By Adelaide Chen    
On Thanksgiving Day, mostly elderly Chinese stood in line for a free meal hours before the doors opened at the Salvation Army in Oakland Chinatown.  The atmosphere was lively as a hundred volunteers brought plates of the traditional holiday food to crowds unfamiliar with turkey and mashed potatoes.

Click to hear an audio report from Will Jason

By Tyler Sipe  – 
East Bay area job centers have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people utilizing their services in the past few months.
Tina Dodson, the director of Tri-Cities One-Stop Career Center in Newark, said foot traffic to the location has doubled in the past month, partly reflecting California’s dramatic half a percent increase in unemployment for October. 
The October state unemployment rate was at a 14-year high of 8.2 percent.  In Alameda County, it stood at 7.1 percent.
Dodson said the last big surge of interest in …

By Amanda Dyer  –
Despite students’ notoriously slim budgets, many UC Berkeley students say they continue to shop at high-end grocery stores near their homes rather than travel farther away for good deals.
Blake Warner, 25, and Caitlin Thompson, 22, left Andronico’s grocery store at Telegraph Avenue and Derby Street one recent fall evening with juice, milk, a package of meat and a few other items.
The couple, both UC Berkeley seniors, live close to the market, and it’s proximity makes it an easy stop to pick up a few things.
Both Warner and …

By Guo Shipeng 
Chinese elders at Hotel Oakland, a seniors’ home on the edge of the Chinatown, had an early Thanksgiving party on Thursday November 20. Check out what it’s like.

By Amanda Dyer
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By Angela Kilduff
At the Big Game on Saturday, hundreds of people watched from Tightwad Hill. Listen to their perspectives and learn about this history and future of Tightwad Hill.
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Many thanks to everyone interviewed. Fans included (in order) are Ted Cotsen, Donald Oliver, Jennifer Gage, Harrison Chastang, Tim Wood, Kelly Peterson, Zach Lawryk and Paul White.

By Casey Miner –
Students lined up to enter a carnival on Lower Sproul Thursday afternoon, milling around, socializing, and investigating the inflatable tents and games arrayed around the plaza. To an unschooled passerby, the scene might look totally normal. To Nadesan Permaul, it’s all too rare.

By Will Jason  –
What is the cost of leaving a computer on overnight? Two graduate students hope questions like that will help translate energy use into terms that everyone at University of California, Berkeley can understand.
Sam Borgeson and Omar Khan — students in building science and computer science, respectively — want to make campus energy use more transparent. They are gathering data on the energy used every day at dozens of campus buildings. Then they plan to display the results at a kiosk in the Free Speech Movement Cafe, in …

By Karen Weise  –
As Congress passed for now on giving a federal bailout to General Motors and other American automakers, local workers and residents are concerned about what a potential GM bankruptcy might mean for automobile production in the East Bay.