I included an item yesterday predicting that University of California Regents would raise student fees by 32 percent. Well, they did. And the New York Times followed that news with a profile of the diminishing state of campuses around the University of California system, including its crown jewel, Berkeley. Anyone who knows Berkeley’s history, and the prominent roles it has played over the years in math and sciences as well as cultural studies,  will find it a much-chastened institution.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry refused Thursday to stop the execution of a man convicted of murder for his role in the 1996 shooting death of a Houston convenience store clerk despite a rare recommendation to commute a death sentence, the Austin American-Statesman reports.

From the media world, the Journal Inquirer of Manchester, Conn., has sued The Hartford Courant, the state’s largest paper, charging that it plagiarized The Journal Inquirer’s work in articles published last summer, a time when The Courant was also, in a subsequent admission, lifting material from several other northern Connecticut newspapers, reports the New York Times. Can I just say: Whoa!!!!

According to FishbowlNY, the Associated Press finally divulges how many staffers it laid off this week — 90. That includes our own talented, smart and extraordinarily experienced Deborah Baker, who covered the Capitol in Santa Fe for close to 20 years. Frankly, I’m still in shock, which is why I haven’t written anything up to this point. Nothing I write will do justice to the injustice of this crappy situation. So let me just say that I’ll miss Deborah for her wonderful way with words; her wry, irreverent sense of humor; her institutional knowledge; her toughness; her compelling stories about West Virginia — where she lived once upon a time; her unflappability; and her wonderful singing voice. Deborah, other reporters and I will miss your expertise and reporting and writing skills. But, more than that, we’ll miss you.

Meanwhile on the other coast, Connecticut lawmakers learned Wednesday that the state’s budget woes may get much worse in 2012, possibly growing to $3.4 billion from the current $385 million, the Associated Press reports.

And state transportation officials in Virginia laid out plans Wednesday to further slash $851.5 million from road-building operations over the next six years — meaning that the state’s six-year road plan has been reduced by $4.6 billion since spring 2008, according to the Virginian-Pilot.

U.S. Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Democratic leaders unveiled a health care reform proposal that they said would cover most of the country’s uninsured population and reduce the federal deficit, the New York Times reports.

Colum McCann’s “Let the Great World Spin,” a novel about daring, luck and mortality in 1970s New York, won the fiction prize Wednesday night at the 60th annual National Book Awards, according to the Associated Press.