Police have reportedly arrested the man accused of killing Jeffrey Pettigrew, a city employee who was also president of the San Jose chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. Pettigrew, who worked for the city of San Jose within the Dept. of Transportation, was shot in the back four times last week at John Ascuaga’s Nugget casino in Sparks, Nevada.

It’s been a pretty open secret in Little Saigon that the law doesn’t apply at the 20 or so Vietnamese coffee shops in San Jose. Patrons can smoke without being asked to put out their cigarettes. And scandalously-clad waitresses are known to remove what little lingerie they wear — or give an occasional lap dance — for a good tip. Things changed Sunday night when uniformed police officers sauntered into Quyen Café on Tully Road at 8:30pm on Sunday night and spotted three females — aged 22, 22 and 23 —who were leaving little or nothing to the imagination.

City officials were evacuated from City Hall at 5:30pm Monday evening after an email threat was received. It’s unclear how many people were evacuated, but a spokesman for Mayor Chuck Reed said 40 to 50 city officials were standing in a particular area outside an hour after the evacuation. City officials said the threat was not directed at any particular person.

Nine newspaper nameplates in the Bay Area will disappear under a consolidation plan announced yesterday by the Bay Area News Group, which owns the San Jose Mercury News.

Mercury News Publisher and BANG president Mac Tully told the San Francisco Chronicle — the region’s only major daily not owned by BANG — that it’s “still under discussion” whether the Mercury News will drop “San Jose” from its name.

Stepping away from City Hall and community centers to talk about the budget and retirement benefit reform, Mayor Chuck Reed, labor leaders and a couple Stanford University scholars will be meeting Monday night to take an in-depth look at the city’s pension crisis.The event is open to the public.

Increasing the tax base helps government provide services at levels that meet most residents’ expectations. At the national level it’s clearly impossible to grow the economy to pay off the national debt. At the state level, the current rate of economic growth is unlikely to keep the budget balanced this year. However, at the local level where budget deficits are not allowed, an increased tax base could go towards providing services to residents and thus restoring key positions.

A stranger attempting to lure a three year old away from the child’s older sister with candy is odd, not to mention, bold. For the stranger to then follow the two children into their home and try to pry the younger child from her mother’s arms is unbelievable.  Although this might sound like a nightmare, this scenario actually took place last week in San Jose. The stranger is a woman whom suffers from mental illness and was subsequently arrested.

Former San Jose city councilmember John Diquisto died of a congestive heart failure Monday morning. He was 83. Diquisto was a Cambrian Park native who worked as a San Jose firefighter for 31 years before serving two terms as the city council’s District 9 representative. He was termed out of office in 2002.

I am sure you remember the slogan during your challenger’s campaign, the “fierce urgency of now.” It has been exactly 30 months since the inauguration of President Obama, and we still have a public school system in chaos and shambles. In addition, we have not completed the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and test scores in math and English-Language Arts continue to be the major factor in judging effective schools.

The City Council, acting in its capacity as the Board of Directors of the San Jose Redevelopment Agency, announced its decision to appoint Richard Keit to serve as Managing Director of the Agency. Keit is currently the Redevelopment Agency’s Director of Business Development and has held various positions in local government, including manager of the housing division, neighborhood business district coordinator and director of neighborhood and industrial development.

On Friday, Mayor Chuck Reed released his June Budget Message, which included his final recommendations for closing the City of San Jose’s $115 million budget deficit in the upcoming fiscal year and preliminary strategies designed to avoid further service cuts in 2012.

The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Association of Santa Clara Valley and co-sponsor Kansen Chu, a San Jose city councilmember, will be holding a community meeting at 6pm tonight at San Jose City Hall (200 E. Santa Clara St.) in the Council Chambers. The meeting will will focus on child welfare.

With Republicans and Democrats in Washington still haggling over a possible federal funding compromise, the possibility of a government shutdown today looms ever more ominous. It has been almost two decades since the last shut down, so it is probably worth reminding ourselves of how it will likely impact everyone.

Since late last year, founding organizer Ted Gehrke had been mounting what he called a “last-ditch” effort to keep the Metro Fountain Blues Festival alive. At the same time that the festival was celebrating its 30 anniversary in 2010, SJSU’s Associated Students was forced by its financial situation to pull out as the main sponsor.

Yesterday, April 4, marked the 43rd anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. To commemorate that tragic event, union workers nationwide held rallies to protest recent moves against workers’ rights to organize.

After the City Council voted 9-2 on Tuesday in support of the agreement reached with San Jose’s Firefighters Union, three more unions, representing city architects and engineers, trade worker supervisors, and mid-level managers, have reached a similar agreement.