones are ubiquitous. Students don’t carry simple calculators or wear watches anymore — they have phones for that. They use their phones like global positioning systems to find each other on campus, or to keep in touch with friends at other schools.

Senior Monet Smith, 17, didn’t hesitate to pull a charger from her backpack during Chris Silva’s English class to juice up her black Motorola.

“I’m not using (my phone), it’s off,” Smith said. “I just don’t want it to be dead when I leave school I have a doctor’s appointment and I just need to know where my daddy’s at.”

The West Contra Costa Unified School District, which includes El Cerrito High, established its cell phone policy in 2004, banning the devices from all classrooms. Principals were given discretion over whether to allow students to use them during lunch. Until now, the ban had not been enforced at El Cerrito during lunch or passing times, and it was not uniformly enforced in the classroom either.

Assistant Principal Preston said this year all the teachers at El Cerrito agreed to the crackdown. But in fact, teachers still differ in how they deal with the policy.
Silva, 28, lets students charge their phones in his classroom. The second-year teacher is sympathetic to students’ need to have cell phones for coordinating schedules or contacting their parents in an emergency.

But Silva said he will snatch cell phones when students are texting during class or chatting over lunch.

“They know this is the wrong place to screw around,” he said referring to the location of his portable at the back of the campus. “Normally the back of the school is where all the bad stuff happens, but this is the safest place on campus.”

Lawrence Pang, 23, a second-year math teacher, is more reluctant to confiscate phones.

First, he warns students, next he takes the phone and on the third offense he takes it to the office.

“I want to avoid the confrontation,” Pang said, explaining he first needs to get more credibility and experience with the students.

Pang also is trying to lead by example. On Friday, Pang confiscated his own phone.

“My (phone’s) alarm went off,” he said. “I pulled it out of my pocket, opened up my desk drawer, and dropped it in.”

Students seem to be getting the message. On the first day of school, more than 30 phones were confiscated from students, according to Assistant Principal Preston. The second day, about two dozen were taken. Now it’s down to three or four a day.
Students are using their phones less often during school hours, even if they refuse to leave them at home.

The silhouette of sophomore Kaiya Gatewood’s phone is obvious in the chest pocket of her jacket.

“I can’t live without my phone,” she said. “If I leave my phone at home and I’m at school, I go and get it.”

In the moments before the final morning bell rang last Friday, Gatewood got a half-dozen text messages wishing her a happy 16th birthday. Her friends had to rush to get their messages in before 8:15 a.m.

“I don’t get any text messages during school,” Gatewood said, “because you can’t use your phone during school.”rr