The day after Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States, the Illinois senator announced his team that will help smooth the transition from one administration to the next, according to CNN.

One of the members on the advisory board is Christopher Edley, dean of UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law and Obama’s former professor at Harvard Law School. Edley campaigned for the senator during a rally in the spring.

Former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, longtime Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, and Pete Rouse, Obama’s Senate chief of staff, will oversee the operation, CNN reports.

A daily roundup of the biggest headlines in Bay Area and national news.

Tonight marks the first debate between vice presidential nominees Sen. Joe Biden and Gov. Sarah Palin. Starting at 6 p.m. PST, the candidates are set to spar on a number of issues ranging from the economy to foreign policy. At UC Berkeley, the Cal Berkeley Democrats and Berkeley College Republicans will watch it together at the Institute of Governmental Studies Library. Look for The Daily Californian’s coverage on Friday.

Watch a video featuring UC Berkeley students sounding off on last week’s presidential nominee debate.

On the heels of the Saturday Night Live parody satirizing Katie Couric’s interview with Palin, a Canadian paper confuses Tina Fey with the real-life governor. [Politico]

UCLA freshmen moved into their dorms this weekend, and for some parents, letting go is hard to do. [LAT]

Meanwhile, The Daily Bruin is reporting that many UCLA students who were considering going into finance are reconsidering in light of the Wall Street shake-up. The Daily Cal previously reported similar reactions among UC Berkeley students.

An Oakland landlady who allegedly berated an African American tenant with racial slurs must pay the man and his wife $31,000 in damage. [SF Chron]

New York University officials announced Monday that Alfred Bloom, the current president of Swarthmore College, will lead its new Abu Dhabi campus in the United Arab Emirates.

The New York Times reports:

When N.Y.U. announced the decision last September to create a campus in Abu Dhabi, skeptics wondered if the university would truly be allowed to have a free exchange of ideas, especially in sensitive areas like religion and women’s rights.

Mr. Bloom, 62, said he was certain that censorship would not be a problem.

“I am convinced that we will be able to provide a vibrant environment which guards academic freedom,” he said.

Similar concerns over free speech arose this spring at UC Berkeley when the campus’s mechanical engineering faculty announced it was entering a $28 million deal with a new university in Saudi Arabia. Under the five-year plan, UC Berkeley professors would design the mechanical engineering curriculum for the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

Such arrangements are becoming increasingly common these days, according to the NYT: “The (NYU) campus represents a shift in how many top universities are thinking about their international brand at a time when there is increasing competition to attract top-flight students from around the world.”

On Piedmont Avenue Tuesday, a crowd of more than 300–including a slew of local and national media outlets–gathered to watch construction workers build a scaffolding to remove the Berkeley tree-sitters. Just as they neared the top of the 90-ft. redwood, the workers unraveled this sign:

The banner received mixed reactions from the onlookers, which included tree-sit supporters, students, journalists and curious passersby. Some booed; others laughed.

After a court ruling gave UC Berkeley the green light to start building a controversial athletic center near Memorial Stadium, university-hired arborists started clearing the 42 trees Friday. The four last tree-sitters stayed put in their redwood until Tuesday, when they reached negotiations with the campus, came down and were promptly taken to jail.

As a Boalt Hall School of Law student and singer-songwriter, Josh Keesan thinks about law and rock music a lot–often at the same time. Last year he combined his passions on the self-produced record The Law of Rock, Vol. 1, setting lyrics about contributory negligence and promissory estoppel to catchy folk-pop.

When the 24-year-old wants to find new music, he said he usually turns to the Internet. But as a student studying music copyright law, Keesan added that he is conflicted about the phenomenon of online file-sharing.

“I think (illegal file-sharing) is sort of a necessary evil at this point,” Keesan said. “I think (subscription) services like Rhapsody are going to become increasingly prominent as just a way of, ‘I want access to everything new that comes out all the time.’ File-sharing provides a way for that to happen because record labels haven’t provided a way for me to get that.”

Keesan’s songs can be heard on his Web site and MySpace. His biography reads: “While the rest of his Boalt classmates are surfing the Internet and killing time on google chat, Josh is tirelessly working to distill legal doctrine into digestible three-minute musical gems.”

When UC Berkeley journalism graduate student James Buck flew into Egypt late last month, he was there to observe how the nation’s emerging blogosphere serves as an alternative to the mainstream press.

But when police detained the freelance photographer in a town outside Cairo, his research trip quickly became a real-life lesson in the powers of the Web.

(Click here to read more…)

Next month’s commencement convocation at the Hearst Greek Theatre is expected to draw record audiences, according to ceremony officials.

1,400 graduating students are currently set to attend the May 13 event, while roughly 700 came to last spring’s ceremony, said Katherine Nguyen, the Californians’ vice president for May commencement. Each student is allotted 10 tickets for relatives and friends, yet the venue’s Web site indicates it can only seat about 6,000.

Nguyen did not know what has compelled so many students to attend this year, but said they and their guests will likely be able to attend if they reserved their tickets by April 1.

This year’s keynote speaker is Craigslist.org founder Craig Newmark, who said his undergraduate years at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio were enjoyable — if somewhat introverted.

“I got a good education, but I should have gotten out more and had a little bit of fun,” said Newmark, who majored in computer science. “I was very much in my ‘nerd years’ then — let’s say I was bad at interacting with people.”

Newmark, who has also given commencement speeches at USC and Stanford University in recent years, hinted that he may soon collaborate with a popular cable TV comedian.

“I’ll also be speaking the following week at Montclair State University in New Jersey, and that’s where Stephen Colbert lives, so there may be mischief in store,” he said. “I don’t know (what), but I’ll think of something.”

When the U.S. News & World Report ranks the nation’s educational institutions–most recently, the top graduate programs–the lists often stir debate.

But first-year Haas School of Business student Buzz Buzko, who earned his undergraduate degree in Ukraine, said that a school’s reputation carries more weight than its exact ranking for people outside the U.S. This year, the U.S. News & World Report listed Haas as tied at No. 7 with Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business Administration.

“Both employers and employees in Ukraine are not aware of anything but Harvard (University) and Stanford (University)–they don’t know what Berkeley is,” he said. “In this respect, there is a problem for students who want to come back to Ukraine and search for a job. The power of Haas is enormous here in the U.S., but it’s basically zero in Ukraine because they don’t know who Haas is.”

Lt. Col. Brad Jensen, who teaches UC Berkeley’s Air Force ROTC program, plans to soon retire after 26 years of military service. His job has taken him all over the country, including Louisiana, Utah, Guam, California, Virginia and North Dakota. Berkeley marks his last stop.

When he enlisted in 1982, the Gulf War was underway. “We sat alert, we had our airplanes, aircraft and missiles on alert and Russia was the big threat,” Jensen said. “We thought the world might end in a nuclear holocaust.”

He nodded to the dozens of Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force members doing training exercises in the middle of North Field. “We send cadets around the world for language training and cultural immersion to try and get them prepared to go work in the Balkans or the Middle East or Asia,” said Jensen, who speaks Dutch, Spanish and French. “They’re going to be stationed anywhere in the world.”

What has changed most about the military between then and now, he said, is a greater understanding of the enemy.

“In some ways, it’s a much harder threat to defend against than the Russians were during the Cold War,” Jensen said. “You know what their missiles were, you knew if we didn’t threaten them they wouldn’t hurt us. But we don’t know that with the terrorists–they want to destroy us and we don’t know where they are.”

As John Garamendi spoke to a packed student audience at Wheeler Auditorium yesterday, the lieutenant governor’s old image of UC Berkeley–where he attended in the 1960s–sometimes seemed to be at odds with the new.

“Last night was pure Berkeley–fun stuff,” he said, referring to the Berkeley City Council meeting that drew protesters and media outlets from all over the nation. Then he asked how many in the audience had attended.

None of the attendees of Political Science 179 raised their hands.

Later, Garamendi encouraged his listeners to peacefully protest against potential student fee increases. The UC Board of Regents had discussed in January the possibility of raising student fees in response to proposed university budget cuts following California’s budget crisis.

“Do you know what marching is?” Garamendi asked. “Do you do that anymore here?”